 
Chemists Have Such Interesting Lives

Paul Buckley

2012

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ISBN 9781370736829

Copyright 2016

# Chemists Have Such Interesting Lives
**Introduction**

The decision to write "Chemists Live Such Interesting Lives" was made after answering a request from Andrew Brodie for some material to send to the Alumni magazine about the history of the department. After writing some notes on the two big fires in the department, I began to think about all the incidents that make up the life of a group of people working together in an institute. If these are not reported somewhere, then quite quickly they become lost and forgotten. This seems especially true at a time when the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is beginning to undergo substantial changes in staff, as academics retire in increasing numbers (written in 1993).

Early in this very busy winter term, I began recording memories I have of life in the department, especially of the earlier days. Requests went out to staff to share their memories of the history of the department, but everyone has been so busy that few have had time to make a contribution.

What follows cannot be said to represent a totally balanced view of the history of the department. In fact whole sections of the department are not even mentioned. Almost nothing is said about the energetic, enthusiastic and indispensable technicians or the wonderful variety of effective secretaries the department has had down through the years. There is total silence on the workshops and their splendid staff, and not a word about the glass blowers or the cleaners or the janitors. Among the long list of talented graduate students on whom the research reputation of the department has been built, only one or two mainly associated with Buckley and Blackwell are quoted. The selections were based on the anecdotes available to the author during the limited time available for writing, or in some cases on polemics which he could not resisted.

Not every story or fact has been checked against the source, but I hope that they will bring back memories of very happy years, and provide a glimpse of earlier times. I would appreciate receiving further contributions, so that a fuller version can be produced in the future, to be kept as a permanent record within the department.

While commenting on individual people who have left or are soon to leave the department, I have endeavored to be fair and honest, but without being predictable and dull in the sense that a retirement tribute can sometimes become. It has been suggested by some that I might have to leave town when this history is more widely read. I hope not.

My hope is that you will enjoy reading the notes as much as I have enjoyed assembling them.

**Stories Myths and from the Department's Pre-History**

The time in the department before the start of 1968 has the quality of a pre-history, knowledge of which has been handed down by word of mouth. The stories have been told and retold until the essential truths were distilled into a kind of mythology which represents a deeper truth. The figures involved are larger than life and loom from a misty past like dinosaurs in an ancient Jurassic Park.

One name is mentioned about all others. He was creative genius who turned his restless energy into intricate practical jokes to torment others, especially the irrepressible Robert Brooks. Ross Grimmett wrote whole Massey Revues, and studied heterocycles in his spare time. His name still brings a strange smile to the faces of all who knew him. Stories are told of the day he placed a full cup of tea in the top drawer of Robert's desk and nailed it shut, watching with delight as the furiously impatient Robert sought to tear the stuck drawer open by sheer physical strength. The news that the anti-royalist Robert had been taken by his wife Mary to see the British Queen in Wellington drove Ross to a frenzy of activity. In succeeding days Robert could not open a book or a drawer, or leave his desk for a moment without a picture of the Queen or some other member of the Royal family appearing to torment him.

After Dick Batt's appointment to the Chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the return of Clem Hawke to being one of the lower ranks, Clem was not overly delighted to find a signed framed copy of his successor on his desk shortly afterwards. Ross could only sympathise with the dilemma this created for the very pukka and politically correct Clem Hawke with respect to its disposal.

Ted Richards arranged to take a Sabbatical leave to begin on a Monday and then booked his flights out of the country on the preceding Friday without informing the University authorities in the form of the all-powerful VC, Alan Stewart. Ted was always a slightly nervous person where matters of protocol were concerned and anxiously confided in others, asking their advice about the advisability of his action. A fatal thing to do. The news soon reached Ross and an invitation duly arrived on Ted's desk inviting him to a farewell afternoon tea with the Vice Chancellor on that very Friday afternoon at a time when he should have already have departed on his flight.

One day Robert Brooks went up into the hidden mezzanine in the Old Massey Building to search for who knows what. However no sooner had he entered than he heard the distinctive sound of a hammer as Ross Grimmett nailed the door shut behind him. Realising immediately what was happening Robert rushed across towards the other exit, only to hear as he approached the second door that same hammering sound. He was trapped. But no, he spotted a small grill with light on the other side. Wrestling the grill aside he poked his head through only to find himself looking at the startled faces of the organic chemistry class, immersed in a lecture by Dick Hodges. Robert withdrew his head hurriedly as the class erupted into laughter at the bizarre sight of a head high above the blackboard. Dick Hodges swung round from the blackboard to see what had happened and the puzzled look on his face only reduced the class further into uncontrollable mirth.

Sometimes even the unstoppable Ross Grimmett went over the top and had to back off. Robert Brooks, an enthusiastic collector of alpine plants was foolish enough to confide to Ross that he had written requesting seed from a clergyman in New Guinea who had recently discovered a new alpine plant. The opportunity was just too much for Ross. He composed a letter in the imagined style of an English vicar in the mission fields and a sample of dock seeds enclosed. Robert collected stamps and recognised postmarks, so the envelope had to be a masterly deception, correct down to the smallest detail. In the event Robert fell for it hook line and sinker. His enthusiasm was boundless as he told everyone about his great coup. Ross could glow with pleasure at a job well done. But when Robert began to send samples of the dock seeds to centres for studying alpine plants around the world things got out of hand. A sheepish Ross had to take Robert aside and confide to him the deception.

Yes, Robert also played the occasional practical joke. Miss Campbell was the very good hearted librarian from down the corridor with the very loud voice. On one occasion after receiving a phone call from Miss Campbell, Robert carefully put the phone on his desk, went down the corridor and carried on the conversation standing in the door behind Miss Campbell, who was still unknowingly shouting into the telephone.

Colin Boswell was lecturing while doing his Ph.D., but was notorious for forgetting his lecture times and arriving late. Doing this once too often, he arrived to an empty class room, with the words "a lecturer who arrives late is in a class of his own" written in large letters on the blackboard.

Many years later, Robert and his co-workers were given a citation classic award for their paper on shellfish. Unfortunately Robert thought that the results they reported must be a terrible mistake. Sack loads of shellfish were requested from Bluff for the study on the uptake of minerals by these filter feeders. The study was expertly carried out with the shellfish being dissected and then analysed in the then ultra-new atomic absorption spectrometer. In the event some of the results were amazingly high, but they published anyway, after eating the sacks of shellfish which were not needed in the study. It all seemed like a great lark and they then promptly forgot about the work and left the field. All around the world people read the paper and at last understood what they had been seeing in their local communities. In Tasmania for example it became clear why people vomited after eating shellfish collected downstream from a zinc plant. Whole new careers opened up in the field of analysis of shellfish. No more work however was ever done by Robert Brooks or anyone else at Massey University on shellfish.

Robert had learned his lesson and never let another chance go by in any field in all his subsequent years in the department. Sometimes in this period of prehistory the truth seemed stranger than fiction.

**A Brief History of Time in the Department**

That there was a time in the history of the Department before Dick Batt seems now hard to comprehend. When Barnicoat and McGillivray left the old Biochemistry Department at Massey Agricultural College, they were replaced by J .D. Hawke and E.L. Richards, who joined Bob Lawrence and Garth Wallace to teach chemistry to Agricultural Degree students. The teaching of first year science commenced in 1959. The lecture theatre was a two-tiered hall with a small permanent blackboard at the back of a raised dais, and another blackboard and easel, which inevitably collapsed if an attempt was made to use it. In those days everyone assisted with unpacking the yearly chemical order, which was supported by a departmental budget of about 900 pounds.

With the establishment of the Veterinary Faculty on the Massey Campus the department acquired the now recognised name of Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. When the teaching of the Veterinary Students began in 1963 the staff also included Robert Brooks and Ross Grimmett, and latterly Martin Rumsby.

The department consisted of two laboratories with ancillary rooms and offices in the original 1927 Massey building. The departure of NZDRI (New Zealand Dairy Research Institute) to new buildings across the road lead to further expansion with the department occupying the entire rear half of floors 1 and 2 of the old building,

On the day that Dick Batt was interviewed for the position of Professor of Biochemistry and Head of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, interviews were taking place on the campus for two other Professorial Chairs. Even as a student at Otago University, Dick had attained a certain notoriety by blowing up a third of the tennis court at his old University Hall of Residence, an act which earned his immediate expulsion from the Hall. Returning to Otago after his time at Oxford University where he earned a second Ph.D., Dick soon became well known as a person who was always ready to challenge authority to try to change things which he regarded as unjust. It particularly grated with him that the Dentistry and Medical academic staff got more pay than the biochemists. The VC became well aware of Dick's dissatisfaction. Dick also gained much local publicity by pointing out how unhygienic it was to leave crates of unwrapped bread lying around the Dunedin Railway Station. Massey University appointed him to the chair knowing that they were hiring an active and combative person.

Dick Batt arrived with a vision of a large and influential Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, but the vision was not necessarily supported by the Deans of the rival science-based faculties, and certainly not enthusiastically embraced by his colleagues in the established Chemistry and Biochemistry Departments around the country

So, Dick called in the Otago University Mafia. First Graeme Midwinter, who was then on a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the States, and then Dick Hodges fresh from his triumph in determining the structure of sporidesmin (causes symptoms of Facial Eczema) and at that time based at Ruakura. Dick Batt, to the chagrin of Otago University, was bringing with him to Massey University the fifty thousand pounds he had been awarded while at Otago University to buy a Mass Spectrometer. The instrument would now be sited in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Hodges would be the ideal person to run the new machine.

Dick Hodges drove into town in his Austin 10 to check out his new job, carrying the rolled up plans for a new house. By the end of a single day he had hired a lawyer, bought a section, found a builder and contracted to have a house built in time for his permanent transfer to Palmerston North six months later. The Batt's were amazed by this demonstration of organisational time efficient.

The old VC, Alan Stewart, would only appoint academic staff when the need was demonstrated by the arrival of students in the courses, "bums on seats" in the jargon of today. The relatively rapid growth of student numbers in first year science led to some very large teaching loads for early staff such as Graeme Midwinter who struggled to cope with the increasing numbers.

Dick Batt clearly saw that under an EFTS (Equivalent Full-Time Student) based funding system which did not distinguish between 100-level and higher level classes, departments with more big first year classes would be the ones who got the most staff. He ensured that the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry benefited from the common first year science program he fought to have introduced for all the Science-based Faculties (Science, Technology, Agriculture and Horticulture and Veterinary Science). He also ensured that this common core should contain three papers taught from within his own department. This pragmatic vision soon saw the numbers of new staff entering the department increasing steadily

A new Science Building was urgently needed. However those always outspoken and opinionated critics, Hodges and Midwinter, were not allowed by Dick Batt to view the plans for the new Science Towers until the very afternoon the final contract was signed with the construction company Bodells. Glancing over the plans, Hodges immediately saw that the building ventilation was not adequate for all the fume hoods, and Midwinter recognised that the cold rooms were under-powered.

However there was very little that Hodges and Midwinter could do about it. Excluded from the building site by the terms of the building contract, they were reduced to cutting a hole in the construction fence at weekends in order to poke around the growing mounds that were soon to become the Science Towers. They were unable to convince the builders that protective collars should be installed around all holes drilled through the concrete floors to prevent small floods from leaking down through the building. The innumerable floods spreading rapidly down through the floors in subsequent years was the inevitable legacy of this engineering oversight.

When the building was occupied, Midwinter ensured that the lights remained on in the cold rooms day and night, so that the overloaded cooling system finally crashed and allowed a more adequate one to be installed. Ventilation for fume hoods has, however, remained a problem.

The $347,000 setting-up grant to equip the new building, might have been adequate for an established department moving into a new building, but given how underequipped the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry had been, it was a rather miserly sum. It was, however, wonderful to have at last a simple spectrophotometer, which could also be thermostatted.

It is useful to perhaps to briefly summarise academic staff appointments over the next thirty years. Roger Reeves arrived in 1965 and Sylvia Rumball in 1967. After the departure of Grimmett and Rumsby in 1967, the period from 1968 to 1975 saw a rapid growth in academic staff numbers. First Buckley, Blackwell and Jolley arrived at the beginning of 1968, to be followed later in the year by Ian Andrew. 1969 saw the arrival of the new Professor of Physical Chemistry, Geoff Malcolm, yet another of the Otago Mafia, and the scholarly Graham Pritchard. The 1970 crop of academics included Malcolm Chick, Michael Hardman, Margaret Wilson, Ian Watson and that budding HOD Andrew Brodie, while by the end of 1971 Eric Ainscough, John Ayers, David Husbands and Ted Baker (at first a Post-Doctoral Fellow) were also on the staff. The pace slowed a little in 1972, with only John Tweedie, Bill Hancock and Chris Moore appearing on the scene, with Trevor Kitson beginning a Post-Doctoral Fellowship that lead to a staff appointment in 1974. In 1975 with the arrival of John McIntosh and Gavin Hedwig the period of rapid growth ground to a halt, although Patsy Watson joined the Department in 1978, and Joyce Waters in 1983.

Minimal movement of academic staff occurred for the next 10 to 15 years. Hancock went off the Genetech in 1986, with David Harding taking over the Separation Science Unit, while David Officer moved from Separation Science to become a lecturer in Organic Chemistry. In that same year Margaret Brimble was appointed initially on a three year term to fill in for the restless Len Blackwell, who was granted leave without pay to work at Melbourne University with Professor Jim Brown on an ovarian monitor. Len had a long love affair with the monitor, which kept his family commuting backwards and forwards to Melbourne over many years.

A wave of retirements began in the late 80s and continued into the 90s. So far during this period those who have retired include David Husbands, Dick Hodges, Dick Batt, Clem Hawke, Bob Greenway, Graeme Midwinter, Margaret Wilson and Robert Brooks. The Department now has two tutors. Josine van Melsem and Shirley Wilson. Other new appointments include Kathy Kitson (from her position as Research Officer in the department), Mark Patchett, Kathryn Stowell, Raewyn Town, John Harrison, Mick Sherburn, Peter Gill, Gill Norris and Tony Burrell, with Drs Brown and Grimes soon to arrive.

**The Growing Department - History Begins in 1968**

By 1968 when three new staff members named Jolley, Buckley and Blackwell had, in that order, arrived the building of the library block was nearing completion and a start was being made on the Science Towers.

Ken Jolley, with his energetic wife Sheila, were the first and arrived toward the end of 1967, to be met in Wellington by Roger Reeves. Paul Buckley arrived on the first of February, disorientated by several months of travel through Asia, and culture shocked to be back in New Zealand, and in Palmerston North. He shared an office with Roger Reeves and Robert Brooks on the top floor of the old Massey Building. Robert and Roger were not pleased one morning to find on their arrival millions of dead insects lining their desks and every other exposed surface in the office, after Paul had absent mindedly gone home leaving the window open and forgetting to turn the light off in the office.

Roger and Robert were understanding of Paul's attempts to speak Chinese, although Vern Chettleburgh from his position in the Army, viewed with some apprehension "The Little Red Book of Chairman Mao" from which Paul frequently quoted and the political position which that seemed to imply. When Paul attended a night class on Marxist Theory in his first year at Massey University, Vern felt that his original fears were amply justified.

All three had to endure with patience the booming sound of Ted Richards lecturing at the top of his ample voice to a class of three or four students about cell walls and organic chemistry in the thin-walled lecture room next door.

Just as the term was about to begin at the end of February in 1968, Dr. Y (so referred to on the timetable as it was still not certain who would be filling this teaching spot) arrived in the form of Len Blackwell together with the wonderfully calm Pam. We were greeted with complicated strings of questions about whether he should remain or set off to Australia to take up a Post Doctoral Fellowship. In a wave of indecision Len remained and is still here to this day.

