Michael Proctor

Michael Proctor interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 11th September 2018

0:05:11 Born in Bournemouth in 1950; my father was in the Army and was serving at Bovington Camp with the Cavalry; he was in some Army house of which I have no knowledge near Lulworth; I think I was there with my parents for a year; I was christened in Lulworth Church; then my father was sent to Germany, to the British Army of the Rhine which was based at Bünde in North Germany; we were there for the next two and a half to three years; my Wikipedia entry is also true as I was born of a Lincolnshire family, and my father was the grandson and son of a farmer and became a farmer; the family goes back to the eighteenth century there and the Proctor family is still a large farming presence in South Lincolnshire; he was one of three sons; my grandfather who was a very poor farmer managed to survive the depression by selling some of his land; two of his sons became farmers eventually, and the third son became a solicitor and moved to Teignmouth in Devon; my father left school in 1938 and was thinking of entering medicine, but then the war came and he never went to university, instead he joined the Army; he fought in the 16th/5th Lancers which was a Cavalry regiment; he was a tank commander and ended the war as a Captain in the regiment, fighting in Italy, having fought in Egypt before that; my mother's side is more obscure, from Shropshire; she was one of three children of my grandfather, Stephen Jones, who I think was a schoolteacher; I think he had terrible health problems as a result of the First World War, and he ended up not as successful as he would wish; they lived in Shrewsbury; my mother went to Shrewsbury High School, the girls' school, and my uncle John went to Shrewsbury School where I went later; it was completely unconnected; my grandfather for some reason sent my father and the brother who was later a farmer to Shrewsbury School, half way across the country from Lincolnshire; that was why I went to Shrewsbury; I knew my paternal grandfather quite well; he died when I was eight, and for the last couple of years we lived in the same house; I have this great memory of his study which was suffused with pipe tobacco, and we would play chess according to his rules which were completely erroneous; you weren't allowed to move backwards in his game so it was a very difficult game to play; my paternal grandmother died when I was five and I dimly remember her; she had heart problems and died early; she was also had farming connections in Lincolnshire; my maternal grandmother lived to a great age and I knew her quite well; she died when I was about thirty; I don't know what her background was as I know very little of the Jones side of the family, but I think she lived locally in Shrewsbury in her youth; there are a lot of relative whom I don't know still living there

4:50:05 My father was very interesting; he's had a traditional country life childhood, tennis, bridge, skiing all that stuff, none of which he ever taught me; for some reason he never felt I should be doing the things that he had done well; it wasn't that he didn't want me to excel in them, but I don't think he enjoyed his childhood as it was a bit limited; my grandparents were a bit staid and lived a narrow life; bridge and going to the Rotary was about as much as they could manage; my grandfather was also a Church Warden, Alderman, all these respectable things; my father never wanted to do any of these things so was a bit of a rebel in that way; he never talked about the War but clearly it influenced him a great deal, and as he got older he spent more and more time trying to meet up with colleagues and going to Cavalry reunions; it was a terribly important part of his life but he didn't talk deeply about it at all; in the end I thought he was quite liberal minded; at a time when corporal punishment was not unheard of he never did that, and he always seemed to me very fair; he was a model builder from his youth, so he tried to get me interested in Meccano and building model aeroplanes; I was not as good as he was so he used to do most of the work while I looked on admiringly; he took me shooting and all the usual country things but not riding; he did all the things he was supposed to do, but was a bit buttoned-up; I remember there was a hilarious moment when I was about twelve; he said to me "You know the facts of life don't you Michael?" I said "of course!", but I knew nothing; that was the end of the conversation; he worked very hard on the farm but he and my mother did not get on, so home life was difficult, and his life was rather narrow; my mother was very active in the War and drove ambulances in London; later she went to Egypt to help with the resettlement of demobbed soldiers, and that is where my father met her; they married in 1948; I think that initially before children came along it was quite glamorous, a lot of skiing and lying on the beach; she liked that life but was not prepared for the life she encountered in Spalding when my father left the Army as my grandfather was getting old; in 1954-5 we moved to Spalding and it was glamorous any more, and the fens are a rather narrow place socially; she felt herself above all these things so never made any friends to speak of and became very depressed and difficult; my father had to cope with it which he did loyally, but it didn't do him any good; she wanted us to succeed and did all the reading things and I even made her make plastic models, but she gradually got worse and worse, introspective, and even stopped driving; she was taking pills and really needed psychiatric treatment at a time when there was a great stigma attached to it; my father never complained publicly but I remember there were never any parties, nobody ever came to dinner, it was a very isolated existence; she probably committed suicide eventually when I was in my twenties; she took a lot of pills and didn't wake up; it was terribly sad and there was nothing anybody could do about it; she also took to drink which was awful, so the last years of her life dinner times were impossible as she was completely over the top by then and would rant and rave at everybody, every night; it was very wearing; as a result of that I was quite happy to escape and go to America, but that was a bit later

