Hell or the garden of eden

At my instigation, the Information Commissioner recently obliged Aberystwyth to reveal that Howard Purnell was on the interview committee that appointed Jeremy Jones of the chemistry department in Cambridge to head of department of the EDCL in 1978. So it seems overwhelmingly likely that the job for Jones was another arrangement in a smoke filled room, an arrangement that was taking place at about the same time as the arrangement for me to move for Swansea. It was arranged that J. M. Thomas would take up a post at Cambridge and it was arranged that W. J. Jones would fill the vacancy at Aberystwyth. Purnell had also been at the same department in Cambridge, and Buckingham was situated in the same department. I suspect that Buckingham’s pressure to make me publish less was an attempt to make the denial of tenure easier. This attempt failed. Such pressures today are illegal, they would be considered to be intimidation at work. Cambridge in the guise of Swinnerton-Dyer of thatcherite days finally intimidated Aberystwyth into closing EDCL. For this he was made honorary professor by the rival physics department, which had been allowed to remain open to no purpose. The appointment of W. J. Jones in 1978 marked the beginning of first degree harassment of my group, harassment which lasted for five years, from 1978 to 1983, and came to an end because Aberystwyth breached contract and allowed my SERC Advanced Fellowship to run out. That destroyed Project Delta and wasted about half a million pounds in Government funding in today’s money. The EDCL was saved from demolition by the efforts of Gareth Evans, who had it listed by CADW. It is not possible to think of a worse administration than the one which prevailed in the late seventies and eighties at Aberystwyth.

In my pungent room without window glass in the Eastgate slum, I tried to think of ways of getting out of “the Swansea job”, as it became known throughout Britain in chemistry. Luckily, Cadman pointed out to me the existence of the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC ) Advanced Fellowship competition. This was the toughest post doctoral competition and was the only way I could stop myself becoming embroiled in the undergrowth of a corrupt jungle. For reasons known only to himself, J. M. Thomas signed the application, for five years at the EDCL, and legally committed the College to give me tenure. The funds were available as all those J. M. Thomas appointments show. Perhaps the arrangement with Purnell had not yet taken place. This was my sixth open international post doctoral competition, having won five already: SRC, ICI European, Canadian, NRCC, JRF of Wolfson and Ramsay Memorial. Even at that point this was a world record. It is all too clear in retrospect that J. M. Thomas deliberately refused to give me tenure because he wanted all the tenure for his own group. Today that would be a form of career blocking, considered by ACAS to be harassment and a violation of human rights. I am a Welsh speaker, so what about all that Welshness to which Thomas regularly refers in his writings? In reality it did not exist, it was all about power and money. So I applied for the SERC Advanced Fellowship in the autumn of 1977. It was clear to many of the EDCL staff that I did not wish to move to Swansea, some were sympathetic. In 1977 the National Physical Laboratory had supported me for the prestigious Edward Harrison Memorial Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, which I was awarded in 1978. Mansel Davies knew nothing of this medal procedure because he might well have blocked it. The perversity of his character was unfathomable. This award was for work in theoretical and physical chemistry. Previous winners include the Nobel Laureate Derek Barton, Longuet-Higgins, Carrington, Luckhurst, and Buckingham. In 1978 I had also completed my D. Sc. Thesis and submitted it. It was awarded in early 1978 at the age of 27, another record for modern times. Mansel Davies also knew nothing of this procedure. So being forced to compete for the sixth time was wholly wrong, and completely unethical, especially as others appointed to tenure were of very meagre calibre in comparison. Many of the EDCL staff sensed the injustice acutely, but were completely under the thumb. After all, they had been my teachers.

