Although I achieved a creditable 2.1 in my economics finals I had no clear vision of what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  I had been offered a job as the rowing coach at Geelong Grammar School in Australia by Lou Luxton, one of our rowing coaches, who must have been on the governing board of Geelong, but I did not feel I wanted to make a career out of rowing.  At the back of my mind I think I must have always kept the sneering remarks of my Battery Commander in Malaya that I would end up my days catching the 7.30 am train to the city, doing some dull job there, and coming back at night to my family  I wanted something more adventurous than that.  I did in fact have an interview with Lazards, the merchant bankers, that would have taken me into just such a life, though I would have lived in London and carried on rowing.  It did not work out.  I am not sure if I said thank you, but no; or if Lazards just said no.  One job did come up that I really wanted.  Professor Austin Robinson, my lecturer in Applied Economics, was asked by the United Nations to propose someone for an economics post in the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, based in Bangkok.  I asked to have my name put forward and he agreed.  But being the UN it was ages before I heard that I had not got the job, by which time I had already accepted another one.

 

It all happened in a weird way.  I was still waiting to hear about the UN job at the time of Henley regatta and had no other job prospect in mind and had no idea of what to do, until one day in the Steward’s Enclosure I got talking to Geoffrey Gilbertson^[1].  He was an ex-Jesus Cambridge oarsman whom I knew slightly; he had contracted polio and was now confined to a wheel chair.  He also happened to be Personnel Officer for ICI Paints in Slough, where my father was Production Director.  He suggested to me that I join ICI Paints as a management trainee.  It all seemed very easy and since I had no other offers I accepted this.  I would be able to live at home and go to work with my father and live a comfortable life.  I think I agreed to start work in October.

 

I went down to Wales as usual as soon as I could get away from moving from Cambridge and settling in at home.  At this time Dennis and I no longer stayed at the Coach and Horses but had found an elderly lady who took in lodgers, a Mrs Sparrow.  She lived in Glawcoed Cottage about a mile west of the Coach on the edge of the canal, a rather gloomy spot hemmed in by trees.  She was a wonderful woman and it was a most comfortable relaxed place to stay, nothing seemed to faze her.  Her husband had been a relatively wealthy man and they had lived a well-to-do existence, at Ashford House in Talybont, just down the road.  He must not have left her well-off when he died and she had moved here some years before and took in lodgers, more for company I think than to earn money.  It was certainly not an expensive place to stay.  I must have done a lot of walking but have no memory of what else I did.

 

I do have a partial record of a trip Dennis and I made to Skokholm Island later in the summer.  Skokholm was run as a bird observatory, at that time, by the what I think was called the West Wales Conservation Group, based at Dale Fort near Haverfordwest.  Groups of visitors were allowed to stay on Skokholm for a week.  Dennis gave me the cost of the visit as a birthday present.  Dale Fort was a spartan place and I think we only arrived there, having driven down from Llangynidr, in the afternoon before the start of the week’s stay.  I kept a sort of diary during this week and I include it here for interest as what I did there greatly influenced my future interests in birds and wildlife.  There are no dates on it but I think it must have been early September.

 

Dale Fort

The anxieties of the previous night were soon dispelled.  As I looked out of my window early in the morning across the haven to the dark green of the further shore I could see the water was quite smooth and the sun already shining brightly.  I heaved a sigh of relief, I knew we should have no trouble in getting across to Skokholm that morning.  I should never mind being stranded longer than a week on the island but the thought of not being able to get there at all, because of stormy weather, was haunting.

 

We met each other for the first time at breakfast.  A quiet subdued party at that time of the morning.  Dennis and I were the only males.  There was one oldish lady, Mrs. Pennicuik, the mother of the sub-warden, Colin, who said she sketched; she seemed very frail.  Two old spinsters, schoolmistresses as it turned out, eager for the joys of roughing it, and three younger females completed the party.

 

The actual inhabitants of Skokholm were something of a mystery; names and nothing more.  Peter was the warden.^[2] ‘Very nice’ we were told and his wife Pat.  Colin was the sub-warden, an Oxford undergraduate, there for the long vac.^[3]  To me, at that time, it seemed strange that they should spend so long on the island and enjoy it.  I puzzled over what they could find to do all day.

 

We wasted no time over breakfast, and I was soon out carrying our week’s provisions down the slope to the jetty.  Down went two large crates of loaves, looking already a bit stale.  I wondered what they would be like at the end of the week; there were cases of tinned food, a crate of cabbages, a bottle of sherry and a sack of potatoes amongst other things.  It was soon down and piled on the quay.  The boat, a small whaler, used for fishing, carrying people to Skokholm, and for all the odd jobs of the fort, came from the direction of Dale, dropped its dinghy by the buoy and drew alongside the quay.  Harold was the name of the boatman, tall and with a strong weather-beaten face, dressed in cap & short navy blue coat.  All of our belongings were soon on board.  We wasted no time as those returning from the island may have to catch the London train and at 8 sharp we started.

 

The sun was higher now, up above Dale village, lighting the long green sweep of the sound, where the trees came down to the water on the north, with the estuary in the centre to the east and the gentler slopes on the south.  We set off in a westerly direction.  Past the fort with waving hands to wish us luck, south towards Ann’s Head.  Past three large sandy bays, past a radar station, and then Ann’s Head itself, its steep cliffs, jackdaws and gulls and a shag or two and the white square lighthouse.  As we rounded the Head, Skokholm appeared, a low line, dark and inviting, to the westward.  The tide was with us, the water fairly calm.  I’m no sailor but I felt few qualms inside only excitement and content and a great satisfaction.  The trip is mere routine to John Barrett, the Warden at Dale, but to me I felt a great thrill going out there towards my first island.  When I had seen it two months before, a little white farmhouse and a lighthouse on a green plot, I had no thoughts then that I should be going to spend a week there.

