Keith Moffatt

Keith Moffatt interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 19th November 2019

00:05:24 Born in Edinburgh 12th April 1935: I have had a great interest in family history for some years so can go back quite a bit further than my grandparents; my two grandfathers were both Scottish; of my grandmothers, one was Irish, the other English; people often ask me when I talk if I am Irish so I think the Irish accent must have come through to me from my grandmother although I didn't know her all that well; my mother's father's ancestry goes back to Speyside, near Tomintoul, a very high village south of Inverness in the Cairngorms; back around 1820 they were part of the Grant family, all making illicit whisky; there is a bit of a tragedy attached to that because the story came down through the family archives that one Isobel Grant, widow, aged about sixty, was burnt to death in an illicit still; these were very dangerous things as they were well concealed underground, with a fire which probably caught her clothes alight; her daughter came south, married into a farming family and their eldest son became a master baker in Edinburgh; his son was my grandfather; he was a tea-taster and an importer of tea, and had a little shop in Princes Street; he imported both from India and China and had quite a good little business there; he was a member of the Merchant Company in Edinburgh and that became quite important for me later; I do vaguely remember him but he died just after the start of the war so I was only four years old; I remember him as a genial, pipe-smoking, elderly man; on the other side, my father's grandfather had been an architect, mainly in Edinburgh but he had lived in Doncaster earlier in his career; he was quite successful and obviously very productive; there is a web site for Scottish architects and he figures on that - William Lambie Moffatt; he had quite a large family, two sons and five daughters; the daughters all married and spread out all round the world; the elder son was my great-grandfather, and my father told me that he was the first chartered accountant in Scotland; he was very successful; it was said that he made three fortunes and lost two of them, but when he died he still had a fortune; he owned a very large house in Lasswade near Edinburgh, a house that was called in those days 'Eldin'; it had belonged to a famous lawyer by the name of John Clerk; this was a relative (great-uncle, I think) of James Clerk-Maxwell, his mother being a Clerk; I can imagine James Clerk-Maxwell as a boy at Edinburgh Academy visiting this house at the weekends; this is my rather tenuous connection with him; so they were rather a wealthy family but their son, my grandfather, never took to accountancy; he loved riding horses and spending the money, and continued to live in that house and that was where my father was brought up, but he lost a lot of money in the Great Depression; my father was also encouraged to become an accountant but he failed his Chartered Accountant exam, and although he did become an accountant he could not rise very high in the business; I always had the feeling of poverty in the family when I was growing up, but it was poverty relative to what had gone before; he worked for an accountancy firm in Edinburgh where he met my mother who was a secretary in the same firm; they got engaged around 1930 and married in 1932 when I think they were in quite straightened financial circumstances; they managed to buy a little house in Edinburgh, had two children, my elder sister two years ahead of me; that roughly speaking is the background of my grandparents but around 1890 my grandfather ran away from the Lasswade house and his rather domineering father and went off to the States to sow his "wild oats"; he ended up in Buffalo and became the coachman in a large house there; it was there he met his wife, the Irish girl, who was in service in a neighbouring house where Samuel Clement had lived in an earlier period; they married in Buffalo, came back to Scotland, by which time she was already pregnant with my father and I have wondered how his family took this situation; the Irish girl was a very interesting case; the story was that her father had died before she was born, in a hunting accident in County Cork in Ireland; that her mother had died shortly after her birth and that she had been taken by a nurse to the States to live with relatives; when I did my research into my family history I discovered it was complete nonsense; I had their marriage certificate in Buffalo so I knew her parents' names; I managed to track down her birth certificate eventually, and in fact she was of very humble origins in Ireland; her father had been a railway worker; my guess is that like so many other young Irish colleens in the 1890s, she went to the States to have a better life as life in Ireland was very poor at that time; so when they came back to Scotland to this rather wealthy family I think they had to make up the story of her birth