9:50:23 Growing up I went to a little pre-primary school run by an old lady in her garden with about twenty pupils; it was wonderful even though the facilities were non-existent, and she did teach us quite a lot except she did stop me being left-handed; I remember picking up my pencil with my left hand and it was transferred to the right hand, which was quite common in those days; I do write with my right hand but dig with a left-handed spade; I went on from there to a prep-school in Seaford, on the south coast between Eastbourne and Brighton, where at that time there were twelve prep-schools, all little - something to do with the wonderful gravel sub-soil and the good sea air; again it was miles away from South Lincolnshire; none of these schools have survived but it was a school with about fifty pupils and five teachers, owned by the Headmaster; it was a very good school for me and I did extremely well - it was a boarding school; the Headmaster was interested in the intellectual education of the boys; he had his firm views; he had been schooled at Winchester and then Balliol so had high standards which he instilled in us; I was immediately branded a swot, top of the class; there were five forms and at the end of my second year I was in the top form aged ten or so; I was three years in the top form and got special teaching, so it was clear early on that I was going to be a scholarship candidate at secondary school; I was pretty good at everything, mathematics didn't stand out, and in fact I never thought of it as my best subject, I was better at classics; I took the scholarship exam for Shrewsbury where my father had gone, and was the top scholar in 1963; this was very good for my parents because farming was not lucrative at that time and they were short of money, and in those days scholarships paid about two-thirds of the fees

13:09:21 My hobbies at that time were mainly model building; I played a bit of chess but very badly; I'm not good at that sort of thing, and still not; I was very bad at games because I was large and short-sighted; it was a school that played rugby, football and cricket; I think I started wearing glasses when I was about ten; I remember going to church as a rare event; my father having been the son of a Church Warden was expected to bring the family to church and my mother never went; he used to take me and my younger brother and we used to leave before the sermon; the reason he gave was that the boys would not be interested although the real reason was that he didn't want to stay; anyway, he asked me to read the hymn board and I couldn't read it, but I hadn't realized before that that I was short-sighted; it is odd that the school didn't notice, but thinking about it I was almost always at the front of the class; I never played any musical instrument; in schools at that time there was group singing and you could take piano lessons which were extra, but that sort of thing was pretty low-key; extra-curricular stuff was not emphasised, it was all stuff for the exams

14:57:18 I really enjoyed Shrewsbury which was a great school, in spite of the fact that I was not good at games which was not a good thing in the 1960s - the top scholar could not run? - it was all right in the end as there were plenty of like-minded persons; there was fagging at Shrewsbury but we were called scum as I recall; it wasn't the absurdly personal type that it used to be in the past, no warming of lavatory seats or anything, but you had to perform personal tasks for the older boys like going to shop and getting food and things like making beds; I remember when I was Head of House making a rule that everybody should make his own bed every day which I guess had not been the case in the past; it is a funny thing that although now it sounds awful I don't think it was abusive; the younger boys expected to do it and then in their turn to have the power, and in general, the older boys asked people to do things but were not abusive in doing so; I did not feel I was scarred by this experience; I wasn't bullied at school, I was not popular but not bullied, and the older boys recognised that I was intelligent and would appreciate that, so that I could talk to them; some of the boys there were not very intelligent

16:44:24 On enthusiasms, I was never a good actor, I was pretty boring actually; I did a little debating, which we all did, and that was fun; I did a bit of rowing but it was rather low-level, but I enjoyed that and even enjoyed it much more later; I could never draw; I tried to learn the piano but I wasn't enjoying it so I gave up; I bought a guitar at one point but never had any lessons - inspired by Bob Dylan, trying to learn his songs; eventually I became a football referee and got my school colours for refereeing which was a bit of a cheat; other than that, I listened to a lot of music, both classical and pop, and got on with my work; I was a pretty boring child

