| Description | Interview with Sir Edward Wright recorded on 2 May 1986 by Dr Jennifer Carter.
Transcript of Interview :
C. If we start with the Department of Mathematics, you came, I think, in 1936, was it, Sir Edward?
W. January '36. I was appointed in October, much to my surprise and to my chief backer's surprise!
Who was your chief backer? Had you Aberdeen connections, at all?
Hardy.
C. Hardy, with whom you had written a book.
W. Yes, he had been my supervisor at Oxford, I arrived in January, I had come for a week beforehand and talked to the staff. The staff consisted of a Lecturer of 70 - Goodwillie - who had been Senior Wrangler at Cambridge in 1891, and a retired Indian Civil Servant (I think he retired a little early owing to ill health), Taylor Lawrence. This was literally all the staff except the Professor and they had been managing to run the department for a couple of terns without a professor; so I naturally said I would take on whatever my predecessor had been doing. Slight smiles spread across their faces. They said: "Eleven lectures a week". I couldn't go back on this, of course, but giving eleven lectures one might manage but writing the things from scratch as well - it was a busy term. Fortunately, most of the exams in Mathematics and in Natural Philosophy and in the two Classics subjects were at that time in March and the Summer Term only had those people who were going on. One had a busy winter but it was a very pleasant life.
C. Almost like the semester system: you worked a sort of half-year, yes?
W. That year was simply a matter of going on with what they were doing. I did revise it a bit in the next year. I may say the load in the department was interesting: we had six different classes - two first year classes, two second year, a third year Honours and a fourth year Honours. At that time everybody taking a Pass Degree in Arts had to take as a minimum joint course in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, which counted as one subject. As you can imagine, this was a considerable burden to them, poor things, and with a class of seventy-five doing that, at a minimum, it was really impossible to do much remedial teaching. Fortunately, in a year or two the Faculty of Arts thought it was a good thing to abolish this compulsion. They had no arguments from me, you may guess! It was impossible to do one's proper duty to those students.
C. And to the Honours people also, I imagine, when so much energy and time was absorbed.
W. Not really It was just that you had a class of seventy-five and you could do nothing - I didn't teach them - you could do nothing but lecture to them. They were about fifty in the 'real' First Year class. The odd thing was that when that compulsion was abolished by First Year class changed from fifty to a hundred. Very ironic.
C. What brought them in, do you think? Why was there that big jump? Were they trying to avoid something else?
W. You must remember they had a very general education in the Scottish schools. They still do, I think, but they had a very general one then. Practically all of them who could do any mathematics had taken what was then called Higher Mathematics and consequently were qualified to enter the First Year, and probably had been pretty well taught. The teachers in mathematics between the Wars in England and Scotland were extraordinarily good. There just weren't other forms of employment for them, not like now then they are twiddling with knobs and computers and so on. Well, that simplified matters a bit. We had also to concede that we should all have our exams in June, and thereafter I introduced the Calculus in the first year and various things like that. They came up, most of them, a year earlier than in England. The First Year was rather like the last year of the Sixth, and certainly my predecessor had been there for 34 years, and the syllabus was naturally a little old-fashioned. We had got most of that sorted out fairly well when the War came along. Then we had bomber cadets for six months - two six-month courses - aircrew cadets, between school and the service, again for two six-month courses, and what were called "Radio Bursars", essentially people who had to be taught enough mathematics and physics to make them competent radar people. And this meant that from about 1940 to 1943 we were very heavily loaded indeed.
C. I hadn't appreciated that at all. That is extremely interesting. And these people were just taking specific courses, they weren't doing a degree at all?
W. Yes. The two sorts of cadets - they were just trying to mature them, if you like. They were great fun. They were extraordinarily nice boys. They sent us exclusively English boys and they sent all the Scots boys to English universities, which was quite a sensible thing if they wanted to turn them into Officers. In 1943 I went to the Air Ministry to work with Dr. Jones, as he was then, afterwards Professor of Natural Philosophy, in Scientific Intelligence, and for two years I, of course, saw nothing of what was happening here. Dr. Potter ran the department and the pressure, the wartime pressure, had eased a little. Some of the extra courses were dropped, though not all. In 1945 I came back. We had, of course, the most interesting students I have ever taught which were the ex-servicemen. It was really great fun teaching them, and very helpful, I hope, looking after their interests, because people who had not been away from the university didn't always appreciate just how much an interruption of five or six years from school, say, to coming to university meant to them. Within a year, of course, they had picked up, they were serious and they were very interesting chaps. I thoroughly enjoyed teaching them.
C. I'm interested that a mathematician found that generation of students so good, because one has this lay person's idea - perhaps wrong - that a mathematician does his best work very early and probably for him an interruption like the Services would be very serious.
W. I think it was pretty serious, but we had some very good ones. Then we gradually increased the staff; I couldn't, without a great deal of reference to records, discover how much we did. I had had the staff increased a little just before the war, and I managed to recruit some very good people. Incidentally, the Indian Civil Service had gone back to Aden as Chief Justice and was knighted subsequently. Harry Pitt, subsequently Professor at various places and vice-chancellor of Reading - he was knighted too! He was with us for the first three years of the war, before he went to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Bill Cockcroft, who was afterwards vice-chancellor of Ulster University and is now Chairman and Chief Executive of the Schools Examinations Council - and he has also been knighted.
