My second employment (I was technically employed – and paid, modestly – by the college during my research year) was with Plessey Electronics, at their research centre at Roke Manor, Romsey. This was an old manor house in some 29 acres of grounds, mainly forested, but including a stretch of the River Test. The old house was a reception area for customers, and the top floor was a “company flat”, where the directors of Plessey could pop down at weekends and enjoy a bit of shootin’ and fishin’. Attached to the house were the development labs, and somewhere in the grounds was a social club “hut”. I started there I October 1965 and stayed until the end of December 1968.
At my interview, I was told that much of the work done there was “on Government contract”, and did I have any objection to signing the official secrets act? Only after I arrived, and had been “indoctrinated” (they explained what the O.S. act meant, and how important it was to observe it to the letter, etc.) did I find out what my project was to be. Basically, what it meant was that I was not to say any details of what I was doing to anyone who did not need to know it – and I’m afraid that that excludes you, dear reader! Which reminds me of an “apocryphal” but true story; one of my colleagues, Dennis[74], was working late in the lab one Friday night, and one of the Clarke brothers (John and Michael Clarke “owned” Plessey) was down for the weekend and wandering round the building; finding a lab unlocked, he went in and asked Dennis what he was working on – so Dennis explained technically what the problem was that he was trying to solve, and was then told off; “I may own the company, but I have no need to know”.
This “Dennis” was one of about half a dozen electronic engineers on my project; I learned quite a bit from them, and I regarded them as quite brilliant. Once, in the Plessey staff magazine, an article was explaining the Plessey logo (a squiggle), saying that it represented what the name Plessey might look like if displayed on an oscilloscope, and pointing out that this was practically impossible and therefore had never actually been done. Dennis and another engineer took this as a personal challenge, and had a circuit designed, built and tested in, I think, a matter of about 90 minutes! The resulting oscilloscope display, photographed, was much displayed in the next few months.
My work was to analyse data from a half-inch magnetic tape (the engineers were working on the data capture and recording equipment), and I was assistant to Hugh Pushman. Hugh was a very practical man in terms of programming, and one of the pioneers; Stan Cobb, my boss, on the other hand was a very theoretical mathematician, interested in the mathematics of the various projects being undertaken in the labs. From Hugh, I learned a lot about how to organise programs to work effectively, despite the limitations of the computer systems at the time. The programs we were writing were quite revolutionary, but the computer (which did not exist in the UK!!) we were using was “off-site”; in fact it was at GCHQ[75], which at the time was a place not well-known to the British public – to the public, it was the means of sending and receiving messages to and from Embassies worldwide, and came under the banner of the Foreign Office, but in recent years the media have claimed that it had an intelligence-gathering role – I “couldn’t possibly comment” on that. Anyway, the computer in question had punched cards as input, magnetic tapes (still no disks!) for processing, and line-printer output, and the punched cards and paper results went by registered post between Romsey and Cheltenham. We were working on five or six suites of programs, so we’d get typically one run a week on each program.
I had to do a number of outings, and was thus first introduced to the delights and otherwise of business travel and “expense claims”; we had to go to Government offices in London and Farnborough, in my case of course to Cheltenham (the engineers were for some reason VERY interested in my visits there, but learned nothing). For some of the work, my security status was checked and double-checked, and college friends and lecturers and even my old school were consulted. Later, Katie told me she remembered the headmaster, Mr MacDonald, standing up in assembly and telling the school that he had been asked to give a reference for “Harris, who is now doing work of exceptional national importance” (the words the security folk use) – no doubt he meant it to show the pupils how important it is to behave at school, but he should not have mentioned my name at all, let alone associating it with that sort of work.