17:57:14 We arrived in the fourth form and there was no specialization; then gradually, after the third year when you went into the sixth form, then there was serious specialization; there was a prize offered every year for mathematics, a written paper, and in my second year (of five) I took this exam and got the prize, and therefore was branded a genius in mathematics; even though I had won some other prizes which were more appropriate to my age, after that I believed everybody who told me I had to go into maths; I specialized in maths and physics and did maths, maths and physics 'A' levels; I might have done biology but was put off by having to dissect rabbits, but in a way I am sorry now because the things that have happened in biology since I was a student are so enormously interesting that I am quite sorry I did not take that path; too late now

19:07:14 The norm at Shrewsbury was to be Confirmed in the second year, and I said no, I had my doubts; the House master, who was actually a man of the cloth, was very understanding and didn't criticise me at all; I haven't been Confirmed but went along with all this stuff; I don't think my parents were very sad about this; I am pretty agnostic bordering on atheist, I've got no hope of the afterlife whatsoever, but I do like the music and the sense of tradition; I grew up with it in the '60s; I was at Chapel every day and twice on Sundays, know all the hymns and the form of the Service, it's quite reassuring really, and I love church music, I get a bit bored with the Services but you have to take the rough with the smooth

20:37:00 I have a younger brother, Henry; he was also at Shrewsbury as a pupil, and then he was at Trinity (Cambridge), again like me, but he is a historian; he didn't know what he wanted to do and in the end decided to be a school teacher, so he went to Eton and that has been his job for many years

20:59:07 From Shrewsbury I applied to Trinity; I can't remember whether I applied anywhere else but definitely put Trinity first; my parents had no ideas, but luckily the person who was teaching my maths in the sixth form had been at Trinity and encouraged me to apply there; I remember an Oxford Don coming to the school and I was introduced to him and he asked why I was going to Cambridge, and why Trinity? I just said my teacher had told me to; I got in with a scholarship so that was alright; Trinity was good but I learnt very quickly that I wasn't as good as a lot of them which was a very good thing to learn; I did get firsts throughout my time but they were not stellar ones and I struggled a lot with the supervisions, and relied a lot on cleverer people to help me out; of course the exams I did on my own and I did alright; so I wasn't destined for glory in academia at that stage; my teachers included David Marr, who died tragically, a big person in computer science; he was absolutely wonderful; Béla Bollobás who is still alive; he was very particular, very Hungarian with very high standards and would not take second-rate as acceptable, so I was a bit terrified of him; Keith Moffatt who became my research supervisor was an absolutely brilliant teacher from all points of view, and very supportive; Alan Baker, the Fields Medallist, who died quite recently, was a very shy and emotionally undeveloped person, a great mathematician and a truly terrible teacher and had no idea how to get on with his supervisees at all; Peter Swinnerton-Dyer did teach me a little bit; he was the Dean, but a very clever man, extraordinarily good, all kinds of mathematics, pure and applied, one of the last sort of polymaths and very interesting; he was like a number of mathematicians, very particular in his way of speaking, but very powerful; he was a great Head of the University Grants Committee; the disappointment for him was that he had such a small domain at St Catharine's which he didn't really like; he used to come to Trinity all the time for sustenance

24:26:00 At Trinity I did a lot of rowing; I discovered that at Cambridge, unlike Shrewsbury, you didn't have to be any good if you were big enough; so I became a full-time rower, not always at the top of the tree but six days a week, and usually in the afternoons; now things have changed so now rowers go out early in the morning; we didn't do any of that stuff; if it was a choice between supervisions and rowing, rowing won, and it kept me fit; also I met a huge number of people whom I wouldn't have met otherwise, who were not mathematicians and therefore not boring, almost all I have kept up with for the rest of my life; so socially it was really important for me to do that as I had two sets of friends, mathematical and rowing; I enjoyed my time at Cambridge as I had a good social life and was able to get on with my work; I went to concerts and things but only as a spectator, I didn't play or act in anything; I didn't really get involved in politics; as a teenager I had been a Young Liberal without really knowing what that meant, and I had the orange badges, "Make Love not War" etc.; when I got to Cambridge I joined CUUNA, the Cambridge University United Nations Association which then was rather active; I thought it was rather good; I'm not sure whether I joined the Liberal Club but I joined the Union Society and went to debates; I'm afraid rowing, drinking and working were really... I'm very dull; the pub I used to go to a lot was in Green Street, 'The Volunteer', also 'The Pickerel' as I had friends in Magdalene, those principally, but then there were all the pubs in King's Street; I never did the King's Street Run; some of the pubs are still there, 'The Eagle' of course, but not much further afield; students didn't and still don't go very far from their Colleges

