From the recording of Joyce Scoffield and Sylvia Asquith

Joyce and Sylvia worked at Bidston Observatory until their retirement, as 'computers', observing and recording the information produced by the meteorological and tidal prediction instruments.

Audio recording of their descriptions of how the different instruments worked and the observation 'operations' they carried out with them. Two voices twelve years apart, at 84 and 92. Connecting with the instruments again. A process of collaborative remembering, stimulating, adjusting and correcting each other's memories while they handle and look at the instruments while back in the building for the first time in fifteen years or more.

[SUN BALL] (JS) The sun shines through there and burns a hole in the card… (SA) You have three different sizes of groove according to the time of year... (JS) That’s true, yes, I remember now … (SA) It was a very long one for the summer... (JS) It was three different types of card, (SA) for the winter a small one (JS) yes (SA) and then you had the spring one (JS) mmmm (SA) and then summer… (JS) No, this is a summer one, because of the single lower screw (SA) oh yes (JS) No, no – not the silver one – the silver one stuck out - (SA) Oh that’s true, I’d forgotton that - (JS) It’s got to be the winter one, the winter ones were straight - or they were when I did the ... (SA) It was done high up on the roof in the Dines cabin - it was called the Dines cabin because the anemometer was a Dines anemometer.

(Kym) Were leaks ever a problem, do you know?

(JS) I seem to remember a bucket around the room…

(Looking at a staff photo: trying to recognise the faces and remember the social relationships which interwove with the research relationships, in the effort to piece together a whole picture of their working community).

(SA) They were putting down current metres, measuring the currents, getting all the information and putting it on a computer. It was very good if you were going to put an oil rig out to sea. It was very good if you could get all these measurements of how wild it could get and whatever, and advise whether it was a good spot or not. Also they got some enquiries about shipwrecks, they wanted to raise the ship, or go on the ship to see what was aboard – we had quite a few of those. If they happened a long, long time ago, they had to do the predictions for all those years back. But once you had the constants for the machine, you could set it up and run it. That would be for underwater then.

(Kym) We’ve had people coming to think about what the Dudeson Lège was measuring. We thought some of it was measuring the water around the edge of the coast, the tidal prediction machines, but also the depth of the water… I remember once you telling me that you didn’t always know what the discs were for, what the measurements were for, of the Dudeson Lège …

(SA) Each one made a coastline curve, and a fine wire connected them all up; and it was the sum total of… you know they had to use various things, and the biggest ones represented the sun, and then you had the moon, and then you had shallow water and think like that. So you had people working from a designated place measuring the height of the water, every hour, so you get an hourly height all the way through the months of the year. We didn’t do that, we just got the charts. And we had to check with them, because mistakes were made. So you got used to reading them.

(Kym) How could you detect a mistake?

(SA) Oh, you’d find a funny measurement, plot a curve and one of the observations was out of line … If the place had the right facilities they were able to put a chart on a drum, and the pen would move up and down on the water, they’d take them off. They’re on special charts for the whole year. They’d roll them up and send them to us. We had to have a year of those before we could do predictions, because we’d have to work out what the constants were for that year. Once you’ve got the constants you’re able to do predictions for any year that they wanted. (16”43)

[THERMOGRAPH]

(Kym) Meteorological charts - are these the same principle as the tidal charts?

(JS) Possibly. They’re like barograph charts, off your barometer. They’re from 1906. 1906! You won’t remember that Sylvia! These are thermograph – dry bulb or wet bulb. To get your humidity you get your dry bulb temperature and your wet bulb temperature, and then you used your slide rule to calculate your humidity. (SA) No, you didn’t use a slide rule (JS) Well I used a slide rule…

(Kym) Maybe, Sylvia, you did the calculations in your head?

(JS) We definitely used slide rules the whole time I was here. (SA) Good heavens! We used to substract it one from the other, and it wasn’t that easy - we used a table, no slide rule – (SA) I can visualise a slide rule right now - (JS) We used a slide rule in analysis. Doing the weather we used a slide rule – to calculate the relative humidity, yes. (20”00)

[TIDAL PREDICTION]. You’d have the dry and the wet. [so you’d have two bulbs, one dry and one wet], yes - upright, side by side of the screen. And below those you had horizontal ones measuring the highest temperature of the day and the lowest number. And the Grass Minimum thermometer, that was outside on the grass. What would that be converting, it could be converting from Fahrenheit to Centigrade…? Oh I don’t think so, we didn’t use Centrigrade in those days – no, no, it wasn’t that. …”Conversion tables”, “Liverpool timetable”….

- So that’s what you produced in the end? So that’s the production - and then that would be done for every port around the coastline? - Every port around the coast, yes.

- Did you have to buy them at that time, or were they government supplied?

