I really ought to talk, I suppose, a bit about my own work. I... I could have joined in and... and, of course, I... at that time I was the director and I... I drove along all of this work. There was a tremendous lot of technical difficulties with the spacing of the interferometer. One had to adjust the speed of the fringes and in Palmer's group there was much odd mechanisms made out of meccano and so on, which made this possible. Well, I... I didn't want to get involved in this and I wanted to do... I wanted to use the telescope for something entirely different, and in... shortly after the telescope came into use, I think in 1958, in the spring or early summer of 1958, there was a... a symposium organised in Paris and we... we all gave papers at this symposium. And Hoyle, Fred Hoyle, he... he gave a paper on... on what became known as flare stars and pointed out that it would be very interesting to find out if the flare stars behaved similarly to the sun in emitting radio emission and this occurred to me to be an interesting subject to study with the telescope so I... I took on that job.

Now, the stars in question, which were known as flare stars were the M type dwarfs, stars with small diameter... smaller diameter than the sun and the occasional flaring of these stars was quite well-known. They had been observed for some years. The question was were these flares to be identified as being similar to the solar flares, or were they something entirely different. Well, I had the... exactly the right instrument to do this with the super telescope because I could direct it to one of these flare stars and... and observe it continuously. I might remind you that there were no computers in those days and we were recording on... on pen and ink, with pen and ink on... on a moveable paper chart. The problem was not only to observe the M type dwarfs as a radio emitter, but also to identify if any... if there was any particular radio emission from them, if these were in any way associated with the optical flares.