| Description | Interview with Sir Fraser Noble, recorded on 12 July 1985 by John Hargreaves.
This is the first of three interviews with Sir Fraser Noble. Continued on MSS 3620/1/28 & 29
Transcript of Interview :
H. Sir Fraser, you first came to the University of Aberdeen when you were only 16 in 1934, I think. I wonder what you can recall of your impressions on first coming up as a student.
N. I think you have got to realise l that I was only 16 and both immature and a little scared. I knew Aberdeen only very slightly but what I did know was that it was going to be a friendly place and there were one or two people there who were able to keep an eye on me. For example, I stayed in digs with my wife's oldest brother who himself had graduated and was then working as an Assistant in the Humanity Department. I also had a second cousin who was a year or so senior to me at the University, and he was very friendly to me and helped me find my .way around. In those days there were no guided tours by the SRC and one had to find ones own feet, one way or the other. It struck me as being a big place compared with the environment of the school in which I had been educated.
H. Had you visited the campus before?
N. Yes, I had on perhaps two occasions, each of them in connection with the Bursary Competition in which I never distinguished myself, but I had also stayed for a week once with my brother who had been working in Aberdeen, and the digs I went to were the digs that he had been in but he had left Aberdeen by the time I went up.
H. If you hadn't had these family contacts, and there must have been some students who didn't, was the problem of adjustment, do you think, very difficult? Who would help the young student in those days to find his feet?
N. I think the student community divided into those who attended Aberdeen schools (and they must have made up half the total population) and those who came from the country. There was barely a handful who came from south of the border, but there were students from all over the country and a few overseas students. I think the students from the country tended to make friends with each other and simply learned to find their own way around. The students from Aberdeen were very sophisticated and very superior beings in our eyes.
H. How important was the role of the Aberdeen landlady in these days?
N. Oh, tremendously important. My landlady had been taking students from there .for quite a number of years. She was a middle-aged widow in very impoverished circumstances who simply had to take students in order to keep herself and her daughter in reasonable circumstances. She worked very hard and she took her sense of responsibility for the well being of her students very seriously, and she was not untypical there were many Aberdeen landladies like that. I can remember when I returned to Aberdeen after the war taking part in a discussion that the AUT organised about the proposal to establish the first Hall of residence in Aberdeen and James Howie who then worked at the Rowett Institute and subsequently became Professor of Bacteriology in Glasgow and then Head of the National Public Laboratory Service, argued very very strongly that this was a terrible mistake because it would mean the end of the Aberdeen landlady, and the Aberdeen landlady had been the backbone of the student welfare system and had provided it free of charge to the University.
H. This wasn't amiss where you had a good landlady. Do you think there were, even in those days many who were in it for the money?
N. Yes, the number who did it on a kind of profitable commercial basis was beginning to grow, but the great majority of the landladies I think tended to have one, sometimes two or three, sometimes five or six students, and at that stage of the University's history they certainly played a very important role.
H. You went up at 16, as indeed I did six years later in another place. Looking back, was this a mistake? And were there many students who went up at this age, because there must have been a good number who qualified at 16?
N. No, I was exceptionally young. I had been … I think my birthday was at the end of April and I was going up at the beginning .of October there would be quite a number, I think, in their early 1I stage, but there wouldn't have been many as young as I was.
H. And for four years you read Honours Classics, in which you distinguished yourself, Why Classics?
N I don't think I really distinguished myself, because I was in a very good year and I think five out of seven of us got Firsts. I probably was extremely lucky to get my First. Why Classics? Because, I think, it had been the subject beloved by the Rector of Nairn Academy and it was always his aim to put all his good students through a Classics course, preferably one in Aberdeen, he himself having been an Aberdeen graduate. And I think I had simply been brought up that way. My father had a fairly good knowledge of Latin and of Greek, but he had, because of ill health, never completed his degree when he was a student long before the First World War. I think it was just part of the tradition that in many of the good schools in the Highlands and in Grampian the good students tended to be encouraged to read either the Classics or Maths/Nat. Phil. many good students of course opted out of that and read subjects like English and History and Philosophy on the Arts side, but there certainly was a tendency for the Classics school of students to be amongst the best in the entry at the time. I was strongly tempted after my second year to switch from Classics to Economics, but I hadn't the courage to do it and I stuck with Classics, a little reluctantly, and l struggled through it and really made the switch to Economics when I got a Scholarship after l had graduated.
H. Do you regret at all the time spent on Honours Classics?
N. No, not at all. I am a personal believer in the transfer of training, which may or may not be fashionable nowadays with the educationalists. There certainly was a period when the psychologists and the educationalists used to tell me there was nothing in this theory, but I believe very strongly that there is. I don't think it matters very much what a student studies. What he ought to get from his university course is a sense of having a trained mind that applies itself to asking questions and assessing the answers to questions. I think I got this from my Classics training which in Aberdeen in those days certainly inculcated a strict sense of accuracy and of careful assessment. We didn't get, I think, enough enlightenment into, let's say, Greek civilisation and Greek history. The historical side of the thing only came to life for .me when I was in my, I can't remember whether it was my second year or third year and the late Eric Turner came to teach Roman History. He, of course, became a very distinguished scholar of papyrology in London when he went to London having left Aberdeen, but his approach to the teaching of Roman History was extremely stimulating and that, rather late in my course, began to open up a new sense of what the whole thing was about which I must .say, my own headmaster had really begun to inculcate in me but which was certainly neglected in the first year of teaching at Aberdeen in those days.
