Julian Hunt interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 1st May and 3rd June 2009

0:09:07 Born in Ootacamund in 1941; father was a District Officer in the I.C.S. so lived in different parts of India until we finally returned in 1947 at Independence; of India, remember seeing villagers bringing in a dead tiger; developed a fear of painted faces from seeing naked holy men; later, at the Dragon School, when boys put makeup on for plays, had to cover my face; in India recently, went on a bus where the driver's face was painted in garish colours which rekindled feeling of childhood terror; we came back from India on leave during the War in a convoy; remember we had to sing-song "I'm H A P P Y..." which I did with tears rolling down my face; remember snake charmers coming to entertain us at Christmas, and my father chasing buffaloes off the lawn; my mother found the heat difficult and felt angry; she would spend hot afternoons trying to teach me to read; remember getting stuck on the work "the" and having to be put in another room, shouting and screaming; we had an ayah, and one of the naughty things my brother and I did was to take the ayah's soap and throw it down in the bathroom, then turn the bathroom into a skating rink; never got to know young Indian boys of our own age and only ever saw Indian servants - a typical colonial life; perhaps the most frightening event of all was Christmas Day, probably 1945-6, in Madras where we were living; we went to a Christmas party on the beach and Father Christmas arrived on a landing craft, through the waves; thought it most frightening and ran away from this most awful apparition I could imagine

7:14:03 When we came back to England in 1947 we lived in Oxford, close to my mother's parents; my grandfather was Maxwell Garnett, a scientist, a Fellow of Trinity who had written important papers on mathematics; he became an internationalist, Secretary of the League of Nations; he was strong primitive Christian; used to take us for walks in the park; we used to all eat in the basement of their house which they ran as a communal canteen into which we all put our ration books; I also saw quite a lot of my other grandparent, my father's father, who lived in Woodstock Road; he had been the Chief Inspector of Schools in Oxford; after about a year my father joined the  Commonwealth Relations Office and went to Pakistan, and I became a boarder at the Dragon School; my brother and I were looked after by a guardian who lived next door to my grandparents so we spent a lot of time with them; I was perhaps brought up more by them than my own parents; on one hand I had Macaulay, mathematics and sailing with my mother's father and Grandfather Hunt, who had been a prisoner in the First World War, but was a great lover of German; my other grandparents shared this love as they saw Germany as the Mecca of civilization; my great-grandfather had been in Munich to do medicine and that was where my grandfather grew up; because he had been a prisoner, he used to invite German prisoners of war, who still remained in camps after the War, to afternoon tea; we used to play battleships and submarines with them; it was a very broadening experience for us; he used to go down to Oxford Prison as a prison visitor and then come back and tell us about them; we were being told how the world was and how it had changed; my other grandfather, when he wasn't telling us about the Battle of Waterloo would be telling us in great detail of all the countries created by the Treaty of Versailles; I think very few children have that broad experience at such an early age; it is never quite as vivid if you learn later on

13:05:22 My mother was away with my father for some of the time; think that the lack of parents did not affect me greatly as in India we were looked after by other people most of the time; in England it was just more of the same; I was probably a difficult and not a very loveable child, whereas my younger brother, Simon, was very jolly; my mother could respond to him and he was much more affected by their absence; on the other hand I was a zealous correspondent and poured out my troubles in Sunday letters; I was always very pleased to see them; my father played with us a lot when he was home; grandparents were terribly important and I spent more Sundays with them than I did with my parents; I first went to the State primary school called Cutteslowe in North Oxford which was very fashionable at the time; there was a wall in North Oxford built to separate the owner-occupied houses from the council estate; the school was on the estate so people from the owner-occupied side had to drive out of Oxford and in again to reach the school; during the War, a soldier on leave drove a tank through the wall; I was at the school from 1947-49; in the beginning noticed boys played at being aircraft with arms wide apart, by 1949 they had become jets with arm sloping behind; notice that children quickly pick up on new technologies and they enter their games

