 I would like to introduce Sidney as the idea was to have to be a talk in his department which is potentially Sidney's old original department. He was, I was telling you, the first full-time member of the class, effectively the founder of the department. He came here in 1943, which is nice. And stayed on his head of the department and saw Sidney. And then I put somebody who was a member of the department on question, took over from 1952. And so, 1952. Yes, well done. Then he did, dealt with, took over from 1992 until 1999. He took his own qualities and he couldn't come and see the change in the place he had not seen. Then became class progress and I took over from 1999 until then. So it's a great pleasure that we have Sidney here. He's a founding member of the department to give a talk about the history of his work. Thank you. Let's go to talk about the history of the HPA after the matter. Medical physics. I've seen through the eyes of some of you who've been through it. And I'm going to talk about the last 60 years, simply because 60 years ago the HPA was formed. But I shall say a lot about the past 30 years. You know much more about that than I do. I retired in 1978 at the age of 60. Simply getting all five rules up that makes me 85 at the moment. So you know much more about the later part than I do. But the only part I'll be talking about mostly. I've always been interested in history. And now somewhat to my surprise I found myself part of it. So first part myself. I took my London B.S.C. in June 1941. Having already decided on a career in medical physics. Soon after I went to see Professor Maynard of what was then the Royal Cancer Hospital Precious Free. And those days of course the hospitals, almost all of them, had to find their own finance, raise their own money with no NHS. And the more eloquent traffic you had through a hospital more likely would give away funds. So it was the Royal Cancer Hospital Precious Free. Many of them have nothing to offer you, but comment is in those days the hospital physicist was worth his weight in radium. He referred me to Professor Russ at the middle sex who was running a team to enable a physicist to be available to any hospital in London requiring a physicist, but without one because of the war. The business has been imposed through uncracked karma. That's what he professed in Newcastle. That's from the time he would become a lecturer in the medical school. I was appointed to understudy him and take over from him. In those days the work of a hospital physicist was almost entirely concerned with the treatment of cancer. Involving the colouration of x-ray-cellable machines and also the use of radium, which was respected and done because of danger upon it. Generally, radium was then stored in a borehole like that of the little sex that we put across small quantities locally, but especially made as a type of steel container. It's about a foot in diameter and about two feet in height. It has a hole two inches in diameter, right down to the middle. And with a brass container, something like 10-10 metres long, was clipped at the bottom of the screw head with many, many turns to see the term. A type on the key is that wood is arsenal when they were designing it, it makes for a bomb and explodes it, and it just bounce beautifully. So it's likely probably alright as far as radium. It was permissible to use radium clinically in those days only if the patient could be nursed in a relatively secure area, which at that time here was the basement of the private patient's wing. Actually, a bomb exploded in one region of one of London's hospitals and the whole building immediately collapsed on top of it. A long search found one of the two radium containers, no two steel containers, in the rubble. This plate was found with a bomb that could explode close to the second container. We put it blowing it across the courtyard and into the opposite wing and collapsed on top of it. But all radium tubes were undamaged in way of clinical use. Radium had been widely used before the war, namely for interstitial and intra-travetary treatments. To reduce the hazards from bombing, some four grams of radium, I think in London terms, that's come about 150 gigavekarels, as radium bromide leaks the arsenic from the floor to the tunnel, part of an old lime kiln in the Chiltern Downs near Luton. This was then a part, in which the first product used for post-proliferation of radium, the gas radon, could be extracted daily and sent to hospitals all over the country. The gamma radium it is of course exactly the same as the radium we used, but the half time was about four days instead of some 1,600 years. Until December I spent some time each week at the Radon Centre and the rest of the middle sex understudying Frank Farmer. Now Professor Russ, and in one of the fundamentals of the British Experiment Radium Protection Committee in 1921, he became a professor in 1919 by the way. The recommendations of this committee were the first in the world on the subject of radiation protection. Even by 1941, radiation protection was still of minor concern compared with today. There was certainly no legislation or code of practice and few recommendations. In diagnostic radiology it was accepted that any patient would only get excreted very occasionally and then over-receive an open accessible dose of radiation. Then he had to death for a warm up before his next examination. I was asked to mention the radiation received by some such patients. The quickly found that the brightening the high doses received by some. Fairly a few patients, for example, often received doses to the back in pen for grad and the highest I missed was about 300 grads. If the larger you put it off, it is then being carried out without any intensification of the image and also not being carried out digitally quickly. I also found that one particular projection of patients in their pregnancy could result in the dose of the gonad of the fetus reaching tens of grads. I was left by one of three people in Britain who were making such measurements and this began to cause concern over the amount of radiation that could be received by diagnostic excreted patients. During my time at the Little Six where I was working with Frank Farmer he was consistent with his work on electronic