A Time to Remember

by Alexander Todd

  My son Sandy completed his Oxford D.Phil. in organic chemistry in 1964 and went to Stanford to do two years of postdoctoral work with Gene van Tamelen; at the same time his contemporary, friend, and by then brother-in-law, Philip Brown (having married my elder daughter Helen) also went as a postdoctoral to Melvin Calvin at nearby Berkeley. Helen, who had just given birth to her first child (actually on my birthday), stayed behind, while Philip went on ahead, and my wife accompanied them to Berkeley in December. There I joined her, after attending a meeting of the IUPAC Executive Committee in Austin (Texas) in December and flying from there to San Francisco. My main recollection of that, my first, visit to Texas, was of a rather aggressively state-proud people, who appeared to tolerate without complaint the most absurd liquor laws I have ever come across. You could buy any liquor you wished in special liquor stores, but apparently could not buy it for consumption on the premises. It was, nevertheless, quite legal to take your own liquor to a restaurant, and there consume it. My first experience of this remarkable arrangement was on Dallas airport; having a bit of time to spare waiting for a connection to Austin, I went into a rather garish pseudo-Hawaiian cocktail lounge, looked at the impressive array of cocktails on the menu, summoned a scantily clad waitress, and ordered one.' Where is your bottle?' she asked. I confessed that I hadn't got one, whereupon I was informed that she could mix a cocktail for me, but only if I could provide the alcohol! One got used to surprises in a state where the Attorney General was always referred to as General Carr, without his having, as far as I know, any military connection whatever.

  My wife and I visited our family in California on several later occasions. The first was on our way to Australia in March 1965, and the second on our return, On that occasion we left Canberra by air for Sydney on the morning of Good Friday, and had hot cross buns on the plane. Our connecting flight from Sydney to San Francisco did not leave until the evening, so we had tea and hot cross buns with the Le Fevres at their home in Northbridge. Owing to the complication of the date line, we found ourselves having hot cross buns again both en route to Hawaii and between Honolulu and San Francisco. The third time was in 1966, when I received an honorary doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. These visits were particularly interesting, because they coincided with the period of widespread, and at times violent, unrest on the campus. I have mentioned earlier how at Aligarh in 1960 I had a cavalry escort to the degree ceremony; I went one better at Berkeley. The dissident students (abetted, I fear, by some members of the academic staff, who should have had more sense) were particularly incensed because one of my fellow graduands was Senator Goldberg, and they threatened to disrupt the graduation ceremony in the great open amphitheatre on the Berkeley hillside, in which the university ceremonies are staged. The upshot was that I had the distinction of processing to the ceremony with an escort of the Oakland riot police, steel-helmeted and heavily armed. Within the actual arena, no police were visible, but in all the aisles, and around the back and sides of the seated accommodation, were large numbers of huge young men wearing football sweaters who, I suspected, were not there simply out of a love for ceremonial. Partly, I think, because of their presence, when the President, Dr Clark Kerr, in a bold and forthright opening speech suggested that the protesters might at least accord the right of free speech to those with whom they did not agree, and those who would not might leave the auditorium, a small number did, in fact, rise and move sheepishly out. The vast majority, however, remained, and the graduation ceremony proceeded without any further interruption. Looking back at the events in Berkeley in those years, it is hard to understand what all the fuss was about. No doubt the Vietnam war had a lot to do with the feelings of the young people in America, but the dissidents were not all young, and the cults of flower people, hippies and so on, spread all over the world during a period of about ten years - and, indeed, relics of it still persist in the behaviour of some sections of our youth today. I also encountered student unrest in Ghana in 1971, while in 1973 I was invited to accept an honorary degree from the University of Ife in Nigeria, but never in fact received it, since the graduation ceremony arranged for March of that year had to be cancelled because of student riots. For similar reasons, the insignia of my honorary doctorate from the University of Paris had to be delivered to me in London in 1969 by His Excellency the French Ambassador.

