Physics is Fun Memoires of Richard Wilson Version of September 25th 2009

Girls, Walking and Climbing

I never had sisters, and although my maternal grandmother had many female grandchildren, they were all older than I was. I went to a boys school and girls were a mystery to me. A mystery that began to become clearer at Oxford. There was a good looking girl from Lady Margaret Hall, Anne Moore, who was also studying mathematics. We tended to have lectures 9-10, 10-11, and 11-12 in the same lecture room (at the Clarendon Lab) 3 days a week. I always tried to sit next to her during lectures. We were serious students and paid attention to the lectures but there was always the 5 to 10 minutes interval in between. I was bold enough by May to invite her out on a punt on the river and tea in my rooms thereafter. I invited another man whose name I have forgotten and Margaret Lahee who I had met in the Oxford University “Scout Club”. There is a photograph of them in my collection. But I never got anywhere with Anne who was reserved, but I became friendly with Margaret who was less reserved. Margaret was actually a student at Westfield College of London University College which was evacuated to Oxford during the war. She had rooms on New Inn Hall Street just west of the Cornmarket. Margaret was always smiling and cheerful. She wore glasses, but a little later on she became of the first girls to wear contact lenses After all; “boys don’t make passes, at girls who wear glasses”. I was still very shy and reluctant to make passes anyway. That reluctance diminished rapidly but by then Margaret had looked elsewhere.

I had always enjoyed walking in the country and in 1937-1939 had done many walks, firstly with the family, and then by myself, in the countryside SW of Wimbledon in the North Downs. We took advantage of the special 1 shilling tickets on the southern railway where you could travel to one station and return from another. During the war I did much more by bicycle around Crowthorne. But by 1945 it was possible to be more venturesome.
I am unsure of the exact dates of my venturesome trips, but I believe it was in July 1945, that a group of 4 of us set off to the Lake District. Margaret Lahee and her room mate were with me. The other man was probably Peter Cave. We took the underground to Finchley, the bus to the main road, the A5, and raised out thumbs. There was a civilized behaviour among hitch hikers. The first person, or group, would stand closest to the roundabout (traffic circle) where the vehicles coming were the slowest and most likely to be willing to stop. Then others would spread out with 30 foot or so spacing further along. As one person got a lift, the line would move up. Some drivers would pass the first group. With our group of 4, few private cars would stop. But we soon found a lorry (truck) going north We probably had a series of 2 or three trucks but the last that day dropped us at Kendal where we took a bus to Windermere, walked to the lake at Bowness and slept in a barn. The next morning we walked north up a valley with an old Roman Road “High Street”. Dropping down to a village (Putterdale) where we stopped at the first barn where we lit a cooking fire and ate. Then we slept in the hay. The next day we went west and climbed Helvellyn by Striding Edge (noting nervously the grave stone on the edge where some one had fallen). Then a bus to Grasmere for tea, and walking SW up Langdale Fell to another barn at the end (just behind Glyll Hotel). The next day we set off west to climb Scafell Pike. It was misty at the top and I did something foolish. The other three\ wanted to by pass the peak in the mist. I left them, walked up following the cairns and walked back to the path junction. I went off, alone, in the mist in the mountains again. I relied on the existence of a path well signed by cairns. I do not recommend this. I could easily have got lost in the mist, fallen down a crag, or merely spent a cold night half freezing to death. So on down out of the clouds to the head of Wastwater and another barn. The other three were by now tired and the next day went down the valley to Seascale, where you now find the Windscale nuclear reprocessing plant ) for a train home. I was more venturesome. It was now fine weather so I set of by myself to a youth hostel at Buttermere to the north and then joined a party heading across the hills again to another youth hostel at Coniston. The next day, it was a short walk past Hawkshead across the hills to a ferry across the lake to Bowness and Windermere where I was able to hitch hike back south. I believe it was to Oxford where I spent a week at the Rover Scout camp at Youlbury.
It was early April 1946, April 8th or 9th, that Margaret, Patricia (Pat) Pankhurst, later to become my sister in law, and my old friend Klaus Roth set of for North Wales. We again took the underground to Finchley, the bus to the main road and again raised out thumbs on the A5. After Shrewsbury the traffic thinned. We agreed to separate. The two girls soon got a lift in a car and then Klaus and I got a lift, standing up in the back of an army truck carrying German prisoners of war who had been working in the fields. Although the war was over they had yet to be returned home to a devastated country. I made a faux pas which has always troubled me. I was trying to be friendly with these men who, according to my thinking were never our enemies. They were only the servants of our fascist enemies. I mentioned to one prisoner that Klaus was born in Breslau. Klaus of course was worried that he would be attacked or pushed out of the back. He was furious with me. But fortunately nothing happened. We reached the town of Llangollen where we took a train through Corwen to the youth hostel at Clynyd on the Dolgelly Road, where the two girls who had gone ahead met us at the station; and we went to the Youth Hostel where they had even prepared supper! The only problem with that youth hostel is that we had to wash in cold water. The next day we headed back to the A5 and on to Bettws-y-Coed. The youth hostel, a small farm house, was 3 miles NE at Oaklands I believe, and I remember we were given tea. The children could not speak English - only Welsh. Margaret and Pat were prepared and gave the three kids candy.
By now the A5 was very empty so we walked all the way to the pass to Caernarvon by Lake Ogwen to the youth hostel at Idwal cottage. (Maybe I interchange here the names Idwal and Ogwen cottages) The next day to Llanberis and the day after we walked up to Pen-y-pas and climbed Snowdon and down the other side to Llyn Cwellyn and a bus to Caernarvon. After a day looking at the castle and the bridge over the Menai strait at Bangor we decided it would be easier to get a ride if we set out north of the mountains on the road to Chester. That was fine for 40 miles or so but unfortunately the driver dropped us off on a side road at Shotwick. We then made a drastic error. Taking the advice of a friendly lorry drive we went into Liverpool and out on the London Road. By that time it was getting late and the girls were tired, so we went to Manchester and caught the 5 pm train home.
I had not yet worn out my friendship with Margaret Lahee. Although she was no longer in Oxford after summer 1945 I met her in London because Westfield college had moved back to London. That meant that I had to make a special visit to London for a “date”, often in vacation when she was at home in Enfield. Enfield West was almost at the end of the Piccadilly line, just before Cockfosters, and 25 minutes walk or a bus ride from her house. Or I could take the LNER steam commuter train to Enfield Town from Liverpool Street. I could walk 15 minutes to South Wimbledon, one stop short of the terminus at Morden on the Northern line. All in all it was 1 ½ to 2 hours! Once or twice I went to her house and once she came to ours for tea. But mostly we met in between. At the end of March 1946 a group of us, including Margaret and Pat Pankhurst met at Barnes Bridge railway station, and walked up the towpath to watch the (Oxford and Cambridge) boat race. Probably 300,000 people watched that race along the 4 mile course. But it was disappointing to me. Oxford was 3 lengths ahead as they came past us, and there was no chance of an exciting finish as the boats rounded the bend to the finish at the Mortlake brewery. I do remember one New Years eve party in Cobham in 1947/8 held I believe by John Coates. It came to an end 10 minutes after 12 as we all had to catch the last train to town. But two or three times Margaret and I met in London by ourselves for dinner and a concert or a play and we said goodbye underground at Leicester Square station soon after 10 pm as we took our respective rides home.. This did not leave much opportunity for romantic moonlight farewells. My grandchildren have different problems. There is no need to stop a party so that everyone can catch the last bus. Issues such as who is to be the member of the party who does not drink are almost beyond my ken.

