| Description | Interview with Edward Raven, recorded on 18th January 1985, by Colin McLaren
Transcript of Interview:
M You came to Aberdeen from Cambridge in 1934. Was it by choice or by chance?
R It was to some extent by chance. In those days the Professor was able to choose his assistants and he had written to his college at Cambridge and I had been mentioned as a possibility. That's how he wrote to me. The procedure then was simply that the professor decided who he wanted and the Court more or less automatically agreed.
M Did you come up for an interview?
R No, it was getting rather late. I had been in for two other jobs that summer and it was into July I think before I heard from him. I came up before term started, but that was after the appointment had been settled.
M Were they primarily looking for a teacher or a researcher?
R Difficult to say. They certainly wanted a teacher. I was, I suppose you would call it senior assistant. I was paid a bit more than the others, they were only paid £250, I was paid £300, because really I was doing a lecturer's job. As soon as I got here I was put straight on to lecturing to Honours students, some of whom were only two or three years younger than myself. But Souter was interested in research himself and I was doing research by then, I had been researching for the past year and so certainly there was the research side to it, and in those days of course, he and the Mathematics Department still followed the old system by which the degree exams were at the end of the Spring term and the Summer term was in a sense a sort of extra. Honours people would come and have some lectures before going onto the next year and those who had failed their exams would come for extra lectures, but on the whole the Summer term was much lighter than the other two and therefore I could do research. I only had in fact I think seven lectures to deliver during the Summer term and so I had plenty of time for research then under Souter. Everything changed of course, as soon as Noble arrived.
M What was your area of research in fact?
R Greek coins. I have done quite a bit on that since those days.
M But you were lecturing in fact primarily in the Latin.
R Oh yes it was entirely Latin. This was the thing I really barely understood properly when I arrived because I was rather unfamiliar with the term Humanity and I think rather confused it with the Humanities plural and I didn't realise that I was going to be doing absolutely nothing but Latin and that there was a complete division between Latin and Greek, this was unheard of at Cambridge.
M What place did Latin have in the Arts Curriculum at Aberdeen in the Thirties?
R Of course for the ordinary degree it was still virtually a compulsory subject, that is to say strictly speaking it had to be Latin or Greek and obviously hardly anyone could take the Greek option so you had everyone having to pass in Latin and the Latin class in those days was I think a little under 100 but it was quite large.
M Why did so few take Greek?
R Well many of them didn't have a chance of doing it at school. Greek was already falling out of use pretty considerably by then.
M What was the standard of the first year intake in Latin?
R Well the bottom part of the class of course was pretty dismal. A lot of them didn't want to do Latin but just had to do it and that was the great disadvantage of this system of compulsory Latin. It meant that the standard was bound to be low. Of course, I was quite unfamiliar with this sort of thing in Cambridge. Nearly everyone read honours there. The pass degree at Cambridge was a thing which had almost disappeared I think, certainly in Classics, so I was quite unprepared for this large class.
M What about the other end of the first year, the brighter ones? How did their standards compare to those with which you were familiar in England?
R Oh they were good. I wasn't really familiar with any standards because I had never done any teaching before, but they were obviously good and I had to take them quite a lot. I had both to lecture to them and to correct their Latin proses and their translations and there was no difficulty about the standards there.
M How popular was Classics as an Honours subject?
R It was quite popular. There were normally about 10 people a year taking Classics at that time.
M And did they go then into teaching Classics themselves or were there other reasons for their choice?
R Oh they didn't all go into teaching. Some of them went into the Civil Service or many other careers, diplomacy one or two went into, all sorts of things.
M To what extent was the syllabus that you found at Aberdeen a traditional syllabus?
R Are you talking about the Honours or the Ordinary?
M The Honours.