 

The island grew as we drew nearer.  A red hut stood out vividly from the green of the island.  Cliffs began to take shape, though it appeared rather featureless.  Merely a flat plateau sloping down towards the north, with the lighthouse on the highest point at the south on quite high cliffs, that on the north were non-existent.  It was hard to see where we would land but as we came right close in a cove opened out and another quay – South Haven as we later knew it.  There were several people there waiting for us, with ropes and baggage.  The tide was too high to let us come straight in and we dropped anchor and then gradually drew alongside till we were quickly roped up.

 

In a few minutes the boat was empty of our load and full of those returning and before I could hardly think, the boat was backing out and we waved good bye, on Skokholm ourselves at last

 

For some afternoons Dennis had been watching seals low down near the sea, just north of Crab Bay.  He said he had seen them very close and was sure that he had found a cave.  He could not get at it without rope and so Colin and I went back with him, equipped with one of the ropes used for mooring the boat.  As we walked along Crab Bay we saw three seals; two of them quite close in, almost on the shore, for the tide was quite low.  The start down was quite simple for although the cliff is almost sheer, the top has worn away a little, leaving a slope, steep enough to scramble down.  The rock is very hard and rough and ideal for climbing.  A little lower the rock has split at about 45 degrees leaving a cleft down which we could climb to the sea.  There was an awkward move to get onto the ledge at the top of this cleft.  Once made, the descent by rope was easy, over rough rock with plenty of handholds, though at the time it appeared quite daring.

 

The cleft led down to another rock, separated from the main cliff, shaped like the roof of a house, some thirty feet high and jutting into the bay about sixty feet.  One side of this roof was a continuation of the cleft.  We went down the other side to the water’s edge and to the caves.  There appeared to be two of these at first sight, though Dennis was convinced that there was a third with a submerged entrance right underneath where we were standing.  The caves had been formed by the weathering of a softer rock, a strata of which was inserted into the fault in the main cliff face.  A cleft in this softer rock ran right the way down from the top and opened out wider at the bottom into a cave.  The middle cave was very small and on closer examination proved merely a crack in the cliff.  All three caves were completely protected from observation from the land, except from directly above, by the roof-like rock on which we were standing.  There was another similar shaped rock some twenty yards away, running parallel and between them forming a minute inlet.  The tide was still too high and there was nothing to do but wait, till we could see more.

 

The far cave intrigued me.  There was a crack in the rock running vertically down to it, ending in a huge slab of rock jammed across the top, forming the entrance of the cave.  I climbed up to the top and set about trying out if it would be possible to climb down it.  I soon found the top of the crack and peered down.  It looked frightening with the sea directly below.  I thought I might try and see if it would go.  I edged down a bit.  The rock was comfortingly firm and rough and I thought I would go down a little more, to a small rock that was wedged in the crack.  The rock was a bit rotten here but I felt that if I could get round the wedged rock I could get down to the slab above the cave.  This was much simpler than it looked and I suddenly found myself on the slab.  I waved to Dennis and Colin feeling very pleased with myself.  They were very near and looked very surprised.  I shouted across that it was really quite easy and waved them over.

 

I crawled along the slab and peered into the cave.  After the bright light outside I couldn’t see much but it was still some thirty feet down to the water and the rock felt very slippery.  I came back and told them to bring the rope.  I climbed, or rather eased myself, up the crack and met them at the top.  We all descended and set about trying to get down the last few yards.  I roped myself for safety’s sake and then started looking for handholds.  These were plentiful, if slippery, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the light I saw more and more, running in a spiral down to about twelve feet above the water.

 

Suddenly, there was a snort, a swirl of water and a seal shot out from the cave into the sea.  So we were definitely in the right place and there was a distinct musty smell.  We saw one more seal that day as it came back into the cave to see what we were doing but it did not stay for long.  Our smell in the confined space must have been strong and frightened the seals.  It was a wonderful sight that disappearing seal and the rest of the afternoon we were keyed up hoping to see another.

 

I was stuck for a good long while trying to find a means of crossing the last twelve feet so that it would be possible to return by the same route.  The rock had been worn smooth leaving no handholds.  It would have been easy enough to jump down but less easy to return, except by swimming out.  At last I swung myself out from the rock and climbed down the rope into the mouth of the cave.  At last!  Colin passed his torch down and while Dennis was descending I started to explore.  There was a large boulder at the mouth of the cave, with a passageway underneath, leaving an exit for seals in comparatively deep water, whatever the state of the tide.  On the landward side the floor of the cave sloped inwards, sandy at first, it soon became boulder-strewn, with large, round and very slippery boulders.  It narrowed rapidly.  The musty smell became very strong at the end.  But the cave soon finished some fifty feet in, with a small chamber six feet long and 3 in diameter, full of smaller rocks.  There was a crack which appeared to lead somewhere but was too small to get down.  I had had hopes that the two caves might have been connected, but no such luck.  We all explored it and had a good look round before returning to the surface.  We did not stay long as the tide was as low as it would go and we wanted to look at the cave with the submerged entrance.

 

When we got back to where we could see it, all that was visible was a dent in the rock, which was probably the top of the entrance, with what looked like a dark hole underneath.  This made it seem fairly certain that there was a cave there, used by the seals.  We could not investigate further till there was a really low tide.  Each time the swell went out we thought we could see further down, but a definite cave did not reveal itself.

 

We climbed up the cliff once more and walked back to the house feeling very pleased with our discovery.  Our enthusiasm was soon damped by that knowledge that everybody had been looking for us all afternoon because the boat had come to collect Peter C. to take him away for his Z training and he had been wanting to hand the island over to Colin.  Also we had the mooring rope for the boat!

