AT THE METEOROLOGICAL OFFICE

©   Charles Warner      27 November 2015

     After leaving Oxford, in January 1987 I applied for a job as a supply teacher of Mathematics at Woolmer Hill School in Haslemere. One of their best Maths teachers was following her husband abroad. The School really hoped that she would not actually go, and had not provided for a proper replacement. So I stepped in to look after a succession of classes of young children of ages from roughly 12 to 17. They were well drilled, and knew how to work through their exercise books, so the first few days were pleasant. However the children soon realized that they were being taught by an untrained novice teacher, and they took advantage and became unruly. I didn't pay much attention to indiscipline, so their behaviour deteriorated and they became noisy. Shouting was no good, so to silence a noisy child I would grab the short hairs at the neck and pull fairly gently. This always produced instant silence. Upon release no pain was felt, so I did no harm by the action, and nobody ever became frightened of me. I pulled the hair of girls with the same good effect as on boys. I thought that this was vastly better than the character assassinations visited upon the unruly by other teachers, which left the victims blanched with horror, with a lasting memory of dislike and humiliation. There was general outrage at my cruelty, and break times in the teachers' coffee room saw some hostility towards me. I could not pull hair; so the only other method was shouting: I placed my mouth carefully next to the victim's ear, and shouted as loudly as I could. After 6 weeks it was concluded (falsely) that I didn't really like children, and I was dismissed.

     Many years later I became friends with Frances Turner. She is a poet and author under her maiden name Frances Jessup of "The Fifth Child's Conception in the Runaway Wife" (Penguin 1973). She is the mother of my very bright Maths pupil Guy Turner. He had been a leading critic of my teaching performance at Woolmer Hill, but when we met ten years later he didn't remember me at all; I was happy about that. He became a Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and gave up a promising Arts career to marry a Norwegian girl, Cecilie, and live in Oslo. I accompanied Frances to their wedding.

     In December 1967 I attended an interview in London for a job in the Met Office; and in February 1968 another interview with the United Kingdom Scientific Mission in Ottawa. I was full of the joys of Alberta Hail Studies. The three people who interviewed me were not impressed by our rough and ready methods of phoning Alberta farmers for their hail reports, and I knew nothing at all about Project Scillonia, on fronts of depressions approaching Britain from the Atlantic. I felt rather arrogant. Nevertheless I received an offer of employment as a Senior Scientific Officer in May 1968, but chose instead to pursue Ph.D studies at McGill University.

     I finally got in to the Met Office, Met O 19e, on 7 Sep 87. The Civil Service is highly structured with First and Second Reporting Officers, and Line Managers. The Personnel Management Department sent out documents spelling out how Job Appraisal Reviews should proceed, replete with simulated Reports on imaginary candidates with names like Willie Maykitt and Miss Millie Barr. The whole structure keeps individuals at a distance from one another, with undercurrents of apprehension.

     My First Reporting Officer was Rod Brown, and I worked with on "Forecasting Rain Optimised using New Techniques of Interactively Enhanced Radar and Satellite" (FRONTIERS). The computer programmes were so complicated that no one person could master them all. Several people worked on different aspects of the system. This was partly automatic, and partly controlled by an Operator. Comparison of radar data with data from tipping bucket raingauges has always raised interesting problems, and I was involved with this. I struggled to get computer programmes working properly. I did not get on very cordially with my colleagues. I asked questions which others felt were unimportant and none of my business. Rod Brown had no time for the Royal Family and no time for me. It was felt that I didn't listen to advice, and tended to take on more difficulties than I could handle. Hours were flexible. I arrived very early in the mornings, and was thankful to take off at 4 pm in the afternoon for my 30 mile commute home to Haslemere, to light up a cigarette and take a pile of work home with me to look over in the tranquil evenings.

     I was driving to work at 0730 in the dark morning of 31 Dec 87 when suddenly on the road I saw a panic-sricken woman. She had very few clothes on and was covered in blood. I looked behind her for Cossack horsemen. There were just a couple of dogs. One of these was her own; the other was a visiting dog who had gone mad and taken a lump of flesh from her leg. I was going by The Royal Surrey County Hospital on my way to work, so obviously I could simply drop her off there. I hastily let her into my car, keeping the dogs out. She later said that she remembered smelling my cigarette smoke. I took her phone number and carried on to work. Her husband was with her when I came by in the afternoon. Madeleine Chatters had a talent for Drama. She recovered, but could no longer do her gardening comfortably, and she and her husband moved to Littlehampton, rather far away. They soon divorced, and Madeleine did no live very long - a sad ending.

     Early in 1988 I produced plans for reorganizing the radar analysis step of FRONTIERS in two Technical Notes. These were thoroughly discussed and I proceeded to work on their implementation. Soon I had drafted the necessary subroutines. Talks with higher line management, Chris Collier and Keith Browning whom I knew from my time in Birmingham, led to my enthusiastically agreeing to incorporate several improvements beyond the original one. It was a joy to have the ear of Keith Browning for an hour, with whom I felt that I could speak freely. I said that I thought that the whole Radar Analysis ought to be ready for operational implementation in a matter of weeks. This further alienated Rod Brown, who put me down for Judgement: Poor. He became positively malicious, never taking me into his confidence or giving me any encouragement.

wedding
     On 25 June 88 my sister Olivia married Barry Branston at the Quaker Meeting House in Godalming. Seen in the photograph are my mother looking indifferent, my sister radiant, me and Barry.