In those simpler, earlier days all the new staff shared a tiny laboratory on the ground floor (there were still ground floors in those long ago days, before the American system of numbering swept through the campus) of the old Massey Building. The three new-comers shared some bench space about the size of an office desk, but precious little else. Len Blackwell convinced the others to follow an interest that he had in physical organic chemistry, but there was no spectrophotometer to follow the absorbance changes with time. The Dairy Research Institute (DRI) came to the rescue and one or other of these worthy scientists could often be seen biking across to the DRI with stoppered UV cells in hand. The research was not made any easier by the fact that the solvents had to be dry since the results varied with the water content.

Finally one memorable day the three sat down in front of an old manual typewriter and began to compose the introductory sentences of a paper. A tape recorder was set up so that tightly written sentences or brilliant thoughts would not be lost for all time. The composition went well but the most eloquent use of the English language could not disguise the fact that the actual experimental results were decidedly thin on the ground.

During these difficult times, when chemicals and equipment were almost non-existent, Buckley, Jolley and Blackwell were not above playing the occasional game of shov' hapenny on a desk in the office that Ken shared with Sylvia Sheet-Rumball. On more than one occasion they were almost caught red handed by the return of the serious and dedicated Sylvia, who even in those days was planning for her vision for the future. You see Sylvia was a crystallographer, but of course she had no X-ray generator. Worse, the older Universities had made it clear that there was only room in the country for two diffractometers, and that it would be a total waste of money setting up one at the very, very agricultural Massey University. Sylvia, as she has shown so many times since, does not give up so easily. She persisted and by a series of prophetic memos to Professor Batt convinced him not only of the need for an X-ray generator, but also of the absolute necessity of such equipment. In hindsight, it is clear to her less politically aware colleagues that Sylvia gained more advantage from her carefully worded memos than all the desultory research efforts in the laboratories of her fellow staff. In the area of proteins, at least, it was not possible in later years for Dick Batt to take seriously any work that did not include either the growing of protein crystals or else a full scale protein structure. After getting an X-ray generator, and knowing that raising a family would take a good deal of her time, Sylvia pushed hard to have a Post Doctoral Fellow appointed. Ted Baker arrived and the rest, as they say, is history.

One of the pleasures of the early days at Massey University was to visit with the elder statesmen of New Zealand science who represented the University Grants Committee (no, I don't remember any women on that committee). These were Father Christmas figures who after chatting pleasantly to you eventually gave you some money for equipment, if you were supported by Dick Batt. Dick did try very hard to get his new staff set up properly in the laboratory. Ken Jolley had played with an NMR Spectrophotometer for his PhD. and nothing would satisfy him but that he would have another here at Massey. The money for this came about three years after Ken arrived. This set off a new wave of excitement, leading to such important NMR work as that on the lactams (which brought a famous Japanese scientist to Massey to talk with the lactam chemists, even though they had long left the field) and complexes of cobalt (simple inorganic chemistry). It certainly felt good to have a real machine around, somehow Robert Brook's atomic absorption spectrometer did not seem to count.

The standard of living went up for everyone when the department moved to a new building, which was stark and uncompromising in its 1960's type beauty. The battleship grey walls would have been disastrous for anyone subject to depression, but the bare concrete did give it a certain back to basics feel.

Geoff Malcolm first met Dick Batt while they were both lecturing at Otago University before 1964. Dick sat in on a lecture that Geoff gave to the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry on polymers, another kind of macromolecule, different from an enzyme but Dick could see obviously related, if only through sheer size, to proteins. Congratulating Geoff afterwards, Dick had no doubt noted that here was a physical chemist who was not concerned only with the cold blooded thermodynamics properties of small chemical systems and the accumulation of worthy but rather boring data.

The unlikely team of Malcolm and Batt later became, a little unexpectedly it must be said, a popular duo on the local winter hostel discussion circuit. Invited once to give their different views on the then quite controversial topic of "The Origin of Life on Earth", word spread of their success in promoting vigorous discussion and the invitations flowed in. Geoff was expected to give the perspective of a Christian, and Dick presumably that of the slightly-hardnosed scientist. Geoff did not argue from the unbending fundamentalist Garden of Eden first and last point of view, but did question the probability of the soup of chemicals approach to life's origins on earth favoured by the evolutionists. Dick also could not to be said to be your classic Darwinian since he argued the panspermea theory that life had floated to earth in some form from outer space. Dick's interest in this theory remained with him long after he came to Massey University.

After Dick Batt was appointed to the Chair of Biochemistry at Massey University, Geoff wrote expressing an interest in shifting north, presumably to escape the worst of the southern winters and to return to his roots in the Manawatu. A complicated Massey subplot followed, which involved the appointment of a person to the position of Professor of Physics, who in subsequent negotiations demanded an expensive nuclear reactor because of his belief in the absolute need to study nuclear physics at Massey. The University, it is rumoured, then abruptly withdrew the offer and instead advertised for the less expensive Professor of Physical Chemistry.

Although Geoff Malcolm was appointed to that position at the beginning of 1968, he was requested not to appear until the beginning of 1969 because there was nowhere to house him. He visited a few times to talk with Brooks, Buckley, Blackwell, Reeves, Rumball, Hodges and others on the chemistry staff. But finally Professor Malcolm arrived entered his new office in the just-opened Science Towers in February 1969. He arrived one morning to squelch his way across a carpet sodden by a leaking pipe in the professorial wash basin. The carpets were stripped out and taken away to dry. It was quite a while before the Professor could feel that he was indeed properly housed.

The key words at Massey University in those days, and for many years subsequently, were "biological orientation". These words were perhaps coined elsewhere on campus, but were fully and totally supported by Dick Batt. In such an environment, it was presumed that the full power of disciplines such as chemistry and physics would only be realised when they were turned to address biological problems. Subjects such as physics could become expensive if they turned toward nuclear physics (still a delicate topic many years later) and at the same time potential threat to developments in biological areas. It was in such an environment that Robert Brooks startled the newly arrived Professor of Physical Chemistry by asking bluntly at the first meeting of the chemists "Well, when are you going to get us separated from Biochemistry?"

Most of the earlier years for Geoff Malcolm at Massey University involved appointing staff. With the growth in student numbers, especially at 100 level, each year two, three or even once four new positions were created. Dick was happy to split the staff evenly between chemistry and biochemistry when the numbers were even (regardless however, of the actual EFTS ratios of the two sub-disciplines), but for odd numbers, biochemistry got the extra position. It must be said, however, that at least twice staff initially appointed to "biochemistry positions" ended up teaching in chemistry. When Bill Hancock was appointed, Graeme Midwinter led a revolt against Bill's undoubted lack of actual experience in biochemistry and Bill ended up teaching Organic Chemistry. Then after Trevor Kitson was appointed to the permanent staff after his time as a Post Doctoral Fellow, he quietly requested that he should also teach on the chemistry side.

Generally Dick only wanted the bits of chemistry which he thought could link most strongly with biochemistry. In this respect Inorganic Chemistry did not reach first base. Dick flatly refused to appoint anyone in this area, until Geoff Malcolm did some homework on haemoglobin, and put up a convincing case that much of biochemistry would not work if metal ions were excluded.

Andrew Brodie had previously, almost on a whim, sent off an application for the position of Lecturer in Biochemistry at Massey University. His PhD. supervisor Cuth Wilkins from Canterbury University wrote a strongly supportive reference, noting that as far as he knew Andrew had no experience in biochemistry, but thought he would do the job well if appointed. In fact Mike Hardman was appointed to this position. This does give pause to think what might have happened if Andrew Brodie had been appointed in Biochemistry and Mike Hardman in Chemistry. Would Andrew Brodie have spent as much time attacking the credentials of "chemists" trying to teach biochemistry without the necessary background as Mike did? Would Mike Hardman now be the HOD of Chemistry?

Andrew and Carolyn Brodie were met on arrival at Palmerston North airport by Mike Hardman and Paul Buckley on a day when it was raining heavily. As Andrew now wryly recalls, it was raining on his first day at Massey University, it was raining when they were flat hunting, and it was raining when they shifted into the flat. The starting salary was at that time an unbelievable $3,500 per year.

It was becoming clear, not only in New Zealand but around the world, that Massey University was in the business of appointing staff. Eric Ainscough wrote about a possible position before he left England to return to Australia, and Ian Watson wrote from Otago expressing an interest in joining the Massey team. Both were subsequent appointees.

When a new position was created in Alan Stewart's time, it was funded at a point on the Senior Lecturer's scale and that was all the money which was allowed. If a Senior Lecturer was appointed then the money was gone, but a lecturer appointee would allow the possibility of some of the money being used for an additional graduate assistant. This was much more straight forward than the complicated individual negotiations which take place in the 1990's.

Life did not just involve new appointments.

Dick Batt was not pleased one day to receive a note from the Agricultural and Horticultural Faculty telling him that one of his rising stars, namely Len Blackwell, had failed terms in Farm Management. How had this happened? The story begins many years before when Len signed up as an undergraduate to enter a career as a teacher, and received what was in those days a good income as an undergraduate. However, the money had to be paid back if he did not go teaching. Fortunately the University counted as a teaching institution, and after about two and a half years his debt to the government would be discharged. The ever restless Len, planning ahead to the time he would be debt, thought perhaps he would join his in-laws farming in his beloved Canterbury. Hence the Farm Management course. As Len tells it, he was sitting in the class one day, when the lecturer said that whenever you start a new operation on the farm you must first make sure that the income you get from the venture is more than the outgoings. Len, after hearing this blindingly obvious statement, packed up his papers and pens, and left the class never to return. Unfortunately he forgot to withdraw. An eleventh hour attempt to sweet talk the lecturer into removing him from the roll only drew a long lecture about how the Agricultural and Horticultural Faculty was being badly treated by the Science Faculty. It took Len some time to live down the ignominy of his failure even to get terms in Farm management.

Life in the department was more relaxed in those far off days. For example, Dick Batt might say at lunch one day that the Toheroa season had opened down at Himitangi, and many academics (including Dick) would disappear to the beach for an afternoon searching for the delicacy. During most term breaks there was a half-day excursion to a Golf Course in a nearby town such as Marlon or Dannevirke.

The tea room at that time was enormous. It ran the whole length of one side of the building, with the long central table stretched down through the middle struggling to keep the growing department together in one unified piece. Then, and every day up until his retirement to the Soil Science Department, Robert Brooks dominated the tea room conversation whenever he was there. It was not so much that he was a great talker, although he was persistent and did not hesitate to tell the same story a hundred times, but rather that he was an appalling listener. Someone else talking seemed to be an insult to his sense of personal decorum. He did not waste time seeking for a point to join a conversation, he simply hijacked it. His weapon was persistence and a loud voice, and in the face of this even the most determined attempts at other conversation died away.

Perhaps the most remarkable of many remarkable collaborations that were set up between staff in the department was that between the taciturn, thoughtful, careful, logical and well organised Roger Reeves and the flamboyant, energetic, erratic, loud and unpredictable Robert Brooks. If the best marriages are made in heaven, then this partnership was surely conceived of, if not in hell, then at least in some never land in between for the amusement of the gods. Janice Reeves said she always knew when Roger had been working with Robert that morning from the way he behaved at lunch time. But like so many of the Massey collaborations, both benefited greatly from it.

Sylvia Rumball carried the term "family planning" to completely new and quite sublime heights with the arrival of her first child. Sylvia lectured to the large l00-level classes in the Marsden Lecture Theatre until late in the autumn term, while very pregnant, and intrigued many students with her professionalism and determination to continue. Then during the May term break the baby was duly born. Finally, exactly as planned earlier in the year, Sylvia went overseas in June with Bill on study leave. This was a tribute to Sylvia's ability to plan, and a foretaste of the organisational ability which would allow her to work and continue her very successful career throughout the time she and Bill were raising a family. The research work she planned on the protein lactoferrin isolated from mother's milk has come to fruition in the following decades. Sylvia used her association with lactoferrin to make a link between science and the very real needs of women for more information about breast feeding and the way it affected their lives.

Nick-names in the department were never very original but also never very unkind. Robert Brooks led the way with the endless repetition of a single theme much in the form of present day minimalist music. Buckers, Blackers, Jollers, Midders, Harders and if you stretched the line even thinner Greeners, but never Wilsoners, Malcomers or perish the thought Hodgeres. Because of the very limited space available on the departmental academic timetable, initials were used as symbols for staff and you heard yourself talking about RDR or GNM or KWJ or MJH and so on. One remarkable feature in those early days was the number of flying creatures which were represented by names in the department, for example Hawke, Chick, Partridge, Batt and Crow.

**Sport and the Department**

Sport played a big part in the early days of the department.

Ken Jolley, a vigorous and sometimes outstanding lock forward, was snatched up by the Marist Club on his arrival and featured prominently in the club rugby scene for many years. A famous photo in the Evening Standard showed Jolley soaring high to catch a ball in a line out. The caption asked "Did he jump or was he lifted?" The friendly hand placed on Jolley's thigh by one of his fellow forwards could only be interpreted in a limited number of ways, none of which Jolley would admit to.

Len Blackwell had a great fascination with all sport but had graciously retired from rugby some years before, after scoring a famous runaway try in the wrong direction. It was one of the really painful sights of those early Massey days to watch Len listening in the NMR room to the commentary of a rugby match in which Canterbury was losing. The tension and anxiety crackled about him until in the dying minutes a final penalty from fullback Fergie McCormick gave his much loved team their deserved, and in Len's eyes, inevitable victory. Seeing Len watching a losing All Black team on TV was only marginally less difficult.

Len Blackwell did team up with Roy Thornton (from the Microbiology and Genetics Department) to coach, firstly the under 21 Massey University rugby team, and later the Rams in the senior competition. Roy was, if anything, a greater worrier than Len, and you had to wonder about their ability to suffer for their sport, when you saw them huddled together frowning on a cold winter's afternoon as their team tossed away a hard won lead late in the game. Len was once threatened by the referee with expulsion from the grounds because of his overly aggressive side-line comments.

Jolley and Buckley played cricket together for the Kia Toa third grade team during the summer Saturdays. Jolley featuring with some vigorous batting and very useful and aggressive bowling, while Buckley was a slow-scoring left-handed batsman who bowled his leg breaks endlessly at the nets while dreaming of getting the chance to bowl in a real match. However, captain John Skipworth never called him to the crease (preferring instead the slow donkey drops of Mike Nicholls from the Ag-Hort Faculty) while Gordon Buick, the captain in later years, only allowed him to bowl when some left-handed batsman on the opposing team was going absolutely berserk with the bat. When Buckley duly took the required wicket, he was immediately banished to the outfield. On one famous afternoon Jolley and Buckley shared a 100 run partnership, with Buckley scoring about 45 of the first 50 runs and Jolley scoring about 48 of the next 50.

The staff of the department played the students at cricket on a number of occasions. It provided a pleasant Sunday afternoon on the oval with afternoon tea once taken at the new Vice Chancellor's house when Joyce Waters, by then a member of the department, invited us in for tea and cakes. Eric Ainscough was one who stood out with both bat and ball, but the final results of the matches have happily passed out of memory and no record remains. Just individual moments, such as Buckley at last having the chance to bowl leg spinners, even if it was to the big hitting Mark Smith, Andy Trow adding his cricketing talents, and Ted Baker looking an extremely tidy cricketer.

The one staff-student soccer match was a much fiercer affair, with Roger Reeves being taken to the hospital to get stitches to his head. Tim Brown from the Microbiology and Genetics Department played an outstanding game in the goal, but again there is no record of the actual scorer

As for running or jogging, it seemed that everyone was doing it back in the 70s. Certainly Trevor Kitson after his arrival carried running to new dimensions in terms of distance and time, although perhaps Alan Stowell should also be mentioned as another zealous long distance runner. Buckley was a committed and regular runner who could often be seen jogging in the evenings along the overgrown river bank trails deep in conversation with Len Blackwell. Len, tired after a day in the laboratory, was sometimes a little reluctant to leave the comforts of home to go for a run and could not resist complaining about the often atrocious under foot conditions. His humour was not improved when he slipped in the greasy mud left by the trail bikes and splashed backside down in a large puddle. In recent years jogging has been replaced for Len by swimming and cycling. Ken Jolley was never a really enthusiastic jogger, and now performs on the gymnasium super circuit floor, but never in the aerobics class with its loud music. Meantime Trevor Kitson has continued designing ever longer and more interesting lone runs in the Ranges near Palmerston North, or over the mountains of Tongariro National Park.

