We had taken it into our heads to gauge the super Poincare group in the style of Yang and Mills. Of course even Einsteins gravity is not a Yang-Mills theory but we were students who did not know any better. After only a few lines many of the features of the new supergravity theory emerged. Indeed one could write down an action which was just that found in the paper of Ferrara, Freedman and van Nieuwenhuizen. One great advantage was that one could prove using the usual algebraic manipulations, and in a relatively few lines, that the supergravity action was invariant under the supersymmetry transformations. In this way the discovery of supergravity theory was completed and it was in this way that the all subsequent supergravity theories were shown to be invariant. Our approach had a signicant draw back, it required one to adopt a condition that broke the gauge symmetry,

Professor Kibble suggested in his understated way that we should understand this step better. Our proof of the invariance of the action was further elucidated in a paper by Paul Townsend and van Niewenhuizen .

Of course we had also derived Einstein gravity as a gauge theory of the Poincare group. The gauging technique was used to nd the conformal supergravity theories and higher spin theories emerge if one took a much bigger gauge group. Ali Chamseddine and myself also gauged the OSp(1,4) group and found the transformations of the vierbein, spin connection and gravitino. The results were reported in thesis of Ali Chamseddine . An action was later found by MacDowel and Mansouri which agreed with the then known supergravity theory with a cosmological constant . One problem was that our paper was rejected by Nuclear Physics B and being students we did not know what to do next. As a result it took quite some time to resubmit it after removing some of the bre bundle language which really had no proper place in the paper. An account of previous work on gauge symmetry and gravity by Sciama, Kibble, Trautman and others and the connection to our work is explained in detail in refere

The time came to get a job. I applied to the research council of the UK for a post doctoral fellowship. The resulting interview did not go well. The panel did not think much of the new fangled idea of supersymmetry and wanted to know how it would aect current particle physics experiments. I, nor anyone else, had any real idea of what was the answer to this question and I did not get a fellowship. The Royal Society did oer me a fellowship to take to the Ecole Normale Superieur. No doubt I had Salam and others at Imperial to thank for this. Most of the young people who worked on supersymmetry had to wait a long time to gain a permanent job although I had better luck.