| Description | Interview with Mrs. Caroline Gimingham, recorded on 8 February 2005 by Jennifer Carter.
Transcription:-
JC Mrs Gimingham's father, the Rev. Dr Baird, was the minister at St Machar's Cathedral, in Old Aberdeen, from 1933 to 1959?
CG That's right.
JC She had her childhood, and student days in Old Aberdeen, before coming back to Aberdeen as a married woman after a gap of a couple of years was it?
CG I was away for a couple of years teaching, near Edinburgh, then back to Aberdeen, where I have been ever since.
JC But not Old Aberdeen?
CG Yes, to begin with, we lived in a number of houses in Old Aberdeen.
JC Good, we can hear about your long acquaintanship with Old Aberdeen, both as a schoolgirl and student, and as a young married woman. What are your earliest memories of Old Aberdeen?
CG Oh, arriving as an eight-year old, not quite sure what to expect, but excited about it. Very soon I discovered somebody my age, living just round the corner, this was Anne Butchart, whose father was Secretary to the University.
JC You lived in the Manse, just round the corner of the Chanonry - where did the Butcharts live?
CG The Butcharts lived in Don Street.
JC In that house with pillars?
CG No, it's the house opposite which was eventually divided into two, and part of it became the Chaplain's house.
JC A large house called The Manse, in fact, another manse.
CG Another Manse now in a way, yes. In those days it belonged to Mr Butchart, it wasn't a University house, and it had quite a large expanse of ground, with a tennis court, and this was the great thing - the tennis parties on a Saturday afternoon. Most of the guests were University staff and their wives. Mr Butchart was very particular about his tennis court. I had a letter from Anne the other day and she told me how he used to get quite angry with wives who appeared with heels on, not wanting to play tennis but just to be sociable. It was grass, not a hard court, so they all had to take their shoes off, before they were allowed anywhere near the grass.
JC He had the reputation of having been quite a fierce old boy. Did he seem like that to you?
CG Yes, he was very genial to children, but quite fierce in his approach too. And he had a lot of power in the University. In those days I think the Secretary had rather more power than he has now.
JC It was such a small university when you were a child - a thousand students if that? You probably didn't know?
CG It must have been about that I think. It was small, and the Principal and the Secretary were the pivots …
JC Mr Nelson wasn't there then but I suppose there was a Finance Officer?
CG Yes there was but I didn't know anything about him. I don't think he was an Old Aberdeen character, whereas Mr Butchart definitely was.
JC So even from your earliest recollections, as a little girl of eightish, you were already having some interaction with the University?
CG Yes, because most of the houses in the Chanonry were occupied by University staff, and in fact belonged to the University.
JC That whole row that runs down towards St Machar's Cathedral, at right angles as it were …
CG Yes, right round, they were almost all University houses, and actually Mr Butchart is really remembered for buying up a lot of property in Old Aberdeen for the University. In fact, if he hadn't done that the University might have had problems when it came to expansion later on. He had bought up a lot of the Market Lands, a lot of the fields around where Hillhead now is.
JC Where the Keith whatever it is playing fields are now?
CG Yes
JC That's very interesting because I had always thought, brackets, wrongly, that it was Angus, Butchart's successor, who had done that buying up policy.
CG No, it was Butchart who started it. Angus may have carried it on, but it was definitely Butchart's idea.
JC So tell me a little bit more about what it was like [in Old Aberdeen]. You were an only child in the Manse then?
CG No, I had a younger brother.
JC And you both went to what school - was The Barn still operating?
CG No, I went across town to Albyn, partly chosen, I think, because Anne Butchart went there, and the Butcharts recommended it. We travelled by the No 20 bus. My brother went to the kindergarten there, and then eventually to the Grammar School.
JC And you were shipped off to boarding school?
CG I was shipped off to boarding school when I was about 12.
JC So you had four years with your parents in Old Aberdeen, and then the break of boarding school, but you came home, of course for holidays?
CG Oh yes, quite long holidays.
JC And did you keep up the Old Aberdeen friends and connections?
CG Yes, we did. There were three of us in the same class at Albyn originally. Anne Butchart, whose father was, as I said, Secretary of the University, and Agnes Williamson, whose father was an architect. We have kept up. Ann and I, and Agnes and I still keep up.
