From: "MARTIN WOODHOUSE" To: Austin Tate Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 22:17:23 +0100 Dear Austin I'm fascinated by (and congratulate you upon) your research into the life of Dr, Horatio Beaker. All the facts you quote are indeed correct, except that he additionally spent some time working with Dr. Barnes Wallis. This period he tended to keep quiet about, however, so that it's not surprising that you haven't listed it --- he probably asked you to delete it from the notes of the various interviews you may have had with him. With best wishes Dr. Martin Woodhouse. [ I am in fact, with my brother Hugh, the "online begetter" of Dr. Horatio Beaker, as you can find from various sites on Supercar. I also designed, while I was at the Medical Research Council in 1956/57, what was probably the first computer which was (a) smaller than a room, (b) ran off two car batteries and (c) was none the less capable of AI You can find a little more about me, and LETTUCE, the Logical Truth Computer, from my Web site, http:\\www.martin-woodhouse.co uk\ -- which I shall shortly be updating. It as, as you see, possible that we may have certain interests in common . . . ) ======================================================================== From: "Austin Tate" To: "MARTIN WOODHOUSE" Sent: Saturday, August 13, 2005 10:45 AM Subject: Re: Dr. Horatio Beaker Thanks Martin, very nice to hear from you. I added a link to your web site in my GA Links page at http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/GA/ga-links.html I also added the "recently declassified" information from you to add to Beaker's bio :-) http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~bat/GA/supercar-biog.html#Dr-Beaker When you do the write up of your involvement as scriptwriter on Supercar, let me have the URL and I will directly link that into my Gerry Anderson and Supercar pages. If you allow it I will also cache that specific page and any image you permit on my site. Nice to hear you were at the APU in Cambridge, some of my early AI colleagues at Edinburgh like Jim Howe came from there with Christopher Longuet-Higgins and others. I worked with Donald Michie up here on planning technology and continue to do so... for emergency response... could use Supercar for that! But in fact I do command an control for personnel recovery, search and rescue and the like. probably influenced by those early Supercar rescue shows :-) Given your work on and interests in early computers.. you may be interested in the British Computer Society's group for this. See http://www.bcs.org/sg/ccs/ Their newsletters are on-line at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/ I am sure that the editor would love to have a short piece and the photo on LETTUCE for that. One new project is "Our Computer Heritage" and you ought to make sure they properly represent your work in that. See http://www.ourcomputerheritage.org/ I am a (not very active) member of the group and gave a talk with Donald Michie and others at the British Museum on the early history of AI - see http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/events/ccs2002/ >> It as, as you see, possible that we may have certain interests in common . . . ) Indeed... and satisfactory... most satisfactory. Best wishes Martin, and thanks for the fun I have had over the years through your work on Supercar. Austin Tate -- Prof. Austin Tate, Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Appleton Tower, Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9LE, UK Tel: +44 131 650 2732 Fax: +44 131 650 6513 E-mail: a.tate@ed.ac.uk ======================================================================== From: "MARTIN WOODHOUSE" To: "Austin Tate" Subject: Re: Dr. Horatio Beaker Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 20:00:43 +0100 Dear Austin Thank you very much indeed for your prompt, courteous and encouraging reply. Encouraging? Yes, because in return for it I will reveal something which you and and your site certainly deserve to be the first to know; namely, that my friend and yours, Dr. Horatio Beaker, is about to return to public life. "Beaker's Bureau" will appear on the Web some time this autumn, so we hope, and thereafter in other media including radio, film and televison. We -- that is, Horatio's long-time friends Martin and Hugh Woodhouse, will be recording recent stories concerning the Bureau, its staff and associates (including Otis the Otter), and also concerning the Bee-Bug, the vehicle which Dr Beaker designed and built to replace the now long-defunct Supercar. Many of these stories, naturally enough, will verge on the exciting and the dangerous. ------------------- I have also introduced you, at one remove for the moment, to Dr. B. I think it likely that you will shortly be receiving emails both from the Doctor himself and from his rather formidable cousin Dame Fenella Farnsworth, who as you probably know was until some years ago Mistress of Girton, and before that was Commandant-General of the WRNS until its dissolution and replacement by the [ so-called ] "Women In The Royal Navy". ( Dame Fenella found this piece of iconographic feminism both feeble and repellent, and relinquished her post at one and with