C. Now, was there something special about your department?
W. I flatter myself that I must have picked some of these able people. At that time, of course, we had the grade of Assistant and this meant that the Professor nominated and the Court appointed; it meant that the Professor had the whole responsibility, really.
C. Would you advertise for a job like that or would it be done on a kind of academic grapevine, that you heard that so-and-so was interested?
W. We would use both. I got Nash-Williams on the academic grapevine, but I thing the others answered advertisements thought Pitt had been a pupil of Hardy's and came on that network. We used both methods, really.
C. Did virtually everyone come in that way? Of all the staff that you recruited, most of them were appointed as Assistants, were they?
W. Most, not all. Macintyre was appointed as a Lecturer; he was a very distinguished mathematician who eventually had a research Chair in the States. Even better, he married one of the best teachers I have ever met: Sheila Macintyre. She was a brilliant teacher - quite a good mathematician, too - in a class by herself. You used to walk past the room where she was lecturing to a class of fifty and you would hear one sound: Sheila's voice. Absolutely deathly silence, listening intently; it was most impressive. We had a number of people who were rather interesting, and the staff, as I say, gradually increased. We modernised the syllabus more and more. We had an external examiner from Cambridge who had been an Aberdeen graduate, and he said: "Wright, you are putting modern algebra into your course. We haven't got that in Part II of Tripos yet." I said, "I don't mind Cambridge following my example!"
C. Did you have your own way pretty well over syllabus matters? I imagine that Faculties and Boards of Studies and so forth didn't really exercise any control…
W. One had one's own way nominally, entirely. In fact one had to take one's staff with one; particularly after the war when staff were difficult to get. That atmosphere was different. And various things that had never been thought of before the war, like being able to invite Lecturers for visits, being able to send your staff away to conferences and so on. We had one of the UGC visits shortly after the was and the Senate got me to put up increased salaries and increased something else - the sort of things they must have heard from everybody - and then they let me put up and idea of my own, namely that people should be allowed to get finance to travel. There was a dear old boy - he turned out be a retired civil servant, but I didn't know this - on the UGC, and he said, "Oh but, supposing you did this, a lecturer might go away and simply have a holiday." And I said: "Well, I have been signing warrants for my staff at Air Ministry, and they were civil servants. I would have thought that university staff were at least as honest as civil servants." There were roars of laughter, by the University Grants Committee who knew he was a civil servant.
C. Did you yourself feel different coming back? I mean, did it put the University in a different perspective to you, having had that break after your first period and going off and working in London - at least I assume it was London you were in?
W. Yes, it was London. Yes, it did make a considerable difference really. For one thing, I was older. This was a handicap because, after all, mathematicians are supposed to shoot their bolt by 40 and I was 39 when I came back. As far as research was concerned, this added to the difficulty. Otherwise it certainly was a wider… oh yes, Scientific Intelligence, part of Air Ministry Intelligence, part of the Secret Intelligence, was certainly very much a wider world.
C. And it must have given you the kind of political contacts - I don't mean in the crude party sense, but with how our system works and so on - that came in useful later.
W. Yes. I already knew, of course, Professor Lindemann - he was a good friend of mine at Oxford, and I also saw him during the war then he was Churchill's scientific adviser. We had given him an honorary degree in 1940: it was the first person I had put up for an honorary degree whom the committee accepted, and he was a great success. A lot of people say he was an arrogant man: I didn't find this.
C. In the pre-war period, were you interesting yourself in the affairs of the University or were you very much mathematically orientated?
W. No. You see, at Oxford I had a postgraduate scholarship for four years, including three of them at a different College - Christ Church - and then I was a Lecturer, a very nice lectureship at Christ Church for two years. One's only duty was "literary or scientific work". It was the equivalent of a Junior Research Fellowship. They were only two differences - I like to think they are connected. They didn't put me on the Governing Body and they paid me 20% more than the Junior Fellows. I liked to think later on, that if I was a bit late in starting my career, I was being compensated by not having administration to do. Christ Church was a delightful college. I sent them a substantial number of my Honours graduates from Aberdeen, knowing that they would be happy there: they all were.
C. So when you came to Aberdeen you saw your first task really was to bring up to date a department which had academically got a bit behind, as it were.
W. Yes. Given the generality, you see, what people took then was not an Honours Degree in Mathematics but an Honours Degree in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, which included all Theoretical Physics and a lot of Experimental Physics; so that if you have a spread like that you can't expect to go so far. It was then common custom for anyone who got a First and wanted to go on in this field - or in Classics - to go on to Oxford and take a shortened degree: a second first degree on a shortened bases, as it were. This I was slightly against. I didn't stop them if they wanted to go but I felt we ought to produce a proper first degree. To do that we has to specialise rather more and eventually ended with most of them taking an Honours degree in Mathematics. The second year had always differentiated the Honours people from the Pass ones; we did that; we differentiated in the First Year - I had a bit of a struggle with the Faculty to be allowed to do that. All that helped, and I think we managed not be too narrow but to get to the stage where they didn't really need to take a second Honours Degree - though a number did. The last one, so far as I know, to try it was my own son.