The day of the false “interview” approached and I felt sick at the blood soaked system, the wasted blood of real talent. It took place in the winter vacations of 1977, and I spent the night before at my parents’ house in a state of complete uncertainty. I loathed the thought of being forced into corruption by self seeking mediocrities, and was intensely angry at those who were so arrogant as to think that I would ever go along with their plans. There were four short listed for the interview, three of whom had been deceived into thinking that they had any chance of being appointed. We were told to sit in the corridor of the bureaucratic building in Swansea and I was hauled in. I knew that the whole procedure was false, Purnell asked if I would take the job if offered, as if he had not done so already. I hesitated before this little weasel of a man for a very long time. He became very tense and nervous. In the end I was forced to answer yes with great foreboding of doom. Purnell asked if I liked rugby and this time I could answer no. I was duly offered a bucket of doom, and went back to the EDCL. I had been given half a microscopic room in which were stuffed three desks. To get at mine you had to walk over the top of another. This was infinitely preferable to Swansea, already a decaying campus of blackened concrete sixties style. My hope was that the Advanced Fellowship offer would come through soon, so I could refuse the Swansea offer with honour and dignity. At this time Gareth Evans was a post doctoral, and we had just been joined by Colin Reid, who was doing a Masters degree which I was told to supervise. These two were nominally part of the group of Mansel Davies and could not have moved to Swansea with me. Moving to Swansea meant the destruction of a very promising group, considered in fact as the best in Britain in theoretical and physical chemistry. The truth is that EDCL did not deserve us.

As can be seen from the Omnia Opera on www.aias.us the flow of high quality papers was unaffected by the rotten administration. There was an unusually long gap of about three months between 22^nd. December 1977 (OO53) and 20^th March 1978 (OO68, submitted to Spectrochimica Acta). This is the only sign that something was wrong. In those months there was tremendous turmoil as I drove back and forth between Swansea and Aberystwyth, setting up my work at Swansea as slowly as I could and continuing to work with the group at Aberystwyth in order to keep it alive. Without my input Colin Reid would never had been awarded his Thesis, and Gareth Evans would have drifted out of the academic world. Mansel Davies was due to retire in September 1978. I have always loathed the campus at Swansea as a concrete jungle. It used to be known as a glorified grammar school. I was given an office and as always nothing had been prepared. Purnell worked in an entirely different area. I know now that he was a mafia boss with considerable power for no reason. He was a small, vindictive man who decided to try to destroy my career when I eventually returned to the EDCL on the Advanced Fellowship. I was not due to start at Swansea until the autumn of 1978, so had no real need of being there. I was reluctantly preparing for something that everyone knew was a mistake. A “career move” has nothing to do with scholarship. The stinking slum in Eastgate had to serve at home for a short while. From the perspective of thirty five years it can be seen very clearly that this was administrative chaos, all they had to do was to appoint me to a low paid tenure research associate when I was still at Tal y Bont. The perennial pleas of poverty repulsed me with their dishonesty. Of course they had money, not least for their own high salaries.

Suddenly in 1978 I was a Harrison Memorial Prizewinner and a Scientiae Doctor of the University of Wales, a distinction higher than full professorship. So I was effectively a full professor but still being kept untenured. The Principal Sir Goronwy Daniel wrote to congratulate me. He was a former pupil of Pontardawe Grammar School. With reluctance I informed Mansel Davies of these very prestigious achievements but he was merely annoyed. I suppose I should not have expected anything else. I was not even congratulated by John Thomas. What I was hoping for also came through, an SERC Advanced Fellowship, and I was told by someone that I was graded top of my year in chemistry. All they had to do at the EDCL was to award me a tenured research associate, lock me in an office, give me some bread and water and throw the key away. I would have brought in all the money they wanted, and they always wanted money. So I bided my time, accepted the SERC Fellowship and got on with work. I was also supported for the Meldola Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry by the National Physical Laboratory, and was awarded this in 1979. Any administration with any sense at all would have offered tenure, but all I got were lies about poverty. I was also awarded a large grant by the British Government’s Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). This was a surprise because I had not even applied for a grant. In today’s money it was about half a million pounds. The SERC Advanced Fellowship was roughly equivalent to an associate professorship in the United States, and was fiercely competitive. The British Government’s stated aim in awarding this fellowship was that the supporting institute should award tenure as soon as feasible. The EDCL administration signed the application form and committed the College to awarding tenure. I also had the enthusiastic support of Sir Goronwy Daniel but he was due to retire in the autumn of 1978. He was later critical of the administration.