H. Could you tell us a little more about the teaching methods in Classics in the different years of the course?
N In the first year in Latin we really did just the ordinary Class's work. We did get divided into three groups I suppose there was an Ordinary class of more than 100, and the smallest of the three groups probably numbered about 19 or 20 and was selected from students who must, I think, have scored the highest marks in some early test that was set, because it did contain those who eventually went on to a Second Year, and then to Honours. The way in which that group was taught was no different from the way in which the other groups were taught. You simply went over set books with a lecturer in charge I think, in any case, the Professor took charge of our group on most occasions. There was perhaps a little more sense of what I would call real university teaching in the Greek Department where there was a relatively young Professor, Archie Cameron, who commanded a great deal of respect but at the same time affection from his students and while somehow he never imbued me with a great sense of scholarship, he did have an enlightened way of looking at the world and he could occasionally depart from his rather dry interpretation of the texts to open our eyes to something quite different. '
H. Were you writing prose in the First year?
N. Yes we were but it wasn't a terribly onerous side of the thing in the First Year. This became a very important element in the whole business later on in the course.
H. And the Second Year was …?
N. As far as I can remember, it was just the same sort of thing but with different texts, and perhaps the texts got rather harder as the years went on. I can't really remember all that much about it. One thing that perhaps is worth commenting on is that in those days subjects like Classics and I think also Maths/ Nat Phil which had been the traditional Arts subjects, were examined after the second term. Modern innovations like English and History were examined after the third term. Now this meant that in the third term students going on to the next stage in Latin or Greek had no formal work to do. Archie Cameron, the Professor of Greek, always laid on something. I remember one year we did a course on Greek poets like Sappho. He used to take us down to Marischal College and set us to work cataloguing the coins in the Museum, and in various ways like that he stimulated our interest. In Latin Professor Soutar used to give us a Saturday morning class in Papyrology and teach us how to - no, not Papyrology, - no, Palaeography, teach us how to read and interpret the medieval manuscripts. But, apart from these frills as it were, I can't remember very much about the course, except that it simply meant working steadily through texts and being examined in them and being able to translate from English into Latin or into Greek, which is an element in the teaching which disappeared some time after the war and transformed them into what I would call nowadays 'softer options' than they were originally.
H. You have commented on some, your teachers in Classics, notably Archie Cameron. Is there anything else you would like to recall or put on record about those teachers? Professor Soutar seemed to suffer a little by comparison with Archie Cameron
N. Well, Professor Soutar was a rather dry, perhaps uninspiring sort of chap whose real interest was in lexicography and his reputation I suppose rests on that. He was also interested in the later Latin writers. He wasn't a very inspiring chap, he had two or three stock jokes like 'Lewis and Short say that such and such a word occurs only three times in the literature, but gentlemen, I assure you I have found this word myself no fewer than four times in Ambrosiasta'. That was the kind of thing that made us all laugh and stamp our feet. No, as I say, I remember feeling stimulated by Archie Cameron, and by one or two of the other teachers but particularly by Eric Turner when he started teaching us Roman History. The point about Roman History was that the Second Year and the Junior Honours and the Senior Honours people all studied it together, and that could present slight awkwardnesses because you might be in your Second Year when the Late Empire was being studied and then have to do the early period in your final year but it all added up in the end. It was only when Eric Turner came that one had to face, for example, the challenge of writing an essay, which was the sort of thing that after the War came to be regarded as .absolutely basic in a university education, but certainly in those days it was as true as it has always been, that the students educated each other, perhaps a little more than the professors educated the students.