C. Did he? I realised he took Maths and Physics here - I didn't realise he went on and did a second first degree.
W. He took Maths. I had intended to send him to Oxford - I didn't want him in my department - and I told him this. He said, "Oh, I want to go to a Scottish university. Which is the best for Mathematics?" That was impertinence, and I told him! I think he, in fact, wanted to stay here for his first degree. As soon as he got to Oxford, after half a term his tutor said, "You are wasting your time, you have done it all before" and turned him over to doing postgraduate work. A year later they gave him a job. The relationship has nothing to do with it - the point really is that I really had got there. We had got to the stage where an Aberdeen degree was good enough; they could go straight on to research.
C. That was a long piece of work, getting to that point, wasn't it? Through the latter 'thirties and then with the interruption of the war, so it would have been about the 'fifties?
W. I think I had got there a bit before. I think John was just being modest.
C. So creating an Honours School, or a group of Honours Mathematicians, was the first really important thing you did and that must have been very time-consuming and absorbing.
W. Very interesting, and I enjoyed it. It was obviously the thing to do. Of course mathematics departments in other universities have done the same thing.
C. But with the staff you described in the pre-war period, and awful lot must have turned on the Professor personally, mustn't it? You must have had to make virtually all the running in research and so on.
W. Not really. I got Macintyre in my first year. I got two extra posts, one of which was to be filled by somebody they had got already on another staff ,who wasn't a great success. Bronowski was one of the other applicants. We had to choose between three people, all of whom made perfectly good Chairs later on.
C. Of course the university world was so small then, wasn't it?
W. It was small, and people with perfectly good Firsts went to teach. I examined for many years - I did it originally at Oxford, simply to make a little money and get married on, but I went on doing it because I found that examining the English public schools on what they were doing was very useful for the First Year here, which was more or less equivalent. I did really know what methods worked and what methods baffled people.
C. And it gave you a kind of comparative standard.
W. And it gave one a little cash to furnish a large and difficult Manse.
C. Tell me about that side of life before the war. You would arrive and you would get an official residence, would you? A large Manse, as you described it?
W. Only a few subjects had them. Maths, Latin (or Humanity, as it was called), Greek.
C. And Mathematics was 52 College Bounds, was it, where you lived afterwards.
W. Yes. 50 was the Greek Manse; and two or three of the Divinity Chairs. That, I think, was all. It was ridiculous - it was an enormous house, and we had no family then, but it was very convenient, being right on top of the department and next door to the Mathematics Library. I wanted to buy a house, because I thought I could buy a more modern one but I realised that having members of staff living in Old Aberdeen could do a great deal more research or scholarship than having them across town. They could save an awful lot of time, It depended on what one was doing, I suppose. In 1948 I was elected to the Court. It was my turn to be Dean of Arts - it was very much a 'turn'. It was my turn to be Dean of Science in 1945 but fortunately a colleague told me that the Professor of Mathematics took his turn in the Arts and not the Science Faculty, so I was able to have the three years before. I was Dean and then some people approached me and wanted to put me up for the Court. I was elected. And so I had a good deal of university administration from '48 until '56. The tradition then was that you stayed on the Court - it was a four-year term of appointment; if you stood the second time nobody opposed you, unless they disliked you and what you did. It was essentially and eight-year tenure. At the end of eight years it was proper - and indeed you should get up and say 'I am not standing again'. Indeed, I did so; and I remember Taylor's face of surprise - he was Principal then. Although he was an Aberdeen graduate he may not have known that particular custom: I was told it by Professor […] And so I stood down for a year, but I was approached again by two of the younger, newly appointed professors, saying would I go back. This was so immensely flattering. This was Professors Watt and Cross.
C. And then you went on, of course, to become Vice-Principal and to succeed Taylor.
W. What happened was that Tom Taylor had a heart attack and he was told by his doctors that he must drop a third of his work - he was a very hard-working man - and so he asked me to take over the Chairmanship of the Edilis Committee, the Building Committee, which by then of course was very important because we had started the building programme. Also he wanted me as Vice-Principal and I said that was not for me, but indeed as it was so obviously intended, this office, (we hadn't had a Vice-Principal before), it was intended to save him work, if you know what I mean, we agreed that he should nominate. I don't know if that is still the practice?
C. I think it is.
W. Very few universities do that. They usually elect the Leader of the Opposition.
C. I hadn't appreciated that you had been our first Vice-Principal.
W. The curious thing is that when there were two universities - when you had King's College and Marischal - each of them had a Vice-Principal. Once you combined, you didn't. The office disappeared. Very curious. In some ways in a smaller institution like a College, you do need a deputy even more, somehow. In a bigger university the Principal is really fairly remote. He isn't expected to deal too much with individual students unless they get across the disciplinary code, unless there is something seriously wrong, or unless there are student politicians who are very useful contacts. Well, that takes us up to 1962 when I took over from Tom Taylor. He died very unexpectedly. He had given his usual brilliant oratorical performance at the Graduations and he went away for a week's holiday afterwards, which was a very sensible thing to do - I think he played a round of golf two days before, he was a very fine golfer, led the Aberdeen Senatus against the Glasgow Senatus very well indeed - and then he just died very suddenly indeed. It was a terrible blow. And, of course, a defeat because I had really been appointed to take the load off him. He was not an easy man to take the load off. He was not an obsessively hard worker but he was a very hard worker. I wouldn't have said he was a workaholic. I could help a bit because one of the burdens of being a Scottish University Principal is having to travel to London; and I was already on the Anderson Committee on Student Grants and then on the Hale Committee on teaching mathematics, which meant I was in London a fair amount, so the Principal's Secretary had a note of my dates in London and if anything was next door and so on I could take it over. To that extent I think I did help him so that he didn't have to travel quite so much, but it was a great loss really.
