Lost, and found again: the Graveney boat and me.

 

By my reckoning, I was seventeen. Reverse the digits and you’ll arrive at my age on my next birthday. I was, in a great many respects, another person; a person who so easily might have chosen, or have stumbled through a doorway other than the one I actually took, ending up who-knows-where.

A model of the clinker-built late ninth century ‘Graveney Boat’ displayed within the Fleur de Lis museum in Faversham – almost on my doorstep, but only visited recently in the company of my teenage grandsons (who are ‘collecting’ the fifty or so small independent museums in our region … as one does.) When I saw this tiny model in its display case I couldn’t help but smile; read on to find out why.

I’ve mentioned serendipity – perhaps that ought to be providence – many times in my posts (e.g. in the first post of a short series reflecting on my career as a scientist, here) but a recent visit to the Fleur de Lis museum in Faversham provided a rather joyful reminder of its potential. Back in the day, I used to volunteer my weekends as a helper on local archaeological excavations. We’d be picked up early in the morning and driven to wherever there was a need for ‘emergency archaeology’, by which I mean the desire to uncover artefacts and learn as much as one could in the limited time before a developer’s bulldozers moved in. Some years would elapse before such sites/finds were afforded protection under law (see here and here) so it really did feel like a valuable and an exciting thing to do. Also, I was a seventeen year old with zero interest in sports – chronic asthma at a time when treatments were limited, two left feet and distinctly bookish tendencies coupled with a well-developed inferiority complex – but with the usual innate need to be doing ‘something’. Volunteering in this way fitted the bill perfectly: an inexhaustible excuse for reading, small groups of like-minded people and working outdoors in out-of-the-way locations. As a bonus, my dad was a bricklayer and so the instruction to bring your own pointing trowel was easy to follow. What’s not to love?

Pursuing archaeology as a career appealed to me a great deal. At this distance from the person I was back then I cannot begin reliably to reconstruct the thought processes that steered me towards studying physics and then beginning chemical physics research. The existence of radiocarbon dating techniques and the later introduction of geophysical probes like resistivity and magnetometry would only serve to heighten my interest, but by then archaeology had become an armchair hobby overshadowed by my fascination with the physical sciences. (The line became blurred a little during the final years of my professional career when I was able to use my chemical physics expertise to make a small contribution to heritage/conservation projects: see here, here and here.)

I only volunteered for one season in 1970 (maybe a little in 1969? – other priorities, like final school exams and university applications, squeezed it out thereafter) but the joy of taking part has stayed with me ever since. Having said that, you may be surprised when I admit that, somewhere along the line, I forgot the associated details. I could always have told you that our mentor in this voluntary work was enthusiastic archaeologist Mr. Jim Bradshaw (who died in 2001); he was a good person to learn from as I recall. I also remember that the two multi-weekend digs I took part in during this period were poles apart in their nature: well-drained flat farmland abutting an oil depot which was hiding a Romano-British residential/industrial site, and mud-up-to-the-armpits marshland which revealed a ninth century boat. In one case, the land would return to being farmed and the other was in the way of a major drainage channel.

The Romano-British site (see the 1990 aerial image below, with links) had apparently been known about for several decades, with bits of pottery being turned up by the plough now and again. More excavations were conducted nearby in the decades following my involvement and within a much better framework of legal protection than the one I was a part of. (These later digs were as a prelude to the deserted oil depot’s removal in favour of housing.) I remember exposing a hearth – a flat patch of hard reddened soil in essence – and being shown how to distinguish ‘random’ chunks of flint, found in abundance in the region, from the remains of an ancient drystone wall or a well-constructed path. However, the highlight was exposing a small but whole clay jar. I had Mr. Bradshaw and a few others clustered around me as I was talked through the safe way to excavate and lift it. The best guess at the time was that it had once contained perfume.

This aerial image of the location of the Wye Romano-British site was taken in 1990, before later development and the excavations that preceded it. Further information may be found in reports submitted by Mr. Bradshaw and by those making reference to his work: here from 1970 in Section II, here from 2016 from 2016 and here in paragraph 2.2 from a national archive.