R The Honours. Well it was rather narrow. There was a limited number of set books and by no means all of those set books were lectured on. This was something which was changed immediately by Noble when he arrived. And I think Souter did not really get across to the students what he expected of them, at least as far as I am aware, because I remember my first year I was left free to decide what I would lecture on to the junior Honours people. (79)
R That was always done in the Spring term, and I decided to lecture on Juvenal, some of Juvenal. This was not a set book but you could do whatever you liked within reason and I remember he took the line that if they have any sense they will have read some Juvenal for themselves. This was a somewhat optimistic idea. Later on under other professors we used to make them read certain books during the Summer Vacation and in more recent times at any rate we would examine them on those books when they came back in October. Souter apparently just left it to their - what he thought was their common sense, but I don't think he really conveyed to them that he expected so much work from them.
M How important was the Classical Society for extra-curricular expansion of their ordinary class-time work?
R The students' Classical Society. Oh I don't think it would have gone very far in that direction.
M Did it bring up scholars from other universities?
R It did at some times, but of course it is difficult for people to come up to Aberdeen. We got people from St. Andrews and Glasgow and so on occasionally perhaps once a term or something like that, but there were student papers and we were called upon sometimes to read a paper. I do remember visits from scholars like that but it was rather a rare event.
M To what extent if you were to have read a paper or any of the other assistants upon their own research, would the students have appreciated this?
R Well it was probably wise at any rate in my case not to read a paper on my own research which was a fairly obscure corner of the classical world. I can't remember quite what I did read papers on now. I do think I once read a paper on Greek portraiture with some lantern slides which seemed a rather more interesting subject.
M What is your assessment of Professor Souter as a scholar?
R As a scholar he was quite eminent in a way. He was a Fellow of the British Academy but his speciality was Late Latin and especially Church Fathers which didn't appeal to many other people. He did some quite distinguished work I think on that but nobody knew very much about it except himself I think. He was apt to mention in lecturing I believe the fact that Lewis & Short's dictionary which we used in those days was very deficient in its dealings with these late authors. Well it hadn't room of course, and he would say 'I have found this word so many times in this author or that author' and really it was that sort of attitude which eventually lead him to be chosen to start work on the Oxford Latin dictionary, but really he had no experience of dictionary work.
R Just his own reading.
M And Souter as a teacher, you already suggested there were limitations in the extent to which he had a rapport with the students?
R Yes. He certainly was not a good teacher. I think he more or less dictated his lectures and his attitude with regard to the choice of books for them to read was dubious because I think he tried to avoid books of which there were readily available editions very often, and he made them buy plain texts without any notes to help them. The lecturer was supposed to help them through the difficulties but this would have been all very well for competent students, the people who were going to read Honours and so on, and I believe this system is used or was used till recently in Holland in the teaching of Latin - you are expected to wrestle with Latin with no help except a dictionary, which is all very well and very good for good scholars, but for the bottom half of the Ordinary Class (as it was in those days) was quite hopeless. In point of fact they used to either get a crib or simply take down what the lecturer gave them as the version. The bad ones I think probably were unable to follow the constructions of the Latin except as far as it was explained to them and this was not at all satisfactory. He also expected even that class to some extent to prepare books for themselves: in that case they would have editions with notes which they would use. But his choice of books was partly governed I think by the fact that he wanted to choose books of which there was no good annotated addition. He wanted the students to tackle the Latin without looking up everything in the notes, and that meant he had to choose pretty obscure and frankly pretty dull books sometimes. I had four years of lecturing on Seneca, De Beneficiis, On Benefits, on giving gifts and the morality of returning gifts and so on, a deadly dull Stoic work, and there were seven books altogether; we ploughed through one book each year. I had four years which was quite enough. It was good in a way, partly because in theory at any rate the better students had to tackle this Latin without any help except what the lecturer gave them, and also in a way it was good for young lecturers like myself who had to tackle this and look up the allusions to this person or that person, find out about them and provide the relevant information, explain all the constructions and so on, without again having to take that ready made from some authority you see, so there was a good side to it, but it was really pretty hopeless to expect students to deal with that; and then he also would choose some rather difficult stuff. He made the Ordinary Class read selections of Cicero's letters which are very interesting and historically important but they are nearly always pretty difficult, much more difficult than that class should be asked to do.