JC Did you make friends away at school, who were Aberdeen based, or were they all from other parts, because you went to St Leonard's, in St Andrews, which I believe drew on quite an eclectic catchment area?
CG Not very many people from Aberdeen went to St Leonards. The Patons of Grandholme were there. I knew them through the church, because Mr Paton was an elder, they were regularly in the church. They had, what I suppose could be called a Laird's pew, with a door to it, and the whole family [sat there].
JC Does that still exist?
CG No, we are more democratic now.
CG As a child of the Manse I suppose you were caught up quite a lot in activities to do with the Cathedral?
CG Very much so, yes. Our focus was the Cathedral rather than the University.
JC What did that involve? Obviously attending Sunday school, and Sunday services - was there more than that?
CG Well, not much more, at that stage, not a childhood stage, but as we grew older both my brother and I sang in the choir, and of course there were church events, like sales of work, which were very frequent, round in the church hall in Dunbar Street.
JC And did you get to know people who were elders - you said the Grandholme chap was - did they come to your house?
CG Yes, very much so.
JC Would the Kirk Session have met in your father's house?
CG No, it met in the church
JC But your neighbours were not on the whole church-connected?
CG They were University. Dr Douglas Simpson was our closest next door neighbour, he was in Chaplain's Court. He and his mother lived there, to begin with, then he married and they carried on there. His father had been the Rector of the Grammar School. His mother was German, as far as I remember.
JC So you had connections with the Butcharts and the Simpsons - what about that row of houses facing the Cathedral, including that enormous one, Castleton House?
CG It was occupied by Professor Ritchie of the Zoology Department, and I can remember we were invited there to go up on roof and watch the fireworks at the Beach, for either the Silver Jubilee, or the Coronation of 1937. It has a railed-in roof, and we got a beautiful view right over the sea.
JC And who was the Principal then?
CG When we first arrived it was Sir George Adam Smith, and I can remember being thoroughly humiliated, or I felt humiliated, we had gone to a garden party there, in aid of a charity I think, it was a very religious household.
JC He was a Wee Free wasn't he?
CG He was, they didn't go to the Cathedral, they went to St Mary's Church, in the High Street, which is now the Geography Department. It had been a United Free Church, it was part of the Church of Scotland but it still carried on the traditions. So they invited us to this garden party and we finished up singing 'Oh God of Bethel', and I was humiliated because I didn't know the words, everybody else was standing around [singing] and here was I the Minister's daughter [unable to sing]. So he was the Principal then, but very shortly after we arrived Sir William Hamilton Fyfe came, and they became great personal friends…He retired the year Charles and I got married and he actually proposed our healths - made the main speech at our wedding.
JC It is a very interesting relationship, isn't it, because on the one hand St Machar's is not the University church, nor in that period was it even the Principal's church, but on the other hand, because you were living so much amongst University people many of them were close friends.
CG Oh they were. My mother was invited to the coffee mornings and so on in nearly all the Chanonry houses, and we knew most of the Professors. At the same time there were University functions which didn't involve my parents, in a way we were just on the edge of the University.
JC Adam Smith, although, as you have reminded me, he was not in the main stream of the Church, in his day he did used to go to services in the Chapel. There is the moving story of him reading the lists of the people fallen in the war [including two of his own sons], and I presume he kept on going to the Chapel even in your day?
CG Yes, though all I knew was that they were not members of the Cathedral, they were members of St Mary's.
JC For how long did St Mary's continue as a church, before the University took it over and put it to other uses?
CG It carried on right through the War [WW II]. There used to be evening services there because obviously you could not black out the Cathedral, so the evening services throughout the War were held in St Mary's. Just after the War it [was taken over by the University].
JC That is also interesting as a social/religious commentary that St Mary's, though of a different persuasion from St Machar's nevertheless gave you house room as it were.
CG Oh yes, the relationship was always very friendly, and in fact St Mary's attracted very good young ministers. Neville Davidson who eventually became Minister of Glasgow Cathedral was a minister there, and Stuart Loudon, who went to Greyfriars in Edinburgh was also there.
JC And was there any interaction between your father and his church, and Episcopalians or Roman Catholics?
CG A certain amount: my father was very keen on ecumenism. The Bishop of Aberdeen we knew, that is the Episcopal Bishop, and later on my father became quite friendly with the Roman Catholic Bishop. This was on an entirely personal basis.
