Being appointed Elder Professor meant very much taking over the shop, in that the professor in those days controlled all the moneys.

My latter schooldays and my university days were during the war, when science – physics, in particular – was a very important and glamorous subject. A lot of us felt that if we couldn’t get into science, we might try engineering or medicine.

I was so pleased to be at university to do physics and mathematics.

The pattern of things was that each of the research students would be doing some particular experiment on the accelerator, often involving the building of counters or a system like that.

I was interested in nuclei originally with my deuteron photo work because that was one of the fundamental forces, and the measurement was basic to new science.

Being appointed Elder Professor meant very much taking over the shop, in that the professor in those days controlled all the moneys.

I had some vague memory of visiting Canberra as a lad, when we came up with my father by car. But when I made the long train journey from Sydney to Canberra and arrived at the little stop, I did wonder slightly whether this really was the national capital.

My father was very much a handy person round the house, and I learnt a lot of carpentry from him.

Although important nuclear physics work was to go on in laboratories such as ours had become – and we had to cut down to a lower energy group – it was not fundamentally opening up new insights on the structure of matter. That required you to be in a higher league.

In the tail above the giant resonance, you can get not just one neutron emitted but two, three, four or five, and so there are a lot of things one can measure, looking at the competition with the emission of neutrons and protons and so on.