27:22:16 I didn't really think about what I wanted to do after I graduated; in those days everybody had a job to go to, there were jobs all over the place and it was merely a matter of deciding what interested you; I came up in 1968 so this was 1971; I had got firsts in maths so the natural thing to do was to go on and do Part III mathematics in a fourth year, which I did; I never thought about it because it was the thing to do and my friends were doing it; I could have easily got a job in anything as there were so many jobs going; there was no worry at that time about what sort of job you might get, and I think there was less avarice perhaps; the idea that the reason that you got a job was because it had a good salary was less important relatively than it is for today's students I believe; at that time I decided that I should do something a bit different and after that I would go to America if I could; I applied to American universities and for Harkness and Kennedy scholarships, and I got a Kennedy Scholarship which took me to M.I.T.; but before that happened I had to give up rowing because I crashed my car; I was driving without a seat belt, which wasn't compulsory then, and ran into a truck on a snowy road and broke both my arms; in consequence I couldn't row, in fact I couldn't even write; this was very good because I had a friend who took notes for me on carbon paper so I could read his well-written notes and listen to the lecturer; I wasn't spending time rowing and this meant I got the bottom distinction in Part III which undoubtedly I would not have done had I not crashed my car; so I scraped over the line in Part III and I had a studentship to do maths here, but I had already decided that I wanted to try out America so I did go for a year; I could have gone for two years with the money and M.I.T. would have kept me on; there were a few reasons for not staying; I had the offer of a studentship in Cambridge and it was clear that if I was going to stay more than a year at M.I.T. I would have to do work, teach calculus for freshers to work my way through a bit as there wasn't a full scholarship available; I had met an American woman whom I later married who wanted to go to Britain for a bit, and the offer was open from Cambridge and I decided that was a better place; at that time the Department of Mathematics at Cambridge was really the best in the world, even better than M.I.T., so I think it was the right decision from the academic point of view

30:33:20 So I spent my year at M.I.T.; I remember that I didn't have much to do officially as I went to see my advisor and explained to him that I was going to be here for one year or two, but I didn't really see myself going on to a Ph.D. in that time; he said that what I needed was Plan N which stood for nothing, no examinations, so that was very good as I could go to lots of courses but not be examined; then I started doing research with a man called Willem Malkus who was a senior academic at M.I.T. and we did some work together which was later published as my first paper, and that started me off really; in fact that paper was the subject of the citation for my Royal Society election, so it was quite well known in the end; so that was very helpful and I wouldn't have got that fillip here in Cambridge; it would have been a different path, and you don't know what the path would have been

31:36:06 So I came back to Cambridge after one year to complete my Ph.D. so I had two more years as a Ph.D. student, supervised by Keith Moffatt who is still at Trinity, a great supervisor; I was just sort of seamless, except that I knew I had to do computing and he wasn't any good at that; so I found a post-doc to help me with the computing side; so I thought if I'm going to go to America at the end of my Ph.D. then I better put in for a fellowship at Trinity early so that I could enjoy it if I got it, which I did, so the last year of my Ph.D. I was actually a Research Fellow; had I put in a year later I would have been in competition with some much better people and wouldn't have got one, so that was another piece of serendipity; I finished my Ph.D., was a Fellow of Trinity and I got a job at M.I.T. where I stayed for two years, which was great fun; I did some nice work with Malkus and one or two others but at the end of that there was no tenure available, so I was made an Assistant Professor without tenure which I would have to have waited years for; the sequence was that I was appointed as an Instructor, which is not as good as an Assistant Professor, which was a two year job; I had been to some summer schools on Cape Cod, so-called Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Summer Schools, where you are supposed to do a project and give a talk about it; I went as a graduate student from Britain to do this one summer and produced quite a good project; then I was in the frame and known to some other American academics from different places; so after about nine months I was asked to go to Chicago and Hopkins with a view to them making me an offer of employment; I didn't actually get as far as them making me an offer but I think they would have done; at that stage M.I.T. stepped up and made me an assistant professor in order to keep me; also at the same stage it turned out that there was a vacancy here; in fact there had been two vacancies; the first was not in my area but in relativity and the person who got the job was Peter Deak CHECK who was a former King's student; I had a letter from my friend Nigel Weiss who I'd worked with and was then a Lecturer who said there was a vacancy, you could put your hat in the ring, fluid mechanics was quite well represented but relativity really needs some more people - the message was you won't get a job; then Keith Moffatt himself left to go to Bristol, and that was in my area; then I got a completely different letter from the Head of Department advising me to apply; so I did and got the job, without an interview as I was in America; very expensive to bring me across and they knew who I was; that would not have been possible today; so I was offered a job at the best department in the world and I definitely took that even though the pay was half what I would have got at Hopkins or Chicago

