1.1. Smyrna, by George McVittie.

I was born 5 June 1904 in Smyrna (Izmir), Turkey. I have one brother: Wilfred Wolters McVittie (1906-1980); and one sister: Dora Elsie McVittie (Mrs John C Crowley) (1908-1999). I am the eldest of the three.

We were all born in Smyrna under the "Capitulations" system of extra-territoriality by which we automatically became British subjects, our father having been born in England.

Though Smyrna might well be regarded as an out-of-the-way spot in which to be born, a curious circumstance regarding the city may be mentioned. The population of Smyrna and its surroundings villages can hardly have exceeded a quarter of a million round the year 1900. Yet within a few years on either side of 1900, it produced a number of men who, to a greater or lesser degree, made their mark in the world. There was Aristotle Onassis, eventually to become a shipping magnate in Greece; (Sir) Alec Issigonis, the designer of automobiles in Britain; Jason Nassos (later Nassau), for long the Director or Warner & Swasey Observatory in East Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A.; and my brother and myself.

2.1. George describes the McVittie's parents.

My father, Francis Skinnner McVittie, was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, England, in 1872, and died in Purley, Surrey, in 1950. My mother, Emily Caroline McVittie (née Weber), was born in Smyrna, Turkey, in 1877, and died in West Buckland, Devon, England in 1942.

As far as I know, my father came from a poor family and received some education in the state schools of the period. He was then apprenticed to become a solicitor's clerk but shortly after 1890 came to Smyrna as secretary to the director of McAndrews & Forbes, which for over one hundred years has exported liquorice from Turkey. My father seems to have done well in the company and was well enough off to marry my mother in 1903. Two years later the control of McAndrews & Forbes passed to American interests and my father lost his job. Hard times followed but in 1907, after a visit to the U.S., my father returned to Smyrna with an agency to import American roll-top desks. By 1914 he had developed a shop in Smyrna which was a primitive version of a department store. A 1922 advertisement lists for sale, office equipment, household furniture, sports goods, revolvers, books, boots and shoes, oils and many other goods. The shop consisted of a long narrow showroom with plate glass windows at the front and along one side. At the far end was an office where my father and his chief assistant worked.

The city of Smyrna had no municipal fire brigade; therefore the various western European fire insurance companies had organised and financed a fire brigade, which was run by a committee of local insurance agents. My father was the secretary of this committee and appeared to be largely in control of the brigade.

My mother's upbringing contrasted strongly with my father's. She was educated privately in Smyrna according to Victorian notions of female education: how to be a housekeeper, to play the piano and to sing, to speak and write French as well as English and to learn some German. Though her parents were not rich, as she grew older she was able to travel with friends or relatives to the Black Sea and the Caucasus, to Switzerland and to Constantinople after her brother was posted to the German Embassy there. Western European nationals in Turkey under the "Capitulations" system lived a life of relative security and ease against an ever-present background of lawlessness and violence.

Picnics, tennis parties, dances in each other's houses were frequent forms of entertainment and the First World War, while it curtailed these activities, did not destroy them. They were vigorously resumed after 1918. Yet my mother was a serious and rather reserved woman with a great taste for reading. Probably this sustained her after 1922 in the lonely life she and my father, brother and sister led in Purley which could not have contrasted more with the life she had been accustomed to in Smyrna. She suffered a stroke in 1933 and was bed-ridden thereafter. In September 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, she was evacuated to West Buckland in Devon, with a nurse to look after her, and she died there in 1942.

2.2. Dora describes her parents.

As I have said, my father Francis McVittie came out to Turkey with a job in a tobacco company. A rather raw lad with a Lancashire accent enjoyed the company of my grandfather as he too was interested in archaeology and they used to excavate together in Ephesus which was then largely unexplored. Whatever work they did was always covered by sand the following season. My father started courting my mother, a very reserved and unworldly girl. He always said that the most he saw of her when he called was the top of her head as she was always bent over some embroidery. I think they did their courting on the way to church where my father sang in the choir and my mother played the organ. The church in Boudjah [now the Izmir suburb of Buca] was non-denominational and was known as the English Church. My mother's family were all buried in the churchyard.

Father and mother were married in the small church of Boudjah. There is only one photograph of them after the wedding. Mother was very handsome and she is wearing a beautiful dress of some light flowing material and a large Edwardian hat with roses. She does not seem to have had an elaborate white wedding but I know she had bridesmaids, two, I think, but I cannot remember their names. They went on their honeymoon to Corfu which mother remembers as a very beautiful place. I wonder what she would think of it now. She was a very intelligent and serious young woman. I don't know how she was educated but she was always a great reader. She always longed to travel but did not have much opportunity in her life as neither her parents or husband were well off. Her aunt, Bella, took her on a holiday on one occasion to the Caucasus and she remembered it with delight. I am not even sure if she had ever been to Constantinople but I think she had.

My parents lived in a very pleasant house in Boudjah. We three children were born in this house. After leaving the tobacco company father was out of a job for a long time. Eventually he opened a large shop in Smyrna where he sold anything required by the large British community from furniture and bicycles to shoes and comics, all imported from England. I remember I was allowed to pick up any comics from the window where they were displayed. My parents had three children, George Cunliffe McVittie, Wilfred Wolters McVittie and me Dora Elsie McVittie. The name Cunliffe was my maternal grandmother's - so my father told me. I think Elsie was the name of my father's favourite sister, who died. She was always known as 'Jimmy', why I don't know - so I was called Jimmy for years.

3.1. Description by George.

I have little information about my father's family. He was the son of John McVittie and his mother's maiden name was Ann Little. John McVittie was born in Longtown, Cumbria, and is described in birth or death certificates of some of his children that I possess, once as a commercial traveller and once as a lodging house keeper in Blackpool. Ann Little was the daughter of Christopher and Margaret Little; her mother had been Margaret Cunliffe before her marriage. My father set considerable store on this connection with the Cunliffes and indeed I was given my middle name because of it. He left notes indicating that Margaret was the youngest daughter of Henry (1764-1825) and Ann (1766-1852) Cunliffe, of Blackburn, Lancashire, and that she had a brother James. This is presumably the James Cunliffe (1798-1854) whose name commences the entries in Debrett referring to the descent of the present Lord Cunliffe, Baron Headley.

