Part 2 in process - Alpha Institute for Advanced Studies (AIAS)

The last I saw of Pant y Bedw in that August of 1971 were two grey haired people
waving goodbye in the driving mirror. I drove towards the future on the dirt road towards
Rhyddwen Road, then up to Mynydd y Gwair and Mynydd Betws, then in the pristine beauty of
late summer, unchanged for ten thousand years, now desecrated by turbines, pylons and gas
pipelines as humanity rushes headlong to destruction. Down the steep mountain side to Rhyd
Amman and across the flat fat land to Llandeilo, the land of Deheubarth. The road ran close to
Tal y Llychau as it had done in the fifties, past the lakes and Abbey founded by Rhys ap
Gruffudd, and after many tortuous bends reached the main road to Llanbedr Pont Steffan, across
a range of hills to the Aeron. I was suddenly confronted by the sea and drove up the coast to
Aberystwyth. The same attic room was awaiting me and for a while I had the place to myself
before the other students arrived. The car was parked on Mrs Gill’s doorstep. Later I was given
a ticket for parking a car on this doorstep, on the wrong side of a road, as if a road had a right
and wrong side. This was a made up offence by some lurking copper looking for promotion. I
paid it in vomiting disgust and he probably became chief constable. I turned the car around in
the same parking space and doorstep and was never bothered again.
After breakfast I walked up to the EDCL in an infinitely cautious state of mind
because most of the class of 71 had evaporated in anger and never looked back. After reading
Kenneth Clark all summer I knew that there was civilization and that it originated in the mind,
but after reading Pardoe all summer I was not so sure where it could be found in the EDCL. The
undergraduate experience had made me very cautious of Mansel Davies, he was unstable and
pretentious. I recall being given an audience in the imperial office opposite room 262, which
had strange doors leading in to it. There was a set of double doors. Much later I found that these
had been designed by Orville-Thomas for a custom made infra red laboratory. Mansel Davies
had forgotten all about me and the Thesis by Pardoe, which I handed back dutifully. I have
vague recollections of a note being scribbled out and handed over. Only then did I notice the
missing fingers. I thought he had shaken hands with too many politicians, but they were blown
off during a synthesis in Cambridge. A synthesis should have warned me that I was going to be
put through the same dangerous process, as if Mansel Davies was reliving his younger days. He
was a post doctoral for a while at Peterhouse, and gave the impression that he had met a lot of
famous people there. At some point I must have been told to go to room 262, which was a quiet
room looking out on the green bank of the Buarth. I was soon dissuaded of great expectations. I
may have been a Graduate Scholar, but all I was going to get was part of a long laboratory side
bench and a chair. Alongside were spaces for other graduate fodder.
I was also dissuaded of any detailed supervision, because Mansel Davies left to
answer a phone or go to a committee and never returned that day. There was blankness and I
wondered what I was doing there, not for the first or last time. I thought that a supervisor should
supervise. By pure luck there were two students there who helped me get started: Arnold Ivan
Baise of the University of Witwatersrand South Arica, who was finishing a Masters course, and
Graham J. Davies of Swansea who was finishing a Ph. D. course. Arnold Baise taught me the
use of the instrument at the back of me on the old rough bench. It was a Grubb Parsons / NPL
far infra red interferometer. This instrument had been drawn out in Pardoe’s Thesis and in
reality it was a box of electronics attached to optics, two mirrors at right angles to each other. It
was quite easy to operate and Arnold Baise was a good teacher. When operating, a beam of light