At the end of March 1947 we spent a holiday hitchhiking again up to Scotland. This time we stayed only in Youth Hostels. Again we went with two friends - maybe John Cotes was one - to make a foursome. We stopped at a youth hostel on the way up. My diary says “Kendal full” and “slow traffic Kendal to Penrith” so the youth hostel was probably at Penrith a little further north. The next day we got a lift with a lorry driver going to Glasgow. There was room for two of us in the cab, and then the other two had to sit in the open back. It was fine till we got north of Carlisle and then it was drizzly. The two men stayed in the back covered with our waterproof capes. But in the Scottish hills between Carlisle and Glasgow the girls insisted we change places and they suffer the rain! The lorry driver stopped in the Gorbals, just short of Glasgow proper, where he invited us into his tenement (a small apartment in a big block of apartments) for tea with the family. The tenements were 4 stories high. There was no front yard and barely a back yard. There were washing lines strung across the street to the tenements on the other side, properly mounted with pulleys to make it easy to bring the washing back from the middle of the road. . It was very black and grimy. It was worse than Halifax. I learned later that 3 tons of soot fell per acre per year in that eastern suburb of Glasgow. People who have never visited this working class suburb can learn a little of the life there from the film: “Miracle in the Gorbals”

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We took the bus to the centre of Glasgow and then the underground (steam) train to Balloch Pier on Loch Lomond and walked the 3 miles up the lake to a youth hostel which was an old castle (Arlem castle). The next day we walked a bit further north to Inverbeg, and then took the ferry across the lake to Ben Lomond, then down the other side to a youth hostel on Loch Ard. The next day we walked on to Aberfoyle and got a lift on a lorry through Callendar and Stirling to Dunfermline and a train ride across the Forth bridge to Edinburgh and another youth hostel on 1st April. The next day we hitched a ride in a car going by Jedburgh to Scotch corner. By telephone enquiry the York hostel was full so went on down the Great North Road (A1) to Doncaster where we walked 7 miles to the next hostel at Tickhill The following day 4 miles east to Bawtry on the Great North Road and then home. According to the accounts in my diary this was a two week holiday for 3 pounds 15 shillings and 7 ½ pence.