 

Some two days later I went down into the cave again, while the tide had still some hours to run before the ebb.  I wanted to try and photograph the seals by flashlight.  It was dark in there till my eyes grew accustomed to it.  Then gradually I could make out the damp rocks around.  The water showed a bright green where the sunlight filtered in through the entrance.  There was no direct light on the water.  It was like being submerged oneself and looking through the bright water with every detail of it standing out clearly, a twist of seaweed as it rose and fell with the heave of the water, a sudden darkening as the shadows of a cloud passed across the entrance, the utter silence except for the bubbling of water on the rock and the strong salt smell of the sea.  The seal did not come back that afternoon.  The return to the outer air was like a return from some submarine travel, into another element.  And fifty yards offshore lay a seal on the surface, looking towards me.  As I appeared the seal disappeared in a smother of foam.

 

I returned there some hours later as the tide came in again and stood out in the open hoping to see the seals come into the little bay.  I stood some ten foot from the water, motionless against the rocks, and waited.  Before long a seal emerged fifty yards off in what seemed a favourite spot.  It dived and emerged closer in.  A third dive brought it into the bay and some thirty feet from me.  I had never been so close and I watched it as it lay on the surface, its flippers and tail sticking out behind it, looking like a big Labrador; big brown eyes, sunken nostrils and long white whiskers.  As his head (for he was a bull seal) dried I could see the fur.  He swam towards the submerged cave and dived, but was back in a few seconds, nosing along under the ledge of rock on which I stood.  He paused for a moment and looked straight at me; I moved slightly and with a swift turn he dived and before long emerged off the point where he had first appeared and looked back at me.

 

When I went to Skokholm I wrote that I did not understand why people should want to go and live there.  By the time I left was hooked on the island, I could have stayed there forever.  This was a dull time of year for birds, although we did a lot of trapping in the island’s Heligoland Trap, but I learned how to ring birds and identify them in the hand.  The seals were a delight; I have never lost my feeling of wonderment for them since.  But it was the place itself and the way of life of Peter and Colin which captured my imagination.  The freedom and the atmosphere were like nothing I had ever experienced; during the coming months I thought about the experience again and again and I am sure it influenced the decisions I made about a future career while I was still working at ICI.  I would love to have gone there as Deputy Warden the following year.

 

Going to work at ICI Paints, Slough, after this was like going to prison.  There were six of us management trainees, all recent graduates from various universities.  I never grew friendly with any of them, partly I expect because I was living at home and only saw them in working hours.  We were put into an office in Sales where all the information about the prices of paint ingredients were compiled.  I have little memory of what else we did.  There was nothing remotely related to management; it was dead boring.  Once we were all sent out to collect prices of ICI competitor’s products in neighbouring towns, in Woolworths and paint shops and suchlike establishments.  Another time I somehow invented the need to prepare a paper on the future use of paint on aluminium and went to the University Library in Cambridge to look things up.  I can remember sitting in my office and looking out of the window at workmen digging holes outside and envying them being outside.

 

I drove in every day with my father and one other director, Ray Richards, whom we collected from his house on Winter Hill.  When we arrived at the factory I would creep from the director’s entrance to my lowly office in another part of the factory.  I remember clearly going out at lunchtime to the Slough sewage farm in the car to watch birds.  So obviously the bird watching bug had caught me by this time.  This must have been after Christmas as I remember my lunch consisted of old Christmas cake!  Gradually I began to realise that I had made the wrong move.  ICI Paints (or probably any other job like it) was not for me; I had to find something else.  The inspiration came one winter morning.  I had got into the habit of walking to Ray Richard’s house on Winter Hill and my father would collect me and Ray Richards.  That morning I had been reading the newspaper at breakfast before setting out and had read about some technical assistance expert who was being sent out to Africa to work on some project or other.  As I walked I suddenly realised that that was the career I wanted; to work abroad mostly and do something useful in the underdeveloped parts of the world.  The concept came like a flash of inspiration.  It took longer to work out the details but they were pretty plain from the start.  I could use my economics degree as the basis of my expertise and, if I tacked an agricultural qualification onto it, I would then be an agricultural economist, equipped for a career which would take me abroad and not involve working in an office.  I could work outside and be free of all the administration that I was wrapped in with ICI. 

 

It did not work out quite that easily.  The major initial stumbling block was that I could not just up stumps and leave ICI, since my father was a director and it would not redound to his credit if I left simply because I could not stand working for ICI.  The way round this was to ask if I could move to the agricultural part of ICI.  Fortunately, when I tried one or two places within ICI‘s agricultural activities, they did not want an economist.  I did go for one interview in Edinburgh with a subsidiary firm there, Scottish Agricultural Industries, but was turned down.  Meanwhile I was planning behind the scenes to go back to Cambridge for another year and take a diploma in tropical agriculture.  On further research I found that what I wanted was a one year Diploma in Agricultural Science (Economics), a diploma designed for those who had obtained a degree in a non-agricultural subject (like botany or chemistry or economics) who wanted to specialise in agriculture.  I cannot remember just how I managed to resolve leaving ICI on good terms or just when I got the Cambridge entry arranged; I imagine it was during the spring.  I also had to persuade PembrokeCollege to take me as a post-graduate student.  Somehow I got everything as I wanted it.  Pembroke even offered me dining rights in Hall.

 

I know that we all went down to Llangynidr for Easter, probably staying at Gliffaes Country House Hotel.  The big event that Easter holiday was the discovery of Cilwych House.  This was a fair-sized old farmhouse just above the river across and slightly upstream of Llangynidr.  It was for rent.  Dennis and I were thrilled at the idea of living there; my parents a bit more cautious.  One morning Dennis and I walked up from the river to the house and discovered redstarts and pied flycatchers in the trees.  This convinced us even more that we had to persuade my parents to rent it.  We offered them a bribe, a welsh dresser that we had seen in Brecon in Odwyn Jones’s antique shop.  It was priced at £30!  It is now in the sitting room here at Gale Cottage, valued at £3,500[4].  The rest is history.  We rented Cilwych House some time in the spring.  It was in a pretty dilapidated state but good enough to camp in. 

