Master:  Thank you for your kind words of introduction, for proposing this toast, and for welcoming my wife Linty and our family on this occasion, marking my survival to octogenarian status.  

 

I came up to Trinity as an affiliated student on a minor scholarship in 1957, and I have lived in Cambridge ever since, apart from three years in Bristol in the late 1970s.   I owe Trinity a tremendous debt of gratitude for having nourished and sustained me both intellectually and physically over all these years, and I am glad to have this opportunity to express my gratitude.

 

I am a Scot on both sides of my family, born and bred in Edinburgh. The Moffatts originally came from the little town of that name in the Scottish borders; they were sheep farmers, constantly at war with a neighbouring tribe, the Johnsons; I used to enjoy reminding Paley Johnson of this fact! 

 

My mother was descended from a Highland clan who lived in the clachan of Gaulrig, about a mile south of Tomintoul.  Little remains of Gaulrig except for a few tumbledown cottages that the inhabitants used to share with their livestock. In 1820, my great great great grandmother, who had been widowed for five years, died in dramatic circumstances:  family chronicles relate that she was burnt to death in an illicit still. I imagine that she was forewarned of the approach of the dreaded Excisemen, and so set fire to her whisky still in order to destroy the evidence of this illegal activity. This was a hazardous procedure because of the inflammability of the product, and she perished in the resulting conflagration!  I am comforted by the thought that the fumes of whisky filling the air will have provided solace in her dreadful plight!

 

My father’s family were on the consuming, rather than the production, side of the whisky industry. This meant that my parents’ partnership was based on sound economic principles, if somewhat fraught at times.  However, it worked out well in the end: quite late in life, following a retirement cruise in the Carribean, they bought Strawberry Hill Hotel in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.  They spent six happy years there, just when the reggae music of Bob Marley was gaining popularity.  They sold the hotel in 1974 to Chris Blackwell, founder of the Island Records label, and it became a centre for music of a certain avant-garde character. 

 

My father taught me an early love of numbers; he also taught a range of other life-enhancing skills, such as the ability to recite the names of the 33 counties of Scotland, from Shetland in the north to Berwickshire in the south. Don’t get me started!  

 

I was just four years old when World War II was declared.  I remember that very day, the 3rd of September 1939: we were on holiday at a seaside resort in Berwickshire, when my sister Lindesay and I were mysteriously spirited away to live with a family in the village of West Linton, some 16 miles outside Edinburgh.  In other words we were evacuated from the city, as many children were, such was the fear of enemy bombardment. I  apparently reacted badly to this experience, so was soon returned to my mother in Edinburgh.  My father had by then been called up, and I saw nothing of him for the next 6 years.  Lindesay was evacuated for a second time to live with her paternal grandmother in Lasswade; our encounters during the war were infrequent, and all the more memorable on the rare occasions when visits were possible.  

 

Throughout most of the War years, my mother was in the WAAFs, and much distracted by the war effort, and my maternal grandmother cared for me. This grandmother was a gifted pianist, a lover of Chopin and Tchaikovsky; musical talent has passed me by,  but Lindesay has this talent in abundance, as do all the younger members of our family, here tonight.

 

In the event, Edinburgh was spared bombardment, though we frequently heard the bombers flying overhead to deposit their cargo on the Glasgow dockyards.  I remember being put to bed in the bottom drawer of a large kitchen cabinet on one such occasion; it was all very exciting.  We of course had gas masks, ration books, one egg each per week, no bananas, and strictly enforced blackout at night.  I remember an emotional presentation at my first primary school about the siege and courageous defence of Malta in 1942. At this school, I learnt the history of the Scottish kings from Robert the Bruce to James the 6th and 1st, which was where history stopped.  I also became a wizard at mental arithmetic, which served me well in later life.

 

At age eight, I moved to George Watson’s Boys’ College, a Merchant Company School, where I remained for the next ten years. I found myself in a class of boys that was exceptional, although I didn’t appreciate this at the time: one became an authority on Baudelaire and tutor in French at Exeter College Oxford, another became Professor of Divinity at Newcastle, a third became Headmaster of Eton, and a fourth achieved distinction for his research on the process of memory; he was elected to the Royal Society for this work a few years ago; and so on!  Such company made for a competitive environment, from which I suffered no harm.  I did however suffer harm on the rugby field, where, being small for my age and not particularly agile, I played hooker in the 3rd fifteen, and regularly found myself crushed under a collapsing scrum! The game of golf was more to my liking.