JC Nothing to do with the formalities of the church, but interesting that they did mix socially at least, and no doubt sat on committees together and things.
CG I am not sure about that, because there wasn't any real formal connection between the three denominations.
JC Your father must have been a pretty forward-looking chap?
CG He was in that way.
JC So tell me a bit more about what it felt like being in Old Aberdeen. I imagine the sort of village feeling was still very strong, because after all it was not terribly long - what was it ten years, fifteen years? - since St Machar Drive was created to cut the Chanonry off, so you must have still felt some of the closeness to the High Street.
CG Oh yes, very much so, because all our shopping was done in Old Aberdeen. There were two grocers - there were two of everything - two grocers, two butchers, two newspaper shops. What else? There was a Police Station, a haberdashers, a chemist, a bakers.
JC Was the Brewery still functioning?
CG No, it wasn't functioning.
JC In Victorian times it used to supply beer to Balmoral, and special horses were employed to take the beer barrels out there. I don't know precisely when that ceased, and had wondered if it was still into your time.
CG No, I don't remember it. The St Machar Bar was there, but it was men only.
JC Well, we'll come onto your student days later, but the Beastie, the Red Lion, was further up the hill. Where did the sort of village feeling end? Possibly at that cross roads on the Spital?
CG Yes. I would say it went up to College Bounds, but the College Bounds houses were slums in those days, they were renovated after the War…
JC You were saying that many of the surroundings of the High Street were quite slummy in those days, both the houses up the Spital and the higher end of College Bounds presumably?
CG College Bounds houses were quite tumbledown, and of course had no sanitation, just a privy at the bottom of the garden. But they were mixed with Georgian mansions. It was a real mixture of a community.
JC What about the wider surroundings, across King Street, where one's now got the Linksfield School and so on?
CG That was fields. There was quite a controversy during the 30s when they started to build the Seaton housing scheme. It was a slum clearance scheme as it was called in those days. People who had lived in Castlehill Barracks in the town were being shipped out. Old Aberdeen residents didn't like this one little bit.
JC What about the other side, Tillydrone?
CG That came later. All that was fields. We used to have cows walking through Old Aberdeen on their way to market on a Friday, going from Old Aberdeen to Kittybrewster.
JC So you were almost in a village surrounded by countryside, until the Seaton scheme came?
CG We were: that was the first of the developments.
JC So in this rather private community, there you were with your university and church friends, did you see anything as a child of the students, or were they a separate world?
CG I don't think we ever got to know many students, but they were very much part of Old Aberdeen, because there were no halls of residence in those days, but they were in digs in Old Aberdeen. A lot of the houses in Cheyne Road, Harrow Road, and on the edges of the Old Town took in student lodgers. A lot of the staff were also in Old Aberdeen. There were people like Douglas Young, the poet, who used to terrify the children in Don Street - he must have been in digs somewhere in Don Street, and he would walk up to King's in a black cloak, and he had a black beard, and he would stride up Don Street, and children in Don Street called him Jesus Christ and were terrified of him.
JC He was a sort of bogey man?
CG Absolutely! Catherine Gavin was another one too [teaching in History]. She must have been in digs in Old Aberdeen I think. And there was an institution called The Bothy - it was in 113 High Street and there were five or six members of staff who lived there, and I think they must have had a housekeeper, I don't know who the house belonged to, possibly the University. Stanley Potter was one of those, and one or two other people of his vintage.
JC Yes, though not in a strict sense a college, there must have been, as well as a village feeling, quite a strong collegiate feeling with so many university families living grouped so close together?
CG Very much so: it was almost an enclosed community, because nearly all the staff lived in Old Aberdeen.
JC And they went home for lunch, of course, because there wouldn't have been any eating facilities in Old Aberdeen?
CG I don't know about that at all, but I imagine they went home for lunch. The Students' Union, up at Marischal College, it existed.
JC And a Senior Common Room existed, because I read the memoirs of a young woman [Mona McKay] who was teaching in the University as an Assistant, just before World War II, and she has this rather charming reference to the Senior Common Room, which I think was then in the Linklater Rooms, and she called it the Beakery. I don't know if that was a common term or individual to her.
So, moving on perhaps beyond your childhood, to your student days, because you came back from boarding school to enroll in the University - how did that work out? It must have been a slightly different life you lived then.