As you’ll no doubt recall, what prompted this post in the first place, and the online research undertaken in order to write it, was the happy accident of finding mention of ‘The Graveney Boat’ during my extended exploration of Faversham’s Fleur de Lis museum. (The Graveney Marshes, I ought to explain, are sited between Faversham and the North Kent coast (UK); there is also a village of Graveney.) None of the images I could find do justice to the mud; nor do they convey the camaraderie that coping with it engendered. However, I’ve included one below along with a slew of links to associated news items and formal reports; this was, without doubt, a big deal. Whilst at the museum I had a brief conversation with someone working there during which I asked about the fate of the boat. She informed me that The National Maritime Museum, who had taken overall charge of the project and had all the recovered material sent to them at the time, still retained the excavated timbers. Apparently, it’s still being stored under water as there are no funds to conserve it further – let alone to repatriate it to the nearby Faversham museum. Having been involved in a small way with the conservation of Henry VIII’s famous warship ‘The Mary Rose’ (here) I must admit that I felt very sad that funds didn’t exist to allow the excellent marine conservation resources in Portsmouth to be brought into play. C’est la vie, I suppose.

The images above are both taken from a 1971 paper in a publication called ‘Antiquity’; there’s another paper, less easy to access, published the following year in ‘Studies in Conservation’. Perhaps the feel of the place and the excavation work required is better conveyed in this (pre-HD) video, available via the Fleur de Lis museum’s web site.

All-in-all, I’ve had a pleasant trip down Memory Lane and had great fun piecing back together again the details of my season in the field as a volunteer archaeologist – a career path never trodden.

Professor Sir John Enderby FRS (1931-2021): a personal reflection

Shortly before I retired fully from my three decades as an academic at The University of Kent I wrote a short series of blog posts on aspects of my career (starting here). They were drafted in a bit of a hurry in response to a request from one of my colleagues – who was, it transpired, already contemplating a ‘retirement conference’ in my honour and wanted a little biographical material; they were far from exhaustive. Within that handful of posts there is mention of the person who kick-started my career in science in the mid-1970s and who influenced it from time to time for the next thirty five years or so …

When I first came across John Enderby he was ‘Professor Enderby’ and the head of the Department of Physics at the University of Leicester, where I was an undergraduate student. It was years later that he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and was subsequently knighted. Sadly, John died at the beginning of August in 2021; he was 90 years old. Only now, a year later and after the worst of the COVID-related restrictions and fears are in the past, was it practicable to hold a meeting to celebrate his considerable contributions to science. As one of the few people still around who had worked with him during his time at Leicester (and for whom the organisers had contact details) I was asked to contribute to the short talks planned for the first day of the celebratory meeting. It was an honour to accept the invitation. This blog post is, in essence, the distillate of my talk on September 5th at ‘Understanding the Structure of Liquids: Celebrating John Enderby’s Scientific Legacy’ at The University of Bristol.

Family members, friends and former colleagues as photographed at the end of the meeting’s first day by Adrian Barnes. (Should you wish to know, when this was taken I happened to be sitting third row back, second from the right; the image shown below is of the period I was speaking about in my talk.)

An immediate difficulty faced when putting together my slides arose from the lack of contemporary images: the key events took place well before the advent of digital photography or scanners. Photographs were something of a rarity, doubly so in the case of colour. Add to that the fact that I’d been ruthless in clearing out my office as I approached retirement ... I did however find a scanned copy of the above image, taken at a Research Council Graduate School held at Leicester in 1977. John is sitting front left and a very young me stands centre-rear. There are so many distinguished scientists of the time shown in this image, and quite a few early-career people who went on to build amazing careers of their own. (When I first located this image, I confess that one of my initial reactions was to lament the lack of diversity – a situation too often ignored at the time I regret to say.)

In truth, I can’t say I remember anything specific of John until the end of my second year as a naïve BSc Physics student*. I had requested a final year research project in the area of Solid State Physics – an area that had increasingly fascinated me during that year, probably due to some inspirational lecturers – but I honestly couldn’t recount my decision-making process now (even to myself). My project partner and I found ourselves tasked with the study of manganese chloride aqueous salt solutions using Electron Spin Resonance, a technique traditionally rooted within the realm of Chemistry. Could this really be a suitable project in Physics? Our project supervisor was to be none other than Professor Enderby, which was a scary prospect. (I discovered years later that the project’s inception owed much to a conversation that John had had with his research associate George Neilson, whose background was in Chemistry.) This was my first proper exposure to what would eventually shape my own research interests across four decades: the belief that so much of interest lies at the interface between our traditional subject disciplines. For that alone I owe John a huge debt of thanks.