14:31:10 I may have memories of when I was three years old but my first very definite and vivid memory was on 3rd September 1939, the day the war was declared; we were on holiday at a little village called Dirleton near North Berwick on the East Lothian coast; a couple who were friends of my parents, John and Peggy Brown, came in a big car and took me and my sister away; they took us to the village of West Linton which is about ten miles out of Edinburgh, and this was evacuation; there was panic in Edinburgh and a lot of children were evacuated by their parents; if they had friends outside Edinburgh the children were sent away; I do remember that quite vividly of course; this family, the Browns, he was the banker in West Linton and they had three children, two boys and a girl, a little older than us; I was there only for about three or four months, my sister maybe six or eight; I think I was very naughty and perhaps the Browns couldn't cope with me; we had got into the phony war and nothing much was happening so they deemed it safe to take me home; by that time my father was away in the army and I saw very little of him for the next six years, I have no memory of seeing him at all in fact; he was already forty years old so wasn't sent abroad; I think he spent it all at Aldershot or something like that, one of the training centres in England, but he had very little leave; my mother joined the WAAF.s at a very early stage in the war; she was about thirty-one at the time; she was working more or less full time and her mother moved in with us, and she was the one who looked after me and I suppose had a great influence on me during these very formative years; she was the English granny and had been born in Bath, her maiden name was Raithby, a Lincolnshire name from where the family came originally; she married a Scot and became even more Scottish than her husband as the years went on, and in her general attitude and loyalty was very vigorously pro-Scotland; they had four children and my mother was the eldest; her sister Phoebe was a war bride who married a Canadian soldier who was billeted in Edinburgh for a while, and she went to Canada before the war ended; she had six children and lived to the age of 104; I was very glad to be able to visit her just a month before she died in Ottawa; I gather from my mother that their house was always in a state of chaos; she tried to instil some organization but her mother was chaotic, partly because she was a very enthusiastic pianist and just wanted to play the piano all the time; when she moved in with us she continued to play the piano all the time; I loved the music that she played which was mainly Chopin and Tchaikovsky; her talent was passed on to my sister who is a very good pianist, and then onto my children who are all very musical, but it passed me by completely; I love listening to music and have worked to it at an early stage in my career and it was very soothing; my grandmother was a lovely personality and I adored her, as did my sister also; my sister did come back very briefly but was again evacuated to live with our other grandmother in Lasswade; she had moved to a slightly less grand house there but it was still rather grand, and my sister lived there for the years of the war; so I was separated from both my sister and my father, my mother was working, so it was my grandmother who cared for me when I came home from school

23:00:14 My first school was a primary school called James Gillespie's Boys School; it no longer exists; it merged with the much more famous Gillespie's Girls School - "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" was based on that school; I was at the primary school for three years from five to eight; I had to walk to school and it was about a mile from Ladysmith Road where we lived to Marchmont where the school was; that school was later taken over by one of the new universities, Napier University; I don't remember any teachers terribly well; it was an extraordinary school; I was in a class of forty boys, rather crammed in tight in rows; what I remember was mental arithmetic because I was good at that; the teacher would go round the class firing questions at us, and if you got it right you stayed were you were, but if you got it wrong and someone further down got it right, you all changed places, so there was constant shuffling around; I was in the top five or so moving around, there were some clever lads there; as to hobbies, I collected stamps as did everyone else; I was a very enthusiastic stamp collector until I was about twelve; one of my uncles, my mother's elder brother, uncle George, gave me his stamp album which was full of quite old stamps, and I thought it was absolutely wonderful; I was a member of the cubs which was attached to the local church in our district of Edinburgh, the 85th Liberton

