Brooke Crutchley and I first got to know each other in the 1930s, on ground so neutral that at the time he probably did not know that I was a scientist, any more than I did that he was Assistant University Printer at Cambridge. The company in which we met belonged to much the same generation, with all of us involved in some different field of creative work. We used to meet for no other reason than that we liked, and amused and interested one another. Then the war came and dispersed our company, and changed us all.
Brooke and I must have got together soon after it was all over. He was then University Printer and I, as one of the managing committee of the Journal of Endocrinology, was learning at first hand about the problems with which scientific journals were then contending. The journal, in the launching of which I had played an active part, and which I edited between 1948 and 1957, had at its start been entrusted to the Oxford University Press in the belief that, since I was then in Oxford, it would belp if I were to deal directly with the University Printer, the illustrious Mr John Johnson, who then ruled the O.U.P.
Our first number appeared in 1939, but it was not long before we ran into difficulties, partly because of the war, and partly because it seemed to some of us that the Oxford Press, which at the time was responsible for relatively few scientific journals, was not as much concerned as we believed the Cambridge Press to be with the difficulties which any new scientific journal was likely to encounter. In 1942 it was therefore transferred - I should think to the relief of Mr Johnson - to the C.U.P.
When I moved from Oxford to Birmingham at the end of the war, I became more and more involved in the affairs of the Journal. At that time all scientific [page 2] journals were suffering considerable delays, which meant that someone whose paper was accepted for publication was not likely to see his brainchild in print until more than a year, and sometimes as much as two, had passed. In fact it took three years to get the first post-war volume of the Journal of Endocrinology into print!
The problem of scientific publication had been considered at a Royal Society Scientific Information Conference in 1947. The remedies which it called for were, first, an increase of skilled labour in the printing industry, and second, an assurance of adequate supplies of paper and of fuel - all more easily said than done. A year later the Society published a further memorandum on the subject, but saying much the same thing. I was a member of the Society's Council at the time, and naturally started discussing the general problem of scientific printing with Brooke, who saw the problem in a much wider perspective than I did, and who with other representatives of the industry had already - that was early in 1949 - arranged to see if the then Minister of Labour could help the situation. It was not just that paper and fuel were scarce; a critical problem was that the printing unions, while recognising that the industry was then working under boom conditions of demand, were reluctant to increase the entry of apprentices, particularly compositors, for fear of a following slump.
Brooke's own view was that while the demand for scientific printing was increasing, as compared with the 1930s, the capacity to do it was bound to contract as firms competed for work of a more lucrative and general kind than the specialised job of printing scientific matter. Ways should therefore be found to encourage a few well-disposed printers to set up scientific presses, and so help relieve the C.U.P., which over the years had borne the bulk of the burden of publishing scientific journals in Great Britain. More than that, he felt that as many Universties as possible should be urged to set up their own presses - at that time I seem to recall that only Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester were so endowed - and to this end should be provided with financial help from the Government.
The Royal Society and some master printers had shown their concern with the problem. The Parliamentary and Scientific Comniittee had been brought into the picture, but how to get action? Brooke and I agreed that the best way was to broaden the attack, and for me to urge my new colleagues [page 3] at Birmingham University, through the Vice-Chancellor, to stir the Vice-Chancellors' Committee on the subject, at the same time as I was to raise the matter with Sir Henry Tizard, who had recently moved to the Cabinet Office as Chairman of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy and of a Committee of Industrial Policy.
