00:00:58 born in nineteen hundred eleven

00:01:00 and educated at the grove park school in rexham

00:01:03 professor sir you worked are h jones

00:01:06 is known internationally

00:01:07 for his work on the structure synthesis and biogenesis

00:01:11 of natural products

00:01:13 sir you were attended university college of north wales at banger

00:01:18 and the university of manchester

00:01:20 he began as a lecturer

00:01:22 at imperial college in nineteen thirty eight

00:01:25 and rose to reader and later assistant professor in organic chemistry

00:01:30 at imperial college

00:01:32 his research on steroids and a settling's led to synthesis of vitamin a

00:01:38 his service as advisor and participant to numerous oversight committees has

00:01:43 earned him pure recognition as the

00:01:46 diplomat of science

00:01:48 in nineteen fifty five

00:01:50 he became wainfleet professor of chemistry

00:01:53 at oxford

00:01:54 receiving his knighthood

00:01:56 the same year

00:01:58 sir you were is widely regarded for his inspirational teaching methods

00:02:02 as many of the students have gone on to become major contributors to both

00:02:06 industry

00:02:07 and academia

00:02:09 joining us for this interview at Sir Ewart's home

00:02:12 is Ms Moira Donnelly

00:02:14 public affairs officer for the royal society of chemistry

00:02:22 your early life

00:02:23 what your parents did for a living

00:02:26 well my early life i first saw the light of day in uh...

00:02:30 the front room of a semi-detached house in a

00:02:33 little village called christophen

00:02:35 which is near rexham on the

00:02:37 wales england

00:02:39 england border

00:02:41 my father was a solicitous clerk

00:02:43 my mother was the daughter of two well-known evangelists

00:02:47 who spent most of their life preaching up and down the country

00:02:51 uh... she was actually born in stockport while my grandmother was on her way

00:02:54 from north of england down to south wales and had to get off the train and

00:02:58 give birth to a child in stockport

00:03:01 so she wasn't really welsh she was born in england my father was born in

00:03:06 wales uh... a welsh village

00:03:09 life in

00:03:10 a little village population of about a thousand

00:03:14 was uh... dominated by

00:03:17 the colliery

00:03:20 mining for coal

00:03:21 which was half a mile away from our house that was the main view from the

00:03:25 front window

00:03:26 along with the great western railway line to to london from birkenhead

00:03:33 the colliery was a fascinating place to a youngster

00:03:37 because uh...

00:03:38 one went around and there was steam hissing here there and everywhere

00:03:43 things turning

00:03:45 and all the

00:03:46 technology was really very

00:03:48 very fascinating

00:03:50 my father used to work in the town

00:03:52 rexham

00:03:53 just a few miles two miles away

00:03:56 and uh...

00:03:58 this was served by an electric tramway from rexham to rose

00:04:02 uh... open deck at the top

00:04:04 great fun of course to climb up the top and sit on the on the open deck

00:04:09 and as a boy i went to school in rexham at the age of

00:04:12 five and a half

00:04:14 on the tram every morning i didn't have to bother with the fare

00:04:18 because my father used to travel on the tram later on and i merely had to say

00:04:21 to the conductor my dad will pay the fare

00:04:24 and uh... this is uh... this is what happened

00:04:26 it was a very

00:04:27 personal service

00:04:29 father used to catch the tram at about

00:04:31 ten to nine every morning

00:04:33 and uh...

00:04:34 the tram

00:04:35 if he wasn't obvious

00:04:36 the tram would stop

00:04:38 and the bell and the

00:04:39 driver would ring the bell and we'd have to go out my dad's not coming today he's

00:04:43 not well

00:04:45 this was uh...

00:04:46 the sort of life we

00:04:48 we led and i think my

00:04:50 interest in technology was

00:04:54 really fostered by

00:04:56 the buses the

00:04:57 those of the old buses with solid tires of course the the first buses i saw

00:05:02 and the

00:05:03 trams and the

00:05:04 the mine

00:05:05 incidentally versham colliery which is what it was called

00:05:09 was the place where

00:05:11 wilkinson got his coal

00:05:13 uh... from for his ironworks which was at versham

00:05:17 it was a famous ironworks and

00:05:19 produced a lot of the cannons used in the uh...