 

It was round about this time that I left ICI Paints, some five months before I was due to go to Cambridge.  I thought I had better get some practical farming experience and where better than down in Wales on the same farm that Dennis had worked a couple of years before, Llewllyn Richards’s Allt Farm at Talybont-on-Usk.  This was essentially a sheep and pony farm and I don’t think I really learnt much about farming but it was a wonderful experience.  Before I started I went to stay on Skokholm again for a couple of weeks.  The sea birds were now breeding and it was just a wonderful place to be.  Peter Conder was still there.  He was a keen photographer and had built himself a huge telephoto lens which he lent me.  He was studying wheatears and I would sit in one of his hides for ages watching wheatears and taking pictures of them.  The manx shearwaters, for which Skokholm is famous, were breeding and we would go out at night and ring them.  I remember going out one night on my own and coming back holding a little owl, which we ringed, then going out again and bringing back an oyster catcher, which was also ringed, and finally bringing back a shearwater.  They were great days and firmly rooted my interests in bird-watching.

 

I moved into Cilwych House preparatory to starting my farming work at Allt Farm.  It needed an immense amount of work to make it habitable; for instance, the previous inhabitants had dumped ash from their fires, probably over several centuries, all round the back entrance and that had to be cleared; the house was dirty, not having been lived in for years, and I had to clean it all up.  But I was happy as the day was long.  I bicycled every day to the Allt farm at Talybont on the track that ran past Cilwych House and along the river; only the last 100 yards was on the main road.  The work was not arduous, except hay-making.  The Richards had one farm worker, an ex-Nazi prisoner of war, a charming man called Heinz, married to a local girl, and he was tough and trying to keep up with him turning the hay was as much as I could do.  They bred Welsh mountain ponies and there was a considerable amount of driving these around in an old truck.  Heinz drove and I went with him.  The Richards also had a second farm, where they had lived during the war, on the southern shoulder of the Brecon Beacons.  One got there by going up the Talybont Reservoir and just at the top above the reservoir is Taf-Fechan, and the farm was Blaen-y-cwm.  It does not exist any more, the whole area is covered now by larch plantations.  They had hundreds of sheep grazing on the Beacons (as well as a number of ponies) and these had to be rounded up from time to time for dipping and shearing.  I had joined in the shearing the year before and I was part of the team again this year.  I was not trusted to shear the sheep; my job was to roll the fleeces up and put them into sacks.  By the end of each day I was covered from head to toe in sheep grease.  I suppose this idyllic time lasted a couple of months.

 

For the second part of my farming experience I organised some two months on a dairy farm.  I continued to live at Cilwych; the dairy farm was just across the river.  All I had to do to get there was wade across the river just above the islands.  The farm, Glawcoed Farm, was owned by Mrs Sparrow and the tenant was a young married man, Price Whittle.  I did not have to do the morning milking; I got there at a more civilised hour when the mucking out was in progress.  I have few recollections of what I did there; I think Price Whittle was not sure of what to do with me and I spent much of the time doing odd jobs; one job I still remember was cutting the hedges along the main road between Llangynidr and Talybont.  I am sure that I learned very little about farming but I thought it would be good experience, which it was.

 

In between these two farming experiences, in July, I went to Scotland with Dennis, ‘Island Going‘.  We had both been entranced by a book of that name written by Robert Atkinson.  It was about his adventures trying to satisfy a passion to get to the island of North Rona (not far off Cape Wrath) and watch storm petrels breeding.  We were not so ambitious; a less remote island would do.  We wanted to spend a week on one of the Summer Isles, off Ullapool,  Eilean A’ Chleirich.  This is now better known as Priest Island and is a RSPB reserve.  Frank Fraser Darling had lived there for a while in 1936 and his book, ‘Island Years’ had been our eager reading that summer.  It seemed the perfect place to satisfy our urge to visit islands.  But this was very much a pipe-dream that year and we contented ourselves with driving around the north-west of Scotland and the north coast of Sutherland.  We did visit HandaIsland, which had and still has a big seabird colony, which only whetted our appetite for a longer visit the next year.

 

Sometime that summer we also went to the island of Skomer, off the Pembrokeshire coast, very close to Skokholm.  The island was uninhabited at the time but a boatman called Reuben Codd took day visitors there regularly.  I think we had to get permission from someone but we simply went down and got Reuben to take us there for three days with all our equipment.  I don’t remember much about the visit except that the weather was awful.  On the final day it was too bad for him to come over and take us back and so we were stranded without enough food.  We caught a puffin, plucked it and boiled it.  It was horrible.  Also on the island was Tony Soper from the BBC Wild Life Film Unit at Bristol.  He now leads tours of birdwatchers all over the world, though he must be getting on a bit.  I kept in touch with him, hoping the BBC might use some of my film.  They never did, although Tony Soper did look at some of it later.

 

During this time at Cilwych I had company from Dennis when he had time off.  I think he was just finishing his veterinary studies at the Royal Veterinary College somewhere up in the middle Thames valley, I think at Wallingford, and must have had time off during the summer vacation; although by then he might have started his first job as a veterinary assistant in a practice at Llanidloes, in the upper Wye valley.  And I suppose my parents would have come down for a week end from time to time, but mostly I was on my own.  It was about this time that I bought my first car since I would need one at Cambridge.  It was Dennis’s old one, a green 1937 Morris tourer, which Dennis had pretty much wrecked by stripping half the insides out; but it worked and I knew its idiosyncrasies.  I paid him £135 for it which I thought exorbitant.  This was the car we had been to Scotland in.