C. You were personally very friendly with him, were you?
W. Yes. We had different backgrounds, different ideas on a lot of things, but he had that great virtue of a barrister that you could argue the opposite view to his and he didn't mind. No hard feelings. Mark you, he usually took care to win! Quite properly. And indeed, before there was ever any question of my being Principal I took the view that ultimately he had, as in the Old Air Force phrase, to 'take the can back' and therefore his opinion ought to prevail. I think many of us felt that; that it was his responsibility.
C. You rate him highly as a Principal, do you?
W. He had some very great virtues, certainly. He was very impressive-looking, he was a very fine orator; the impression of the speech was so great; and when they read, they also read very well. I don't know if you have seen the little book of his speeches? It is quite interesting.
C. Was he a man of vision for the future of the University, do you think, or was he in that sense a conservative ( with a small c)?
W. Politically, he wasn't a Conservative - he was a Labour man - but he had some conservative instincts, I think. If you want my view of him you should read the speech or address that his widow asked me to give at his Memorial Service. It is printed as an appendix to the book of his speeches. It was sincere and I meant it. He was a charming man and if he told a joke, it was against himself, which was a great virtue. But charm is hard to recapture. He was a very good-looking man. You have seen the bust of him?
C. I have seen him once. He was in the chair when I was interviewed for my job, and then he died before I took up the post. But I didn't, for example, having only met him on that one occasion and he was sitting down, I didn't appreciate that he was a tall man - I thought he was small.
W. Oh, very tall. I think I was a little taller. I think he used very kindly to give me the seat by the driver when we went to meeting, on the ground - as he said - "I don't know whether you are taller this way, but you are bigger this way!", which is fair enough.
C. Like Taylor, you took over as an internal appointment as Principal. Was that a disadvantage, do you think, or was it an advantage?
W. Oh, no. I think it was a most enormous advantage. I had been a runner-up to two other Vice-Chancellorships - one was a new one and for the other a local man beat me. On each occasion I was, on the whole, glad not to get it. I had committed myself. People were supporting me and you can't turn round and say, 'No, I won't' and so I would have taken it. I may say, my wife and son were equally glad, because they liked Aberdeen. Indeed, I was approached about a new one a month or two before Taylor died, and of course I had no conception that he was going to die; and my wife and I had the usual weekend one has thinking about these things and decided 'no', we were very happy where we were. I think it's an enormous advantage, really, being appointed locally; particularly, as in my case, my great support from the lay members on the Court who were unanimous and went to Tom Johnston, who had been Secretary of State, as Chancellor. They were offered two or three other names and turned their thumbs down rather firmly, I gather. I didn't know all these details, I was told this afterwards. This meant, of course, that I started with the Court who had committed themselves to appointing me and therefore they wanted me to be a success. I had always admired the Court. The trouble with the Senate is that it is a big body, and it always has the faint feeling that in many things - the important things - there is a longstop. The Court may…
C. So that it can be that shade irresponsible if it wants to be?
W. Well, this is true everywhere. I have information form other universities that this is undoubtedly true. The Senate is a sound body. One of the first things I did was to reduce the length of Senate meetings by half. It was simple enough, really. Tom Taylor - this was the unfortunate side of his legal experience as Sheriff Principal - he read through all the agenda, gave everybody a chance to talk and of course what this means is that people get bored; they look ahead; they say, "Oh, I might just say something about this"; the trouble being that by the end of the meeting you have got a rump, and interested rump. You might have an important bit of business not decided by an impartial jury but by the people who just wanted it. This might be a good thing, but it might equally be a very bad thing.
C. And so meetings would last, say, from 2 o'clock to half past four?
W. Three hours, sometimes three and a half.
C. I see the problem then! And so you resolved to reduce this by half?
W. I didn't resolve to reduce it by half, but in London I had met what we call the 'starring system' which is that people have to say what they want discussed before the meeting starts. You don't let there be any argument about whether they should discuss it; anyone who wants it can discuss it, but this means he must have read his papers before he comes. The result was extraordinary: not only did it halve the length of the meetings, but also it meant that almost everybody stayed to the end, which meant you had a real Senatus deciding - you couldn't always avoid business coming from the Faculties late, of course. So that was an improvement. I managed to shorten the Court meetings too, in a rather different way. I think the previous Principals had simply discussed the business the morning of the meeting with the Secretary; I got whoever was clerking the meeting to show me the week before what he was going to put down, what information he was going to supply, and to say if I thought something was irrelevant - and irrelevant piece of information on the order paper has to be discussed. If you put on the order paper that the Professor of Mathematics is a fool, however irrelevant it may be you can't stop him saying that he isn't. So the irrelevant bit if information which may be added, very faintly, can be a disaster, and also to say "They'll want to know that, they'll want to know that" ad so on.
C. I'm surprised previous Principals hadn't exercised the right of the Chair in that way.
W. As far as I know, they hadn't. They may well have discussed what they themselves wanted one, but this was a different matter.