26:16:17 On religion, my Lasswade grandfather was also the organist of the local church, so there must have been a musical talent there although my father was not musical; it was Presbyterian and relatively strict; I had to go to church but went reluctantly; during the war when my father was away I wasn't aware of it although my mother was vaguely Presbyterian too; I was involved in the church in my early years, even up to the age twenty, partly because of my father's influence; moving ahead a bit, we moved to the village of Inveresk which was eight miles south-east of Edinburgh near Musselburgh, where there was a parish church; I ended up many years later marrying the daughter of the Minister, another large family, so Linty is the daughter of the Manse; my father was the treasurer of the church; you have the Kirk Session in Scotland which more or less runs the church, and he was a member of that; I felt obliged to go to church quite regularly during my teenage years; sometimes I felt quite inspired that my father-in-law to be would preach; at other times, like any teenager, I found it tiresome; I was Baptised and then Confirmed when I was about fifteen or sixteen; I was quite keen and taught in a Sunday School for a while; my mother kept a diary throughout that whole period and I have been going through it quite recently; I find that I was involved in the church far more than I realized; when I came to Cambridge there was the Presbyterian Society in St Columba's Church and I was drawn into that, but again rather reluctantly based on my lack of conviction; it came to a crunch with the Apostles' Creed where I found I couldn't really believe any of it; I ended up later in life writing my own version, a sort of natural philosopher's creed, in parallel with the Apostles' Creed; my wife and I now go regularly to Evensong in Trinity College; it is partly the atmosphere that we enjoy, the music obviously, the sermon as I like to hear what is being preached, but when it comes to the Apostles' Creed I think through my own creed (SEE BELOW); I think perhaps many people feel the same - the Resurrection of the Body, what do you mean by this? I feel very much part of the Christian tradition and like to think of myself as still a Christian, provided the interpretation of Christian belief is allowed flexibility; the whole ethos of Christianity is something I can subscribe to; on belief in God, I believe in dark energy as a substitution - invisible, immortal probably, eternal; this is dark energy as currently not understood, the great mystery, so rather in parallel with the Medieval concept of God

34:03:10 Back to my first school, one thing that I do remember was this lovely female teacher who told us about the siege of Malta which was happening at the time, and she was very moved; I could detect that in her and it made a huge impression on me; I remember the school bully as well; I managed to avoid being bullied but I was very aware of this rather nasty big boy in the playground; I moved on at eight to George Watson's Boys College which became co-educational in the 1970s, teaming up with George Watson's Ladies College when my mother had been at school; my father had also been at the boys college, and maybe his father too; anyway there was that tradition; George Watson's Boys College was a wonderful school, a Merchant Company school, and the fact that my grandfather had been a member of the Merchant Company served me well as after a few years at the school I became what was known as a Foundationer which covered the fees which helped my parents; it was rather like what used to be the Direct Grant schools and half-funded, I think, by the Merchant Company and half fee-paying, but they were modest fees; there are some very good boarding schools in Edinburgh like Fettes, Loretto and Merchiston which are full-fee paying, expensive boarding schools; this was not, it was a day-school; I was there for ten years from eight to eighteen, but I could have gone from age five, right the way through; I was in the class I joined all the way through for ten years; four of the boys I remember very well: Eric Anderson who became Head Master of Eton, Jim Hiddleston became a Tutor of French at Exeter College, Oxford, John Sawyer became Professor of Divinity at Newcastle, and Fergus Craik, a very good friend of mine, who is one of the world's experts on memory at the University of Toronto and Fellow of the Royal Society like myself; so all these in one class of boys going all the way through the school is quite remarkable; of course we weren't aware of it at the time but it was a very competitive sort of class; there was streaming when we got into the senior school at age twelve there were five streams, 'U' which I now realize stood for University, then A,B,C and D; so I was in U where the competition to be top of the class was fiendish; the wonderful thing about Scottish education is that you don't specialize until the age of seventeen; in those days you went right on to the Scottish Higher Leaving Certificate which I took at seventeen, and I took five highers and one lower; the highers were mathematics, physics and chemistry, English, Latin and French; only in the last year did I specialize in mathematics and physics; we were really preparing at that stage for the Bursary Competition for Edinburgh University