 

And so I came back to Cambridge.  I was put into a post graduate hostel, Madingley Hall, about five miles out of Cambridge, right in the country.  It was a gorgeous spot and we lived very well.  It was mostly occupied by Colonial Service regulars who had been given a sabbatical and sent on what was called the Devonshire Course.  They were in their forties, much more mature than your normal post-graduate, not that post-graduates were very common in those days, at Cambridge anyway.  I suppose there were only about 30-40 of us at Madingley Hall and we got to know each other well.  The warden was Canon Charles Raven, in his eighties, who had just married a wealthy American widow, who died soon after, leaving him very wealthy indeed.  Among his other interests was botany and I remember him and his son dropping in on me at Cilwych on a plant hunting expedition.  The bursar was a rather dour Scots lady called Anne Young, in her forties, very good at her job, which was why we lived so well, and delightful when one got to know her.  She owned a house in Cambridge where I later rented a bed-sitter and lived for about two years.  She lived at Madingley with a strange, very small Welsh woman called Llewellyn Pritchard, Lulu to her friends, seemingly quite dotty but actually very clever.  She later stood as Parish Councillor for Newnham, so she cannot have been that dotty.  She also had a bed-sitter in Anne’s house in Clare Road on the floor below me.

 

The number of post-graduates doing the Diploma in Agricultural Science was small; probably less than thirty.  There were only two of us doing the Economics part, the rest doing their botany, chemistry etc.  My fellow economist was a girl my own age, Ann Moat, who was living at GirtonCollege.  Her father was a wealthy North Country industrialist, and she had an MG.  We got on very well and were thrown together a lot.  She wasn’t particularly pretty!  But by the time of the Girton May Ball, at which I was her partner, she asked me to marry her.  I was taken aback, not having realised she felt that way about me and I had never thought of her as a potential wife.  I was not ready to settle down as a married man and turned down the proposal.  I have often wondered what would have happened if I had said yes.  We did not keep contact after we finished the diploma although I heard her father had bought her a farm.  Perhaps we would have made a good farming partnership; I have even looked her up in the Girton Year Book but there is no trace of her.

 

I determined to work hard and do well in the exams.  My great temptation was to continue rowing; I think I could still have rowed for Pembroke.  But I vowed to myself that it was more important to work this time round than to row and so I abjured rowing.  Well, not quite.  Tony Savage, bow of our victorious Visitors Cup IV was now Secretary to the Cambridge University Boat Club and he asked me to coach the 2^nd University crew, the Goldie.  I could hardly refuse the honour, so for two weeks in the early spring I coached them.  The river froze over for part of this time.  Then one of the crew got ill and I found myself back in an VIII, rowing for Goldie.  But this was short-lived.  I did not get asked to row in the Blue Boat proper.  That really was about the end of my rowing career.

 

My hard work paid off and I got a First and Pembroke made me an Honorary Exhibitioner.  However I was no nearer finding a job.  Many of those doing the Diploma in Tropical Agriculture and some of us doing the Diploma in Agricultural Science went on to the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad prior to going on to a career in the Colonial Agricultural Service.  This sounded a logical next step for me and the Professor of Agriculture wrote to the College of Tropical Agriculture, recommending me.  But they had never had an economist and said there was no call for them in the Colonial Service.  So I was turned down.  I seem to remember that I was also offered a job in the Colonial Service in Northern Rhodesia as an economist but nothing came of this either.  Finally I was offered a job as a Research Assistant in the Farm Economics Branch at the School of Agriculture in Cambridge.  I accepted this with alacrity and arranged to start work some time in the autumn at the princely salary of I think £300 a year (actually, with the income from my Trust Fund, which was another £300 a year or so, I was reasonably well-off).

 

Before starting work, but after finishing the diploma, Dennis and I made another visit to Scotland with the intention of fulfilling our dream of spending a week on Eilean A’ Chleirich.  We set off north in early July and managed to find a fisherman in Ullapool, Wallie McCrae, who would take us there and pick us up a week later.  It was only a couple of hour’s trip in his fishing boat.  We were equipped with our most inadequate tent and enough food to keep us going.  This was supplemented by a large number of herring we bought in Ullapool harbour as we set out and salted on the way out to Eilean A’ Chleirich in the boat by Wallie, plus some pollock he caught as we sailed out.  I kept a diary of the holiday and it is all described in detail there.  We had a very mixed few days, and the weather was not very kind to say the least.  Dennis found it all too much, particularly the midges and managed to signal to Wallie to come for us a day early, which Wallie had been planning to do anyway  as the forecast was for gales and storms.  He was on his normal daily round of the Summer Isles with a boatload of trippers and we returned to Ullapool in a very mundane fashion, somewhat subdued compared with the excitement of setting out.  We ended up on Skye for a couple of days before coming back in mid-July to Cilwych and to Cambridge in September.

 

I did not know how long I would be working at the School of Agriculture and so decided that I would rent a bed-sitter.  Anne Young offered me one in her house at 2 Clare Road, Newnham.  It was a vast room on the top floor, with use of her immaculate kitchen.  I paid £2/10s a week. It was not available for some weeks and I went and lived with Reg Howard (ex Pembroke Henley crew) who had a job as head cowman on a farm at West Wratting, some 15 miles out of Cambridge.  It was just the cowman’s cottage but reasonably comfortable for all that because it was a big farm.  I can remember vividly driving from the farm into work in my new car, proud as punch.  I had swapped my old Morris for a second-hand MG TD, British Racing Green, and only a year or so old.  This must have been more or less as I started work, since I did not live long with Reg.