There is rather better information concerning my mother's family. Her mother was Eugenia Wolters (1840-1926), eldest daughter of the Rev Johann Theodor Wolters (1805-1882), who officiated in his latter years in three Anglican churches, one in Smyrna and the other two in nearby villages. He is said to have ridden on horse - or donkey - back between them each Sunday. His father had been a German Lutheran missionary in the Caucasus and South Russia regions. Eugenia Wolter's mother was a Scotswoman, Elizabeth Galloway (1815-1882) and, though Eugenia no doubt knew German, her preferred language was English.

My mother's father was Georg Weber (1840-1910), a native of Alsace (town of Reichenweier, near Colmar), who came to Smyrna at a date now difficult to determine. A family legend has it that he came as a result of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. However the Treaty of Frankfurt which ended the war was signed in May 1871. This hardly gives time for him to emigrate to Smyrna, meet and marry Eugenia Wolters and produce a son by 6 January 1872. Moreover a sketch-book survives, without indication of ownership, which contains minutely detailed pen, or pencil, drawings of archaeological sites some of which are reproduced in Georg Weber's books. One or two have dates, the earliest being 1867, so that it must be presumed that he came to Smyrna in the middle 1860s. He spent his life as a teacher in the Evangelical School in Smyrna, a school run by the Greek Orthodox Church on the lines of a French lycée, or a German gymnasium.

My grandfather must have been born a French national, was educated in France and was identified in later life as a Frenchman by those who knew him. His preferred language was French though he knew both German and English. It is not clear when or why he and his family became German nationals, but this must have occurred in the early 1870s.

Georg Weber was one of the early archaeological explorers of the Smyrna-Ephesus region, and seems to have devoted many of the school holidays to producing maps and plans of archaeological sites. I have been unable to discover how the travels involved were financed and I assume that they must have been paid for out of his salary, which can hardly have been large. But in the Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology (Vol. VII, p.226, 1882) are printed letters that passed between the then Secretary of the Society and my grandfather regarding the "so-called Tomb of St Luke at Ephesus". The Secretary urges him to carry out more excavations and Georg Weber replies that he "obtained a workman" to clear part of the ruin. There is no indication as to who paid, perhaps because a reference to finance was beneath the dignity of the Transactions. This particular ruin at Ephesus was an abiding interest of Weber's and his conclusion that it was not the tomb of St Luke was accepted by Sir William Ramsey ("Historical Geography of Asia Minor" p.110. John Murray, London 1890). Ramsey also refers to my grandfather's map of the Ephesus region as the only reliable one at that period.

Weber published a number of archaeological articles in the "Revue Archéologique", the "Revue des Etudes Grecques" and the "Mitt. des Deut. Archäol. Inst. Athen" during the period 1880 to 1904. His principal writings consist of three books:

Les Sipylos et ses Monuments: ancienne Smyrne (Navlochon), Ducher & Cie., Paris, 1880;
Guide du Voyageur à Ephèse, Imprimerie "La Presse", Smyrne 1891;
Dinair (Gueïkler) Célènes Apamée Cibotos Delagrange-Louys, Besançon, 1892.

The first of these is much used as a source-book by C J Cadoux in the opening four chapters of Ancient Smyrna (Blackwell, Oxford, 1938) and even as late as 1967 George E Bean reproduces Weber's plan of the ancient city of Erythrae in Aegean Turkey (Ernest Benn, London, 1967).

Prehistoric archaeology has been an abiding interest of my own from the time I began to read the books of Sir Leonard Wooley after leaving the University. This may have arisen as an unconscious inheritance from my grandfather, for it was not until late in life that I discovered his writings and read reviews of his books. Formerly I had vaguely supposed that Georg Weber, like many other Europeans living in Turkey, had some amateur interest in archaeology. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that his contemporaries regarded him as an authority on the classical archaeology of the Smyrna-Ephesus region.

My mother's only sibling, Theodor Georg Weber (1872-1956) was educated in Germany and after receiving his doctorate in jurisprudence and studying Turkish and Oriental Languages, entered in 1895 the Foreign Service of the pre-1914 German Empire in the "Dragoman" service. In those days, three types of career were available to senior members of the German Foreign Service: the diplomatic, the consular and the Dragoman. I am indebted to Dr Sareyko, of the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany, for an extract from an "ancient document" which, inter alia, states: "Since the Ambassador and his deputy were not conversant with the Turkish language, the official business between the Embassy and the Turkish authorities, in so far as it could not be conducted in the French language, was conducted exclusively through the agency of the first Dragoman of the Embassy". A Dragoman was therefore an official interpreter and the "ancient document" goes on to expatiate on the importance and responsibility of the post. My uncle had reached the rank of First Dragoman in the German Consulate-General in Constantinople (Istanbul) by 1901 and in the German Embassy by 1911. He had also entered the consular service by examination in 1908 and headed the consulate in Smyrna as Consul in 1917-18, one of the brief periods before 1919 when he worked outside Constantinople. The years 1919 to 1924 present a confused picture: Theodor Weber serves in various government offices in Berlin, acts as interpreter at the Versailles Treaty negotiations, is on a mixed Anglo-German "Court of Decisions" in Berlin 1922-24, and so on. Finally in 1925 he is appointed German Consul-General in Salonika (Thessaloniki) and stays in that post until his retirement in 1932.

Theodor Weber's nephew Wilfred McVittie also made a career in the Foreign Service, this time that of Great Britain. During the 1920s he lived with our parents and sister in Purley, working by day in the city of London and studying by night at King's College, London. He entered the British Consular Service in 1929 and was posted to Japan where he was Consul in Yokohama in 1938 and later Mukden (Manchuria) and Formosa (Taiwan). He was detained by the Japanese from December 1941 to August 1942, then served in the U.S.A. and was finally seconded to the War Cabinet Offices in 1945. After the war, Wilfred McVittie was appointed First Secretary (Commercial) in the British Embassy, Buenos Aires (1946), Commercial Counsellor in the Embassy in Mexico City (1948), and then to a similar post in Lisbon (1952) where he was also Consul-General. He completed his career as H M Ambassador to the Dominican Republic from 1958 until his retirement in 1962. Wilfred McVittie was awarded the C.M.G. (Companion, Order of St Michael & St George) in 1958.