Lunch time tennis has always had its dedicated following, Andy Trow played whenever weather and laboratory classes allowed, often in foursomes which included Bill Hancock and Paul Buckley. Matches continued even in light rain, although the most difficult conditions for playing were the spring gales. Geoff Malcolm joined others on the courts a few times during his early days at Massey, but soon the duties of an administrator reduced him back to being a weekend walker with his family

In the early 70s a mania for golf swept the department. Some, like Clem Hawke, had been playing the game for years and would still be playing the game years after the fad had passed. Others, like Dick Batt, would attempt the game much later in life but do not feature in the golden years of golf in the department. This was the time when Paul Buckley organised the University wide staff-student golf match at courses such as the Marton Golf Club. That was the time when the younger staff joined the Rangitikei Golf Club near Bulls, and the trip to the course on Saturday or Sunday mornings became a regular feature of the week. This course in the dunes was particularly lovely on a sunny morning with the dew still on the grass and the magpies calling in the trees. The beauty of the course did not however diminish the intensity of the golf which was played.

The Staff-Student golf match always had its memorable moments. One year when graduate-student John Woodhead was finishing his round late in the day, the Club House overlooking the 18th green was packed. Everyone watched the final four with interest, hoping for a diversion to end the day. John's approach iron ended deep in a greenside bunker, and a combined murmur of sympathy and interest went around the Club Rooms. He did not disappoint the crowd coming out of the bunker only after two or three swishes of the club. Unfortunately, although on the green, he was still far from the pin. Concentrating hard he sent the ball on its long journey along an excellent line. For a long time it looked as if he might hole the putt and finish the day on a high note. The ball narrowly missed the hole but suddenly it was clear to everyone that in his eagerness not to be short John had stroked the ball a little too hard. It would again be a long putt back to the hole. Still the ball rolled on and on. Then slowly, inevitably and unbelievably it left the green and dropped into another bunker. The Club House erupted in a great climatic roar of laughter that went on and on. People were laughing until tears ran down their faces and were holding onto tables and chairs for support as they laughed on helplessly. No one had ever seen a grown man putt into a bunker nor believed that they ever would. He was cheered as he took two more swings to get back on the green. And cheered even more loudly when he finally putted out. As John somewhat dryly mentioned later, he had in fact won his match on the 17th green.

Each golfer had his own personality and style.

Len Blackwell, with the intense drive for perfection which was, and is, so much part of his personality, endlessly practised his swing while on the golf course, viewing it in an adjoining window whenever that was possible. He would hit a booming drive to follow the very average efforts of the others in the four and then, because it did not feel right to him, mutter to himself. Only occasionally did he play to the standard which he demanded of himself. In one Student-Staff Golf match held in the pouring rain, Len complained so bitterly about the weather that one of the students took off his rain gear and gave it to Len. Ken Jolley had an easy economical swing and always played steady accurate golf. One day, after bending his number 6 iron around a small tree, he simply re-straightened the club and proceeded to make brilliant use of it for the rest of the round.

Paul Buckley had the awkward style of someone who played too much hockey, but tried to make up for the deficiencies in his swing with determination and a short game which depended on impossible recoveries to stay in competition. Roger Reeves always calm and effective was able to analyse each aspect of his game. He improved steadily and remorselessly each time he played. Once Paul and Roger played together for the first and only time in a Club organised Canadian foursome. They alternatively got each other into deeper and deeper trouble, until at last the other Club members they were playing with felt so sorry for them that they felt compelled to keep offering their sympathy.

Malcolm Chick in his few trips to the course was memorable for his cries of "Stone the Crows" and "Starve the Lizards" as his ball flew away in unexpected directions. His shouts added a distinctly Australian flavour to the course.

Clem Hawke, to the rest of us, was the complete golfer, and often inspired us to play well above ourselves. He played competitively to a low handicap and knew all the rules and the course etiquette. Paul Buckley once, but only once, stood behind Clem as he made a putt. Paul had hoped to get a better line for his own putt, an action which it turned out violated one of the great unwritten rules of the game. Clem sank his putt and then swung on Paul and gave him a vigorous lecture on the proprieties of the game. If, after that, we did not stand behind someone when they were putting, or we did not stand on the line someone else was going to putt along, or if we did not talk while someone else was swinging, it was all because of the tutelage of Clem.

Robert Brooks as a golfer deserves a chapter to himself. He was never what you would call a great golfer, but he was consistent, scoring from 10 to 15 on most holes. He would pick mushrooms to relieve the tedium and spread pine needles around the hole on the green to try to improve Ken Jolley's putting. Robert was responsible for one of the more memorable mornings on the course. We had left Robert's place about eight and waved farewell to his very pregnant wife Mary. As we drove up to the Club House on the Rangitikei Golf Course, the green keeper came frantically running down the hill to tell Robert that Mary was in labour. The rest of us played our round of golf while Robert drove furiously back to town (no one wanted to be with him during this frantic trip, as at the best of times he drove his car in a most energetic manner). As we putted out the final hole Robert drove up in a cloud of dust to announce that it was a girl.

Like everything else that he did, Robert's retirement from golf was abrupt and spectacular. 0n the 17th hole at Rangitikei you stand on a tee high above the fairway, with a shrub covered bank below, while the Club house looms above you. Robert, standing on the 17th tee, looked at the distant fairway far below, looked up at the members looking down at him with amused interest, looked at the golf clubs that he held in his hand and looking across at us said "I'm giving up the game." He turned and walked away, so we finished the round without him. Robert told us later that as he entered the golf Club the Club members had asked him whether he was the visiting professional golfer. Talk about "Make my day".

Robert Brooks although sadly otherwise inactive in the sporting sense, learned by reading the sports page to talk an excellent Kiwi sporting line at morning tea, and exchanged good natured and plausible sounding sports talk with Ken Jolley (no mean achievement given Robert's lack of sporting background).

A visitor to the department during the 1970's had confided to us that he never appointed anyone to his group without going out first to play a round of golf with them, to find out what they were really like. We all knew exactly what he meant and were glad that Massey University had not used that method of appointment.

Hockey was represented within the department by Buckley, Hancock and Elgar. During the term break the Massey hockey teams were often pushed to find enough players, and on one such Saturday afternoon. Dave Elgar and Paul Buckley played three games for three different Massey teams, scoring between them more than ten goals. In the last game an exhausted Dave Elgar just stood by the opposition 25 yard line and if the ball was hit to him hobbled into the circle to take a shot. Once he collapsed from tiredness as the opposing fullback approached him and the referee misunderstanding what had happened awarded him a penalty stroke. Paul Buckley made the Manawatu B team for a few matches, but generally even when he played well on the field the reporter misspelled his name, and negated any publicity that he might have received,

If tramping and walking are included as sports, then most of the rest of the department would have to be mentioned. Chris Moore in particular has been an active tramper, and people like Andrew Brodie, Graham Pritchard and even Ian Watson were and are keen walkers and explorers of the Manawatu and surrounding hills.

**The Department in Less Serious Mood**

One of the best April Fools day jokes ever played in the building was the changing of the buttons on the lifts. Depending on what you pushed you either ended up on a floor quite different from what you wanted, or did not move at all. All morning puzzled people left the lifts trying to work out what was wrong. No one confessed to the prank but by the afternoon of April lst everything was back to normal.

Alan Furness had a lively, if slightly sadistic, sense of humour. In the laboratory one day Andy Trow was about to clean some magnesium turnings in dilute hydrochloric acid for use in a Grignard Reaction. Alan could not resist asking if Andy was not afraid that the magnesium would all dissolve in the acid and be lost. Andy pooh-poohed the idea saying that he had cleaned it this way before and left the laboratory. Alan hurriedly removed and hid Andy's beaker and replaced it with an identical one filled to the same height with just dilute acid. He watched with scarcely concealed delight as Andy went around the building lamenting loudly his unexpected loss. In the end, Alan had to confess, but Andy Trow still clearly recalls the lost magnesium fifteen years later.

Jokes can of course also backfire. While Robert Brooks was on leave in Australia, in the tea room one lunch time Paul Buckley suggested to Ken Jolley and Roger Reeves that they should show Robert how easy this analytical chemistry really was. Boring yes, difficult no. Why not examine levels of lead in, for example, finger nails? Ken Jolley liked the idea and even Roger was intrigued, although he suggested we analyse lead levels in hair instead. So the die was cast. With the help of a technician and most of the barbers in town, hair samples were collected, along with an information sheet stating facts about each person's job, life, gender, etc. This was in the days before the University ethics committee existed, and no permission was asked for or given for the study. The barbers co-operated enthusiastically and soon Robert's laboratory smelt like a saloon with wet shampooed hair. Yes, duplicates were done, and careful dilutions carried out, and by the end of the summer, quality analytical results had been obtained not only for lead but for iron, magnesium and many other cations. The paper on lead in hair was duly published. The proposition that analytical chemistry was boring was proven to our satisfaction. However when Robert returned, he not only did he not see the joke, but he immediately entered with enthusiasm into the lead field himself, and soon had his students taking bark off trees in Fitzherbert Avenue, mowing grass on the motorway strip in central Auckland and slaughtering sheep that had grazed on the edges of busy roads, all in order to analyse for lead. Worse was to follow. Our "Lead in Hair" paper became a huge success. All the reprints were soon exhausted and more had to be run off at the printery this at a time when a paper on enzyme kinetics was exciting perhaps 20 to 30 requests for reprints. Several hundred were needed to meet the demand for "Lead in Hair. " One scientist in Vienna wrote to say that they spent time as a group discussing our important paper! The final nail in the coffin of a seriously back firing joke followed about a year after publication of the now famous paper. Paul Buckley was watching the news on TV, and became conscious of a scientist from Canterbury University talking about "lead in hair", "hair which would be collected from barbers in Christchurch". Now Paul was really listening closely. "Looking for correlations with occupation, gender etc". But that had already been done here at Massey University! Then the final humiliation. The work at Christchurch had not even begun, it was just being planned, but it was still being reported on national TV. So much for the media awareness of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department. We had wasted an opportunity for national exposure at a time when the only publicity we were getting was from the columns of that failed Biochemistry student, Tom Scott, in the Listeners.

The week before Merle Richardson was to be married, Peter Dodd as a pre-wedding joke, drove her small mini half way up the library ramp, and left it there festooned with toilet paper. Alan Stewart the VC was quick to spot it and after a hasty check on the license plate number was on the phone to Merle demanding its immediate removal. Merle loudly protested her innocence. Her car was she said in the car park. Alan Stewart could not be so easily dissuaded and Merle was soon seen driving it away.

Doug Davies prepared to leave one Thursday for his first Easter Holidays while at Massey University. As he departed, he called out "See you all Tuesday" and Noel Foot and the others were quick to sense the chance for a prank and just wished him a cheerful farewell. Doug duly arrives with his lunch on Tuesday morning ready for another good day's work, only to find nobody around. He opened the workshop, but was a little surprised to see no sign of Hodges. The lateness of the others remained a little puzzling as he worked on, but it was not until he came up into the main block around 9:15 am that he finally found someone who immediately demanded to know why on earth he was there. So it was that Doug learned that the University has a holiday on Easter Tuesday.

In the days when Dick Batt was in his most expansive mood, and no department in the Faculty seemed safe from his empire-building plans, Robert Brooks and Paul Buckley thought it would be a bit of a lark to produce a large portrait of Dick and hang it in the tea room to greet him on his return after the annual summer holidays. All the Deans and the VC had to take their holidays at the same time in order to prevent unexpected take-overs in their absence. It was a gentleman's agreement among the administrators; although with the VC away very little of substance could occur in any case. Robert threw himself into the plan with his usual tremendous energy. He had to combine four sheets of photography paper which had been exposed to slightly different extents for the final portrait in order to get a picture large enough. The resulting effect was much like the cross wires of a telescopic sight on a rifle, aimed at Dick's face. Robert mounted it crudely and covered it with Perspex. Having done so much he hesitated and lost his nerve. Should it be hung? What would Dick think? It was only when Paul Buckley agreed to do the actual hanging that Robert regained his enthusiasm for the project. After the common room hanging, Paul left for his annual holiday and while he was absent Dick returned saw the portrait and naturally wanted to know who had hung it. Robert fell over himself with embarrassment. He did not want to tell tales, but he could not bear Dick to think that he might have to take all the credit. In a series of obvious analogies, such as referring to Buckley as a friend with left wing persuasions, he effectively named his collaborator. In the event Dick's reaction was only mild amusement but the portrait spent the next ten years in Paul Buckley's office, rather than in the common room.

I wish it could be said that the staff of the Department had escaped the commercial greed that can lead to speculation in the stock market. Sadly they didn't. When the share market showed its first signs of real movement in the distant 70s, and it seemed likely that oil might be struck in Taranaki, a syndicate of staff including Brooks, Batt and Buckley decided to take the plunge and buy some speculative shares. After much soul searching, the group bought shares in Waihi mining and some in a Taranaki oil exploration company. The price paid for Waihi Mining was only about 50 cents a share, but still much higher than the 10 to 15 cents it had previously been selling for. Ken Jolley away on holiday looked at the price and wondered which idiots were buying the shares at that price. In the following weeks graphs were put onto the common room notice board and the price of the shares plotted every day. It was endlessly fascinating to see the rise and fall of the prices, but at first the rises were greater than the falls. Then in short order the exploration company found signs of oil, and the price of the shares dropped. These capitalists could not believe their eyes. The price was halved. No one bothered to plot more points on the graph. Everyone just waited and hoped the price would recover. Only the sensible voice of Dick Batt urged the group to sell and take their losses. After months of dithering, the shares were finally sold with the despised Waihi making a slight profit, but the glamour oil shares giving us a large net loss. Even in the golden days of the share market in the mid to late 80's no one suggested forming another share investment group in the tea room.

On capping day in 1993, a large portrait of Bart Simpson appeared at the main gate of the University, with a blackboard behind with the lines "I must not steal blackboard dusters" written many times. Paul Buckley was sufficiently amused to stop his car and walk back to ake a photograph of the stunt. However after twenty minutes of his nine o'clock lecture, he turned to pick up a duster only to find there were none. The full extent of the stunt slowly dawned on him as he rushed off to find the Janitor and get another duster. By four o'clock on that same day, he had forgotten completely about Bart Simpson, but then twenty minutes into his second lecture of the day, he again found all the dusters missing from that same lecture room. This time he was a little quicker in appreciating the joke, but had still not bothered to check for dusters before the lecture began. Hundreds of dusters were removed university wide on that one capping day, later to be returned safely.

**After the Lecturing there is the Assessing: Two sides of the Same Coin?**

Demonstrations were always part of the first year lecturing program.

One of the more memorable involved releasing gas-filled soap bubbles and lighting them as they floated towards the ceiling of the Marsden Lecture theatres. Before Len Blackwell tried the demonstration for the first time he ran through a practice the day before with John Ayers, and everything worked perfectly. The next day in his lecture he darkened the theatre as he prepared to begin. He lit the taper to ignite the bubbles, switched on the gas and hurriedly held the rubber tube below the surface of the soap solution. Unfortunately, as he quickly realised, he had opened the gas tap too far and instead of nice soap bubbles forming and floating upwards, the gas was bubbling out of the surface rapidly and with too much force to form the required bubbles. "I must turn down the gas" he thought, but then he realised that he had no spare hand to do this. In the practice the previous day, with two people, there had been no problem, but now he needed three hands. 250 students were watching expectantly. He hesitated for one fatal moment, and the next second there was a loud report and a blinding blue and red flash as the cloud of gas ignited all at once. The students in the front rows leap back startled, and after a moments stunned silence, the lecture theatre erupted in loud and continuous clapping and cheers. Len had made a hit and seriously singed his hair and eyebrows. As a footnote Len points out that when he requested help from a student for this demonstration in the repeat lecture later in the week no one would come forward. News of the explosion had spread too fast.