instruments and measuring the ionizing radiation. He first contained the electron at the valve for a very long time, the total length of high-inflation glass with a good connection at the end. This is, of course, long holidays of transistors. After this time the conventional method of measuring the strength of radioactive source involved in using this instrument which you may or may not have seen will be electrocuted. We have to be fairly expert in making sure that these are properly prepared and so on. I must say I found much more convenient not to have too much of a gold bead. A gold bead means a glass either covered in graphite and much that you see that in the fetus get much better for measuring where things work. I don't suppose these are used much nowadays, are they? So they still pick up in the degree that the, what is it now, pay levels. So anyway, they just have to be used in those days. The thought was that it was based on the gold electroscope. Well, sorry, it's really different from the electroscope and then the gold leaf views and so on and the ratio from two tubes to give you the ratio of the contents and so on. Other things they need groups, they weren't always. I have no idea how much radiation we received during this course, but it must have been quite substantial. The time taken was appreciable and shielding minimum. During this time, the idea was limited that it might be possible to build an electronic metal detector to assist the search in the room for the metallic carbon bodies. It was longer than all days of transistors and commercial metal detectors and also in the early days we stood ahead with our receivers. Everyone then knew that the movement near the coils of a tuned circuit of a radio receiver could alter the frequency that it caused, the ultimate, yeah, howls. But they were visited to us and they were not free to go. Together with the fact that I played about with this project and decided that it was not likely to be then useful, we published a brief note about it in the long term. In 1942, I saw an article in the region cited by an American surgeon who said how useful such a machine had been in their hospital after the Pearl Harbor attack. I wrote him asking about the incident. He replied convincingly, he had no intention whatsoever letting me know how it worked. A couple of years or so later, the further letter offered one free if you wanted it. He would get a sense of what next time an American bomb was coming across this factory with supplies for war-torn Britain. It usually arrived, but at that time, Frank had moved to Newcastle and I had moved to UCH, so he reckoned that we owned the machine jointly. We were once with one of us and if you ever needed it was sent on the next main line at LNER Express to be collected from the guard personnel. It was good at detecting the harnesses of very poor for non-magnetic metals and useless for anything else like a clasp. I had never seen operations with electronic bodies last for hours, with a metal lock found at the end. With this machine, such operations were then much faster, almost always satisfactory. He had the past in such operation, I witnessed, took 17.5 seconds by the theatre clock from a spinning station to removal. The American machine, and we've got a slide of that, some un-mattled cases. It had a carriage core, as part of the two machines that were located in here, which came right to the end here, and the rubber sheath, this rubber sheath had to cover the whole thing, make it sterile for operation purposes. It was a locator, not really a detector. I've been interested to see recently that commercial metal locator now being used to determine the presence of the carriage core and body. But this was a locator, not just a detector. There was one here at UCH when I left in 1962. I don't know what's happened to it since, but... Good. Thank you again afterwards, John. In 1941, in London, the blitz was coming to an end, but still were there rates almost every night, a lot in that day as well. The big London teaching hospitals were decorated to place it in the home counties, where a safety home for an underused mental hospital had ground sufficiently large for the required walls from the botherers to be installed as prefabricated structures. I visited one during my time as a middle-deck to calibrate the output for the two commercial expectations of the machine being used by a dermatologist for treating skin cancers. In the early days of radio therapy, there have been three units of radiation zones, some of which you may have come across. The threshold had a theme of those. It was one of the very early ones, and the pastile dose was also used in the very early days. Early on, it was very effective because the very effective carbide, of course, had a very pronounced quality dependence. And here is the run for dose, the Argyle dose, the 1920s definition, much more satisfactory. Now, the dermatologist asked me if I'd bought my pastiles. I said no, but I'd bought a victory army to which I had doses in rough news. He said he didn't mind so long as I told the radio about how many pastile doses there were to one Argyle dose. I replied that for the radiation he was using, about 300 arguments to run pastile doses. The range of gamma rays was typically more than 10,000. When I finished, I was packing up, and the radio asked for help. The dermatologist had told her to select the medical students and treat for 1,000 feet of diameter air with the upper arm because there was what I said was going to cause a pattern of the virus. He'd be on the next day and see from the skin redening whether I'd done my calibration properly. The visit to another such hospital was to search for two small radium units. To insert the radium into tissues would be packed into a pattern of tube about 2 millilitres in diameter and up to 10,000 feet of long. She was a gold golder. A superficial intra-privatory application to practice similarity was much shorter and some 5 millimetres in diameter. His patients had a cancer for this, and three small people had inserted some days previously. He was of low intelligence, found the needles irritating and pulled two of the three out. When this was discovered, the staff searched the ward without success and then called for help. I got there to see that I