3.2. Description by Dora.

My great-grandfather, John Theodore Wolters was a small farmer and missionary from a Moravian sect. He was sent out to Turkey to convert the Jews. (He was German). His first wife was a Circassian girl whom he had converted to Christianity. She was murdered in a pogrom against Christians. They had one daughter. Later, he was lonely and wanted to marry again but there were no suitable ladies in Turkey at the time. He consulted a friend, a clergyman, in Scotland who had several unmarried daughters. He went but was refused by his first choice. However, another sister, Elizabeth Galloway, accepted him. She was my great-grandmother. This couple were much loved and respected by the villagers of Boudjah. They lived in a large house above the village which was later burnt down, I think. Later they lived lower down the road near my grandmother's small house by the Greek church. The strange thing is that these two old people died on the same day. This is carved on the memorial locket left me by my mother. No explanation was ever given me except that it was not due to war, murder or accident. This couple had six children; two sons, Frederick and an un-named, unmentioned one who went to the bad, and four daughters Eugenia, Bella, Mary (some confusion here, I thought she was Dora and that I was called after her) and Margaret. Eugenia was my grandmother and Bella lived next to us in Boudjah and ran a school in her large house.

Aunt Bella helped my mother by sending in the midday meal for us when my father was dismissed from the tobacco company he had gone out to Turkey with. Mary (Dora) married and went out to Canada. I do not know her name but George had a small photo of her cabin, which I have mislaid. Margaret lived with Eugenia - she was a bit simple. Frederick married and had three daughters and a son who died as a child. Hilda and Amy worked as teachers for the Church Missionary Society and were driven out of Jerusalem in the 1914-18 war and took up residence in Basle as companions to an old lady. I have received most of the family details from them when John and I once looked them up out of curiosity. The third daughter Mrs Carpenter, now a widow, married a clergyman and my mother, George and I once spent a holiday with them in Guernsey. She had two daughters and various sons. I remember I liked one of the girls, I think either Violet or Doris. They lived near London, Chislehurst, I think. This family is younger than my mother, Uncle Theo and us, because Eugenia was older than Theodore.

My grandmother married a learned schoolmaster and amateur archaeologist called George Weber. He was a Frenchman despite his name, but had taken German nationality after the Franco-Prussian war when his native provinces were ceded to Germany. I hardly remember him, only seeing him ill propped up with a chair and pillows in bed. My grandparents had two children, Theodore, who was educated in Berlin, married a German and became to all intents and purposes German, and my mother Emily Caroline who, because of her marriage became British.

I do not know much about my father's family which he said came from the Lowlands of Scotland. He lived in Lancashire. I know he had an older brother, George, who died of drink, and another brother, Miller, of whom he was very fond, but they quarrelled and never saw each other afterwards. My father was a difficult man. He also had two sisters who lived in Blackpool. He visited them when he came to England and mother was very shocked by the way they lived. I think they also drank. Probably because of this weakness in the family my father was a teetotaller for years.

My mother's father was George Weber and he came from Alsace-Lorraine. The inscription on his tombstone mentions his place of birth but one needs good eyesight to read it. He taught in a girl's school in Smyrna but although he was known as a 'savant' he could not keep order and had to have another teacher in the classroom to do it for him.

4.1. Description by George.

My father's only sources of income lay in Smyrna and so, like a number of other British people in the same situation, he decided that we should stay in Turkey at the outbreak of the 1914-18 war. On the declaration of war, the Turkish authorities rounded up British and French subjects and interned them in houses in the Turkish quarter of Smyrna for a brief period, after which they were released. When the Turkish police came to collect my father, he demanded how they expected the fire brigade to operate if he was interned. The question apparently presented such an insoluble problem that he was left at liberty. After the war the incident was held against my father; but it was typical of the ambivalent attitude of the Turkish authorities in Smyrna towards British, French and other Allied nationals throughout the war. Whenever the Germans applied pressure, a few of the poorer Allied nationals would be rounded up and incarcerated in the houses of the Turkish quarter only to be released again after a few days.

During 1915 the commercial life of Smyrna, and the supply of food, was disorganised by the Allied blockade but there was a rapid recovery thereafter although the blockade continued. Somehow my father's business picked up momentum: he was able, for example, to rent a house at the seaside for us in the summer of 1917. After the war he prospered greatly, buying from the Royal Navy stores that were deposited in the Aegean islands and reselling them in Smyrna. He also supplied oil to the Greek Army that had occupied the province of Smyrna in 1919 and was ejected again by the Turks in 1922.

The destruction of Smyrna by the Turkish army in September 1922 [Note by EFR. Certainly much of Smyrna was destroyed by fire started by arsonists, but it has never been established who the arsonists were; Greeks and Turks still argue over the issue] found us on holiday in England. My father and mother suddenly faced, if not total ruin, very straitened circumstances. They never returned to Turkey. By 1924, through the contacts with British Fire Insurance companies he had made while secretary of the Smyrna fire brigade, my father began to build up a small business in London for the import of oriental carpets and for the invisible mending of these carpets when they had been damaged in household fires. The firm provided my parents with a modest income. They lived in a small house in Purley, Surrey, and my father died there in 1950.

4.2. Description by Dora.

My earliest memories of the 1914-1918 war (I was born in 1908) were of my mother telling me in the grocers by our garden gate that I would not be able to have any sweets as there was a war on. I also remember my mother saying that the worst shortage was being without soap, so when the second world war broke out I hoarded soap. Another memory was seeing a dog fight between Turkish planes and a British one which was brought down and my mother crying.