The Meldola Medal is awarded to a chemist under the age of 32 for the most promising publications. So much for Buckingham’s “publishing too much”, and I won it outright in 1979. Past recipients include Poliakoff, Luckhurst, Carrington, Rowlinson, Robertson, R. H. Jones, Todd and Norrish (two Nobel Laureates), Hinshelwood and Ingold. With Luckhurst, Carrington and Sutton, I am among those who have won both the Harrison Memorial Prize and Meldola Medal. These are the most competitive awards in early career, where competition is really meaningful. I was also judged to be the joint winner of the Marlow Medal of 1978, but it was awarded elsewhere because I received the Harrison Memorial Prize of that year. Again I was supported by the National Physical Laboratory. I was so unlucky to be administered by a bunch of local careerists. The EDCL would not have allowed me to take the interferometer to Swansea, and in any case that would have destroyed the work of Gareth Evans, shortly to become a University of Wales Fellow under my guidance in open inter collegiate and inter subject competition. So nothing had been thought out by Purnell and Thomas. In addition, J. M. Thomas had allowed the student intake to fall to a dangerously low level. There were only five students in the final year of chemistry when he suddenly left in 1978. In that year our group also began to match that of J. M. Thomas in quantity, although we were a much smaller group. Our group was already above the Thomas group in internationally acknowledged quality. I decided to concentrate on my work, and reject careerism, and began to produce the papers that led to the formation of the European Molecular Liquids Group (EMLG) at the National Physical Laboratory. The Pisa group of Paolo Grigolini had also indicated that it wished to cooperate with my group in the area of memory function analysis, and I had been invited to produce my first prestigious “Advances in Chemical Physics “ review by Stuart Rice. I was invited by “Accounts of Chemical R search”,edi ed at Cornell, to write up the Meldola Lecture, which I gave at Oxford.

On 22^nd March 1978 OO61 was submitted to Faraday II and is the first to use the new description of the far infra red as the Zero to THz Profile. This led shortly later to the discovery of the gamma process of the far infra red. OO61 was co authored by Gareth Evans and William Coffey and reports the discovery that spectra can record the time evolution of the dynamics of molecules from picoseconds to years, on a time scale stretching from a million millionth of a second to millions of seconds or more, all in one spectrum. There is still no theory or computer simulation that can begin to understand this process in sufficient detail. The itinerant oscillator of Coffey failed dismally, to his intense annoyance with me, not with nature. On 31^st March 1978 OO62 was submitted to “Molecular Liquids”, with Coffey. This paper began to extend the analysis to incoherent neutron scattering. Coffey produced a vastly over complicated theory

and had not yet learned Debye’s adage that complexity is lack of understanding. All these papers were submitted from the EDCL, none from Swansea. On 11^th May 1978 OO54 was submitted to a Faraday Discussion meeting with Gareth Evans and Russell Davies. This is the first paper that records work on the interaction of rotation and translation making extensive use of computer simulation. The program that I had struggled with for nearly three years was at last working efficiently, producing a vast amount of new information. Another problem with the “Swansea job” is that it would have made computer simulation almost impossible. So Purnell and Thomas did not even know what I was doing at a time when the rest of British chemistry knew all about our work. I was digging in to my work with all my strength, and Gareth Evans and Colin Reid were also beginning to work to great effect. This is despite the fact that Colin Reid was initially a very difficult student who would be absent from work for weeks on end. On one occasion there was a violent flare up between Colin Reid and Mansel Davies and again I was being made to supervise someone else’s student, caught in the middle. I knew that Mansel Davies had only a short time to go before retirement, and I thought I would be free from verbal violence. In reality it was to intensify to near insanity with the arrival of the delightful Jeremy Jones, the last head of department of the EDCL.