H. And then, after your graduation in Classics, you fulfilled your intention of moving on to Political Economy.
N. Well, the point about that in a way was that, as you know, all Honours students had to read at least two subjects outside their Honours curriculum. In my first year I read English. The sort of reason for that I suppose was the sort of reason that most students follow: partly I was interested in English literature; partly the Professor of English, who followed the tradition of those days of taking the Ordinary Class himself was an eccentric, a character, a personality, and a man whom it was a joy to listen to, although one couldn't always get very coherent lecture notes from him. That was Adolphus Jack. And then I had to decide what I would read in my second year as a supplementary subject, and the Professor of Political Economy was the great Alexander Gray who was very popular with students. I had decided I was going to attend his class. Sadly for me, in one sense, Alexander Gray went off to Edinburgh just before I was due to start reading Political Economy, but he was succeeded by a young man from Oxford, Lindley Fraser, who really brought in one sense a breath of fresh air to the Faculty and had a different approach to lecturing on Political Economy and I attended the class in the first year in which he taught it and thoroughly enjoyed it and, as I say, was tempted to make the switch to Honours Economics curiously called Economic Science although the basic department was the Department of Political Economy. I Was still in two minds, about this as I was completing my Classics Honours course. The chance came to apply for a scholarship, which was then nominally attributed to a student who was reading Double Honours, but normally given to a student going on to do a second Honours degree, and it fell vacant because a very brilliant English Honours student, Dorothy Hackett, who had held it passed out very high into the Civil Service and she had been using it partly, I suppose, in preparation for her Civil Service career to follow her English Honours degree by doing Honours in Economic Science. I fell heir to this, luckily for me, which left me rather well off in those days in financial terms. I think the scholarship was worth £120 but the Moray and Nairn Education Authority which had treated me really very well because my mother had been left badly off my father was a schoolmaster and schoolmasters' widows didn't have any pensions and Moray and Nairn had the great decency and generosity not to reduce or withhold my Bursary although I had got this rather handsome Scholarship, and I was able to live rather well for two years while I was studying Economics and in fact helped support my mother as well as look after myself.
N. What was the content of the course in Economic Science under Lindley Fraser? How far would it be recognisable in an Economics Department today?
N. I don't know how recognisable it would be today, because I find that the whole subject today has got beyond me. It had, I think in many ways gone in the wrong directions. It was still Political Economy in his day. He was a bit of a philosopher. His great book, a book called Economic Thought and Language and he was very concerned with definitions. He tended not to approach the subject in terms of economic doctrine which had been the approach used by Alexander Gray, but to work from the basics, the study of the factors of production, the theory of value. In those days of course I suppose the primary interest of economists was in micro-economics, the theory of value and questions of competition, imperfect competition, monopolistic competition, this kind of thing so that the great figures were people interested in that kind of thing and not simply in the theory of employment which began to dominate Economics after Keynes published The general theory. Now, The general theory had been published before I took my finals and Keynes was certainly a very important element in the work I was doing in 1938-39 with Lindley Fraser, but the approach was still fairly broad. Other people were regarded as important - people like John Hicks, the theory of capital Joan Robinson, the theory of imperfect competition. But of course people Like Hicks and Joan Robinson were pretty close to Keynes and all the economists, certainly .in Cambridge, were beginning to talk the same sort of language as he did, although they weren't always in agreement about what it all meant.
H. But you were conscious of Keynes as a central figure, or one of the central figures?
N. Very much so. By the time I was going through my last year or so of my course, very much so. The applied side of the course was very concerned with the problems of unemployment the slumps in the post First War period, in the inter war years, and questions of how to tackle unemployment, and Keynes simply consolidated - or perhaps that's not quite the right word, because he made revolutionary advances, Keynes simply helped to clarify a lot of issues that had been studied in an applied way.
H. How large was the Honours Class in Economics?
N. Very small. I had mentioned that in Classics we had a class of, I think it was seven Honours students in my Final Year. In Economics there were only two or three. In fact, I had to compress my course a great deal I had intended to do so even before the War broke out but of course when the War came along that confirmed the idea of compression. It was difficult to measure the number of students who were there because ,I was sometimes working with students who were, let's say, in the Advanced Class and sometimes with students who were already in their Senior Honours Year. Senior to me there were really two Honours students, one of whom of course you know very well Malcolm Gray. The other one, Norman MacIver, who was a very brilliant, imaginative man, sadly was killed in the Royal Air Force quite early in the War. But there were quite a number also working with me who were in a sense nominally perhaps a little behind me: for instance, Sandy Youngson A.J.Y. Brown, as we knew him. Youngson Brown, who dropped the Brown from his name later on for various professional reasons; he was, I suppose, theoretically .a year. Behind me but attended some classes with me, particularly Economic History classes. Paul Streeten was another one he was a refugee student from a concentration camp whom we brought to.Aberdeen and befriended and looked after, and that was the point about my life in Aberdeen in those days that was really rather important to me, I suppose, in the development of my own career and Paul was in the Advanced Economy Class with me and there were perhaps this is in answer to your question thirteen or fourteen in the Advanced Class but of those only a very small number would go on to do Honours.
H. So there would be a mixture of lectures and what we now call a seminar or a tutorial would that be the nature of the teaching?
N. There wasn't all that much in the form of seminar and tutorial, except that since I was virtually on my own I got pretty frequent personal tutorials from Lindley Fraser as long as he was there, but he departed, of course, when the War broke out within the first month or two he helped to win the War doing his propaganda for the ministry of information he was I think persuaded to go off by Lionel Monckton. And I got a certain amount of tutorial teaching also from both Miss Macdonald who was a pillar of strength to the department for many, many years, and from Henry Hamilton who, of course, was in charge of the Economic History side of the work but subsequently, when Lindley Fraser didn't return after the War, was appointed to the Jaffray Chair of Political Economy.
