40s and 50s Memories
Patrick Fowles with a his father at King's
King's boys in those days were expected to
aspire to Cambridge or Oxford, and my mother
expected no less, so it was a disaster in the
making when I failed O-level Latin.
My post-King's years: A summer under the
tutelage of an aunt who taught Latin saved the
day and I passed on my second attempt and
was later accepted to read a Natural Science
Tripos at Cambridge. Unfortunately, the
acceptance was for 1958 - not 1957 when I left
King's - and to avoid a further delay due to the
draft, I elected instead to go to Imperial College,
London, where I earned a BSc in Chemical
Engineering in 1960.
1960 turned out to be quite an important year in
my life. I had all but made the decision to accept a
job offer by Imperial Chemical Industries at their
Billingham plant when my mother brought to my
attention an ad in the Times for NATO Science
Scholarships for study abroad. I decided to
apply for a NATO Science Scholarship to
either MIT or Cal Tech in America, or McGill
University in Montreal, Canada, and was
accepted at MIT. NATO Scholarships were for
one year, extendable, assuming good grades,
for a second year, and my original intent was to
stay just long enough to get a Master's degree
and see the USA, then return to ICI, who were
willing to keep the job offer open. It didn't quite
work out that way.
I had stayed in touch with Mr. Morgan while
at Imperial College, and he invited me back
to King's after my finals to be his aide for the
final weeks of the summer term. So my first
post-college job was actually at King's College, where I monitored Mr. Morgan's classes,
proctored exams, and generally helped out
while enjoying eating at the staff dining room
table and breezing into the erstwhile forbidden
Master's Common Room.
In September, 1960 I sailed to America on
the Queen Mary and was given a rousing
welcome by hurricane Donna on the last night
of the voyage. It was frightening to feel such
a large vessel being thrown around as if but a
toy, and we arrived in New York City to power
outages in many areas. I spent my first night in
America on Long Island in an all-electric house
without electricity and so arrived the next day
at MIT unshaven as I had been given a very
(then) modern electric shaver as a going-
away present. MIT is in Cambridge, across the
Charles River from Boston, so in the end I did
go to university at Cambridge, just not the one
everyone had originally intended for me!
At that time American bachelor degrees in the
sciences were less advanced in the particular
science, but much broader in a general
educational sense, than English bachelor
degrees, and American master degree
programs were typically two years, the first
involving mainly coursework which more than
made up the difference. As a result, I was
quite familiar with the material during the first
few months, which allowed me to settle in and
get used to the system before having to really
knuckle down. It soon became apparent to me
that I wouldn't have much time to see America
if I stayed on the master's degree program for
two years and then had to return home, but also
that it was possible to live quite comfortably on
a teaching assistant's pay plus summer jobs
if I wanted to stay longer. So I switched to a
doctoral program (I never did tell Mr. Morgan!)
and stayed over five years, working on my
research and thesis (The Turbulence and Eddy
Viscosity Distribution in the Laminar Sublayer)
during the academic year and on paid jobs in
the summers, and every now and then heading
off to see the country using my thumb. I hitch-
hiked coast-to-coast four times and to several
other destinations, including Kansas to see this
young lady I was in love with, but that's another
story.
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