Book Review: Walking in All of the Squares, Alexander Thom, Engineer and Archaeoastronomer

Review by Duncan Lunan

The late Prof. Alexander Thom  (Fig. 2), from Dunlop in Ayrshire, had an extraordinary career, but I knew only a fraction if it because I was unaware of this book until Dr. Elizabeth Pitts very kindly sent me a copy, after the death of Dr. Euan MacKie.  This review barely scratches the surface of his career as a theorist, inventor and designer, which his son Dr. Archie Thom describes in detail in his biography. The title Walking in All of the Squares comes from a poem, ‘Lines and Squares’, in When We Were Very Young, by A.A. Milne.   As it happens I had that book as a child and can quote many of the poems, and recite at least one;  I don’t remember that one, but when reproduced here, it is extremely apt.

I found the early chapters, detailing the Thom family history from their move to Dunlop in the 19th century, hard to follow because of the large number of names, including many versions of Prof. Thom’s and many nicknames for him.  I was never invited to use any of them in the five times or more that we met, so he was always ‘Professor’ to me.  I have to keep saying so to avoid confusion with Dr. Thom, which caused immense confusion when the Philippine compositors of my book The Stones and the Stars  (Springer, New York, 2012)  insisted on reducing all references to them in the Bibliography to initials, then required me to re-identify them all over again.

It’s clear that in his early and later years at Dunlop, Prof. Thom was keenly involved like his father in improving technology for the farm, hard though it can be to tell who invented what.  Major improvements included electricity, radio  (crystal sets), and water supplies including hydro power, and many inventions and improvements to tools and machinery, some of which were taken up by other farms but few if any were patented, probably it was too much trouble.  In the circumstances it seems strange to me that the young Alexander Thom received no encouragement from his father in his academic pursuits, and his achievements at school and academically were very much self-motivated.

The trail becomes easier to follow in 1913 when he moved to Canada and became a surveyor on the Canadian Pacific Railway, exacting work in very difficult conditions, where he learned techniques which he continued to use throughout his very active life.  His first published paper was on astronomy in 1916, and that interest never left him.  Another keen interest was aviation, and after joining the industry as a draftsman he rapidly moved on to engineering.  He was the first Reader in Aeronautics at Glasgow University and most biographies leave it at that, but in 1939 he volunteered to work at Farnborough, playing a major role as Principal Scientific Officer in the Royal Aircraft Establishment, creating their first supersonic wind tunnel among many other accomplishments.  Frustratingly, Dr. Thom gives no list of the aircraft he worked on, saying only that there were a great number of aircraft types, including seaplanes and flying boats.  

Even more frustratingly for me, although he mentions acquaintance with Barnes Wallis, there’s no mention of the late Capt. Eric Brown, the world’s most experienced test pilot who spent most of the War at Farnborough, nor of the late Prof. Terence Nonweiler, who made his name at Farnborough analysing the performance of German missiles and rocket aircraft.  One would imagine that they must have been in almost daily contact, yet there’s no mention of Thom in Eric Brown’s autobiography Wings on My Sleeve, nor in his account of the first British supersonic project, Miles M.52, nor yet in Paul Beaver’s more recent biography, Winkle, the Extraordinary Life of Britain’s Greatest Pilot.  (See ‘Space Notes:  Capt. Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown, RN;  ‘The Miles M.52 and the Douglas Skyrocket’;  and review of Paul Beaver’s book, ON, April 9^th 2023, 30^th July 2023 and 6^th August 2023.)  And none of them mention Nonweiler!  Since I knew both Eric Brown and Terence Nonweiler, it’s a great pity neither of them are still around to ask, what gives?  It’s particularly strange because when Prof. Nonweiler stood down as Professor of Aeronautics and Fluid Mechanics, moving to New Zealand in 1975, he was succeeded as Acting Professor by Dr. Thom.  Even if the changeover was too fast for them to have met, Dr. Thom couldn’t have been unaware of his predecessor and his influence:  when Prof. Richard Brown took over the same Chair in 2006, he found paperwork of Terence Nonweiler’s still in his desk.  It makes one wonder if the dreaded words ‘Top Secret’ have a bearing here.  The reasons for the cancellation of the M.52 are still obscure:  the relevant paperwork is missing from the Ministry records, and Eric Brown was convinced that money changed hands when Britain’s lead in supersonics was given away to the USA.  For good measure, Terence Nonweiler’s Ph. D. thesis on high-speed submarines remains classified to this day.  