H. Was there Economic History teaching throughout the course, or was it concentrated in a particular year?
N. My recollection is that in my two years I certainly had Economic History in both years, but I don't remember whether I was getting formal lectures in the Second Year. I was certainly doing Economic History and writing essays I can remember that.
H. How far was there a quantitative element either in the Economic Science or .in the Economic History? How conscious were you of the need for numbers?
N. I think very much less than one would be today. I find this a little difficult to disentangle in my own mind, because it was beginning to develop more when I was lecturing after the war. I do remember getting, if you like, tutorials from Lindley Fraser. The department at that time lived in little rooms above the archway as you go into King's and the mathematicians were near neighbours and Edward Wright had recently come as Professor of Mathematics, replacing a great old warrior character called Macdonald who used to keep a strict eye on the finances of the University Hector Macdonald and Lindley Fraser and Edward Wright, both being Oxonians, were, I think, pretty friendly and Edward quite often used to open the door to suggest to Lindley Fraser that it was time to go off to lunch or something like that and he would come in and find that I was alone with the Professor getting some sort of tutorial, and he would look at the graphs on the board or the mathematical formulae, throw his head back in a manner that you will remember very well, and chuckle. I used to ask him about this many years later. He used to say that he thought part of the trouble was that most economists who were nowadays tempted to use mathematics were really a bit simplistic it their approach to mathematics, and it's a point of view that I have shared for rather other reasons. I think that the tendency to base economic theory and the development of economic analysis on mathematics has tended to be taken too far.
H. We've talked, or you've talked, about some of your teachers in the University. I wonder how much you saw as a student at that time, or how much you were conscious of the Principal, Principal Fyfe?
N. I became very conscious of him for a very particular reason. His predecessor I remember - George Adam Smith -but not terribly clearly, I remember him preaching in Chapel, that kind of thing. Hamilton Fyfe, on the other hand, made a considerable impact on us all. I think he had away with him, with young people, he was very accessible to student societies, willing to go and talk to them, very often on the kind of thing that they were interested in. He would talk to them about Canada, of course, but he would also talk to them about international affairs generally, and the reason I got to know him personally rather well was that in about 1938 the University branch of International Student Service became very active - that was the predecessor of what nowadays is called World University Service. I was already by that time fairly close to a number of students in subjects like Economics -I have mentioned Malcolm Gray .and Nornan MacIver. Norman was the first student Secretary of the joint Staff Student Committee that kept an eye on International Student Service.
H. Was the formation of that committee a student initiative, Do you remember?
N. I think there was more staff involvement in it all along at that stage than there is nowadays. The Principal was himself the Chairman of the Aberdeen Committee, and it was much involved with refugee problems. We spent a lot of time thinking out ways of bringing refugee students from Germany and then later from Austria, to Scotland and interestingly enough there was a Scottish Committee of ISS as well as, of course, a United Kingdom one. The Scottish Committee met from time to time to determine the Scottish policy and attitudes and it was that which first took me to Glasgow University and to Edinburgh University and first brought me into contact with Alec Cairncross who was then actually the Secretary of the Scottish committee: he was then a young lecturer in Glasgow in the Political Economy Department, and we used to correspond a great deal. Now Hamilton Fyfe was Chairman of that committee, and in a benevolent but very practical and active way he kept an eye on what we were doing, encouraged us and prompted us, and sometimes intervened on our behalf in quite dramatic ways. One of his nephews was alleged on one occasion to have visited a great friend in the Home Office to try to plead the case of .a refugee student whom we desperately wanted to get out of Germany. The procedure, of course, was that the Home Office would grant a visa when it was satisfied that the incoming student would not become a charge on public funds. The Germans would release the student from concentration camp once they were assured, or thought they had been assured, that he would be out of Germany within, I can't remember, four weeks or six weeks or something like that. If you got him out within that time, all was well. The negotiations had to go through Geneva. The story that I'm referring to was of a visit to this senior Home office official who had been at Oxford with the Principal's nephew and there was no way he could see of getting him moved up in the pile of pending cases, but at one .stage he smiled at his friend and said, "You'll have to excuse me, I have got to go and see my secretary for a few minutes" and, according to Hamilton Fyfe, in his absence the case was moved from low down on the list to high up on the list. In that kind of may we saw quite a lot of him for a period of at least, I should say, a year, eighteen months before the outbreak of war. I can always remember, too, being very much moved by a. piece which he wrote I can't now remember where it was published, whether it was published in a periodical somewhere ,or whether it was just in the University Review, I can't be sure, but what he had done was to take a passage from Thucydides, a passage about factions of all war, and simply transferred the Spanish names of the struggle between Franco and the Republican side in place of the Greek names and somehow succeeded in bringing home to everybody how eternal this question was, what its real significance was. I remember being terribly moved and impressed by this. Yes, we saw him in that kind of way.
H. This accessibility was something new it. Would have contrasted with the style of Adam Smith?
N. Yes. Adam Smith, of course, by the time I had gone up to University was a very old man. Oh yes, I should imagine it was something new in general in the style of university Principals.