The house where I was born in Boudjah, one of the two villages near Smyrna where the British lived. The other village was Bournabat [now called Bornova]. We had a lovely garden in an olive grove of very old trees. My mother was a very keen gardener. In the corner of our garden was the Konak (Police Station) and during the war the police often used to beat Greeks who had tried to avoid military service. These poor men used to howl loudly and our mother used to send us out of hearing to the other end of the garden. On one occasion a prisoner dug through the wall of the Konak and escaped into our garden at night and my father, hearing the noise of this man being chased, went into the garden holding an oil lamp and was surrounded by soldiers pointing guns at him. However he managed to explain and they allowed him to go back, very frightened, into the house.

Periodically the police used to catch the British at the railway station as they were enemy aliens and imprison them. My father used to talk himself out of it by saying that he was chief of the fire brigade in Smyrna (which was true) and that if they put him in prison the town would certainly burn down one day. So they would let him go but he was afraid of being caught on the return journey so he would go and hide on the roof of the Spartali's magnificent house on the quay. The Spartalis were an elderly rich Armenian couple. They had a house in Smyrna and one in Boudjah with a huge garden full of greenhouses, ponds, statues, and of course, vineyards. I used to go and play with their granddaughter, Bice, who lived with them as her parents were divorced. While my father was hiding at the Spartalis my mother remained alone with us children and one Greek maid. On one such occasion we saw a magnificently dressed Turk coming up the drive. The maid and her friend immediately started screaming that he was coming to murder us so my mother sent her in to hide and went out on the veranda with us children hanging on to her and, speaking a little Turkish, asked the man what he wanted. It was difficult to find out as he spoke no Greek but in the end she found out that all he wanted was some roses from the veranda to stick in the turban round his fez. Mother hastily gave them to him much relieved.

At the end of the 1914-1918 war the British prisoners of war from the Koutelamara campaign [Kut-el-amara was a city in what is now Iraq where the British suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Ottomans] were repatriated through Smyrna. Most of them had dysentery and had been very badly treated by the Turks. We entertained a number of the officers at tennis parties. I remember they could not understand why they could not have baths after tennis. My mother explained that water was scarce and only obtainable from the well at the bottom of the garden which we used as a refrigerator by lowering bottles and butter in a bucket. However the British officers were not deterred and drew up several bucketfuls of water, carried them up to the bathroom and got their showers. The poor Tommies were not entertained by "gentlefolk" like ourselves. The only people who looked after them and the sick were the Petites Soeurs de Charité, the Catholic nuns who did much good in the village. My mother did express some concern about this. These nuns used to come round in pairs, always in pairs, to collect money for their good works. I have always thought well of Catholic nuns since then.

Just after the war a number of Australian troops came to Smyrna from the Greek islands. One officer drove a high four in hand carriage with mules and turned them in front of our house with great expertise.

During the war my uncle Theodore Weber (Theo), who had been educated in Berlin and was to all intends and purposes a German was sent to Smyrna as German Consul. This made bad feelings in the family as my mother, having married a Scot, was British. She disliked Aunt Nelly (Theo's wife) intensely and father was annoyed with uncle Theo because he did not help financially with grandmother who was his mother. Their daughter Traute (Gertrude) used to arrive at our house on horseback with two army officers (German) which used to annoy my mother. She, having married a Scotsman, became, as so often happens, more British than the British, and feelings between families were decidedly cool. I can remember my mother shedding tears of emotion when, later on, in England, she was listening to a royal wedding on the wireless.

5.1. George's education in Smyrna.

My early education was dominated by the fact that the fact that the family remained in Smyrna, and so was cut off from England, for the four years of the First World War. My brother and I never went to school but were educated privately by governesses, largely on the lines of French education, up to 1914. During the war I can vaguely remember being taught at home by a sequence of men and women teachers. I suspect that some of the men, who were British and like us had stayed behind in Smyrna in 1914, were being helped financially by my father in this way. Somehow my brother and I, and later our sister, learnt to read and write English and French and acquired a knowledge of such subjects as geography, "histoire ancienne" - chiefly Greek and Roman history - and selected French literature (Racine, Corneille, etc.) and arithmetic. But my brother and I owe our pre-University education mainly to the Rev Lucius G P Fry (1881-1935) who was the Church of England Chaplain to two of the churches in the Smyrna area during 1919-1922. Also to some extent to a Greek schoolmaster, whose name I can no longer remember, who taught us Modern and then Ancient Greek during the same period. In a testimonial letter of 1923 date, Mr Fry records that I was a pupil of his from January 1920 to March 1922. Mr Fry organised in Smyrna in December 1921 a University of Cambridge Senior Local Examination which my brother and I both passed. I had offered English, English history, Greek, French, Mathematics and Advanced Mathematics, and obtained a distinction in French and Mathematics with Second Class Honours in the examination as a whole. These details are given as a tribute to the excellence of Mr Fry's teaching: however willing to learn a pupil may be, it is still a remarkable pedagogical feat to cover essentially the whole of a normal the nineteenth century novelists, poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth secondary education in two years.

My father was the Honorary Secretary of the British Chamber of Commerce in Smyrna and in the spring of 1922 I was employed as Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. During this period I learnt typing and shorthand but I continued reading mathematics on my own. My father had obtained for me through his book-suppliers a book on Einstein's theory of relativity supposedly at a semi-popular level. Though it excited my curiosity, its contents seemed to me to be not only unintelligible but remarkably close to being nonsensical!

Apart from formal tuition there was my parents' collection of books; Shakespeare, centuries all provided reading material. There were also books that had come from my grandfather's library: books by Sir William Ramsey and an enormous early edition of the Larousse Encyclopaedia, which was a mine of information to a boy. The start of a life-long interest in astronomy I attribute partly to a habit we had as a family. In the long Mediterranean summer we were accustomed to enjoy the cool of the evening by sitting in the garden after dinner. Deck chairs were used, seats which made contemplation of the heavens unavoidable. There was no street lighting to speak of in Smyrna or in the outlying village of Boudjah (Buca) where we lived. On moonless nights the stars blazed down in a fashion I was not to see again until I visited Colorado many years later. A boy's interest could hardly fail to be aroused by the display, stimulated as it was by reading Sir Robert S Ball's "Story of the Heavens" and by gazing through a 3-inch Naval telescope my father bought me in 1919.