R And he seemed to take the same line with regard to Honours. For instance in his own lectures to Honours he lectured on Lucan and he would choose books of Lucan of which no annotated edition was available. Two or three of the books of Lucan are more popular than the rest, numbers 1, 7 and 8 are the usual ones; he would lecture on books 2 and 3. I think he felt that this was something a scholar ought to do you see to provide a commentary where none was available in print, but again it meant that he was lecturing on the less interesting books.
M To what extent do you think he was trying to perpetuate the traditions of Geddes in maintaining a high standard of Latin scholarship in the north-east?
R So far as his students were concerned I think he may have been influenced to some extent by that. He himself had not been under Geddes I think. Geddes had become Principal before Souter was here as a student. It was Sir William Ramsay of course who was his Humanity professor.
M But Ramsay had had a tradition of going off on archaeological investigations, a rather different character than Geddes, and I wondered if Souter was in any way trying to reinforce the more traditional style of academic work in the department?
R I don't know really. I don't know very much about how the department was run under Ramsay, what books he read. I think Souter kept on one or two of the books which had been used in Ramsay's day and in one case it was Statius and Statius again is one of these rather obscure, not very interesting authors, so there may be something in it.
M To what extent did Souter involve himself in the university as a whole, in university politics?
R Well, this is something where I am getting a bit more out of my depth, but he certainly attended the Senate and so on and in fact after Sir George Adam Smith retired - Sir George Adam Smith was Principal for my first year - after that I think Souter took on sort of temporary Vice-Principalship or whatever you'd call it in the interim before Sir William Fyfe arrived, that was two terms. I don't think he was a leader of university politics. I can well remember that one who was a bit of a leader, that was Hector Macdonald, the Professor of Mathematics in my first year, on the day of a Senatus meeting would pop round from the Mathematics department next door during the five or ten minute interval between lectures and have a word or two with Souter, no doubt telling him in what way he would like him to vote on this or that question you see. Macdonald died at the end of my first year but I well remember seeing him come in in that way.
M Which of your fellow assistants stands out in your memory?
R Well, not going quite back to the beginning, the obvious one is Eric Turner, who ended up as Sir Eric [the] great Papyrologist. He came two years after me in 1936 and at first he was simply in the Humanity Department [for] two years but then after Noble arrived they decided that he should be made a lecturer in Ancient History to serve both departments and that he continued to be, except for war service, till 1948. He was one of the people at Bletchley during the war.
M The others, did they come and go at quite frequent intervals or was there little mobility?
R They mostly stayed three or four years. You were supposed to be not more than five years in the post but then with changing Professors, (there was a change three years after I arrived), this didn't always work out. I myself was made a lecturer after I had done six years but by then the war had intervened and it was rather different from normal procedures.
M To what extent were you able to carry out your research here or was it absolutely essential to go back down south to work on your own - I think you described it as esoteric - aspect ...
R Yes well I had to work in the British Museum on other coin collections for quite a lot. Of course I could do a great deal away from the coins and I did quite a bit up here, and there is of course a small collection here which I naturally looked at, but in that work one has to collect information from all the collections one can get in touch with, both private collectors and public, and when you can't go and visit the place yourself you try to get them to send you plaster casts of the coins, because you have to go into great detail and identify all the different dies from which these coins were struck - since they were hand-made every die is slightly different. And then you work out what is called die linking, which enables you to arrange the coins in the right order to a large extent, so naturally that I had to do either by going to the museums in question or by just studying the plaster casts I had. When I had been here about three years I did go and spend an Easter Vacation in Berlin, that was one of the greatest collections and still is, and I had been there before, the Autumn before I was appointed here. So one needed to travel about a bit.
M Did the university in any way underwrite the cost of that trip or was it purely personal?
R Not I think in that case. It did help me a bit later on after the war to attend some Classical Congresses of various kinds.
M What was the department's relationship with the Greek department?