H. Now, looking back on the Aberdeen Arts courses in the have 30's, you have met a lot of people who have come up through other universities at the same time how would you say an Aberdeen education compares with that elsewhere?
N. The Honours courses were good, but didn't take a good student as far as the Tripos in Cambridge or the equivalent degrees at Oxford and in Classics, for example, it was almost standard practice for a good graduate in Classics to move on, usually to Cambridge or some of them to Oxford, and spend at least two years. They weren't taking a higher degree, they were taking a second first degree. But the basis of the degree was good in the sense that I think it was a very good thing that there should be at least two subsidiary subjects not connected with your Honours course as a compulsory element of the whole thing. I had done English in my first year and Political Economy in my second year and I had also done Zoology in my first year, because in the Summer Term Latin and Greek in a sense having stopped functioning, you could do a one year graduating course in one term in subjects like Geology, Zoology, Botany. I did this because I wanted to do a bit of Science.
H. Was this a normal way for an Arts student to do these Science subjects?
N. I think it wasn't unusual, although none of my immediate contemporaries in Classics actually read Zoology or Geology to my recollection. One reason, I think, why I chose to do it was that James Ritchie was the Professor and he had quite a good reputation as being a clear and interesting and stimulating lecturer. We used to go down to Marischal College and spend every afternoon from 2 o'clock to 3 p.m. we attended a lecture which he always gave - it was always a model in terms of how to get good, clear lecture notes but at the same time be interested in what the man was saying, and then we spent two hours in a practical class.
H. And this was an Arts class? Science students presumably had different arrangements?
N. No, there were Science students in it too, as far as I can recollect. It was quite a big class. I think it was probably basically an Arts class, I think you are right there. But if your question originally related to the Ordinary degree, then again I would say the basis of the curriculum was very good, the idea of the studium generale, the minimum of seven subjects, was excellent The trouble was you could wither do the curriculum justice, work hard emerge as a pretty well-educated person at the end of it, or you could get through doing next to nothing - and quite a number of pretty bright people got through, doing next to nothing - although, of course, in chose days there were one or two compulsory elements in it, like the cojoint course, you had to have Maths/Nat Phil, you had to have a Science component, and that was quite a stumbling block for some Arts students, for quite a number, I suppose but that was recognised after the War, it was one of the .weaknesses in the whole thing, it had to be tightened up a little bit, made a little bit more difficult. Something had to be provided in it in terms of the basic syllabus that would stretch students .a bit more than leaving them to decide how much they were going to work at the individual subjects.
H. What sort of a community was Aberdeen University? Did you feel that you belonged to the University, to a Faculty, or to a much smaller group as far as your own social life was concerned?
N. The whole University, as I said, was small, and leaving aside for this purpose the question of the division between those who were Aberdonian in terms of school background and domestic background and those who were not Aberdonian, it was a very well identified community and there was a sense of community amongst the student body. Those who lived in digs, particularly in different areas, of the city, had lots and .lots of friends. In those days one went along the street and whistled Gaudeamus and half a dozen windows would open, and conversations would follow and parties would join up for walks and so on.. There was a strong sense of community in that sense, and that brought students together from different departments and different faculties, partly because, the total numbers were small - anyone involved in student activities like sport or debating tended to know people from the other faculties probably in a sense that members from the Arts Faculty nowadays won't know very many students from the Science Faculty or very many students from the Medical Faculty. The Medicals in those days were very prominent in the SRC, in student politics. They took a very active part in it. I think for many years now that has not been the case, the medicals have probably been too hard pressed and almost too self contained up at Foresterhill. So there was a strong sense of community. One tended of course to have one's closest friends from the departments in which one worked. Working at King's, as I did, my closest friends were students first of all from my own department but also from other departments who worked in the Library., The Library was a great social centre. I used to think that the main task of the University Librarian in those days was to stride up and down trying to keep everyone 'shushed' and making more noise and disturbing more people by the sound of his footsteps than any conversation that was being whispered in corners.
H. The Librarian was already Douglas Simpson?
N. Oh yes, one of the great figures of the University. There was no amenity in the sense of a Student Union. At King's the men had no common room, there was a tiny little room above the boiler house to which some us - I didn't actually play cards - some of the men played cards in their spare time. But there was no way of getting a cup of tea or cup of coffee until much later when people would go to Jack Hepburn's in the High Street,
H. When did Jack open?
N I think that was a good deal later. I don't remember him when I was an undergraduate, anyway, not off hand. In fact, we had no money to spend on coffee anyway. The women students at King's did have a common room, and that was in the Cromwell Tower. It was a very small area which I think I penetrated only once or twice for some reason, and men of course weren't normally allowed in. There was no Students' Union until, was it 1938, when the Broad Street Students' Union was opened up. I think the Debater was a fairly important focus for student activity on a Friday evening, but there were none of the facilities … Departmental societies tended to predominate, and they had to find meeting places through private enterprise. The Classical Society used to meet in the old Princess Cafe in Union Street, I forget when - four o'clock, maybe, or five o'clock on a Friday afternoon - and one tended to be there for an hour or an hour and a quarter, perhaps, and the social side of it was having a cup of coffee and a chocolate biscuit, which was all we could afford anyway.