5.2. Dora remembers the Rev Lucius G P Fry.

As soon as I was old enough I went up to town (Smyrna) by train with my brothers to Mr Fry. He was the vicar of the English Church and he taught eight of us in a small hall at the 'Point' near the station. We were very lucky in Mr Fry as he was a very able teacher and took my brothers to university standard examinations. Besides us there were two girls, Maudie, Elliot whose father ran the railway, and May Walker. Then there were three more, Mr Fry's daughter Joan and two boys Freddie Rees, of a wealthy family in Boudjah, and a Whittall - I can't remember. All three were younger than we three girls and much younger than my brothers. Mrs Fry was a very able artist. I remember at an exhibition of her work a large painting of dancing dervishes.

As I have already mentioned, the family was fortunately on holiday in England in the summer of 1922. I had been accepted for a Civil Engineering course at Edinburgh University, which was a compromise between my father's insistence on "practical" studies and my own inclination towards mathematics. As he was to pay, engineering it had to be. I had been left in lodgings in Edinburgh and the family had moved south on their way back to Smyrna when news came in the first week of September that the city of Smyrna had been destroyed in a fire, that much of the population had been massacred by the Turkish army [Note by EFR. Certainly much of Smyrna was destroyed by fire started by arsonists, but it has never been established who the arsonists were; Greeks and Turks still argue over the issue] and that the British residents had been evacuated and deposited in Malta, Alexandria and elsewhere with little more than the clothes they stood up in. My father's business had apparently been destroyed and this indeed proved to be the case. I abandoned my University course and, later in the autumn, joined my father as his assistant in London. A Relief Committee to help the British refugees, had been formed by members of the wealthier British families of Smyrna and my father had been appointed its Secretary. In order to give the Committee proper legal standing, it was taken over by the Imperial War Relief Fund. It was in this way that, early in 1923, my father and I met Sir John Cowan (1844-1929), chairman of Redpath Brown & Co. Ltd. of Edinburgh. Sir John very rapidly made up his mind that I was to enter on a course in Edinburgh University. He and his friends in the city put together a fund of £600 for that purpose. It was regarded as a loan to my father, repayable if he eventually recovered his business in Smyrna; if not, it was to be an outright gift and so it proved to be. Sir John Cowan's office administered the fund and paid it out directly to me during my student days in Edinburgh. Sir John had also relied on the advice of Mr Thomas Wilson, who taught at the Edinburgh Academy, and who had been a friend of my father's in Lancashire in the 1880s.

Sir John Cowan never revealed the names of all the subscribers to the £600, but when I graduated in 1927 he said that one of them was Sir Alexander Grant (1864-1937), managing director of McVittie & Price Ltd., whom I was able, in addition to Sir John, to thank personally. Also when I left for Cambridge in 1928 I pressed Sir John for a complete list so that, as soon as I began to earn money, I could repay the subscribers. He thanked me on their behalf but said that they were all men who, like himself, would not miss their contributions. But there was one exception, and that was Mr Wilson, who had insisted on contributing £100, though he was obviously a poor man. I should repay him if I wished and this I gladly did as soon as I got my first job. Mr Wilson had befriended me in my student days in Edinburgh and I was well aware of the straitened circumstances in which he lived.

I imagine that, apart from Mr Wilson, the contributors were hard-headed successful business men, of a kind that it is fashionable to denigrate today, in the mid-1970s. Yet these men did not hesitate to support financially a young man of whom they knew no more than that one of their number had presumably been favourably impressed by the young man and his father. I owe them a great debt of gratitude and I can only hope that my thanks to them were adequate when I finally left Edinburgh.

I was to study for a three year course leading to the M.A. degree and Sir John Cowan's fund was based on such a period. I had however set my heart on a M.A. with honours in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy which took four years. Therefore bursaries must be obtained to supplement the fund. By studying in the evenings and in the train travelling to and fro between London and Caterham, to which place the family had moved, I succeeded in achieving sixth equal place in the Entrance Bursary competition of 1923 and was awarded the Bruce of Grangehill Bursary of the annual value of £35 for three years. I started on the Honours degree course in October 1923 and, in the following summer, sat the examination for, and was awarded, a Spence Bursary which brought in £50, £40 and £50 in three successive years.

In due course I graduated with First Class Honours in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in 1927. During this time, the men whose teaching influenced me the most were (Sir) Edmund T Whittaker (1873-1956), the professor of pure mathematics, (Sir) Charles G Darwin (1887-1962), the Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy, and N Kemp Smith (1872-1958), Professor of Logic and Metaphysics. Whittaker had a highly polished lecturing style and persuaded his audience that every topic was easily comprehensible. A subsequent reading of one's notes showed that this was not so, at least, not until much further work was done. Darwin's lecturing style was untidy but his asides on the nature of applied mathematics - and of applied mathematicians - and his obvious enthusiasm for the subject intrigued me. I often came away from one of his lectures having understood very little but determined to find out what my chaotic notes meant and what it was that aroused such interest in this man. My introduction to relativity theory came through a course that Whittaker gave in 1926/27. To Kemp Smith's discourses on Locke, Hume, Berkeley and Kant I perhaps owe the germ of my attitude to mathematical physics which, many years later, Stamatia Mavridès ("L'Univers Relativiste", p.7, Masson, Paris, 1973) was to describe as that of an "empiriste irréductible" (uncompromising empiricist).

The years in Edinburg were very happy ones, not only because the world of learning was opening out in front of me. The social side was equally pleasant. Sir John and Lady Cowant welcomed me into their home as if I were a grandson; afternoon and evening parties at the Whittakers and lunch parties at Darwins also stand out in my memory.

