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John Dunworth gives me a thought-provoking VIP tour of the NPL

At the invitation of John Dunworth I paid a VIP visit to NPL.  He had said I had only to ask and he would arrange for the top people to show me whatever I wanted.  He was as good as his word and it turned out to be a fascinating tour.

In the Autonomics Laboratory I was shown an enclosure designed to exclude light and sounds.  It had been constructed to determine how people behave when completely isolated from sensory stimuli.  I sat in the enclosure but declined to have the door closed to see how I myself reacted.  I saw it as an uncomfortably close analogy to my experience in my last few months at M.I. in which half my department was removed, then the other half and then my secretary departed so that I was on my own with no duties to perform.

John Dunworth had arranged for his Deputy Director, A.E. Bailey, to join us for lunch and afterwards he took me to his house in the grounds of NPL.  Here he was at pains to say that the vine at his house was rooted in Crown soil!