My life took an unexpected turn after living for about eighteen months at the Regina, when my boss Bill Richardson, the superintendent at Kew, asked if I would come and live in the Observatory.
The caretaker and his family had moved out quite suddenly and ¨the girls¨ had been worried by strange men knocking on the door, in the late night, which given its relatively remote location, down a long track, and its history, he considered it would be useful to have another person in the building all the time, to help with any problems that might come up and also help with the safety. Actually, I think the two women working there, Charmaine and Lesley, would have given as good as they got but it was something that Bill was worried about and felt responsible for. The flat had originally been in what felt like a rather ‘spooky’ basement but had been moved up to the second floor in the twentieth century, and occupied three rooms there, otherwise I think I would have said no!
So it was, that for about eighteen months I lived in the flat of this 18th century gem of a building, in the middle of the floodplain by the Thames. When I was doing my night shifts, I’d be by myself anyway again, so having free access to roam the building at leisure, exploring this place where all sorts of scientific history had been made (but not the basement).
The strange thing about Kew Observatory was that it sometimes became even more isolated, on its own island, as being built on the flood plain, at very high tides, the Thames (long before the Thames Barrier was built), would quite quickly spill out of its banks and over onto the Golf course and in doing so completely surround the -slightly higher- land that the Observatory was built on, effectively cutting it off. Usually, when the tide receded, it was possible to negotiate the access road again, even with some water left on either side
Built just on or just to the north east of the site (various maps differ) of a Carthusian monastery, founded in 1414 by Henry V, named the ‘Charterhouse of Jesus of Bethlehem of Shene’, the observatory itself was (and still is) a rather good looking octagonal Georgian building, following a popular Swedish plan at the time, of placing a rounded cupola on the roof, and was then painted a pale green.
It was originally commissioned by the keen astronomer King George III, to observe the transit of Venus, on June 3rd 1769, (long before his accidental poisoning by arsenic, which is now surmised to have caused his later ‘madness)’, and later to accurately test and recalibrate royal chronographs and watches. It was built by a Solomon Brown, who also built the famous pagoda in Kew Gardens. It had had an illustrious and impressive history but when I was there it had somewhat fallen on hard times, with its staff complement reduced to just six.
To get there you walked down a long track from Richmond, over the mid Surrey Golf course. The day that I arrived, on the 1st October 1975, I had been told to report to the Superintendents office and I was a little nervous, not knowing quite what to expect. As I came through the gates, a gardener was standing in wellington boots and a spade, busily digging a trench. I’m looking for Mr Richardson, I enquired? Ah! You must be the new chap we’ve been expecting, said the gardener, I’m Bill Richardson, the Superintendent, welcome to Kew! So began a couple of years, doing a dream job (for me at least), taking and collating weather readings, and working with various experimental instrumental prototypes. On that first day, he was actually in the process of putting a six foot (two metre) rain gauge in, to see how accurate it would be in relation to the normal gauges we used, which were just six inches (fifteen cm) across. The problem was that in strong winds rain tended to blow straight across the top of the smaller copper gauge, rather than falling into it , so with a bigger gauge the idea was there was less room for error; this meant measuring both totals daily and comparing the respective daily differences in total amounts in different types of weather.
For many years, the official time was regulated at Kew and not Greenwich (as in Greenwich mean time) and a large number of famous scientists have worked at Kew over the years: Sir John Herschel (son of Sir William Herschel who discovered Uranus), discovered and catalogued many new astronomical discoveries and invented an early form of photography, Frank JW Whipple, the inventor of the jet engine, and Superintendent of the Observatory, like Bill Richardson from 1925-1939) Faraday (of Faraday cage fame), Sir Napier Shaw, who wrote the Manual of Meteorology and did work that created the model of the development of the atmosphere that we still use today and the later Director General of the Met Office, Group Captain James M Stagg, who made the famous D Day forecast for Operation Overlord in June 1944. Both Livingstone’s journeys to Africa and Scott’s fateful journey to the Antarctic relied on Kew, for advice and instrumentation.
The History of Kew Observatory, Robert Henry Scott, 1885
Following the King’s lead, Kew became the place in the early 18th century where mariners would send chronometers to be calibrated against a ‘gold standard’. When they had been correctly adjusted again, they would be returned to the owner, with the inscription ‘OK’ (Observatory, Kew) on, which is where we get the expression that something is good, is ok, from. However this may be an old wives tail, as other documents suggest that work validating scientific instruments began in 1877 and that ‘KO’ was inscribed on them in fact.. although looking at the actual inscription below it definitely looks ok to me! It’s a good story.