Len often shared the first few lectures of Cell Biology with Bill Hancock, a most laid back individual. Len recalls one year when he tried to show a set of slides of such things as yeast and spermoza to the class, he discovered they had all been dropped and mixed up after Bill's lecture earlier in the day and not resorted. Len had to improvise his way through the slides never knowing what would be next. Bill was totally unphased when Len complained to him of the problem.

Later in the same week an old Open University film about the cell was also shown to both streams. Bill bless his relaxed old heart set the film going and walked up to the back of the darkened class, out the back stairs and got a cup of coffee, returning only as the film ended. Len, with no prior warning, set things up for the repeat showing in the afternoon. The film was so old that it created some amusement each year, so Len was not surprised as he wandered to the back of the class to hear some amused giggles. When he finally looked up to the screen he saw showing clearly through the flickering movie a sketch of a huge erect penis and the words "Mr T is a prick" written beside it in large letters. The screen had been vandalised and the authorities had painted over the sketch in white so that it became invisible to the eye until a film was projected onto it. Len could only limply apologise at the end of the showing, and later demand to know why an unrepentant Bill hadn't warned him.

Roger Reeves was lecturing in the Marsden as the first moon walk was about to take place. It kept being delayed but with about twenty minutes remaining in the lecture, it became clear to those monitoring progress through earphones on small radios that the famous first step was about to take place. As the murmurings increased, Roger, calm and determined to the last, made a pact with the class. The radios could be turned up and he would stop talking so they could hear, but he would continue writing, and they would continue taking notes. And so that strange lecture went to its conclusion with the historic commentary from the moon sounding around the class, with the lecturer silently writing on the board and the students silently taking notes. Roger had completed another class on schedule regardless of the history being made elsewhere in the Universe.

Most of the incidents in classes end up being for the amusement of the students and the discomfort of the lecturer. Occasionally things are reversed. Paul Buckley was well launched into his Marsden Chemistry lecture when the door opened and a fair-haired student came hurrying in, obviously very embarrassed at arriving late. His eyes lit up as he spotted an empty seat in the middle of the front row and he rushed toward it. To get into it as quickly and unobtrusively as possible (although this was by now becoming increasingly impossible as the class began to watch his flustered entrance with mild amusement) he quickly sat on the bench and slid backwards over and down onto the seat. Unfortunately in his haste he had forgotten that the seats in the Marsden Lecture Theatre flip up when no one is seated. Instead of arriving on a seat he disappeared from sight, except for a pair of legs and a pair of hands flapping futilely in the air. After a pause of a second the legs disappeared and a bright red face appeared as the whole class and the lecturer dissolved into laughter. It was as the lecturer was moved to comment, "A very hard act to follow"!

One year in those early days Roger Reeves discovered some new technology, namely the overhead projector. But not the much abused but now familiar projector of today with its individual transparencies. Instead these monsters had roles of transparent film on which to write everything. New to the task Roger steadily rolled the pre-prepared lecture before the students as they wrote desperately to try to record the fast moving material. One student said he had no memory of what was taught in the class but still got nine pages of notes.

Rex Gallagher was someone who always endeavoured to liven up his classes with unexpected demonstrations. Sometimes his demonstration did not necessarily relate directly to the course content, but they were always memorable. I still don't know how he explained away the significance of this demonstration but for many years he would have a technician unexpectedly drop a stack of metal bars of different lengths in the middle of his first-year lecture. The sound was amazing and certainly memorable. In his third-year lectures on spectroscopy, Rex would suddenly, with no warning, begin to jump up and down and noisily break glassware. Startled students thought that he had lost his marbles and wondered whether to run from the class to get help. Rex finally calmed down, and pointed out how he had dramatically demonstrated the excited state in spectroscopy. Students from his class, 20 or more years later, can still recall this demonstration.

The department has never been notable for the willingness of the academics to experiment with new teaching methods. Conservative some would say. Solidly exploiting and retaining what worked best would be the reply. On the suggestion of a sabbatical visitor from Australia, Paul Buckley and Len Blackwell did for a couple of years use the technique of Tandem Lecturing when teaching glycolysis to students in the Organic and Biological Chemistry Paper. Each lecture was scripted with first Paul and then Len making his contribution. It provided variety for the class, and it was a fun experience for them both. The luciferase demonstration used in these lectures required a complete act of faith, as after the solution was aerated, the lights of the Marsden were turned off, and the entire class had to wait in total darkness for an endless one or two minutes, before if everything went well, the solution lit up with a beautiful blue light. It was comforting to have another staff member to ab-lib through this endless wait.

Remembering a lecture and getting to the right room on time, not always as easy as it sounds. In one rather disastrous year, Robert Brooks forgot completely to go to his first 100-level lecture in the Inorganic and Physical Chemistry course. A late reminder in the tea room from a student sent him scurrying to his second lecture in the series. Then determined not to forget again, he arrived in good time and launched into his third lecture, only to be interrupted by a slightly late and rather annoyed Rod Thomas, who demanded to know why Robert was lecturing to his Plant Biology class.

Mark Patchett can be forgiven from thinking that his first lecture to second year biochemistry was in the Marsden Lecture theatre, but he was puzzled as to why the students were all ignoring his handouts. It became clearer when Chris Epp arrived ready to lecture to his Cell Biology class and Mark was left to hurry across to the Old Building in search of the missing class.

For many years the Cell Biology laboratory was run in the (then Interim now permanent) Biology building on the road to the Sports Centre. Conditions were rather primitive and fume hood space at a premium. Alastair MacGibbon has memories of his first Cell Biology Lab class with Ted Richards in charge. In those early days Ted had a habit of yelling at the top of his voice at every class he had contact with. On this occasion he boomed out a comment about people not playing about, just as one nervous student had cautiously opened a drawer to look at the precious quick fit glassware that it contained. The sound of Ted' s voice so startled him that the drawer popped out and all the glassware shattered with a loud crashing noise on the floor. Ted's cries became even louder.

Residue bottles were unheard of back in the early 1970s. Students from the Cell Biology laboratory recall, almost with affection, the regular ether fires which popped their way up each sink when a student carelessly threw a match into the end sink amongst the ether fumes rising out of the drain.

In the Cell Biology laboratory, Ted Richards and Dick Hodges were like the original Odd Couple of TV fame. Ted ran things like a military operation, with loud orders and no departures from established procedures. Dick Hodges was very laid back and very much into the "Why don't we try that ..." mode of operation. In the background Christine Young ran a splendidly efficient ship from the technical point of view.

The rubber hoses on the water pumps on student benches in the 1970s were sometimes not connected with the correct high pressure tubing. Alan Furness, when demonstrating, would turn the water on to full to try to get maximum suck from the pumps. In one memorable teaching laboratory, five of these hoses ballooned out at different times and exploded, soaking Alan, the students and their work books.

On another occasion Alan Furness asked an overseas student to hold a flask full of acid and vanadium while he, Alan, went to get a clamp. Alan turned away only to find the English as a-second-language student had not understood his carefully enunciated instructions and had also turned and was now standing beside him, as the now unsupported flask crashed down onto Alan's new suede shoes. He was not amused.

At the end of 1968 there was a major confrontation over the pass rate for the 200-level chemistry students within the Department. At least two of the three new, and very green, staff members (Blackwell, Buckley and Jolley) had been energetically teaching the class all year, and had written what they imagined to be an eminently fair examination. The performances of many students suggest otherwise. Dick Batt was adamant that the pass rate had to be raised by passing students with marks in the 40s. Buckley and Blackwell disagreed and stood firm on a matter of what they perceived to be their standards and their principles. At first the more senior staff (those who had been there at least a year or two longer than Buckley and Blackwell) seemed to support the idealistic and rather arrogant stance of the two new staff, but gradually one by one they folded in the face of Dick's reasonable arguments. Even Hodges and Reeves in the end toed the line, and then Buckley and Blackwell had to agree as well. They had received a good lesson both about the meaning of grades and the exercise of power.

Geoff Malcolm was rather surprised at the pass rates at 100-level in the 1970s, usually around 55% compared to the 85% of Otago University. It was not long before the Applied Science Faculties began to get a little concerned at the failure rate of their future students, and a minimum pass rate at 100-Ievel was decreed and handed down as an order from above. Suddenly all these courses were marked to a curve and the question from all the students became whether they were or were not in the lower quartile of the class. The desire to pontificate about the inevitable loss of standards which would result from this assessment procedure became for some staff irresistible. To offer any different point of view was regarded in the same way as an attack on mothers and apple pies.

At an early Biochemistry examiners meeting, Dick Batt picked up the results for one class, glanced down and said, "wel1 shall we take those with 46 and above as having passed." Malcolm Chick, new to the department and attending his first examiners' meeting, let out a loud exclamation, "Bloody Hell', then realised what he had said and turned bright pink. So began an extended discussion on the cutting mark, with Dick battling to achieve his objective in the face of stiff opposition from some of the Biochemistry Staff.

These early confrontations were the fore runners of what became an annual event: The Examiners' Meetings. As the years passed the meetings became more and more predictable and because of that more and more tense. The point of dispute was always the pass-fail border line mark. At 100-1evel this is no longer a problem, as there is a minimum pass rate, and if the cutting mark has to be set at 42% then so be it. However, for higher levels each course is discussed each year before the final cutting mark is decided. Always those on 50% pass and usually those with 49% also are accepted. Beyond that the division becomes more and more acrimonious. In a paper where there is a clear division of several marks between that pass mark and the mark of the first failing student things go smoothly. If little separates the students at the cutting mark the arguments really begin in earnest. It was "the wets" versus "the drys", or "the bleeding hearts" versus "the concrete heads". Both sides have their established philosophical positions. On the one hand standards have to be maintained, and of course everyone agrees on that. It is just that one side feels that if any mark below 49 is passed then standards have definitely taken a tumble, while the other side feels that the finals paper in this particular year is perhaps harder or written differently from the previous year, and this should be taken into account The concrete heads feel that by the time the pass mark has been taken to 49, they have already bent over backward to be fair and any further arguments are irrelevant, while the bleeding hearts feel that the error in the production of exam papers and in the performance of students means that the absolute error in a given mark is significant and that some flexibility has to be maintained in approaching the results for each paper The drys feel that it is best for the border-line student to repeat the paper, while the wets feel that a year is a long time in anyone's life and in cases of doubt it is better to give the student the chance to perform at the next level. When, with a cutting mark at 49%, the percentage of students passing a paper is much lower than in previous years, the concrete heads are quick to point out that this shows what a poor bunch of students are in this particular year's class, while the bleeding hearts are equally quick to draw attention to the significant differences in this year's finals paper. One thing that the bleeding hearts quickly learned was that the concrete heads treat any mark as God-given and absolute. If the final mark is 50 or above the concrete heads are silent and satisfied, regardless of the calculation that has gone in to transform it from the initial final exam paper mark to the composite grade based on continuous assessment, provided of course they are not shown the raw finals mark.

As the arguments and the individual positions of the staff became more established with time the meetings became more difficult. A veil of secrecy must be drawn over which staff adopted which positions. Perhaps it can be guessed. The influx of new staff in the 1990s has freshened the debate, which will continue as it has in the past in fairness to all students who take courses within the Department.

More dramatic responses to perceived lack of performance by students seemed possible back in the 1970s. On one memorable occasion Ken Jolley was so annoyed by what he thought was a blatant example of student cheating, that he threw the students laboratory book down the stairs and threatened to throw the student after it.

Alan Furness (acting as a marker in the course) similarly was not pleased when he received 16 laboratory reports from one student late in the second year physical chemistry course which were both carelessly done and which seemed to have been copied. He wrote in large letters the word CRAP on the write ups and demanded that everyone be done again. The student was spitting tacks and threatened to kill the demonstrator (Stewart Gumbly) who he mistakenly believed was responsible for the cements.

Fairly, or unfairly, the following riddle was carved into the desk of a lecture theatre that Graeme Midwinter used. "Question: What does Graeme Midwinter think that students and computer cards have in common? Answer: You have to punch both to get information into them."

**And There shall be Fires and Floods**

The very first fire took place at that time when myth substitutes for reality. The one and only chemical research laboratory in the Old Massey building caught fire during the night. By the time the fire was extinguished through lack of oxygen, the room had been effectively gutted. The VC, Alan Stewart, was not amused by the chemists' conflagration and his humour was not improved when he met Robert Brooks in the corridor next morning. Robert conscious of the major buildings that were beginning to appear around the campus remarked good naturedly with a smile when he saw the VC, "Good Morning Dr. Stewart, bad luck last night, but at least you're building them faster than we're burning them down."

The second major fire took place just a few years later. The third-year Inorganic laboratory class was proceeding on its calm way, when suddenly the fire alarm bells began to sound. Expecting another false alarm, the laboratory supervisor slightly irritably moved out into the corridor to check that the fire alarm bells were really ringing and that they were not going to stop suddenly yet again. Switching his eyes from the clanging of the bells to the top of the stair well down the corridor, he saw a pall of black smoke rising up the stair well. It was real.

By the time the students had been shepherded out the fire escape at the end of the building the smoke was starting to appear below the fume hoods in the fourth level laboratory. Neil Whitehead, taking time out from composing bagpipe music in that slightly unmusical hum of his, remarked that perhaps the smoke was something to do with the fire alarm. The Supervisor blandly agreed and they set off after the students. By this time smoke was coming down the corridor, and it was clear that the supervisor would have been better served if he had shut the smoke door at the top of the stairs. Suddenly David MacKay, (who was in charge of the chemistry store) appeared on the top platform of the fire escape wanting to get the breathing apparatus, which of course was in a cupboard halfway down the now totally smoke filled corridor. Nevertheless David bravely set off to try to rescue the breathing apparatus only to emerge coughing and spluttering a few minutes later. Yes, the the Laboratory Supervisor was remiss in not shutting those smoke doors, however, he prided himself on his calmness as the 300 level students had not even seen the smoke or realised that there was a big fire when they evacuated the laboratory.

Over in the Registry Building, Professor Malcolm was told that the fire engines were going to his building. He hurried out to be confronted by a thin stream of smoke coming out of the vents at the top of the building and came hurrying across the campus to join in the fun as the fire engines arrived. In the fourth level research laboratory of tower B, Len Blackwell was still busily going about his research, completely unaware of the drama that was taking place just down the corridor. Only as he emerged for lunch did he smell the smoke, and wonder what on earth was going on.

Other people should report the drama that had taken place at the seat of the fire on level 3 of tower A outside the Chemical Store, where an entire trolley had toppled a load of organic solvents and strong acids onto the floor. This lively mix of chemicals fumed ominously as Ken Jolley, leaving his teaching post in the 300-level Chemistry laboratory, struggled with the fire hose and tried to get water to dilute the rapidly warming soup of chemicals. There were unfortunately two taps that had to be turned on before the water would flow. Before the mysteries of the taps could be resolved, the whole mixture exploded into flames. Students in the 200-level laboratory looked through the glass section at the top of the door to see a sheet of orange flames fill their view. Ken Jolley hastily evacuated the laboratory, with some students now having to crawl along a corridor filled with dense black smoke. Graeme Midwinter and David MacKay continued a desperate but totally unsuccessful attempt to stop the holocaust.

This first fire really honed the department's fire fighting skills and led to regular practice evacuations. Staff at last began to shut the occasional smoke door.