00:05:22 the peninsula peninsula war and the battle of waterloo and so on

00:05:26 these were produced by wilkinson's

00:05:28 wilkinson's ironworks he made his own money there were

00:05:31 penny coins that uh... wilkinson's ironworks produced

00:05:35 life was

00:05:37 uh... such that one had to win scholarships and so on unfortunately i

00:05:41 did manage to

00:05:43 accumulate enough in the way of scholarships and exhibitions together

00:05:46 with uh...

00:05:48 a teacher's training grant

00:05:49 this was the

00:05:51 the key to it

00:05:52 accepting a grant from the board of education

00:05:55 uh...

00:05:57 to be trained as a teacher three years of university education followed by a

00:06:01 year's diploma

00:06:02 and this i undertook to to do and it guaranteed me

00:06:06 a fair amount of support for my university

00:06:09 days together with i won the top scholarship in vangar

00:06:14 which was quite a help and a county exhibition on top of that

00:06:18 so that all together i was uh...

00:06:20 not badly not badly offered at university

00:06:24 i did manage to supplement it uh...

00:06:27 for

00:06:28 one of the

00:06:29 quite a period six years actually as a correspondent for the guardian

00:06:33 manchester guardian as it was known in those days

00:06:35 i used to write up the uh...

00:06:38 weekend sporting activities for their tuesday feature they had a feature in

00:06:42 the guardian sport in the universities

00:06:45 and uh... i used to do the vangar section

00:06:48 so you finished uh... your undergraduate degree and then you did go off and do

00:06:52 this teaching diploma right away

00:06:54 that's right and uh... that was a very useful

00:06:57 thing for me in that it

00:06:59 broadened my

00:07:01 uh... experience i found the history of education

00:07:05 fascinating because it introduced me to a whole lot of history that somehow or

00:07:09 other i'd missed out on in school

00:07:12 the disadvantage of our school

00:07:14 history education was that you never got a complete view i think i did the tutor

00:07:17 period three times i was very knowledgeable about henry the seventh

00:07:21 onwards

00:07:22 but uh... i had some big gaps otherwise

00:07:25 well you completed your phd and it was at that time that you had a couple of

00:07:29 options

00:07:33 you had the option of going to oxford or to manchester

00:07:38 yes and i chose the manchester one because i had been so

00:07:43 inviting and the work that was being done there

00:07:47 was so inviting it so happened that

00:07:49 even at the undergraduate stage i had

00:07:52 been asked by simonson i'm not sure if i was asked or told

00:07:56 uh... to give a

00:07:58 a talk to the uh...

00:08:00 chemical society the local chemical society

00:08:03 and uh...

00:08:05 i chose as my subject vitamin A and the carotenoids

00:08:10 which i found very fascinating

00:08:13 i didn't realize of course when i chose this subject that i would have to do so

00:08:16 much reading in

00:08:17 in german but most of the work by carer in switzerland and kuhn in germany was

00:08:22 published in

00:08:23 the brichter or the helvetica

00:08:26 these are published in german

00:08:28 but uh... i enjoyed doing this and then of course found that had one was doing

00:08:32 this kind of work in manchester and also working in the steroid

00:08:36 steroid series which

00:08:38 proved to be extremely

00:08:41 fashionable at a later stage

00:08:43 and indeed there were so many activities going on in the natural

00:08:48 natural product field

00:08:49 that i found it quite uh... quite exciting

00:08:53 and i got introduced

00:08:54 by him there

00:08:56 into work on the synthesis of vitamin A

00:09:00 uh... did a bit of work on vitamin E

00:09:02 uh... and

00:09:04 into the particularly into the steroid steroid steroid field

00:09:09 that was my

00:09:10 real apprenticeship in manchester for

00:09:13 two two and a half

00:09:14 two and a half years

00:09:15 the first few months at imperial college i was supervising eighteen

00:09:19 eighteen research people i'd supervise one in manchester

00:09:23 so one was really thrown in at the deep end and one of them uh... portuguese so

00:09:27 we had to do the supervision in french which was not so

00:09:31 not so easy

00:09:32 but uh...

00:09:33 this was the way it worked and i gradually found myself

00:09:36 due to the involvement of harvard and

00:09:39 government and changes of one kind or another

00:09:43 in a couple of years i was largely running the organic

00:09:46 the organic department

00:09:48 which of course for a twenty

00:09:50 something year old

00:09:52 was a tremendous tremendous opportunity

00:09:56 and although the

00:09:57 the war

00:09:59 began in in thirty nine

00:10:01 and we had

00:10:03 all sorts of restrictions one of the great mercies of course was that we

00:10:06 should have gone to edinburgh

00:10:08 but happily because uh...