Further thought suggests that security must have been a factor:  for example Prof. Thom would only say “I knew Wallis”, but Dr. Thom reveals that he took great interest in the geodesic construction technique which Wallis devised for the R.100 airship, and afterwards developed for the Wellington bomber.  Between the wars Thom had invented a power-assisted control system for aircraft which ‘was soon surrendered into the hands of the control boffins’ when he went to Farnborough;  but the major need for that was for Eric Brown’s experimental transonic dives with Spitfires, because Brown was so small that he lacked the strength needed to pull out, as he explained in talks at the British Rocketry Oral History conferences in the 2000s.  The same factor made him the chosen pilot for the M.52 “because I was the smallest man in the room”.  Thom also was in the party of scientists headed by Eric Brown who were taken to Germany to evaluate the surviving jets and rockets at the end of the war;  and as the creator of Farnborough’s supersonic wind tunnel, it seems impossible that he wouldn’t have been involved in the intense debate and half-scale rocket-powered tests which were conducted to test the M.52 design, and particularly its capsule escape system, all of which went to the USA  (see ‘The Miles M.52 and the Douglas Skyrocket’, above).  Yet none of them talk about working together, nor about Terence Nonweiler’s study of the German rockets.

In 1945 Alexander Thom was elected to the Chair of Engineering at Oxford University, where he made major contributions for the next 17 years, to the extent that the new building housing the Applied Engineering department, which he created, was named after him.  I have to admit that the maths discussed in this section are beyond me  (I reached my ceiling in maths during my first year at Glasgow University),  but the calibre of the mathematicians in correspondence with Thom, reproduced here, and the deep respect with which they address him, make clear how valuable his contributions were. 

At an age when most people would happily have retired, however, in 1961 Prof. Thom returned to Dunlop and embarked on an entirely new career in the study of Neolithic stone rings, standing stones and other monuments, by which he had been fascinated since an incident in his yachting hobby, when he watched with an engineer’s eye as the Moon rose over the Callanish megalith on the island of Lewis.  Aided by Dr. Thom, other members of his family and numerous volunteers, he surveyed hundred of megaliths in the British Isles and in Brittany.  One might get the impression from his own books and from others’ accounts that he did all this on his own, or with only Archie Thom to assist, but Dr. Thom creditably gives full acknowledgement to those many helpers, giving a list of them when he runs out of space to describe all their efforts in detail – particularly in describing their great survey at Carnac, much of it in conditions at least as difficult as the professor’s early work for the CPR.  That survey of standing stones at Carnac and other sites has been estimated to be the largest archaeological project of the 20^th century, in terms of man-hours, and having seen the final result assembled as a gigantic scroll at Dunlop, I can very well believe it.  Along the way he became convinced that the Neolithic builders not only possessed advanced geometry and a precise numerical system, but had conducted intensive research into the movements of the Sun, stars and particularly the Moon, perhaps enough to realise that the world was round  (see below).  At first the findings were uncontroversial:  the late Prof. Archie Roy and Prof. Michael Ovenden had covered them in first-year Astronomy lectures in the early 60s, and when I visited Stonehenge with a fellow-student in 1965, C.A. Newham’s influential booklet on the subject was on public sale.  

