Saving our Skins: Chapter 7. The Dreaming Spires
Saving our Skins: Chapter 7. The Dreaming Spires
Reflections from a Lauder Stargazer
The continuing story of “Saving our Skins”. Life in Oxford
Updated September 5, 2021.
The move to stratospheric research at Lauder had been timely and proved to be an inspired decision. After nearly 4 years at Lauder, we departed for our adventure in Oxford, City of the Dreaming Spires.
Our flight to the UK left Auckland on my 33rd birthday, September 24, 1983. New Zealand is just west of the International Date Line and we took the Western route, starting in the early morning. So, it was a long and not-very-pleasant birthday, lasting about 40 hours. Our 3 young kids needed constant entertainment. A lowlight of the trip was sitting cramped-up near the back row of the DC10 for hour after hour on the tarmac at Bombay (only later did it become Mumbai) while they dealt with a technical issue. I remember vividly the “breakfast” they served up once we were finally airborne. Green scrambled eggs with a hard outer crust.
The 3-year scholarship was generous. It also included a “hardship” allowance because the cost of living was much higher in the UK. This meant that my take-home pay there would exceed the university salary of my supervisor – though for Oxford Dons there are usually additional stipends from the colleges as well as from the university itself. In return for the government’s investment, I was expected to return to New Zealand at the end of my studies (or somehow pay back that large investment).
The scholarship was for study in the Department of Atmospheric Physics, at the Clarendon Laboratory of Oxford University. John Houghton – later Sir John Houghton – was the head of department but was taking up a new position heading the Meteorological Office (UKMO) in nearby Bracknell.
John Houghton became a lead-author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessments and later co-chair of the Nobel Prize winning 4th IPCC Assessment. I should add here that I could have been one of the hundreds of recipients for that prize too, had I responded positively to the request by Susan Solomon to be involved. Her e-mail began “Dear Colleague …”, and I took umbrage at the lack of a more personal approach from a close colleague and declined the invitation. It’s a lot of work to be involved with these assessments, so that was no doubt in mind too. One of the biggest mistakes I ever made!
Houghton, or JTH as he was known there, would still be closely involved with the Department, but the incoming head was Fred Taylor (both were members of Jesus College, pictured above). Fred had recently returned to Oxford from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (JPL), where he was Principal Investigator with NASA’s Galileo probe to Jupiter. The original planned launch date had been 1982 but was delayed until 1989. Its long journey to Jupiter would take 6 years, ending with its planned crash-landing in 1995. Fred’s Department letterhead included his academic credentials: M.A., D. Phil., so he was sometimes behind his back referred to as Mad Phil by cheeky post-grad students. The lab also worked on developing satellite-based instruments for probing the atmosphere in collaboration with scientists at JPL and at the nearby Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, named after New Zealand’s own Noble Laureate Ernest Rutherford, the “father of nuclear physics”.
I was enrolled at Jesus College on Turl Street (The Turl, as it is more commonly known there). The College has a strong Welsh heritage, so my middle name “Lloyd” may have been helpful in having me admitted. More likely, it’s also one of the traditional colleges for atmospheric physics, though it dates back much earlier than the modern version of that discipline. It was opened by Queen Elizabeth the First, whose portrait graces the wall behind the top table of the dining hall. Its alumni include T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), and past prime minister Harold Wilson, whose portraits also hang on display in the main dining room.
We had a chance to revisit the college during a visit to the UK in 2018. The public have limited access to the grounds most days, but only between 2:00 and 4:30 pm on payment of a fee of £3.00. College Alumni are allowed in free at any time. It was outside the public visiting hours but of course I didn’t have my identity card with me. Luckily though, they let me in when I was able to tell them that the principal during my time there was Sir Peter North.
During visiting hours it would have been packed with tourists, but we enjoyed a leisurely self-guided tour of the grounds and buildings in splendid isolation. The only downside was that in the dining hall I was dismayed to discover that a portrait of Tony Blair now hung alongside the others. Blair was the prime minister responsible for taking the UK to war in support of US president G.W. Bush’s misguided response to the “9/11” terrorist attacks of New York City and Washington DC in September 2001.
Back in 1983 our family had been allocated a 5-bedroom house in Herbert Close, off the Cowley Road. Not far from the old British Motors Morris car factory, it was well away from the “Dreaming Spires” of the University area. Most definitely in the working-class “town” part of the “Town and Gown” dichotomy that makes Oxford so special.
The house had originally been built for a senior member of The College with a large family. With its own private grass courts, cricket ground, and squirrel-filled forest, it was very pleasant. It was to become “party central” for our colleagues and friends. Much better for social gatherings than the usual Oxford 2-up, 2-down apartments. But quite hard to keep warm. Andrew and David enrolled in a local school and we all promptly came down with every illness imaginable, presumably due to exposure to a wider range of germs after our secluded life in Lauder. I came down with a case of shingles (herpes zoster), which precipitated Louise to go out and buy a large medical encyclopaedia called “The MacMillan Guide to Family Health”. It had just recently been published and included flow diagrams that enabled self-diagnosis. I think she was concerned about other strains of herpes. But the tome served us well over the years that followed prior to the emergence of the internet. Our GP even borrowed it once after our return to New Zealand.
My time at Oxford was hard work but still fun. I avoided traffic jams and parking restrictions by commuting the 2 miles from our home in Cowley to the University by bicycle. Already, vehicular traffic was discouraged in the inner city. I chuckle watching old episodes of the TV show Inspector Morse, when he would pull up in his Jaguar and park without difficulty directly outside Blackwell’s Bookshop on Broad Street. There’s no way that could happen in real life. You can’t even drive on that street now. The two older kids were at school in Cowley. Most of their classmates were from Bangladesh. Coincidentally, one of Andrew’s teachers had a Kiwi connection that I’ve already alluded to. She was Pat Mitchell, the by-then estranged wife of Austin Mitchell who wrote The Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise.