We kept records from very old instruments there as well for continuity, such as an original set of thermometers eleven feet (four metres) high on the north wall of the building, housed in a very early version of a white louvered screen called the Welsh screen, (so it was never directly in the sunlight), which had begun in 1867 when Kew became the central Observatory for the Met Office. As well as manual readings taken regularly, it used the very first photo-thermograph, which recorded temperatures onto a photographic plate. In fact in 1975, we were still taking measurements and maintaining this instrument, by changing its photographic paper in darkness every day, developing the two foot long sheet, drying it and measuring the images recorded on it. Readings from the North Wall screen were usually about 0.5F higher on average than those in taken on the more modern, much smaller, white louvered ‘Stevenson’s screen’ thermometers, out in the grass paddock, well away from the Observatory itself. In turn, these were compared (from 1969 onwards), with readings from an aspirated psychrometer (where air is pulled past the thermometer bulb or sensor to ensure it does not stagnate), and printed on an initially experimental, new digital thermograph sensor, taken by the ‘MODLE’: a large rather noisy machine, that printed the reading accurate to tenths of a degree centigrade, every few seconds. From 1959 Kew began work on rocket and satellite equipment, designing instruments to be sent up in American satellites, including a spectrometer designed and made at Kew, and in 1961 for the ‘Skylark’ rocket.
Once you had been working at Kew for a while though you realised that in certain settled conditions, especially in the autumn, the paddock, being on the flood plain on the Thames would often form a layer of very dense ground fog, where temperatures would fall dramatically compared to those just above this cold layer.
One summers night I phoned our observation taken at 10pm (2100 GMT) into the London Weather Centre, which was based in High Holborn in central London (who collated all the London observations at that time), and reported a temp of 17C. The person there asked me to repeat the reading, as he was sure I had made a mistake, as the temperature on the thermometer in the screen there in central London was still 26C, some 9C greater than at Kew, about 6 miles to its west.
Of course we now understand the effects of a UHI (urban heat island) like central London much better but this was being exacerbated even further that night by the low but dense cold fog that had formed at Kew. We measure the visibility taken at weather stations at the level of two metres, so again sometimes our reports of the visibility there would drop from twenty kilometres to just twenty metres in a few minutes, as the layer of thick fog on the ground became slightly higher, to be just on average just above the two metres reporting level.
Generally, as a result, the mean temperature in the instrument enclosure in the paddock in the late summer and autumn was often a lot lower than in the North Wall screen. You might think at a glance that the mean (average) temperatures at Kew had suddenly cooled but of course nothing of the sort had happened and it illustrates how very difficult climatologically it is, comparing ‘like for like’.
The differences in all three temperature readings could often be quite large, but were entirely relevant for understanding better how to compare different temperature readings taken in the past with different instruments, in different situations: still a huge challenge that Meteorological offices the world over face now- and especially important, given the effects of climate change. How do we know how much temperatures have changed in the last century, unless we can very accurately gauge the effect using different instruments has?
Another of our daily duties was to change and read the filter papers on a set of instruments that recorded the amounts of carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide in London’s air. London then was still a very dirty place, despite the introduction of the clean air act in 1968. The colour of the filter papers on damp gloomy winter days especially, at Kew told the story, they were (literally) black. We used an instrument to read the papers and it gave us a measure of this pollution. This is one thing I often notice with period dramas set in London: they are often far too clean! Everything then had a patina of dirt on it.. windows, public seats outside, cars, especially in the winter. Actually, the Netflix drama ‘The Crown’ in its first season did justice to this, in the episode featuring Churchill and the notorious London pea-souper fogs of the fifties and sixties. They were certainly somewhat better by the seventies but still present, to some degree.
A layer of dark, fine gritty particulates (much of it emitted by the capital’s traffic exhaust fumes) would settle over everything. Including our lungs of course, with resultant ill health for many. Only really in the past few decades, have things thankfully finally improved, the London congestion charges and better filtering systems in both private cars and public transport facilitating this improvement.
Along with Kew’s long history, as you might expect, came elements of notoriety too. There were three ‘rings’ of vaults built under the observatory and its immediate surroundings, some using the medieval bricks from the monastery, which were still accessible in part when I was there, though they would often become partially submerged under water when the Thames flooded. A map from 1927 exists of the original network. It was possible to still explore some of them, (though I’m not sure we were meant to), and parts were bricked up by 1975. Sometimes the basement itself would be flooded: in 1881 we know it was flooded for the third time in five years.
