In the war, very end of the war, end of the, actually the German war had just finished, the Japanese war was still running, I was posted directly by the Air Ministry to join a big exhibition that the Air Force had organised. I had nothing to do with the organisation of that at all, but to explain radar and stuff like that to the British public and my memory is that we had four million people round it but I could be exaggerating, but it was a big exhibition. In was in the old bomb-site of John Lewis, it was just a sort of wreck in the middle of Oxford Street, and it ran for, I think, about six months and we had really an amazing variety and number of people come round. And it was absolutely fascinating because you got housewives coming round, say, and then they would see some little component, you know, oh, I made that washer, sort of thing, and we tried to explain what they were doing, why it was important and, of course, a lot of the stuff in the war was made by tiny firms, separate from each other, each not knowing what the other was doing for security reasons. So that this exhibition really tried to pull it together and show people the significance of what they were doing in the factories, and very often they were housewives who had no particular knowledge of anything, they just learned how to make that particular part and we explained what it was all about. We had the first jet plane there and, which, incidentally, I’m very fortunate, I actually saw the very first flight of this very first jet plane at Cranwell in 1944. I just happened to be there when this thing took off with no propeller. A wonderful thing to remember actually, and we had that in the exhibition. I think it was called the P1 Whittle jet plane, and stuff like that, and it really took off, this exhibition, and it had a big impact on me. I felt, golly, the public really can get excited by technology and science and they might really want to know how radar works, you know, this sort of thing. Yeah, I think that had a big affect, certainly when I met Frank Oppenheimer years later of course, this was in my mind and I sort of resonated with him with that background experience. I think that’s true.