But after Prof. Gerald S. Hawkins had popularised the topic in his book Stonehenge Decoded (Souvenir Press, London, 1965, Fig. 3), many archaeologists turned vehemently against the whole subject.  The late Dr. Euan MacKie of the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University, was a conspicuous exception, (Fig. 4), and came in for a lot of criticism in consequence.  One of this book’s surprises is that Thom’s early work was considered extremely valuable by the late Prof. Glyn Daniel, the editor of Antiquity, who had been Euan MacKie’s tutor.  Daniel later turned extremely hostile and resorted to actual abuse in the pages of Scientific American.  I was privileged to see the Thom’s defence of Euan MacKie in a two-paragraph letter to the editor thereof, in which not a word was wasted.  In The Stones and the Stars  (Fig. 5)  I praised Euan MacKie for his dignified silence on the matter, but when he came to lecture to the Astronomers of the Future Club in Troon in 2014, it turned out that he didn’t know about it and ‘dignified restraint’ were not quite the words for his reaction.  “You don’t mean that he published it?  The bastard!”  Walking in All of the Squares refers to this matter only in passing, and offers no explanation for Glyn Daniel’s total volte-face since the early days.  But I remain proud of Prof. Thom’s comment on the completion of ‘my’ Sighthill stone circle by Royal Navy helicopter at the spring equinox of 1979 – “Don’t you wish Glyn Daniel was here to see this?”  

In the late spring of 1978, when I was trying to persuade the Glasgow Parks Department and the Manpower Services Commission that I should build the circle in stone rather than in ‘modern materials’ as specified, I turned for support to Professor Thom, whom I had never met.  I made an appointment to see him on April 13^th, at the house in Dunlop which he had built for his wife and himself, during the Depression.  I was warned that he didn’t suffer fools gladly, so I knocked at his door with some diffidence.

“Good morning,” he said as he opened the door.  “Have you seen the latest criticism of my work in Antiquity?”

Not wishing to admit that I wasn’t a regular reader of Antiquity, I said, “No, Professor, I haven’t seen it yet.”

“Well, don’t bother,” he said, “the man’s totally innumerate.  Come in!”

In a long and active life I have been privileged to meet many people of great talent, in many different fields.  But I have met only two to whom I would apply the word ‘genius’, people who gave the impression, affable and attentive as they were, that there was far more going on in their minds than I would be given access to.  Terence Nonweiler’s intellectual life was compartmentalised in that way;  for instance, it wasn’t until after his death that I learned that he was a pillar of the Glasgow University Cecilian Society, even though I had friends in it at the time.  Alexander Thom  was also musical, it turns out, as well as being a very good artist and an accomplished yachtsman, both of which activities feature in his book’s illustrations.  He really did walk in all the squares which were available.

As an example of Thom’s genius, in his Megalithic Sites in Britain  (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1967, Fig. 6),  Prof. Thom published a histogram of the alignments of ancient Neolithic sites in relation to celestial events on the horizon  (Fig. 7), and it’s been reproduced many times, for instance in Euan MacKie’s posthumously published account of his own work in relation to Thom’s, Professor Challenger and His Lost Neolithic World   (Archeopress, Oxford, 2020, Fig. 8).   In my view, it synthesises so much data, of so many different kinds, that it should be ranked with the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stellar characteristics as one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20^th century.  Most of the subsequent discussion has related to the solar and lunar alignments, but the histogram also includes the brighter stars visible from Britain in Neolithic times, from Antares in the south to Arcturus, which is the brightest star north of the Ecliptic  (the plane of the Earth’s orbit, consequently the Sun’s apparent path in the sky through the year).  When extended, the histogram proves to have much more to tell us, (‘Beginners’ Astronomy: Alexander Thom Star Dates’, April,  3^rd, 2022), and as promised I’m now trying to circulate that idea more widely.

A short anecdote in the book explains one thing for me.  When Prof. Thom wanted to survey a standing stone near the Mull of Kintyre, access was refused by the owner – Paul McCartney, as he then was.  When I was compiling the flight plan for the aerial archaeology flight which I coordinated in 1982, Prof. Thom’s request was for us to cover a standing stone near the Mull, almost certainly the same one.  We overflew Macrihanish  (while I was given a shot at the controls)  but couldn’t find the stone, and as available flight time was drawing short, we turned north and met Dr. Thom’s request that we search for a ‘lost’ stone circle at Pubal Burn, further up the peninsula.  Had we found the stone and photographed it at low level, we might also have captured an image of Sir Paul shaking his fist at us, or taking down our aircraft registration to make a complaint.  He might have got a dusty answer if he did, because the pilot was IBM’s head of scientific public relations in the UK, though aerial archaeology was his private interest.  (See ‘Archaeoastronomy from the Air’, ON, July 17^th, 2022).

The cover illustration for Walking in All of the Squares is by Alexander Thom’s great-grandson Eoghann MacColl, who’s never mentioned this book to me.  It shows the outdoor cold-water bath in which Prof. Thom took a daily plunge for most of his life.  When we first met, during the campaign to save the Sighthill stone circle, Eoghann mentioned that he was assisting with what became Euan MacKie’s last book, Professor Challenger and His Lost Neolithic World^,, which I cited in ‘Visit to Machrie Moor’, ON, 25^th August 2024.  Last year we met at a seminar on the archaeology of Arran, and he invited Linda and me to stay on and visit the new excavations at Drumadoon, including the recently discovered cursus which rivals the one at Stonehenge and promises to revolutionise ideas about Neolithic society  (Fig. 9).  Unfortunately we had to get back to the mainland for another appointment, but now we’re resident on Arran, I hope the opportunity will recur.   

What prompted me to begin reading Walking in All of the Squares now was partly that I’d only just retrieved it from storage after Linda and I moved to Arran in March this year.  But on September 4^th 2024 I was interviewed by Meg Elliot for a BBC podcast about the Sighthill stone circle.  I knew that I was being particularly fluent because I was largely recapitulating a talk that I gave to the Arran Branch of the University of the Third Age in Brodick, in May.  But when we finished, Linda told us that for much of the interview a robin had been hovering at the patio door as if listening, brushing its wings against the glass, but not tapping to be fed as some birds do, particularly seagulls and blackbirds.

That was interesting because in 2019 we had been to a solstice drumming event at Tara, where the kings of Ireland were crowned.  As part of the sequence the participants were invited to enter meditation, lying in a circle while the drummers moved around them, and imagining themselves to be trees, sinking down through the roots into the earth below.  That didn’t particularly appeal to me and I kept my eyes and ears open;  and therefore was aware of something the drummers might have noticed, but the meditators couldn’t, which was that as the birdsong around us grew louder with the approach of sunset, it was becoming more attuned to the rhythms of the drumming, increasingly so as the meditation went on.

Back in the 60s, when I was heavily involved in the folk scene, I had become very aware of how the rhythms of traditional songs follow natural speech patterns, even at cost of changing the tunes from verse to verse – something which classical singers whom I knew found intensely annoying, because it broke the rules they had painstakingly learned.  I also noticed that fluent speakers would follow speech patterns which their conversants would pick up, gradually changing them, and then the first speaker would follow suit, and so on.  At university, I found it particularly helpful that poets like Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins had intended their work to be recited aloud.  It did wonders for Wordsworth, and made much of Hopkins more accessible – to the annoyance of my tutors, who insisted I was missing the true subtlety of the work.  Obviously I didn’t agree, and after the late Chris Boyce said that one of my early stories ‘read like music’, I started trying to achieve that effect in my writing.  I’ve twice been told that I achieved it – by the singer Liz Dyer in 1974, and by the late Aleta Jackson ten years later, talking about my first and third books.

So was it the speech rhythms that were attracting the robin?  I don’t know, but that night I had a dream in which two small, black, long-necked birds visited the patio and were similarly drawn to  what was happening inside.  I’m not religious and don’t believe in life after death, but in the dream, it seemed to me that those birds might have been Alexander and Archie Thom, in which case the robin might have been Euan MacKie.  ‘Only a whimsical notion’, to quote Mike Nesmyth, but it felt good while I was asleep – good enough to get up and write these last few paragraphs when I awoke.

The Stones and the Stars, Building Scotland’s Newest Megalith, by Duncan Lunan  (Springer, 2012), is available from the publisher, through bookshops and on Amazon.  For details of it and Duncan’s other books please see his website, http://www.duncanlunan.com.