When I came to Cambridge...
[Q] Who did you contact?
[Lawrence] Bragg was the... Bragg was the connection with [RW] James, you see, from the old days. So Bragg... I... I thought... I wanted to do something in the structure of matter but something unusual not straightforward crystallography and one of the things I thought of joining was the MRC Unit, which I'd heard of because there was correspondence between Bragg and James, which was something they told me about; the wonderful things they're doing at the MRC, what they might be able to do at the MRC. And I remember a letter in which Bragg wrote to James and he said, 'When I have Kendrew... Kendrew has now got good crystals of myoglobin', so this was a stable companion to the haemoglobin which Perutz was working on which was proving difficult. And so, Bragg said, 'We probably have a good choice here, being able to compare the two structures', I remember very clearly. So I asked Bragg, Bragg said the unit was full, now to this day I don't know whether that's true or not. I have a feeling it's not, I think they, either I wasn't regarded as reliable or there'd been somebody from Cape Town several years before me who turned out to be a dud and maybe they thought that James's recommendation was faulty. So Bragg wanted me to work, I said I'd be happy to work on alloys, order-disorder phenomenon in alloys, uphill diffusion and so on, but Bragg said they were shutting that down, a man called Hargreaves was on... And what he wanted me to do, he was trying to direct me to work on silicates, order-disorder in silicates and I didn't... I didn't find that interesting. I think I would now, but, I didn't have enough... didn't know enough to know that was a fascinating problem, but just as well.
And so, I spent six weeks when I first was in Cambridge... letters would take two weeks because the boat... there was no airmail and the... the ship took two weeks from Southampton to Cape Town, and there were no... no telephones, so for six weeks I was hanging around wondering what to do, but, James had said, 'Go and see my old Manchester colleagues', they were the whole Manchester mafia in Cambridge. There was [John] Lennard-Jones, Professor of Chemistry, theoretical chemistry; there was [Douglas] Hartree, Professor of Mathematical Physics and I went to see them both. And I'd actually done some work on quantum chemistry, I actually calculated the bond lengths it's quite... if you know some quantum mechanics you can teach yourself, the molecular orbitals and valence bond theory and I'd calculated it. So I was... he offered me a PhD and it would support in the chemistry. But Hartree was the one whom I decided to work with because he had a problem, which he thought he wanted a crystallographer, it was problem in the phase transitions in steel, during the curing of steel, a problem left over from the war. I think I'd better not talk too much about it but it was a... it would take too long... it was a... led nowhere but I learnt a great deal. First of all I learnt to compute originally by hand with a Brunswig and later I used EDSAC, I was one of the first users of EDSAC, which was the first process control with a store unit, it was really the first of its kind. And I do remember on one night, because you could compute at night when there was less pressure on it, and meeting John Kendrew, or rather John Kendrew's wife bringing him some... thermos flask and sandwiches to last the night. Yes. It was quite a romance, you see, I wasn't a nerd, like there were these guys, these computer guys whom we now call nerds, they weren't called that in those days but they would hang around all night and sleep during the day, John Kendrew wasn't. But, that was the... it was quite fun; we had... it was all done with paper tapes and so on and I learnt a great deal. But, I was solving partial differential equations together with chemical change.
[Q] And there was no time chain with either one of you was using the machine or the other.
No, no, you could use... no, on EDSAC?
[Q] Yes.
Oh, no, no time... you had to wait, your tapes had to... you had to get into a queue and then you had to run your tapes. And you also had... in those days you had what we call post-mortem tapes, so, if something went wrong you could interrogate the contents of the store, so it was all quite interesting.
