I kept my word and formally resigned my Cambridge chair in 1971. To mark my retirement the University Chemical Laboratory held a large dinner - so large, indeed, was the guest list that it had to be held in the Hall of King's College. I was deeply moved to find included among the guests not only former colleagues and students from the Manchester and Cambridge days, but also old friends from my student days in Glasgow, Frankfurt, and Oxford, as well as Sir Robert Robinson and R. B. Woodward. It was a tremendous party, and one notable consequence of it was the creation of the Toddlers' Club, an exclusive dining club of eighteen members which I have already described (p. 71).
Even before I resigned my chair it was clear that my life would not be very much easier as a result. Following the death of Sir Frank Lee in the spring of 1971 I came under heavy pressure from the Vice-Chancellor and the University Treasurer to succeed Sir Frank as chairman of the Syndics of Cambridge University Press. They were most insistent and, particularly as I had refused to allow myself to be nominated for the Vice-Chancellorship, I felt I had to accept.
My refusal to stand as a candidate for the Vice-Chancellorship - the highest office in the University of Cambridge - perhaps calls for some explanation. My reasons were simple enough. In the University of Cambridge the Vice-Chancellor holds office for only two years, the running of the university being largely in the hands of its permanent officials. In my opinion, two years is too short a period in which to initiate and put into operation any reforms which experience might show to be desirable. In this sense, the Vice-Chancellor seemed to me to be largely a figurehead with little real power, but carrying a great deal of responsibility if things went wrong. Responsibility without power has never appealed to me, and I believe that the Vice-Chancellorship of the university should be held for a longer period (as in Oxford) or be a permanent appointment as in all other universities in the United Kingdom. Already on my first visit as chairman to the offices of the University Press I was horrified; the Press was to all intents and purposes bankrupt, with a soaring overdraft and with sales and receipts dwindling, so that they were unable to cope with rising costs. I believe that only the knowledge that behind the Press stood the university with its great resources had kept the bank from calling a halt. Fortunately, even I could see that the Press could be made to function profitably and that all that was wrong with it was bad management. The Press was managed by the Syndics, a group of academics appointed by the university on a system of rotation; no doubt they were excellent choosers of scholarly books, but they evidently thought that the Press should be run just like a university department; they also seemed wedded to the idea that Press staff should not only be, as far as possible, academics themselves but also be remunerated on university scales without reference to the rates paid in the world of commercial publishing. Fortunately there were some members of the Press who realised the position and were looking for a lead which could only come from the top. I had a few busy months at the start but was lucky enough to get things on the right lines quickly. In these initial moves I received great help and encouragement from R. W. (Dick) David, the University Publisher, who was well aware of the problems and who, quite unselfishly, sought with me to reorganise the Press, even if it detracted from his own position of authority; I shall always be grateful to him for his help. It was evident that the first essential was to appoint a really first-class managing director/chief executive with experience in commercial publishing. Since it was obvious that to get such a person one would need to pay the going rate in competition with commercial publishers, I decided that the best thing to do would be to engage the right man and only tell the Syndics about it after the deed had been done. In this way I was able to appoint a really brilliant executive in Geoffrey Cass, who had previously been associated with Allen and Unwin Ltd. He took office with us on 1 January 1972, and from that day the Press never looked back. Within a year it was back on the rails, and by the time I had to resign (with great regret) my chairmanship at the end of 1975 when I became President of the Royal Society, we were not only making very substantial surpluses but had built up an extremely strong cash and assets position. Although the success was undoubtedly due to Geoffrey Cass, I like to think that I played some part in what was an important rescue operation for the University and for academic publishing.
In March 1973 Sir Geoffrey Gibbs resigned as chairman of the Managing Trustees of the Nuffield Foundation and I was appointed in his place. As the Foundation had been in existence for more than twenty-five years and had an efficient administrative organisation at its London headquarters in Regents Park, the duties of its chairman were not unduly onerous. It seemed to me that we had rather neglected our advisory committees in Australia and New Zealand and that it would be a good thing for the chairman to visit them and discuss programmes and policy on the spot. It happened that I had been invited to deliver the Centenary Oration at the University of Adelaide in 1974, so that it was possible to fit in the Nuffield visits on the same trip. Accordingly, in August 1974, my wife and I travelled to Adelaide and, after the university's centenary celebrations, we visited various centres in Australia on Nuffield matters, and spent a memorable fortnight on Lindeman Island before going on to New Zealand for our second visit to that beautiful country.
We flew from London to Adelaide via Mexico, where we stopped off for an all too short visit. In addition to seeing the marvellous collection of antiquities in the great archaeological museum in Mexico City, we were only able to visit two pre-Columbian temple complexes at Teotihuacan and Tula, but that was enough to make me resolve to return to that beautiful and fascinating country at the first opportunity. Prior to our visit I had been interested in the history of pre-Columbian America, and I knew a fair amount about the Toltec and Aztec civilisations; but I was quite unprepared for the breathtaking size and beauty of the Temples of the Sun and Moon and the huge ceremonial avenue of the Teotihuacan complex. Teotihuacan will always rank in my mind with the great temple at Karnak in Egypt, which is about equally majestic and awe-inspiring.