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1942 to 1944 recollections of student life in Belfast |
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 |  I was interviewed by a civil servant with piercing blue eyes – C. P. Snow, I learned later. The deal was £50 per annum for two years to study ‘physics with radio’ in the Engineering Faculty of Queen’s University, and an ordinary BSc after a year’s experience in some technical type of war work. When the war was over, we could return to complete an honours degree. In the waiting room I had my first ever conversation with a Catholic, a likeable lad who later delighted the class by answering "Exactly! " when the most serious student asked, anent cosmic rays, "where the hell do they come from ?"
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That first autumn term we became a close-knit group, two girls and seven boys, learning the art of soldering under a stereotype ex-RAF sergeant. Our Adviser of Studies was a quiet man with my father’s twinkling eyes and tongue-in-cheek Belfast humour. The first thing he advised us was "make your work your hobby", before describing exactly how he drilled a hole in his bedroom window for the aerial to go through. A keen radio ham all his life, he later became the University's first Professor of Electronics. |
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| Our various first-year classes filled a 9 to 5 day in the city centre College of Art and Technology. Some were shared with chemical engineering students and a horde of ‘rude mechanicals’ and civil engineers. For maths tutorials we sat in alternate rows in a huge tiered lecture theatre, assistants working their way round as we tackled the set problems. I was often out of my depth and hid my work in tongue-tied embarrassment. The same room was used at 2 p.m. for lectures on DC machines, memorable for the lecturer’s attachment to a bottled lunch. | ||
Alcohol was not then the important feature of university life that it seems to be now. The top floor of Martin’s Coffee House, opposite the City Hall, was our howff. For the mid-day main meal of the day, I often went the two miles home, but sometimes we ventured into a spartan ‘British restaurant’ nearby in the Falls Road for a low-price nutritious but uninspiring meal. Then we would wander round Smithfield market, a great place for second-hand electronic components. |
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Physics was very much the poor relation. The lecturer was a man ‘from the south’, and we sat round a laboratory bench while he talked; no textbook was recommended. Natives of Belfast rate practical people higher than ‘airy-fairy theorists’ and I’m afraid we were not thrilled with his physics. Still, eight of us passed all the year-end exams. The one who failed had been more interested in sexual harassment, so we were glad when he did not appear for second year. Thereafter we went for physics to the main campus, 2 miles away in the opposite direction to my home; a very different experience culminating in an intensive course in glass-blowing. Professor KG Emeléus’ lectures were interesting, but without a textbook there was a great deal I did not understand, and failed the end-of-year exam. However, I could resit a year later. The time had come to venture ‘across the water’. |
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