 

All the employees at the Farm Economics Branch were civil servants.  Our main work was to provide the basic economic and financial data for East Anglia on which the Government’s annual agricultural price review was based.  We had a sample of about 300-400 farms throughout the area (which stretched from Lincolnshire in the north, round Bedfordshire and Herts in the west, and across the north of London in the south) for which we prepared annual farm accounts during a survey that took place during the winter months.  This survey lasted about three months; the compilation of the results was done later back in Cambridge.  In addition we carried out a number of research projects on topics of current interest.  I had handed on to me a survey into the costs of starting farming, which had been started about a year before by someone who was leaving.  This involved keeping records, on about thirty farms of various kinds throughout East Anglia, of their capital costs and their annual expenses for about the first two years of starting farming.  I would visit them about two or three times a year and got to know some of them quite well.  They were a very mixed bunch, ranging from a film producer who was farming more for tax purposes than anything else, through retired businessmen who knew little about farming but hoped to make a living (and at least one of them was being given very bad advice from one of the big land agents, even I could see that, although he could not), to ex-farm labourers who were struggling to make ends meet.  I enjoyed the travelling and getting to know East Anglia.  I produced a report towards the end of my second year but my boss did not like it and refused to publish it.  I was very disappointed as I thought it was a good piece of work.

 

I took part in the annual farm surveys in 1954 and 1955, which again involved a great deal of travelling with stays in a central point for a week or two while we covered a group of farms.  Each farm needed the best part of a day to complete the enormous form we had to fill up.  Some farms had good records and one could complete all the necessary boxes in two or three hours.  Other farms had no records worth speaking of despite the fact that they had been on the survey for several years.  These would require extracting information from all sorts of places, much of it out of the farmer’s head and even a day was too short.  And it was important to collect all the information in one visit as it may have taken an hour or two to get there in the first place.  It was very good experience and I certainly got to know a great deal about farming in East Anglia, what a wonderfully strange and varied group of people the farmers were, and the problems facing farmers at that time.

 

The application of economics to agriculture was virtually non-existent at that time.  Farmers may have had a good head for business, or thought they had, but they had no analytical capacity to work out how to make their farms more profitable beyond what common sense revealed.  The National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAAS), which should have been able to provide this kind of advice, only concerned itself with technical agricultural matters.  A small group of us in the Farm Economics Branch therefore initiated a training programme for NAAS officers to help them provide advice on economic problems and we also started offering advice to farmers on an individual basis.  This was much more interesting than carrying out surveys and was becoming a major activity by the time I left.

 

During these years at Cambridge my bird watching activities took up much of my spare time, particularly in the winter.  I had joined the Cambridge Bird Club while doing my post graduate studies but was not very active then.  Once I was living in Cambridge, however, I became more involved; I was particularly useful to undergraduate members because I had a car, my MG, which none of them had, even though it was a two-seater, with room for a third in great discomfort in the back.  In winter the place to go was the Wash where tens of thousand of geese, duck and wading birds congregated.  I went there several times in the winter of 1954-55 with two or three undergraduate members of the Bird Club, Clive Minton, Ian Nisbet and Chris Smout.  (I have lost touch with Clive Minton; he emigrated to Australia when he left Cambridge; and with Ian Nisbet; Chris is or was till recently Professor of I think Medieval History at Edinburgh).  The other two who came in the following winter were Ian Wallace and Joe Cunningham.  They feature in my future travels.  It was a wonderful experience to go up there in the early morning and, if we were lucky, to see several hundred pink footed geese flighting in from their night time grazing inland to the Wash and then to see these enormous flocks of duck and waders.  Most of the species were new to me but Clive was a fanatic and we spent hours in the biting wind and cold, with a telescope, trying to estimate the numbers of different species.  The estimates would read 7,000 + or – geese, 2,000 knot, 10,000 wigeon and so on, astronomical numbers.^[5]  This counting of waders on the Wash has since become an industry among present day bird watchers, but then we were the only ones doing it.  The other place that was a favourite was the Ouse Washes; this is the area between various branches of the Ouse which flooded in the winter and was a mecca for geese, ducks and Bewick swans.  Today it is an RSPB Reserve; then it was our own little private empire.  The only other people we would see would be wildfowlers.

 

Whenever I could I would go down to Wales for the week-end.  My father retired in May 1955.  He retired early, when he was only just 60, because he had been told he would never become managing director of ICI Paints, which had been his ambition, and there was no point in staying on until his due retirement date in 1960, when he would have been 65 years old.  Knowing that he was going to do this he bought Cilwych House outright, early in 1955.  When he retired he went to live there permanently, with of course my mother.  She greatly regretted leaving Cookham Dean and all her friends but agreed for my father’s sake.  So for me, going to Cilwych was both going to the place in the world I loved best and also going home.  It was about a four hour drive from Cambridge.  I would go down after work on a Friday, probably sneaking away early or arranging to visit a farm part of the way there, and return early on a Monday morning.  Looking back I always seem to leave about 5 am and be at work at 9 am, absolutely whacked and totally unfit for work!  I don’t know what I did down there, I suppose walked in the hills and perhaps fished a bit.  I checked in my father’s Fishing Record Book and there is no reference to my fishing but that may just be because I never caught anything.

 

In June of 1955 I went on a real bird watching expedition to Lapland.  It was my contact with Clive Minton of the Cambridge Bird Club that brought this about.  He was friendly with a Dr. Eric Ennion, who ran the Monks’ House bird observatory which was located between Seahouses and Bamburgh in Northumberland, just across from the FarneIslands.  Dr. Eric Ennion^[6] (always known as ‘the doctor’) had spent 20 years of his life as a GP at Burwell in the Cambridge fens, where he studied and painted birds and wrote books about them.  After the war he gave up medicine to become the first Warden of Flatford Mill Field Study Centre on the Suffolk Stour.  After five years there he had started the bird observatory at Monks’ House in 1951.  He took in parties of up to 30 people each week to study birds.  At this time he had been commissioned by Collins, the publishers, to write a book on wading birds for the New Naturalist series and was planning to go to Lapland with his son Hugh to study and paint them.  Clive was to be one of the party, and the doctor was looking for a photographer to join them.  Clive convinced the doctor that I would be a suitable person to fit the part and so I was asked.  I don’t think I was really a good choice as I was much more interested at that time in cine filming, having recently bought a 16mm Bolex camera, which was no good for illustrating a book.^[7]