     My sister takes after our father Oliver Martin Wilson Warner, FRSL, biographer, historian and Nelson enthusiast - artistic in temperament, while Mum and I are practical by nature. She has endless troubles with hypoglycaemia resulting from her diabetes mellitus diagnosed at the age of 9 - a catastrophic drop in blood sugar leading to unconsciousness. It happens very often. I used to think that she should be able to avoid it by anticipation and taking precautions; I would become angry. But the attacks went on happening. Attacks are easily dealt with if one has Lucozade close at hand. One simply feeds it to her, and in a few minutes everything is back to normal. Polly used to behave as if nothing untoward had taken place and asserted herself to be the life and soul of the party. It was her way of not being gloomy in the face of the handicap. I urged her to take precautions, but the advice was set aside. It seems that a creative person has to have the capacity to shove aside practical worries so as to allow full scope to receive and recreate impressions. Polly is not practical at all; she is a colourful and versatile artist, and good with people.

     My mother and I originally did not approve of Barry with his working class background repairing hoovers. If one divides English society into two categories, upper-class Nobs and working class Wookies, our family has always been Nob. Polly happily married a Wooky. Barry holds that Self should always be a person's prime comsideration and that nothing else matters. What happens in the world at large is not your business. To think that you can make the world a better place is simply to harbour an unrealistic delusion. Like my half-sister Bridget who married Reg Vaughan in August 1954, Olivia was thankful at last to get away. Protection from me remains one of Barry's duties. He remains guarded in his attitude to me. Olivia cannot have the heart bypass operation that would be useful because of generally weak circulation. Barry had polio as a child and now he suffers Post Polio Syndrome, with progressive loss of function of hands and feet. How do they manage? They have common interests and a marriage of wonderful strength.

     Olivia's artistic talent is for painting and calligraphy. She is a member of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators. I have studied palaeography in trying to trace the circumstances of the medieval royal deer park of Witley. Barry made a reputation in graphology. He wrote the best seller "Graphology Explained" (Piatkus, 1989), and has had further books on the subject published in other languages. Thus our family has comprehensive abilities on the subject of handwriting.

     Only very gradually did I manage to get my computer software integrated into the massive interactive FRONTIERS organization. FRONTIERS had a leisurely Experimental mode and a timed Operational mode. It was insisted that everything had to work in Experimental mode first, and be demonstrated both to higher management and the staff of the Central Forecasting Office. This imposed delays, and postponed encounters with the difficulties particular to the Operational mode. Rod Brown was not a programmer and did not trust me. He and Chris Collier got their information on my computer progress from other colleagues. There were delays due to equipment malfunctions, the necessity to give demonstrations to visitors and other ongoing research projects. I was given enough help to get on, but the mood was dour.

     On 7 March 89 I had my first Staff Report and Job Appraisal Review. This was a Box 4 which means "Performance not fully up to requirements. Some improvement is necessary". My Radar Analysis was nearly working, but not quite, and I was exhausted. I did not give any attention to Staff Reporting practices, did not realize the importance of written objectives and agreed dates, and raised no protest about not achieving "agreed deadlines". A way forward was agreed: I achieved everything, principally having my Radar Analysis operational by 10 April, and expected a satisfactory Staff Report on 7 June. But this anticipated date passed with no Report.

Tiger
     This was a time of opening up of China. The author Jung Chang was writing her classic family history "Wild Swans", and China was beginning to send people out West. One of those was the mild-mannered Cheng Ming Hu who came to the Met Office and worked with us. We called him "Tiger". He wanted to be joined by his wife. Nobody took much interest in his personal life. I and my mother decided that we would provide the necessary background guarantees for him to get her over here, and she duly came. The photo shows Cheng Ming Hu and Ga Yuan Yuan on the south coast of England at Wittering on the weekend of 11 Mar 89 when they came to stay with us. They showed us some techniques of Chinese cooking. I was under the gun at work, so we didn't do a lot of celebrating.

     On 18 July I lost my temper with a junior member of staff who had been perpetually abusive and grabbed her by the scruff of the neck. This was Assault. Rod Brown immediately initiated disciplinary proceedings. I was interviewed in Personnel, and my victim was interviewed separately, so that blame for the incident could be properly attributed. There was no effort to smooth things over by any getting together. On 21 July Rod Brown produced a new Staff Report. Chris Collier left me with a Box 5 assessment: "Unacceptable". I had a Disciplinary Hearing and received a new lease of life on 4 September. After that I got on well and on after a new JAR on 20 October I received a satisfactory Box 3 assessment from Rod Brown and Chris Collier. However I now had a Third Reporting Officer, Paul Mason. He was celebrated as an expert in Large Eddy Simulations in Numerical Weather Prediction. He knew nothing of me. He marked me down to a Box 5. There are some vain and cruel people who should not be allowed to mess with the lives of others. The rest of my career in the Met Office was a devoted to quite satisfying analyses of radar and gauge data, finished appropriately on my last day, 7 Jan 90.

     I appealed against my dismissal to the Civil Service Appeal Board. At my Appeal hearing I was represented by the glamorous Geraldine O'Connell of the Institution of Professionals, Managers and Specialists, and we won the case (on 7 June 90). The Met office would not reinstate me as I asked, but paid me compensation of £14,300. My father's hero Lord Nelson would have angrily rejected this, but I put it in the hands of my stockbroker, who failed to make any further gains with it; I also paid tax on it unnecessarily. I enjoyed a quiet life at home in Haslemere caring for my mother, and carried on with studies of tropical clouds.