Oh you had to buy them. You can still get them. 22”00

- [Bringing out some charts that Sylvia and Joyce might have filled in and sent]

There are still all the constituents [cards], yeah - We used these. Don’t recognise that one… 23”00 We used to put the angles on the back, didn’t we? To begin it. The amplitude on the front, and the angles on the back. Because the angles were on the back of the machine, so we used the back of the card - set it up from there, and the amplitude on the front, turning the little screws so it went up… went up the (?)

- I wouldn’t have known how you would have worked with the machine, so that’s quite important information. So the back of the card signifies all of the different points that you would change at the back of the machine, is that right?

Depends on the machine. I mean not all machines had constituents at the back. At least one machine had one lot of constituents. The latest one, D.L., that had them front and back didn’t it.

- You can walk behind it – the ? Dieter Liege (?) it’s that massive on that you can walk behind, at the back…

RAIN GUAGE S. You look in through here… J. There’s this little hole here, that’s where the rain comes in Yes that’s where the rain goes in. You used to open this… Yes that opens easily … open the door, yeah, just twist back – that’s right - there’s nothing inside them now, of course – there was a drum inside, and you put a chart on it, it was all fixed up - and it would rotate once in 24hrs, wouldn’t it? Yes, and we had to take it out and wind it up, didn’t we? We had to wind it up - To wind it up, yes - I remember the wind-up mechanism.

- The 1 o’ clock mechanism.

And a rain chart - about that long. We wrapped around, and a piece of metal that fitted in –Oh yes, I remember that – And um, it moved around with a clock inside it, but you had to wind it up on a set day, didn’t we? [27”00] Every day, m-hm. So we wound it every day…? You may have done Yes probably we did, because it would be awkward to… But I cannot remember how the rain got through the from the top? It’s here, it’s here – I know! But I cannot remember how it got from there, to cause the pen to move up and down…? Yeah there’s the tube coming down – it was obviously dripping into something, I can’t remember what, though.

I’m sure we can find out – we’d love to find out.

And alongside it was the rain guage, and this is the rain record, but they weren’t connected. No it was separate - and that wasn’t very tall. And there was a bottle in there which, um … [28”15] It was scooped out like this – … And the rain went through that little hole and into the bottle. So you had to take the top off when you did the ops, take the bottle out - and you had a special holder - tip it in, measure it, and you had to write it down, take the observations. I remember… I’d only been in a few months and I’d been shown the met and it was my first day round and it snowed, and all the top – I looked at it and it was all snowy. And I thought, Oh, it hasn’t gone into the bottle! So I got hold of it and threw it all away. There was only a tiny bit in the bottle. And the doctor called me in and he said, “Miss Brooks, how much did we have today, precipitation?”. And I told him, and he said, “What! What did you do?”, I said there was loose snow all over the top, so I threw it out. He said, “You should have melted that! You should have melted that! Come, I’ll show you.” It was all in the actual … Like this – this is the recorder – So mine: all this scooped up part was all snowy. “So it should have gone down the little hole, you see? So you have to take that (snow) out carefully and take it in and melt it.” And he just took it in and melted it, as a demonstration. I’ve never forgotten it.” Nobody told me what to do if it snows. I didn’t think of it! 30”30

- In the Wirral Archives there’s a typed up book and in the book it says: Change the anemometer chart at this time in the morning and the baromograph chart at this time in the morning, with times all the way through the day, and that must have been 7 days a week presumably?

Oh yes, every day … Christmas day… The main observation was 9 o’clock GMT, and you did all the changing of the charts and everything – That’s right, we did! And you did all the other observations. You’d just simply read the two, dry and wet, on the screen, and then go up on the roof, do the cloud - Oh, yes- Go up onto the roof and do the cloud, or the skies in eighths. You go used to it!

- So with your eyes you had to portion up the skies into eighths, and you recorded how much was full of cloud?

About half, half, way – four eighths, up … Completely overcast: ‘8’. Um, type of clouds – we knew all that pretty well – you looked around and you had to put three types of cloud, if you could

SUN BALL 

From ‘Bidston Observatory. The Place and the People’, by Joyce Scoffield, illustrated by Sylvia Asquith. (Pub. Countyvise Ltd, Birkenhead 2006). p. 155 Bidston’s first sunshine recorder [a Campbell Stokes-recorder] was provided by Mr Eric Rpbson and installed on the roof of the anemometer cabin in 1907. Readings began on January 1st 1908. It was soon realised that the domes rising 20 feet above roof level, obscured the recorder from the sun’s rays in the mornings and late afternoons during the winter months, so the recorder was re-sited on the roof itself each winter from September to March, close to the southern parapet. Many years later, as the trees matured around the site Observatory, the parapet site became unsuitable, and a new winter location was found on the narrow ledge encircling the eastern dome. The card was changed daily at sunset, and to access the recorder the observer had to open a small door in the dome and lean out of the window. This practice was to continue right up to the late 1990’s, by which time an automatic system of sunshine measurement had been installed. Perhaps this was well timed because, as the photograph below reveals, the trees are so tall in 2006 that now the eastern dome windows are shaded from the early morning sunshine in winter.

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