 

So, in early June, I drove up overnight from Cambridge.  I remember arriving before dawn and going to sleep in their garage.  They realized I had arrived as my car was there but nobody could find me.  When I woke it was to find they were all looking for me!  We were not due to set off for Lapland till the next day and so we went to the Farne Islands for the day, mainly to ring shags, the scars from one of which I bear to this day.  The next day we set off on the ferry from Newcastle to Oslo, with a new Ford van that the Doctor had bought for the trip, heavily overloaded with food and supplies, which swung dangerously on the roads.  We were going very much into the unknown as the Doctor had been unable to find out much information about the area or its birds and few people had been there or written about it.  We relied very much on a book by a man called Davidson (I do not remember the name of the book) who had been bird watching there a year or two back.  It all sounded pretty remote and wild.  That was about our only source of information about Lapland.  It was a great adventure; we did not paint the word ‘Expedition’ on the van like one would probably do nowadays but we were off into what we felt was uncharted territory.  We drove for 2 ½ days more or less non-stop; crossing from Norway into Sweden (and forgetting that the two countries drove on different sides of the road we put the van in a ditch to avoid a car coming straight at us; but we soon pushed it upright and went on our way unscathed).  Then into Finland, through Rovaniemi and on to Inari and then to Karigasniemi, back on the Norwegian border.  We stopped at a village called Mutenia on June 16th, where Davidson had stayed, and pitched camp in the woods nearby.  The weather was miserable, cold and wet, but the birds were fabulous.  My diary of the trip records these in some detail.  I did some filming (enough to make a film that I would subsequently show to a number of bird clubs, though its quality now seems awful!) but I was useless as a photographer for the Doctor’s needs to illustrate a book, and the weather made it virtually impossible anyway.  I have since realised that it is no good trying to do any serious bird or animal photography that involves keeping to other people’s timetables; it is a very anti-social occupation and unpredictable in the amount of time required.  So my photography on the expedition was doomed from the start.

 

We stayed there till June 27^th and then drove back along the Swedish coast for 3 days, camping overnight at various places that looked good for birds.  Our final destination was with a Swedish family, Sven and Sigrid Wohlmark and their three children, the eldest of whom was married.  Sigrid Wohlmark had been the Doctor’s au pair before the war and they had kept in touch.  They were an absolutely delightful couple and incredibly hospitable, pampering us after our travels and introducing us to all the delights of Swedish cuisine.  Our first breakfast there was all sorts of herrings and cheese and beer!  I think we stayed there for three days until we recovered from our travels.  And so back to Oslo, Newcastle and Monks House.  We had a wonderful day at the gannetry on the Bass Rock before I drove back to Cambridge.

 

I went back to the Wohlmarks in August the same year on my way to a conference of the International Society of Agricultural Economists in Helsinki, which the Farm Economics Branch thought it useful for me to attend.  They were as hospitable as ever.  I had my 26^th birthday with them and they took me out to a restaurant in Stockholm where we gorged on crayfish and schnapps, washed down with beer.  I felt terrible the next morning!  Later that day I met up with some of the participants to the conference on a ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki and felt myself cringe at this bunch of mostly American blue-rinsed wives all chattering away to each other.  They were all right once I got to know them but this sudden change from the delightful quiet Swedes to this loud-mouthed bunch was difficult to cope with.  I remember little about the conference and do not think it helped my agricultural economics much except to reinforce my intentions to seek a career outside the United Kingdom.  We came back by bus with an agriculturally-oriented tour through Denmark and Belgium, looking at cheese plants and vegetable farms etc.  One thing did result, however; I persuaded Huntings to let me go at their expense on the next two conferences, in India in 1958 and Mexico in 1961.

 

Although I was enjoying the work at the Farm Economics Branch, I was finding the work increasingly frustrating and narrow and my long-term objective was still to work overseas in developing countries.  I was not really very interested in making well-off farmers in England better off, when I could have been helping farmers in poverty in the developing world.  Somewhere in the middle of 1955 the opportunity I was looking for came up.  A new company, called Hunting Technical Services (HTS), was in process of being formed, with the objective of using aerial photography as an aid to land classification for agricultural development.  The parent company, Hunting Aero-Surveys, had a fore-sighted managing director, Tristram Weatherhead, who saw this a new means of exploiting the aerial photographs which were Hunting Aero Surveys’s bread and butter, but were only used up to this point for topographical mapping purposes.  Weatherhead had appointed a man called Vernon Robertson to be managing director of HTS.  Vernon had been managing the CambridgeUniversity farm until recently and so, when he wanted an economist to work for a couple or three months on a project they had just secured in Iraq, it was natural for him to look to Cambridge to find someone.  My name was proposed and I got very excited at the prospect.  Unfortunately the Professor of Agriculture, Engeldow, vetoed the proposal.  He said I was too inexperienced and, if I did a bad job, it would redound on the good name of Cambridge.  Vernon got hold of a retiring agricultural officer from Nyasaland (Harold Gillman or Gilly, with whom I was later to work for several years) to do the job, even though his knowledge of economics was non-existent.  I was not terribly impressed with what he did!

 

However, despite the professor’s veto, the contacts had been made between Vernon and myself.  Early in 1956 Vernon came back to me with a proposition.  The work in Iraq, on which they were in partnership with one of the big Victoria Street firms of consulting engineers, Sir Murdoch MacDonald and Partners (MMP), was going to last several years and he could foresee the need for an economist on this job if things went as he expected, though not for a year or two; and he expected that the need for an economist on the staff of HTS could only increase.  There was not enough work at the moment to justify his recruiting an economist but if I was prepared to train as a soil surveyor, he would take me on the permanent staff, with a view to becoming Hunting’s economist in due course.  This was too good an offer to refuse and in April 1956 I left the Farm Economics Branch and joined HTS, at first on a temporary basis, and in the autumn, on a permanent basis.