39:37:13 I was aware that I was a good mathematician from the age of about fourteen or fifteen; I didn't have any difficulty with the mathematics, I enjoyed it, and came either first or second in the class; usually I would get up in the 90s out of 100 in the exams, so I knew that was my subject in a way; on the other hand it was difficult to make the choice on the question of going for the arts or sciences because I kept up Latin and enjoyed it; but at a certain age you had to choose so there was a choice; the teaching was very good at Watson's College; my maths teacher I remember well, Sinclair was his name, not inspirational perhaps, the inspiration came when I went to Edinburgh University; I remember Hector Waugh who taught history, he was brilliant, partly for his teaching of history but also he coached us on the rugby field; I played rugby but was not good at games; I played for the 3rd 15 and I was a hooker and the scrum collapsed on me regularly; I enjoyed golf more; as we lived in Inveresk it was about an hour's journey by tram and bus to school so it was difficult to stay in school for other activities; I was very involved during the daytime and we did have to play rugby after school; I did play cricket but hated it; golf I did enjoy; there was a golf club which took us around the courses in Edinburgh, but it was more an ex-curricular activity; I wasn't involved in drama or debating at school; we did have the prefect system and I became a prefect in my final year; we were expected to keep order in the junior parts of the school on important occasions; prefects themselves could be very undisciplined; we had a prefects' room and spent a lot of time playing pool which was extremely popular; there were a lot of pin-ups in those days of semi-dressed women which covered all the walls; one day the Vice-Chancellor of the Merchants Company visited the school and the Headmaster wanted to show him the Prefects' room of which he was rather proud; he opened the door, took one look, and immediately slammed it shut; we were in trouble after that

44:50:23 There was a Bursary Competition which was for all the Scottish universities though I think you may have had to state which university you wanted; I was aiming at Edinburgh University anyway and I came out quite high in the list, though I was hoping to be top and wasn't; but I went to Edinburgh University to read mathematics, although I think perhaps I was enrolled for physics in the first year but gradually I moved from physics to mathematics and ended up between the two in mathematical physics where I have remained ever since; the university was inspirational; the teaching was superb and I remember particularly the Professor, A.C. Aitken very famous, a New Zealander, who was the sole professor of pure mathematics; he was also a numerical prodigy, one of these people who could do incredible arithmetical calculations just like that; you could give him two five-figure numbers and he would multiply them just like that, quicker than the computer could do in those days; he would demonstrate this ability to his class, but that was so entertaining we loved it; the second in command in mathematics was one Dr W.L. Edge, later Professor Edge; he had been a Research Fellow of Trinity College in his earlier years, and he inspired me to apply to Cambridge; he taught geometry and had a very stern manner, but he really cared about his students and took a very close interest in them; he was a very keen hill-walker and took us walking on the Pentland hills, and talked geometry all the time; I was involved in the Physics Society and became President of that in my third year; that entailed organising entertaining lectures and dances, socials in the evening, there was a lot of that in Edinburgh in those days; it was a four-year degree so plenty of time for that; I was also involved in the Edinburgh Mountaineering Club which went off at weekends up to places like Glen Coe and climbing; but again, it turned out that I didn't have a very good head for heights so that wasn't a very good idea; you asked about church-going, and one of the first clashes with my father was when I said that the mountaineering club was meeting to climb on Salisbury Crags on a Sunday morning; we had a bit of a bust-up over that, but that was my little minor rebellion; I was not involved in student politics, I am not at all political; my parents were very Conservative and pro Churchill who was my father's hero, and the hero of so many people; so I thought Churchill was wonderful too

49:51:19 We moved in Inveresk when I was thirteen, so about 1948; my father had come into a lot of furniture, not money, so the question was what to do with it; they managed to buy a large, lovely, Georgian house in Inveresk village and moved all the furniture there; it was a beautiful place with a lovely garden; my mother was a passionate gardener and created the garden there which was one of her talents; she was talented in a number of ways, a writer, reader, and also gardening; I met Linty, the daughter of the Manse, who became my wife, at the age of thirteen and fell in love immediately; but of course, although being very good friends, we went our separate ways for many years and had other affairs; we came back together again at the age of twenty-four or five; I invited Linty down to a May Ball at Trinity in 1960 and we were married in December that year; on marriage I found suddenly that I had seventeen or eighteen nephews and nieces so I married into a large family; her father by that time had moved to be Parish Minister in Iona as a retirement position, so we spent some lovely times there on the island though we were married back in Musselburgh; in my Edinburgh years I was free to have girlfriends and even in Cambridge in my first year I had another affair with a Slovenian girl; that came to an end and then our paths crossed again in a very positive way and never went wrong

