When this was... the cost of this was worked out, we ran into our first financial crisis. The trouble was not only that the redesign had cost a lot of extra money, but the cost of erecting steel, which had begun, which had been about £80 for a ton, had begun to rise sharply, so in any case, the original costs of £330,000 would be quite inadequate. Now, that did not cause a great deal of trouble. I... first of all, the DSIR were quite used to dealing with increases of costs, just sheer increases of costs, and the particular factor that the cost of erecting had gone up from £80 to something like £90 for a ton was not of particular importance in this increased cost. What I had asked to do so, though, was... and it became desperate, as I say, to save money, I did so at that stage by abolishing the original idea of making access to the focus.

We... when we had discussed how we would make access to the focus of this telescope, the bowl was to be... to have the focus in the aperture plane, that is the focus was to be carried on a steel tube rising up from the apex of bowl, a quarter of the diameter, that's 62 and a half feet. We had decided that the – in consultation with Husband – the easiest way of doing this was to have an arrangement where we could invert the bowl, and reach the focus by having a movable structure on the diametrical girder, moving on a track, which would... we would invert the bowl, and then drive this tower out to the centre of the telescope and climb up the tower, and have easy access to the focus. Husband never liked this idea. I'm never quite sure why. After all, the tower was to be quite high. He was probably a bit worried about the safety of working at this height on a slender tower running on the diametric girder. Anyhow, I said, 'Look, I'm going to save £20,000 or £30,000 by abandoning this idea. We will... instead we will have an arrangement that we will lower the tubular steel mast to the ground. We will invert the bowl and have a device to lower the tubular steel mast to the ground, and we will change the focus and then that is that'. So we did overcome this 1954 financial crisis without too much trouble.