C. This was looking at the agenda as a whole and trying to get the balance right?
W. I had noticed before then that again and again I would find myself arguing with a man who was a very good friend of mine - Dr. Milne, a graduate representative - and it would then turn out that there was some piece of information hadn't been put on the paper, or that it had been put in a way that wasn't clear to us. There is no doubt that things look very different from the Chair from how they look to the Secretary of the Clerk; why, I don't know, but you get a different view from them.
C. Presumably because the Chair wants a decision, above all, whereas the Clerk is merely…
W. He can see everybody to, whereas the Clerk is acting as Secretary, taking the Minutes. (That's scarcely in the history of the University.)
C. It is interesting.
W. Those were fairly early things to do, but of course we had already started expanding.
C. Had you come in - if I may interrupt there - with an agenda, as it were? You have described how you took the job on really very suddenly, at short notice.
W. I was Acting Principal for something like five months.
C. And so that gave you time to think what you wanted to do?
W. Oh no, it didn't. I was far too busy. It was a very difficult situation being Acting Principal. And if you know that your friends are putting your forward as a candidate it didn't make it easier. There are a lot of geese to whom you can't say "boo". That didn't help much. Of course I had already for a year or eighteen months been Chairman of Buildings, though Taylor had still, very properly, taken a lot if interest. We had started the building programme. I do think, if I am to talk about the buildings which are important, that it would be awfully helpful if you could let me have a chronology - the Edilis could probably produce it.
C. Yes, let's do the buildings specifically, as it were, separately, because they are interesting and important. Indeed, I would have thought this was one of the major things you were concerned with in your period of Principal-ship, was it not - the acquisition of land and the putting up of the buildings?
W. I built more square footage than all the Principals in four and a half centuries before me. Mark you, my buildings won't last as long as theirs did! And I don't think they are all as attractive.
C. Outside the buildings, what do you regard as the other major preoccupations you had?
W. Obviously there was a vast amount of day-to-day business. It's rather like batting at cricket: it depends on the bowling what can do, really. And a good deal of instruction - well, perhaps not instructions but suggestions, but they were effectively instructions - came from the UGC as to the numbers they wanted us to take. The Robbins expansion was taking place, and while the new universities were being designed and built - it took them some time, very properly, to get to taking any numbers in - the numbers fell on universities like Aberdeen.
C. What did you feel about that in the end? Even I remember the sort of terrific division in the University between 'Expansionists' versus 'Non-expansionists' and people like Bill Witte arguing strongly against, George Burnett strongly for, and so on. What was your own feeling?
W. I was by no means strongly expansionist, but it was very difficult and rather undesirable to resist the increasing finance for the University because there were good people heading the departments - Heads of Departments are the crux of the University, really, that's my view (having been a Head perhaps!) I certainly took that view - you had to get him round, if you could. You did ask me a question…
C. I was wondering what you other major agenda items were. Buildings obviously was one. You were describing, indirectly, how money was another and to in a sense respond to the pressure of the UGC to expand, whether you thought it was desirable in itself or not?
W. There was obviously student welfare. One of the things I found when I first came to Aberdeen was how different the attitude to students was. Compared with Christ Church which, after all, has a lot of Etonians and it is a great Whig ascendancy College, with thirteen Prime Ministers and all that sort of thing, but none the less you were expected to know about your students, you were expected to know a lot about them. It was just - not that I taught them very much - not done not to know everything about your pupils. There was a curious feeling of a Mess or something like that. Here, nobody was unkind to students (in fact they were far too kind when obviously a student needed to be gently taken by the scruff of this neck - you could do that, couldn't you?); on the other hand, they didn't seem to have, except with the brighter ones, owing to the size of the classes and the very large student - staff ratio, they didn't seem to concern themselves individually with the individual student as much as I had got pretty firmly rubbed into me. Not rubbed into me, that's not fair, but that was very much the atmosphere in which I had worked. You mustn't talk shop in the Common Room but 'shop' didn't include your pupils if you wanted to discuss them with someone.
C. So you saw that gradually change, did you, at Aberdeen?
W. Well, it changed with more staff and better ratio, obviously, and Hamilton Fyfe had tried to do something about it; he established the Regent system, but it was undoubtedly a somewhat alien system. People did adopt it. I think people were quite anxious to do it when they could, but certainly the increase in staff made the difference. They had a more basic material welfare, for example…
C. Setting up the first Halls came within your time, and the Student Health Service and that sort of thing?
W. The Student Health Service, the places for them to eat, and places for them to sleep. Of course, Aberdeen had been exceptionally fortunate in having the most excellent lodgings very cheaply. This was because it was a seaside resort. When we originally proposed to build Crombie Hall it was opposed by the student representatives.
C. So I believe. And you had to push quite strongly to get it did you?
W. Yes. I remember the Court asking Taylor what he would do if he couldn't fill the places, would he compel them? He said, he supposed he would have to. I thought this was a desperate business and at this moment - this was before I was Principal - I said, "Well, couldn't we have half men and half women?" A purely statistical reason! And one or two said, "That's a good idea!" My theory was that if you drew from two constituencies, with 120-odd places originally, obviously you would have less problem. It was simple … work-study or something like that. Then everyone else thought it was a good idea for other reasons. Crombie Hall was built with that in mind, of course, and it has been a great success. Then we had the oil, and this transformed the lodging situation drastically and suddenly, and it was necessary to build and build and build; and of course the UGC, at the same time, instead of giving us the money to build these things compelled us to borrow it. That was quite a problem.