R Well I myself, I must say, didn't see as much as I probably ought to have done of the Greek department. One met them at meetings like the Classical Society and that sort of thing and occasionally at other events. Turner of course was moving backwards and forwards between the two departments all the time doing his ancient history but looking back I sort of rather blame myself for not taking more interest in the Greek department. I did have to be in contact with Professor Cameron whenever I wanted to go down and work on the coins at Marischal College because I had to get the keys from him, but the ordinary work - I don't think there was really much contact.
M How close was the department in its relations with other departments within the Faculty of Arts?
R Well we had these Honours degrees of Latin combined with various modern languages - Latin/French - there were more in those days than have survived till the present. There used to be Latin/French, Latin/English, Latin/Spanish and so on. But possibly it was rather more theoretical than real, the combination there. I do get the impression for instance, in one case certainly, that while we - this is later than Souter's day - while we gave special courses to people to try and make this link between the subjects real and valuable, the other side just made them do the normal Honours course and didn't take much notice.
M Perhaps we can now look at the university community on a wider basis. What were your first impressions of the community when you arrived?
R Well I was kept pretty busy of course and I didn't have a great deal of time for anything outside my own department and I did not stay here during the vacations, I went back to my home of course. I had in Cambridge been fairly active in the musical world - I played in the orchestra - and I was certainly disappointed to arrive here and find that there was nothing for me to do in that line in the university. There was no music department till it was started during the war and though there may have been a few small orchestras in the town, which I didn't discover, though some survived till later, I don't think they had much room for a woodwind player, they were mostly string orchestras. One or two kindly people in the musical world here used to have me out to some sort of meals and musical evenings, but really I got very little to do and I was a little taken back to find that there was so little music in the university. It was a bit odd of course because only a few years earlier a great musician Charles Stanford Terry had retired and he was still alive when I arrived here, though I never met him, he died when I had been here about eighteen months. And he had conducted a musical society which gave a concert once a year at any rate. I have come across a little information about the sort of stuff they did and it was rather popular. I don't think they ever tackled any great work, I mean even Messiah would not have been the sort of thing they did; they did a miscellaneous concert of part-songs or that kind of thing I gather. But that seems to have faded out after his time, at any rate I've never heard of anything of that sort. There was the Chapel Choir and I think possibly the students had sing-songs of student songs but that's about all there was as far as I could make out.
M Did you form any impression of the relationship between non-professorial and professorial staff?
R Well there were very few lecturers in those days. A few departments like Geography had a lecturer as head. Rex Knight was still a lecturer at the head of the Psychology department, but otherwise the set-up was mainly professors with so many assistants. There was one lecturer in History and there was one lecturer in French in each case under a professor, but that sort of thing was quite rare, and so assistants were all - almost all - very junior. The professors were often very kindly I think, certainly Souter was quite kindly in his attitude to me. Not only was one invited round to the house - that's not surprising - but he liked to take us out for walks. He often went for a walk in the afternoon and one of us would be asked to accompany him every so often and he introduced me to several walks that I shouldn't have discovered for myself. He introduced me to Hazlehead, well that may seem rather obvious, but he didn't take me the obvious way. We went by bus and down the Countesswells Road and then came into that wood at the top of Hazlehead and so to the park. I think he did that deliberately so that I should come down from the top of Hazlehead and see this view of Aberdeen below, a surprise view, and the walk with him which I remember most I think was quite a long one which took us to the top of Brimmond. One went out on the Alford Road by bus to a place called Jessiefield and then you went north by a little side road and you got onto what in England would be called green lanes, I am not sure what one calls them here, farm tracks and so on. One little bit that I remember was through a wood and eventually you came out on the south side of Brimmond and climbed to the top of the hill - it hadn't got radar and stuff on top of course in those days - and then you came down and joined other farm tracks and came down eventually to Bucksburn. I could trace that walk on the map still, although I haven't done it for years. I do remember taking my wife that way after the war once and it was (381) quite a pleasant walk. In that sort of way his generation of professor I think looked after their staff quite a bit.