  In 1966 my son-in-law Philip Brown was awarded a Queen Elizabeth Fellowship to do a couple of years' research in an Australian university. He, with Helen and their daughter Alison, went to Adelaide, and my wife fulfilled her duty as a good grandmother by going out there in the autumn of 1967, to preside at the birth of a grandson, while I went off to Czechoslovakia on IUPAC business. We were both back in Australia in 1968, where I had two duties to perform. First, I was invited as chairman of the Royal Commission on Medical Education, which had just reported, to attend and address the joint meeting of the British and Australian Medical Associations in Sydney in August, and, immediately thereafter, in the capacity of Chancellor of Strathclyde University to attend the conference of the Association of Commonwealth Universities which was also held in Sydney. We were able to spend a fortnight's relaxed holiday on Lindeman Island during our stay, and finished our visit by going to Adelaide for a few days, and then to Western Australia where, at Fremantle, we saw our Adelaide family off on its return voyage to England, where Philip was taking up a lectureship in chemistry at the University of Newcastle; there, in 1970, our second grandson was born.

  This accomplished, my wife and I flew from Perth to Johannesburg with an all too brief stop in that enchanting island Mauritius. In Johannesburg I visited the company owned by Fisons Ltd, and had some discussions about the organisation of the fertilizer industry in South Africa. We were only a few days there, but, in addition to seeing the industrial complex at Sasolburg, we visited Pretoria, where I had a talk with the chief of the South African Council for Scientific Research. Johannesburg is not, in my opinion, a very attractive city. Apart from its appearance, which is spoilt by the great heaps of mining waste, I found the general atmosphere depressing, and, in some measure, rather frightening. On the one hand one had the very colonial-style country clubs, and, on the other, the depressing black townships out on the veldt. To see apartheid in action is not pleasant, and I find it hard to understand why the whites in power cannot see the writing on the wall, and move more rapidly to a free society than they are moving at present. Disaster need not overtake South Africa, but even a brief visit convinced me that time is running short.

  In the autumn of 1963 Harold Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister, and, after a deal of confusion at the Conservative Party Conference, Lord Home emerged as his successor, resigning his peerage in order to do so. In forming his government he appointed Lord Hailsham (who also disclaimed his peerage) as Secretary of State for Education and Science. The fact that I had just taken on the Mastership of Christ's, and could hardly take leave of absence until I had been there at least a year, enabled me to avoid becoming Minister of State for Science. It was, however, fairly clear that I would be in some danger of renewed political pressure, if the next general election, which was shortly due (and did indeed take place in October 1964), resulted in a Conservative victory. By late summer 1964 I had formed the view that Labour was likely to win the forthcoming election, and I had a fair idea of the kind of reorganisation of science and technology in government which that party, largely under the influence of Patrick Blackett and some other scientific Labour adherents, had in view. Blackett himself came to tell me about their plans, and it was clear to me that I was so much at variance with his ideas that, if Labour were to be returned to power, I would either have to resign as Chairman of A.C.S.P. and be labelled as a man who would only serve a Conservative government, or be sacked for refusing to toe the party line. Neither of these alternatives appealed to me, so I resigned with effect from 30 September 1964, and went off to open the new chemical laboratories at the Technion in Haifa.

  Dav
id Ginsburg, an old acquaintance, was head of the chemistry department at Haifa, and had been responsible for the planning of the fine new building I was to open on 11 October 1964. He knew my reputation as one who always contrived, on visits abroad, to speak, or at least to be able to make myself understood in, the local language. Rather rashly he had told me a month or two before that this time he would fox me, since the local tongue was Hebrew. This I took as a challenge. I therefore wrote a suitable little speech in English, sent it in confidence to Professor Mazur at Rehovoth (who had worked with me in Cambridge), and told him to translate it into modern, colloquial Hebrew, to write out the translation in accented phonetic script, and to make a tape of it spoken by a native speaker. All this he did, and sent the material to me. It is true that I have always had a certain facility for languages, so I simply committed the whole speech to memory, and reproduced the pronunciation by mimicry from the tape. I thus arrived at the Haifa ceremony well prepared, but having sworn Mazur to secrecy. The ceremony began with a speech from the Minister of Education, followed by others from the Mayor of Haifa and the President of the Technion - all of them in flawless English. I followed with my little speech in Hebrew to an astonished audience which greeted it with great enthusiasm. I must admit that David Ginsburg took it very well, and the whole affair was a great success; the only snag was, that I had great difficulty in persuading the journalists present that I really didn't know any Hebrew at all!

