I'll first of all deal with the problem of the oscillations of the bowl. I was, of course, in constant daily contact with Husband, either in Sheffield, or he would come to Jodrell Bank. And the various problems were solutions were thought. We first of all... Husband thought we could put additional loading on the ends of the... near the trunnians to stop this, but the final solution was to build a circular, stabilising girder running from the extreme diameters of the bowl, and to build on top of the diametrical girder an enormous... well, not enormous, it was a very large system of hydraulic rubber wheels, like great tractor wheels, on which this stabilising girder would rest, and would move, and this would take out the oscillations. And this is how the telescope was, in fact, built, with this rather slender, stabilising girder, not load-bearing, but stabilising, and later on the drainage, it also included a method of draining the bowl. It had an internal channel through which holes in the bowl would take the water, and they would overflow on to a trench drain around the diametrical girder.

Now, of course, this led to a considerable increase in cost. The other trouble was that the... I mentioned the Metropolitan-Vickers estimate for the driving system had doubled, and, worst of all, when the project was put to the Air Ministry, when the Scientific Advisor, they had refused to pay because... not because they were not willing to do so... I mean, they... the Air Ministry in principle were fine. The point is that someone in the Treasury had spotted that two different... two different parts of government were about to give money to the same project, namely the Air Ministry and the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, and they absolutely refused to do this. And so by the end of 1955, we were facing an enormous debt. In fact, in the autumn of that year, when the Bursar and Husband had investigated in what detail they could, we were faced with a deficit of the order of a quarter of a million pounds, and bearing in mind what I said about, that was a vast sum of money in those days, as it would be today.

So the Chief Finance Officer of the DSIR was brought to Jodrell, and I remember taking him into the control room, and I said, 'You know, I thought they would cancel the project', and I said, 'It was a chap called Joliffe, whom I knew, got to know very well, later on', and I said, 'Well, what are you going to do?' He turned to me he said, 'I don't know, Lovell'... he said, 'I don't know, Lovell, but the strength of your position is that huge mass of steel that I'm looking at through the window'. Because these towers were then at 180 foot level. Well, what actually happened was that he had in mind that there should be a pound for pound discussion, and that he... that it might be possible for the government department to pay half the costs if the university would be responsible for bearing the other half of the cost.