35:23:04 My field is fluid mechanics, broadly speaking, but within that magneto hydro-dynamics which is magnetic fields and conducting fluids with particular interest in my case in the earth and the sun, and they are the magnetic fields that are produced by them and in other astrophysical bodies; there is another branch of the theory that deals with electro-magnetism in engineering but I didn't do much of that; so it is an extension of ordinary fluid dynamics; Keith Moffatt was the person who got me onto this by giving a wonderful lecture course on the subject; that was his field also at that time and it was just inspirational, so I decided that this was the thing I wanted to do; when I went to M.I.T., Malkus was also in that area so that all worked out very nicely for me; it is a slightly niche subject but meant I was able to teach courses in fluid dynamics as well as more general applied maths, as well as my specialised subject; so I was the replacement for Moffatt in this area, then Moffatt came back into a different job which was ideal; I came as an Assistant Lecturer without tenure initially but in my department at that time no assistant lecturer had ever been fired, they had all been able to step up into vacancies that were made available by people leaving; I was the first one for whom this was not possible because there were no vacancies because in the late seventies there was a terrible economic crisis and all salaries were frozen and there were no new appointments for years; I was one of the last appointments for about five or six years; so I was the first person having to face being promoted in post, but I managed it; I remember talking to one of my colleagues about how I was a bit worried about this process and would I be sacked; he said I didn't really need reassurance but a psychiatrist and that my promotion was assured; I was a Research Fellow at Trinity at the time and they allowed you to go away; so I had gone away for two years and came back as a Research Fellow, and as soon as that happened I was appointed to a College Lectureship, a teaching fellowship at Trinity; I was in that position until I left it; I like some teaching; I like teaching things I understand and that is sometimes quite difficult; I like teaching people who are interested; I am not very patient with people who do not seems to take things in quickly; in the end I didn't like teaching the same thing over and over again; when you have to deal with a question that you yourself answered as an undergraduate still appearing on the answer sheet forty years later ennui sets in a bit; I have been talking about supervisions; I quite like lecturing if I do proper preparation, but I was always a bit lazy and didn't prepare properly so sometimes I was not as good as I could have been; I don't think I was ever a popular lecturer; undergraduate was all right, but I was never really organized enough to be a really popular graduate lecturer, although I did have students and people in my classes; I wasn't one of these people who won the teaching prize but I got by; research I really enjoyed, I enjoyed the creative stuff and supervising research students; that was great fun, especially when they were good; I didn't have all the best ones but luckily my colleague Nigel Weiss who I worked with very closely had lots of good students and I interacted with them, which was great; I think I supervised about ten Ph.D. students, and a number more who weren't my students but I did stuff with; at that time there were no Masters students, there was Part III maths but that's really like an undergraduate course with lectures; that aspect was very good and we had a good research group; it was pleasant socially and quite a lot of work was done; we did well and got research grants; it was a very good period; research grants are not essential; I learnt in America that it was very different; when I went there in the seventies I was given an office and told that the telephone was paid for; because I was new and didn't have a grant the administration graciously allowed me to make outside calls on the telephone whereas in general it would come out of your grant; so here is wasn't essential to have a research grant and still isn't, but if you want students and post-docs grants are essential, and post-docs are a very important part of pushing on research in applied maths; so I was definitely keen on getting grants and almost all the time I had one and post-docs to supervise; I had a lot of post-docs over the years, jointly with Nigel mainly; possibly none has become famous, a few are professors in Leeds - a lot of the people we worked with went to Leeds as academics, so if you look at the department there you'll see people from our research group; it seems to be chain migration; one person goes and is successful and the style becomes the style of the group, and you recruit people with a similar style and they typically came from Cambridge in those days as it was a very big applied maths department