  Before returning to England we visited Jerusalem — at that time a divided city. I confess it did not add to the pleasure of sightseeing to be told to keep one's head down near the demarcation line, so as to offer no target to trigger-happy Jordanian guards on the other side. We also visited the impressive Weizmann Institute at Rehovoth (of which I was to become a Governor a few years later), and one evening, at the home of the British Consul at Tel Aviv, with David Samuel and his wife Reina, we heard on the radio the result of the general election in Britain. The Labour party was returned, although by a smaller majority than most people expected. In one way it was something of a relief to me, since it was widely thought that, had the election gone the other way, I might have been under considerable pressure to take ministerial office. Had such a thing happened, of course, life might have been a little less hectic for, in addition to a lot of overseas commitments, I had acquired added responsibilities at home, which acceptance of ministerial office might have allowed me to shed.

  In 1963 agreement was finally reached that the Royal Technical College in Glasgow should have university status. This followed a long, and at times bitter, struggle between 'the Tech.' and the University of Glasgow since the former came into existence as Anderson's University in 1796. Now it was to become the University of Strathclyde, and I was invited to be its first Chancellor. As a born Glaswegian, I was delighted by this honour, although, on appointment, I recalled with some amusement that, many years before, on my first attending a metallurgy class in the old Tech., I had had my overcoat stolen from the cloakroom. My formal installation as Chancellor did not occur until April 1965, when we had a tremendous party in the Kelvin Hall, and I became the first honorary graduate. I have continued to hold the office of Chancellor ever since, and have enjoyed every bit of it. It really has been a joy to be associated with the building up of a modern technological university in which people are not inhibited by the weight of tradition; unlike some of the new universities created in the 1960s, Strathclyde has been a real success, both academically and in its relations with industry. The latter I have watched with particular interest, since, under pressure from my good friend the late Lord Netherthorpe, then chairman of Fisons Ltd, I joined the board of that company as a non-executive director in 1963, and, during the next fifteen years, was in close contact with the actual operation of a large research-based company; I learned much as a result.

  Most people in England regard Strathclyde as one of the new universities created as a result of the Report on Higher Education issued in 1963 by a committee under the chairmanship of Lord Robbins. As I have indicated, this is not so; the long drawn-out battle between the 'Glasgow Tech.' and Glasgow University for university status, which would allow it to give its own degrees was finally won before the Robbins Committee reported. The University Grants Committee was, however, aware that the Robbins Report, when it appeared, would propose the creation of a number of other new universities and its chairman, Sir Keith Murray (later Lord Murray) asked. Strathclyde to agree that the granting of its Charter should be deferred until a decision had been taken on Lord Robbins' recommendations; the Charter was, in fact, granted in 1964.

  The committee set up under Lord Robbins to conduct an enquiry into higher education reported in 1963. I found myself in disagreement with a good deal of the Report, and especially with the proposals greatly to expand the number of universities in the United Kingdom, and to upgrade several colleges of advanced technology by giving them university status. I confess that I was astonished - and still am - by the ill-considered haste with which its recommendations were accepted by the main political parties (largely, I fear, for reasons not unconnected with an approaching general election). I made no secret of my views at the time, and, indeed, criticised the report in the House of Lords when it was adopted, and on numerous later occasions.

