I really thought of... what should I do for research? And it was suggested that I should go and work with somebody like the Braggs in London. But Freddie Brewer, who was my tutor, said, you don't need to go to another university, we've just decided to set up a department here. And this decision was with the old professor who had succeeded Miers, would himself make an x-ray tube. And they had appointed a young man, too, who had just taken a good degree and was interested to work with the X-ray tube and begin to do some X-ray crystallography. And this young man was Tiny, Tim Powell. And so I could go and be Tiny's first student. And so I thought, well why not, so I did that.

[Q] That was a thallium compound?

It was thallium dimethyl halides was the subject we worked on, which was really very interesting.

[Q] It's a metal-carbon polymer, wasn't it? Very unexpected.

Yes, yes.

[Q] That was an interesting... it must have given you quite a thrill to get into that work?

Yes. I grew quite beautiful crystals of this thallium compound, and drew them accurately and...

[Q] Took X-ray photographs?

Gave X-ray photographs, which weren't very good X-ray photographs, because we only had a rather horrible cylindrical camera devised by Hilgers.

[Q] Oh, really?

Yes. And Tiny didn't somehow know anything about oscillation photographs, which as I discovered next year when I moved over to Cambridge it was really just absolutely necessary.