53:06:18 Dr Edge was really quite an inspiring teacher and I like to think that he recognised some talent in me for mathematics though I was really stronger in physics, the applied mathematics side of things; anyway he encouraged me to put in for the scholarship exam for the Trinity group of Colleges which I did; he said that I might get into Magdalene, "Babbage would be willing to teach you", so I astonished him by getting into Trinity with a minor scholarship; we were up against boys coming straight from school; I came with Jim Mirrlees who got his Nobel Prize in economics years later; he came on the same scholarship trip with me to Cambridge; I came as an affiliated student which meant I did Part II immediately in my first year; in fact I found Part II boring because I'd covered so much of it at Edinburgh and I attended Part III lectures, the graduate lectures, and still managed to scrape a 1st in Part II which made me a Wrangler; I went straight to George Batchelor who had taught in Part II and asked if I could do straight research as I didn't want any more exams; wonderfully he said yes on the basis of my Edinburgh degree; he'd come in the same way from Melbourne University where I think he had got a Masters degree; he started his research in 1944 under G.I. Taylor, a very famous engineering scientist in Trinity College; that was the tradition in Cambridge; Batchelor had wanted to come earlier but the war had delayed his arrival; he had done practical work for aerodynamics during the war, war-related work in fact, then as soon as he could he came with his wife; they came by boat, a marathon journey in 1944, arrived in Cambridge to research with G.I. Taylor who was the world authority in the field of turbulence; when he got here he discovered that Taylor had lost interest in turbulence, partly because of his war-time activities, but Batchelor was determined to work on turbulence and he did; one of the great mysteries of my subject of fluid mechanics, one of the most challenging areas, and still is, and by the mid-fifties Batchelor was the world authority on turbulence - in his mid-thirties already, he was very well known; he founded the Journal of Fluid Mechanics in 1956 and it's now the biggest journal of Cambridge University Press, the most expanded and successful, though it struggled, as journals do, in the early years; he also founded our department, the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in 1959; I became his research student in 1958 in the middle of all this, and it was natural that I would work on turbulence as well; there was the other area called magneto hydro dynamics which had just sprung to life because the first little text book had been written on the subject by T.G. Cowling then at the University of Leeds; so I put the two together, said to Batchelor that I wanted to work on Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence; he agreed, and that was the title of my thesis in 1962

58:27:19 Most people experience turbulence when they are flying and then you certainly know what it is, a random buffeting around; it is this random element in the fluid flow that is difficult to analyse and understand; people have the general idea that you have instability of a flow and that instability generates large, circulating, motions or eddies which then successively cascade their energy to smaller and smaller scales until finally viscosity takes over; this is called the energy cascade; this was something that Batchelor wrote about; he discovered what had been done in the Russian literature during the war, he unearthed that work and wrote about it and made his name largely on understanding and interpreting the work of the Russian scientists; when I got into it magnetic fields and what not sounds like an extra complication; you've got all the equations of electro-magnetism, Maxwell's equations, interacting with fluids which have to be electrically conducting fluids; liquid metals on the one hand or ionised gas on the other; well the applications there are immediately to either geophysics, the problem of the earth's magnetic field or astrophysics, and this is where my research ultimately found its application; the problem was what we call dynamo theory; of course everyone know what a bicycle dynamo is, you work and the it generates electric light, so its transferring energy from motion to magnetic field, but we do it in a fluid, a fluid dynamo, and its the fluid motion as far as the earth is concerned, in the earth's liquid core, and the motion there generates the earth's magnetic field; we understand that very well now but back in the 1950s it wasn't at all well understood, and even wasn't recognised that this could be the explanation for the magnetic field of the earth and, as it turns out, of the sun and stars, so it has vast applications and is all due to turbulence; if the fluid were either at rest or moving without this random effect of turbulence then it could not generate a magnetic field; so if you want to explain the origin of the magnetic field of the planets or of the stars you have to include the effect of turbulence; you can specify in a statistical sense - probabilistic, the average or the mean square of fluctuations, but not in detail, so it involves that interaction of fluid mechanics, which is my field on the one hand, but with that sort of statistical input

