Having a State Scholarship meant that any University tuition fees were paid together with a princely sum of £350 a year for my travel and upkeep. Application to Cambridge was out of the question for me because I had no Latin. Consequently, I applied to four other higher education establishments: to Nottingham University because my father had completed a short pharmacy course there, and to three constituent colleges of London University, King’s, University College and Queen Mary. I never heard from Nottingham again, probably because I had the temerity to put that august University fourth in my preferences, and I travelled to Queen Mary College (third on my list) on the Mile End Road for an interview, only to find that the Professor had gone home to do his gardening! Both King’s and U.C.L. called me for interview and subjected all applicants to fairly gruelling examinations. At U.C.L. it took the form of a multiple-choice examination with a long series of ‘spots’ which had to be examined and commented upon for a few minutes before moving on to the next. At King’s College, the test, organised by Dr John Cloudsley-Thompson, was far more imaginative. A series of zoological specimens was presented as the fall-out of a spaceship that had crashed in Hyde Park. We had to identify what kind of animal each specimen was, without necessarily naming it, and then comment on its likely habits and habitat, and thus what kind of planet the spaceship might have come from! I enjoyed both tests and was accepted by both colleges to start in the October of 1953.

When the time came for me to make my decision, I chose King’s over U.C.L. mainly because I liked the sound of a ‘royalist’ establishment, and because I knew a boy around the corner who had gone up to King’s in 1952 and was very happy there. Such a random choice reflects the rather poor guidance given to these matters by the teachers at the school. My state scholarship did not provide money for a student Hall of Residence, or any other form of student accommodation, since the prevailing view was that students within a reasonable distance from home should live there. This, however, suited me well; it allowed me to maintain my cycling activities and active membership of the Northwood Wheelers. Living at home did not curtail my extra-curricula activities and I often stayed late in London. I soon became adept at sprinting to catch the last train from King’s Cross to Pinner. Only once did I come unstuck. One very cold night I leapt on what I assumed was the last train to Pinner, but it carried on through Pinner and Northwood to make its first stop at Moor Park! Since there were no return trains until about 6 o’clock in the morning there was nothing for it but to walk the six miles home to Pinner in freezing conditions.

At King’s I had enrolled for an Honours degree in Zoology, which meant one year of Chemistry, two of Botany and three of Zoology. Although I had enjoyed Chemistry at school, things at University were very different.  Dr Dolley started his lectures in Physical Chemistry by assuming that we were all familiar with calculus, and then proceeded to derive complex equations from seemingly unrelated material. Not having done any ‘higher’ Maths at school, I was soon lost and struggled through the Chemistry course. I must have passed the examination at the end of the year because I went on to the second year – but I never went to Senate House to consult the lists. Botany was well taught at King’s, being a mixture of ‘classical’ Botany reviewing plant life from algae to flowering plants and more modern aspects including plant physiology and biochemistry. The Zoology course, however, was still very much stuck in the classical mould, a veritable ‘Cavalcade of the Animals’ mainly concerned with morphology, form and function and a bit of behaviour, all within an evolutionary framework. We had very little Physiology and almost no Genetics and heard nothing of the modern developments taking place in Biology, some even down the corridor at King’s (see below). First and second-year Zoology students attended lectures and practicals together. In my first year (1953-4) it was Invertebrates, followed by the Vertebrates in the second year. In the third year it was a re-visitation of the Invertebrates, looking at certain topics in greater depth, and also an elective ‘special subject’, in my case Entomology, ably taught by Don Arthur and John Cloudsley-Thompson. Other members of staff teaching Zoology at that time were Ben Dawes (Parasitology), Margaret Brown (Vertebrates, especially fish), Margaret Tribe (Annelids) and the very eminent Sidnie Manton who specialised in the evolution of the Arthropods and was one of the very first women to be elected to the Royal Society. The head of department was Professor Jim Danielli, a cell biologist who only seemed to give cell biology lectures as a third year option.

I soon found my feet in the Zoology Department and revelled in the advanced level of the teaching. Unlike the grammar school where I always seemed to be overshadowed by Laurence Plaskett, I found myself consistently at the top of the marks list for every intermediate examination, always scoring over 70 percent. In Botany I seemed to hold my own but in Chemistry, as I have indicated above, I always struggled. In 1956, after three years of study I graduated with a first class Honours degree in Zoology.

I mentioned above that the Biology courses at King’s, especially that of Zoology, seem now to have been very old fashioned. Although Jim Danielli must have tried to bring the course more up to date, students like me could slip through the net with very little physiology, biochemistry or genetics.  I don’t think that I heard much about DNA and its role as the genetic material. This was remarkable considering the fact that such world shattering research on DNA structure was taking place in Professor John Randall’s Biophysics department by, among others, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, and the seminal paper by Crick and Watson had appeared in Nature in early 1953 the year of my arrival at King’s. It was only after my departure to Edinburgh (see next decade) that I learnt much about the importance of this work.