M Was there any suggestion of resentment of the power of the professorate amongst the junior members of staff?
R I don't remember hearing much in that line; one was obviously so junior oneself that one probably didn't expect to have much attention in a way. I have heard occasional stories of people being put in their place you know, but on the other hand the generation which Souter belonged to, that is to say the Professors appointed before 1914, were many of them very kindly, considerate people I gather. I didn't know any except Souter myself, but this is from what I have read, especially about some of the Divinity professors. There was a famous one whose testimonials for his students, however mediocre, were so glowing that everyone had to be warned against taking him too seriously.
M Where did you live when you first came?
R I lived near King's in digs. Cheyne Road and round that part of the town. Nearly all the time. I had to change digs several times, eventually I found a good one in Cheyne Road.
M Would this have been true of most of the junior staff at the time?
R Certainly several of them did live there. Some of them of course were connected with Aberdeen in some way, either had actual homes or relatives I think that they might have lived with. I don't remember more than one or two in my own particular area.
M You have spoken of your disappointment at not finding a musical scene comparable with that at Cambridge. Were there any other disappointments?
R Well the conditions under which one worked had some disappointing features compared with things nowadays. For instance, one got absolutely no secretarial help. I had to type out stencils and run them off on the duplicator for any of the papers that I wanted and I had to give papers every week to somebody; that took up quite a bit of time. I hadn't even learnt to type at that time but I had to buy a typewriter after the first year and got down to that. For at least twenty years we had no secretarial help at all of that kind. It was about the mid-Fifties I think before a few secretaries began to appear and then they were mostly for the professors and I didn't get much help for several years after that. Another thing was that one had absolutely nowhere in the college to call one's own. There were no rooms for staff other than the professors or Heads of Department that I know of. When one went to King's to lecture, one went to the ante-room which was supposed to be the professor's but this was where one left one's hat and coat and found one's gown to lecture in. There weren't even any rooms to give tutorials in except (452) the lecture rooms; we had two Latin lecture rooms and even the professor himself would give his tutorials in one of those lecture rooms. If he tried to do it in his own ante-room he would be interrupted by us coming in constantly to give lectures. In the library there were these seats allocated to students - you may remember the system. That had been started I think by Professor Ferguson when he was in charge as the curator, several years before I came but the rest of us had only a very few seats available. In the Geddes Room there was a large table in the centre with a good many seats around, which were not allocated, and one could perhaps squeeze in there but working in the library was not very easy for the junior staff. When Eric Turner started to work on the collection of papyri which he published in 1939 I think it was, he had to be allocated a special desk at King's to do his work at. So one wrote one's lectures in one's digs, and this went on so far as I was concerned till just before the war, just the beginning of the war, because in the Summer before war started there was a considerable amount of work done at King's converting those rooms immediately above the entrance to King's library from one storey to two. They had been big one-storey lecture rooms like the others on the south side. Once that was done these rooms became available and that was better for small classes. As one result of that alteration we took over the place where we remained till I actually retired in 1980, just on the south side on the way to the pavilion. Now that had been used previously by students as the place where they had their cups of coffee in the morning and that kind of thing, and we got in there in January 1940 after the war had just started, and it was Noble who was responsible for seeing the opening for the Classical departments, and both Greek and Latin were transferred to there, and we were able to have rooms of our own upstairs there. In fact I kept that room, apart from my absence during the war, for the remaining 40 years of my career. So that was a great improvement. But it wasn't till after the war that other departments began to provide rooms for people to work in to any great extent.
M What about a common room, was that available to you then?