C. How far were you conscious of UGC direction increasing? That would be, again, what the outsider would think happened, roughly, in the period we are talking about. Were you conscious of that while it was going on?
W. Well, I think so. Of course, what happens is, every five years they come to see you. They see the Principal first and they see right through the various sections and then they see the Court at the end of the day and tell them what is to come. They do indicate, not only then but also in letters of course, and occasionally they ask you to come to see them and you ask to see the Chairman in Park Crescent. We had a nice fight over the Forestry Department which they wanted to shut down.
W. I don't think there was anything else as strong as that. There were plenty of new ideas, new departments, new units and so on to be started in the University: that essentially came from the University.
C. That was our own initiative?
W. It came from a variety of people. That was really why people wanted to expand. They wanted to do a number of things, and there is no doubt that the larger the University the more interesting extra things like the Sparsely Populated Areas and that sort of thing can be done. The Forestry Department issue was quite amusing because the trouble was there were to be three Forestry Departments: Oxford, Bangor and Edinburgh (Edinburgh because it just had a new building). In fact Edinburgh didn't have a straight Forestry Department; they called it Environmental Sciences or something. We, fortunately, had an academically brilliant Forestry Department - very good teachers, Harry Steven, John Matthews. Of course a good many of the staff had been in the Colonial Forestry Service and therefore had already been though the experience of having their job pulled from under them.
C. So they fought harder?
W. They didn't. I asked them to keep quiet and told then I would warn them when I could do no more; asked then if they would let me have the fight first. They kept perfectly quiet. I had a kind friend on the Agricultural Forestry Sub-committee of the UGC. After all, once an Intelligence Analyst, one doesn't forget some of the skills. Eventually I had to go to the UGC to see Wolfenden, who was Chairman, and I explained that the Department advised fifty or sixty landowners, and Wolfenden said, "I suppose several of them are members of the House of Lords?" I said, "And the House of Commons." That was untrue, I am afraid, but it was a guess worth trying. Oddly enough, what happened was Berrill succeeded him - Berrill was a great man for efficiency - and at his first meting it was agreed we could keep it.
C. Just like that. Very nice.
W. We had one of the nicest parties. I entertained the Forestry Department and I entertained my friend and his wife to dinner. One of the sweetest things said was by one of the younger wives to my wife: "I wish the Forestry Department was at risk every year."
C. That reminds one of another feature of the growing University, which must have been that the kind of social ties among staff and so forth became less close as the staff grew in size. I know your wife, of course, worked tremendously hard to keep in touch with people.
W. One of the difficulties in Aberdeen is that we are on three sites, separated not by enormous distances, but by quite a distance. Nothing compared with the London distances, but then each of the Colleges in London is much more a small university in itself - or a big university.
C. You yourself took a terrific interest also in appointing staff, didn't you, even down to the lowest levels, you always chaired the relevant committees.
W. No, not always. I did a little to begin with, but I then… I took a lot of interest in Heads of Department and Professors, which are partly overlapping, and one of the things that surprised me about Heads of Department who - I took up the references for those people - Heads of Department took up the references, I presumed, (I always used to) for their junior staff. Not at all, most of them let the office do it. This astonished me. I never would have let the Office do it, the Mathematics grapevine is far too important. After all, if a Professor told me the wrong thing about someone he was recommending, I could play the same trick on him next time. At least he might think about it! The other thing I did - some people thought it was a breach of confidence - [pause : topic resumed later] It wouldn't be true to say that the UGC firmly told us exactly what to do, but naturally their influence was considerable, and when what they wrote to was put to bodies like the Senatus, obviously those who agreed with what the UGC was suggesting had strong support.
C. So really, from your position, your feeling was that whether you were pro or con -expansion, it had to come because that's what we were being told to do?
W. It had to come. After all, the ones who wanted it were much more vocal than the ones who didn't, and in some ways better politicians. Burnett was a very shrewd politician. Jones was opposed to it, but dear Jones could get himself in a position where he only got one vote in the Senatus, and that's not being a good politician; the most brilliant Intelligence analyst on either side in World War II. Absolutely brilliant and a first-class player.
C. But not a success as Head of Department here?
W. I think in some ways, yes; not entirely. We're all of us partially successful. Was I not talking about the appointments?
C. Yes, you were, before we broke off.
W. I think that will have to be edited a bit, to put things in their right order. What I did, with the Heads of Department - I got the committee to produce what you might describe as a 'long short-list'. This might be eight or nine; it got rid of people who obviously had no chance however good they were, they had no chance. Essentially, if a single member of the committee wanted somebody on that list they got them, more or less. Sometimes you would argue with them gently, or the committee would. Then I wrote to the referees of each of these. I said, "The following is our preliminary short list. Of these, x and y give your name. Would you please tell me what you think of them as a teacher, as a scientist or a scholar, and as a colleague, or name any special quality, and if you feel able to make comparisons with anyone else on the list, we would be most grateful.