42:24:18 On the international aspects of the field my own view is that without conferences it would be a very uninteresting career; it's not just the chance to go to interesting places it is to see what everybody else is doing and talk to them in a way that you couldn't possibly do if you weren't travelling; I didn't do many long-term visits to work with people, but I went to a lot of meetings and then you learn what is going on in the field so it's really essential to do these things; I went to a lot of places in America; the particular subject I was interested in was actually done in East Germany, so I went there a few time, to Czechoslovakia, one meeting in Japan, I never went to the Soviet Union at that time, but Poland, France, so all over Europe and the States

43:51:02 My first marriage lasted twenty years, and eventually she got fed up with me; I met Julia in 1997; that was a nice story because the wife of a good friend of mine at Cambridge had a twin sister, a doctor, who knew Julia through her work in Essex; these two sisters decided that we needed to meet; Julia was a widow, and we were brought together at an event, and the rest is history; she continued as a doctor until last year; she moved from Essex to Melbourne but gave it up very quickly as she got fed up with being a doctor

45:10:05 I always hated administration; in the maths department there used to be termly meetings of the staff and these were dire; stuff about the curriculum, everybody had to have a say; the first Head of Department was not at all bad because he let everybody have a say but had already sewn everything up, so there really wasn't any decision to be made and it was easy enough to have an argument about it, but his successors weren't as clever as that and it was just awful; I resolved that I would never be in administration, certainly not in the department and did my very best to be incompetent; so I succeeded in that until latterly, but in the College I felt very strongly, and I still feel that you've got to put something into a college to get something out of it; so I was made a Tutor at an early age which meant I was involved with the social side of students, something I quite liked; Trinity was quite well supplied with money to make the social side work, so it was O.K., and I was a Tutor for fifteen years until I became a Reader and then I had to give up as that was the rule then; we had a hundred pupils and would rotate through them, and I got to know some people that I still know today; it was very friendly and it made me part of the College; I also did other stuff that you would expect young Fellows to do, on the College Council and so on; at the end of that period when I had to give up being a Tutor, I found I needed the money; tutoring was quite well remunerated at that time and I had a big drop in income even though I had been promoted in the University; I became the Dean which was the equivalent of the Lay Dean here, the disciplinary Dean, and did that for ten years or more; that was also enjoyable even though you are only dealing with difficult people; it kept you talking to students and also having been the Tutor and the Dean, you worked out how the College worked, and was close to the Senior Tutor and Bursars; Trinity works very differently from here; it is run by rules, there are written rules and so-called good customs which are much more important than written rules, but they don't really cover administrative matters; the rules are mostly obeyed; for example, what I was astonished to discover in this College is that the allocation of rooms is arbitrary, at the whim of the Vice-Provost, whereas in Trinity the Vice-Master writes a letter about room allocation to people, but it's actually run elsewhere; the way it is run is very simple, a room is vacant, you apply if you are entitled to it - certain sorts of room are reserved if you are teaching - and if you are senior to anyone else who applies, you get the room, that's it; senior means when you became a Fellow; it works, there is no argument, everybody accepts that this is the rule; both Rob Wallach, who was the first Vice-Provost that I worked with, and Nick Marston, I've asked them both whether we should introduce some sort of rule to make their lives easier and they don't seem to want to do this; the other thing that was distinctive was that we were well-paid for teaching but were expected to do six hours of teaching a week, and people did so without complaint; I don't know how that was made to work but it did work; latterly Readers and Professors do four hours teaching in Trinity, but it was accepted; there are some people in this College who enjoy being here but don't see that part of the job is to do a lot of teaching; I know that successive Provosts and Senior Tutors have had difficulty with finding the right people to do the teaching; I think it is a problem at King's that at some point will have to be dealt with because it's getting harder and harder to get young people to commit to lots of teaching; there has to be a structure that will make people happy about doing the teaching that is needed; at Trinity the pay was good but somehow there was a general understanding that this was what was required and people were not rebellious; there was also a financial penalty, a big one, if you didn't do it, and people would wonder why you were falling down on the job, and those that were were named at the Council every year, but there were very few; I don't know why it is different here as I don't know enough of the history of King's as you would think they would be very similar; of course there are lots of Fellows of King's who do more than their required teaching and do it gratefully and realize why they are doing it; it's just that there is not a mechanism for making it universally accepted that this is what you do; Trinity is very much more formal, people still dress more formally; students at Trinity would never have addressed me by my first name without my telling them that it was O.K. whereas my first interaction with a King's student was with Tristram Gillion Farron CHECK who was then President of K.C.S.U. wrote to me "Dear Mike", and I realized immediately that it was a different world; that's fine, I'm quite relaxed about that but it is a difference; I remember going to Trinity and getting letters from my Tutor addressed "Dear Proctor", and I thought, having been at school where it was the same, I thought surely they've moved on, but then I realized it was a term of endearment because if I had been outside the College it would have been "Dear Mr Proctor"; probably a greater proportion than here went into lunch, but what was very different was that the Fellows ate at a separate table with different food; lunches when I first arrived at Trinity were quite elaborate; you didn't need dinner after you'd had lunch; the whole structure of the place with a dais in the Hall and High Tables which really were high made it very different; at dinner the students had to stand up for the Grace, but I understand that that happened here too until quite recently; I'm not at all unhappy at how it works here, and I think that each College should have its own traditions and be pleased with them; that's what makes things interesting in Cambridge, and at Oxford too; I think if you like wearing ties Trinity is a better place to go than King's; I do wear a tie with a gown as I find it odd to wear a gown without one still, and I do wear a tie when I'm meeting older people as they often wear one too and it is better to be overdressed than underdressed