CG It was completely different. My parents wanted me to go to university in St Andrews, but I'd had enough of St Andrews. I wanted to be at home. I liked St Andrews as a place, but I wanted to be at home for university. I was very happy at university. It was small in those days, we knew almost everybody.
JC What did you study?
CG I did an Ordinary Arts degree, which was very common then, a lot of people did just an ordinary degree.
JC Yes, the fashion for Honours came a little bit later. So you were an Arts person and therefore your contemporaries, the other Arts students, would have been living in the way you described earlier, in digs, unless they were City-based people in which case thy lived at home. Did you mingle with other kinds of students as well, for example, Medics, or were they very separate?
CG We mixed with them. During the War there were men in first year Arts, but then they were called up, and there were very few men in the Arts Faculty.
JC It got down to two at one time I was told.
CG That's right John Wilkie and Jack Weir - they were the two who were contemporaries of mine.
JC So that was an unusual experience in that respect, the absence of men. Did women become as it were more active in the absence of men, for example, did they run the SRC and the Union?
CG Yes, though there were of course Medical students and Engineers, and Science students who were in reserved occupations, so there were men in the University, it was just the Arts Faculty that was without them.
JC When did that begin to change? Immediately the war ended in 1945?
CG Yes, when the men started coming back. I just missed that because I graduated in 1945. I did a Dip.Ed in the university for another year, up to 1946, and the men were just beginning to come back.
JC What other effects for students did the wartime experience of university have? Were you involved in voluntary work, or fire watching?
CG Fire watching definitely: you may have heard this from other people but fire watching was a feature of life. You had to do it. I slept in the Elphinstone Hall, in one of the smaller rooms off the Elphinstone Hall, Prof Witte, Dr Witte as he was then, was our leader and there were about ten of us usually, once a week.
JC Did you witness the famous bomb on the playing fields?
CG No, I don't remember that.
JC Otherwise how did the war experience impact? For someone like your father there must have been a lot of extra work, consoling people whose families had been broken up by the war and so on?
CG I don't remember much about that.
JC You were probably a bit detached [from home] living your student life.
CG I probably was. They had to do fire watching duties too, there was a rota for the Chanonry. One of the University wives, Mrs Ferguson, whose husband was Professor of Logic, organised the Chanonry children into a group, she wanted us to run messages during air raids, but our parents definitely objected to that - they let us practice with her, but not actually do it.
JC What about food rationing, did that impact severely or were you in such a country area that it didn't really?
CG We did occasionally get something from the farms, but we were on strict rations, like everyone else.
JC And you would have gone home for lunch presumably, as you lived so near?
CG Yes, as a student I did.
JC Was that your main meal of the day?
CG Yes, lunch - dinner - in the middle of the day, and high tea in the evening.
JC And I suppose that would have been the same pattern for students in digs?
CG Yes, though I'm not sure about that, whether they went home for lunch, or took sandwiches.
JC Where would you have eaten sandwiches if you had taken them? Possibly in the Pavilion?
CG Yes: we used to go there for coffee in the mornings. Certainly when we were first married, which was 1948, the Linklater Rooms served lunch. I can remember Bednarowski - a friend of mine, Eric Frykman, who was the Lecturer in Swedish, got quite worried about Bednarowski because he had rabbit and ice cream for lunch every day - separately, one after the other.
JC Of course the next stage, after that, was putting a staff table at the head of the Elphinstone Hall, along with the students [who ate in the body of the Hall]. It was a very good arrangement because as a new member of staff you got to know everyone, just by sitting by them at lunchtime. Subsequently, when the Senior Common Room [on Elphinstone Road] was built for food, people sat in Departmental circles, as, to an extent, they did previously in the coffee part of the Elphinstone Hall set up.
Where did you actually graduate? I was interested talking to some Medics from World War II and they said they had literally never come to Kings until they came down to graduate in the Elphinstone Hall.
CG That surprises me, because we graduated in the Mitchell Hall [at Marischal College]. They would have come down for hops. Mostly Saturday night hops were in the Union, but there were dances in the Elphinstone Hall too - the Graduation Ball and the Bajanella Ball.
JC Were those names still in use - bajans and bajanellas, semis and semolinas etc
CG No, we didn't use those names, Semis, semolinas, but bajan and bajanella was still used.
JC It was a local equivalent of Fresher?