Central to the images above is a monochrome image of the ESR spectrometer we used for our allocated final year research project. It was taken by the departmental technician who acted as official photographer. I was given a copy, as was my project partner, which I annotated by hand and included in my project report – the front cover of which is reproduced on the left. The report itself was typed using a fairly basic typewriter; the equations were inserted by hand as were all graphs, diagrams and tables. I generated a carbon copy for myself; there were no photocopiers in the department. Very few people possessed an electronic calculator at the time, which were still fairly primitive back then – and prohibitively expensive, so calculations were undertaken using logarithms and slide rules.

Unbelievably to us at the time, my project partner and I were invited to a party at John Enderby’s house to celebrate his research group’s success in winning their first truly substantial research grant from what was then the UK Science Research Council. Being made to feel welcome – a part of the team despite our particularly junior status – had a great impact; it afforded one of the many lessons I have sought never to forget. However, there were things to learn from the day-to-day as well. For instance, John’s habit of wandering through the labs. most days, coffee cup in hand, is one deceptively simple example. He’d engage anyone and everyone in conversation about what they were doing; keeping himself abreast of developments of course but, in the process, bolstering the confidence of undergraduate and early-career researchers alike … whilst also keeping them on their toes. With my time as an undergraduate student coming to a close I began the process of sorting out what my next step might be. I had obtained a place on a PGCE course, so secondary school teaching was one attractive option. However, despite enduring feelings of inadequacy, my ambitions were focused on the desire to dive into research. Thus, despite fascinating offers in the areas of ionospheric physics and geophysics, it took me relatively little time to accept John’s offer to join his group as a PhD student.

John’s own 1963 PhD thesis was entitled ‘Some electrical properties of liquid metals’ – my own, submitted sixteen years later wasn’t that dissimilar, although the theoretical landscape had altered considerably in the intervening period. The computational equipment available had progressed a great deal by the time my PhD project came to an end, but the project itself was conducted on a shoestring budget.

"Liquid metals" implies high temperatures – up to about 1750°C in my case – but without much of a budget everything had to be built by hand. Simple angle-iron frames held furnace bricks stacked within an asbestos box (- yes: I had to cut and drill such sheets, the work being done outdoors and using water to suppress dust; different times). The furnaces were lowered/raised using simple screw jacks and the basic vacuum system included copper tubing soldered together by me; I also did all the glass-blowing and the machining of many other components. The colour inset is one of my wife’s still life paintings: a jar like this was used as my primary calibration cell – the whole project rested upon its use!

As it turned out, after a period of study leave in the USA, John left Leicester for a post in Bristol only a year after my PhD began so I never did benefit from his continued day-to-day supervision. One of his Leicester colleagues, Alan Howe, bravely took me on and became my key early-career mentor in John’s stead. John and I stayed in touch however and met on innumerable occasions through the years. This included the period of his tenure as Physical Secretary and Vice-President for The Royal Society, during which time I recall being treated to an excellent meal at the Army & Navy Club so that he could debrief me on my department’s performance in the recent Research Assessment Exercise. I’ve lost count of the number of supportive references etc. he wrote for me, and I have cause to be particularly grateful for his gentle nudges into what became an extensive involvement with the UK Research Councils (see here).

During the first couple of years after the move to Bristol in 1976 John would visit his old department at Leicester often. On just such a visit he wandered into my small lab. for a chat. I wasn’t there, so he had to make do with my latest written log entries. At this point I ought to point out that John was incredibly enthusiastic when ostensibly exciting results emerged, but occasionally this enthusiasm misfired. In the longer term it was never a problem: as the saying goes, first attributed to Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas and throw away the bad ones.” John was a master of this approach, which I heartily applaud, but in the short term there are risks. He thought that my data on the resistivity of liquid palladium-silver alloys might represent the first evidence for ‘paramagnons’ in a liquid metal and he duly shared this idea widely. It didn’t, as I demonstrated through further measurement in the months that followed. No long-term harm was done; John was an excellent scientist: when I had generated more reliable data we simply moved on – that’s how science works.