18:14:11 On games, already I was building with bricks and playing with trains; my mathematical grandfather could build bridges using old-fashioned Victorian wooden bricks which spanned about five feet by putting weights on one side; my interest in mathematics and science was very much connected to these experiences; my mother's parents had a place in the Isle of Wight and during holidays we would sail and row, and look through telescopes etc., and all the time it was through the prism of this grandfather who was a scientist; I went to the Dragon in 1949, firstly as a day boy, staying with the guardian; in January 1951 I went to Wilding's which was a small house at the Dragon; that was just terrible; tried to encourage a boy who was beaten to go to the Police Station and complain; L.A. Wilding was quite a brilliant teacher and wrote many books on Latin, and he had been a Fellow of New College; he was the form master of the top class of Dragons and pushed boys through the scholarship exams to Eton and Winchester; he smoked like a chimney and was very angry; in the morning he would even make jokes at breakfast - we all ate together at the family table; on Sundays he would carve a huge pork joint which he would give to guests and we would wonder how much would be left for us; I had my inadvertent revenge when my uncle visited and left me a pineapple; in 1951 that was like gold in England; I had not finished it by the end of term and when we came back in May we were in bed when there was a shout, "Who has taken the pineapple?"; it turned out that he had bought himself a pineapple but I had seen it that afternoon and thought it was my old one; I had shared it out and we had all eaten it; hazing and fights between boys; on Sundays we would write letters home and the housemaster would inspect them; I was writing about how terrible the boys were and he took my letter, crumpled it up, and asked me why I felt this, and whether it was my own fault that they were nasty to me;  a rather severe form of therapy - Dragon style; food in this house was not bad but then went on to School House after about a year and a half where the food was diabolical; sleepwalking at Wilding's; became happier and more confident in School House

29:07:15 Skating on ice made by masters spraying the lawn with water, also skating on a flooded Port Meadow; remember running naked through the fields to swim in the river in summer; being taught to swim and a master who stamped on peoples' fingers if they tried to get out of the water; I tend to remember the bad stories about people being cruel and would empathise with the victims; masters used to regularly throw board erasers at your head; occasional public beatings in front of the whole school; I was taught by several masters who had taught my father at the Dragon in the late 1920s; some had been teaching there from 1916; there was a man who taught P.E. who had been a sergeant in the Army in the Boer War; he taught boxing and he tried to encourage me to fight on when my opponent was already in tears; Mr Retty used to teach us dancing which we did with other boys; my brother broke his finger dancing the Gallop; we did at least learn to dance and I found it very useful when I went to Poland for a conference, where Polish girls still knew how to dance the Polka; that was the first and last time outside the Dragon that I have actually danced it; a teacher I really liked was a man called F.E. Hicks; he had a boat which he moored on the Cherwell at the end of the playing fields; he believed in using mathematics to teach navigation; began to see that trigonometry was really useful; he had been a prisoner in the Second World War; I mention the wars because one was brought up with these tremendous memories from the people who taught us; they were not bitter about it, but we felt somehow fortunate that we were here because of their contributions and experiences

37:03:14 Called masters by nicknames which was supposed to make them like older brother; I felt an awkwardness in this as they still had to maintain discipline; in general the masters were kind; in my last year and a half at Dragons I was beginning to be very ill; although I was head of house I was beginning to get acute pains in my arm; this was caused by an incipient tumour developing on my spine which materialized later when I was at Westminster; when I left Dragons I was in hospital for six weeks in London, the Dragon masters came to see me; it was a school which made people very ambitious; we had a famous half-holiday when Gaitskell became Chancellor in 1951 as he was an Old Dragon; if you were in the scholarship form - upper one - your progress was charted on where you got on the railway from the school to your goal; same applied at Westminster with the station between it and Oxford or Cambridge; was never in either the annual Shakespeare play or Gilbert and Sullivan; inhibited by my fear of dressing up, also very bad at singing; the value was that one became familiar with much of Shakespeare which very few people were; enjoyed rugger, hockey and soccer; one of the pleasures was being taken to play matches in other schools in the masters' cars, and stopping on the way back for a drink in a pub and high tea in Oxford; I think what I learnt from that was the extraordinary sense of achievement of doing things in a group; the pleasure of the group was almost better than doing things individually for me; so much of science is the pleasure of doing it as a group

45:04:12 Gerd Sommerhoff's classes were not important to me as I was really interested in mathematics, mechanics and navigation which connected with my interests at home in building and meccano; Gerd was more interested in microscopes and looking at river water etc. but didn't connect with the scientific world that was being explained to me by my grandfather; a more profound experience was on two holidays when my parents were away I went to stay with a great-uncle in Scotland; he was Lewis Richardson, who was one of the most important King's scientists of the last century; he invented the kinds of mathematics that are used in weather forecasting, he then switched and applied mathematics to the study of war and psychology; he had continued to be an experimental and innovative scientist; people still talk about the things that he was doing when I was there as a boy; he wanted to paint his house but before buying paint we did experiments to find what sort of paint was needed; every morning he would take notes from the radio as he said he could not believe things written in newspapers; he never believed anything until he had done it, which was an extraordinary vision; it fitted with my own suspicious nature so it resonated with me, and is the sort of contrary view that scientists have to have; two of his famous books were published by Cambridge University Press but he had to pay to have them published; we later published his collected works despite the presses lack of enthusiasm