But that was close to the end of my clumsy courtship of Margaret Lahee. After another date in London, she found a more interesting man and married a medical student Dr Gephardt. I called on them a couple of years later, January 1949, in Brighton, driving down from Tunbridge Wells with Peter Lund on the pillion of my motor cycle, and to their house in Kingston near Teddington Lock 20 years later. Their 17 year old daughter looked like their mother did when she was 20. That was in summer 1966 by which time the Gephardts had 5 children and Andrée and I had 6. I have heard nothing more from, or about them, since. I have enquired, but the college does not know My sister in law, Pat Wilson (née Pankhurst) who was a friend of Margaret at Westfield College does not know either. As I edit this I remember a song that Margaret used to sing which was prophetic:
‘He may go, he may tarry, he may sink or he may swim

For he doesn’t care for me and I don’t care for him

He may go and take another who I hope he will enjoy For I’m going to marry a far nicer boy.”
Graduate Work
By 1946 the war had been over for a year. I took my final examination in June, and my parents came up just afterwards to drive me and my belongings home. We waited for a day to see the examination results. My parents and I had confidently expected me to pass with first class honors, as they, and Laurie had. But I was deeply disappointed when I only got a second class honors degree. This might have meant the end of my education. I was hoping to get a special government (Department of Scientific and Industrial Research - DSIR) fellowship to continue graduate work. I had thought that a first class honors was a prerequisite. I will never forget my father’s almost immediate comment. “It will be expensive, but we can pay for you to get the D Phil.”. Fortunately it was not necessary. Everyone in the lab had expected me to get a first and all the paper work had been done. So after a short week of rest at home I started graduate work on July1st 1946. I believe that I have justified my father’s, and the Clarendon laboratory staff’s, support of me that time.
But before I got down to real work, I participated with a Rover Scout Camp in Youlbury where many French Rover Scouts had been invited. After a week there everyone went to North Wales and camped at Bethelgert just south of Snowdon. I got sick and had to stay in the tent. At the tail end of this, I went to Cambridge for a nuclear physics conference. I was still in my scout uniform and stayed in the Youth Hostel in Cambridge, and hitchhiked back to London. That was my first conference and I remember being excited as Louis Alvarez described the first work with using the 184 inch cyclotron that had just begun operation with 180 Mev deuterons. He was scattering the 90 Mev neutrons obtained by stripping the deuteron. Ken Bainbridge described the plans at Harvard University for a 130 Mev cyclotron, noting that the neutron beam was headed straight for the divinity school. Little did I know that 9 years later I would be working with that accelerator. Then I went to Paignton by car with the family for a meeting of the Spiritualists National Union of which my father had just become President. I spent much of the time walking on the downs.
My college physics tutor, C.H. Collie, became my supervisor. He suggested that I work on the photodisintegration of the deuteron, and to measure the angular distribution of the reaction to determine whether it proceeded by a magnetic dipole transition or an electric dipole transition. I also met Hans Halban, returning to an academic atmosphere after his wartime work on the atomic bomb. He became a second supervisor and was, in fact, more important in my scientific work although I will never forget the hospitality of Collie and his wife to Andrée and myself the day we arrived back in Oxford. At that time the custom in England was to call colleagues by their surname. When he was my tutor he was Mr Collie. Now he was Collie. The head of the machine shop was Mr Stonnard and all other machinists had this honorific. Only close friendships changed this: Halban’s machinist was not Mr Round but Victor. Victor he remained to me till his death in fall 2005 . Of course everything has got more informal since 1945.
Victor was not a scientist but he became a lifelong friend. He was a fine, warmhearted man with a quick temper. He was a close friend from 1946 till his death in 2005 and his wife Barbara still is a close friend both of Andrée and myself. Victor was born near Arras in northern France of an English father and a French mother. Victor’s father was a British soldier in world war I. Victor, brought up in France, came to England about 1938. I don’t know the true details of his life, because Victor told slightly different versions at different times and in different company. But in June 1945 he found himself as Regimental Sergeant Major leading a group of men at zero hour minus two headed for Sword Beach in Normandy. It was perhaps even a more dangerous beach than Utah Beach. It was on the extreme eastern end of the allied front. I only have Victor’s account of what happened. Because of the rough sea they landed further out than originally intended and were almost up to their necks in water. A 50 year old corporal was pulled back by the waves and his heavy pack so Victor went back to pick him up. They rushed to the safety of the edge of the cliff. The flame throwers had been there first. About half the flame throwers had given up their lives but the pillboxes were empty of live soldiers.