In December 1924 the ‘worst flood for 30 years’ flooded the vaults for over a week, and on 7 January 1928 ‘the highest flood on record’ not only completely submerged the ‘observation lawn’ but came up in the basement almost to the level of the new floors.
The rooms in the lower basement were unused when I was there and we always felt somewhat ‘strange’ in them. Interestingly, I came across an article when researching this piece, written in 1889 by a journalist of the time, one R. H. Scott who commented:
‘The chamber in which most of these instruments [magnetographs] are situated is a somewhat ‘eerie‘place. It is underground, in order to be kept constantly at the same temperature, and as care must be taken to shieldthe sensitive photographic paper from all light.. the chamber is all but totally dark.
There were always mutterings that someone has been killed in there from the staff but I didn’t take a great deal of notice of them. However, a decade or so after I left Kew, I came across another history of the place, which stated that in 1795 John Little, who was at one time a curator at the Observatory, was hanged for the murder of two old people in Richmond, and was also suspected of having caused the death of a man named Stroud, whose body was found under an iron vice in the basement room in the building. This man, Little, (as played by the equirry in the recent Bridgerton series on Netflix) had often been George III’s only attendant, when he walked in the gardens. So it seems it was true in fact. Suffice to say I never went down there at night, when I was there alone!
All in all, it was a fascinating place to spend some time. Eventually, on December 31st 1980 it was closed by the Met Office, as it was felt too costly to run and cutbacks were being made, and was sold by the Crown Estate to become a private office building for 35 years, although now it has been beautifully refurbished as a private home, that you can rent for a mere £37,000 a month, though outside it still effectively looks much the same as it ever did, (apart from various outhouses, which were demolished and a newly located car park). Much of its antique equipment of any value was hauled off to the Science Museum in central London and its books and records to the UK Met Office’s headquarters, then at Bracknell, Berks now in Exeter, Devon.
It may seem strange to have spent so much time talking about a place that I spent relatively little of my life at. However, I cannot emphasise enough the impact ‘being at Kew‘ had on me. On one level it immersed me in this grand building, which I came to love, with its patina of age, its dusty rooms, some now shuttered, where great experiments had been carried out in the past, its huge library of books and records, some with the meticulous copperplate handwriting of weather records kept every day for centuries by other observers, that I could relate to, as I was continuing them. Living in the building night and day I came to have a different relationship to it than the others working there, indeed I would have been exceptionally sad if I had still been there on the day it finally closed, in 1980, I think. Living there gave me a sense of the passage of time, that even now, half a century later, I struggle to put into words and to explain well. How time in some ways is so very fleeting and yet in other ways is immense: how could fifty years possibly have passed (I think) since I worked there? When I was working there, looking at the weather records made during the First Great War (when a Zeppelin bomb had landed in the observatory grounds) it had seemed an impossibly long time ago, and yet that much time has passed again since I was there myself.
I dreamt of being ‘at Kew’ for years and years afterwards, I always had a recurring dream where I had woken too late to do the first 0600 weather observation of the day and had to rush to do it .. I would dream of running up and down its stairs and realise I had gone the wrong way or forgotten my observation pad (this actually happened quite a few times): in itself a dream all about time. Kew was literally all about time in fact, I came to realise, it was written into its history. Kew was time itself, in its own way a kind of travel machine, a ‘tardis’, as you went through its elegant doors each day, you could imagine how busy it once was, bustling with ideas, discussion, activity, experimentation, then read all about it, in its books. I came to be there at the very end of it all but it still felt I was contributing to history and it gave me a sense of my place in the world at last, a sense of how things change and how it was possible to influence things, to change things. And that was an important lesson for what was to follow, at least for me, in the next few decades.
How we can influence things if we try. It may feel difficult, it may feel as if we are going forwards two paces and then backwards but change is possible if you believe in yourself…
There’s future, there’s hope, hope for you
Hey young man just believe in what you do.
I’ll be your friend, I’ll be around
I’ll be everything you need
I’ll be your friend, I’ll be around
I’ll be everything you need
Pride is something good for you
Believe in yourself.
The Communards & Jimmy Somerville, Disenchanted, London Records, 1986
Kew was the first place in my adulthood that I grew to love, perhaps in fact my very first true love, with a very interesting job where you could clearly see what you were doing was useful, worthwhile. It was however, to be the last job I had, where things were quite so neat, so simple.