R The common room, oh yes that was the Elphinstone room, the part nearest to the Chapel, that was the common room. We went for coffee there and the newspapers and so on, and that went on for a long time till the 1960s. I didn't go in there a great deal, except occasionally if I wanted to get a read of the newspapers, I used sometimes to go there in the afternoon because there was practically no afternoon lecturing at King's in those days and one could get the papers so easily at that time. Another (519) thing I'll tell you which I used to do sometimes in the afternoon, I don't know if you know about this. In those days the current periodicals had no room for themselves at King's. What is now the sacrist's office was rigged out as a sort of crude place for these periodicals. In those days there was no entrance to the sacrist's office under the archway, that was a blank wall. You went in at the door on the way to the Chapel and there were these two little rooms. They had perfectly plain, deal, unpainted, shelves round the walls, a table in the middle and one or two rather rickety chairs, and nobody in charge, and the periodicals were laid on these shelves, and you just went in and read whatever you wanted to. So I used to keep up to date on my particular subjects sometimes in the afternoons there. That went on till about the beginning of the war I think. That was one place where one could get a seat and a quiet place to do a bit of work. It was not so easy in the library.
M How would you characterise the student community in the Thirties?
R There were a certain number of people who you would not get today, people who went on trying to pass Latin for year after year and obviously had little chance of passing, they were the bottom end of the scale, but on the whole I think I was fairly reasonably well impressed by the students. But I had very little experience of people outside my own department really - a certain amount, eventually when we got some music going, which we did after three or four years, I met a few in that way.
M How did this come about, the institution of a fresh musical initiative?
R Well, the first concert of all that I played in here was got up by two or three people including myself and my present wife who was then a Classics student, and two or three other friends of hers, it was just a sort of chamber music effort to try and get a little music going. It was just after Sir William Fyfe had arrived, it was in May 1936, in the Picture gallery. I remember it particularly because in the middle of one piece something went wrong with my instrument and I had to stop and take it to pieces and start all over again. But we got encouragement from Fyfe who I think was keen on getting that side of things going and many more cultural sides of things going. Then we began to have Saturday evening meetings of about a dozen or fourteen or fifteen people, mainly string players in the Students' Union and for the most part we simply played for our own amusement. We did once give a concert I remember, but this was quite unofficial and was before there was any music department. At least it enabled us to keep a bit of music going.
M To what extent were the students conscious of social problems in the town?
R Oh yes I think they were for some time though I myself had very little to do with this side of things. I know for instance that Noble when he was a student here was a fairly active Labour supporter who went round making speeches at street corners and I think that was the way in which he became a competent speaker.
M How was this viewed in the university?
R Well I wasn't here of course then but I don't know that anyone objected strongly, possibly some of the more elderly professors.
M And how politically conscious were the students? Was it apparent from student literature on the campus itself that they had any great interest in political matters of the Thirties?
R Well I don't honestly remember. I used to take Gaudie in those days but for instance how far any of them took sides on the question of the Spanish War, I really cannot remember that sort of thing. I was kept pretty busy in those days you remember. I had to write a lot of lectures you see. For the first three or four years I had four new courses of lectures to write every year and so on, and in any case I'm afraid politics is not something which I pay much attention to.
M With the imminence of war, was there any general change in atmosphere in the university community?
R Well I saw it coming of course. I can remember Professor Cameron telling me about the invasion of Austria which I had not heard about. I suppose he had heard on the wireless.
M Is [this] Cameron [of] the Department of Greek?
R Yes. We were reserved or supposed to be in a reserved occupation though people did begin to go away to the war fairly soon. In my own department it was the people under thirty who went first and that would have been most of my fellow assistants, even Turner was under thirty. They all went in the early months of 1941. I was able to hang on till the Summer Term but I was called up in September 41 actually and that left Noble with nobody but himself and eventually he appointed a recent girl graduate to be an assistant and he got Dr Edward who was the retired head of the Training College, the present College of Education, to come in and give some help, but they had to cut down the amount of teaching. For instance Noble was not prepared to try and teach Ancient History so that just went by the board for the rest of the war.
M Can we just perhaps deal with the war and your own career. You were called up in 41 and very briefly what happened when you were away from the university? You were in the Royal Air Force.
