Professor Peter Goddard (OE) address on opening the new library 10th May 2007

Mark Hanley_Browne, headmaster with Professor Peter Goddard and chairman of Governors Francis Abbott

For someone who has never felt very confident about public speaking, it is one of those ironic twists of fate, deliberate on someone’s part one suspects, that I have ended spending a fair proportion of my life giving lectures, as a Cambridge don for 29 years, and making speeches, as Master of a Cambridge College and now the Director of a Research Institute.

Of course, making speeches is not the same as being heard. I always remembered that WH Auden defined a Professor as a person who talks in other people’s sleep. And mathematicians can get away a deal of eccentricity and being social maladroit - it’s almost expected of them. Somebody once said that you can tell an extrovert mathematician from an introvert one because the extrovert looks at your shoelaces when talking to you while the introvert looks at his (or her) own.

Admitting you are a mathematician is probably second only to being one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Inland Revenue (or whatever they are called now) in conversation-stopping power. Four years ago, when I was President of the London Mathematical Society, our national mathematical society, I was up in Edinburgh chairing a Mathematics conference. I got in the taxi to go to the airport at the end of an exhausting day and my heart sank slightly when the cabdriver seemed intent on conversation. When he asked me what I had been doing, and I told him I had been chairing a mathematics conference, he replied, as often people do, “I was no use at mathematics at School”. But then he went on, “I was good at arithmetic and all right at English but when they put the two together to make algebra I got completely lost!”

Well, I have to admit that I was good at mathematics at School: not so good at arithmetic. Aeron Rogers, my Mathematics Master, whom I will come back to in a couple of minutes, told me always to remember that I only got about 66% in my last arithmetic test. And as for English, I was way behind the competition, but I was in a year with Clive Wilmer and Steve Gooch, who have spent their lives as a poet and a playwright, respectively.

I came to Emanuel already interested in mathematics, but diffident and hoping I might be good enough at it to study it at university, and I left six years later with an open scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, a marvelous grounding in mathematics and much else besides. I owe that transformation, which has been the foundation of all I have been able to do since, to this School, and to those who taught me here, especially the Masters, but also my fellow pupils from whom I learnt a great deal and with whom I had a great deal of fun.

It was a more-than-sobering thought for me a little while ago, as I walked down the school drive, to realize that it was just over 50 years since I did what seemed then a long walk with my mother to interviewed (both of us I think were being interviewed) by Dr JBC Grundy (or “Jack” as he was always known after I arrived). I had never met anyone called “Dr” before who wasn’t wearing a stethoscope: I hadn’t heard of PhD’s. My parents very much wanted me to get a good education, so I could get a good job, but nobody in the family had been to university before, indeed my parents had left school at 14. I found the School a rather forbidding place; Robin Marjoribanks describes it very well in his commendably frank booklet “The Noble Aim”* produced in 1994 for the 400th anniversary of the School’s founding:

Grundy was a man of paradox: conservative to the point of reaction, yet fully alive to the problems of the modern world; jovial yet pernickety, a man of warmth … yet at times completely insensitive to the feelings of others; provocative yet taken aback by the results of his provocation; inspiring in some dislike and distrust, in others deep and enduring loyalty. There was tension - at times shattering rows - between headmaster and both staff and senior pupils. … He had set him self to hold back the flood tide of modernism by fully maintaining the traditional values of hard work, hard play and discipline.

I have always been into hard work, perhaps to the point of addiction, but for me it has to be associated, at least part of the time, with really having fun. Jack Grundy seemed to us rather humorless and rather aloof, but, apart from dictating the superficially brutal ethos of the school, irrelevant to the real business of what we were doing in being educated, educating one another and having fun. But, as Robin Marjoribanks points out, Jack left a school stronger than the one he found and, as Aeron commented to me after I had left School, Jack made first-rate appointments to the staff and that is one of the most important tasks for someone running an institution.

For about 20 years, I had some responsibility for the Cambridge admissions system, first as Senior and Admissions Tutor of my College, then as its Master and as chairman of the University Committee dealing with admissions. I was frequently asked by alumni and others, “What can I do to increase my daughter’s or son’s chance of admission?” My stock answer was that playing the flute for the National Youth Orchestra or playing hockey for the county might, in certain circumstances, give them a slight edge, but what would help them most was what could not be guaranteed by paying fees or anything else: an inspiring teacher.

This is what Emanuel gave me: first, mathematics masters who were both outstanding teachers and outstanding mathematicians: particularly Francis Grundy and Aeron Rogers. Francis spotted my mathematical talent and told me that I could realize my dream of studying mathematics at university. He and Aeron generously nurtured and encouraged me without letting me get overconfident or too cocky about my achievements.

Aeron died in 1989, I think. Later, after I had become Master of St John’s, one of his nephews or cousins visited me and said that Aeron would have been proud of my election as Master; I replied that, although that might well have been true, what he would have said to me would have been “How is your research going? Have you written any good papers recently? Don’t let all this administration get in the way.”

Aeron and Francis were very different. Aeron had recruited Francis as his heir apparent. Francis, or Frank as we called him, had a sense of classroom discipline that would have at times made contemporary Baghdad look like a model of law and order. Aeron had preconditioned you before you were ever taught by him - he did not teach below the fourth form - to regard misbehavior as completely unthinkable. Without ever resorting to physical violence, he projected the aura of a disciplinary martinet. And this enabled him both to get on with the business of teaching in his own class without having to worry about discipline and, by making forays next door into Francis Grundy’s room when ever insurgency or rebellion seemed to be gaining ground, to keep order within some bounds there too.