 

Scottish education was broad, and, although mainly in the science stream, I was able to continue with French, English, Latin and History until taking the Scottish Higher Leaving Certificate at age 17. We then had a further year at school preparing for the Edinburgh Bursary Competition. My final term at Watson’s was enlivened by an exchange with the Lycée Henri IV in Paris.  There were five of us, clad in kilts, who went to Paris for the term, exchanging with five French boys who went the other way, each living en famille.  My host family lived in a sixth floor apartment in the Boulevard Raspail, and I walked each morning across the Jardin de Luxembourg, up the Rue Soufflot, and to the Lycée Henri IV behind the Panthéon. Remarkably, wine was served at the school lunches there, making these a spirited learning experience. I don’t remember much of the afternoon classes because we played truant much of the time in the cafés of the Boul'Mich. 

 

For a boy who had been raised under strict Presbyterian control, this was a liberating experience.  The redeeming feature of my Protestant upbringing was that the Minister of the Parish Church of Inveresk where we lived had a daughter named Linty, the youngest of a family of seven, who dazzled me from the age of 13. What dazzled me most was that she could dive from the 10m diving board at the huge open-air Portobello swimming pool, a feat that I could never equal.  I resolved there and then that I would marry this talented girl at the earliest opportunity.

 

At Edinburgh University, I was lucky to be taught by the legendary Professor A.C.Aitken, famed for his feats of numerical dexterity in the multiplication of large numbers — he could still compete and win against the primitive electronic computers of that period; also by Nicholas Kemmer, who taught mathematical physics, and W.L.Edge, who taught geometry over finite Galois fields, both former Fellows of Trinity.  Edge was intensely loyal to Trinity College, and induced a number of his students to take the Trinity Entrance Scholarship examination.  He didn’t hold out much hope for me, because geometry was not my strong subject, but he encouraged me to try for the Trinity group of Colleges, with the grudging words “You may get into Magdalene, and Babbage will be happy to teach you”. I remember staying in F1 New Court when I came to take the Scholarship exam; it was sheer bliss! In the event, I got a minor scholarship to Trinity, worth £60 a year, a fortune in those days.  My Edinburgh classmate Jim Mirrlees won a major scholarship on the same occasion, and we both matriculated in October ’57 as affiliated students to read Part II of the Mathematical Tripos. 

 

Jim had managed to skip the first year at Edinburgh, and came straight into the second-year class.  In the 3-hour exam at the end of his first term, he walked out after 2 hours, and we all thought Poor Jim, he can’t solve any of these difficult problems;  it turned out that he had solved them all, and saw no point in staying any longer! From that point on, his Nobel Prize was never in doubt.

 

While still at Edinburgh, it was necessary for me to seek gainful employment during University vacations, in order to make ends meet.  One of my vacation jobs was on night shift, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.,  at the Walls’ Ice Cream factory outside Edinburgh.  My task was to stand at a machine that chugged out those awful rectangular-wrapped ice-creams on a conveyor belt, pick up six of these in my left hand, transfer them to my right hand, and place them on a second conveyor belt at right angles to the first, where they were machine-wrapped in packets of six, and carried away, I knew not where.  I became literally a dab hand at this process, but after several hours, the novelty wore off.  The only way to get an unscheduled break was to drop an ice-cream into the chugging machinery, Luddite manner, thus bringing it to a grinding halt!

 

In the summer of 1957, I found myself in Manitoba, working on the Trans-Canada pipeline, which was then being laid some 50 miles south of Winnipeg.  This pipeline was over a metre in diameter. A huge machine first scraped the rust off with a hideous screeching noise; this was followed by another huge machine that coated the pipeline with black bituminous paint; my job was to follow close behind this machine with a bucket of boiling tar and a brush, and fill in the seams between different sections of the pipe, the parts that the machine couldn’t reach. It was exceedingly hot, the air was full of rust and the fumes of tar, and the day was very long; but the pay was good, and I earned enough in several weeks to allow me to hitch-hike the length and breadth of Canada; one of my rides was with a rich American who offered me a seat in his light aircraft for the next stage of my journey; to hitch a ride in an aircraft was an opportunity not to be missed and I readily accepted, although it took me quite a bit off my planned route!  