H. You met in the restaurant, you didn't have a room apart?
N. No, you had a little ... I think, if I remember rightly, we had a little room we were allowed to use for this purpose, but you had to make the arrangement to rent it, and this was what,of your subscription went to meet. The Pavilion wasn't opened - the sports Pavilion - until near the end of my undergraduate period. The Swimming Pool only came then too, you see. There was a changing facility and so on, and all the sports facilities were concentrated in Old Aberdeen at King's, but not just at Old King's, also across Regent Walk at New King's where all the new buildings including the Administrative Building now are.
H. Did the opening of the Union Building make a great difference to student life?
N. Well, it did mean that it was possible for student societies to arrange to have rooms there to have their meetings and I think, certainly as a Kings based student, it took me up to Marischal maybe once or twice a week in a way that I wouldn't have visited previously. I think it did begin to make a difference. I remember I used to go there in 1938 - 39 usually to read Hansard, partly because one of one's preoccupations in those days was what was going to happen. We all thought that war was going to be inevitable, it was going to affect us, and it was important to read the parliamentary debates to try and understand what might happen.
H. I am going to ask you about political attitudes in a moment, but before we leave other sides of student life - what about the Charities Campaign and the Show, were these central events, and did you take part in them?
N. Yes, they were very central events in the sense that the Charities Campaign preoccupied a lot of people right through the easter vacation, most of these people being Aberdeen domiciled people. The actual Charities Week was an important week in our lives, and I think much more than nowadays a higher proportion of students would play an active part in house to house collections, for example, and that was all very well organised, and then collections in various cinemas and theatres and special events and so on. Yes, I remember quite distinctly finding myself in interesting places and situations in that connection places that I wouldn't otherwise have gone to, including some of the old flea pits, the old cinemas where admission was by so many jam jars, that kind of thing. People were always very generous and the students were welcome wherever they went, there was always a conversation, there was .always an interesting conversation provided you could understand it.
H. The Show, did you …?
N. I never played any part in the Show. Again, I think generally speaking it would be students who were domiciled in Aberdeen who would dominate that, but I always went to the Show and thoroughly enjoyed it. I used to say the Show before the War was better than it's ever been since; in fact, there were one or two peopIe who achieved quite considerable distinction in the theatrical world who made their name in the .Aberdeen Show in those days. Of course, the came is true now people like Buff Hardy and Steve Robertson and the lad Donald, who figure in "Scotland the What", they made their .name in the Show, June Imray made her name in the Show and they were post war. But certainly pre war the Show was a very important thing and It went on all week, it was that week when we were so busy making collections, it was the first week of the Summer Term always.
H. Another institution which you may or may not think isn't what it was: Gaudie. Was that …?
N. Yes, Gaudie I think was not at all a. bad student newspaper when it started. I had only the most tenuous links with Gaudie indeed, the link came through a friend of mine, a boy from Elgin who was reading Honours English he used to report for Gaudie from time to time and also quite often did either theatre or cinema reviews, and when he did that he, was given two free tickets and I very often got the second one and went with him. He, in fact, made his career in journalism and after the war became editor of the English daily newspaper in Baghdad. After quite a number of years in the Middle East, having married an Australian, he went off to Western Australia where he now is.
H, Coming to politics, it .is obvious, as you have said already, that you were conscious of international politics in the 30s was this typical of the student body was it an intensely political period?
N. I think, yes. Not in the sense that there was any kind of student revolt or anything in the nature of serious student demonstration. But there was tremendous interest in political questions which was partly natural because there was the .Depression and many students in those days , were confronted with the prospect of unemployment - unemployment was one of the great issues of the day - and many students were pretty hard up. There weren't the State awards that have kept students going pretty comfortably ever since the War, Local Authority bursaries were not obligatory things some local authorities were more generous than others. We were all pretty hard up, unless we were sons or daughters of the more prosperous classes, the more professional classes but even farming sons and daughters weren't all that well off in the 1930's. There was a natural interest in politics and that certainly turned to international politics. S always used to say that the Spanish Civil War .had an enormous influence on our generation and there was a good deal of activity in the City of Aberdeen centred on the Spanish Civil War. The students were really on the fringe of that, they never were at the centre or it but they were terribly interested in it, and there were one or two quite significant episodes involving clashes with the police and so on, in which again students were not directly involved but nevertheless they made a big mark on student thinking.