R I was in the Air Force. I was doing photographic interpretation. At first I was interviewed for going into the army when I was at home in that summer but the sort of things they talked about didn't encourage me much. They seemed to think of putting me into the medical corps or something of that sort and I knew that this photographic work was the sort of thing which might suit me because in a way it had some resemblance to my own coin work. It meant looking at small detail on the photographs and it was rather like comparing this die with that die on the coins you see and I made that point when I was interviewed and was chosen for the work. They had to expand very much. We started the war with I think about two photographic interpreters. I forget what the exact figure was by the end of the war but including the Americans it was something like 1500 so you can see there was a lot of ground to make up.
M And how long were you involved in that?
R For the rest of the war. Four years. I was in this country at first. The Headquarters was at Medmenham nearly Henley. A big house there which belonged to Garfield Weston, a bakery king and of course a lot of huts were put up round the house. It wasn't originally there but it had landed there before I got there. I was there for 18 months or so then I went out to North Africa where we had a unit. I was 9 months in North Africa, first Algeria then Tunisia and then we went across to Italy. This was just before Christmas 1943 and we set up shop in a little town on the east side of Italy called San Severo which is north of Foggia and I was there for the rest of the war.
M So when did you do the fire watching that you mentioned in your letter?
R The fire watching. ARP work. Oh that was before. I joined that in October 39. Several of us junior members of the staff here became ARP wardens. For instance Stanley Potter from the Mathematics Department and others who you wouldn't have known. Alec Parker who was then the Head of Spanish, Kenneth Brooke who was a junior in the German Department and who else, well anyhow that's enough to be going on with. We were at Seaton School, we had a little post sort of tucked away where the kids kept their gym shoes or something of that sort you know. We had to man this place at night, so every so often one spent a night there waiting for the telephone to ring and we had quite a large sector. It extended to the Brig o' Balgownie and down to the mouth of the Don and all that Seaton housing area and quite a bit of Old Aberdeen. We occasionally had to go round visiting people. I remember we had to go and distribute rubber ear-plugs to all the different houses, and this rather opened my eyes, to see the poverty of some of these houses in Aberdeen. For instance, I remember visiting my own postman with his family, all living in one room you know. Then I forget his official title - he was not the head of the whole of Aberdeen - but for our part of Aberdeen the head of ARP was Professor Ferguson, and we used to get postcards and notices round from him about our work.
M Can we talk a little bit now of the Forties and the Fifties outwith the war. You mentioned Professor Noble on various occasions. How would you assess him first of all as a scholar?
R Oh he was a good scholar but he was not Souter's type who would beaver away and do a lot of work and publish a lot. He was an expert on philology you see, comparative philology, and knew all about Sanscrit and all this sort of thing, Indo-European, and taught it of course and he would write encyclopaedia articles. He wrote for the Oxford Classical Dictionary on that sort of subject, Latin dialects and that sort of thing and I remember just after the war he wrote an article for the new Chambers Encyclopaedia which came out then. I remember that particularly because he got me to type this article out and it took me some time. But he didn't publish much, he didn't even write many reviews.
M Were his strengths then as a teacher?
R Oh yes he was a good teacher. As I told you he had learnt the art of speaking and holding people's attention by oratory on the street corner and he had better ideas as to what books to make people read and so on.
M Was he more popular with the students than Souter had been?
R Oh I think so undoubtedly yes. The students appreciated his skill as a teacher. I may say that he would lecture entirely without notes. He used to take in a plain text of the author he was lecturing on, say Livy, he was very fond of lecturing on Livy. The students would have an edition with notes which they could use but he would simply take in a plain Latin text. He would translate it without any assistance and would then comment on it. He would know what to comment on to help the students and he would not give then unnecessary stuff. He only allowed himself one very slight help in lecturing. He explained to me once. He used to make little marks under some of the Latin words which would remind him what sort of comment was necessary. I mean a cross would mean: explain the derivation of this word; and a circle would mean: comment on the syntax or something of that sort. But apart from that he did it entirely from memory and had a very good memory obviously. He was also good at university business. He was a prominent member of the Senatus and he was of course the University Grants Committee member representing Aberdeen. He was a good administrator.
M To what extent did the place of Latin in the curriculum change in this period?