C. That was inviting the referees to rank everybody if they knew them?
W. If they wanted to, and I never got a letter which said, "It's not business to do this." Obviously one must ask these questions. It's no good saying "What is his suitability for the office?" I got, usually, very useful replies. Sometimes the reply told you as much about the author! Sometimes you found that certain subjects were split up into different specialities, where roughly anyone in your own speciality is first-rate. In History, presumably anybody doing your period would be first-rate. Or, alternatively, terrible! So, sometimes you could tell as much about the writer, but certainly they were vastly more informative than the general one which just asked for … The only useful thing about the general one is that you noticed what they didn't say, and hoped that they wrote then as you did and what they didn't say was bad. You hoped they meant that, otherwise it was a little unfair: a tricky one. That did work, and I was astonished at the number of Heads of Department who let Mrs Michie send a routine letter.
C. Then your long short-list was on the basis of these replies reduced to three or four?
W. Reduced to an interviewing list. Dugald Baird, I think, when he was Dean of Medicine, got me to interview seven people for a Chair That was early days. I said, "Never again! Preferably three - or four. Five, if you really push me, but no more." Otherwise you get their faces muddled.
C. Quite. And you didn't have outside referees on the committee, did you?
W. No, we didn't. This was the point. I had been an outside referee at another Scottish university; I was the only outside referee, and it just seemed to me that I was in too powerful a position. I hope I didn't abuse it, but after all, it was for a Chair and there was no internal expert in the filed and it seemed to me a mistake - not a mistake, but I thought I could do better. Essentially I was getting a very large number of external referees - they had to do it on paper. This was the point, of course, and people would usually say, "I don't know so-and-so's work at all"! or "I am not really qualified to do it" or "I think x is better on so and so". There is no doubt, of course, that in writing references it is easy enough when you have only got one friend to support. You mention all his good points; only if asked about them do you mention his bad ones, it is best to leave them out and hope that it is up to them to notice. That's easy, but if you have two, you can do an awful lot of harm. This was the thing I was talking about earlier. My chief backer for the Chair here - there were two of us that he was asked about and he had been had this way before, he had compared two of us (I was one) and neither of us had got anywhere near it. So this time he thought the one who was most likely to get it he would support. He was a charming man, Hardy. I have two letters of his which I found when I was moving: one, writing to say how astonished he was that I had been appointed; the next one, written the next day because the was the kindest of men, saying how glad he was. They are delightful letters. When I saw the other man who was already a professor and a very good mathematician, and his father was a Professor Edinburgh, I thought … He ended up as a Vice-Chancellor!
C. Trying to get a picture of your time as Principal, the things you have mentioned - I am trying to get a picture of how you thought issues fell in terms of weight and importance: obviously outside contacts with the UGC; money generally; people, meaning the appointments of the senior people in the University; buildings; academic policy at all? Encouragement of research and this sort of thing, or wasn't that so much of Principal's preoccupation?
W. I always felt as Head of Department that it was my business to look after research and so on, and no Principal interfered with me. I would have been astonished if he had attempted to do so. This is why I say Heads of Department are vital.
C. Appoint the best chap you can get and let him get on with it, would have been your motto, would it?
W. Certainly. And if you have got the right man, then the more freedom he has the better. He is only going to get what people think is his fair share of funds and resources. Of course he isn't going to think he has got his fair share! I certainly kept out of my own department, the Mathematics Department, though I did usually chair a committee for lecturers in that department, on the grounds that I had something to contribute, but of course the Professor's opinion was what mattered.
C. And, of course, you were in being active in research yourself?
W. Yes. I always love doing research.
C. Was it difficult to keep time for that when you were Principal?
W. Oddly enough not. You see, there is the Long Vacation when most people are away - no doubt working hard in libraries and so on, but still they are away. And it is convenient to be here because again and again Kelman, the Buildings Officer, would ring up and say "Look, such and such university can't use this money for building and we can have it if we can produce £30,000 of our own" or something like that. Nobody but I could agree - well, Cramb could have done but he had solicitors' practice to look after. This happened quite often; we always tried to have things on the drawing board ready to go to tender if necessary.
C. Would I be right in guessing that progressively you found the need to travel irksome, and disliked it, or would I be quite wrong about that?
W. Well, I have never been totally fond of travelling. I stopped going to conferences because you are put up in an uncomfortable and noisy student residence - I like my comforts. No, the only thing that the oil really did for me, personally, was to produce a good air service. Instead of having to get up at half past five and fly to London, and get back about ten o'clock, dog-tired, you could get back… the moment you had finished a meeting you just went to Heathrow and said "Can I be waiting on the next plane?" Usually you got on, with luck, in the afternoon. That was very much nicer. There was the also the interesting thing: if they ran out of planes, they cancelled the Aberdeen plane - until the oil. Thereafter they would cancel this plane and this plane and you would think that… but not a bit, there would always be a flight. That was the great advantage. I like flying, anyway. This is on the ground, of course, nobody likes it.
C. Have we mentioned all your major preoccupations or is there something obvious that I have left out of the time you were Principal?
W. I was very interested in the Air Squadron because I was one of the three officers who started it. I was interested in that when I was Professor.
