In terms of role of the President, George Porter, who was my predecessor but one, did not have his own secretary. He told me he had to fight to get his own secretary because his secretary was actually the secretary of the Executive Secretary who was a paid official. Who was like a Civil Servant. The attitude of the senior staff of the Society was like civil servants. The President and the Officers were like Ministers, they came and went, and provided no continuity. So they regarded themselves as the keepers and the... of the protocol of the Society, and they organised the meetings and organised the procedures, but George Porter managed to get his own secretary. Michael Atiyah, he was my immediate predecessor, inherited his own secretary, and he helped loosen up things a bit. But when I came, the Executive Secretary, I found that he opened all my letters, read them and passed them on before they came to me, you see, which is what a high Civil Servant would do. Of course, the letters come addressed, sometimes they were personal, sometimes they were scientific, often they were cranky, people still trying to prove Fermat's last theorem, or there was a whole collection which was, Einstein is wrong. So I was asked what I do with these letters. They said, 'Well, we keep them. We have a whole filing cabinet called cranks. And we don't throw anything away just in case they turn out to be right, because some people like to lodge their...' It's a way of lodging something at the Royal Society.

I think I... I must say I didn't honour it always. When I saw something that looked totally cranky, I didn't pass it on. But I found that they also wrote letters, on occasion it was very useful for the Executive Secretary... you see, the Executive Secretary is paid, and he's called the Account Holder, so the Treasury regard him as the important person, as he controls... actually he doesn't control, but he keeps the money. Council decides how it's spent and so on. So he's quite a powerful figure and he corresponds to something like an Under Secretary of the Ministry. He's quite well paid, and indeed they'd... up till then they'd all come from the Civil Service. He'd been in the Cabinet Office for many years, and he... so I gradually... and so then when I came to write my first report on my... this was a performance report at the end of each year. All the staff have an appraisal. He came to me and said, 'Do you want me to write Enid's appraisal'? I said, 'No, I'll write it.' 'Oh', he said, 'I thought you'd want me to do it.' So I said, 'But she's my secretary'. 'I see her every day', he said. He was trying to say, 'She's part of my office, you see'. She's part of my office, and she's just loaned to me, that was the attitude. Gradually this changed and indeed the Assistant Executive Secretary told Liebe... because I was clearly proving a little bit difficult, I had been used to the LMB and places like that. Peter Cooper said to Liebe, look we don't want the President to be active, we want a figurehead here, you see. Well, this was ludicrous by now, because by now we'd got pretty well involved in science policy, and had been for some years, and indeed Lord Todd appointed a staff member, the very first of his kind, and he was several Presidents back, just one member of staff to deal with science policy. They'd never had that before. The policy, such as it was, was made on the hoof. And Michael Atiyah had increased the number of people dealing with science policy and global issues, and I actually strengthened our science policy group, because this was becoming more and more important.