 

At this period the Iraqi Government was beginning to profit from their vast reserves of oil and was putting some of the revenues into the development of their resources.  Several of the major projects on which they had embarked were for agricultural development.  In such an arid region this basically meant irrigation development.  Two major dams were under construction for storing irrigation water and for hydro-electric power generation.  One of these was on the Greater Zab river at Dokan, in a gorge in northern Kurdistan about two hundred miles north of Baghdad.  The other was on the Diyala river at Derbendi Khan, about one hundred miles north east of Baghdad on the border with Iran.  To assist in planning the use of the stored water for irrigation, soil surveys were needed because much of the land was saline, often so saline as to be unsuitable for crop production.  These areas had to be identified, classified and mapped before the irrigation system could be planned.  During 1955 HTS had been employed by the main British consulting engineers for the Dokan dam, Binnie, Deacon and Gourley, to undertake the soil surveys of the lands that potentially could be irrigated.  This was called the ZAD project, the initials standing for the three rivers involved, the Zab, the Adhaim and the Diyala.  This was the work that Vernon had wanted me for when he first approached Cambridge for an economist and for which Professor Engeldow vetoed me.  A different British consulting firm was put in charge of the irrigation planning for the Derbendi Khan waters, Sir Murdoch Macdonald and Partners (MMP), and they asked HTS to undertake the soil surveys for this area.  The work on this project began in early 1956 and it was for this that Vernon now wanted me on board.  The potential area that would be served by Derbendi Khan Dam stretched along both banks of the Diyala river to its confluence with the Tigris river in Baghdad and then on both banks of the Tigris as far south as Kut.

 

It was planned that the main soil survey would begin once the weather started to cool down at the end of the summer, about mid-September.  From early June until then it was too hot in the field to do much work, except perhaps in the early morning.  HTS were anxious to do some preliminary work before the weather became too hot and Vernon planned a reconnaissance soil survey for the area nearest to Baghdad for May, an area we christened Lower Diyala.  This would give HTS a chance to compare the soils there with the soils which they had mapped the year before on the ZAD project.  The reconnaissance soil survey team consisted of Vernon, the HTS Soils Consultant, Dr. Robert Smith, a bluff, friendly Australian who seemed to me to think very highly of himself, and Stuart Harris, an HTS soil surveyor/geologist who had worked on the ZAD project and knew the soils, and myself.  Stuart was about my age, very earnest and busy, totally dedicated to soils!  I got on well enough with him, which was just as well as I would be in camp with him for most of the following season, but we were very unlike.  But he was a good soil surveyor and was particularly good when it came to organizing life in camp.  So I joined HTS for the reconnaissance in May on a temporary basis, had a holiday until the beginning of September, and then joined them permanently.

 

So I had a month in Iraq learning to be a soil surveyor, learning to live in camp, learning to cope with the heat and thoroughly enjoying myself.  I suppose my months in Malaya had accustomed me to the sort of environment I found myself in Iraq but it was all new and exciting and I felt that at last I was doing something worthwhile.  For the first two weeks we lived in the Zia hotel in Baghdad[8]; an old-fashioned hotel on the banks of the Tigris owned by Michael Zia, an Assyrian I think.  It had a wonderful Agatha Christie sort of atmosphere, of faded gentility.  We would get up early in the morning, dressed in our shorts and field clothes and breakfast in the dining room, where I always felt out of place dressed like that and Stuart’s short shorts always annoyed me!  After this early breakfast we would drive out into the desert a few miles out of Baghdad to a site we had selected for taking soil samples, bore a hole, describe the soil and take samples for chemical analysis; we would repeat the process several times until it got too hot and then return to the hotel for lunch.  Lunch was followed by a siesta, then a few beers sitting outside on the lawn by the river Tigris, then dinner and early to bed.  We usually travelled in land rovers but Vernon bought a beautiful Chevrolet station wagon, nominally for the future project manager, that was his pride and joy and we had to treat it with great care and were never allowed to drive it.  I soon learned to drive a land rover around Baghdad and it was nerve racking.

 

After about two weeks we had to extend the sample area further north, too far to cover from our Baghdad base.  So we set up camp on the banks of the Diyala river in a quiet spot just north of the little town of Baquba, about 30 miles from Baghdad.  HTS had a store in Baghdad full of camping equipment from the previous season’s work on the ZAD project.  Stuart knew exactly what was there and what we needed and organized the move.  I watched bewildered while the camp was set up, a most complicated affair as far as I could see.  There were three sleeping tents for the three of us (Dr Smith did not join us); a mess tent; a cook tent; and various assorted others for cook, drivers, watchmen etc.; water supplies to be arranged and the local authorities to be informed.  It was a delightful spot on the river’s edge with a fantastic bird life.  I particularly remember the bright blue Persian kingfishers flying up and down and plunging into the water.  However we were fully exposed to the heat and had to consume vast quantities of water to quench our thirst and our rate of work slowed down.  After about ten days there Vernon decided that we had done enough and had all the basic soil information we needed.  He thought we had earned a few days off and we drove north, in Vernon’s pale blue Chevy. of course, up the Diyala to the Derbendi Khan dam site, where we stayed with the engineers, up in the mountains on the Iran border.  It was very beautiful country and much cooler.

 

We returned home in mid-June.  I stayed in Boreham Wood for a week or two, within walking distance of HTS’s headquarters helping to write up the results and plot the sites of our bore holes on aerial photographs.  I learned much about aerial photographic interpretation that stood me in good stead in the years to come.  Then my contract was up and I was free to do what I wanted till mid-September.  At this point in my life I felt that my long search for a career was over.