As a result of this fire, selected Staff were asked one sunny November day whether they would like to learn how to use the breathing apparatus, which had sat for so long unused in boxes in the corridor. Paul Buckley, Ken Jolley, David MacKay, Roger Reeves and a few others signed up for what seemed like a fun way to fill a couple of hours. However they did not know that the Fire Service were planning a full breathing apparatus training course, similar to one they take their own firemen through. Paul Buckley found that he had to remove his strong glasses to fit the mask securely on his face, and then after the face mask steamed up as well, he was virtually totally blind. This as it turned out mattered little, because the training course took place in total darkness in the hot service tunnels running beneath the campus. The climax of the course was a search through these tunnels for a "lost fireman". As the team set off in the inky blackness, Ken Jolley took charge and organised us all in the search. Under his firm direction, it was not long before the missing man was located hidden amongst some pipes. We had to drag the "unconscious" man out and four people carried him one to each arm and each leg back up the tunnel. Unfortunately we had no way of knowing that in the centre of the tunnel there was a ladder leading up to a manhole cover. The unfortunate fireman had his head rammed against the invisible ladder in what must be one of the more ineffectual rescues on record. Surprisingly we passed the course.

When the major fire on level 4 of tower B broke out on December 12th 1989, only the cleaners were around to hear the sounds of exploding containers, before they rapidly left the building to the professional fire-fighters. When Paul Buckley arrived around eight o'clock there were fire engines and hoses spread out in front of the building. He found himself aimlessly wondering why on earth the fire brigade was holding a practice at this time in the morning. Vern Chettleburgh walked by and said you can forget about working in that building for a couple of days. Certainly the hideous fumes (quite noticeable even from a safe distance in the car park) drove the present writer from the building for a couple of days, but the British spirit of let's go on as if nothing has happened led to most of the building being used later the same day. Gavin Hedwig was in the level 4 Physical Chemistry laboratory across the corridor, grumbling about the fire and cleaning bench tops just hours after the fire was put out. The secretaries had to battle for days to get their stinking carpets replaced after water from the fire soaked down through the floors. You can be too British and stiff upper lip in these things. I also take my hat off to those who actually went in (for example Andy Trow, Mark Bown and Scott Ingham) to clean up the toxic, foul smelling cocktail of chemicals in the laboratory, and also to the workers who tore out the burnt furniture a week later.

Scott Ingham lost records of two years of laboratory work toward his PhD. Although initially devastated, Scott in his usual determined manner repeated all the essential laboratory work within six months. Mark Bown had carefully taken carbon copies of all his laboratory records but had unfortunately left them all in his laboratory notebook, which was near the seat of the fire. Five years later Joyce Waters was still copying the charred remains of spectra and other records to salvage the damaged records.

As to the cause of this large fire, the truth will never be known. The door had been blown off a fridge used to house protein crystals, which should not have been used to store flammable solvents. It was also true that there had been a major clean out of a cold room on the preceding Friday, and everyone had been searching for additional refrigerator space to store valuable samples. Apart from that everything is just speculation.

Smaller laboratory fires were of course much more common

In the early 1970's, Robin Pierson, an honours student working with Len Blackwell and Paul Buckley, was trying to dissolve a barbiturate in ether. It was proving a difficult task, and he placed the more than two litres of ether in a beaker on a hot plate in the fume hood to warm gently and left the laboratory. Shortly afterwards Alan Furness with his back to the fume hood was talking to Alastair MacGibbon, when suddenly Alan saw Alastair's eyes open wide in amazement. Two litres of ether had caught fire and a great tongue of flame was rising up the fume hood. Alan watched in startled disbelief as Alastair sprang past him, ignoring Alan's learned conversation and headed for the seat of the fire. As Alastair explained later, it seemed to him that if the carbon dioxide extinguisher were used there might be a danger of blowing the flames back into the crowd of bottles of toxic chemicals at the back of the hood thus spreading the fire and increasing the danger. Instead Alastair grabbed the fire blanket, and joined by the suddenly aware Alan Furness, bravely swung the beaker of ether onto the floor with a crash and flung the fire blanket over the top. By this time the secretaries from their office adjoining the Physical Chemistry laboratory had heard the commotion and were peering in fascination through the top of the glass doors at the flames and the frantic activity. Unfortunately the fire blanket was so porous that the ether vapour came straight through and the fire continued on the outside of the blanket and on the hands of Alan and Alastair. By this time Len Blackwell was somewhat ineffectually squirting at the fire with the carbon dioxide extinguisher from what he regarded as a safe distance, and with his help the flames were finally put out. At this point Robin Pierson returned to the laboratory, saw the smashed beaker on the floor, assumed the worst of Alan and Alastair, abused them for their carelessness and stormed out of the laboratory.

One of the notable sights in the department was to see Dick Hodges dealing with a solvent fire in the teaching laboratory which had spread up and down the bench. He would grab the nearest tea towels and dance up and down flapping the cloth on the flames like some demented sea gull, but his slightly ungainly technique certainly seemed to work.

In the 1970s Paul Buckley and Len Blackwell had been doing work with potassium t-butoxide, which was prepared by dissolving metallic potassium in t-butyl alcohol. One day Paul tipped the remains of the solution of potassium t-butoxide into the sink, little knowing that a tiny fragment of potassium remained unreacted. A solid pillar of deep orange flames rose out of the sink, and the next thing that Paul knew was that he was standing out in the corridor looking through the glass at the top of the door, as a calm Ken Jolley doused the fire with the CO2 extinguisher. Self-preservation is a wonderful thing.

In the 1980s there were two puzzling fires in the 100-level preparation room. In both cases they began in the rubbish bags, and at about the same time in the teaching year. The first fire simply burned itself out overnight destroying the rubbish bag and charring the adjoining bench, while the second was discovered by Geoff Williams, a PhD. student, late in the evening and extinguished with a fire extinguisher. Fortunately they have not continued to recur, as the department was starting to get rather rude memos from the Registry about these annual events.

David Elgar describes seeing Alastair Bingham running down the laboratory with the back of his laboratory coat on fire as he desperately sort to remove it as quickly as possible. He had been preparing potassium ethoxide by dissolving potassium in ethanol. Somehow the flask had broken spraying Alastair with ethanol and flames as the potassium caught fire. Yes, he escaped without injury.

Floods were never as memorable or as spectacular as fires although they were probably even more common. They were, however, much more work to clean up.

At times flooding occurred so regularly that there seemed to be almost an unspoken arrangement between the flooder and the floodee. For example Rose Motion often used to leave the water running in the sink with the plug in as she prepared to wash her dishes. Just as regularly she forgot about the water and Kathy Kitson would come hurrying up the stairs from the Alcohol Research Laboratory below to get her to stem the flow of water yet again.

The mother of all floods occurred overnight when a mains water pipe burst in the service rooms on top of tower A. Dave Elgar was one of the first to arrive the next morning, and found water running along the floor on level 1 by the lift. When he got to level 4 he found that the whole 400-level teaching laboratory floor was afloat with several centimetres of water. There was a desperate search to try to find someone with a key to the service area where the water was coming out from, to try to stem the flow. For several hours afterwards the floor was patiently sucked dry with squeegees starting from level 4 and working down.

In the early 1990s large floods were occurring so frequently, and to such devastating effect, that the University Administration began to worry about the University losing its insurance cover. The HOD received a stiff little note from the VC requesting that flooding in the department should cease and desist (as if we were doing them deliberately). Little plastic roofs appeared over all expensive equipment, and not before time given the soaking that equipment such as the stopped-flow spectrophotometer had received in the previous week. The VC's stand against floods was certainly more successful than the fabled King Canute's attempts to stop the tides.

Chemicals generate their own accidents.

In the teaching laboratory in the old Massey Building, a student decided to shorten the route which was being used to clean out the Gooch crucibles after the gravimetric determination of a copper complex. Everyone else washed the copper complex away with water before adding concentrated nitric acid to complete the cleaning. This student cut out the water wash and added acid directly to the copper. The resulting explosion spread brown fumes and acid over the back of an adjoining student, who Sylvia hurriedly removed for cleaning. Fortunately no serious damage was done.

Dave Elgar is a fund of stories about the department. Perhaps not surprisingly these do not feature David Elgar himself. He describes David Harding inadvertently emptying a Winchester of concentrated sulfuric acid over his canvas shoes, when the bottle broke at the neck while he was pouring the acid. He did not panic but simply lifted first one foot up into the sink and flooded it with water and then the other. However when they both looked down afterwards the shoes had gone except for the soles, the lace eyelets and the laces. His wool socks were undamaged.

Dave Elgar was not so amused when David Harding poured a solution saturated with phosgene down the fume hood sink, forgetting that the gas would return through the pipes into the laboratory. After a hasty evacuation, everyone stayed away for a few hours while the ventilation system cleared the air.

Dave Elgar also described how Geoff Bethel, a Post Doctoral Fellow working with John Ayers, splattered the ceiling with caustic soda. For many years afterwards the ceiling kept slowly flaking paint. Geoff Bethel was a keen runner who always went for a run when things were not going well. At least he stayed in good condition.

It was that same Dave Elgar who one morning when he went in to use the ice machine found the 300-level chemistry laboratory flooded with mercury. A mercury bulb for use with the manometer had been left with its tap open.

In a 100-level laboratory class one morning the students were diluting concentrated sulphuric acid to determine the heat capacity of the Dewar flasks which functioned as Calorimeters. Afterwards they poured the diluted acid down the sink. The unmistakable and unpleasant smell of hydrogen sulphide began to fill the laboratory. There seemed to be no where it could be coming from but still it kept coming. Rotten eggs is the description given in the textbooks, but the smell is worse than that. Of course things get even worse as H2S builds up so much that you can't smell it, because then you are in real danger of being killed by this very toxic gas. Paul Buckley cleared the lab, and on further investigation it was found that Patsy Watson's class of diploma students had been using lumps of iron sulphide in the morning and despite repeated calls from Patsy not to, had washed some lumps down the sink and into the traps at the end of the bench. The laboratory had inadvertently become a hydrogen sulphide generator, when the 100-level students added the acid.

Alan Furness recalls the day when Andrew Brodie was working in the laboratory. Andrew had prepared a tiny amount of some new complex in its perchlorate form and Alan good naturedly reminded him to be careful, since he thought that he had been told that perchlorates were explosive. Andrew was quick to reply "Not if you know what you're doing", and continued to think about the IR he was planning to run. A minute later Alan at the other end of the laboratory heard a sharp report like a .303 rifle firing and hurried back to find a white faced Andrew Brodie holding the rim of the beaker with the rest shattered into a thousand pieces by the perchlorate detonation.

Andrew's collaborator Eric Ainscough also prodded lightly with his spatula at the new perchlorate complex which Helen Bergen had freshly filtered in the fume cupboard. There was a sudden explosion and Eric was knocked to the floor. Andrew Brodie hearing the bang, came hurrying into the laboratory to find Eric still lying stunned on the floor with Helen hovering above him unsure what she should do. Not every graduate student gets to knock out her supervisor.

A summer student (who had completed 200 level chemistry only) was working for David Officer, when he was asked to prepare a solution of sodium hydroxide. It seemed a straight forward enough request, as there was little danger involved in dissolving pellets of sodium hydroxide in water. However the students instead weighed out 72 grams of metallic sodium and added that directly to water. The resulting explosion fortunately was directed straight toward the ceiling, and the student miraculously escaped injury, although the laboratory was entirely coated in a thin film of sodium hydroxide, and had to be scrupulously cleaned.

Chemists live such dangerous lives.

**Research Students and Research**

Life in the Physical Chemistry laboratory with Rose Motion and Alan Furness around was never dull.

Rose Motion tells of the problems that she had with the venetian blinds on the sunny side of the level 4 laboratory of Tower B. Then, as now, sunglasses and sun cream were needed in the winter when the sun and the central heating combined to make useful work almost impossible in the laboratory when the blinds were up. The blinds were damaged and could not be lowered but all Rose's requests to Vern Sixtus to have them fixed were ignored. Then Kathy Kitson told Rose what happened when the blinds in her lab were not hanging in a nice regular way. Alan Stewart the VC was so upset that he ordered something to be done immediately. Within minutes Rose was standing a little unsteadily on a stool cutting through the strings on one side of the blinds so that they hung at a crazy angle. Within one hour Dick Batt rushed into the lab to say that the VC had been on the phone demanding that the blinds be fixed. The offending blinds were taken down but not of course replaced.

Vern Sixtus had a way of ignoring requests from graduate students. In this same laboratory the university clock began to behave very strangely. At about 5 minutes after each hour the minute hand would sink rapidly to the bottom and remain there until about five minutes before the hour when it would wind into action to reach the hour more or less in the correct position. Only to repeat the whole procedure each following hour. Of course nothing was done. When the time was changed and the clocks put back or forward an hour, the clock would fail even to make the effort to reach the half hour, and just go madly from one hour to the next just before each hour was due. In the end the clock was removed for repairs, but not returned. Finally in desperation Rose and others from the laboratory sneaked into the new Tower D while it was being furnished and pinched a new clock to fill the gap. The clock worked perfectly. Nothing was ever said about a missing clock and a new clock duly appeared to fill the gap in Tower D.

When he was in charge of the chemical stores, David McKay instituted a system by which graduate students could receive credit to their accounts if they returned equipment or chemicals to the store. In this way David hoped to make full use of the resources of the department and not have large amounts of equipment sitting in the laboratories not being used. It was a fine plan and deserved to succeed. Unfortunately most people preferred to have equipment and chemicals near at hand on the bench in case they ever wanted to use them again, rather than back in the store. In fact even when a student finished up there was a tendency for the equipment to be retained by others in that same laboratory, or at least all the more valuable and hard to get equipment was retained.

However there was one most notable exception. Alan Furness learned of David's credit system and was delighted with the possibilities. From that day forth he set to work to ensure that he would acquire a credit not only on his own personal account, but also in terms of the good will he would get from an eternally grateful David MacKay. Nothing was now safe in the laboratory. Beakers and flasks left too long unattended were scrupulously washed and returned for credit. Bottles of chemicals unused for any length of time, were suddenly back in the store, and again Alan's credit rating grew. David MacKay took to dropping the word in Alan's ear if he felt that someone was squirreling away unused equipment, and Alan swooped. Together they became a fearsome duo as Alan's credit continued to grow

Not everyone was happy with this new zealous approach to equipment return. Keith Mackie sometimes had to check out the same chemical from the store several times (and once twice in one day), and his debit grew inversely as Alan's credit expanded. He was furious. Len Blackwell had spent three or four years collecting a grey sludge of silver residues which he stored in his locker and intended to recycle to recover the valuable silver. He could not believe his eyes when he returned one day to find that it was gone. Angry and upset he buttoned holed Alan who, although surprised at the response, confessed that he had indeed cleaned out the beaker and returned it to the store. Then he then made the fatal mistake of attacking back. "But it's been sitting in your locker for four years and you've done nothing with it." Len went through the roof and was still muttering about it some months later. After 20 years he can recall the incident with terrible clarity.

When Alan finally ended his PhD, over three trolley loads of equipment were taken from his locker, and still he had more than $7000 worth of credit in his store account. In a recent statement he said that by his accounting the department now owes him about $500,000, taking into the account the compounding of interest at market rates. I can only recommend that the department pay as soon as possible and cut its losses.

Alan Furness watched in amazement as John Shaw used gloves to reach into the ugly and corrosive chromic acid cleaning solution to retrieve his glassware. John assured Alan that the gloves provided perfect protection. Alan decided to try. Perhaps there was water on the gloves, but as he plunged his hands cautiously into the chromic acid, it felt as if they had catch fire. The heat was phenomenal. He afterwards returned to the use of tongs to retrieve his glassware.

Alan Furness also had the memorable experience of travelling up in the lift during a sharp earthquake. After banging his way up the lift-well he emerged pale faced on level 4 convinced that serious repairs were needed. Either this earthquake, or a subsequent one, so damaged the join between the main towers and the link towers that quite major repairs were needed. In a force 7 to 8 earthquake level 4 of tower B is not the place to be. Whoever is there risks being cut off from the stairs at both ends, and trapped without a fire escape, while the chemicals that have fallen off the shelves and broken cause fires with toxic smoke. The least the University could do is supply a rope ladder.