  The setting up of the Robbins Committee was a response to the growing feeling in the United Kingdom that all was not well with our educational system. We seemed to be educating too few scientists and technologists to satisfy the demands of industry and to make up leeway in the field of industrial innovation; the weakness of our industries in technologically based innovation also encouraged the loss of too many of our ablest scientists and technologists to the United States - the so-called 'brain drain'. On top of all this, the public was frequently provided, through the press and other media of communication, with statistics of the number of young people per thousand attending universities in various countries; these invariably showed Britain to be at, or very near, the bottom of the league. What they did not, of course, show, was the wide variety of institutions listed as 'universities' in different countries; little attention was paid to the pyramidal nature of our educational system, in which the term 'university' was reserved for a small group of institutions designed to complete the education of an elite.

  Whatever views one holds about elitism, it seemed to me self-evident that simply to multiply the number of institutions giving education designed for an intellectual elite would offer no solution to our problems. I agreed, of course, with the Robbins view that all who were fitted for university education should have it; but I did not believe that a vast untapped pool of such young people existed, most of them being, supposedly, denied opportunity for advancement for socio-economic reasons. In any case, most of our universities were relatively small, and until each had grown in size to accommodate perhaps ten thousand students I saw no point in creating a rash of small new universities, most, if not all, of which would try to provide the traditional English type of university education, modelled on that of Oxford and Cambridge. The probability that new universities would develop in this way seemed to me the more likely on the basis of past experience. Most of our great civic universities, originally founded as technically oriented institutions, had had their original pattern and aims modified in this way quite early in their development; history, I felt sure, was likely to repeat itself.

  An approximate doubling of the number of our universities would, it seemed to me, be not only extremely costly, but, if the number of students was to be vastly increased as Robbins recommended, it would deflect too many of our young people away from the advanced technical and vocational education which was far more needed by the country, and far more suited to the young people themselves. For it must be remembered that, if discoveries are to be made and exploited, far more technicians are needed than scientists and technologists; this did not seem to be recognised in the Robbins Report. If my view that the number of suitable young people who were under existi
ng circumstances denied a university was not as great as many people thought, then doubling the number of universities would almost inevitably lead to a lowering of standards and the presence in the universities of too many students lacking in ability and especially in motivation.

  Looking back now over the years, it seems to me that practically everything which I foresaw when the Report appeared has come to pass. I believe, moreover, that the period of student unrest in the late sixties and early seventies was, at least partly, rooted in the Robbins-type expansion which, incidentally, occurred at about the same time in most other developed countries - Germany provides a striking example. One consequence of the creation of a large number of new universities which I did not at the time foresee - although I should have done so - was the way in which the provision of tenured staff for them would mean simultaneous recruitment of a large number of young university teachers from more or less the same age group. This would clearly upset the staff age-distribution in universities, and block the promotion of promising young people coming forward in future years. The economic depression of the seventies has revealed these consequences of our actions all too clearly, and we are now faced with the daunting problem of rethinking some, at least, of our arrangements in the face of financial stringency, which makes our problems even more intractable.

  When I resigned the chairmanship of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy I thought that, apart from occasional participation in the affairs of the House of Lords, I would thereafter be clear of government commitments. In this I was soon to be proved wrong, and, in 1965, I found myself chairman of a Royal Commission on Medical Education. Such a Commission was admittedly long overdue, since there had been no comprehensive study of the subject since Abraham Flexner's report, which was published in the United States in 1925, and the last review of the position in this country was that of the Goodenough Committee in 1942-4; moreover, there was a good deal of unease about the supply of doctors in the United Kingdom, and the ever-growing reliance on immigrant doctors to keep our health services going. I confess that I was at first surprised at being asked to undertake this task; further consideration, however, led me to the view that I had qualifications which made me a rather obvious candidate. For one thing, not being a member of the medical profession, I had no axe to grind; I was also experienced in work with government and government departments, and, in my scientific career, I had always had close contact with the medical sciences and academic medicine. In addition, of course, I had, through Sir Henry Dale and the Nuffield Foundation, many other contacts with the world of medicine, and I was fortunate in having a first-class body of members of my Commission -able, imaginative and hard-working men and women - to all of whom I am deeply grateful, and whose continuing friendship I cherish.