As it happened, the first move towards exploring my own sexuality proper, was made by a woman that I worked with, Charmaine. She was about 5 years older than me, quite thin and taller than I was and really quite a different character as well. But after working together for about a year, she asked if I wanted to go to the ‘Best Disco in Town‘ with her at the Lyceum Ballroom in central London, one Saturday. I was a little surprised, as in all honesty, no way had I been envisaging her as a romantic partner but I said yes and thought ‘why not’.
We began a reasonable relationship for some time, she was very into ice skating and went to practice at the famous Richmond rink near our workplace regularly. She suggested I should try it out too. I did and was no natural by any means. She said ‘no problem, you just need a teacher’ and so I was enrolled for a couple of lessons a week, taught, no less, than by the bronze medal winner of Ice dancing in the previous Winter Olympics. It was very much a thing in the rink social calendar then, that couples were ice partners. She perhaps had hoped one day we might became competitive. Sadly it wasn’t to be, as I simply wasn’t good enough in the end. Yes, I could skate backwards, do toe loops and single axel rotation jumps but never much more or with any great panache. In truth my heart wasn’t into it and I felt a bit of a fraud.
She was quite sporty actually and also enjoyed skiing, and so we booked a winter holiday, my first ever plane trip, to go skiing in Kitzbuhel, Austria. Actually I did take to skiing more readily and really enjoyed it, getting out on the last day on the proper runs with her, as opposed to the nursery slopes. We did get on surprisingly well, she was engaging, intelligent and quite witty; in short a really nice girl. Obviously, we both had meteorology in common too as an interest. Potentially, despite the age difference, she was right to consider that the relationship had a lot going for it. The one snag obviously was that, try as I might and boy, I really did try, I could not find her conventionally ‘attractive’. We were going down the street holding hands and I was still finding it difficult not to be staring at the lads. I particularly recall going to see the film ‘Midnight Express’ with her in Kingston and being quite affected by it, I had no idea it was going to feature the element of homosexuality it does (and Alan Parker had toned it down, as it was). I was slightly embarrassed I think how affected I was by it. I still think it’s a great film with its tremendous, innovative moody score by Giorgio Moroder.
Eventually, in 1978 I left Kew (and Charmaine) for new pastures or rather runways, working at Heathrow Airport in the large Met Department there in Queens Building. It could not have been more different to Kew, busy, functional and efficient. I settled in with my other workers there but it never felt like I would stay there very long. I also finally found a flat of my own, in the suburbs of Teddington, close to Bushy Park. I carried on with my Met work at Heathrow, still doing shift work including nightshifts, working with a team there of about 15, including the husband of Charmaine’s good friend Lesley, who had also worked at Kew with us. In the time I was at Heathrow I started to explore things more and eventually came out as ‘bisexual’ to Malcolm and Lesley, the very first people I did so too, (besides a few men I’d already met by then). In retrospect I must have trusted them very much to do and it is to my eternal gratitude that they were very accepting of it, if not a little surprised.
I was quite worried what Charmaine would think and when we did actually meet again she told me she was very surprised. I was in turn surprised that she was surprised, as I’d thought I had been all too obvious before. But I did learn later that it’s amazing what you don’t see sometimes if you don’t want to, even when it’s staring you in the face. She got over it though and we eventually lost touch but the last I heard she was joining the Wrens.
There was still a steep learning curve to come for me though, and once I had begun climbing that curve I wanted to understand everything about this new culture I was getting myself involved with. I still had the impression, even then, that it was quite seedy, all underground and ‘hush hush’. As I started to meet other men though I soon realised the one thing they had in common was how very ‘normal’ they all were. It was a genuine but pleasant surprise.
Mostly, I met men through contact ads initially but it wasn’t that long before I was meeting men who were also frequenting the social scene in London and regularly going out to a pub or club on a Friday or Saturday night. Soon I was going with them to places like ‘Spats’ on London’s Oxford St and ‘The Salisbury’ on Shaftesbury Avenue and entering a new glamorous world of club culture. Clearly it was time to start learning some moves- new grooves. At that time there was only one big sound that was being played at all the clubs, the dance craze that had originally’ come out ‘ of the States, that was still proving all enveloping, D-I-S-C-O.
ON to Sex, love and life (The Rituals) part 2.3 Disco and the dance floor
