In my day gap years after school were not the norm they are now, but I did one anyway, and spent several months of it working as a Scientific Assistant at the Ministry of Agriculture’s Pest Control Laboratory at Worplesdon. I earned around a tenner a week, which was enough to buy lunches of toasted ham sandwiches and halves of Double Diamond at the Ship across the road, to pay my Mum 30 bob rent, to buy a second-hand guitar I still use, and finally to spend a princely five pounds on a ticket for the Isle of Wight Festival, which to this day Lefties say was a capitalist rip-off (how much is a Glastonbury pass now?).
The lab was an imposing Edwardian mansion, set back behind a gravel drive, with decent sized grounds containing animal enclosures and outbuildings where, among other things, accommodation for moles was housed. For my work was split between myxomatosis research (under John Vaughan, a Cambridge graduate with a sense of humour as daft as mine), and research on moles (under Dr John Woods, a dour Liverpudlian rather resentful that he was paid less than his brother on the Ford assembly line).
But it was a thriving scientific community, from the virologists with their antigenic tests on the top floor, to the subservient old porter who only revealed himself as an angry socialist towards the end of my time there, when I’d gained his trust. There was a real sense of community over soup and coffee, even involving the green and temporary me in talk about cars, zoology and gamekeeping.
The grand house, although altered and fitted out for practical science, was still a dignified, even a genteel, working environment. That included especially the bare, but still posh, drawing room where John Vaughan and I would examine rabbit fleas under the microscope, chasing any that escaped around the polished wooden floor with tweezers until John would triumphantly exclaim, “The quickness of the hand deceives the flea!”
The main downstairs lab was, I believe, the old dining room. There I combed fleas off deceased wild bunnies and salvaged their tapeworms to count, as you do, and on one afternoon a week counted the fleas on sticky traps collected from an experimental site at another secret government establishment. I found one on my first day, and was surprised to see how much interest it drew until I discovered it was the only one seen in the previous six months of the experiment… or in its entire duration thereafter.
I shared this lab with various others, including Jill Parrot, chopping frozen blackbirds into small cubes to measure their fat content, and the Department of the Environment lab assistant Nigel, whose boss worked on aircraft bird strikes and who claimed to identify an arctic skua from half a feather sent from some airport. Nigel’s spare time was spent trying his hand at taxidermy on other bird-strikes – I’ll have to tell you about his woefully deformed stuffed shelduck sometime.
My bosses’ personal lab, where I met visiting Japanese scientists and sexed the fleas I’d combed whilst listening to Cream on my cassette recorder, was upstairs, my bench having a bay window with a view overlooking the special animal enclosures. One was a large fox-proof enclosure which had cost £10,000 to secure, from which (also on my first day) I saw a fox escape, sending Dr Mead-Briggs, the chief honcho of the whole establishment, into a panicky pedestrian fox-hunt.
The other enclosure cost even more, because it was made mole-proof by digging the boundary-fence several feet deep. My clearest memory of it is of John Woods having to dig out a mole that had died (with a radioactive tracer-ring on its tail) from six feet underground, a spade in one hand and a Geiger-counter in the other.
There were some very bright scientists there, and I’m sure good work was done to benefit British agriculture. But at some point after I left, the MAFF decided to run the lab down. Perhaps its work was transferred to the larger Min of Ag lab at Pirbright, from which the lab-leak of foot and mouth disease later came, leading to the epidemic that, thanks to the modelling and draconian culling by Neil Ferguson, virtually wiped out the UK dairy industry. Or perhaps the government was just cutting costs, and laid off the staff without a cost-benefit assessment.
In any case, the site was abandoned and, typically, though it was still owned by the taxpayer, no thought was given to an alternative use, or to profitable sale. Consequently, the beautiful building began to decay for lack of maintenance, and graffiti started to appear and windows to be broken, as will always happen when built environments cease to be used by people. No doubt the locals wondered why such a desirable asset seemed to be entirely neglected, but those with the power, and the title deeds, were somewhere away in Whitehall – and who cares for far-off real-estate when there is an inexhaustable stream of tax-money and so many novel ways to spend it and win votes?
At some stage, squatters moved in and, having no personal stake in the place, added to the decay by wanton destruction that left it – as the attached photos show – a ruined shell.
Eventually, they lit a fire and burned the place down, whether accidentally or deliberately one cannot tell. A while after that it was demolished of necessity, and when I happened to drive past the site a few years ago, it was a building site for what is now a care home for the end of life.
All in all, it’s rather a sorry personal story of decayed heritage and value, if not exactly greatness. The site of my first gainful employment was called Tangley Place – but it might as well have been called “England.”
Is it age that makes us increasingly aware of decay?
Young people are obsessed with what’s new. They don’t realise that you have to work just to maintain what is.
I fear a future where the generation of people who know how to do something other than click/swipe have gone. Predict wails of “why is nothing working?!”, if not starvation and anarchy.
It may well be the decay of “these vile bodies” in part, but there was undoubtedly more hands-on involvement in physical things in the past, because most of us were involved in making them.
My male ancestors were mechanics and ironworkers, and knowing such men had made my car led me to assume I could mend it. Likewise, my Dad made radios as a teenager, so electronics was something to learn, wielding a soldering iron, rather than something with a seal and a label saying “no user serviceable parts.”