CG Yes, and of course the term campus wasn't used - it was the Varsity, it's the Uni now I think.
JC But the Varsity would have included Marischal, which then was still housing most of science. As far as I remember, before World War II Botany had moved down to Old Aberdeen, but none of the other Sciences.
CG Botany and Forestry were in Old Aberdeen, but all the others were at Marischal. What I know as the Chemistry and Physics Buildings were not there. They were built in the 1950s.
JC And that, I suppose, was when the character of Old Aberdeen began to change, and it became what it is now, a largely university place.
CG A campus - in inverted commas! And from a sociological point of view, the change in shopping, with the rise of supermarkets, had quite an effect on Old Aberdeen.
JC When, from your memory, did the shops begin to disappear?
CG When we were living in Old Aberdeen with a young family Campbells [the grocers] was still there.
JC I remember that the first supermarket was Asda at Dyce [some time in the 1960s].
But coming back to a slightly earlier period: you graduated, you went away for a couple of years [1947/1948] then you came back as a young married women to live exactly where?
CG First of all we were in furnished rooms in town, but then we moved into Clark's Lane, which my father referred to as a hovel. There were three cottages, which belonged to the University. They were very small, there was no electricity, no sanitation, there was a loo along at the far end of the lane, which we shared. Principal Taylor, Tom Taylor, was Principal at that time, and he used to walk down to the No 1 tram, through Clark's Lane, because the tram ran on King's Street. I would meet him on my way down to the loo, walk along with him, then said 'I've got to go this way'.
JC So you went round to the Manse for a bath?
CG It does seem incredible. We paid a rent of £6 a year to the university.
JC So I suppose it was a bargain, even in those days? How long did you tolerate
that?
CG We were there perhaps eighteen months. Our predecessors in that cottage were the Mitchells, an Assistant Librarian, and he eventually moved into the house opposite King's [attached to Powis Lodge].
JC That was the house subsequently inhabited by the man who taught Modern Greek, Hector Thomson, with his fiery wife Andromache, who was reputed to chase him round the table with a kitchen knife. So where did you move after Clark's Lane - you stayed as a University tenant?
CG We moved to 23 Don Street after that. It did have electricity and so on. And then we moved to Wright's and Cooper's Place - no, I'm wrong, we moved to Wright's and Coopers after Clark's Lane, and then on to Don Street, and then on to High Street.
JC Just coming back for a moment to Wrights and Coopers - this was presumably before the McRobert money had done it up?
CG Yes it was before, but the houses were fine inside, they had been done up, and they belonged to the University.
JC I guess it was in the 1960s the McRobert money turned it into a sort of showpiece. So you were in Wright's and Coopers - which bit? The bit that is the long bit, or the little small bit that is a sort of annexe?
CG We were in the first bit, there were three houses in the first bit. It was lovely, we enjoyed it: then to 23 Don Street. This happened at that stage in the University. People were moving around all the time. As you got one more child you moved on.
JC Would most people of your husband's then rank have expected to be housed by the University?
CG It was partly an inducement to get people to come to Aberdeen after the War, to increase the staff. During the war a lot of the staff had been called up, and their wives had very often taken over lecturing.
JC Can you think of examples?
CG Yes, the Walkers in English. Ralph Walker's wife lectured to us in English. There was somebody else in the Classics Department I think.
JC That's a point I hadn't picked up, that wives just moved into their husband's places.
CG I think it was just coincidental.
JC Well, they would have had to be qualified - and then they presumably stepped back again when their husbands returned from the war?
CG So it was a very different world.
JC Sorry, I'm interrupting you too much, but it is very interesting trying to go back to that time. So you were in Don Street for a bit, and that was your best house?
CG No, the High Street was our best house - 102 High Street. Then it was amalgamated with 100, and I think they are still one house, though they were two houses originally. It is almost opposite St Mary's. There is a house with a gable end onto the street, and a garden or open space - where the Trengoves are now. That was a soup kitchen for the poor, in the 30s. I don't know who ran it, but I remember my mother serving in the soup kitchen. You got a bowl of soup and a hunk of bread for a penny.
JC Gosh, there were enough poor people in Old Aberdeen, this rather quiet community, for that to be necessary?
