Well, to be brief, the new Society was formed in ‘71 and started functioning in ‘72. It was amalgamation and it was decided to... I won’t go into the detailed structure. That’s not appropriate. But it was one of the main features that there were individual sections of the society which had the same status as the original independent societies. So the Faraday Society was already named after a distinguished early English chemist. Organic chemistry was now represented by the Perkin Division of the Chemical Society. The inorganic section, which I was most concerned with, was called the Dalton Division for obvious reasons and there was an analytical section as well. So each of the Presidents of these separate sections had seats on the Council of the new Chemical Society and were quasi-independent but working under the umbrella of the full organisation. So in that way the present structure of the now Royal Society of Chemistry came into being and has functioned extremely well since then.

One of the main functions was again external relations, interactions with other societies in other countries and indeed in this country and so a section was devoted to that and I was the Deputy Chairman of that section so was very much involved in the international aspects of our work.