When Dick Batt's name is mentioned it is impossible not to think of alcohol, breathalysers and the metabolism of alcohol. He targeted these as areas of research of national importance where there was potentially large amounts of funding available from the tax on liquor. Working with Bob Greenway and others, Dick set up the Alcohol Research Unit and was fortunate to have such outstanding researchers as Kathy Kitson, Kathryn Stowell and Allan Stowell working in it. In later days, the politics of alcohol began to dominate Dick's life and he was often in the press or on TV making statements about alcohol, which sometimes did not sit well with the funding bodies. He became an expert witness in many trials and in this way raised money for a fund which was used to support many departmental social activities including the staff-student evenings.

The dividing walls throughout the Science Towers (at least all those which were not part of the concrete core) are notoriously thin. Staff in adjacent offices in the link towers are able to talk to each other through the walls without raising their voices. A private phone call was and is impossible. In the days before male staff left their doors open when talking to female students in their offices to avoid claims of sexual harassment, an unwilling listening ear in the next office always provided the ideal defence witness against any false accusation.

The graduate students in the Dick Batt's alcohol research Unit did not at first appreciate this peculiarity of the building. Dick Batt's office was just through the wall, with a convenient door from the secretaries' office into the laboratory. One afternoon Terry Braggins, Allan Stowell and Pandora Evans were drawing extended and hilarious analogies between the gas-liquid chromatograph and the more intimate details of the human reproductive apparatus. As unlikely as it might appear, to them the possibilities seemed limitless and certainly the descriptions were picturesque.

Later that day Allan Stowell had cause to visit Dick in his office and while there was surprised to hear voices from the adjacent laboratory. Dick noticing Alan's reaction raised an eyebrow and giving him a knowing look said, "I can hear every word you say next door." Alan's hurried return to the laboratory with the unexpected news led to some rather subdued conversations over the next few days.

Of course the thin walls were soon forgotten, and a week or so later Dick Batt had to interrupt the loud sounds of a laboratory water-bottle fight, which were rather disrupting his learned conversations with a distinguished visitor.

Then there was the Alcohol Research Group's famous or notorious (depending on your point of view) studies of alcohol metabolism in live human subjects. The volunteers were a varied collection of academic staff, fellow graduate students, flatmates and anyone else that could be talked into drinking about a third of a bottle of gin or the vodka equivalent, and then allowing blood samples to be taken. The room where these experiments were carried out became known as chunder alley. Bob Greenway, a joint supervisor of the project, was a little disgraced when he was unable to complete the experiment when it was his turn to be the guinea pig. Flatmates were a particular hazard, as when well alight after supping their alcohol, they always wanted to help the researchers redesign the projects rather than to submit meekly to the next measurement. It is less edifying to recall that one female graduate student was suddenly faced with the unexpected (and previously unexplained) demand that she should also swallow some deuterated alcohol or risk ruining the results of the whole experiment. The ethics of such a request to the then inebriated student seemed doubtful, even for those far off days when the Ethics Committee was not the looming presence it is today.

Dick Batt, who because of his many commitments as Head of Department was not always available for regular day to day supervision of his student's projects, was particularly helpful to them when the time came to write their theses. Allan Stowell for example still today recalls with pleasure the assistance that Dick gave him, not by writing his thesis for him, but by showing him how scientific writing should be done.

Sylvia Rumball, against all odds but with Dick Batt's strong support, succeeded in getting an Xray generator and a precision camera for the department. Ted Baker and Mike Hardman mentioned in the hearing of a visiting University of York X-ray crystallographer that they were looking for a protease to study. Guy Dodson said that Chinese gooseberry, now known as Kiwi fruit, was known to contain one. In a very short time the protease was isolated, and while Mike Hardman and Mike Boland studied the dynamic properties of the protein, Chris Moore and Alan Came set out to sequence it, while Ted Baker crystallised it and determined the three dimensional structure. Ted's paper was the first to report the structural determination of a protein by a single researcher. In those early days the protease was named Mao-an, after the famous Chairman Mao but publication demanded the use of the rather boring official name of actinidin.

Bryan Anderson, with the background of a small-molecule crystallographer, arrived in 1977 to work with Ted and Sylvia on the structure of lactoferrin. Despite the collection of data on diffractometers at other New Zealand Universities, and the acquisition of a discarded diffractometer from DSIR in Wellington (in truth it only worked once), it was not until Ted collected data from heavy atom derivatives while he was on leave in Oregon in 1985, was the structure of this protein finally solved.

Success breeds success in this field. The small group of Ted Baker, Sylvia Rumball, Bryan Anderson and Gill Norris grew rapidly as new money flowed in. Ted's skill as a crystallographer is now matched by his equal skill as a grant writer. The group was well known for arriving for morning tea together at about eleven o'clock in order to occupy their own table.

John Tweedie alone of the Biochemists answered the challenge of the exploding field of molecular biology and began research in the area with enthusiasm. This was an especially valuable decision at a time when the Vice-Chancellor, Neil Waters, was pressuring the department to become involved in this field. As John so modestly says, "It just seemed to be the direction that biochemistry was taking, so it was obvious to begin working there". John's dedication and commitment, along with the work of his students, and particularly the outstanding work of Kathryn Stowell, brought the department into the 1990s. John even allowed bone marrow to be removed through a needle in his hip, in order that the RNA vital to the lactoferrin project could be obtained. The twilight zone is now famous throughout the department, and is adept at producing mutant enzymes, if not on demand at least with great facility,

The search for aldehyde dehydrogenase in sheep liver began in the early 1970s with two outstanding graduate students, Alastair MacGibbon and Kathryn Kitson, together with the new Post Doctoral Fellow Trevor Kitson. The search for a cytosolic and a mitochondrial aldehyde dehydrogenase was on, and when successful led to more than 20 years of study of these fascinating enzymes. Trevor Kitson, after joining the academic staff, made an interesting zoo of sulfhydryl compounds to modify the active site. Len Blackwell and Paul Buckley with students such as MacGibbon, Motion, Bennett and Sime, as well as Post Doctoral Fellow Jez Hill, studied the dynamics at the active site, as well as chemically modifying it. Often these two groups proposed in the literature quite different models on how the enzyme was functioning, but never attempted to collaborate to resolve the differences, the literature debate was too much fun. It could, however, make life interesting for students such as Kerry Loomes who worked with both groups.

A major collaboration has now been set up in order to produce mutants of the enzyme, with Mike Hardman joining those studying aldehyde dehydrogenases and John Tweedie providing the molecular biology know how. It is hoped that soon the crystal structure can be solved and all of the outstanding questions resolved. The group creaks a little with its sheer size, and all hands are waiting for the mutants to appear,

**Academic Staff**

A department is a composite of the people it contains. The academic staff of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department make such an interesting study that it is difficult to know where to begin. It is clear to me that it would be neither fair nor advisable for me to make comments on colleagues who will continue to work in the department beside me. However staff who have retired or resigned or plan to leave the department in the next twelve months seem to be fair game.

DICK BATT

Professor Dick Batt requires a full biography of his own. He was both a very complicated man and a very simple man. He was on one hand ambitious and willing to use power and on the other hand a most relaxed and laid back person in all his personal interactions. Only when Dick felt that he was being used or unfairly attacked did his full anger and determination show through. He could then become demanding and uncompromising. He was always aware of the wider political ramifications of his actions and those of others. He saw clearly that the continued strength of the department depended on teaching large first year classes, and he ensured that for most of his time at Massey University three first year papers were taught within the department. He fought the other Deans in the wider University to protect the interests of the Science Faculty and increased the size of his own Department (at one time it include physics as well as Chemistry and Biochemistry). A bestselling political novel could be written around the manoeuvring and intrigue that took place in those early Massey days. Dick had many angry opponents within the Science Faculty who felt, rightly or wrongly, that he always put the interests of his own Department ahead of the wider interests of the Science Faculty. When the Mathematics and Computer Science Departments grew so big that they threatened the power balance in the Science Faculty, these Departments were driven off to join the Social Sciences Faculty. Of course the Deans of the other Faculties felt that Dick Batt pushed the Science Faculties interests too much, but Dick was doing the job exactly the way he thought it should be done. Certainly the Deans of some other Faculties could not be described as white knights when it came to the exercise of political power.

But it is foolish to concentrate too narrowly on the politics of Dick Batt. He also came with a strong vision of the role of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in New Zealand Science, and the major contribution it would make in the field of protein chemistry, This was a field which he saw as relating to all New Zealand's most important exports, and which seemed neglected elsewhere. In Universities such as Victoria and Canterbury biochemistry had been confined in its growth or displaced completely to another campus (Lincoln) and only Otago and Auckland Universities had strong biochemistry departments. At Massey University Dick encouraged staff to work on proteins. It was never a requirement, but Buckley and Blackwell turned their physical-organic and physical backgrounds toward proteins. When the X-ray generator finally arrived it was always clear that proteins would be the major focus of its use. This vision he held to and carried forward, even into late '80s, when molecular biology swept like a prairie fire through biochemistry, and the VC became a strong advocate of the new opportunities this provided to the department. Dick was always looking for opportunities to exploit commercially advances in research made within the department and John Ayers and his resins are an important and continuing example of this. In this too he was ahead of his time, and it is disappointing that there was no one major breakthrough which would have brought fame and funds into the department.

It is easy to make a stereotype of the old Dick Batt, as a power hungry person who always wanted things done his way, a person who pushed particular types of research and took very little interest in others. It was never really clear whether he enjoyed all the university politics, but he certainly did perform very well in this area. He could bring a meeting to its knees with his stifling control from the chair or he would hurry things along if things were going the way he wished. Even though he performed so well at meetings, he never seemed to particularly enjoy them and was much happier working behind the scenes getting things done the way he wished. Departmental meetings were few and far between during his Headship. But he worked hard to ensure that his staff had the equipment that they felt they needed for their research.

It saddened the whole department to learn of his sudden and untimely death at the beginning of 1994 at the age of 70. This occurred at the one time of the year when people were scattered around the country on holiday and many did not learn of the funeral until several weeks later.

TED RICHARDS

Ted Richards was a colourful and memorable character. The strength of his character showed through in all he did.

For example, he was so concerned about students coming late to his lectures that at one time, heedless of fire regulations, he would lock his lecture room after he had begun the class. Later he would place a minder at the door to intercept the late comers. When Ted was lecturing you could see students sprinting madly across campus to try to get from the Cell Biology laboratory (in the Biology Building) to the Marsden Lecture Theatre before they were late for his class. Once in the lecture you could not even make a helpful whispered comment to the person next to you without a loud interjection from the ever watchful Ted. A single student talking always infuriated him.

Ted could be very insecure about something that he did not quite understand. One day he came rushing in to talk to Len Blackwell just before his lecture on _p_ orbitals to the Cell Biology class, with that old question about "If there is a nodal plane where the probability of finding the electron is zero between the lobes of the _p_ orbital, how do the electrons get between the two lobes". Unfortunately the time was too short to give the excited Ted a convincing answer. Instead he tried to fake it and lecture his way past the point, as he had inadvertently been doing for years. Of course with the matter so much on his mind he only succeeded in making the inevitable question painfully obvious. He came dashing up the stairs after the lecture even more agitated than before to sort out the answer which he was going to have to take back to his next class.

Len Blackwell can also remember one student coming up to Ted and setting him up for destruction by asking two questions. Firstly "Did you tell us that etc etc", to which Ted replied that indeed he had, followed by the second question "Then how is it that etc etc". Ted did not make any attempt to argue his way out of the trap, but went immediately onto the attack. "Don't you get smart with me young man. Get out of here." Would the modern student have been so easily turned aside I wonder?

One year it was noticed that Ted's fiery impatient manner had calmed. It appeared as if the blustery winds of the autumn equinox had turned to the calm days of early winter. However, just as it seemed time to congratulate him on his remarkable change in personality, it was announced that he had been appointed to a Chair in the Technology Faculty and the reasons for the change became apparent. Meetings in the Department were never the same without Ted to announce impatiently ten seconds after the time the meeting should have begun: "Let's begin, where is everyone, I'm too busy to sit around here all day cobber!" (Fortunately, this is a role that Mike Hardman has taken over in recent years).

GEOFF MALCOLM

Geoff Malcolm arrived fresh faced from Otago University, appointed to the new Chair of Physical Chemistry. Geoff is one of the nicest people to walk the face of the earth. He immediately committed himself to making the combined Department work, and did this by throwing himself with enthusiasm into the chemistry teaching program. Dick Batt never had a more loyal ally. Geoff always supported him even when Geoff felt Dick was being overly political and even a little unreasonable. The chemistry staff all knew they had a supporter in Geoff, someone who stood in your corner of the ring, and was willing to fight for you if that was necessary.

Geoff reluctantly, for the wider good of the department, gave up his involvement in research but continued with his enthusiastic teaching throughout his time as Dean of the Science Faculty. Unfortunately the very niceness which served him so well within the department became a burden in the harsher world of Massey University politics, to which he was exposed in this new role. Geoff's greatest virtue, his total reasonableness and ability to see the other person's point of view did not make his job as Dean any easier. Since he always worked to facilitate the goals of others, he could not consistently advocate a single self-interested position, which was fine unless others were doing just that in their own self-interest.

A Professor from an earlier time, the need to begin to think and act in a political and later a commercial manner, never sat easily with him. He was conscious, even a little self-conscious, of the role of the professor in bringing a special mana to events, and I think felt that this mana suffered if the Professor became simply another commercial salesperson.

GRAEME MIDWINTER

What can be said about Graeme Midwinter that has not already been said? He was outspoken, opinionated, self-assured, determined and unwilling to give in to any unwanted intrusion into his affairs or his life. But he was also completely generous with his time and his knowledge. Graeme was willing to go to endless trouble to help others, without wanting any kind of acknowledgement.

There was no more terrifying sight than to see Graeme searching the building for missing equipment. No laboratory was safe. He was equally as intimidating when looking for the selfish and thoughtless swine who had left a mess in the enzyme unit.

When he was expressing strong dogmatic views on such diverse matters as the work of Social Scientists, the role of computers, the design of the new Massey Bridge or the behaviour of louts, he was unstoppable, and as he spoke the Universe seemed to tilt and take on a new clarity and truthfulness. What was left to be said? He had said it all.

Graeme was and is a most practical man who finds solutions to all sorts of problems. This meant that he shared with Dick Hodges the ability to keep machines operating long past the date that new technology had succeeded them. Strong advocates for change, such as Ted Baker, were able to build up their equipment only in the face of determined questioning about the validity of their requests by both Graeme Midwinter and Dick Hodges. As Ted followed one request with yet another, Graeme was heard to mutter about whether Ted was a spoiled child who would never be satisfied. Despite being an outspoken critic of his old supervisor Dick Batt on some issues, he stood behind him and supported him in all matters of substance throughout the time they were in the department together.

IAN WATSON

From the moment you met Ian Watson you knew that you were in the presence of a warm human being, but also a person with a clear vision of the wider political view. Although he might occasionally forget a class, or to the annoyance of the students during a lecture waver between different symbols and miss out crucial steps in a derivation, and although he never resigned himself to using a positional wheel to tell students in the Advanced Physical Chemistry class where he could be found, you could not help liking him. Details any fool can attend to and Ian was neither interested in the details, nor did he pay excessive attention to them. He was always full of good humour and had the ability to make the person he was talking to feel important. The research laboratory could be left in disarray, with pools of mercury left unattended after an enthusiastic three or four day period of working at the bench, but you knew that he had enjoyed being there, and would not soon be back again.

His initial elliptical political contributions at Science Faculty meetings were a little baffling, but he did become the Academic Staff Representative on the Council, and then gradually moved off to higher administrative positions away from the department. We were not surprised, but pleased for him. Even when he had the unenviable task of distributing throughout the University a limited amount of research money through the MURF fund, he managed to remain a popular figure, helping where he was able and we all understood what a difficult job he had to do.

As I write, he has been appointed the Principal at the Albany Campus and his success story continues. The conservatives in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry might fret about whether the Albany Campus will indeed bring benefits to the Palmerston North Campus, but teaching chemistry on the new campus from 1995 is an exciting new challenge. We look forward to working with Ian Watson on this new venture while remaining on the Palmerston North campus.

