Well, I've been concentrating on the building of the telescope and what happened immediately afterwards with Sputnik and the debt we'd incurred. Now, throughout the whole of that time of course, scientific research was going on at Jodrell, and I'd like to say a bit about that. I think I spoke about the work of Hanbury Brown and Hazard on the transit telescope when they had discovered the radio emission from M31 and certainly one of the first definite proofs that the radio waves were not confined to the galaxy as we had thought for a very long time. I did, also, myself, as a student, a few measurements on the transit telescope on the low... low frequency spectrum of signals but my... my main concentration in those days continued to be on meteors and I had particularly Clegg, John Davis, JG Davis and a New Zealander, CD Elliot... Elliot.

Now, Blakett had said to me, 'Now you must read up. If you're going to study meteors, you... you must find out about them'. Well, remarkably compared with the situation today, there are almost no astronomical books published in England. There's one by the Astronomer Royal, Spencer Jones, on spherical astronomy and... and there's almost... almost nothing about meteors. The... the flood of books from America had not yet then arrived and Blackett, he had contact with a lot of people various parts of the world and one day he said he had a young man who had escaped from Norway during the war, Herlofson, and Herlofson was a meteorologist.

Now, whether Blackett was so confused that he thought a meteorologist would know about meteors, I know not. Anyhow, he said he thought Herlofson might be useful to me, so Herlofson appeared. He... he was... he had then been useful during the war I think somewhere, as a meteorologist, and I think he was then going as a student to... in Oxford University, but he was a tremendous help and the first thing he did was to tell me about the people who really knew about meteors in this country and they were not the professionals. They belonged to the British Astronomical Association, the amateur body, and he put me in touch with the... the director of the meteor section of the Astronomical Association and this was Manning Prentice.