00:10:10 the administration was so lax in making their arrangements

00:10:15 by the time

00:10:16 december thirty nine came uh... thirty

00:10:19 nine came that's right

00:10:21 we decided it was decided we should stay in london and we were the only

00:10:25 academic establishment to stay in london

00:10:28 uh... i often say like the windmill theater we never closed

00:10:32 and uh...

00:10:33 it was a tremendous opportunity and advantage because

00:10:37 being the only academic

00:10:38 place

00:10:39 anything that went on in whitehall or anywhere else well you better go up to imperial

00:10:43 college there's sure to be somebody who knows something about it there

00:10:46 and so we were constantly being

00:10:48 used

00:10:49 by government and the forces for this and that and the other the other thing

00:10:53 which was all very

00:10:55 all very exciting

00:10:57 of course it was made

00:10:58 a good bit more hectic in

00:11:00 september of

00:11:02 nineteen forty when uh...

00:11:04 the action moved to london and uh... from there on of course right up until

00:11:09 the spring of nineteen forty five we were never without the threat

00:11:13 uh... of some sort of action

00:11:15 and i don't think people realize just quite

00:11:18 what uh...

00:11:19 it was like in

00:11:21 the early days of nineteen forty one for example when on

00:11:25 several occasions more than a thousand people were killed overnight

00:11:29 in the in the bombing bombing raids

00:11:32 and this went on not on that scale i mean these were individual individual

00:11:36 nights

00:11:37 spaced

00:11:38 by perhaps a week or

00:11:40 two weeks or

00:11:41 ten days

00:11:42 uh... in the raids so often at weekends which was uh...

00:11:48 very unpleasant

00:11:51 for me at that stage being

00:11:53 young and ambitious

00:11:57 the work was more of a worry than uh...

00:11:59 than the uh... the enemy action

00:12:02 but you were involved in civil defense

00:12:04 I was involved in civil defense of course at home one had to do a certain amount in the

00:12:08 way of trying to protect oneself and uh...

00:12:11 i wasn't fit for the the forces i'd been turned down in a medical in thirty

00:12:15 eight

00:12:16 and in any case i was in a deferred

00:12:19 occupation as a university science uh...

00:12:22 worker and teacher

00:12:24 but uh...

00:12:26 the

00:12:27 civil defense activity began just before the war when

00:12:31 it was realized it would be very helpful if all our people in civil defense all

00:12:36 through the country had a

00:12:37 a much better acquaintance with war gases and an ability to

00:12:42 uh... detect and identify them

00:12:44 and so

00:12:45 Harry MLS who

00:12:47 was one of my colleagues in uh...

00:12:50 London at the time and I we

00:12:52 went down to Porton and we did a course there on war gases and their identification

00:12:57 and then we set up uh...

00:12:59 an organization at

00:13:01 Imperial College in which we trained people in a four day

00:13:05 a four day course we gave them

00:13:08 uh... experimental work and we used the grounds of Imperial College for

00:13:12 simulated uh... mustard gas incidents and things of that sort

00:13:16 throughout this time of course my wife was

00:13:19 with me in London uh...

00:13:20 occasionally

00:13:22 she would be moved out

00:13:24 my persuasion or my

00:13:26 in-laws persuasion

00:13:27 and our first child was born up north

00:13:31 in October

00:13:32 forty one and then came back but our second child uh...

00:13:36 he was born during the flying bomb period and she had him in a nursing home

00:13:40 in Putney

00:13:41 flying bombs going around at the time

00:13:44 he was quite unperturbed by

00:13:46 the V1s or the V2s it didn't seem to

00:13:49 disturb his

00:13:50 wish to sleep most of the time

00:13:53 so you began at Manchester in 1948

00:13:56 yes and uh... I was very fortunate in being able to take

00:14:01 with me from Imperial College two of my

00:14:04 very bright

00:14:04 young men Bernard Henmist and Mark Whiting

00:14:08 and

00:14:09 in Manchester there was already

00:14:11 T.G. Halsall

00:14:13 who had

00:14:14 received an offer

00:14:16 of a job with Hearst up in Edinburgh when Hearst went there but he decided to