That was the front where, by chance, the only Panzer (armored) division was on the cliffs above. As Victor and his men huddled in the caves below, the order came to re embark - but the weather was too rough. A day or so later they got to the top and had to clear a potential minefield. The simple way of clearing a minefield was by crawling along the field with a bayonet in one hand probing the ground in front. If a mine was there you only lost a hand or arm. Twenty five years later Victor took Barbara there to show her the landing site. They were stopped by a gendarme: “You can’t go there: it hasn’t been cleared of mines”. Victor was able to inform him otherwise. A few days later the British had advanced to the little town and port of Caen. Cherbourg had not yet been captured. Victor, the only French speaker, was sent to examine the electric motors on all the cranes and other port equipment to determine the voltage and current necessary to operate them so that the right diesel generators could be brought in. As he was finishing the sappers arrived to check for booby traps. Victor had assumed that there were none. He was lucky. There were none. For a few days he was commander of this little port.

In September when the British army had swept beyond Paris to Belgium, Victor asked for 2 days leave to see his family (in Arras I believe). The leave was denied. So hot headed Victor “borrowed” a motor cycle on Friday night, drove to Arras and returned in time to turn his men out for parade on Sunday evening. No one said a word. Later that year Victor was sent to the far east arriving just as the war came to an end. But his courage did not fail him. He spent the first few days of peace diving into the bay to defuse the mines in the harbor of Saigon. Victor was decorated by both the British Army and the French Army for his bravery. I know of no one who deserved them more. Sixty years later, in 2004, I sent him a letter on the anniversary of D day to thank him once again for what he had done for us all. Apparently I was the only one of his friends who remembered.
Victor arrived in Oxford in the fall of 1946. He made some of the equipment I used as a graduate student. He soon became a favorite of the graduate students particularly those in the Halban group. He was strong. Picking up a sledgehammer in each hand he would turn them under his arm - both simultaneously. With effort and practice I could do it with one! It was in summer 1947 that we, at Hillend farm decided, as noted elsewhere, to make strawberry jam. I bicycled down to Radley where Victor and Barbara were living with their new baby Annette to give them a couple of bottles. This was an investment which paid off a hundredfold in friendship during the following years.
When I left Oxford for the USA in 1955 Halban went to Paris and took Victor with him and established him as head of the machine shop in the new laboratory at Orsay. From Barbara’s point of view it was downhill. Instead of their small house on Headington farm, they had a small apartment in Massy Verrières. I visited them there a couple of times between 1955 and 1960 and in 1960 I went on sabbatical leave to Orsay, staying in the next town of Palaiseau. But in the 1960s matters improved and Victor could afford a nice old house in Lardy, where Barbara still lives, and also afford a fine car - a Mercedes. One time Frank Pipkin from Harvard came with me. After dinner at their apartment in Lardy Victor drove us back to Paris. Frank asked : “How fast can this car go anyway?” At 250 km/hr we soon reached the outskirts of Paris and had to slow down.
Victor and Barbara had 5 children. Annette, now Grampenau, Bernard, Michael, Yvette. I tried to see them whenever I visited Paris. I remembered D day in 1944 and 60 years later in 2004, I sent Victor a brief personal letter of thanks for what he did that day. In late October 2004 I was on my way to a meeting in Lausanne and then to Geneva to discuss terrorism. I proposed to fly in to Paris and call on Victor and Barbara before taking the train to Lausanne. I phoned Victor and he said OK. But a day or two later Victor got a heart attack and he was dead before I could meet with again. Victor will always remain alive in my memory.
It was probably in Spring 1947 that one of the lecturers in Oxford, Richard Hull, took a dozen of us up to North Wales to learn rock climbing. I believe we stayed in the Climbers Club hut at Ogwen cottage. I remember climbing Glyder Fach and also the Craig-yr-Isfa on Carnedd Llewellyn. In summer 1947 the family set off for a month in France and Switzerland. For everyone except my mother it was the first trip overseas. Even my father, who had left England’s shores when in the Royal Navy in world War I had never set foot on a foreign country. We drove in the 1927 Invicta which my father had put back into service the year before. After landing at Calais, we headed through Rheims to Bar-le-Duc, Basle, and on to Grindelwald in Switzerland where we stayed a week. We walked a lot and I bought my first ice axe and my first