On graduating in 1927, I was awarded the Charles Maclaren Mathematics Scholarship (£200 for three years) and the Nicol Foundation (£50 for one year). The second award involved doing some teaching in the Physics Department and I therefore spent the year 1927/28 as a research student at Edinburgh, attending Whittaker's postgraduate lectures. One set of these was on a unified field theory of gravitation and electro-magnetism, whose author I cannot now recall. During the year I was accepted by Cambridge University as a Ph.D. student with (Sir) Arthur S Eddington (1882-1944) as my supervisor. I also entered Christ's College at the suggestion of Mr S W P Steen who was a fellow of the College at that time and, indeed, for most of his life. He had however been a lecturer in mathematics at Edinburgh University for a couple of years in the mid-1920s and I had got to know him there. We had in fact patrolled the streets of Edinburgh at night together as special constables during the General Strike of 1926. Steen had fought in the First World War and I thought it prudent to attach myself to a man with his kind of experience.

The years of 1928-30 in Cambridge resulted in my writing a thesis on unified field theories which was accepted for the Cambridge Ph.D. degree in 1930. I cannot claim to have fitted well into Cambridge life after the free and easy existence as a Scottish student in Edinburgh. It was also a strange experience to work under Eddington. In Edinburgh I had enjoyed Whittaker's urbane geniality and Darwin's bluff and hearty manner; neither had prepared me for Eddington's remoteness and unapproachability. It is true that by 1928 he was entering those mystical realms of thought that were eventually to produce "Fundamental Theory". He was pre-occupied with these matters to the extent that at one point he set me to work on the cosmological, forgetting that G Lemaître who had worked with him a year or two earlier, had already solved it. In a letter to W de Sitter posted in Cambridge on 19 March 1930, Eddington writes - misspelling my name -: "A research student McVitie and I had been worrying at the problem and made considerable progress; so it was a blow to us to find it done much more completely by Lemaître". I well remember the day when Lemaître's letter arrived and Eddington rather shamefacedly showed it to me.

The Cambridge period includes the only time in my life when I received any formal instruction in astronomy. It consisted of Eddington's course in Stellar Structure. Otherwise I was self-taught. The books by Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin), Russell, Dugan and Stewart's textbook, the writings of Harlow Shapley and Edwin Hubble were my main sources of information. I also profited greatly by listening to the discussions at the meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1931 onwards.

During the years September 1939 to September 1945 I was seconded from King's College, London, to the Scientific Civil Service and worked at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) located at Bletchley Park (BP), Bletchley, Bucks. There I soon headed a unit that I shall refer to as the "BP Met group" of which I was initially the only member. The work on which the group was engaged was the provision of observational weather data from areas controlled by the Germans and their Allies, though we also took part in similar work in the Japanese theatre of war. The weather data were needed by our own forecasting services in preparing weather forecasts for the R.A.F. and later the U.S. Air Force in operations over German-held territory. In order to understand the nature of the work of the group it is necessary to give a brief description of the organisation of the meteorological services in existence during the immediate pre-war years. A network of weather observing stations had been set up covering Europe and, indeed, the whole world. At certain agreed hours the observers at all stations made a note of the weather and incorporated it in a numerical international code message which I shall call a "synoptic". This consisted of 5-figure groups and, for example, the synoptic known as "short report for aviation" had the symbolic form

          IIICL CM wwVhNh DDFWN

Here III was the number assigned to the observation station, CL and CM were the types of low and medium cloud, each classified on a scale of 0 to 9; ww was a 2-figure number describing the weather at the time of observation, from "00" which meant "cloudless", to "99", "heavy thunder-storm with hail"; and so on for the other meteorological elements. The synoptic was sent at once by the observer to a collecting centre. In a remarkably short time after the simultaneous observations for all stations in, say, Europe had been made, they were being broadcast by radio in a "collective" message to be used by forecasters in the area. These men translated each synoptic into pictorial symbols which they placed on a map of Europe at each point of observation. The weather charts so constructed were the basis of the weather forecasts. Since the principal times of observation were six hours apart, the whole operation from making the observations to the completion of the weather charts had ideally, and indeed in practice, to take much less time than six hours.

The numerical international meteorological code used in a synoptic was not, of course, secret. When war began a belligerent who wished to continue broadcasting the collectives to which his forecasters were accustomed, and at the same time prevent the enemy from reading his synoptics, had to encipher them. This, of course, meant replacing each figure of the synoptic by some other figure according to a rule known only to the belligerent and, possibly, to his friends and allies. A schoolboy version of a cipher for example is one in which the digits 0 to 9 are replaced by themselves in scrambled order, 0 becoming 2, 1 becoming 7, and so on up to 9. The principle of the cypher is therefore a simple substitution and the discovery of the principle I shall call "breaking the cipher". But clearly the encipherer can change the substitution table so that 0 now becomes 5, 1 becomes 2, and so on. The simple substitution principle has not been altered, but I shall say that the cipher "key" has been changed.

Since a synoptic was of value for a limited time only, it was clear that very elaborate ciphers, requiring much time for enciphering and deciphering, would be self-defeating. Again it must be have seemed obvious to the Germans and their allies that ciphers which could not be broken by textbook cryptographic methods in less than, say, fifteen hours would be good enough for meteorological purposes. Thus relatively simple, quickly worked ciphers could be thought to be adequate.

At the outbreak of war the German meteorological ("Met") broadcasts went into cipher. Presumably under German influence, so did the Russian and, as the war developed, the Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Vichy French broadcasts followed suit. If the R.A.F. was to operate over Germany it was necessary to make the synoptics from German Met stations available to our forecasters. I had registered in 1938 for meteorological work in the event of war and was informed in September 1939 that I would be called up. There followed an interval of uncertainty which I spent in London on an intensive self-organised course in meteorology. Finally I was sent on 25 November 1939 to BP, on a three months appointment in the Met Office, to work on Met Ciphers and I spent the rest of the war there. In the summer of 1945 I wrote a history of the work done by the BP Met group but at the present time (1976) I am informed by GCHQ that only the fact that enemy communications were read may be mentioned publicly and that the processes used at BP may not yet be divulged. Hence the "cryptic" nature of the following account.