51:36:12 Remember the bullying of a boy in a wheelchair who had suffered from polio; at the Dragon we were very interested in politics and remember the 1952 American election, Ike versus Stevenson, where boys would go around wearing badges for Ike or Stevenson; all the common rooms had newspapers and every day we would read them; in upper 3A the master would give us a question every day that we would have to answer from the newspapers; this is very unusual now, and there is ignorance even among undergraduates; we were very political remember a marvellous debate between Guinness, who spoke as a Conservative, and Francis Hope, who later wrote for the 'New Statesman' and was killed in an air crash; nothing like that goes on in schools now; don't know whether that was because of the school or the period; J.B. Brown (Bruno), one of the masters, was a member of the Communist Party, he also produced the annual Gilbert and Sullivan; the Dragon had prefects and I was invited to be Head of House; I was invited by letter from 'Joc', the Head Master, to take the role on my own or with another boy; I agreed to the latter, but found one had no power except that you were called a Prefect; during the dark evening between tea and supper, and at weekends, your job was to reduce the level of mayhem; I used to use my brother as a spy; but you also had the role of speaking at the Sunday service; it was an interesting experience of leadership without power; pinups on study walls

57:34:24 I got a place at Westminster before I was thirteen; I had also taken the scholarship exam to St Pauls in the summer of 1954 but didn't get one there or at Westminster; they were formidable exams; you had optional papers in Latin and Greek verse; I was in the top stream at Westminster; I was a day boy when I started as my parents were in London at the time, but it was a difficult time because I was so ill; many nights I just couldn't sleep and my father used to read to me; I was in shattering pain and all the doctors said they were growing pains, but eventually I went to a doctor who was a distant relative; he started pressing vertebrae in my back and pressed one that made me jump in the air; I was sent to Queen's Square Hospital for Nervous Diseases; I was thirteen and a half in a ward of twenty-seven people, many of whom were seriously mentally disturbed or suffering from war injuries; in the mornings you sometimes woke to find people had died, so it was life in the raw

Second Part

0:09:07 My first term at Westminster I was commuting from my parents' house in Putney; I enjoyed the feeling of being in London; I was in a day-boy house but it still had the structure of prefects; I then went into hospital, the first four weeks to Queen's Square Hospital; it was very new technology then but they were able to  put me on a pivoting X-ray table and X-ray the spine which revealed a tumour; they didn't tell me what they told my parents, that there was only a chance that they could remove it and if not I would die; I then went to another hospital where I had surgery and they did get it out; this had been causing me terrible pain because it had been pressing on a nerve; I was then put in a ward with veterans of Dieppe etc.; what was traumatic for me was that after the operation I could not lift my head as they had taken muscles from my back; today I am supporting my head from side muscles in my neck; living with such people in the ward was an experience and I think it led to my interest in left-wing politics; later while I was at Westminster when my parents were abroad, I spent time with my Aunt Peggy Jay, my mother's sister; she was the wife of Douglas Jay who was a Cabinet Minister in the Labour Government of 1951; I used to visit them in Hampstead at weekends and met my cousins, Peter and Martin, who had been at the Dragon before me; we used to talk about Labour politics and I began to take a lot of interest in it; as a boarder, we used to read a lot of politics and I used to go to the House of Commons sometimes; this was the period of Suez; listening to the Government speech on the radio announcing war, which the opposition opposed; on Fridays at Westminster we had Corps and also went on field trips and learned to fire Bren guns; we also had Political Society sessions where I remember quizzing Lord Althorp who used to write about whether we needed to be a republic or not; Ted Heath came, but one of the most interesting was C.P. Snow; he told us that the British were narrow-minded as compared to Russia, where he had just been; there, no physicist could pass his exams unless he could write a very detailed paper on 'War and Peace'; I found it very stimulating and began to read such works; it was a school that made you feel you should take an interest and participate in aspects of public life; children who are not brought up in capital cities feel politics quite alien generally, whereas those in such cities feel politics are relevant to them; the Dragon was unusual; the other feature of being at Westminster was that I did have some splendid teachers; for mathematics I had a great German teacher called Adolf Prag; we had a very small class; in those days the mathematics sixth had four boys in it while there were twenty-seven in classics; at that time Dan Mackenzie was in the same class; in a divinity class, which was taken by a Canon from Westminster Abbey, we were asked who believed in God; this was not a question we were usually asked, but Dan said he did not believe because he was a scientist; we were a very strong group of scientists and have remained close; at that time we were told that it would be impossible to become scientists unless we were fluent in German; even as an undergraduate when I had vacation jobs in ICI, I was told I had to learn German; in the United States in the sixties they had to learn two foreign languages, and many tried to learn Russian or German; at that time, as a scientist, you didn't feel you were the dominant culture speaking English