The above are scanned copies of my PhD laboratory logbook pages, the graph on the left and the lower insert being the ones John saw during his unannounced flying visit. It would have been tempting to take this unexpected ‘spike’ in the graph at 33% Ag at face value. However, scientific scepticism – major claims need major evidence – and the desire for both explanation and reproducibility drove me to track down the origin of the feature. My ‘family tree’ of samples (central panel) showed that the ‘paramagnon-like’ feature was evidently associated with a single sample that had been contaminated by the tungsten electrodes I used. This sample, in its turn, contaminated subsequent samples made from it. Given my vanishingly small budget, I had to wait six months before I could buy fresh samples of high purity palladium and silver in order to measure this region of composition again. The graph on the right, although still fascinating in the context of the theories of the time, clearly shows that John’s paramagnons were, sadly, a will-o'-the-wisp.

There were rather few ways in which I could honour John’s scientific contributions, but in 2006 I nominated him for an honorary doctorate at my own university (Kent at Canterbury) which he was able to receive during a formal university degree ceremony. In 2014 I wrote a two-page article in the monthly magazine ‘Laboratory News’ in a short series on heroes of British science – it gave me my penultimate opportunity to pay tribute.

I hope I possess sufficient wisdom to choose to learn from others: to learn what works and what ought to be avoided. I learnt a great deal from John. Indeed, from my days as an undergraduate student, through various transitory research posts and to my thirty years as an academic with my own thoroughly interdisciplinary research team, John remained a person to learn from. I am thankful for the privilege of having known him.

* I had applied for a Joint Honours degree in Physics & Chemistry, but due to an ‘administrative oversight’ I arrived at Leicester to find myself registered for their BSc Physics programme. Lacking the self-confidence to anything other, I simply ‘went with the flow’. I have used the term serendipity often in relation to my career: this apparently random event is perhaps an early example.

A plate from the past: SGT and me

 

I follow many scientists and science-centred organisations on Twitter. In fact, they dominate the list of accounts I follow – which is hardly surprising given my interests. One of these is the Institute of Materials, Minerals & Mining and the other, which is closer to home in terms of my own scientific career in materials research, is the Society of Glass Technology They recently surprised me …

The COVID-delayed sixteenth conference on the Physics of Non-Crystalline Materials was held at the university I worked at before retiring more than seven years ago (see here for details of the current incarnation of my old department). I put something up on Twitter about how strange it felt to have a meeting running for week at my old stomping ground given that, a decade ago, I would have expected to participate. The SGT account holder, who I’ve known for a long time, replied saying that I ought to pop in to say hello as they had something to give me from several years back. How could I resist …

It turned out that they had commissioned a commemorative plate to mark the fact that I delivered the 2015 Mellor Memorial Lecture – the SGT and IoM3 share the hosting of this memorial lecture, and it was the turn of the SGT that year as part of its annual meeting, ‘Glass Reflections’ (here, this is an old link – pre-https days – so your browser may warn you that it’s not secure). I was honoured to be asked. Although I tried hard to prepare properly, I confess that I wasn’t pleased with my performance at the time; I’m almost never pleased with my performance. I was a little taken aback to have all this effort made to honour the event – and completely delighted.

David Moore presenting me with the plate (image taken by Christine Brown). The plate's inscription reads: Presented to Prof Bob Newport by the Ceramics Society - IoM3; 55th Mellor Memorial Lecture 'Glass: out of History and Art and into Tissue Regeneration'; 8th September 2015. The backdrop is a 2018 painting by Heather Gulliver showing an African Coral Tree; it hangs in the PNCS16 conference venue at the University of Kent.

Here’s a little background for you, taken in part from the IoM3’s web site: Joseph Mellor FRS (1869-1938) was a pioneering ceramist and heavily involved in the work of the Ceramic Society (which became the IoM3). He wrote several books including ‘Modern Inorganic Chemistry’. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1927 – no mean feat.

In 2016, in their centenary year, the SGT elected me a Fellow of the Society – an honour I continue to treasure, but have only a certificate in commemoration (see here, second half). That will do nicely.