shall never ever see again. The medical superintendent, the hospital administrator and the hospital maintenance put all together searching the patient's face trying yet again to find the missing needles. There were no bagged counters in those days, and the search instruments just known as the clutching pen told me that there was radiation present. He turned out to be from the third needle still in the patient sitting quietly beside his bed. He moved away, no further radiation detected. Half where the floor sweepings would go into the incinerator. This time turned out to be just this working, corrugated iron structure half buried in the ground at the furthest corner of the estate. I can tell the gamma radiation was coming from the snuff for the contact to be waked out. Although there had been a gardener on the estate before the war, he came to help. There was a very, very strong smell. Half an hour had passed while I examined one bundle of the field raked out and found one of the two missing needles. When he figured everything out there was still radiation from the area in the middle of the incinerator. The last last needle was found buried in the earth's floor under an upturned half quarter. Fortunately, the incinerator was slow burning and low temperature and both needles were still intact and ready for further use. In the last few days I had letters from three people from the early days who regrettably were unable to be here called the Ristio Tully from HAL. He told me that for this purpose he used an iron station chamber because the sensitivity of detection was very poor in those days to have a very large iron station chamber the news of standard methods of spin. One hot day in the middle of August 1942 on a Friday afternoon about 4 p.m. a professor was on holiday in the Lake District and I was all of nine months experienced behind me who was the C. Lim member of the staff actually in the department. Perville's Clifford Walker later as Exeter was planning out a research project for the professor on people with good luminescence and illuminating dials with pots. He would all be to a large Victorian house in Hastings which he used to illuminate him taking test samples from all the folk working there. The results were quite crazy. He was then far more redirected than he expected. It turned out that on the Monday the director of the outfit had taken delivery of some 50mg of bacon in a large amount as bromide in HBR solution in a glass cuban made pot. He put it on his personal research he was then called to the phone and then turned out to lunch and so on he was asked the part of him to turn around and said, do you know what happened? Ah, crazy. But it was not on his fence. The first reveal of the dead pot ends. Now this is the middle of a heat wave. He knew of course he found out that he had a case of unaccustomed tidiness. He'd taken the tube out of the dead pot melted looked at it coffee water then he opened the window and put it on the wilting flowers in the garden. That was Monday. Unfortunately there was a thunder storm. This was Friday afternoon. I went to the premises and was very worried about the ground where the radium had been poured. Since in wartime any vacant land had to be used to growing vegetables. So we dug out as much of the soil as we could from there loaded into a garage near by not finished using almost midnight the periodic shaft to put that light out. He was the professor who said we should call him the MDL for those days were the forearms of the NRPB. They came and all the soil that we'd collected and dug out put into the lower tens. A few days later I went to see if all was now well to be approached by one of the staff who took me to a magnificent drawing room. This was the room where she did her loonash. There was a desk on the shelf behind the desk. So this was the room. They also used an easy sort of common room for the folk who had been on the premises. But that's all right. I said no. I'm looking through some old papers. I came across a story dating from 1925. A long or 50 milligram radio tube was found to contain much less from that. It was temporary making but it was found that only about half the number of contents were still there. This tube was one of those which had been filled after the First World War with a range of replaying from limited dials from armaments. It was used to filter this range of replays of the radio tubes needed for hospitals. And it was all done using the soluble radium bromide to facilitate handling. However, the seal on this particular tube was inadequate and there was fluid inside. It appeared that the body fluids of innumerable patients had leaked in and dissolved out some of the radium. It was impossible to present and trace those patients but for all the reasons that in all of the country's hospitals the constant recalls can be kept as insoluble radium sulfate to stop that thing ever happening again. In 1943 Prof. Rasmussen called a meeting of the physicists in the hospital he knew about to discuss setting up an association hospital for physicists at the HPA. Only about 60 of us in the country at the time. In history it was the informal society of people interested in the subject. I'm sorry about this. It's been sort of a professional matter it didn't start clear this time until the NHS was being set up in 1945 and 1948. In those days few of the measuring instruments needed could be purchased and then they had to be made in-house. When I moved to U.C. in 1943 I was a physics department for my first three years for the victory in our meter, the lathe, the solving iron every time radio was used in the operating space. I was required to be there with my shaft, my table, and my slide rule. After the size and position of the growth had been determined I would have given about five minutes to calculate the number of the strength of needles required in distribution and a length of pigment time required to give the described dose as uniformly as possible to the target volume. In doing the x-ray films after it I usually found there had been three ideas one was mine after calculation was finished the second was out of the surgeon asking the surgeon from the dose of what the x-ray shows. There was sometimes a similarity between the three. About 1944 I was asked to measure the radius