But the outing that I remember most was my first flight. Part of what I was working on involved “navigation”; this is a fascinating subject, and I learned about the difference between UK and European mapping (which results in a 2-yard difference in the middle of the North Sea – shades of the Bermuda Triangle? – if you went to the same latitude/longitude based on UK vv European maps). The RAF were using some relevant equipment, and Bob (one of the engineers) and I were booked to go up with them and see it in use. We set off to Boscombe Down[76], and were met by a Squadron Leader, who walked with us to the plane; he pointed out a massive concrete barrier, half-way down the runway, to protect runway repairs on the other side, and remarked that it didn’t half make the pilots nervous when they came in to land and saw it in front of them – from their perspective, it looked as though only a quarter to a third of the runway was available to them. We managed a wry smile at this! Our plane was a De Havilland Comet 4 (the civil version of which became the first commercial jet plane), and its furnishings were “sparce” – metal racks for the equipment, metal bulkheads, and metal seats for the crew (and us). Take off was fine, and we flew down to the Scilly Isles and back; looking down at the Scillies from 30,000 feet was magical, with yellow sand, green and blue water, really like pictures of tropical islands. We saw the equipment working, made some notes, and asked questions of the crew (who in turn tried hard to find out what we were working on!), and settled back for the landing. Well, the plane landed and took off again, and went round the airfield – so we thought it was that concrete barrier, and the pilot hadn’t enough space to land properly; but when this happened again and again, we realised it was planned, and indeed were told afterwards that they were doing vibration tests on the undercarriage (“doing the bumps” was the expression the pilot used). It was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.
One of the programs gave me a lot of trouble. The mathematics seemed very complicated, and I’d gone from notebooks and paper to using wallpaper to contain the formulae, and was still not getting very far. While I was working on this, Mum and Dad had their Silver Wedding Anniversary; they planned a fortnight’s “midweek” holiday in Ilfracombe, and Rosalie and I were to join the rest of the family for the middle week, Saturday-to-Saturday. Anyway, while sitting on the cliffs overlooking Ilfracombe, Rosalie was talking about her maths degree course (which she had just started or was about to start), and I mentioned and described Algebraic Projective Geometry … and the solution to my problems hit me[77]; I had found a use for Algebraic Projective Geometry! Back at work, I checked my theory, and the computer solution was really very simple (indeed, a common standard published algorithm). So a month or so later, I drove over to Portsmouth to see Dr Haskell, and after greetings broke the news to him – he had been so proud that APG was “no use to anyone” when I was at college; I couldn’t tell him what I was doing, but the maths application fascinated and dismayed him in equal measures. As I was leaving him and going downstairs, I met Mr Likely, one of the Applied Maths lecturers who often “sat in” on our pure maths lectures to keep his pure maths up-to-date; he’d been sitting in on Dr Haskell’s APG lecturers, and was going to tell Dr Haskell that he’d found a use for APG – he’d used it to prove Einstein’s Special Relativity in two lines! He showed me the maths, literally on the back of an envelope, and of course he was right. I explained what I’d done, and he was then going to give Dr Haskell the second grievous blow of the day.
After a few months, Hugh Pushman left Plessey, to form his own company (Hugh Pushman Associates), and to my surprise I was asked to take sole responsibility for the software project, and completing the programs. It was one of those unexpected events, which at first cause quite a bit of uncertainty and panic, but in retrospect can be seen as a significant door opening. Anyway, by the time I left Romsey in December 1968, the suite of programs were all working (on test data) and waiting for the real data to arrive.
I must mention the Roke Manor canteen; to a young man on his own (I was living in digs initially, and later had a small flat), the excellent canteen was a godsend, and I’d have my main meal of the day at work, and only needed to prepare a light meal in the evening and weekends. The kitchen gardens of the house provided vegetables and fruit, and the canteen folk (the manager, if I remember rightly, was a very cheerful lady called Mrs McGoldrick) did wonders for us, at very reasonable (subsidised) prices. In the early autumn, the highlight was mulberry pie – the gardens had a mature mulberry tree, and while I knew the nursery rhyme about going round a mulberry tree, I’d never seen or tasted one until then.
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