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As described in the previous chapter, Sir Howard Florey had made arrangements for the first three professors appointed to the John Curtin School of Medical Research to meet him in Oxford early in August 1949. Adrien Albert (Medical Chemistry) was working in the Wellcome Laboratories in London and Hugh Ennor (Biochemistry) had come over from Melbourne. Bobbie and I arrived in England on 2 August. She stayed with my friend Cecil Hackett and his wife Beattie at Northwood, just out of London. I went up to Oxford and spent a very busy four days talking about the future of the School with my new colleagues (it was the first time that we had met) and with Florey. With the help of Florey's colleague, Gordon Sanders (who later came out to Canberra for a few months to help us with the planning), among other things we decided on an H-shape for the JCSMR building, with the main laboratories on the south side of each wing, to avoid direct sunlight, and rooms for special facilities on the north side, with narrow passages, to make cluttering with equipment difficult. The spine of the H was reserved for School requirements, with the library on the top floor, a lecture theatre and seminar rooms, administrator's offices and a tea-room on the ground floor, and stores on the bottom floor. Since there were no laboratories in Canberra at the time, the ANU had arranged with Burnet to make available two laboratories at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute until we were able to move into laboratories in Canberra.
Sir Howard Florey, 1898–1968
Howard Walter Florey, an Adelaide Rhodes Scholar and since 1935 Professor of Pathology at the University of Oxford, was invited to Australia by Prime Minister Curtin in 1943 to advise on the production of penicillin in Australia. He came out in August 1944 and spent six months here, during which he visited the mainland capitals. After commenting on the lack of adequate facilities for medical research in Australia, Curtin invited him to develop a plan for a national medical research institute. This was ultimately realized by the inclusion of the John Curtin School of Medical Research as one of the initial four research institutes in the ANU (Foster and Varghese, 1996). In 1947, three Australians and one New Zealand expatriate were persuaded to meet as the Academic Advisory Committee for the new Australian National University, Florey being Advisor to the John Curtin School of Medical Research. He continued in this role until 1956, visiting Canberra several times. In the early days I, and I presume other heads of the first four departments, corresponded regularly with him. I have a file containing 35 such letters in my Basser Library archives, the great majority written in 1951 and 1952, before Hugh Ennor had been installed as Dean. From 1960–65, Florey was President of The Royal Society of London and, from 1965 until his death in 1968, he was Chancellor of the ANU. He was not an imaginative scientist of the calibre of Burnet or Dubos, but he ‘got things done’ in relation to such matters, for example, as penicillin production, the John Curtin School of Medical Research and new buildings for The Royal Society. He had the English habit of addressing everyone except close personal friends by their surname. I found him very helpful whenever I looked for advice (see Fenner and Curtis, 2001).
The Act setting up the ANU was passed in August 1946, and with it came a statutory grant of £325,000. We discussed with Florey how best to spend this money, and decided to use our portion of it to buy back-sets of important journals, get equipment for our laboratories, and provide ANU scholarships to enable young Australian scientists to do a PhD degree in England (none of us wanted to take on PhD students until we had settled into our labs in Canberra). I recommended three such students: J. H. Bennett to work with R. A. Fisher (he later became Professor of Genetics at the University of Adelaide), F. W. E Gibson to work with D. D. Woods on chemical microbiology (he became Professor of Biochemistry here in 1967 and Director of the JCSMR, 1977–79), and W. K. Joklik, who worked for 8 years in my department and then became Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Duke University, in North Carolina.
Cecil John Hackett, 1905–95
I insert this note on Cecil Hackett because almost every time that I went to London, from 1949 to 1993, I stayed with Cecil and his wife Beattie, initially at his home in Northwood, then in Geneva, when he was working at the World Health Organization, and most often at their flat in Moscow Road, London, just north of Hyde Park. Born in Adelaide in 1905, Cecil graduated MB BS at the University of Adelaide in 1927 and MD in 1936. I met him when he lectured to me on physiology in 1936 and subsequently because of his involvement in the expeditions into Central Australia organized by the Board of Anthropological Studies (see Chapter 2). From 1937 to 1940, he worked in Uganda, investigating the bone lesions associated with the tropical disease yaws. During the War, he served as a medical officer in the Royal Air Force in West Africa, India and Burma, and from 1945 to 1954 he was Director of the Wellcome Museum of Medical Science in London. During the next decade he worked as a Senior Medical Officer at WHO Headquarters in Geneva, concentrating on yaws and its elimination from Indonesia. Back in London in 1965, he continued studies on lesions of syphilis and yaws in bones. In 1980–81 he was the prime mover in arranging for a stone recognizing the contributions of Lord Florey to Great Britain to be placed on the floor of Westminster Cathedral, where his wife, an avowed non-believer, worked so hard as a voluntary helper that she was awarded an MBE and a carving of her head was used as a gargoyle on the Cathedral (see Fenner, 1995).
From August to November Bobbie and I stayed with the Hacketts at Northwood, some 20 km west of London. Since no laboratories were available in Canberra, we took the opportunity to travel around Europe, in the process seeing as many microbiologists as I could. We bought a Ford Prefect car and drove first around England and Scotland (a total of some 3,000 miles) then through France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Italy (a total of about 4,200 miles). In Germany we went through the Ruhr, still bearing most of the wounds of the War, to the peaceful countryside of Neidergrenzebach, where we met our closest relatives on the Fenner side in the house where my paternal grandfather was born and I saw my great-grandfather's grave. I also attended several national and international scientific conferences in England. Bobbie and I enjoyed learning about the countryside and looking through the great art galleries and museums of Europe. It was an unforgettable experience.
On 8 November, we moved into Nuffield House, in London, where we stayed until we left for home, embarking on the Orontes on 12 January, 1950, and arriving in Melbourne on 18 February. Such was the interest in The Australia National University in those days that there were items in the newspapers recording my arrival in Perth, in Adelaide on 15 February, and in Melbourne a journalist from The Age met the ship and interviewed me, with an article and photo in that newspaper next day.