CG Yes, definitely: we are inclined to think of Old Aberdeen in the 30s as a University preserve, which it was, but there was a lot of poverty too. People came from the houses in College Bounds, and some of the tenements in High Street which are no longer there. A lot of the houses have been upgraded, all the way down from College Bounds, and in the High Street; a lot of the lanes and closes off the High Street were slummy too.
JC I wonder how long the soup kitchen went on?
CG I don't know. It came to an end in wartime.
JC When rationing meant that poor people were better fed. So what have we missed? Is there anything else that you would like to put on the record?
CG I can just remember all the people who lived in the Chanonry. The house at the corner, as you come in from St Machar's Drive, was occupied by the Williamsons. I have mentioned them, because he was an architect, and it wasn't a University house - one of the few properties that was not. Next to them was a relatively new house, I'm not sure when it was built, Professor G D Henderson, Professor of Church History and Moderator of the General Assembly, he lived there, and his two sons were contemporaries of ours. So then there was Professor Phemister of Geology, and again his children were contemporaries of ours. Next to him was Mrs Niven, with her two daughters. They were rather interesting. Her husband had been a Professor of Mathematics [actually it was Natural Philosophy]. I'm not sure whether the house was a University one at that time, though obviously it was occupied by the University. She had two daughters, Lucy and Mary, and Mary died rather young, in her 20s, and old Mrs Niven was quite convinced that it was the University that had killed her - fumes from the Botany Department, she said. I think she tried to take [legal] action against the University. There was a great row about this. But they used to hold musical evenings. The two girls were forced to play violin and piano, I think. Karl Barth was visiting the University in the 30s and was taken to one of these evenings, and he was heard to say when he came out, 'Such evenings are the invention of the devile'. I have always remembered that story, and it went round Old Aberdeen. Opposite her was one of the Clarkes - he was Headmaster of the Old Aberdeen Grammar School, and of course his son was married to Margaret Clarke, who was a daughter of the Adam Smiths. She was the Adviser to Women Students. She and her brother-in-law lived there, then the Botany Manse was next, where the Matthews lived (Professor James Matthews, of Botany, who lived in the Botany House) then Mitchell's Hospital, where the old ladies lived, and still do. Then we come to the houses up the lane from the Chanonry. One of those wasn't a University house, it belonged to the Irvines of Drum I think, it was their town house, and it was let out to someone who had no connection with the university.
JC Just as Chanonry Lodge itself, the Principal's house, was once the town house of the Earls of Huntly, in the seventeenth century - I don't know precisely when it came to the University. It wasn't, as you would have expected, part of the Cathedral's [housing] - it was a nobleman's town house. If you look at it, it is rather out of character with the other surrounding houses.
CG I have no idea when it was built.
JC No, Grant Simpson has researched it, but I don't remember the answer. Surprisingly little is known about it.
You mentioned a moment ago the Botany Department, now going right back in a loop to your childhood, Botany would already have been there then? I am not sure in my own mind exactly when that building stopped being the Gymnasium.
CG I don't know. I said that John Clarke was the Headmaster of the Grammar School, but it was the Gymnasium of which he was Head.
JC So it probably wasn't that long before you came to Old Aberdeen - a couple decades?
CG Professor Trail must have been Professor of Botany. I don't remember him at all, but Mrs Trail was definitely a character of Old Aberdeen. She lived at 81 High Street. I remember her well.
JC She wrote a memoir of old Aberdeen?
CG Yes, two - Reminiscences of Old Aberdeen, and The Story of Old Aberdeen. She was very much part of my childhood. She used to throw children's parties in that house.
JC So that was when she was a widow, or when her husband was still alive?
CG When she was a widow. I don't remember Professor Trail at all.
JC Then of course, because you came back as an adult and as a young married woman, in a sense you saw the whole expansion of the University after your childhood.
CG It is very difficult, not really having been away, separating it out. You tend to telescope things. It is difficult to remember exactly when things happened.
JC I was very surprised recently, when we were having a reunion of a History class of the early 60s, and one of the things they asked me to do was to lead them round Old Aberdeen, to see what had happened since their day. I was staggered when we put dates to all the buildings, practically everything had been built in the 60s.
CG There was a terrific expansion then.
JC The Taylor Building - the Elphinstone Hall and the Chapel were almost the only standing buildings - then you got the Taylor Building, the Edward Wright Building, the University Offices, and so on. They remembered how new the Science buildings, Chemistry and Physics, were in their day.