13:14:07 My parents were abroad much of the time and I had two holidays in Malaya where my father was Deputy High Commissioner; this was a period of war, fighting Chinese guerrillas; interesting seeing a country that was going towards independence; by that time I was seventeen and did a student project, touring round and getting information on smallholdings and rubber-growing; found the essay recently and can see it was based on many interviews and studies; although I was very interested in science I was also interested in wider political matters; Malaya became independent in August 1957 when I was there for the holidays; by July they had still not got a National Anthem; they had held a competition for it and Benjamin Britten had sent an entry to Tunku Abdul Rahman; my father was a very good pianist and played on Radio Malaya; the Tunku came to my father's house and asked him to play this piece; they agreed that it would not do but sent back suggestions of how it could be changed to Britten, who was not amused; they had the brilliant idea of taking a popular dance tune and slowing it down which worked very well; it was quite an occasion with the Duke of Gloucester representing the Queen; this was the period of the end of empire; more than many of my colleagues I have embraced Europe; I was sceptical to start with, and sadly this is still not the majority view, but the marvellous thing about modern Britain is that it is part of Europe

19:00:06 On religion, I am a semi-believer; I can't accept the bleakness of this extraordinary event in biochemistry and physics; by sometimes going to church, by sometimes having semi-religious social things together, we create good feelings about ourselves and work together better; it is not a rationally understood set of beliefs and reactions, but it is somewhere near where I am; by saying the Lord's Prayer as I have done for sixty years, I am somehow connected with the past; I don't go much further than that but see the alternative as too bleak

22:02:09 Westminster had a kind of connection with Trinity, Cambridge, for its scientists; I had a strong connection as my grandfather had been a Fellow of Trinity, and his two brothers had been there; before I went I had time out where I worked on a building site in Cardiff for four or five months as a trainee engineer; lived in a small council house and went down to the site by truck every day; I was paid 1/11d an hour so I got £8 a week with board and lodging paid; it was a cold site on the docks where they were building a terminal; witnessed extraordinary industrial relations where a foreman punched a worker on the nose; when I remonstrated with him he said he was trying to build an oil refinery not win a popularity contest; it was very interesting as I was already trying to understand the maths and science in relation to what these people were doing; it was a very primitive place and I had an escort who carried my theodolite; he was a huge black man and made sure that the workers obeyed my instructions; his piece of advice to me was to have children by one woman as family allowance was paid only for the second and subsequent children; he had three by different women so got nothing at that time; this situation was not rectified until the Labour Government of 1974; this was quite a formative period before coming to Trinity, and I had some pretty realistic ideas about society as a result; at Trinity I quickly joined the Human Relations and Industry Group which was run by the Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations, Professor Kirkaldy at King's; a lot of engineers were involved as the thinking then was that to be an engineer you had to be a manager; we had evenings when shop stewards from the ship yards would confront managers; there was quite a sudden change in Cambridge where management became a more technical business; the only people who brought shop stewards to Cambridge after that was the Socialist Workers' Party; I also went to the Labour Party in Cambridge but found the undergraduate politics puerile; Raymond Williams was here but didn't come to meetings very much; I only got really interested in politics when I went to America as a post-doc. in 1967

30:46:17 I was taught by Mr Binney in Trinity, an old-fashioned hydraulics engineer; we used to go for walks with him on Sundays over the fens looking at the drains; the only superstar was Baker, the head of engineering; at that time engineering was a million miles from electronics; one of my professors, Shurcliff, with whom I became a research student, talked about modern ideas of connecting gases and magnetic fields, and commented on how the Americans were using this technology to control the way rockets might land, and the errors that might occur; taught with humour; found that the lecturers I liked, most did not, and vice versa; another element which was only found in the UK was being taught in the lab; marvellous to be taught in a place where machines were running while we were being taught; we still used fly-wheel gas engines that dated from 1905, but for teaching the principles they were tremendous