DICK HODGES

Dick Hodges was one of those unforgettable figures, whether you saw him striding around the building bent over at the shoulders wearing a tatty laboratory coat, or standing beside his beloved Mass Spectrophotometer puffing on his pipe and peering over the long sheets of photo sensitised paper spat out by the machine. He looked like everyone's essential image of a slightly mad scientist. It all seemed so unreal that you looked around to see where the TV cameras were.

His first response to any question was a gruff comment given with a slightly crooked grin, which effectively dismissed the substance of what you were saying. He then went out of his way to give you extraordinary help. His mind was so sharp and alert that he could not stay focused on one point of view, but sometimes ended up arguing with equal clarity on the opposite side of the question that he had been debating.

For four years he used the same question in a 400 level Organic Chemistry finals paper, and for four years no one answered the question He was constantly baffled by the student's inability to score well on his exam questions. He could always point to one or two students who had done brilliantly, but there were very few in that middle ground between complete success and total failure. Puzzled questions came back from external assessors who had tried to do his 400 level organic questions, asking how on earth some aspect of the question could be completed. In the early days when chemical bonding was taught along with organic chemistry in a single paper, students sometimes got 40% of their marks from the only two bonding questions and only 7 or 8% from the three organic questions they had to answer from the six that Dick Hodges had set.

While disliking committee meetings, he still played a major role in reorganising the Computer Centre. It was one of the great tragedies for the department when Dick was struck down with a mysterious medical disorder that led to his total loss of short term memory and his immediate retirement. It is such a cruel irony that this brilliant and dedicated man ended his career in this way.

BILL HANCOCK

As one academic staff member was heard to comment, you could not help but like Bill Hancock, even when he was shafting you. Not that Bill shafted anyone in the Department, but he was a wonderful operator, who finally found the opportunities to use these skills within the department too limited and left to work with Genetech in San Francisco. Bill Hancock had such a wonderful appreciation of how power was used and by whom. Perhaps more importantly he knew how to present himself and his work so that it became a positive pleasure to those wielding the power to help Bill accomplish his aims. For example he was a genius at getting research grants. It was only near the time that he was leaving that he told me one of the secrets of his grants-man-ship, which was always telling the granting body what they want to hear. I know it is glaring obvious in today's hardened climate of endless grant applications, but some of his fellow staff in that far off time of the 1970s had a naive belief that it was the scientific merit that counted. Bill had his staff and technicians monitoring all work in any field even vaguely related to peptides and proteins (his research involved making peptides on solid support), and had a genius in spotting directions that would of great future importance.

His move to HPLC in those early days and his interest in separation science began long before the new Biotech industries realised that the key to their success was not the molecular biology (which became relatively straight forward) but the successful purification of the products to a standard that would ensure that the would be licensed for use in medicine. Dick Batt was fascinated by Bill's ideas and approach and supported him every step of the way. When he finally left Bill set up an agreement whereby he could have returned to the department after a period of up to five years, as a kind of a fall- back position, but it was clear that he would never return.

Those who knew him still miss Bill's good natured and good humoured approach to life. He kept balance in his life by regularly playing hockey, tennis and table tennis, often at lunchtime. We now enjoy his occasional visits back to Massey.

MARGARET WILSON

Margaret Wilson could be a severe and even uncompromising person, when she felt that the needs of students were taking second place to the career games that those little boys dressed up as big boys, who were her colleagues in the department, liked to play. So often she felt that these little boys, and their big egos, paid only lip service to the students on whom their bread and butter depended, and instead were busy making their career moves, or establishing their international reputations.

In return for this intense interest in their welfare, Margaret was in turn highly respected by the students, who however also knew that if they tried to cut corners in their work, they would be quickly reminded of the fact. Her preparations for lectures were meticulous. She worked patiently with her nutrition research and in her last few years in the department battled with a remodelled amino acid analyser, which never quite worked in the way she wanted.

Highly conscious of the sexist attitudes which so many of her fellow staff members will probably carry to their graves, Margaret in the end became tired of fighting off their thoughtless male tea room talk and gave up coming down to the tea room, preferring instead to concentrate on her own work in her room. Margaret was glad to retire just before sixty years of age and begin a new life with new challenges. She is by all accounts enjoying herself thoroughly in New Plymouth.

MARGARET BRIMBLE

Margaret Brimble in her five years in the department made maximum impact. Coming in as a three year replacement for Len Blackwell (on leave without pay at Melbourne University), Margaret was eventually appointed to the position which became vacant on Dick Hodges' unfortunate early retirement. Margaret attracted a large team of graduate students to her work, which was immense in its scope, setting out as she did to synthesise complex natural products.

Everything that she did, she did with the maximum attention to detail. Her lectures highlighted clearly all the topics of importance, which helped the students to prepare well for her exams. Her laboratory was run with almost military precision. Unfortunately this precision and attention to detail did not always leave room for other staff and their students in the same space, and almost inevitably both Len Blackwell and David Officer moved their research operations to other labs. (Len came to his bench in the laboratory one day to find that his chair had been taken away by Margaret and given to one of her graduate students. Len turned red with annoyance but to the amazement of at least one of his graduate students said nothing to Margaret).

Her own research students were intensely loyal, and Margaret built up a special relationship with them. In her early years, perhaps feeling intimidated as a younger woman staff member amongst so many middle aged males, Margaret at times was out spoken in her criticism of each of them. But when, despite her fear that she would be blocked for her promotion, she was deservedly promoted rapidly through to Senior Lecturer and her criticisms became less severe. The Vice Chancellor, Neil Waters, worked hard to retain Margaret in the department, but finally for a number of reasons she returned back to Auckland University as a lecturer, and is now about to move on to Sydney University. We are sure that she will succeed in all that she does, and wish her well in her future career.

ROBERT BROOKS

Robert Brooks was ostentatiously a character. He enjoyed the role and he cultivated it. He was never a raconteur in the sense of a teller of great stories; in fact his stories were more like operatic recitatives. The same stories or one line jokes were repeated endlessly, apparently in the belief that humour was cyclical. They were funny the first few times and then not funny, but if repeated still more times they became funny again. In later years he almost became a caricature of himself, welcoming the groans as the story about the brush makers daughter in Kenya was trotted out yet again.

He was reputed to have two sets of jokes in his 100 level lecture notes, which he would use in alternate years so that those repeating the course were not bored. A joke did not have to bear any relationship to the topic being discussed, but was trotted out at the appropriate time to enliven the lecture.

Robert was always full of energy and life; impulsive and voluble he threw himself into his work with tremendous energy. The long hours he spent at work, writing papers and books, were never enough and he always had some other major project or projects in hand. These included renovating or adding to his house, digging a swimming pool and filling them in (he piled old white ware into the hole to make the task easier) or teaching language courses in the evening. There seemed no end to his energy and he seemed unwilling or unable to be still.

His ability with languages was legendary. The monolingual Kiwi could only marvel at his apparent fluency in French, German and Russian (teaching courses in these languages at the PolyTech), and his familiarity with Swahili (from his days with the British Army in Kenya), Portuguese and even Chinese. He was always willing to use his language skills as a number of slightly confused Chinese visitors learned. Who else after studying Portuguese for a few months would happily allow himself to be interviewed in that language on TV?

Robert Brooks is an endlessly generous and helpful person, who will go far out of his way to help you if you asked. He was a boisterous counterbalance to all the more serious academic faces in the department. You might chide him about some thoughtless remark, or want to sink through the floor at the things he said but you couldn't help but like him. Even Trevor Kitson could not embarrass Robert by retelling one of his most tasteless stories at his farewell function, but the stony looks on the faces of some of the other guests made the telling all worthwhile. However, it must be said, that there have been no major farewell functions since that evening and there may be no more, such was its impact.

Robert of course did not retire, he simply moved to the Soil Science Department and carried on as before. He is still regularly in the department and long may that continue.

CLEM HAWKE

Clem Hawke was a true gentleman. In many ways he was the prototype of what an academic should be. He studied lipids with immense patience throughout his career at Massey University. During his last year in the department he was a little dismayed to see revisions to the Biochemistry Course left little room for his favourite lipids and good naturedly chided his colleagues about the omission. He somewhat reluctantly took on the job of acting HOD in the years before his retirement. To Clem's eternal credit, during his tenure as HOD he gave back to the department the power and ability to make decisions. He worked hard to help all his staff and, in the process, further deepened the respect in which he was held.

He was not a colourful extrovert in the sense of a Robert Brooks, but rather introspective, controlled and thoughtful in all that he did. But a quiet word of criticism from Clem was a most powerful rebuke. While in pursuit of the Warburgh apparatus borrowed from the 300-level biochemistry laboratory by Paul Buckley and Len Blackwell he was as tenacious and determined as a terrier. Even the glucose tolerance factor work had to come to a complete halt for the weeks the apparatus was needed in Biochemistry. Rose Motion was terrified the day that the sleeve of her laboratory coat caught the equipment and sent it crashing down, smashing some of the glass tubes. Clem now brings his powers of concentration and attention to detail to bear on the golf course, with the expected enviable results in terms of low scores.

GRAHAM PR1TCHARD

Graham Pritchard, with his quiet and gentle manner, has a prodigious knowledge of biochemistry and a positive love of research. He was frustrated beyond belief during that summer the department's first 5 year plan had to be drawn up and he, like many others, had to spend weeks working on, what seemed at that time, to be an endless and seemingly futile project.

His research collaborations with Mike Hardman consisted of two to three weeks of enzyme preparation by the patient Graham, which was all used in a few hours by Mike Hardman on the stopped-flow spectrophotometer. Graham, always generous in his recognition of others, was quick to defend Mike's apparently uneven contribution to the collaboration by pointing out that Mike had to process all the data. He could often be seen in later years crouched over a MacIntosh computer, hunting and pecking the keys with one finger while writing yet one more research paper.

Graham's measured and thoughtful contributions to staff meetings will be missed. He brought, not just new insights to the analysis of a problem, but that unique quality called wisdom. You could almost set your watch by the time he crossed the bridge to Massey each morning on his bike, regardless of the weather. At least Graham will have more time now to explore the hills and countryside on extended walking trips. Already his knowledge of wilderness areas in the Manawatu and surrounding areas is encyclopaedic. It is easy to picture him returning to his botanical roots, as he begins on his new life after retiring from the department.

DAVID HUSBANDS

David Husbands; the very name suggests the power, certainty and solidarity of both physical build and of mental attitude that David brought to the department. He was nothing if not self-assured and confident. He could be by turns blunt, almost to the point of rudeness, and then suddenly equally charming and engaging. Politics and political power fascinated him, and he entered wholeheartedly into the local political scene.

Dick Batt and David Husbands were as different as chalk and cheese and they never had an easy relationship. Given the power of an HOD in a University department, David's life was not easy in his later years in the department and he never received promotion through the system. However when he retired early, his speech of farewell was a model of engaging charm. He is positively thriving in his new life in the countryside.

**Of Trends, Thieves, Politics and Computers**

The trends taking place in New Zealand society as a whole were of course reflected within the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Consider for example sexism and the denigration of women. Robert Brooks until the day he retired was still making jokes about women and minority groups. These jokes were repeated so endlessly and so mindlessly that they were ignored by most of the department. However the battle over the female pinups in the workshops was a brilliant victory for the women in the department. For some time female staff had complained about feeling uncomfortable about the pictures of nude women on calendars in the workshops, places which they had to visit as part of their regular work. The women were regarded by the men as being picky and a little unreasonable. What was so wrong about the pinups? Then one day the walls of the stopped-flow room suddenly became covered with photos of male nudes which were put there by the quick thinking Kathryn Stowell. A hasty request by the professors to remove them was turned down and it was pointed out that the men in the workshops had their nude pictures so why shouldn't the women. All should come down or none. Within the day all the offending pictures both male and female had been removed and have never appeared again to this day. Feelings ran strong on the matter, and one person in the workshop did not speak to Kathryn again for several years.

On the other hand the Vietnam War was never allowed to become a major tearoom issue. Those who were protesting the war would march on Friday evening, but there was no attempt to confront or challenge those in the department who might hold quite different views. Differences were just expressed quietly in one to one conversations or joked about.

Smoking in the tea room was an issue which was confronted. Trevor Kitson and Robert Brooks were vigorous and articulate advocates of a no smoking policy in the tea room. At this distance it seems hard to believe but the proposal at that time seemed radical. A packed and tense meeting of the Tea Club carefully discussed the issue. It was made more difficult because it was really the first time something controversial had been openly discussed in the department with the aim of reaching a definite conclusion, as opposed to just good naturedly joking about it. In the end smoking was banned from the tea room. Dick Hodges took umbrage and announced that he would not come to the tearoom again, and sadly until the day he retired he did not. Now that all the university buildings are smoke free the debate seems very dated. How quickly history moves on.

Perhaps surprisingly, the very divisive Springbok Tour of New Zealand in 1981 did not tear the department apart in the way that it did for many New Zealand families. This was partly out of the great goodwill that people felt for each other and a determination that outside issues should not be allowed to create divisions and there remain no memories of acrimonious arguments, just different views strongly expressed. Many from the department did march against the tour with a particularly good turn out for the Palmerston North match at the Showgrounds. This was the first match where coils of barbed wire kept protesters well away from the venue. After the violent attacks by the police at the demonstrations the week before, many people wore bike helmets to protect themselves. I was one of the people who did not have a helmet and a lovely but very short lady insisted I walk inside her. I thanked her even though I think we both knew this brave gesture offered me little head protection.

In the 80s, the political consequences of the advance of the Business Schools and their production of large numbers of graduates, descended unwanted onto the heads of Massey University Chemists. These graduates were all keen to apply the theories of business practice to a New Zealand burdened with large debts. Regardless of the party in power, the New Right philosophy began to dominate the politicians thinking. Suddenly accountability was the name of the game. The Universities were an easy target. Initially protected against massive cuts by the rapid increase in student numbers (who were driven to come to University because of the lack of jobs). So the Government reacted refusing to increase funds at the rate needed to maintain the established staff-student ratios. Politicians rightly or wrongly regarded the Universities as sacred cows, and privately wealthy sacred cows at that. Suddenly questionnaires were being handed out to the students to monitor teaching performance and standards. Mentors were appointed to provide peer group feedback on teaching skills. The Department had to prepare five year plans. During one long summer many staff were tied up in the thankless job of writing them. Staff appraisals were held every year. The jury is out on the consequences of all these changes but it has created a mindless busyness which wastes staff time. However busyness never equates to greater efficiency and it is harder and harder to find time for creativity, which should be one of the main functions of a University.

Thieves of a different kind have appeared around the Department.

A story that illustrates Robert Brook's energy and determination involves a missing palladium crucible. One of Robert's PhD. students showed some High School students through his laboratory and without thinking he pointed out a palladium crucible, commenting on how valuable it was. By that afternoon it had gone missing. Robert was on the phone in minutes contacting every jewellers shop in town and telling them of the hoist, and asking them to watch out for the stolen property. Within a couple of hours two children had brought the crucible into such a shop, the police had been called and the crucible returned.

Until the late 1980s a policy of minimum security in the Science Towers prevailed and nothing was stolen. Then quite suddenly things changed. Regularly the laboratories were broken into and solvents essential for making home bake were stolen. After each robbery the security stepped up a notch, but so did the determination of the thieves. Finally with all the laboratories securely locked, the thieves proceeded to smash open the doors with jemmies. The arrival of electronic monitoring, together with changes to the outside locks, and new keys for many of the most at risk laboratories seems to have solved the problem.