CG Those were just fields when I was a child, with cows grazing in them.
JC So, anything else we have not covered? I found very interesting that tour of the personalities and the fact that you remember them so well.
CG I remember them very well. They were definitely part of my childhood. There was Professor Roe, who lived in the Grandholme Dower House, which is in Don Street - [Freddie Roe Professor of French]. His children, of course, spoke French until they went to school. His wife was French.
JC She was another wife who did some teaching in the University?
CG Oh, she did.
JC Anything else we should put on the record, do you think?
Resuming after another brief intermission for coughing - we were just beginning to talk about a neglected aspect of Old Aberdeen life, the maids who waited on all these houses. What do you remember about them?
CG Well, these houses wouldn't have been possible to live in without maids, because there was no central heating, fires had to be set and lit every morning, and cleaned out, the big houses were terribly cold. Most houses had live-in maids.
JC Did you have them at the Manse?
CG Yes: we had two to begin with, a nursemaid and a general maid, and then we only had one, but I think most University houses had two.
JC And where would these ladies have come from? Would they originally have been young country girls?
CG Yes, very often.
JC And that, I suppose, died out during the war?
CG Yes.
JC So how did your mother cope in a great draughty Manse?
CG It was awful. But you just did it. Of course the University wives had a very leisured life prior to the war. They did have the maids. They did a little gentle dusting in the mornings, and arranged the flowers.
JC Gardened, probably, if they were interested?
CG Some of them would. They went out for coffee or tea. The University Ladies Club met in the afternoon.
JC And in the summer they had these famous tennis parties - they seem to have been very much a feature of social life in Old Aberdeen?
CG I think they were, the Butcharts' tennis parties - you wanted an invitation to them but you were also a bit worried about it because Mr Butchart was fairly fierce.
JC Were there other places to play or was it just the Butcharts?
CG Oh yes, the University had tennis courts, and as children we were allowed to play on a Saturday morning.
JC So you could practice your strokes there before you showed up at the Butcharts?
CG Oh, we as children were not allowed at the Butcharts, definitely not!
JC So the maids are interesting. One forgets that day to day life depended so much on a now non-existent servant class. Did your own live-in maid, did she become a family friend?
CG Oh yes, she was a family friend, then she got married, and moved away. That was shortly before the war started, and we had another maid, who didn't really become a family friend because she was called up within about a year. That was the end, and life changed completely.
JC Thinking of another just pre-war thing, you mentioned in the passing that you recalled a visit of the Prince of Wales. That must have been in 1936, or early 37?
CG I can't remember exactly why he was coming, but he came up overnight by train and he was met by local dignitaries, of whom the University Principal was one. The Principal, incidentally, was always included in these official Town occasions, and this was Sir William Hamilton Fyfe. The Prince of Wales got off the train and was introduced to everybody. 'This is the Principal of the University' : 'Oh', he said, 'is there a university in Aberdeen?'.
JC I wonder what Hamilton Fyfe replied! This was shortly before he became, so briefly, Edward VIII. He'd come to open Foresterhill, had he, or was it just a visit?
CG I think he was just coming up for a visit, but somebody did say he'd come to open Foresterhill, but I thought that was the Duke and Duchess of York. That could be easily checked.
JC I don't know either way. But I do know that the opening of Foresterhill was a great Aberdeen occasion, because of the amount of private money that had been raised to build it.
CG There was a great tradition, of course, amongst the students for raising money, for charity: Charities Week, the Show in the Theatre, and the Torcher. All that was kept going in the war, though the Torcher had to be in daylight - I'm not sure that they had torches but they had a procession. It was definitely part of university life, student life.
JC Coming back, then, to your student days, to cover an area which we didn't cover before, I didn't ask you about how, as a student enrolling for the ordinary MA, you chose your subjects - did you get advice?
CG There were no Advisers at all. One just plunged in. We just arrived. My first day at University I can remember quite clearly, because I didn't know anybody, because I had been away at boarding school I didn't have a group to come up with, and Isobel Middleton, who did one of your oral interviews, she looked after me, my first day. [She lived with her widowed mother in St Machar Place,Old Aberdeen] I was doing German, and the German class was at 9 o'clock, so she took me along. She was two years ahead of me, in Junior Honours, also doing German, and we met together. The German Department was definitely a Department, we were all welcomed as new students, and
had our first class.