54:55:17 I had not thought of going anywhere else or doing anything other than being Vice-Master though it would have been nice to have been thought of as a possible Master of Trinity, but that was never going to happen; as Vice-Master I helped to draw up the rules when it ceased to be a Royal appointment because the present Master was elected by the Fellows; it is nominally a Royal appointment but we sent only one candidate to the Palace; some people asked if I'd like to be Master and I said of course I would, but I didn't get beyond the first hurdle; people seemed to think I'd done quite well as Vice-Master and it was more of a job there than here because there the Master is a sort of remote figure who doesn't get involved in writing papers, and is often away doing important business for the Royal Society or whatever; I had some experience which was relevant to this job and to other jobs as head of house; somebody in Trinity, Boyd Hilton, a historian, a great friend, said the only reason I was doing this was that I wanted to be head of house; I thought no, but thinking about it again I thought maybe I could do these things; then I was very ill at about the same time as I became Vice-Master and I nearly died with a terrible immune system problem; I was in hospital for about a month and had a lot of time to think about things, whether I should just continue doing the things that I was doing as it would have been very easy to carry on for the next ten years as a professor and end up retired, or to do something different; I became Vice-Master then got the feeling that could be thought of as a head of house; one or two opportunities arose so I was interviewed and short-listed at Caius, also short-listed at Magdalene but didn't get it because of the Archbishop, then again it suits him better than it would have suited me but it would have been quite pleasant and I would have enjoyed Magdalene for completely different reasons from him; it's a very friendly small place and one could have got on with lots of other things as well; then another College invited applications and as I had been short-listed twice I wrote in and was rejected immediately; suddenly someone asked if I'd thought of King's as a possible place to be head of house, and I had not thought of King's; from where I stood King's seemed to be disorganized, chaotic and difficult and I couldn't imagine how it would be possible to be head of house there and enjoy it, but I persevered and put my name forward and the rest is history; as soon as I arrived here as a potential candidate I realized that people weren't barking mad and it was a lovely place; you could see there were things that could be done because people were not wholly confident that things were being done correctly and so there was an opportunity to make a difference, and of course an opportunity to be in a place the Chapel and all the rest of the history was just wonderful, so I was very pleased to be a candidate and very pleased to be Provost

59:12:03 As Provost, I like feeling that I've helped people, I like positive feedback, and as long as I'm getting positive feedback I am really enjoying myself; of course were I to do something really terrible and be roundly criticised it would make it much less pleasant and has not yet happened to any significant degree; I've enjoyed getting people to get along; I think I have reduced the amount of anger that I did see at early Congregations before I was Provost; people seem more relaxed and better prepared to get on with what they should and want to get on with, research and teaching rather than worrying about fights in the College; I think it was plain when I arrived that there had been a long period when details had been forgotten about, so there were gaps in governance which in some ways made it rather attractive as the Provost could do anything because there was nothing to stand in his way; on the other hand it was not very satisfactory as nobody knew where they stood in relation to certain things, and I've tried to help with that; I have tried to make the governance of the College more transparent; the Fellows now know what the Council is talking about which they didn't know before; I have also enjoyed going out and getting money which has been moderately successful thanks to the Development Director; some transformational gifts have arrived, especially recently, so we can get on and do some of the things we want to do for the College; the money for access which has come to the College recently is going to put us in the forefront of that area which is part of our ethos anyway; that is all entirely satisfactory