1:02:52:09 My impression of Trinity when I first came was not terribly good because I had been accustomed to a very open and liberal, gender-neutral, atmosphere at Edinburgh University; Cambridge, Trinity particularly, the fact that it was an all-male environment, very heavily dominated by Public school chaps, which again for me, a Scot, coming from Edinburgh which I'd hardly left until this time, although that is not quite true as I have spent a very formative two months in Paris on an exchange in my final year at school; I got used to Cambridge as we soon realized that there were girls there, they were just over in Newnham or Girton; I did acclimatise myself and became a Tutor at Trinity after ten years, by then feeling at home in the College; it took a long time; one of my students, Mike Stanton, now a well-known professor in Brazil, he persuaded me to first take on the senior treasurership of the punting scheme at Trinity; from that I became senior treasurer of the College Union as they thought I was sympathetic to their various demands; that was in 1968-69 when there were intense student demands, the time of the awful Garden House affair; but then we had an extraordinary meeting in Trinity in January 1969 when the whole College, all the Fellows, all the undergraduates, were all invited to the dining hall, the only hall big enough; Rab Butler was in the chair; the College Union had set the agenda with all their questions and demands - demands to abolish guest hours and gate hours, these were matters of great concern at that time as undergraduates had to clock-in at 10pm, oppressive you might say; it was very interesting that at that meeting the issue of women's membership of the College came up for the first time; it was raised by the undergraduates themselves; I was very sympathetic; King's were well ahead of Trinity; we didn't admit women until 1978, although I think we had graduate students in 1976, and one female Fellow in 1977, anticipating the inrush of women in 1978; then of course it changed the whole atmosphere of the College in my opinion for the better; at the meeting the demands where not accepted; it was a bit like the Cornford business; it was agreed that committees would be set up to look into the difficulties and details and then come back with recommendations; we set up a liaison committee, that the Student Union would meet with a group of Fellows, Senior Tutor and what not, regularly and report to the Council, but we did not give the students representation on the College Council and do not do so even now, unlike King's

1:08:15:05 Just this year CUP have published an updated and much enlarged version of a book that I wrote on dynamo theory in fluids; I wrote it in 1978 and a lot has happened since then, much stimulated by that book I think; with the help of a French colleague, Emmanuel Dormy, we updated and expanded and modernized the book, and it was published this year under a revised title 'Self-exciting Fluid Dynamos'; it is about the origin and evolution of magnetic fields in stars and planets mainly, galaxies also, so it's very wide-ranging; of course I would have to take that with me to a desert island it I was only allowed to take my own books; if I could take others, I might take the Princeton book of Applied Mathematics, or I might prefer to take my lap-top with a perpetual supply of battery power, I would take a large book, 'Mathematica' which I've had a lot of fun with over the last few years; it is actually a software program which I think is extremely good; I don't have time for reading much; my wife feeds me with material as she's a great reader; I think I would take some great compendium of poetry, I prefer the more traditional as I'm not so fond of very modern poetry; I like poetry that involves either rhyme or rhythm, or preferably both; in fact I've tried my hand at writing the odd poem myself; I suppose that's my hobby; my top three poets would be Byron, Shelley and Keats, that's the period, but of course I'd take Rabbie Burns

..............

Apostle's Creed and
- - A Natural Philosophers' Creed

I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth:

- - I believe in the dark Energy that powers the Universe and all that it contains;

And in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord:

- - And in Jesus Christ, mentor and inspiration of the human race,

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary:

- - Who was conceived and born in humility;

Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried; He descended into hell:

- - Who suffered under the yoke of oppression, was crucified, dead and buried; he departed this life.

The third day he rose again from the dead:

- - But hope revived within the human heart,

He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty:

- - Infused by that hidden Energy, source of all virtue, justice and benevolence.

From whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead:

- - Whose denial leads but to desolation and decay.

I believe in the Holy Ghost:
The holy catholic church:
The Communion of saints:
The forgiveness of sins:
The resurrection of the body:
And the life everlasting. and in life everlasting from generation to generation.
Amen

- - I believe in the universal spirit of humanity; in verifiable scientific truth; in the fellowship of those who seek truth; in man's enduring capacity for self-renewal; in rebirth from the dust and ashes of the stars; and in life everlasting from generation to generation.
Amen

hkm 15 Oct 2015