H. Student opinion would have been solidly pro-Republican, or were there any Fascist …?
N. No, I wouldn't have said it was solidly pro Republican, because I don't think student opinion ever is solidly anything. There's a rather facile belief that students are always very left wing I think students as a whole tend to be like the population as a whole to have as many views but there was a fairly strong left wing element in the University amongst the student body. I think at that time I came to regard myself as, I wouldn't say Socialist, but Labour certainly in my sympathies. My father and my mother were Liberal - the newspaper that my mother always took as I was growing up was the old News Chronicle, so I had that kind of background in my thinking. But I played no very active part in what I would call 'student politics'. I rather looked down my nose at the SRC, for example, and I don't know to what extent national politics played any part in the way in which the SRC was elected. Once or twice, for example, during Rectorial elections questions of national politics tended occasionally to rear their heads. There was the Rectorial election which was won by Admiral Evans, Evans of the Broke (I have forgotten the year now, whether that was 1936 or 1937 something like that, probably it was 1937 or 1938) and that was quite a hard fought election, there was a lot of student participation in the arguments. It was interesting that Evans should have won if you like, that reflected a kind of right wing view. Perhaps the other side was rather split there was a Scottish Nationalist group supporting Eric Linklater, if I remember rightly. The group that I was associated with, curiously enough, supported Stamp, who became Lord Stamp the economist, and I suppose you could say that was slightly Liberal-Radical. There was another candidate, Sir Alexander Roger who was an arms manufacturer, and I think a lot of us were terribly worried at the idea of a man with that background being elected Rector of the University. I can always remember the Rectorial fight of that year being a real fight you know the one I mean the one with flour and pease meal and the struggle for the flags in the Quadrangle at Marischal College.
H. Many of you must have been conscious that the War was coming. How far in the late thirties was pacifism professed by students?
N. There was a very strong pacifist element in their thinking, but .I wouldn't say that there was any outright Pacifist Party. I regarded myself as a pacifist, certainly. In, I think it was 1938, (no, it was probably before that) I was still doing Classics , a new society was formed which we called the Reform Club and its constitution, as I remember, admitted to members of any political party or adherents of any political party who were concerned with reform. You had to be, if you like, forward looking in order to be a member of it. That society flourished I think it probably died out during the War for the next year or two we used to have an excellent series of weekly meetings and study groups I remember the study. group (probably this was in 1938-39 or it might have been the session earlier than that) concerning itself with a very detailed examination of a book by G H Cole called The condition of Britain, and that gives you an idea of the sort of the thing we were interested in but we weren't all committed left-wing students, there were members of that Club who certainly weren't like that. I remember one comment made .to me by Archie Cameron (so I must still have been a Classics student at the time) when I was getting a tutorial of some sort from him and he started asking me about this club because he had been asked to speak to it - I think about Greece - and he referred to the young lady who was its secretary who had come to negotiate with him, saying "She's not very left wing, she's a rather pale pinkish sort of person, isn't she?" which was a characteristic phrase of Archie Cameron "a rather pale pinkish sort of person". There was certainly a great deal of interest in politics.
H. Was there a strong Socialist Society, and did its members join the Reform Club or did they regard you as too pale pinkish?
N. I'm not terribly clear in my recollection of that. I was never a member of the Socialist Society, although I regarded myself as Socialist in my sympathies and the other day I came across a kind of programme of a mock parliamentary debate that we held, in which, along with lots of other people who achieved distinction of one sort another, my name was there as a member on the Socialist side. There were quite a few whom I know well too in after life who were there as members on the Tory side, the Liberal side, the Scottish Nationalist side. I don't think I was close enough to the real Left Wing to remember clearly whether they played a great role. There certainly was a pretty left wing group I remember going to one or two public or they may even have not been public meetings. I remember one, .for example, addressed by Palme Dutt, people, like that came up. My recollection is that if there was a Communist Party in The University it must have been a very small one I don't think Aberdeen ever had the kind of 'cell' that existed in Cambridge or Oxford or anything like that. On the other hand, there undoubtedly were people around who were concerned with propagating the gospel, so to speak.
H. What about attitudes to the Empire and to link these with your own. When did you first think of going to work in the Indian Civil Service?
N. Well, that's a terribly difficult one to really know the answer to that. Attitudes to the Empire came into my interest in international affairs. I read quite a number of Left Book Club books I was actually provided with them by our very respectable parish minister back home in Nairn who used to pass his on to me. There was a chap called, was it Leonard Barnes?: he used to write books about imperialism and so on, and of course there was the Mayo book on 'Mother India' that kind of thing interested me while I was still an undergraduate. Specifically, what led me to apply for the ICS in the end was simply an advertisement which I probably spotted in some periodical or paper which I was reading in the new Union that we were talking about, and it arose simply because after much hesitation at the beginning of the War when they had suspended recruitment to the ICS the Government decided to reopen recruitment but at that time the idea was that they would continue to recruit from the universities but not call the people .out to India until they had done their War Services and they modified that in the summer of 1940 and decided to pull people out of the armed forces and send them out to India. The group that I went out with all came out of the armed services, but had all volunteered to join the armed services; they didn't take anybody who was waiting to be conscripted to the armed services, that was an interesting point. I had one or two links with India: my mother used to talk a little of her recollections of her grandfather's conversations, he had been a soldier out in India way back before the Mutiny, or round about the time of the Mutiny or something like that, I'm not really very sure now. There was a cousin of my father's who actually became Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces of India I never met him, but he corresponded with me and when he heard that I was opting to go to the North West Frontier Province he wrote me a letter, which I still have, in which he said that of course the best Province to go to undoubtedly was the Central Provinces that was the one that had the best shooting, and .didn't really understand the Indian peasant until you had been out on a shooting expedition with him, a point of view that I sympathise with in a sense, although I was never keen on shooting, myself, but I could understand exactly what he was driving at. There's no straightforward answer to your question.