Suddenly I was told that John Thomas was to go to Cambridge, shortly after arranging with the BBC to make a fuss over his FRS. I remember feeling a sense of great betrayal, mixed with relief. A new head of department would surely award the tenure expected by the Government. Purnell wrote me a hostile and sarcastic letter from Swansea instructing me not to expect a “personal laboratory”. The archetypical scarecrow made to be knocked over. I had not expected anything of the kind. This revealed his true nature, he was a cold blooded crook, and it was only matter of time before I resigned from the Swansea job. On 31^st May 1978 OO55 was submitted to Faraday II and was the pioneering paper of the multi technical approach that became the Delta Project of the EMLG. This was immediately acknowledged to be an excellent paper in which high quality data were collected by Gareth Evans, Colin Reid and Ram Yadav, with some low frequency data by Graham Davies. Data from neutron and depolarized Rayleigh scattering were also used. The critically important thing was the fact that data over a sufficient range disposed of theories like dominoes, the most successful one being the Mori three variable theory. That remains the case to this day. For the first time, dichloromethane was used as a model liquid, and this became one of the three liquids of the Delta Project. On 15^th June 1978 OO58 was submitted with Gareth Evans, Colin Reid and William Coffey to Buckingham’s letters journal “Chemical Physics Letters” and showed the dramatic effect on molecular dynamics of using a glassy solvent. This was followed by OO59 on 10^th July 1978 with Gareth Evans and with Kestemont, Hermans, Finsy and van Loon of the Free University of Brussels on the computer simulation of the itinerant oscillator model.

As a Scientiae Doctor and holding a distinction higher than full professor I decided to apply for the advertized post of head of department of the EDCL. This was forced upon me by the need for tenure, but such a job is not suitable for a dedicated scholar. Somehow the application was leaked to Mansel Davies. Although he had no authority over me as a Ramsay Memorial Fellow, I was told to withdraw the application. This was done in a sarcastic, malicious way, “you as head of department!”. These days that would be seen as another clear violation of the laws governing behaviour in the work place. It would be seen as deliberately and unreasonably refusing to award well deserved promotion and blocking the chances of promotion. At the time I thought it over and wondered what damage Mansel Davies could do even at that very late stage in his career. So I withdrew the application in considerable bitterness. I know now that some arrangement had already been made to give the job to Jeremy Jones behind the scenes. Other candidates probably had no chance at interview. Mansel Davies may have known this, but denied to me that he had any knowledge of the procedure. One of the candidates was J. O. Williams, who had been given rapid promotion to Reader, but who had refused to move to Cambridge with Thomas. J. O. Williams’s application was revealed most dramatically to me in the corridor as he burst out of the interview, infuriated and incoherent, snarling at me in the Welsh language and almost knocking me over in rage.

OO60 was also submitted on 10^th July 1978 on current and spin density correlation functions which I evaluated with my molecular dynamics computer simulation program. OO64 was submitted on 3^rd July 1978, a short paper to Faraday II. By this time I had already produced the equivalent of the entire output of papers by my supervisor Mansel Davies in his entire career, and had comprehensively out performed him in early career. Yet he was still as patronising as ever. The strangest thing about him is that he kept informing Gareth Evans, with whom he was on good terms, that I was the best scientist he had ever worked with. I could never bring myself to have much respect for him in turn, although he did do some good work. The verbal outbursts, career bending and so on knocked almost all the respect out of me. Having written that, he was infinitely preferable to what the tide washed in next, a little man called Jeremy Jones who had been a student of Orville-Thomas. Most of the EDCL could not believe that such a man could be appointed as a head of department, surely they could have found someone better. Within ten years the EDCL had been closed and abandoned.

J. M. Thomas disappeared in the summer of 1978 and the EDCL porters had to help him pack. I do not know if he had the right to use the porters for his personal affairs. Before he left however he joined in the pressure to make me move to Swansea in a short interview where he very grudgingly seemed to offer tenure again. Of course nothing came of it. Pressures to force me to move to another job would now be illegal. I remember him intoning in Welsh to me that he had heard of my SERC Advanced Fellowship but I was not to refuse the Swansea move. “You’re not supposed to do that” he said in Welsh. I found this to be intolerably patronising so made up my mind to take the SERC Advanced Fellowship. The great output of work that started in 1978 shows this decision to be entirely the right one to make. He should have been making efforts to appoint me tenured full professor in view of my British, Irish and Commonwealth record D. Sc. and Harrison Memorial Prize, both acquired in 1978. The money was available of course, and was always available. In the same interview he told me “I know all about you”. I almost replied “Very good for you”, but said nothing. So there was obvious personal animosity, and again that would be against ACAS rules these days. It was probably illegal in those days too. The reason is that I helped a technician called Mansell Davies who lost an eye in an accident while doing work for Thomas, and wished to claim compensation. In that summer of 1978 Mansell Davies rented a flat to me in his house in Borth, overlooking the sea, so I popped out of the Eastgate slum like a cork out of a cyanogen lecture bottle. The individual Thomas was nothing like the image, the cult of personality at work. They never are. What is needed in a National University is an intelligent and helpful head of department who shares resources fairly, and above all a fluent Welsh speaker truly dedicated to Wales.