C. And in student concerns more generally, I would guess from what you have said about your…
W. I was very interested in student concerns. During the war I was one of the Senatus members on the Union Committee. We had the Air Squadron at Marischal. We had nothing that you could call a mess but we did use the Kirkgate Bar, and we used the Union to eat quite often. I knew the Union Provisor then very well. I actually fire-watched and he said, "Come and do it in the Union. I can give you a bed with sheets and a hot meal." So he could! You got Form 6 allowance. Everybody got this. Everywhere else you were paid at the end of your shift. At the Union you were paid at the beginning. You then went down with the students to the Kirkgate Bar, which was included in the Union. It would have been terribly difficult to get on to their roof, but still it was included. They paid partly for the night watchman and this sort of thing. You sat there, drinking gently; the students all had money to stand their round because usually they were very keen on standing their round, but you didn't like them doing it. Then at 9.30pm when the pub shut you went back and had supper, and went to bed. Fortunately we were never turned out. Of course, the Union roofs were not inviting.
C. So those wartime and departmental contacts with students stood you in stead, did they, later when you were dealing with the student troubles?
W. I think so, yes. Again, on a Saturday night, when we were fire watching we would help clear, get the chairs back in the room from one o'clock in the morning. The students, who were fire watching, and I did that to make life easier for the Union. I got to know the students very well. There were various things like that. The cadets we had in the Air Squadron were an interesting lot. They had a bogus university - the University of Ellon - and they produced a magnificent proposal for research. The idea was to breed a cow and instead of producing milk it produced different alcoholic beverages - gin from one teat, whisky from another. (A copy of this document got to the Air Ministry. They thought it was such fun.) They were a nice lot. They were very interesting, because they were all reserved as Engineers, or Forestry students or Agriculture. It was very Aberdonian; they realised that plenty of was would be left for them and they discovered they could stop being reserves by volunteering for aircrew. So in they came to the Air squadron and did the initial wing which was the awkward thing where you were drilled and so on - nice to do it gently. Then they said, "no, I am air crew" and the scientists who were responsible for getting people reserved were furious. They thought I had done it. I hadn't. I had never encouraged anybody to be aircrew. I wasn't encouraging a boy to go to his death, that was his job.
C. In the sixties, at the time of 'revolting' students, were you conscious of this as a big problem when you were coping with it?
W. No, I was conscious of it. I kept my eye on it. We had one boy who was a bit too militant but even he had a brother in the Fleet Air Arm, that was something to be said for him. We had a succession of Presidents who really were excellent. I don't mean that they took my view or anything like that, but they did tell me if something was going to cause trouble and they told me in good time; and I could tell them if there as any sporting chance of getting it or not. In fact, immediately after I was appointed, Peter Scott was Rector at the time and he came to me with a list of things that the students had asked him to do. I said, "Oh yes, I am doing that, I am doing that, I hope to do that next year" and so on. This was pure chance. Peter looked a little downcast and said, "Do you mind me telling them that I got you to agree?" and I said, "Not at all, Peter. You will be blamed for an awful lot of things that aren't your fault. Why shouldn't you take credit for something that isn't?" (This is not the sort of thing for history!). I thing the Rector system is excellent. We were very lucky with our Rectors and also they stayed for three years. The weakness of the student activist is simply that he isn't here long enough to learn and to see that consequences of what he is doing. That's the real difficulty; it isn't really that… very few of them want to be a nuisance. They do think they know about what ought to be done. Very often they do. But they just aren't here long enough to get the experience. That's why medical Presidents were so useful.
C. I remember one called Darling who was very good, John Darling. In general, the Rector seemed to you a good institution, a useful institution, not in any sense nuisance?
W. I think so, because he was here for three years, he was democratically elected, there was no doubt about that. That was one thing - another thing I altered immediately: the Rectors' election, it was Scott's election, I think. The election use to be by Nations. Each Nation, according to where they were born - there were two big Nations and two small ones - each Nation met in a lecture theatre and voted openly. Their names were called by one professor and their votes recorded - they voted for a Procurator, a representative. When Peter Scott was elected my son was a student and he came back, this was a Saturday morning and they had started at eleven, and he arrived back at a quarter to two for his lunch, not best pleased of course. And this was disastrous because people playing games couldn't go, and on the whole I wanted the games players: they voted in a way which I thought interesting. So the first thing I did was to get that changed. There were one or two senior people who liked it as one of the oldest methods in Europe or something, but I got it changed to a method of balloting, on a working day so that they could come between lectures. This meant that one doubled the turnout. And nobody could complain that every student hadn't had a decent chance to elect the Rector. Very few except the undesirables - not the undesirables but the politically active, shall we say, were likely to spend their whole Saturday morning on this sort of nonsense.
C. I suppose the Rector, if he is someone of the stature of, say Jo Grimond whom I remember well, does bring a very good outside perspective to the Court?
W. Oh yes. Jo Grimond was very interesting indeed, and with his political experience. He had not been in office, but he had been an MP. I remember him warning us that certain of this colleagues felt that universities were doing too well. I may be misquoting him.
C. No, I think you are right. I remember him on the subject of staff Sabbatical leave which he was very opposed to and said the public would not understand why university lecturers who had all this long vacation and so forth needed sabbatical leave as well.
W. Nor did the staff understand in some departments! They thought we were sitting on a bag of gold. Of course it was only a matter of redistributing the duties.
That has all been extremely helpful.
End of interview
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