the strong support of HRH Princess Anne. She was offered her position at Girton almost before the ink was dry upon her retirement notice. ) --------------------- I would ask you, please, to disregard any apparently combative tone which may appear in Dame Fenella's writing. I have known her for a long time and can tell you that the first piece of information she looks for in any new acquaintance tends to be their ability to stand up for themselves. Secondly, I should add that both the Doctor and his cousin are likely to address you as "Professor Tate." I will, if I may, use the less formal "Austin". The point here is that anything I tell you with this style of greeting is guaranteed as the actual, historical and usually verifiable truth, however outlandish it may seem. You must, on the other hand make what you will of whatever is addressed to you using your more formal title, whether it comes from my friends in the Bureau or, indeed, from myself. I shall be expanding a little on LETTUCE and other elderly aspects of AI a little later, if I may. Thank you for telling me how to contact the BCS group on this subject, too. With my very best wishes Martin ======================================================================== From: "MARTIN WOODHOUSE" To: "Austin Tate" Subject: Hi (and apologies) Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 07:03:14 +0100 Hello Austin Dame Fenella ( she is in fact a "double dame" and thus a member of a vey small group indeed, having both the DBE and the Bath ) is Felicity's sister. Felicity, like her cousin Horatio, has been for many years somewhat withdrawn from the world; Fenella, on the other hand, engages with it daily and in a thoroughly combative fashion. Indeed, she has informally joined the staff of Beaker's Bureau, where her colleagues spend a certain amount of time trying to supress her tendency to email people simply to find out whether or not they are easy to annoy (or, worse, deferential because of her known position in society.) ------- You are most welcome to communicate anything I may tell you to the Supercar world, at ant time. ( Or, indeed, to the world of computing. You are, quite truthfully, the first person apart from my brother Hugh and myself to know of the imminent appearance of BEAKER'S BUREAU -- I assure you of this so that you may, if you feel inclined, make something of it when passing things on . . . ! ------ The reason for my drawing a distinction between my own informal mode of address and my Bureau colleagues' likely or formal one is twofold. One : We intend ( Hugh and I ) to come as close as we can to crossing the boundary between fact and fiction as we can and indeed to cross it whenever possible. It is for instance virtually certain that Horatio or Fenella or both of them will offer advice from time to time to both Government and Industry, upon this subject and that. Two: The (genuine, and provable) facts of my own CV are I sometimes think so diverse and colourful as to resemble fiction. ( I will shortly send you a couple of cuttings from the Times and elsewhere to demonstrate this, if I may.) I have, for instance, been a doctor, research scientist, a Royal Air Force Commando (and quite illicitly, a pilot); a TV writer as you know, a Hollywood film scriptwriter and the author of 11 novels, quite a lot of them best-sellers; but also a night-club owner (active) in both Barbados and Grenada, where I had a small sugar-cane farm and also set up and ran a quarry -- obtaining a West German qualification in explosives and blasting on the way, which I suppose these days is a little discreditable -- and helped to design, set up and run the Maternity Unit in the local hospital in Montserrat (now of course volcanically devastated). I have also been at one time in another a milkman, a taxi-driver, a dealer in commodity futures (successful, I might add) and the joint owner of a small chain of open groceries called "Pick 'n Pack" . . . [ Oh; and I wrote and used one of the world's first pictorial electronic book publishing systems on computer -- "Illumination", self-reading books on diskette -- at a time when everybody was saying that such a thing was quite impossible ] This covers about a third of the various things I've done, and been, in my disreputable life; my girl-friend describes me as butterfly-brained but I prefer to think of it as "Been There, Done That, Got The Tee-Shirt, What's Next?" Hence, of course, BEAKER'S BUREAU, since I'm certainly not going to slow down at 73. I recount all this not out of vainglory but to show, I think, that my own CV might easily be considered a piece of fictonal bullshit by the average sane person. Moreover, this CV will be set out in in some detail on my own site, and the bio itself will be written by Dr. Beaker (who else?) I just thought it might be a good idea that if you and I, as I hope, develop a line of communication there ought to be some way of my being able to say, Look, this next bit is the actual truth whereas this bit is just a piece of fun. But I expect you will in any case and as you say, be able to tell which is which ! Cheers Martin ======================================================================== From: "MARTIN WOODHOUSE" To: "Austin