2110-6-5-20

68 Lissenden Mansions N.W.5

16/10/33

Dear Colonel Buchan

I have just read with great interest the announcement in the "Times" of Saturday that you are to give an address at Glasgow on Oct 30th on "The Responsiblity of the University to the Community".

I doubt whether you will remember that we are acquainted for I have noticed the look on your face in the Athenaeum of "let me see - do I know that fellow only by sight?"

The fact is we came in touch at a Carnegie luncheon in London just about the time I was ceasing to be the physical science "Expert" and you were a new member of the Universities Trust.

All this is a preface to my wish that you will be able to glance at the book I am

sending you and also at a memorandum about Universities, which I wrote by request as a sort of oldest inhabitant of the "provincial" universities.

Both things are oldish, but on matters of faith and opinion I really don't think I should alter much if, instead of having dropped dead from the august Oxford Press there were now call for a new x^th reprint of it.

My first University teacher, by the way, was Sir William Thomson, or as Lady Thomson would have it later on, Baron Kelvin of Largs.

Perhaps "teacher" is inadequate word for what he was to a boy of 15, with a previous education at the hands of "Divinity" students who came out for the half day to my father's fairly big house at Barrhead

Yours sincerely

Arthur Smithells

You would enjoy hearing details of my death as Carnegie Expairt.