Once we... we were released from our problems, which arose from the over expenditure on what became the MK I telescope, I had an ambition to build even bigger telescopes, and I consulted with Husband and I said I wanted to build a telescope 600 feet in diameter and he, I'm afraid, took a deep breath and said, 'Well, we'll look into it', and one of the problems was the windage on a reflector of such immensity, particularly the variation of wind with altitude because the wind has always been an important factor and still is in the... in the 250-foot telescope. And so we decided the thing to do would be to build a small model and this resulted in building an elliptical dish, about a hundred feet by 60 feet, which became the MK II telescope.

Now, I applied for money to build this telescope, to the DSIR, and they... they were the... after all, the worries had been cleared up, they... they agreed, but they would not allow me to call it a prototype because it would have implied that we were really going to build a much bigger one, so they gave us a reasonably small grant and we then built which was then the MK II telescope, which came into operation in 1963, I think, and that was interesting because it was one of the very first heavy instruments or machines to be controlled directly by computer. We had... we... we secured an... a Ferranti Argus I computer and used that to control the MK II telescope. That telescope still exists and my successor decided to... it was too difficult to illuminate the elliptical surface and... so it is now... has a subsidiary paraboloid in front of the elliptical surface and can be used as a straightforward paraboloid. That is now an instrument to be used, and was used in conjunction with an inferometer with the MK I radio telescope and is still a part of the MERLIN network.