Throughout the war I myself and the BP Met group formed part of the Air Section at BP whose head was Mr J E S ("Josh") Cooper. However I worked at first with Col (later Brigadier) J H Tiltman. Tiltman and Cooper were professional cryptographers and it was a privilege to be instructed by them. In early February 1940 Tiltman broke the Russian Met cyphers and I found that the Russian broadcasts contained synoptics from a dozen Met stations in Germany. This convinced the Deputy Director of the Meteorological Office, Mr Ernest Gold, that my appointment should be made permanent. He had proposed at the end of January 1940 that it should be terminated because the French were supplying deciphered synoptics from the main German Met cipher. This proposal was vigorously opposed by Cooper and, in the event, the incident provides an example of the short-sightedness characteristic of the phoney war. In any case, a visit to the Dunstable Central Forecasting Office by Tiltman and myself showed that the French decodes were very incomplete and that we could do far better via the Russians.

Cooper and I visited Paris at the end of February 1940 and it was agreed with the French that the main German Met cipher should be their responsibility while the BP Met group would deal with any other Met ciphers that might present themselves.

At the beginning of March 1940 two temporary forecasters were sent by the Met Office to help me. One was Mr Philip P Howse who, after the war, made his career in GCHQ. Cooper added Squadron-Leader John Moore to the BP Met group and in August 1940 the Met Office sent me Dr Gillis, who subsequently made a career in academic life in Israel.

The invasion of Norway by the Germans in the spring of 1940 produced demands from the Met Office for synoptics from stations in Norway occupied by the Germans. This involved breaking a new German cipher, which Cooper, Moore and I duly carried out. On 21 May 1940, communications between Paris and Dunstable were cut, as the Germans swept through northern France. Fortunately copies of the current keys of the main German Met cipher, produced by the French, had reached Dunstable. Moore and I went over there and turned out partially deciphered synoptics. From that time onwards the whole responsibility from breaking enemy Met ciphers and reconstructing their keys when these changed, fell on the BP Met group. It soon became evident that we could supply an adequate, at times an ample, flow of current deciphered synoptics provided that I was given a sufficient staff and provided that the interception of enemy Met broadcasts was increased beyond what had sufficed in peace-time. The possibility arose because the Germans and their friends and allies were making, and continued to make throughout the war, a major cryptographic error the exploitation of which was the key to our success.

In addition to participating in the cipher breaking operations (for instance, for the Italian Met cipher after June 1940), I was much concerned with obtaining staff. The BP Met group was still under the control of the Met Office who occasionally produced temporary forecasters for the group, though often also tried to take them away as soon as they had become productive cryptographers. One of the men was P E Archer who joined the group in July 1940 and started to work on the German Naval Met cipher. By November 1940 I had a staff of seven and was pressing for six more, if a steady flow of deciphered synoptics was to be achieved. This number was attained by the end of March 1941 but by then experience had shown that changes of key in the various ciphers occurred fairly often and each key had to be rapidly reconstructed. By May 1941 I estimated that a staff of thirty-five was required and this was accepted by the Met Office. However their attempts to provide this personnel were unsuccessful and by the end of August 1941 it was agreed that the BP Met group, as well as the interception facilities at the Dunstable Central Forecasting Office, should be taken over by Air Intelligence. These transfers were completed by the end of the year. The Met Office retained control of a deciphering unit at Dunstable which worked from keys supplied by my group at BP. I was now able to recruit WAAF personnel and Cooper was able to lend me staff from among his permanent cryptographic personnel. At the height of its activity, in November 1943, the BP Met group numbered sixty persons. By April 1943 I was being told by Cooper that my salary was to be equivalent to that of a Wing-Commander in the RAF, as I was the head of what amounted to an independent section at BP.

An essential element in a synoptic is, of course, the place at which the observation is made. I had found it possible to follow the advance of the German Air Force across northern France during the spring of 1940 by reading the enciphered synoptics sent from temporary airfields. Archer had worked out keys for the German Naval Met cipher by February 1941. Sometime in May of that year he noticed that the German Naval Met broadcasts contained "ship report" synoptics from locations in the Atlantic, presumably made by German submarines. This gave a direct guide to the positions of German submarines but the reports were also capable of other kinds of exploitation at BP. The "ship reports" proved to be one key factor in the reduction of our shipping losses in the Atlantic during 1942 and 1943. For example, a loss of 690,000 tons in November 1942 fell to 150,000 tons in January 1943. The M.B.E. (Medal of the British Empire) awarded to Archer in January 1946, and the O.B.E. to me, were no doubt as much due to this achievement as to the production of deciphered synoptics throughout the war for the use of the R.A.F. and the U.S. Air Force.

An invitation from the U.S. Army cryptographic organisation took me to Washington during the period 21 August to 9 October 1942. They had set up a unit to break Met cyphers, excluding those of the Japanese theatre of war, and had some success with the Russian one. The head of the unit was Captain Edmund J Wrigley of the U.S. Signal Corps though many of the juniors in the unit were civilians. Wrigley had set up an elaborate textbook cryptographic procedure for reconstructing each key of the Russian Met cipher. It was slow and required that a team of people should work according to a pre-arranged plan as if each person were a cog in the machine. I described our method which relied heavily on the intelligence and resourcefulness of a single key-breaker. This appealed very much to the juniors who quickly learnt our method, but was strongly disapproved of by Wrigley. He also made a member of his unit study the possibility of breaking the German Naval Met cipher and informed me at the end of the investigation that it could be done. I told him we had been doing it since February 1941 but I doubt if he believed me. My report to the head of the GCHQ on my return emphasised that the Americans wished to go their own way even if it meant repeating all our mistakes. It was not until December 1943 that a sensible plan was evolved, namely to second a U.S. officer to the BP Met group where he could learn how we dealt with Met ciphers in the European war theatre. After a few weeks of practice this officer returned to Foggia in Italy where an American unit was set up that successfully read German Met ciphers.