35:24:08 At Trinity in my year there were thirty old Etonians and ten old Westminsters; coming back as a Don was interesting as the Etonians treat them as akin to an under-gamekeeper or a floor sweeper; the important thing for them was beagling at the weekend with the Trinity Foot; I played soccer with them but also grammar school boys; saw it all as part of the pageantry of life; it was actually very friendly; some of my closest friends were reading philosophy, English and history, and we would spend a lot of time talking endlessly, or going to films; I went on a football tour in my first time with this extraordinary mixture of people; I think the collegiate system works very well for undergraduates but is a near disaster for many academic lives subsequently; having moved from Trinity to University College, London, and having seen American universities which don't have colleges, I see that having huge advantages; the curious thing about the collegiate system is that you may have conversations over lunch but they each goes back to his silo; if you don't have colleges, interdepartmental connections are stronger; another feature of Cambridge is that it prides itself on intellectual prowess and ownership, whereas if you are at an empirical, utilitarian place, like UCL, you judge knowledge more by its use and its connections; I felt very privileged when I went back to Trinity as a Fellow because I was of an era where a lot of the Fellows had had outside careers - E.H. Carr and Vivian, also Otto Frisch; the colleges were fantastic as they had come from all sorts of places; feel that the college recruitment policies have become far too narrow and Cambridge's reputation may be based on past glories; unless there is a very firm policy to keep recruiting people from outside, the system becomes too cosy; for undergraduates it is fantastic and I enjoyed it, but it was then very insular, English, male; I met an Italian girl here and later went to see her family in Rome, then I met my present wife, but it was a pretty male life; during that time I also travelled in Europe, Germany in particular, which I enjoyed; when I came to think about what to do, one idea was to train as a civil engineer; on one of my vacations I went to Pakistan where my father was then and saw large irrigation projects; I planned to go to America to learn civil engineering, but then I met my wife; instead I decided to become a research student in Cambridge, which I did with my supervisor, Shurcliff, in the new technology of magnetic fields which people thought was going to be a new way of improving the efficiency of power stations; it was an exciting period when a lot of public money was being spent; I had an industrial scholarship to pay for my PhD on this subject; in doing so there was new mathematics to be done, which was interesting; after a year my professor got the job of head of engineering at Warwick; I went with him and at that time also got married; I worked in an aircraft factory as there was no university; my wife, a textile designer, was wardrobe mistress in the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, a very progressive theatre in the 1960s; on one occasion the Minister of Culture, Jenny Lee, came and chaired the discussion at the end of 'Lock up Your Daughters'

47:00:00 I did a PhD and it was very exciting; I gave seminars on what I had done and people were very excited by it and gave me ideas of how it could be improved; by the time I had finished my PhD I had written joint papers with a number of professors; as a social person I thought you could make progress faster by working with other people;  I also had to confront distinguished people who had made mistakes in their maths; I then put in for a Trinity fellowship and got one; I then went to South Africa as a visiting lecturer for about three months; I then went to America on a Fulbright scholarship which was extremely influential in my life, partly because I was doing interesting scientific work but we were there in 1967 when things were hotting up; one evening we were driving back from New York and drove into Haarlem in the middle of a riot; my wife was working in the anti-Vietnam movement which was run with extraordinary efficiency; to be with the million people marching on the Pentagon was an extraordinary experience; while in Africa we were in a bus that was taken over by the Ugandan Army which was out of control; have been in quite a few events like this where things erupt; I incline towards the authoritarian, keeping things under control as people get very frightened if control is lost

