'You realise, of course, that Cannabis in all its forms is proscribed.'
'I suppose it is.'
'Well, we can probably straighten things out fairly easily so don't worry. Here in this book I have a record of all the legal holders of Cannabis in this country with the amounts of material they hold.'
I glanced quickly at the opened ledger. On the page visible to me there were a dozen or so names of doctors and professors each with small amounts of drug opposite them - usually only a few grams or ounces.
'Now,' said Inspector X, 'presumably you got your hashish from one of these holders and the only irregularity is that he didn't notify me; but we can easily put that right by an appropriate entry. Which of them gave it to you?'
'I'm afraid none of them did.'
'Then who did?'
'The Indian police.'
'Yes, but how did it get into this country?'
'In a suitcase at Leith.'
'You mean that you smuggled hashish?'
'I wouldn't call it smuggling. It was in a properly labelled flask, but the Customs people didn't seem to be very interested in it; it was just one of a number of bottles of chemical specimens in the suitcase.'
At this point there was a brief silence; then 'How much of the stuff have you got?'
I confess I had been waiting, not without trepidation, for this question and at first I tried to parry.
'Well, of course, what I have is a distilled extract of hashish and not the drug as it appears on the Indian market.'
'Never mind about that - just tell me how much.'
I plucked up my courage. 'Two and a half kilograms.'
'Good God!'
The Inspector looked worried and after a few moments he said 'What are we going to do about this?' followed by a long pause and then 'I think we had better make you a licensed holder of Cannabis.'
So he wrote in his ledger ' Dr Todd 2 1/2 kilos', and added ' You will of course understand that this material must be kept under lock and key, that all amounts you use in your work must be duly recorded, and that your records will be open to inspection by us at any time. Furthermore, if you publish any papers arising from work with this resin we will expect twenty-five reprints of each paper.'
'Certainly. Where shall I send the reprints?' 'Send them to me at the Bureau of Drugs and Indecent Publications.'
Until my appointment to the staff of the Lister Institute, I had existed entirely on research awards of various types and had given little thought to such things as security of tenure. My outlook on such matters changed somewhat after my engagement to Miss Dale. She gave up her Beit Memorial Fellowship in the summer of 1936 and returned from Edinburgh to her parents' home in Hampstead; I found lodgings in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, not far from Warren Street Underground Station, nicely poised for Chelsea and Hampstead between which places I divided most of my time until we were married on 30 January 1937. Already during the summer of 1936, after I had accepted appointment to the Lister Institute but before I had taken up my duties, other possibilities began to appear. In July of that year I, with my fiancee and her parents, attended a garden party at the Robinsons' home in Oxford. There we met President Cody of the University of Toronto who was visiting Oxford and was looking for someone to occupy the vacant chair of organic chemistry in Toronto. Encouraged no doubt by Sir Robert Robinson and Sir Henry Dale, Cody asked me if I would accept the chair; I said I would, and he departed for home a few days later. Some time thereafter I had a long letter from Cody explaining that I was rather young and that it might be easier for me to come as Associate Professor and be promoted to Professor in a year or two's time. My fiancee and I discussed this proposition at great length and, of course, consulted her father and Sir Robert. Finally we agreed that this was reasonable and I wrote off saying I would accept the offer. After some delay I had another letter from Cody saying things were very difficult in the chemistry department in Toronto and offering me the post of Assistant Professor! At this I blew up and wrote a fierce letter addressed to President Cody in which I told him exactly what I thought of him and the University of Toronto! Sir Henry Dale was somewhat alarmed by the letter when I showed it to him, and asked that he be allowed to send it first to his friend Charles Best (of insulin fame) in Toronto who would decide whether to pass it to Cody. I believe Best conveyed the gist of it but not the actual letter. I suppose he was right, but at the time I felt very sore about it. However, my wife and I had just married by then and were settling in to a flat we had found in Wimbledon, so that such matters didn't disturb us too much.
When we were married we went to spend a day or two in the New Forest, but decided to defer the honeymoon proper until winter was over and go in April to Portofino in Italy. So it was that we found ourselves in April 1937 spending a fortnight at the Hotel Splendido (the title was rather flattering) on the hillside overlooking the tiny harbour of Portofino. There were few other visitors but they included an American couple who looked to be ten years or so older than ourselves, and who kept themselves very much to themselves - as, I suppose, we did. I did not recognise either of them, although I quickly deduced that the husband at least must be a chemist. While swimming at nearby Paraggi, I saw him lying on the beach reading Chemical Abstracts; this behaviour I found peculiarly repellent in such surroundings and decided that we would not seek to press acquaintance! It was our custom to have breakfast on the hotel terrace and, while doing so one morning a telegram was brought to me. I opened it and read the surprising contents. 'Are you interested blo-organic chemistry Pasadena. Letter follows. Millikan.' I laughed and then read it aloud to my wife. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that the interest of the American chemist was evidently aroused by what he had overheard, but we neither of us said anything. I mention the American couple because just over a year later at Harvard we met them again and all four had a good laugh at our recollections of Portofino - they were in fact Professor and Mrs Louis Fieser whose textbooks on organic chemistry became almost universally used.
In due course, after our return from Portofino, I received a long letter from Dr Millikan, President of the California Institute of Technology, setting out his proposition. Briefly put, Mr and Mrs Crellin, a wealthy Californian couple, had made a substantial benefaction to the CalTech for organic chemistry and with it a new building - the Crellin Laboratory - was being erected alongside the existing Gates Laboratory where the young Linus Pauling had recently been installed, and which was largely devoted to physical chemistry. My kind of organic chemistry was not well represented in the United States in those days, and apparently the Rockefeller Foundation informed Millikan that if he could persuade me to come they would provide $1 million to help develop and maintain the Crellin Laboratory as a department of bio-organic chemistry; I believe that this was the first occasion on which the expression 'bio-organic' was officially used (it certainly was novel enough to fox the international telegraph company!). I was not prepared to accept without first seeing the situation in Pasadena at first hand, and I proposed that my wife and I should go there for a month or six weeks in the spring of 1938 on a basis of no commitment on either side: this was accepted by Millikan, and it was agreed that we should visit California in March 1938. My decision to go was not greeted with marked enthusiasm either by Sir Henry Dale or Sir Robert Robinson. Apparently they were quite happy that my wife and I should go to Toronto, because they thought we would only spend a few years there before returning; but Pasadena was another story, for they feared that if I went there I would probably stay! Perhaps it was for this reason that Sir Robert pressed me to submit an application for the chair of chemistry at King's College London at the end of 1937. This is the only job for which I have ever made a formal application - and the University of London's electors to the chair did not even bother to take up my references; which was, perhaps, just as well, for I really had no desire to go to King's College.