The working out of keys for the main German and Italian Met ciphers and the breaking of minor ciphers used by the Germans and their allies in south-east Europe kept the BP Met group and myself fully occupied during 1942 and 1943. Air Marshall Harris would send immediate enquiries if ever the flow of German synoptics ceased because of a change of key or because his bombers had damaged a German radio transmitter sending out the collectives. Or the Russian Met cipher had to be read again (October 1942) because Winston Churchill wished to have a daily appreciation of the weather along the Russian front. The BP Met group had an adequate staff during this period, in contrast to the understaffing of 1940 and 1941, but the surrender of Italy in September 1943 made me realise that the road to victory might be paved with difficulties of re-adjustment. The Italian Met broadcasts came to a sudden end and the subgroup working on them found themselves with equal suddenness completely idle. The young woman in charge reacted by sulking in silence for two days as if the surrender of the Italians had been intended solely as a personal affront to her. Similar problems occurred throughout BP as the area controlled by the Germans shrank. Indeed it seemed to me that the intelligence supplied by the reading of enemy ciphers had had its maximum importance so long as we were merely staving off defeat. As victory approached its value appeared to decline.

However the Japanese theatre of war also provided Met ciphers to be broken. During my visit to Washington in the summer of 1942 I had found that Japanese Met ciphers were the preserve of the cryptographic organisation of the U.S. Navy. There were two main ciphers, one used for sending synoptics to Tokyo from the Pacific islands and elsewhere, the other for collectives issuing from Tokyo. The first cipher had been named JN 36, the second JN 37. In January 1943, Tiltman reported after a visit to Washington, that the U.S. Navy was ignoring JN 37 because they claimed to be getting all they wanted by reading JN 36. Our experience of Met ciphers in the European theatre was that a continuous flow of deciphered synoptics could be provided only by reading as many different ciphers as possible and even then the service might occasionally be interrupted by a simultaneous change of key. It was therefore decided that Philip Howse and J Gillis should start work on JN 37. Since the Japanese lacked friends and allies in their theatre of war, they were much less able to commit the major cryptographic error which had proved so useful to us in the European theatre. Howse and Gillis therefore had to employ standard cryptographic methods to break JN 37. By May 1943 they had progressed sufficiently for us to contemplate the distribution of deciphered synoptics to forecasters in the Japanese war area. Enough material on which to work could not be intercepted in Europe and therefore we concluded that the west coast of Canada would be the best location for a production unit. Negotiations continued during 1943 with finally a visit from Canadian Defence Minister Ralston in December 1943 when I pressed strongly for the setting up of a unit similar to the BP Met group to deal with JN 37. In January 1944, the Canadian Government agreed to this plan and the first step was to be a visit to Canada by Howse and myself. We were to recruit 70 to 80 Canadians for a unit on the Canadian west coast and the BP Met group was to add a nucleus of some 20 people who had experience in breaking JN 37. During January 1944 the attitude of the Americans, as reported by GCHQ's mission in Washington, remained unclear. The U.S. Army and Navy were at first reported to be going to make a concerted attack on JN 37 but later we heard that they had agreed "in principle" to our doing it in Canada.

Howse and I left for Ottowa on 9 February by the "Queen Elizabeth" to New York. This was the voyage in which she was damaged by a giant wave somewhere off Greenland. The whole voyage had been so rough that Howse and I hardly noticed the difference when the ship hit the wave, though we were surprised to see a film of water outside our cabin door shortly after it happened. On arrival in Washington we entered into a period of confused negotiation with the Canadians and with the U.S. Navy cryptographic organisation. By the latter part of March Sir Edward Travis (head of GCHQ) and John Tiltman had also come to Washington and we finally discovered that General Marshall and Admiral King had decided "a long time ago" that the U.S. Navy was to break JN 37 and they would go ahead whatever we and the Canadians did. I felt that we had to retire as gracefully as possible from the competition and this was also Sir Edward Travis' conclusion. However it was agreed that Howse should stay in Washington and work with the U.S. Navy cryptographers using the method which he and Gillis had devised for breaking JN 37. Howse remained in Washington until the early part of 1946. I also understood that deciphered Japanese synoptics were to be distributed to the British and Australian Air Forces in India and the Far East, a matter which gave me considerable trouble until the end of the war.

On my return to BP in April 1944 I found that Gillis and seven members of the BP Met group who had formed the nucleus of the subgroup working on JN 37, refused to work on any aspect of Japanese Met. Gillis left the BP Met group to work elsewhere in BP. After D-day (6 June 1944) the amount of work needed to maintain the flow of deciphered synoptics declined steadily as the Germans came to re-use more and more of their old keys. In March 1945 the U.S. Met unit at Foggia discovered a way of recognising which old key was being used at any given moment. I started working on my history of the BP Met unit, and of the methods of cipher breaking we had employed, in April 1945. It was completed by the time I left BP on 31 August 1945 to return to King's College and I believe that the document still exists at GCHQ.

Reflecting on these war years after a lapse of over thirty years I am puzzled to account for the urge that drove me on in this cryptographic activity for which I had not been trained, did not intend to pursue after the war and which left me at the end of the six years in a state of physical and mental exhaustion from which I did not recover until the long, fine summer of 1947. Perhaps Josh Cooper put his finger on the driving force in a letter he wrote to me in December 1946. Some of the younger members of the, now scattered, BP Met group had organised a reunion dinner in London and Cooper and I had been invited to attend. After it he wrote to me as follows:- "The section (BP Met group) was what you made it and always had a "special" kind of spirit all its own, and it is clear now that this spirit has survived the peace. I know of no other section that has even projected such a reunion, let along held one. I think that the answer in a way is that you were not so much applying your science to the war effort as continuing to serve science by repairing an outrage done to the super-national fellowship. This did of course serve the war effort as you realised but I still think there was something fundamentally different between your "purpose" and the "purpose" of the rest of us".

Another paradox was that my somewhat unhappy experiences in Washington in 1942 and 1944 left no post-war sense of animosity against the United States. Indeed nearly all the Americans I had met on these two visits I had liked as individuals and my interest in their country and their way of life had been vividly aroused.