Third Part 3rd June 2009

0:09:07 Returned from USA in January 1968 and joined the Central Electricity Research Laboratories; given the task of looking at why three out of six cooling towers had all collapsed on one day in about 1965 in a high wind, all vibrating as they did so; they gave me time to study turbulence which I had not studied before; I began to develop new ideas of how turbulence impacts on buildings; we did experiments which emerged later into big theory about how turbulence is distorted; my whole professional life started with this academic research on inhomogeneous turbulence; continued this research after leaving, but while I was there found other scientists dealing with large questions such as the growing UK nuclear power programme, also researching acid rain; sadly these sorts of findings are not communicated well so that the Government was apparently not aware of acid rain until some twenty years after; the earlier research that I was doing in my PhD which was sponsored by the Electricity board, came to a grinding halt because they said that nuclear power was going to be so cheap that you would barely need to metre it; we had some discussions in seminars about why they were pushing ahead with nuclear power so strongly since the Act of Parliament that set up the Electricity Generating Board made no mention of nuclear being the reason for the institute; I learned that the Ministers in passing the Act stated in Parliament that this was one of the primary roles of the organization; we also did experiments looking at icing of overhead electric cables and oscillations of wind; it was then suggested that I apply for a job back in Cambridge and in 1970 I was appointed as a lecturer in applied mathematics, which was quickly turned into a joint lectureship in engineering; I had a very interesting time here for twenty-two years; the advantage was that both departments thought of me in the other department so I avoided much of the administrative responsibilities; I was able to have projects and research students in both disciplines; we were able to initiate new course on issues of environment; in the early 1970s one of the questions was whether we were getting into the period of a new ice age; by the late 70s after the hot summer of 1976, people began to measure increasing carbon dioxide on a mountain in Hawaii and the mood swung the other way; progressively I had more and more PhD students some of whom worked on this important theory of turbulence changes over hills and around buildings, continuing the work that I had begun; I began to work on the serious question of how pollutants disperse in the atmosphere; I wrote some important papers and it was nice to see people picking them up and using them for practical purposes, particularly in America; at that time it was hard to get new ideas applied in the UK; we estimated how pollution moved around and realized that if you could get the Americans to adopt them then it would be easier to get them taken up here; on sabbatical leave we went to America and I worked for the Environmental Protection Agency; I helped them with some experiments and also did field experiments on a hill in Idaho where pollution was impacting; this verified beyond doubt how pollutants move in complicated flows; by the middle 1980s, after writing reports for government departments etc., a number of people felt we ought to make it more systematic; with colleagues I formed a small company - Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants; we started with just one telephone answering machine, then moved to an office on Shire Hill, and is now on King's Parade; we had support from many Government agencies with computers; our methods were ones that people were able to use after a brief training; the late 80s was a time of great change in computing; we felt we needed a screen system so started developing our own variant of Windows; luckily Microsoft developed theirs, but it was useful having attempted to do our own

11:48:00 This was a very interesting period; the head of my department, Professor Batchelor, an Australian (when I was appointed I was the only Englishman on the applied side), and he was a very inspiring and extraordinary man; he was rather fierce and departmental meeting were extraordinary affairs; Herbert Huppert was there; he had come via the United States from Australia; because of his background he had an easy relationship with Batchelor; Herbert started off in oceanography and then switched to volcanoes and avalanches and his work had been influential; he didn't much enjoy the supervision side of college life, but I found that interesting; I often bump into people that I have supervised and find that quite fun; it is a very intense life of a Don in Cambridge where you are doing supervision, research, lecturing, and, in my case, consulting; when I came back from America in 1968 I had been so appalled by what I had been seeing of the ethnic divide that I threw myself into local politics in Britain, first in London in the Labour Party, where I was on their right wing; coming to Cambridge was interesting as the debates were about whether Cambridge should have its own science parks; Trinity, where I was, used its land for the first one, and that began to change the atmosphere in Cambridge; on our street, Americans came in to work on the sites; some people in the Labour Party were horrified by the thought of more middle-class people coming to Cambridge, suggesting it would become like an inland Bournemouth; the Cambridge science parks now employ over 30,000 people and it had revolutionized Cambridge; one of the big companies that came, for which I can take some credit, was a French-American oil exploration company called Schlumberger; persuaded them to build on the Cambridge University site and Swinnerton-Dyer, who was also on the planning committee, used the £3m they paid to buy the Old Addenbrooke’s site which was otherwise going to be sold; I was on the City council for three years from 1971-4 and in my second years was leader of the Labour group; during that time we introduced the pedestrianization of Cambridge; one of the minor reforms was to allow council tenants to choose the colour of their front doors; this was all part of my life as well as being a father of three children

