was then clear that no such proposal was going to be made. Throughout the discussions two points were known to all concerned, not least because I stressed them over and over again: (1) that I was due to leave the Colony in June, 1968, and (2) that, according to the calculations contained in my Memorandum of August 25th, the entire project would take one man at least six months working full time (four months of which would be occupied by the subject-matter index) but that if I did the job I would only be able to do it part-time. I had assumed that if a decision were made at the latest by the end of September I would be able to get the extraction of the index entries done before I left at the end of June 1968 and I agreed to deliver all the items by May 1st. By the end of November two further months had been taken out of the eight I had envisaged on the subject-matter index; the decision to reduce the amount I could bind myself to do therefore became inevitable.
Possibly it was naive of me to expect a firm proposal to be made to me within six weeks of my Memorandum, but I had the impression that both the profession and the judici- ary regarded the preparation of a proper index to the Reports as of importance; nor did I believe the sums involved to be large in view of the nature of the task. I certainly did not anticipate that on a matter known by all concerned to be urgent it would take one quarter of a year from the time of writing the Memorandum to the time when the relevant Committee would even consider it, a time when had a deci- sion been made it would obviously have been too late fully to implement it. The history of the affair in fact reveals a delay in decision-making which to my mind is not readily comprehensible and I should be grateful if you would allow me to summarise it.
My Memorandum of the 25th August was produced
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