wristwatch. The watch cost 15 I believe, about $60, and was, of course, not as good as the $3 Walmart watches today. One day we crossed the glacier and walked up towards the Wetterhorn. I think we made it to the “Wetterhorn hut” from which real climbers attempt the ascent of the peak. Another day we took the funicular train up to Jungfrau Joc from where a guide took Laurie, Geoffrey and I across the glacier and up the Munch. It was exhilarating. Then we drove back on a more southerly route to Paris where we were to stay 4 days. The first day was in a “pension” in St Cloud, but my father did not like so we moved into a hotel just off the Champs Elysees. When in St. Cloud Geoffrey and I took the metro to Rue Montmartre. The only night life we saw was a movie of a smuggling group in the Basque area; the American fell in love with a girl who loved a smuggler and then the American did the “right thing” and protected the smuggler from the police. In European movies 60 years later, Americans are not portrayed as politely as they were then. Of course Basque dances are rather like Morris dances, Indeed it is widely believed that the origin of the Morris dances was in the Basque country. I still remember a couple of the tunes and recently replayed them to myself on my concertina.
In summer 1948 Collie and Halban went to a conference and heard a talk by Sam Devons on the use of coincidence measurements in nuclear physics. He described the decay scheme of radioactive sodium Na 24 which has a dominant 2.76 Mev amma ray. Moreover the source can be calibrated by beta gamma coincidence measurements. Sam had described the procedure in a prewar paper (August 1939). Collie and Halban suggested a change in the direction of my thesis. I would merely measure the absolute cross section for photo disintegration both by Na 24 and by Th C” . This would tell us the range of nuclear forces. The change was made and the principal measurements made that autumn (fall 1948).
One of the people in the Clarendon Laboratory from 1945 to 1948 was Jim Tuck. Jim had designed a betatron in 1939 and would have beaten Kurst to the first operating machine, but he was taken to Whitehall by Professor Lindemann and became an explosives expert - especially on shaped charges. He was sent out to Los Alamos in 1943 and was, so I was told, instrumental in hydrogen bomb design. After the war the Clarendon had been given a small betatron and Jim made it work. I thought at first of using it to measure the threshold energy for the photodisintegration of the deuteron, but it proved to be unsuitable. Nonetheless Jim liked me, and I remember him showing us his color slides of a New England fall and of the New Mexico mesas. I had not seen color slides before and the colors were hard to believe but my appetite was whetted for visiting the USA. Jim also described to me his immediate mentor, R.V. Jones, who also had been pulled to Whitehall by Cherwell. RV Jones was the architect of the technical part of counter intelligence as described in his book “The Wizard War.” It was an especial pleasure when Jim introduced RV Jones to Andrée and myself some years later at a meeting in Los Alamos. I remembered RV Jones a couple of times later in my life. In 1983 I was in Kuwait where I met the minister of Health, Dr Abdulrahman Alawady who got his MD degree in Aberdeen where RV Jones was head of the physics department. Abdulrahamn told me he used to date RV Jones’ daughter. Then in 2008 at Erice, Dr Mcloskie mentioned his time as a student in Aberdeen. Dr Mcloskie was a friend of the whole Jones family.
Another person I remember very clearly was Rudolph Kompfner. Rudi had an architecture degree from Vienna and in 1938, he presented a plan for a model village to an architects convention in Glasgow. At Euston station he picked up a copy of the “Wireless World” for reading on the journey. In it the Varian brothers described their invention of the klystron. Rudi thought that he could do better and made a paper design for another klystron. In 1939 he found himself in England, and like many enemy aliens he was asked what he could do to help the Allied war effort against Hitler. He said “I have designed a model village and a microwave klystron”. So he was sent to work with Professor Patrick Dee, then working on magnetrons at the University of Birmingham. There he invented the traveling wave tube. By 1946 he was working for the British admiralty at Oxford and at the war’s end he was allowed to stay at government expense and study for a PhD in physics. He learned his physics upside down. I remember trying to explain to him how a synchronous AC motor works. After going over the details of shunt wound and series wound motors which he did not understand, I changed my explanation. “It is just like a traveling wave tube.” I said. “The electrons are catching up with and riding with the wave”. He understood at once - and I understood a bit more than I had before. In 1953 or so Rudi joined Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J. where I visited him in the late 1950s.