18:49:05 Another dimension was the great European dimension which I would have not been able to experience if I had stayed in America; I was an anti-European in the 60s having seen how backward their agriculture was, but I had some excellent German friends and I began to change my attitude; Batchelor was very keen on the European Mechanics movement and I began to take a big role in stimulating meetings; collaborative projects within the European Union were very exciting and enabled one to interact with people all across Europe; some of the ideas I had certainly emerged from that period; by the middle 80s we were visited by Frenchmen who suggested we should have a big European centre for fluid mechanics and computing; what that did turn into was a very effective network of 150 laboratories and companies across Europe of which I was the Secretary General; it has been running for twenty years despite Brussels not being very happy with it as they like to control everything; I joined the Meteorological dining club in the middle 80s and met other members there in London; in 1991 I was asked whether I would be interested in applying for the job as the head of the Meteorological Office; the idea of moving to Bracknell for five years to be in charge of 2,500 people and 300 researchers was very exciting; whereas computers were not being used in weather forecasts in the early 70s, by this time the connections between computing and satellites was all coming together; it was not just an administrative job but was also technical; I was interviewed in Whitehall; one of the interviewers was Swinnerton-Dyer among the academics; the second Under-Secretary for the Ministry of Defence confirmed that I thought it should remain in that ministry rather than going to Environment; I had been warned that this question would require a positive answer if I hoped to get the job

24:24:10 It was a challenging and interesting job; it was originally within the Government, then in 1989 it had become an executive agency and had a certain amount of independence under my predecessor, Sir John Houghton; soon after I arrived they wanted to turn it into a different sort of agency, a trading fund agency, that was expected to make profits; instead of being given an assured amount of money by different government departments, the money that was originally given to the Met Office was given to the clients in government; for example, the Royal Air Force were given money, and could have then decided to buy more meteorology and less airplanes or vice-versa; we had a famous City accountancy advisory firm advising us; it was interesting and part of the so-called total quality improvement, to do with thinking about how the organization was working, and the communications systems; very soon you find these gurus have their own ideas; the organization had been quite rigid and it was interesting to introduce these new methods of thinking; convened lots of meetings with the staff so they all knew me in the end, which was not true of my predecessor; the final conclusion was to become a trading fund on this basis but we had no idea what the profit would be at the end of the year; to our astonishment we got twice the profit we were meant to; by that time I had already left so my successor had to renegotiate contracts; found it very interesting going into the forecasting office and seeing hurricanes off Florida or snow storms in Iraq; I got interested in it at a human level as I was horrified three weeks after I arrived in the job to read of thousands of people dying of cold on the Iran-Iraq border; we knew that there was going to be this cold weather and I asked why we hadn't told them; I learned that we were not allowed to tell them; under international rules you are only allowed to tell people if there was an imminent hurricane; that is still the case; at the international meeting where I spoke on natural disasters in 1994 the Chinese delegate said this was monstrous interference in the internal affairs of other countries; we greatly improved the method of forecasting hurricanes; I had given a seminar in Beijing when a man from Hong Kong suggested that we could do a lot better with hurricane forecasting than we had been; I invited him to Bracknell and with a few lines of computer code within three or four weeks we suddenly improved the accuracy by some 30%; this method was then picked up by the rest of the world; so part of my time was representing the UK internationally; we had two or three week meetings in Geneva every summer where we really made big progress; in my first year I got them to agree to publish every year the final temperature of the world; I tried to get them to improve their financial reporting system; until 1995 meteorology was entirely concerned with the world outside towns whereas more than 50% were living in urban areas; we moved an important resolution and that began to change

33:24:24 During that time I was still a visiting professor in Cambridge and used to come up on Saturdays, and I began to move forward into the next phase of my academic research; the other thing was that I was in Whitehall and found what a devious place it actually is; we once had a meeting with very senior people from the MOD where someone said that at such meetings everybody lies; the Permanent Secretary was horrified, but after some discussion we concluded that people had to lie as they were dealing with such difficult things that they can't always say the truth; he was commenting that in Britain we have the defence, army and civilian people all in the same organization which makes it stressful in terms of decisions; most other countries separate them somewhat; nevertheless, I was surprised and shocked that you could agree something with someone and then it would be denied; the curious thing about the academic world is that people really don't lie much; learnt that you must never say that something was unacceptable because you have no way of retreat; the time came to consider my next move; after an extension of six months at the Met Office I came back into the academic world, and at the same time went back to my company as a director; in 1997 I spent three months in Toulouse working at a French institute connected to their meteorological office; I then went to America to do environmental work; by this time I understood weather, one of the features of which is its localized nature; like other things, there are standard models of weather, so that a valley was always a Swiss valley, whereas the weather pattern of a valley in Arizona is quite different