 

My Tutor when I finally arrived in Cambridge was Mark Pryor, who found an ingenious loophole in the University Ordinances that enabled me to count my second year in Cambridge both for the BA degree and as the first year of a PhD. This loophole, needless to say, was swiftly closed by the Old Schools. My research supervisor was George Batchelor, world authority on the problem of turbulence; at that time the dynamics of electrically conducting fluids was in vogue, so I opted to work at the interface between these two areas of research, on the problem of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, a topic of great relevance both in astrophysics and in the development of plasma containment devices like the tokamak.  Batchelor was a model supervisor; I would give him screeds of immature hand-written work, which he would return to me the next day with copious marginal comments and criticisms.  Just two years earlier, he had founded the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, one of CUP’s most successful journals, and he brought a scrupulous editorial acuity to bear on any writings that were put before him. In spite of a rather austere temperament, he inspired great loyalty and affection in his students; for me, it was an intensely formative experience.  

 

In those days, as a research student, I owned a 1937 MG TC sports car, which I habitually parked, believe it or not, in Garret Hostel Lane, under the revolving spikes behind Bishop’s Hostel. These spikes provided a convenient entry point to the College after midnight, when entry via the Great Gate would disturb the night Porters and lead to tutorial sanctions the following day. Climbing into College was the accepted price to pay for an evening on the town!  DNA analysis of these spikes might provide fascinating evidence of past nocturnal activity.

 

In 1960, I managed to induce Linty to come down from Scotland for the May Ball, which was of course in June. This was a good move, because it led to our marriage before the year was out, and our first child was born nine months and a day after the wedding. Edge congratulated us on attaining the minimum within epsilon!  For the first six months of married life, we lived in a caravan off the Hills Road, next door to Hammonds' Auction Saleroom, where we bought the furniture for our first home in Chedworth Street, in the so-called ‘favoured Newnham area’; we purchased the house from Jack Hamson, Fellow of Trinity, for the princely sum of £2,200. [We have recently installed a new central-heating boiler which cost more than twice that sum!]

 

In 1961, to my surprise and delight, I was elected to a Teaching Fellowship at Trinity, and simultaneously to an Assistant Lectureship in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP).  I should say that it took ten years before I really felt at home in this College.  The all-male public-school atmosphere when I arrived in 1957 was alien to me, after the liberated atmosphere of Edinburgh University and its Student Common Room. Things are very different now.

 

But revolution was already in the air in the ’60s, and things came to a head in 1968, when student unrest was a global phenomenon.  I found myself unwittingly at the centre of this in Trinity having succeeded the same Jack Hamson as Senior Treasurer of the College Union.  Some of you may remember the meeting that was held in this Hall in January ’69 under the Chairmanship of the Master, Rab Butler.  I have never been to another such meeting either before or since. It was open to all members of the College, senior and junior, and its purpose was to discuss proposals that had been prepared by the College Union Committee concerning College rules and regulations. The meeting was rowdy, and Rab, thinking he was back in the House of Commons, was in his element.  It was at this meeting that the issue of the Admission of Women was first aired; ten years elapsed before this was realised. This was rapid by Trinity standards: there was after all a Hall Lighting Committee which had been deliberating for 60 years without agreeing on a solution!  I chaired a Kitchen Reconstruction Committee during the ’80s, which laboured for several years and produced an extensive report; this Committee included a College Chaplain, Robert Atwell, now the Bishop of Exeter, for spiritual guidance! But even so, it failed to persuade a College Meeting to accept its recommendation to move the Servery from Hall to the other side of the Screens passage; as you may have noticed, this move actually did take place some 30 years later without anyone batting an eyelid, and has been judged a great success.

 

There was another revolution underway at that time in relation to the College Tutorial system. Until 1970, there had been just 5 undergraduate Tutors [Denis Marrian, Alan Ker, Theo Redpath, Michael Vyvyan, and Harry Williams] and they alone were responsible for all College Admissions, other than for those who got in as Entrance Scholars or Exhibitioners.  Directors of Studies rebelled at this system, since they had to teach all those who were admitted; so the whole system was overhauled with effect from 1970 after extended, acrimonious debate; thus for example, when Theo Redpath retired, his Tutorial Side of 160 pupils was split between two new Tutors, Tony Weir and myself.  I was astonished to find a remarkable proportion of Etonians in my half.  [One of them, during my first term as Tutor, distinguished himself by driving his car to Cambridge Railway station to pick up a friend; in an excess of exuberance, he drove right through the plate-glass entrance to the station and onto Platform One, causing great consternation.] The other Tutorial sides were similarly split, and an Admissions Tutor was appointed; the new Admissions procedure, which endures more or less unchanged to the present day, was thus established. 