Aeron and Francis gave enormously generously of their time to me, outside normal classroom hours included, to let me get on at my own pace, and they did this for other pupils too - not only the very bright ones destined for Cambridge and Oxford. Although Aeron, in particular, probably got his principal satisfaction from developing the talents of able students and coaching them for entry to the leading universities, all of those in their classes got a better education and better grades because of their teaching. I remember Mr Raine, who taught us metal work, saying that he would never have got through ‘O’ level without Mr Rogers’ help.

Aeron and Francis had a profound influence on the way I do my research in mathematical physics and how I express myself in that discipline. Francis taught me how to handle algebra and geometry, particularly algebra, with some elegance and restraint and Aeron how to approach the mathematical description of a physical situation: how to formulate one’s assumptions precisely and then proceed to analyse them mathematically and finally to form a physical interpretation of the result. I kept in touch with Aeron after I left Emanuel in 1963 to go up to Cambridge until I attended his funeral (in Welsh, apart from some concessionary English for the visitors from England). He would come to visit me and other former pupils at Cambridge. When I was working at CERN in Geneva in 1970 to 72, he came to visit my wife, Helen, and myself for a week. We had only a small apartment, so we arranged to put him up in a hotel for part of his stay. Finding an acceptable hotel at reasonable prices was not easy but eventually we found one that looked good in a street near the railway station. However having made the booking by day, the hotel and the locality seemed rather embarrassingly different when we took Aeron straight there from his evening arrival at the airport. The exotic and exiguous dress of the young women taking advantage of the balmy evening to disport on the street could not be explained entirely by the hot pants then in fashion. They were presumably all in the same line of business. We were embarrassed, but Aeron seemed to enjoy his stay.

There were many others whom I remember with thanks: Mr Richardson who gave us a two-year course on art appreciation in the Sixth Form. I hadn’t traveled abroad at all and Mr Richardson showed us treasures of the world, from the Prado, the Uffizi, the Louvre and elsewhere, that I have spent the years since seeing in the flesh, so to speak. I would particularly like to mention Harry “Dolly” Mearns, who gave his whole working life, 47 years, to Emanuel. His specialist subject was Economics but he also taught English to the lower forms. In my second year, taking us for English, he ranged widely, exciting our interest in subjects way beyond any syllabus.

One afternoon, he talked to us about the sum of the angles of a triangle. We had just learnt the theorem in geometry that says that the sum of the angles of a triangle always adds up to 180º. The previous evening he had been listening to the Third Programme (now Radio 3) about Cosmology and, as a result, he posed the following: “If we take three stars in the sky as the vertices of our triangle, do the angles still add up to 180º, as they do if we draw a triangle on the blackboard?” This really puzzled me. I could prove that the angles of any triangle add up to 180º but I could also see that some how more was involved in making this statement about a triangle in the heavens. The full answer has to do with General Relativity, which I learnt about six or so years later, but I began to glimpse then that more than pure logic was involved in modeling the physical world mathematically. And I have spent most of my intellectual life on this relationship between mathematics and physics, first glimpsed in “Dolly” Mearns’ English lesson. Lest you think that this inspirational lesson of his was an isolated example, nearly forty years later, I presented the prizes at a school in King’s Lynn, and told this story of “Dolly” Mearns’ inspirational incidental lesson on relativity. Afterwards, an Old Emanuel who happened to be there as a parent, came up to me and told me his “Dolly” Mearns story. I am sure there must be 47 years’ worth of these inspirational stories. Not all our teachers were distinguished in that way. Dr Ulyatt, who taught us physics, was not so strong on the mathematical side of the subject, but we learnt when Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus was published, and we reconstructed the mathematical side of the subject for ourselves, which was a very good way to learn it.

When I came to Emanuel, in some ways I found it a taxing environment; it seemed I came from a different social background from just about everyone else. There was a fair amount of social snobbery amongst both students and staff, but that was also an education in itself: it equipped me to some extent for being able to cope with the wide variety of social environments I have encountered through my life so far. Having this room named for me is a formidable honour. It would be inappropriate for me to say that it is inappropriate but I take it that I stand here as token, however inadequate, for what I have devoted my life to so far: education and research. (For some years, most, but not all of my time, has been taken up with administration. Administration can actually be fascinating - it has led me into also sorts of interesting professional contexts, architecture, building, fund management - but it is a means to an end.)

Research is of fundamental value to society. It is about the disinterested pursuit of truth without predetermined goals, about intellectual honesty. One does not have to be a particularly acute observer of the contemporary political scene in the UK or US to see the need for that. It is about achievement in the long term, adding to knowledge, and, at the highest levels, changing the way we understand and think about the world. Education is about preparing for life: it is life-long but needs secure foundations. It is not fundamentally about the acquisition of short-term skills, preparing for work. Both research and education have been perverted by the use of crass short-term measures of success. Crude quality controls drive out the sort of inspiration that I was privileged to receive from many of those who taught me at Emanuel and that I believe it still provides. What is important in research and education is what is achieved in the long-term: the research paper that is still read after thirty years, the former pupil who remembers with thanks the inspirational moments, the advice and guidance. For me, these, particularly the latter, give the most satisfaction. So in opening the new library this is what I want to say: thank you to the School for the education for the life it has made possible for me: teaching, leading distinguished institutions here and in the US, experiencing what is happening at the forefront of mathematics and physics, and making some contributions there.

Thank you to my fellow students for what I learned from them and to the masters like Aeron Rogers, Francis Grundy and Harry Mearns who provided such an inspiring education.

** The Noble Aim is still available for purchase from school.