In those days, Allan Glen's School occupied an old red sandstone building and an adjoining temporary wooden structure in North Hanover Street, about a hundred and fifty yards north of George Square in the centre of the city. The school had no dining hall and we therefore had to eat at lunch time in small restaurants or cafes in the area. I seem to remember being allowed a shilling a day with which I was able to buy a cheap lunch (less lavish than my parents no doubt intended) and leave enough over for hot chestnuts or ice-cream which, according to the season, were obtainable from the Italian street vendors who peddled these delicacies outside the school. One of my earliest recollections of this period is the announcement of the armistice on 11 November 1918. This was the occasion for celebrations in the city, but the school was not given a holiday to mark the occasion. As a result the pupils staged a one-day strike. Militancy is thus hardly a new phenomenon in schools! I cannot remember in detail the reaction of the school authorities - they were probably wise enough to act with restraint.
Allan Glen's School carried as its subsidiary title Glasgow High School of Science. It had been founded in 1853 under the will of Allan Glen, a Glasgow carpenter who believed in the importance of science, and considered that it could be the vehicle of a liberal education just as effectively as the arts. To mark their breakaway from the classical tradition, the first governors decreed that no Greek was to be taught in the school, an instruction which was still being obeyed at the time when I was a pupil. For the rest we were taught all the usual subjects, although mathematics, physics and chemistry were increasingly emphasised as one proceeded through the senior school. I think I was sent to Allan Glen's in preference to one of the other similar schools in Glasgow because I had some vague idea that I would like to take up medicine and was already showing some interest in science. The interest in science, and especially in chemistry, developed rapidly after I went to Allan Glen's, but all enthusiasm for a career in medicine vanished in the spring of 1919. At that time, while tree-climbing with some friends, I fell from an upper branch and dislocated my left elbow rather badly. The joint was set by our local doctor but unfortunately it locked and I found I was unable to straighten my arm. Various rough and ready measures were tried to straighten it without very much success and finally our doctor, with the aid of a colleague who held me down, proceeded to apply main force. As no anaesthetic was used, the operation, although partly successful, was very painful. I decided that if being a doctor meant doing such things to people I would have none of it!
I cannot recall when my interest in chemistry began but it was certainly some time before I went to Allan Glen's. I remember being given a 'Home Chemistry Set' when I was eight or nine years old and I suppose this might have started me off. It was in a pink cardboard box and contained little pill-boxes of sulphur, iron filings, charcoal, etc. with which one could make ferrous sulphide and various kinds of incendiary materials. Once at Allan Glen's my interest grew apace and with it my experimental ventures, the latter reaching a good way ahead of my detailed knowledge, which was, of course, increasing in my school classes at the usual slow and stately pace. The main school building was inadequate to house all classes, and my form used to do practical chemistry in an outlying annexe about half a mile away in Renfrew Street. This annexe was located almost directly opposite the Glasgow premises of Baird and Tatlock Limited, the laboratory furnishers. I quickly discovered that they were quite prepared to sell to me not only chemical glassware, Bunsen burners, and so on, but also (which was more surprising) all sorts of exciting chemicals from concentrated nitric and sulphuric acids to carbon disulphide and chloroform. On such delights I spent quite a bit of my pocket (and lunch!) money and was able to carry out some, fortunately unsuccessful, attempts to prepare nitroglycerol, and at the same time to ruin the stair-carpets at home by dropping acid on them.
My career at school calls for no special comment. I had no great difficulty with any of the subjects except art. I was perhaps the worst performer in the school when it came to free-hand drawing. So bad was I that the art master on one occasion drew attention to my initials (A.R.T.) and observed that my parents 'certainly had a sense of humour'. We were for the most part well-taught in chemistry, which was made a live and interesting subject by the chief chemistry master, by name Robert Gillespie. I at least found the physics teaching much inferior, and I fear that as a result the subject appeared to me to be rather dull and uninspiring although not particularly difficult. I have always regretted this, for it did, in some measure, affect my attitude towards physical chemistry; it is not so much what is taught as how it is taught that determines one's attitude to a subject. In my experience over many years as a university teacher, I have often been struck by the fact that most of the really able young people I have known have been good at most subjects. I suspect that, in many cases, the choice of, say, chemistry instead of botany or indeed of languages as a specialty rests as much on the quality of earlier teaching as on natural inclination.
In the spring of 1924 I passed the Scottish Higher Leaving Certificate examination in English, French, mathematics, physics and chemistry, with German and dynamics as additional subjects at intermediate level. The school liked to encourage boys going to university to remain for a further year in the sixth form before matriculating, but I decided not to do so but to go directly to the University of Glasgow. It may be that I was unusually mature for my years, but at any rate I must confess that I never regretted this decision - I doubt very much if I would have gained anything by a further year at school. I thought it would be a good thing to save my father some money by getting a scholarship of some sort, so I began by sitting for the University Entrance Scholarship offered by the school. This was meant for those boys who had done the extra sixth-form year and the examination was set accordingly. I found that I could not attempt a single question in the physics paper; needless to say I did not get the scholarship. I then decided to apply for one of the bursaries offered by the University of Glasgow in a competitive examination which I duly sat. It was customary to publish the names of the first hundred candidates in order of merit and to make awards accordingly; in the 1924 competition when the list was published my name appeared in the first twenty. But my labours were in vain; had I taken the trouble to study the entry form before filling it in, I would have discovered that there were no bursaries on offer for which I was eligible. I then discovered that the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland made awards to native Scots which defrayed a large part of their university fees. I accordingly obtained the appropriate application forms. When I showed them to my father, he looked through them and almost exploded. Pointing to one of them in which the parent of the applicant was asked to sign a statement that without assistance he would be unable to send his son to university, he roundly declared that I should know better than to accept charity, let alone be so stupid as to think that he would do so under any circumstances. He then tore up the forms and threw them on the fire. So that was that! I therefore matriculated a couple of days before my seventeenth birthday at the University of Glasgow as a pensioner to read for the degree of Bachelor of Science with honours in chemistry. It is only fair to add that at the end of my first year I was awarded the Joseph Black Medal and the Roger Muirhead Prize in chemistry which did in fact provide me with a scholarship for the rest of my course.