1:01:19:13 I have done some teaching of students; maths students in King's are just like maths students in Trinity and very easy to get along with; on student representatives on the Council, we didn't have that structure at Trinity, so it was quite interesting to see the students there; in general they have been wonderful; in the first couple of years there were some quite difficult people as student reps; in the last two years they have been absolutely tremendous, really constructive engagement and we have been able to do what they want and they have been helpful to us; I don't think we've turned the corner but if you can offer the students the knowledge that they are being listened to then you don't get representatives of the students who say the Fellows are against us and we must have radical demonstrations; so far we haven't had any difficult demonstrations

1:02:26:10 If you want to do research full-time you shouldn't be a Fellow of a College; being Provost is an administrative job; I do have a little bit of time for research but I have one student who is finishing very soon, I hope, and I have a couple of collaborators and we are still doing some research, but it's very part-time; I have retired from the University so I don't have any obligation to do anything; I don't miss it actually; having spent years as Vice-Master and then here, basically on a part-time basis in the Department, I wasn't a full-time researcher for some time; I've done some work, I'm a Fellow of the Royal Society, I'm never going to do such good work again, so it's a matter of pleasing myself rather than doing anything important; I'll do it when I can; I wouldn't say necessarily that a pure mathematician will have done the best work before thirty, but by my great age you are definitely going downhill; I think that one thing that has changed in my subject is the advent of lots of computing for almost every part of the subject; unless you are very good at numerical analysis you don't make the progress that you didn't need to make in the past because in the past you just did pen and paper stuff and that was quite sufficient; that is not good enough any more; I am a bit of an old fogey when it comes to computers, other people do the computing for me

1:04:24:21 I have been here for five years and am just about to start my second and last term as Provost; there are a number of things where the College ought to have some strategy; what I am trying to do is to introduce a discussion on how, for example, we organise our teaching, how it's remunerated and how we incentivise people to do the teaching in the College; how we spend the money we have allocated to research, I think there is a lot of opportunity to do more imaginative things; this again has been talked about but as always in these situations there is a lot of talk and no one is prepared to sit down and say here is a proposal; my aim is to make proposals which can be shot down, I don't mind, but at least start a more concrete conversation that might lead to change; I would like to think that we can build this wonderful proposed auditorium in Chetwynd Court, I would be most gratified if that came to pass before I left; that means a lot of fundraising and the outcome is not at all certain; building projects are always difficult, like in Gibbs; the Gibbs building refurbishment, if we had all the money then many Fellows would agree reluctantly to quit their sets for a year or two to get it done; without the money there is no prospect of the College putting in it's own money because the Fellows won't agree because they like it how it is and they don't see the point; I can understand that completely; but with Chetwynd this is something really new that many of the Fellows are really in favour of, they can see how it will transform the way we organise our seminars and it will also bring in a bit of money from conferences; so it is altogether a good thing and it is one thing that the Fellows can almost unite about so we really need to pursue it in the future; I'm very keen on pushing that forward and that will be our plan; of course there is a fundraising campaign to include this among other things, starting in December; the Director of Development and I retire on the same day so it is our joint attempt to finish our careers; our aim is £100,000,000 and we have raised £50,000,000; somebody asked me why I really wanted to carry on for another five years; having done five years I realized when I had done four years that I had really just arrived, I'd done a few things but nothing had really happened and I couldn't just step down then; hopefully I will have more focussed thinking about the next five years; when I first arrived I didn't know anything about the College and what people would go along with; I do know a fair amount now; I know the characters and I know most of the ethos; different people have different views but you work with different people to get different things done; in general my feeling is that people accept that the things that are being proposed are what they want and there iare no rebellions at Congregation, so I think so far so good

1:08:09:22 On China, I think inevitably we are going to have to deal more with China; we all have our slight caveats about it; for fund-raising reasons it is obviously good to be connected with China, but it is a different world from your United States benefactor; it is not philanthropy exactly and you have to manage the money in relation to the demands that might be made; I am a novice at this but I hope to learn more; I haven't yet been to mainland China for the College; I went recently to Zhenjiang, the vinegar capital of China, but that was nothing to do with fund-raising; I think one has to deal with China; they will be everywhere quite soon, and we should be there too