This plan was more than fully implemented, with Brooke, I seem to recall, doing the drafting of a memorandum which I put to the Birmingham Senate for submission to the Vice-Chancellors' Committee, and with me getting directly at Sir Henry Tizard. In my first letter to him, I wrote that I had
been discussing with Brooke Crutcley, the University Printer of Cambridge, the present tardiness of scientific printing. He and other representatives of the industry had been asked to see the Minister of Labour next week to discuss the matter, but Crutchley does not believe that anything very much can come of the meeting, as it will be mainly concerned with matters like apprentice quotas.I then went on to describe some other main considerations, ending by telling him that Brooke's own view was
That the only way we are going to solve the problem is to encourage those Universities which lacked them, to establish University presses - not necessarily under University ownership. This, on the one hand, would require financial help from the Government, and on the other, would necessitate a cooporative movement on the part of existing University Presses to assist the new undertakings in all possible ways - for example, by training staff. Crutchley himself is prepared to organise this cooperative effort.In his reply Tizard asked me whether I did
not think that the Royal Society should be concerned with scientific printing? I do not know whether the Council has had any discussion about it recently. If the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy had a memorandum from the Royal Society, we might be able to do something more effectively than if the Council took the initiative itself.
The upshot of all this was that in November of 1949 the Royal Society, in collaboration with the British Federation of Master Printers and the Printing [page 4] and Kindred Trades Federation, set up a 'Consultative Committee on Scientific Printing'.
This Committee consisted of three representatives of the British Federation of Master Printers, three from the Printing and Kindred Trades Federation, and two, sometimes three, from the Royal Society, and continued to operate for nearly ten years. I was appointed chairman, but the driving force was always Brooke.
Indefatigable as always, he then urged me to get the problem taken up by Herbert Morrison, then the Lord President of the Council, and as such, and in theory at least, a member of the Cabinet responsible for Civil Science. As Deputy Chairman of the Government's Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, I therefore sent the latter a long minute, dated July 1950, again invoking the name of Crutchley as the one man who was concerned to see that a very weak point in the country's scientific structure was put right. In this minute I pointed out that it took four times as long to get a scientific paper published as compared with before war, and that British mathematicians had been forced to get their work published by foreign academies; that it took two years to publish a scientific book, by when its message was often out of date; that in the boom conditions which prevailed, the printing industry as a whole had little interest in science; that some master printers, Brooke in particular, wanted to do more than they were doing to help but that they could not get compositors; and that the trade unions were unprepared to increase the number of apprentices, not only because they feared a business slump which could bring about unemployment, but because they suspected that the printers would employ new apprentices not on scientific printing but on more lucrative work. The Lord President summoned a meeting to discuss the matter, but I cannot remember that anything dramatic resulted from it. At the time I had been enthused by the idea that straw, as well as wood pulp, could be used to make paper, and Herbert Morrison was much impressed by a copy of an issue of the Daily Telegraph which someone had lent me, and which had been printed entirely on straw paper some time in the early twenties.
But Brooke was never set back. He knew that there was no easy solution to the problem, and that the best way to improve matters - this was always his main point - was to keep up the pressure and to go on encouraging the few public-spirited printing houses to follow the example of the University Presses [page 5] at Oxford and Cambridge by subordinating considerations of financial return in order to do a national good. There were others, we knew all too well, who were prepared to serve the nation - and who in the end I am sure did - but not if it meant they had to subordinate their personal monetary interests, and whose commercial instincts in the end led to the imposition of additional costs on the members of scientific societies and on libraries.
By the time our Committee was dissolved in 1958 we had achieved a fair amount, although I would find it difficult at this distance to point in particular directions and say 'That's what we did'. But we were all busy people, and I doubt whether we would have gone on as long as we did without feeling some sense of success. But whatever we in fact achieved, we owed most to Brooke, who was tireless in his efforts to help the scientific world. As a printer and publisher he knew all too well that a nation's efforts to increase the number of its scientists and technologists, and the volume of its research, would be severely handicapped if there were serious impediments to scientific communication.
If the transformed state of scientific publication was not quite what we had aimed for at the beginning, at any rate by the start of the sixties there was no hold-up in the publication of a vastly bigger volume of scientific writing than we had ever anticipated. I have no statistics available, but I am sure that the C.U.P. has continued to carry as big a load of responsibility in this field of printing as it ever did before. The scientific world has more than a little reason to be grateful to Brooke - University Printer and scientific printer par excellence.