of the steam by the start of the X-ray department. There were no personal monitors available at all in those days so I had to adopt a gentle film but after recovering it was dead I took the first weeks results and went down and called for Dr. X Ah, Dr. X I had the results of last week's radiation measurements who only got so much? You're a stacking man! Unfortunately these films offered a needed target to brokers. Yes, unfortunately these films had it prepared me for this. This was on the relationship to the month of December to a senior registrar who went to his control of the funds on the 1st of January and that would come to trace the audience. When I was at UCA I was required to run the firebomb squad our job was to move any of the articles from the roof down to the road or whatever else when I displayed my page to get them off the roof and the screen for any words before your heart could take hold depending on due service if not The hospital then existed but I think it does now on 5 sites with roads between them for a 15 over 100 is any one part 3 per site We could choose where we slept but to leave the crew on the balcony of an extra wall on the fourth floor underneath the glass roof for a bit of an attack which deepens the sub-basement and leaves the hospital playing water intake What are the bonds that ever got on the hospital while I was on UCA? When did you have to have a drink of any agent, please? You need to go after the wall of the general election at which we were once a party with the church and with the beaters and can adapt you to go to the prime minister and one of the election promises was the national health service He chose as the director of health one under Alan Devon a very strong willed character which led to a lot of apprehension In the following 3 years the intense lobbying and negotiating arrangements were reached that seemed to promise well for the future especially for the medical profession and even more especially for hospital specialists after then as a general rule in the modern pre-hospital there was not one by local authority or other public body consultants were on the way and unpaid for their hospital duties but they were allowed to earn their living by treating private patients and the private patients being and charging fees In the following years that restriction sails the drawn up and agreed preparatory for many groups of health service workers and the victim machinery set up each hospital or group of hospitals that were quite arbitrary I started in 1941 at 200 pounds a year about the end of the work requested at 550 pounds which is indeed and we were able to get knowledge and buy our first house at 1150 pounds I looked for the finance office at one of London's richer hospitals and they spent a third of all their income on advertising for further donations The finance department of the hospital was very much a money raising concern usually they still had a pre-war unit for external gamma ray therapy containing about 6 grams of radium called mostly a radium bomb The treatment head was built with sufficient security and natural radium for the patient under treatment as of all those times the radium was kept in the safe due to the head biotechable tube The bomb entertaining the radium was moved dramatically from safe to head for treatment and then back similarly after treatment the tube was disconnected from the safe every night on the safe spot On Monday morning the tubing was wrongly connected the ring on the end of the flexible tubing being left cross-faded on the fitting in the safe As soon as the fans started the air pressure built up blowing the tubing off to the safe allowing the bobbins to describe a graceful parabola to finish under the sink in the corner for room After planning what we're going to do while they care for this we put it back in the safe and the tubing connected properly this time It was probably in the late 50s when I had a phone call from the sub-optimal visible servant I should say about that no, I'm sorry it comes here again Soon after setting up the NHS the visits took her for fellowship of all waiting in hospitals to supply and then charge off to the vent of whatever region they had It's not too ominous for small-radio needles that it involved this charge for the six gram of our so-called radium on I found out that we could replace this region by cobalt-60 and replace it again every three years for a substantial smaller sum So we got the required cobalt-60 and told the minister to supply we no longer needed their radium this was not well received in private Probably in the late 1950s when I had a phone call from the sub-optimal visible servant we gave the task of compiling a suitable answer to a parliamentary question asked by an MP Essentially the question asked how it was that it's a new dirty so-called nuclear cobalt form for a service property being used in some UK hospitals for the treatment of cancer I've went out of the cobalt and found in the familiar name that these radio-friendly treatments had incorporated cobalt-60 and nothing was ever to do with thermonuclear device incorporated in the case of a cobalt I've been struck to see that MP's face and my answer was red Again, with the war we heard about the atomic bombs used on Japan and took steps to find out what we could about them As I'm after, we heard that the wartime airfield at Harville was being used for experimental work on cobalt crops He soon announced that work was underway to get fleet going about low energy experimental power Further, among other things small quantities of radio-assets for research projects and medical services could be available I'd like to know if this task would give every health to any request for radio-asset for medical or medical research work I went to see Deep and discussed ideas with the staff to react to as a middle of what had been an aircraft hangar in case of an immense wall and roof of concrete So as a ladder, we climbed up and walked around on the top and several people conducting experiments some of pieces of equipment they loaded things down into the corn and pulled the luggage In the late 1940s the government decided that the top brass was for free services needed no hunting about the scientific background of the atomic bomb and a double van of one-beat coal