Tate" Subject: Re: Dr Beaker and Dame Fenella Farnsworth Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 03:44:55 +0100 Austin -- Thanks for your Rapid Response Yes, and it cuts both ways; if we mention you in a fashion you'd rather be avoided (it would of course be unintentional) then please just tell us and we'll alter/remove it at once. And please also say whatever you like on any aspect of BB you like, same applies and we know full well that you, like ourselves wouldn't intend to upset ( besides it would be pretty hard to do with Hugh and myself ! ) The first chunk we'll be sending you -- it may take a couple of days yet -- is the CV / biography of DAME FENELLA FARNSWORTH who, with Dr. Beaker, make the Bureau's leading pair. You will see the considerable detail we've gone into ( that's mostly due to Hugh who is a well-known obsessive-compulsive) and I'm fairly sure that the mixture, about 50/50, of fact and outrageous fiction is inextricable . . . The Bureau, incidentally and similarly, is going to have two kinds of function from its start. One is the telling, in one format or another, of entertaining and fictional stories. The other is the answering, genuinely, of any question on pretty well any subject which anyone may wish to ask the Bureau. I know All About Science and Hugh knows All About The Humanities --- on top of which, of course, we have access to the expert views of . . . er . . . people like . . . er . . . yourself . . . . ? Yes ? ======================================================================== From: "MARTIN WOODHOUSE" To: "Austin Tate" Subject: Dr Beaker and Dame Fenella Farnsworth Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 08:46:35 +0100 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2180 X-Spam-Level: * X-Spam-Status: hits=1.03 tests=HTML_40_50,HTML_MESSAGE version=2.63+local X-Edinburgh-Scanned: at renko.ucs.ed.ac.uk with MIMEDefang 2.33, Sophie, Sophos Anti-Virus, Clam AntiVirus X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.33 (www . roaringpenguin . com / mimedefang) Dear Austin After a couple of weeks' setting things up, I am seriously starting work on BEAKER'S BUREAU with my younger brother Hugh. I'll shortly be emailing you a copy of our first real document, a detailed summary of the biography of Dame Fenella Farnsworth and her relationship with Horatio Beaker. You will then see something of what I described earlier as a fairly intimate mixture of fact with fiction; Hugh was indeed in the Naval Reserve, for instance, did command a flotilla in Operation StopGap, but did not actually meet Dame Fenella except as a joint gleam in the eyes of both of us . . . He does also seem to have mentioned yourself, en passant. This is going to be the most enormous fun, I promise you, and you will be a most welcome associate at all times. With best wishes Martin Woodhouse ======================================================================== Date: Sun, 4 Sep 2005 11:28:01 +0100 From: Martin Woodhouse Subject: Accompaniment note To: a.tate@ed.ac.uk Hi Austin It occurs to me I'd better explain it a little : BEAKER'S BUREAU, in Wester Ross, consists essentially of three main persons: Dr. Horatio Beaker; Dame Fenella Farnsworth, and their younger colleague Rick Rugged (real surname ROUGEARD, from Alderney) who is the person who does most of the overtly action-stuff, fires guns, lays people out with fists, etc. Of these three, we originally knew most about Beaker (but are right now distilling this down into a similar ten-page CV). We felt therefore that we needed to research/create his companion Dame Fenella. You can see when we started doing this 'cause I think it's on the first page of the file, Aug 23rd if I recall. Writing the Beaker file * won't take nearly as long and I'll hope to pass it on to you before the end of the week. ( * Mostly because I'm writing the draft, on a PC and not Hugh with his b ----- 2b pencil ! ) Once again I emphasise:- Though you're the first person to see these files and I'm sending them one to you on a kind of personal basis, you can do whatever you like with any or all of it's (their) contents, in terms for instance of what you might like to say on your site, etc ? I wouldn't dream of sending them to you "with restrictions. . ." And yes, I will indeed shortly be going back to attack the martin-woodhouse.co.uk site and will put a reference to you and your site on it, if I may Martin ======================================================================== Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2005 18:06:40 +0100 From: Martin Woodhouse Subject: Re: Fenella Farnsworth To: Austin Tate I know that Hugh does feel miffed with Gerry. I myself think A.P. Films behaved badly towards us but I tend also to recognise that "that's showbiz". Yes, he got 24-26 scripts out of us at a negligible fee and didn't then carry on with what he had implicitly promised but simply fired us; but on the other hand (as I often point out to Hugh) there could hardly have been a better way for a couple of young and unknown writers to get launched than by doing 26 shooting scripts in 26 weeks and having them shown to the viewing world ! ========================================================================