Anniversary Dinner 1962
I am sure that the greatest honour that can befall an after-dinner speaker is to propose the toast to the Royal Society and I simply couldn’t imagine why the Royal Society chose a mere Admiral to propose the toast. Then I got hold o f their history and I found out how much they depended on Admirals in the past. In the last two hundred years, forty-six o f the most distinguished Fellows of the Royal Society have been Admirals. The only Fellow of the Royal Society about whom a film has been made twice, was in fact a young Captain who also became an Admiral and a Fellow of the Royal Society. One was made before the war and there’s one in London now; you can see it in glorious technicolour and cinemascope. It’s about a man called William Bligh who had some trouble on the Bounty. But it wasn’t only Admirals who became Fellows of the Royal Society, because in those days there were also Captains. Edmund Halley, Astronomer Royal, commanded one of His Majesty’s Ships in 1698, with orders to traverse the North and South Atlantic Oceans in order to survey compass directions.