38:42:06 I then came back to Cambridge; if you have left a place and come back changed as a person it is very difficult to go back to that place again; people expected me to be unchanged; had difficulties over my Met Office pension which Trinity wanted to take from me; the result was that my Trinity fellowship continued but not my senior research fellowship; I then went back to University College in 1999 as Professor of Climate Modelling which was really appropriate; when I came back to Cambridge I was amazed to find there was no environmental cross-disciplinary thinking at all, nobody was thinking about climate and was nowhere near the big international discussions; UCL is a more empirical place, and people really look at the usefulness of things before they think of the intellectual idea behind it, which is exactly opposite to thinking at Cambridge; from 1999 until retirement I have been in London, focussing particularly on the Antarctic region which are the areas where the climate is changing most rapidly; in 1997 the Labour Party won the election; while I had been at the Met Office I had caused problems because on two or three occasions I was invited to advise the Labour Party leaders, like Michael Meacher, about how the Government had been changed under Mrs Thatcher with the new government agencies; I said that I thought it was effective, but the MOD people were not happy my talking to the potential incoming Government; even more terrible was that I had written down my opinion and given it to them; people put me up for a life peerage when the Labour Party came back to power, and I still think I am the only scientist who has been appointed to the senior side of the Party since Labour came back into power; I was appointed in 2000 and had to choose my title which is Lord Hunt of Chesterton, which I represented on the Council and was where I had lived; I have really found this role in the House of Lords interesting; one of the most intriguing things was that within a month of arriving in the House of Lords there was a Transport Bill which had not been widely proclaimed in the Party manifesto of 1997; this was a Bill that would integrate transport and the environment; because I had worked on the pedestrianization of Cambridge I was very interested; the Government had formed a new department of he Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions; then the Bill arrived in the House of Lords and to my astonishment the word "environment" was nowhere in the Bill; I asked Michael Meacher who confirmed that was so and it had gone right though the Commons with no one noticing; in the Lords the word was inserted throughout the Bill as  the purpose of taxing the car was to improve the environment; because I had been a civil servant I could ring people up in Whitehall and they confirmed that it was deliberate as the transport people would do all they could not to include the environment people; since then, the department has been split up and now there is much more environmental work in transport; one of the big improvements in legislation has been the pre-legislative scrutiny before a Bill comes out - a draft bill is produced, witnesses called,  and individual members of the public can write in their comments, and the Government does a response to the comments before it actually publishes the Bill; it is quite efficient with people from both Houses involved

47:58:10 From the political point of view think the great thing is that the UK is part of Europe which gives us a bigger canvas on which to operate; even now we are the only parliament, apart from the Czech Republic, that does not fly the European flag outside, so we are still reluctant Europeans; from a scientific point of view it has been amazingly exciting and even now I am involved in many projects; the company is involved in European issues and global ones too; one of the things we were involved in was to produce pollution forecasts down to individual streets which we can transmit to people via mobile phones; the method was picked up in Beijing so we could predict pollution levels street by street; my wife is asthmatic so I am well aware of people having breathing difficulties, so it is good to be able to give them advice; in the future we would like to have reflections back again on how useful the advice has been; one of things I have done in Parliament is to join a very rewarding group called Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment; it is a meeting-place for people from the leading industrialized nations, and at one I met colleagues from India who commented that in 2006 in Assam there had been a drought for the first time in recorded history, and that over the whole area the rainfall was halved; at the same time in the north west of India there was lots of rain for the first time in fifty years; it is going to be very serious; the ice and snow in the Himalayas will change and whole parts of China they are expecting will become desert; the big question is India, that has this huge and growing population, which depends critically on the monsoon, will have extraordinary consequences

53:39:13 My elder daughter, Jemima, is a novelist and has done a lot of journalism, and now has two children; my younger daughter, Matilda, became a doctor and specialized in paediatrics, and is now in general practice with two children; she married a novelist called Giles Foden who has just written a book entitled "Turbulence" which is a fictionalization of the story of my great uncle, Lewis Fry Richardson; my son, Tristram, became a historian; at Cambridge he studied history and the Footlights, so that presentation is an important part of his makeup; the only time Trinity had to censor its summer play was when he put one on about Trinity College and Barings Bank, in the year that it went bust; he has worked since in television and radio and has published two book, one of which has just come out, on Engels; he was taught by Gareth Steadman Jones who steered him in that direction; he is also married and has a baby son; I feel I have had a fortunate life, particularly after the near disaster at an early age