Prof. Mansel Davies (not to be confused with the technician Mansell Davies) remained at the EDCL until the day of the interview for a new head of department. In those days such a process was entirely secretive, but recently the Information Commissioner obliged Aberystwyth to give some details. Howard Purnell was on the interview committee, and there were about twenty or thirty applicants. There was a short list which included Jeremy Jones and J. O. Williams. None of the candidates had my record of achievement in open competition, so stopping me from applying is suspicious, especially as I had the support of the Principal, Sir Goronwy Daniel. It is also blatantly illegal and I would have made a strong candidate. My Civil List predecessor Hamilton was full professor at the age of twenty three, and Heisenberg at twenty six. I was already twenty eight at the time. So the system always slid out of its obligations. The Scientiae Doctor was meant by the University of London, who founded it in 1860, to be a distinction higher than full professor or personal chair, but this distinction was not honoured by the University of Wales despite the fact that it awarded the degree as a mark of internationally recognized achievement. The administration of the University of Wales was therefore anarchic, it did what it liked because those whose duty it was to control it failed totally to do so. This left a small clique in control, as nearly always in Wales. The Harrison Memorial Prize was a rare achievement, but the University of Wales refused to recognize it. By the “University of Wales” was meant a few untalented careerists, cuckoos in the nest. The People of Wales should not be deceived in this way. The talent and dedication to the language inside Wales is to be found outside the colony known as “The University of Wales” in individual homes and in the best secondary schools. This has always been the case. There was also an exact precedent: Graham Williams had won a Harrison Memorial Prize in 1977, one year before me, and was promoted to a personal chair, without a D. Sc., in 1978. So I should also have been promoted in 1978 to a tenured personal chair because I had a D. Sc. and a Harrison Memorial Prize. If the money was available for Graham Williams it was available for me. So this was illegal prejudice and career blocking. There was no pressure on Graham Williams to move to Swansea. So the system was riddled completely with injustice.

The enthusiastic support for my work from Sir Goronwy Daniel became vividly apparent when I was invited to a reception in late winter of 1978 at the Principal’s Mansion with Lady Daniel, formerly the Honourable Valerie Lloyd-George. So I found myself transplanted from the worst slum in Aberystwyth to the resplendent mansion. Being a cold, damp night I put on a borrowed leather jacket over a woollen jumper, and emerged from the slum at a brisk pace. I decided to walk to the Principal’s mansion because my car was parked at the EDCL. Sir Goronwy and Lady Daniel were both very pleasant, despite the Principal’s reputation for a ferocious nature, and almost his last act as Principal was to hand me my D. Sc. Certificate at the Degree Ceremony of July 1978, where he broke into a broad, genuine smile. He offered me a sherry which I could not refuse, and I remember Lady Daniel’s bemused countenance as I started to melt under the combined effect of leather jacket, woollen jumper and sherry, being an athlete and non drinker. She looked like Lloyd-George almost exactly and I looked like a long haired owl. All was going well, and I felt completely at home, “here is appreciation at last” I thought. The whole occasion was spoiled by a pathetic comment from Prof. Sir Granville Beynon, who told me that I was too young. I was about to assure him that he was too old and way past it when Sir Goronwy stared him down. There was deep rooted envy as well as animosity in a small place like Aberystwyth. Nevertheless that touch of kindness by the Principal did me a power of good at a time when I was being beaten up by the petty minded. Sir Goronwy evidently did not know of these pressures, or if he did he kept his diplomatic distance. Some time later he wrote me a latter in retirement asking me to bide my time, and that letter is now reproduced on www.aias.us. Sir Goronwy did more for the Welsh language than John Thomas ever did or ever thought of doing.