We had a metallic blue Morris Marina 1700. It was only a couple of years old but was a bit of a lemon. Its gearbox failed with only 17000 miles on the clock and had to be replaced. But because it was built just down the road at the Cowley factory it could be repaired cheaply. But it did prove reliable enough to explore Europe in the summers. England was far too crowded and the weather was far too fickle. In winter we mostly just hunkered down from the cold. We did note that traditions like Christmas carols and puddings, and Guy Fawkes firework displays, are much better suited to England’s climate than New Zealand’s.
Lots of New Zealand friends came to visit. One was Gloria Smith, a larger-than-life drama queen from Alexandra, whose maxim in life was to “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”. In truth she was lucky to be alive because once on her way back home on a frosty winter night after visiting us in Lauder, her car skidded on ice in a sheltered cutting at Tiger Hill, close to where Joan Richardson had come to grief a few years earlier. Luckily, this time only the car was a write-off.
Gloria introduced us to her son Malcolm Macpherson (by an earlier marriage). He and his GP wife, Susan, were living in Brecon, Wales. We got to know them well and made several trips to Wales. We’d usually make a loop trip there via Swansea to catch up with an old colleague from Fiji, Andrew Lochhead (OBE), who was an emeritus professor at the University of Swansea. His place was like a museum, and included a bust of Ramsay MacDonald, who had been prime minister of Britain in the 1930s and had been widowed before he took office. His daughter Sheila (Andrew’s wife) and her older sister Ishbel had lived with him at 10 Downing Street sharing the first lady duties.
Andrew became a great friend. His alma mater was St Johns College Oxford, so he enjoyed visiting us and returning to his old stomping grounds. He also visited us a couple of times in New Zealand after our return. He died at age 90 in 2001 and in his will, he generously left 100 pounds to each of our children. They couldn’t believe their luck. I suspect many other children all around the world were similarly surprised. He often complained that he had a lot more money than he would ever need.
Another colleague from Fiji days was Roger Nisbet, who had by then shifted back to Glasgow with his wife and family. We drove up to visit one New Year. I can understand now why the Scots embrace New Year with such abandon in their Hogmanay celebrations. Glasgow, at latitude 56°N, can be dismal at that time of the year. We saw grey skies and rain, with only 6 hours 45 minutes between sunrise and sunset. But like every place in the world, it receives an average of 12 hours of daylight, so at mid-summer they get about 17 hours and 15 minutes of daylight, with the bonus of a long twilight period.
Louise became a committee member of the University Newcomer’s Group. Like us, most of its members were just passing through Oxford for a few years before returning to their home countries. As a result, we now have many friends all around the world that we met through the group. Louise enjoys telling the story of a day she was fund-raising for them, with another committee member, by collecting money for tours of Magdalen College. In a quiet moment, Louise asked how she came to be at Oxford. Her reply was, “well after Zelman had finished his stint as Governor General, what more could we do?” Her husband, Zelman Cowan, had been Governor general of Australia from 1977 to 1982 and was then provost of Oriel College.
During our time there we managed to avoid the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster, contracting mad cow disease (but nobody wants our blood now), being killed by the IRA (we never ventured to Ireland for fear of our lives), getting caught up in Arthur Scargill’s Coalminer’s strikes against Maggie Thatcher, or the Falklands War that rescued her political career.
We even survived the fallout of watching England beat the All Blacks at Twickenham, after their tour to Argentina was cancelled at short notice because of the war. Our excuse is that the All Black team was cobbled together at short notice and several of the top players were unavailable. Anyway, the loss was fun for us because we were the vanquished, and the home fans were only too delighted to ply us with drinks set up in racks in the trunks of their Bentleys in the carpark afterwards. The home team should always win!
England wouldn’t be England without cricket and at work we had an annual atmospheric physics department cricket match. It was always stratosphere versus troposphere. I captained the stratosphere team against John Eyre’s troposphere team (he was later director of the UKMO). We always seemed to lose, but I put it down to their home ground advantage.
We had a terrible family scare when Hamish, who was then about 2½ years old, came out in bruises all over his body while we were touring the South-West of England. We rushed back to Oxford, petrified that it was leukaemia. At the John Radcliffe Infirmary he was treated by a young New Zealander doctor who diagnosed the condition as “Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura”, a rare blood platelet disease that required hormone treatment. The idiopathic part of that mouthful translates as “relating to or denoting any disease or condition which arises spontaneously or for which the cause is unknown.” We were lucky to be at Oxford for the treatment. For several days Louise and Hamish were confined to the Hospital. His face became quite bloated from the steroid treatment, but he eventually made a full recovery.
We were keen to keep our friends in New Zealand up to date with our experiences but baulked at the idea of writing multiple letters with the same content. We started writing annual updates which we had printed – along with artwork from the kids - and posted out to friends and family around Christmas time. To add a colour we’d simply print them on coloured paper.
Since the 1990s, we’ve been sending them by email. And, as the kids got older, their artwork was replaced with photos. Many other friends do that now too, but I think we were pioneers in the field. The trick is to avoid making them skite-sheets. I think it’s fair to say that Louise has been successful there, but no doubt some of my friends would delight in saying otherwise for my part. But I’m not the only one. Every user of social media like Instagram or Facebook is guilty of self-promotion to some extent (or so I’m told, I don’t frequent either of those places). Anyway, we’ve continued the annual tradition to this day, so it’s been going now for about 35 years and makes a nice summary chronicling that part of our lives.
In the next chapter I’ll talk about my research at Oxford …