 

In 1975, I found myself briefly holding the position of Senior Tutor in the College.  Indeed I think I hold the record for the briefest tenure of this Office, from January to August that year, having previously and mercifully arranged a sabbatical year in Paris from September 1975. And yet, during that eight-month’s tenure, momentous things were afoot; most notably, a College Meeting was held at which the decision to admit women as undergraduate members of the College was finally taken. It fell to me to present the proposal, which had powerful supporters. There was also powerful opposition: Patrick Duff, a former Vice-Master of the College, observed at the meeting that the College had flourished for more than 400 years as a male-only establishment, and that Henry VIII would be turning in his grave at the prospect of this monumental change.  Whereupon Piero Sraffa, our eminent Italian economist, who had been sleeping at the back of the room, suddenly roused himself and said, in his precise Italian accent: “Master: when this College was founded it was required that all Fellows be in clerical orders;  Henry VIII must surely have been leaping from his grave since that Statute was changed”.  This stirring contribution to the debate carried the day, and the motion was passed with the required two-thirds majority.  Women Fellows were admitted from 1975, Women Undergraduates from 1978, and, above all, in the current Millennium, our Woman Manciple (or should we say our Womanciple?) Maria, an appointment for which we all have reason to be grateful!

 

Our Council Minutes for 1975 reveal a further drama in which I, as Senior Tutor, was necessarily involved.  This concerned two young mathematicians of the College, both in statu pupillari.  Forty years have elapsed since then, and the Freedom of Information Act allows me to tell this tale; but to protect the identity of these two, I shall simply denote them by the Greek letters, Alpha and Delta. It so happened that in those days, the undergraduate mathematicians of the College were wont to engage in a harmless pursuit, whereby each would attempt to break into the locked room of another while the occupant was out, overturn the bed and the bookcase and cause a degree of havoc, then leave and relock the door as if nothing untoward had happened. Well Delta, anticipating such an invasion, set up a booby-trap before going to dinner in Hall one evening. While he was out, Alpha successfully picked the lock of Delta’s room.  As he pushed the door open, there was a minor explosion, which alerted the Porters, who, fearing a terrorist attack, called the Police. A Policeman duly arrived, entered the room, and switched on the light, triggering a second explosion, thus alerting the Cambridge Fire Brigade, who arrived forthwith and got the situation under control. The result was that Delta was charged with disturbing the peace by incendiary activity, while Alpha was not charged with anything, although it is arguable that he should have been.  Delta was, I believe, let off with a fine and a warning.

 

One might have thought that these two would be sufficiently chastened by this experience; however, a few weeks later they were caught in a second misdemeanour: it was considered a challenge at that time for undergraduate mathematicians to purloin, by any means, the order-of-merit from the final tripos examination, in order to determine who came first on the list, who second, and so on.  Ever since 1909, only the class-list had been published, as now, not the detailed order-of-merit, which was a closely guarded secret. Well it so happened that on the night of 13th June 1975, the very same Alpha and Delta were apprehended, seeking to break into the DAMTP office of the Chairman of Examiners, with a view, as they later confessed, to merely borrowing for a brief moment the order-of-merit for the recent Part II examination; just long enough, that is, to make use of the nearby Xerox machine.  The matter naturally came before the College Council who understandably rusticated both Alpha and Delta for a year, with the unforeseen consequence that they just had an extra year to prepare for their subsequent research careers. Delta is now a distinguished Professor of Information Technology in the West of England; while Alpha is an authority in the field of Security Engineering in this University.

 

Master, time does not permit me to relate  all that I have been involved in since these heady days. In any case, the miracle of the Internet makes this unnecessary, because I have set out the highlights for all to see on my personal website.  I would like however to conclude by reciting to you, with your consent, or indeed without it, a version of an old Scots ballad, “The Twa Corbies”, which, being translated, means “The Two Crows”; some of you may be familiar with this, or with an inflationary English version “The Three Ravens”. This version that I shall recite was discovered on a scrap of parchment during an exploration of the Whewell’s Court cellars that I conducted with Dr Seal in October 1967, with a view to possible renovation;  the parchment has been carbon-dated with remarkable accuracy to the 1st of April 1865, when Whewell’s Court was under construction. This ballad has sombre undertones;  but it also has historic interest in that it provides clear evidence that the practice of the ‘buzz’ in the Combination Room (whereby he who drains a decanter of port is entitled to the first glass from the next bottle to be opened) was already well established by 1865. Here then is this curious ballad: