John Rayner
PhD in Geography (1965)
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John Rayner is a UC alumnus having graduated with a PhD in Geography in 1965. He started life at UC as a lecturer in Geography, after arriving from his native England in 1961. He completed his PhD in 1965.
Born in England in 1936, I graduated from the University of Birmingham in 1958 in Geography with ancillary subjects of Mathematics and Archaeology. With an Arctic Carnegie Scholarship, I completed an MSc in meteorology at McGill University in Montreal in 1961. There I worked on one of the early IBM computer mainframes. My first faculty appointment was at the University of Canterbury as a lecturer specialising in climatology.
Arriving at UC in July, I was just in time to meet the other faculty before they all deserted me for a conference and I had to supervise an undergraduate geography field week in Akaroa! Since I enjoy that kind of activity, the experience was not too bad although it would have been nice to have been able to name New Zealand flora, etc. The students did fly my pyjama bottoms from the school flagpole.
Valerie and I made some great friends in New Zealand and we still write to many of them. We found the working, living, and cultural environment thrilling. We tented in nearly every area of the country except north of Auckland because a tropical cyclone spoiled our plans that summer. We made the Haast Pass trip just after it opened in 1965. In fact, we always say we would have stayed had it not been for having ailing parents so far away in England. We have very fond memories of our time in New Zealand.
Geography is a broad discipline since it attempts to understand the environment as a whole. That means it contains specialists who might just as well be in other disciplines such as physics, or history, or psychology etc. At the core, however, we try to synthesize all these aspects into what we observe in the landscape. To that end, although I specialized in atmospheric conditions, my first research projects after my Masters degree involved working with Dr Jane Soons, a geomorphologist (later Professor and Head of Geography at UC).
Our work on storm damage in Canterbury was published in the New Zealand Geograher (1965). Then we set out to understand some aspects of erosion in the Southern Alps. With the aid of a NZ Grants Committee award, we instrumented a whole small valley to measure continuously the climate and runoff near the University Biological Centre at Cass. Many enjoyable days and weeks, often with students, were spent at that Centre from 1962-5. Some of our findings were published in Geografisca Annaler (1968).
In 1961, I had registered for a doctoral degree at the UC. The research I chose was very different that mentioned above and involved analyzing large scale meteorological data for the New Zealand and surrounding ocean areas by spectral techniques. I had no adviser and the only people who seemed know anything about statistical spectral analysis were in Physics. Dr John B. Gregory and G.J.Fraser were planning to look at research ionospheric data from rockets sent up from Birdling's Flat using this procedure (I published a book on the technique in 1971).
I wrote my own computer programs for my research. In order to do the calculations, I needed lots of IBM 1620 time. This I obtained by receiving the keys to the computer centre at Ilam in the evening, working through the night, and then handing them back in the morning. (Most of the University was still located in the old buildings downtown. Incidentally one of those buildings had a plaque commemorating the work of Rutherford very much like the one I was familiar with at McGill.) The IBM technical support person soon got fed up with me calling him late at night so he allowed me to pull the machine apart and replace components! I now build my own desktop computers from scratch. These of course, would have done all of my doctoral calculations, that then took hundreds of hours on the IBM 1620, now in a few minutes. I was awarded my degree in 1965.
I was always involved in sports at UC. I played soccer until I tore an ACL while playing here in the USA. I captained the McGill University team. In the cricket photo two of the other members I would rate as my best friends. They are Reginald G. Golledge, (third from left in back row), originally from Australia, and Leslie J. King, second from left front row, originally from Canterbury. Both were geographers and were also here at the Ohio State University. Reg and I had numerous research grants and publications together. He died recently. Les ultimately became Vice President at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada and was recently with us for our son's wedding celebrations.
2011