H. Did any of your contemporaries go at Aberdeen?
N. No, I think the last Aberdeen graduate to go before me had gone quite a few years before I went out .a chap called Crombie who went to Madras and I think became Chief Secretary in Madras. I think he was the last and he was certainly an undergraduate he had left the university before I had anything to do with it. There weren't many entrants from Aberdeen after the First World War. I think there were considerable links between the University and India before the First World War.
H. I wonder why the link weakened?
N. I don't know, it's an interesting point.
H. Perhaps in the last section, we could talk a little about your Final Year and the impact of the War. How did the War affect the conclusion of your studies?
N. Very drastically. I think in many ways it affected the way I subsequently came to look at my carver. The War broke out in early September and I was due to go back at the beginning of October to Aberdeen to prepare for my final exams the following June, and I was thinking very hard about the whole future, wondering whether I was still sufficient of a pacifist to register myself as a conscientious objector, and I had come to the conclusion that I couldn't argue that the country was wrong to go to war against Germany I thought the decision was right. I had thought that we were wrong at the time of Chamberlain not to go to the defence of Chechoslovakia, although I could understand the good reasons why we didn't. By the time I went back to Aberdeen at the beginning, of term, in the first week .of October, I had applied to appear before the Joint Recruiting Board as a volunteer for the armed services and that in itself is an interesting and amusing story, but we won't go into that unless you are interested later but the nub of the outcome was that I took the King's Shilling and had to be medically examined, and was told to go home and wait my call up. I had been back in Nairn for about three weeks, really getting very frustrated and bore, when a letter came from the War Office telling me that it would be at least six months before I would be called up because I was registered as a potential officer for the Royal Artillery and in effect there were no guns to train me with so I took the train immediately back to Aberdeen. I went to see Harry Butchart the University Secretary, whom I knew only slightly, and he was, I must say, very understanding about the situation. He sent me straight out to Hazeldene Road where Henry Hamilton lived, to see him because he had taken charge of the Department of Political Economy, Lindley Fraser having virtually disappeared to go and work in London at the Ministry of Information, and I said to Hamilton, "This letter says I've got six months may I please take my final exams in March?" And already, I suppose, the War was bending the rules in all kinds of ways - Hamilton and Butchart between them organised things very quickly so that I was given permission to present myself for examination in March. I had the most frantic six months, in fact it must have been less than that, to try and get ready for this. It was a greatly accelerated Honours degree in economics which I took, and that's one of the reasons why I could never quite regard myself, after the was as a properly qualified economist. I suppose in order to be a properly qualified economist, in my own mind, in my heart of hearts, I would have, on coming back from India, gone to Oxford or Cambridge and registered for a Higher Degree, and worked for two or three years in that way, the way in which we are accustomed to think students do work nowadays to prepare themselves properly for the profession, but I didn't do that. Anyway, that's how the War affected me it cut me off in the middle of the development of any career as an economist.
H. Were Honours courses running anything like normally, or were you largely working on your own?
N. I was on my own.
H. With guidance from anyone?
N. With guidance from Henry Hamilton and Annie Macdonald and indeed, nobody else, that I can recollect. Lindley Fraser was not around that year, except he may have been around just occasionally in the first month or so. And Malcolm Gray and Norman MacIver were waiting to go off to the Air Force, and did in fact go off fairly soon. Sandy Youngson went off soon after the outbreak of the War and he returned to Aberdeen to complete his degree.
H. You had a ,special diet of exams?
N. Yes; in which - interestingly enough, because it links with what ,you questioned me about earlier on I remember very clearly one thing about the actual exams, and that was that in the Essay Paper there was a subject which more or less was the title of Keynes's pamphlet How to pay for the war and I remember having absorbed that pamphlet, that book of his, and been absorbed by it, and I wrote my .essay on that which may well have been why I got a good degree in the end.
H. And the social life of the University would obviously be very greatly changed?
N. I don't remember a great deal about the social life in that particular period because I was so immersed in work, trying to overtake the syllabus in the short time left and working very much on my own. I wasn't taking much part in social life. There was a black out too, of course. I don't remember much about social life then. Barbara, of course, then had not only graduated but had finished her teacher training and had already started teaching she wasn't in Aberdeen at all, so I had no distractions of that kind.
H. Did you work in your digs, or in the Library, or...?
N. I worked in my digs, in the evenings I worked in the Library normally, in the mornings and the afternoons. The Library wasn't open in the evenings. Some students used to go and work in the Public Library, in fact a lot of students did, but I never did, I always worked in my digs.
End of Interview
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