In one famous case the initiative displayed by Michael Nain, then a PhD Student, lead to the capture of two thieves. Working late in the building one night, he heard sounds on the stairs and looked out to see a man with his leg in plaster and a woman struggling to get a microwave oven down the stairs. As Michael said afterwards, they seemed such a nice couple that he offered to lend them a hand. With Michael's help they managed to get the microwave down the stairs and out to the car park. He even helped load the microwave into the car. Then he suddenly had the unpleasant feeling that perhaps everything was not what it seemed. At the last moment he took the license plate number of the car. Returning to his office he called the campus security, who contacted the police. As a result when the two thieves drove up their drive in Foxton, they were met by the police, who were able to recover the stolen equipment and make their arrest. The next day Michael was a little sheepish during the telling and retelling of the story in the Department, not knowing whether he was a fool for being duped at first, or a hero for successfully helping capture the villains.

Even on the occasional University Open Day security measures are now given the highest priority. The general public are only allowed on certain floors and the lifts are guarded and the other floors regularly patrolled. Still, suspicious characters have been found roaming the upper floors. Because of this at the end of the Open Day all valuable equipment had to be removed immediately from the 100-level laboratories. In a rush for trolleys, Geraldine Wood, then Head Technician, exercised her power, if not her right, to take the 100-level trolleys for her own use. In desperation Paul Buckley and Shirley Wilson borrowed the key to Andy Trow's preparation room and, not realising that the silent alarm was still in place and operating, entered the room. Security rushed over to the building to investigate the presence of a lanky figure with long hair (Shirley) who fitted remarkably closely the description of their most wanted thief on campus.

A more persistent, and in some ways more unpleasant, type of robbery is that practised by the Stairway Dancers (as the police insist on colourfully calling these thieves). Several staff have had money and valuables stolen from their offices, when they were absent for a short period of time. For example one Post Doctoral Fellow had several hundred dollars stolen from her laboratory. The annoyance of being foolish enough to be caught out and lose money, the nuisance of having to replace all credit cards, as well as a feeling of violation of personal space, makes these robberies more difficult to deal with. Everyone is now much more aware of the problem and either keeps locking their offices or makes sure that nothing valuable is left in them.

Although this last theft did not take place in the University, and although it was a Physicist not a Chemist who was involved, it is too good a story to leave out. Paul Callaghan was a brilliant physicist and he was a member of the Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Biophysics for many years.

One evening he biked to a staff-student meeting at his local school. When he came out the bike was missing. Paul set out to find the thief. Some initial enquires turned up reports of a fair headed high school boy who was seen at the scene of the crime on the night in question and Paul got his name. That's all he needed. The following day he went around to the boy's home and waited for him when he came back from school. He was jumped on by this vocal excited man who threatened him as to what would happen if Paul didn't get his bike back (if he did get it back all charges would be dropped). No one stands in the path of an excited Paul Callaghan for long and the boy confessed. But matters were more complicated than Paul imagined. The bike had been broken down into parts and spread amongst boys around the city. Paul did not stop, he went from house to house forcing each boy to hand over another part and give him another address, until his bike was complete. Paul learned later that as a consequence of his interventions, there was much beating up of boys at the top of the chain by boys further down the chain. I hope the lesson that crime does not pay was well learned.

Campus politics always created interest.

Christmas coups have been a part of the Massey University history. One of the most significant was the absorption of the teaching of physics into the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Physics had previously been taught as part of a joint department with Agricultural Engineering. Everyone expected that with the separation of physics from Ag-Engineering, a separate Physics Department would be created. Instead there was talk of confining the teaching of physics to 100-level only, a suggestion that alarmed Geoff Malcolm. After one historic meeting, a different solution was found and the department emerged as the Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Biophysics. The VC and Dick were reported to have emerged from the meeting slightly stunned at how easily it had all happened. Many of the Physics staff were disgruntled but it was a fait accompli. All the obvious jokes were made about which discipline who would be absorbed next, and some began to refer to the department as Chemistry et al. The marriage of convenience did not last, and it was with some relief on both sides that the newly appointed Professor Paul Callaghan led his physicists away to establish a separate identity for Physics again.

One word that seemed to threaten the old guard of Batt, Hodges and Midwinter was "computers". Some seemed to seemed that there was something indecent about an academic staff member sitting down and pressing keys. Typing was to be done by the secretaries. Besides typing would take the staff away from their research at the bench which was the only type of research activity that was really approved. The staff then had to slowly write everything out by hand, an activity which was for some unknown reason accepted as kosher. In the case of a paper only one draft was allowed to be typed before the final draft had to be prepared for sending to the journal. Furthermore there was always the battle of the hand writing. Some secretaries muttered to themselves if the hand written version was not tidy enough. For any staff who could touch type, the restrictions on computers were absurd. But it did not stop there. If new equipment included a computer for data processing, it was viewed with great suspicion. Was it all a plot to introduce, perish the thought, a computer into the department and stop real science going on? This was despite the fact that Hodges depended on an old computer for the interpretation of data from his mass spectrometer (in the early days he had to fight hard to buy an extra 8K of memory). The funding agencies also did not want at first to know about computers.

The Graduate students could use the main frame computer but the undergraduates suffered because they never saw a computer in chemistry, or got to use one with any of their equipment. Because of this, the Department began to look decidedly old fashioned. As new staff such as David Officer arrived, a person who rightly regarded computers as essential for a modern science department, gradually more computers were purchased, albeit with great reluctance with regard to allowing them to be used for word processing by academics. To this day there is a communal Mac room where the more senior staff must share the few computers, while the wiser new staff members have negotiated a computer for their own desks as part of their appointment package. It has been interesting to see the more ancient staff improving their hunt and peck skills on the keyboard, until now there is virtually no staff member who does not use a computer. In his retirement Dick Batt bought his own IBM computer and used it in all his work. The wheel had turned full circle.

One of the great moments of revelation in the department was when one of Robert Brooks's graduate students forced Robert to begin using a work processing package on the old Prime Computer, and abandon the old gestener skins (with their endless corrections in pink) for the new computer age. Robert never looked back, publishing several books using the magic of computers, although he did then show some initial reluctance to be converted from the mainframe computer to his own PC.

The other great debate was between those who preferred the MacIntosh computers and those who favoured IBM clones. The MacIntosh advocates were by far the more evangelical, and with the outspoken Margaret Brimble on their side, swept the IBM clones from secretarial offices, and the MacIntosh took over. IBM based systems are used in the teaching laboratories, and this dual system continues to this day,

**Co-operation and Competition**

Every department and organisation has its own ethos. The Chemistry and Biochemistry Departments can be summed up in one word \- helpfulness.

Right from the start it was clear that any staff member could be asked for advice or assistance, and that advice or assistance was always willingly and enthusiastically given. The tradition is shown in the long term collaborations which sprang up on the chemistry side in teaching. Examples of joint research include Buckley and Blackwell (in the early days also with Jolley), Reeves and Brooks, Ainscough and Brodie and Baker and Rumball. But it was much more than that. When Dick Batt encouraged new staff to become interested in the study of proteins, much of the sharing of skills in biochemistry was with the endlessly helpful Graeme Midwinter, who freely and with patience shared his knowledge of the mystique of protein isolation. Dick Hodges unhelpful when any question was first asked, would then spend hours helping you solve structural problems relating to the mass spectrometer. The same attitude of helpfulness was evident throughout the technical staff, workshop staff, secretarial offices and in all other Support services.

One aspect of the building, which may have been unplanned, but which helped promote an atmosphere of co-operation, was the grouping of most of the staff offices in the stairwells. Much business was conducted on those central stairs. Staff were never tucked away (with the notable exception of Brooks, Wilson, Greenway and Ayers) in obscure comers of the building in isolation. Perhaps some future study should be made of the long term benefits of building design on staff interactions.

The history of the department is the history of cooperation between staff. There has been almost a total absence of the infighting and back-biting which is usually the inevitable result of bringing talented and ambitious people together in one institution. However nice and relaxed the academic staff appear on the surface, the reality is that they are all survivors who have been through the whole education system and successfully competed with their fellow students to win support to complete a Ph.D. They have had to show both ability and determination to achieve their goals.

The edge where competition will usually show up is when resources are scarce. Dick Batt deliberately did not award a fixed research budget to each staff member, believing that this would mean that everyone would endeavour to spend all of their budget in every year, to avoid taking a cut in the following year. Instead there was a generalised policy of fiscal responsibility, by which everyone was asked to be fair and reasonable in all their purchasing, and in turn the department would try to meet all costs. If toward the end of the financial year money was running short, the financial watchdogs, Hodges and Midwinter, would become more heavy handed in their scrutiny of requests for equipment and chemicals. Despite, or perhaps because of, these two heavies the system generally seemed to work well.

In later years it was Mike Hardman who had to sign your order form, and he seemed sometimes to take a tight fisted delight in keeping you dangling before deciding, or finding some cheaper way you could get what you wanted. Ken Jolley with his formal training in accountancy returned the department to tighter individual budgets. At many a staff meeting he compared his financial role in the department to his role at home trying to keep within his monthly income while living with three free spending daughters.

For larger equipment a case had to be made to the Vice Chancellor, who seemed to have a quite remarkable amount of discretionary funds available to put into large research equipment. The Department (which in reality meant Dick Batt) had also to support requests for large equipment to such bodies as the University Grants Committee There was some jockeying for position when the equipment requests were given their ratings. Of course the most effective operators had already done their ground work behind the scenes well before the ratings meeting. They hoped they had convinced Dick Batt of the absolute need for their equipment. The meetings gave the appearance of democracy, and because of the general goodwill amongst the staff, who genuinely wanted others to be able to carry out their research with the best equipment possible, the system worked. The most that would be heard after such a meeting would be murmurs of dissent, which quickly disappeared, with the realisation that your turn to buy your equipment would eventually come. In that sense the system was basically fair, and seen to be so.

The other area where dissent and disagreement could not be avoided was the thorny question of promotion. In the earlier years, the promotion through to senior lecturer was usually reasonably straight forward. The big battles were always fought over the elevation from Senior lecturer to Reader or, as it is now called, Associate Professor. When academic staff reached this hurdle, the competition became intense. It was not made easier by the limitations that the Government put on the proportion of staff in a University who could be employed as Readers. In addition across the University there seemed to be a gentlemen's agreement between the Deans that each year the Readership positions should be shared between the different Faculties. This meant that it became more and more difficult to cross into this academic promised land, As Graeme Midwinter was heard often to remark, you have to spend a good deal of time polishing your International Reputation. Two things made not being promoted difficult. One of course was the inevitable and unflattering comparison with the person who had been promoted ("I do twice as much teaching and administration as Dr. Y and have published just as many papers, and in better journals etc etc"). The second was the justifications that the authorities thought that they had to give to those who were not promoted (the reasons given could change from year to year depending who was actually promoted). There was a time when it did not seem politic to mention that you had in fact been promoted, because of the hard feelings that it generated in those who were not successful and felt unfairly treated.

The anger that all this generated has passed. As with equipment, it did appear that over a large number of years the promotions were more or less fair, although it was also clear that it was those who knew how to operate the leavers of power best who would be promoted first.

Above all however the friendliness and mutual helpfulness of the department survived the tensions over resources and promotion intact, and will hopefully continue on uninterrupted into the future.

**The Appointment of New Staff**

The appointment of new staff and in particular a new Head of Department proved a remarkable exercise.

The appointment of a Professor is of course not decided by the staff in the Department. The issues are too important to allow this to happen. Instead a complicated system of pseudo participation has been developed, under which one or two specially appointed academics are allowed to see the applications, and they report back in a general way on what they have seen. Those selected for this elevated role seemed to take particular delight in counting not the publications but the publications in refereed journals. The staff then grapple to be fair to the candidates in a general meeting

By the time the Chair in Biochemistry and the position of Head of Department were advertised for the first time, the academics in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department had lost the ability to effectively make decisions through meetings. During his time as HOD Dick Batt had accomplished this by never holding any meetings where matters of substance were decided.

This inexperience was made glaring obvious at the very first meeting to appoint the Professor of Biochemistry and HOD, when a secret final vote was called for before any discussion had taken place. Although this showed a commendable desire to shorten the meeting, it appeared there was little willingness to have opinions expressed which might influence how others might vote. In the end there was strong support for one person, who although offered the position by the selection committee was then made a counter offer by his own University which he could not refuse.

A second advertisement gave the department more practice in the process of democracy through meetings and led the interviewing committee to make an offer to an overseas candidate who had flown himself into Palmerston North airport in his own plane. He was indeed in the language of the market place a high flyer. Another candidate was heard to remark, "What do I have to do to match that? Drop in by parachute?" In hind sight the overseas candidate was just a little too flashy and although initially dazzling to the eyes, in the long haul he would not have been a good choice. Luckily negotiations with this overseas candidate broke down too.

The department still did not have a Professor of Chemistry nor a full-time acting HOD. First Clem Hawke and then Andrew Brodie filled in admirably while we waited for the dilemma to be resolved. It was clear that advertising again for a Professor of Biochemistry would have led to a great loss of face by the University. People would begin to wonder what was wrong with the Department when no one would take the job. Instead a Chair of Chemistry was advertised to be combined with the HOD's position. All the issues were this time smoothly debated by a staff now much practised in the art of democracy through meetings and Andrew Brodie was appointed to the position.

Staff retirements began to occur regularly and the department had to begin the task of appointing new people. The appointments have gone smoothly with outstanding people appointed to each new position. In one case however the process by which this occurred was simultaneously traumatic and fascinating. The list of applicants was not long, but one person with a strong-looking background was offered the position and he accepted. When Dr. X, as we will call him, him arrived with his wife, it fell to the lot of Paul Buckley to pick him up from his motel the next morning and bring him out to the department. All seemed to go well, although in hindsight Dr. X was a little disturbed by the look of Robert Brook's old laboratory in the light of the ultra-clean laboratory that Dr. X required. Dr. X did wonder out loud about how long it would be before he had the expensive equipment that he needed for his research. Still he had an in-depth discussion with Andrew Brodie, completed formalities with Betty Bretherton, and signed up with the University. As he drove Dr. X back to his motel at the end of what appeared to be a successful morning, Paul Buckley discussed with him the was best part of town to buy a house.

Unbelievably within two hours Dr. X had resigned and was returning to England. The first news that filtered in was that Dr. X phoned a transport firm from his motel to stop both the delivery of his luggage to Palmerston North and the transport for his cat to NZ. A phone call to Andrew Brodie confirmed that it was true he was resigning, paying back the travel money to the University and returning to England. Betty Bretherton was astounded. Most of the Department was totally disbelieving. Paul Buckley was thunder struck. What signals had he missed that would have told him that such an abrupt action was about to take place. It was the fastest resignation after an appointment ever in the University. He had waived his rights to superannuation. Needless to say Paul Buckley was not asked to meet any other new staff as they arrived In fact it was usually several days before he was allowed to even talk with them

But what of the vacancy? When the position was re-advertised the Department was amazed to learn that Dr. X. had reapplied. The department took no chances and flew a different candidate over from Australia to give a seminar and visit the Department. This person, Dr. Z, was offered the position and accepted it with a starting date of the following January. However as the date approached, messages were sent delaying the arrival time, until a now not totally unexpectedly a message came to say that Dr. Z would not now be coming to Massey University because of "family reasons". The confidence of the department in its ability to attract staff was severely shaken by this second refusal. It is clear in hindsight that the department had a lucky escape and nearly paid a penalty for over valuing a few years extra experience in a field.

The departmental list of staff now looks like a new car yard with so many staff with appointment dates in the 1990s. The Drs. Patchett, Burrell, Sherbum, Town, Gill, Norris. Stowell, Brown, Grimes and Jameson now fill spaces in the letter boxes. The Department has begun to expand in the new directions that these staff bring with their new enthusiasms and insights. They have brought renewed vigour and life to the department. Most also seem to have that absolutely invaluable gift, a sense of humour. They are able to smile at the way the administrative system operates in the University, to bring wry humour to the difficult hoops that they must jump through to try to get money for the equipment that they need and to laugh at the foibles of the middle aged staff who are teaching courses which the new staff think should be changed.

Given that appointments had to made in most cases at absurd distances with only brief phone interviews to supplement referee's reports and publication lists, the department has been lucky indeed.

It is an exciting time to be in the department.