JC Did it have Departmental rooms?
CG Yes, in the Cromwell Tower. Then we had the first lecture. Then, at 10 o'clock I just hadn't a clue what to do.
JC Did you not have a matriculation, or enrolment of some kind?
CG We must have had. I don't remember a Freshers' Week. But there must have been something, because we did have an evening of being introduced to all the societies - that was in the Students' Union.
JC But I am still wondering how you chose your subjects?
CG We did know that if you were doing an Ordinary degree, as I was, you had to choose Latin and a Science subject, and altogether seven subjects, two at Advanced level. But apart from the Latin and the Science subject which were compulsory, you could choose whatever you liked. There was not such a variety of subjects as there is now.
JC So, as an Arts person, if, and I am guessing here, the Science was an obstacle, did you try to get that over in first year?
CG Yes. Biology was the popular one.
JC And the other compulsion was Latin, but you had done that at school?
CG Yes, you had to have Latin to get into University, so it wasn't really a problem. But I remember the Latin classroom - each subject had its own classroom - and in the Latin classroom the benches had numbers on them, and the way they took the register was whether you were covering your number or not at the start of the session, and you had to sit in that seat right through the year.
JC So it was a bit schooly and restricted?
CG Yes, though that was partly because of the war, because if you didn't attend classes you were kicked out.
JC I understand. And your natural home, as an Arts student, was the Library I assume?
CG Yes, everybody went to the Library. Then we went for coffee to the Pavilion, or up to Jack's in the High Street.
JC The Library, in those days, was of course in the old Quadrangle situation - did it seem to you then a very grand library, or did you regard it as rather small?
CG Oh no, it was quite grand. It was a lovely building, we really liked it. We felt at home there. There was no mezzanine floor then, it went straight up to the roof, though there were galleries all round.
JC That's how it was when I first came, and it seemed a terrible disaster when they put in the mezzanine floor.
CG Dr Simpson used to walk backwards and forwards, and there was an attendant who used to shelve the books.
JC I remember a History student saying to me that she had never read such and such a book because it would have involved climbing a ladder! Yes, everyone of your generation remembers the old Library with enormous affection - because, I suppose, in a sense you had so few other places to meet?
CG It had a social function as well as work.
JC How did that balance out, because there must have been a lot of temptation to chat all the time?
CG There was, but they were fairly strict about it.
JC They came round and told you off. But, even in my day, Honours students had allocated desks, in the galleries. I remember it as an early Scotticism that surprised me: 'This desk is meantime reserved for…'
CG I didn't realise that was a Scotticism.
JC Is there anything else then? That addendum we have covered just recently has been very interesting - what else have I missed?
CG I'll probably remember all sorts of things after you have gone. I look back on my student days with great affection, and on childhood days in Old Aberdeen, because we had terrific freedom compared with what children have nowadays.
JC I'm sure child molesters must have existed in those days?
CG I'm sure they must, but they didn't impinge the way they do now. We wandered around all over Old Aberdeen.
JC Did you go down to the beach unsupervised?
CG We went to the Don, to the Bridge of Balgownie, unsupervised, until our parents saw us on one occasion right down by what is called the Black Hole, by the Brig of Balgownie, and were horrified, so we were forbidden that. But we wandered around - Seaton Park was, of course, a private estate, and we used to go over the back wall of the Cathedral, and try and dodge the gamekeepers, and the poachers - there was a lot of poaching went on from Old Aberdeen.
JC What about the beach - did you go there as children?
CG Not very often: it was a long trail down St Machar Drive, School Road, and across the golf links. We went with the family - I don't think we went on our own to the beach.
JC You wouldn't have gone to the Beach Baths to swim?
CG Oh yes, we did - from school. I learnt to swim at the old Beach Baths.
JC It is funny, isn't it, with childhood remembrances, it was never cold!
CG I don't remember it being cold. Of course it was a heated pool, the Beach Baths, though the [sea]water was cold…
JC But you thought nothing of picnicking on the beach?
CG Oh, nothing!
JC I expect you were well wrapped up - I have only once swum off the beach at Aberdeen.
CG I wouldn't do it now.
JC Well shall we draw to a close now? Thank you very much, it has been extremely interesting.
CG I have enjoyed it.
End of Interview
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