My Third Job!

After leaving Marconi's, although they tried to persuade me to stay, I took a very temporary job with a local wireless shop. Mending receivers and getting an introduction to the cheap television now available was just fun. I also did a bit of evening class teaching at the Mid-Essex Technical College to swell the coffers, which it did. All the while I was looking for what would be my career job, I tried with the Civil Service Commissioners who offered me an AEO post. Thinking I could do better, I applied for a Cancer Research Post with the MRC. After my interview, one of the board stepped out and told me that the job was mine but he had a better one for me with AERE at Harwell if I cared to apply!

In due course I was told to attend at Harwell. So with bags packed and helped by my brother we staggered to the station in Gidea Park. The case was one that he had bought in India, it was large and very heavy!

At Harwell I was shown into the presence of my new boss, the leader of an electronics group whose name I have long forgotten. He asked me whether I should like to stay at Harwell or be posted to Malvern! I elected to go to Malvern to see what was there and then afterwards to come to a decision. So off I went to Great Malvern straight into the arms of Frank Goward who led the Synchrotron Group. After a wonderful week I had to return to Harwell to give my decision, so my fate was sealed!

Ursula and I planned our marriage and I went back to Malvern to The old ABL Lab shared by the British and the Americans during their wartime exploits of Radar Research. TRE as it was called was moved from Swanage where it was very vulnerable to the enemy to Great Malvern where it took over the Boys Public School.I lived in barracks along with most of the others and Ursula and I got ready for married life from January 1950.

I did experiments on the accelerator, on explosives, and some other projects. I met some very senior people including Sir John Cockroft, Skinner, Curran and a few others. My group leader had Claus Fuchs at Harwell as his boss and duly reported all that we did to him.....straight to the Kremlin as we now know. Pontecorvo was found out, and some the English band of traitors gradually discovered.

The synchroton was a working machine, the first in the UK, but another group alongside had already developed the electron linac and were working on a brand new electron linear accelerator using dielectrics. This was designed by R.B.R.S.Harvey...alas there was a problem. A new phenonomen was just surfacing and ,it was called "multipactor". This precluded any acceleration in the new machine due to secondary electron emission. With Adlam and Mullett I worked at finding out more of the properties of the dielectrics. This brought me into X band radar components and cavity investigations and was wonderful. I met the man who eventually became professor at Sheffield, Cullen, and later he showed John Adlam and I around his lab there. Gordon Thomason an electronic wizard was another of my Malvern friends and we visited him at Abingdon later on. Harvie elected to leave accelerators when the group was moved to Harwell and went to Baldock. I met up with him later on. There were some amazing people at Malvern, some with no paper qualifications but absolutely brilliant in electronic wizardry. A character named Hubert Gent went about in a cloak. I learnt that the only circuit one needed to know was the Miller Integrator, two others developed from it, and with the cathode follower and the grounded grid amplifier one was in charge! Alas transistors spoilt it all.

In Malvern Ursula and I joined the Piers Ploughman Club and we performed in some amateur dramatics there. Noteably "Little lambs eat ivy" and "Midsummer Night's Dream". I took the part of Oberon and Ursula would have been Titania except thet Christina was on the way and Thelma Lee took over that part!

Other chacters at Malvern were Peter Dunn, John Dain, Herbert Watson, Donald lees Jeff Jones and Laurie Medcalf and lots more.

We were to be moved as a group to Harwell but being junior we had to wait for a council house at Abingdon. So for 8 months I had to spend the working week at Harwell and only come home to Nalvern for week ends.

To start with in 1949 we rented a furnished bungalow in the Link. Then we moved to the top floor of a house in Hornyold Road, where we had two rooms and I made a "landing" kitchen.Then when Christina was imminent we were allocated a Ministry flat in South Lea. To our joy Christina was born in Brunswick House on Graham Road. Years later it was up for sale and we made enquiries! We had a share in the South Lee house greenhouse and a patch of veg garden. We met tree lupins for the first time there and watched the coronation on Les Dawson's TV...a miracle in those days! We had a black cat called Wallace who seemed to wait for my return on Friday night after being away from Malvern during the week. Wallace came eventually with us to Abingdon, got lost once and then came back. We left him with the next-door-neighbours, the Bacons, when we went to Geneva.

I made a concrete garden path in 57 Sellwood Road, talked to the cow in the field at the end of the garden and planted lupin trees from seed gathered in Malvern. I went to work evry day using the Harwell transport system (bus), this ensured that I got home every night at a good time except when Thonemann who ran Zeta had a "good idea" and decided to press on regardless, driving us home himself!

Helena was born in the "Warren" at Abingdon. While waiting for her arrival I used to take Christina around on a little seat fixed to the handlebars of my bicycle, apparently it used to be quite an alarming experience for her she now tells me!. We had many friends in Sellwood road, even one of the later directors of the accelerator group who arrived from South Africa and lived there with his family! The packing case in which his furniture came became a playroom for his children. Ben Kingdom from Malvern was a neighbour too with wife and family, and he still lives there!

At Harwell we from Malvern were dazzled by the equipment that one could extract from the stores. The Malvern crowd that I knew were housed in building 152, just inside the wire from Staff Club B.
There John Adlam and I began work on measuring accelerator fields using perturbation techniques which we developed. A character called (no name) used to come in and offer useless help, apparently he was keeping an eye on us. I suggested running the accelerator using the signal from the light programme (radio) as it was extremely stable...he cogitated a bit about this, and went back to his office in Hangar7 to think it over! Alas another character called (no name) decided that he wanted to recruit John permanently as his number cruncher, John refused and we were split up. John was sent to do a job for which he had no knowledge or experience, so I threw in the sponge too and moved over to the Zeta group. This was a bit of a red herring too. After a while I applied for a post at CERN where I was welcomed almost with open arms. Goodbye to Harwell and Hallo to Geneva! Cockroft told me I was going to the "fleshpots". True the salary was double but it still wasn't sufficient. We still had ration books in England so Switzerland was a big change.

We began in a Pension "Salm" in Place Reverdin, then took a new flat in Avenue Wendt. Donald Fry came to lunch once while our piano was being rebuilt, he was head of general Physics at Harwell before becoming Director at Winfrith Heath. Years later while taking the AERE plane from Manchester to Abingdon I met him on the plane. He shifted some important person out of the seat alongside so that he could chat to me about all the goings on!