Such then was my general philosophy, and I put all these lines into operation beginning in the major new field with some preliminary skirmishes in the nucleoside and phosphorylation areas.
I was extremely fortunate to have as my colleague in the chair of physical chemistry that remarkable scholar and scientist Michael Polanyi. Prior to my interview for the Manchester post I had not met him, and on that occasion I had no more than a passing word with him. As soon as my appointment was officially announced I therefore went up to Manchester to meet him and discuss plans for the future. It was a fine summer day when my train drew into London Road Station and there was Polanyi to greet me. We went outside, bundled into his small Ford car, and set off. By the time we reached the foot of the sloping approach to the station Mishi (the name by which I always knew him) was already well embarked on a theoretical discussion which was brought to an abrupt halt when, emerging into the traffic of London Road, we collided with a stationary tramcar. We drove the slightly dented car without further incident to the university, had a brief chat, and proceeded to the Staff House for lunch at the end of which Mishi discovered that he had forgotten to bring any money with him that day; it is only fair to say that the indulgent way in which this confession was received by the cashier and her polite refusal to let me help suggested that this was not the first time such a thing had happened. I tell the story only because it serves to underline the essential unworldliness of Michael Polanyi. Usually deep in his own thoughts (which were always well worth listening to), he paid little attention to everyday life around him. He began life as a medical man, served as such in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War and thereafter, in his long career, was, in succession, experimental and theoretical physical chemist, economist, social scientist and ultimately philosopher. He was a truly remarkable man and one whose close friendship I was privileged to enjoy during those Manchester years, when he was moving gradually away from physical chemistry to economics, a move which accelerated after his main Manchester disciple, M. G. Evans, moved to the chair of physical chemistry in Leeds during my stay. Mishi left the running of the chemical laboratories almost entirely to me, which may have been just as well since his administrative technique usually involved issuing on impulse some sweeping directive to Dr A at lunch time and then spending most of the afternoon seeking subterfuges which he hoped might ensure that the directive (now regarded by him as bad) would in some way become inoperative without his having directly to countermand it.
I had the good fortune to be able to make the move from London to Manchester with scarcely a break in my research; I took with me two of my Lister Institute colleagues - Dr Anni Jacob and Dr Marguerite Steiger. Both of them were not only outstanding research chemists but also women of strong character. They quickly organised not merely the young research students but also the technical staff of the laboratory and got them going in their work; no slackness was tolerated! But our quick start and rapid progress thereafter also depended very largely on a new appointment which I made. When Heilbron left Manchester he took with him to Imperial College his laboratory steward F. G. Consterdine. Fred Consterdine was a very efficient person, and was generally regarded in chemical circles as the country's outstanding laboratory manager; he had built up a smooth-running organisation in Manchester, but it was clear that unless someone equally talented and efficient could be found to replace him, that organisation would be unlikely to survive for long. Such a man I found in A. R. Gilson. At the time of my appointment he was a junior member of the Manchester chemical laboratory staff. His potential had not passed unnoticed by Polanyi (nor, as I soon learned, by Consterdine), who mentioned Ralph Gilson to me as a promising youngster whom I ought to look at. I did, and was enormously impressed both personally and professionally. I therefore appointed him laboratory steward, gave him carte blanche with my full confidence, and I never did a better day's work. Appropriately enough, he was by far the youngest applicant being about five years junior to me - I being the youngest member of the teaching staff of my department. Ralph Gilson and I struck up not only a partnership but an enduring friendship; between us I like to think that we put, in turn, Manchester and Cambridge on the scientific map and he, over the years, has probably done more than any other man I know to guide the development of chemical laboratories both in design and equipment. Much later our ways parted - but only superficially - when he left university work in Cambridge in 1956 to become managing director of Perkin Elmer (Great Britain) Ltd. I must add that the entire chemistry staff, teaching, research, and technical, gave us their full support right from the start; I shall always be grateful to them and to the Vice-Chancellor, Sir John Stopford, who backed me at every turn and from whose wise advice on administrative problems I greatly benefited. The only occasion when my youth got me into a bit of trouble was when, late one evening a few days after taking up office, I went down to the chemistry department to do some writing. In this endeavour I was unsuccessful, for the night watchman on duty refused me admission on the grounds that students were not allowed in the laboratories after normal working hours unless they had written permission from the Professor!
Manchester University was a lively place in those days. Although I had only one year to see it in peacetime conditions, life in it had zest and vigour even during the war years. It certainly had no fear of appointing young professors. Three other very young men in addition to myself were appointed to chairs in 1938 - Willis Jackson (later to become Lord Jackson of Burnley) in electrotechnics, J. R. Hicks in political economy and R. A. C. Oliver in education. P. M. S. Blackett (later Lord Blackett) had come only a year earlier to succeed W. L. Bragg. I had little to do professionally with Blackett apart from skirmishes on the Senate - physics and chemistry being the two dominant departments in the university we were careful to treat one another with respect on Senate. However I used, from time to time, to find myself a minor participant in the frequent wordy battles between Blackett, Polanyi, L. B. Namier the historian, and Wadsworth, the then editor of the Manchester Guardian on political and economic matters or on the nature of science (one of Polanyi's hobby-horses). Disagreement between Blackett and Polanyi on the social responsibility of scientists and the freedom of science was profound. Patrick was endlessly pressing left-wing socialism while Mishi would have none of it: Wadsworth and Namier were somewhere in the middle. I was not, as I have said, deeply involved but, even if I did not go quite as far as Mishi, my political views were nearer to his and distinctly to the right of the others. There were, of course, all sorts of currents within the university and with something approaching a constant state of war between Lang and Drummond (the professors of botany) on the one hand and H. Graham Cannon, our zoologist, who had the lowest opinion of their subject on the other, there were few dull moments.
One of the pleasantest features of life in the University of Manchester in my time was that most of the teaching staff lunched at common table in the Staff House each day and, as a result, one quickly came to know colleagues in subjects far removed from one's own. A wide circle of friends could thus be built up quite quickly and with much less effort than is the case in a university like Cambridge, where the staff is broken up into small groups on a college and departmental basis. It is, of course, also true that in Oxford and Cambridge the lack of any body corresponding to the Senate of a university like Manchester tends to make inter-professorial contacts more difficult. In Manchester, staff from the Manchester College of Technology (which, although the Faculty of Technology of the University, was located about a mile away near the city centre) also came from time to time to the Staff House. My colleague there, James Kenner, Professor of Technological Chemistry, used to lunch with us fairly regularly and it was thus that I came to know him well. Kenner, a much older man than I, had a fearsome reputation as a quarrelsome man and, indeed, when I accepted the Manchester job there were several people who warned me that I would get a rough passage from Kenner, who would not take kindly to seeing a mere stripling in the senior chemical chair. They were quite wrong. Kenner could be quarrelsome and difficult and he relished chemical polemics, but this was largely because he had become embittered through what he regarded - perhaps not without reason - as lack of recognition of his chemical contributions and lack of support in the College of Technology. This is not the place to discuss the problems of a strange and difficult man; to me he showed only kindness, and I am grateful to him for many helpful discussions on various aspects of organic chemistry.