00:14:20 throw in his lot with me and stay in Manchester so with the aid of these

00:14:23 three

00:14:26 skilled and enthusiastic lieutenants our work in Manchester got off to a

00:14:30 an excellent start

00:14:32 we carried on with the

00:14:35 settling work

00:14:36 Mark Whiting was looking after that

00:14:38 particularly

00:14:39 and developed

00:14:41 all the

00:14:42 reactions that we had discovered at Imperial College and added several

00:14:47 several more

00:14:48 well Manchester was a wonderful time for me I

00:14:52 had all I wanted we had all the equipment we needed we were doing very

00:14:55 well I had lots of collaborators

00:14:58 and it came as quite a surprise in

00:15:01 1954

00:15:03 to get a letter from the registrar at Oxford

00:15:06 telling me not that I was to come for an interview but telling me that I had

00:15:10 been elected to the Wainfleet professorship at Oxford

00:15:14 and that he would

00:15:15 like to hear from me that I was prepared to accept this this election

00:15:21 well of course I wasn't there were lots and lots of things that I had

00:15:26 doubts doubts about everything was going very well for me in in Manchester

00:15:33 both work and domestically

00:15:35 I didn't relish the prospect of going down to Oxford where I knew

00:15:40 by repute there was a great deal to be done building wise equipment wise

00:15:46 and it would almost certainly result in a

00:15:49 a break in my research activities

00:15:53 well to cut a very long story short all sorts of negotiations went on and

00:15:58 eventually

00:16:00 I did

00:16:01 I did make the decision to

00:16:03 to move to Oxford and we did that in 19

00:16:07 1950

00:16:08 55

00:16:09 As you look at natural product chemistry now how do you see the field developing further?

00:16:17 developing as far as

00:16:20 learning about

00:16:22 natural products I don't think we're going to go

00:16:25 an awful long way in isolating more natural products because

00:16:31 you get the law of diminishing returns if you work in the composity family

00:16:35 you look at a new

00:16:37 species and you find well

00:16:39 ninety nine percent of what you find is what you found before there's only one

00:16:43 percent that's different

00:16:45 but the advances are going to take place undoubtedly and these are going to be

00:16:49 very helpful in learning how nature manages to to make its natural products

00:16:54 you see

00:16:55 I'm well satisfied to understand

00:16:58 what goes on in the millions of chemical reactions in our bodies

00:17:02 or in this plant or that microorganism

00:17:06 and there are millions of chemical reactions going on all the time

00:17:10 and it's going to take us a very very long time to understand

00:17:14 how these work and

00:17:16 to gain control as I hope eventually man will

00:17:20 over his environment really understanding exactly what

00:17:24 what goes on

00:17:25 and this should help enormously so

00:17:28 I see a very big future on that side

00:17:31 What sort of advice do you give to young scientists you come across now who are starting out

00:17:36 say in organic chemistry or any other field of chemistry?

00:17:39 Well the advice I give of course is to look around and find

00:17:43 interesting fields in which to work but don't

00:17:46 look for these too early make sure you've got

00:17:49 command of the basic science

00:17:52 it's very essential that you should have a good

00:17:54 coverage of

00:17:56 basic chemistry and basic physics

00:17:58 it's then you can build on these I'm sorry I don't believe biochemistry is a

00:18:03 science that stands on its own

00:18:05 I think it's very much dependent upon chemistry and chemistry and physics and

00:18:10 upon biology which of course is

00:18:12 very much easier to understand if you understand the chemistry and physics

00:18:16 behind it

00:18:17 so I believe there is a very great future in these

00:18:21 in these subjects but it's got to be based on a firm understanding of the

00:18:25 fundamental principles of chemistry and physics

00:18:28 so that

00:18:29 I see them

00:18:30 I know some people will say that

00:18:32 chemistry as we've known it hasn't got a future well I don't think that is a

00:18:37 proper assessment I think it's always got to have a future

00:18:41 you've got to build on it

00:18:42 in order to be able to advance

00:18:44 Well Professor Stewart-Jones I'd like to thank you very much for talking to us today

00:18:49 and I'd like to thank you for your patience and tolerance I feel I've

00:18:54 exceeded the

00:18:56 almost the right of someone to dominate the scene in this way for an hour or two

00:19:03 I've certainly enjoyed it