R Well it improved of course under Noble because he chose better books and as I told you he made Honours students read more books. He also introduced a proper Advanced Degree. Under Souter the Advanced Degree was rather a farce really. Yes I think it was very much improved.
M Did the standards of Latinity of the students show any change in the Forties and Fifties?
R I think it was still pretty good. Certainly we had some very good Honours years after the war into the Fifties, sometimes quite large Honours years. The numbers taking Honours began to go down by then. It was pretty rare for us to have ten people or thereabouts taking Honours in a year, but occasionally we had some remarkably good years.
M Are you prepared to comment on the work of Professor Noble's successor, Professor Watt?
R Oh yes Watt was certainly a good professor too, and again he ran the department very efficiently and chose the books and the work that the students should do very efficiently.
M He was perhaps more than the other two very much involved in university affairs was he not?
R I don't know that he was more involved than Noble. Of course he became Vice-Principal eventually, a thing which didn't exist I think in Noble's day, but Noble -the mere fact that he was the University Grants Committee man put him in a prominent position so far as that was concerned.
R Oh he became Principal of King's College, London.
M But this was simply a college within a university, whereas here he had had a Regius Chair in a full ancient university. Was the move to London considered promotion?
R Ah yes he was a Principal you see. It was administrative work now, that was the end of his scholarship, and I remember him saying that he felt that he had done all he could here, he had shot his bolt as he said in Aberdeen you see. He had been here from 1938-52, 14 years, and had difficult years with the war and so on. In a way I think he was a little unwilling to leave but they were finding it a bit difficult I think to get someone, because the Principal of King's College, London, strictly speaking was supposed to be a Church of England man. Noble of course was not, he was Presbyterian, but he was at any rate an elder of St. Machar's and known to be a keen churchman and therefore he filled the bill in that way and I think they probably found it a bit difficult to find anyone who did fill the bill from further south. So he was persuaded to take this on, a little unwillingly but I dare say he was quite glad to have the climate in London instead of the climate in Aberdeen to some extent.
M Turning to the more social side now. You mentioned earlier that you married, in fact you married one of your students. May I ask was this a rare occurrence in Aberdeen?
R I can think of one or two other instances though I shouldn't think it was very unusual.
M But it caused no difficulty within the [department].
R Well it was sometime after, you see it was well after the war that we married .... I was whisked away to war.
M And was life very different as a married member of staff. You had of course been made a lecturer and subsequently became a senior lecturer in 1952. How did your social life within the university community change?
R Well I don't know. One did perhaps go out to events a bit more. One was here the whole time of course. In a way as a young assistant one was a bit detached. Of course to start with when I first came here I didn't dream that I would spend the rest of my life here obviously. Most assistants got jobs elsewhere and moved away.
M Can I ask at this point, I was going to ask later, but it seems appropriate. Why did you decide to stay and in a sense spend your entire working life here?
R Well I did go in occasionally for jobs elsewhere but I came to like Aberdeen. I think that many people from the South do and I was brought up in the country of course and I appreciate living in a place like this where one is near the country and where one can take one's holidays without meeting dozens of cars on the roads all the time and so on you see, and I got to know the merits of Aberdeen. There is of course as everyone knows the disadvantage of it being so far away. I suppose from the point of view of my research it was a little bit of a disadvantage. I used to reckon I was about the only person in Scotland who worked on Greek coins. There is another man in Edinburgh now but you see one appears to be rather separated from people with one's own interests.
M After the war during the Austerity period in the Fifties and about even the early Sixties, in what ways did the community change?
R Well of course there was an increase in numbers but then in a sense this is nothing new. This had been going on from the time of the Fusion in 1860 hadn't it? I think the university was about 600 then, it was about 1200 by the time I arrived 70 years or so later. Immediately after the war by about 1948 it went up to 2400 or thereabouts I think, then it sank back to about 1700 in the early Fifties and then came the big expansion afterwards, but as I say this is nothing new. In Cambridge for instance - Cambridge in my father's day (he went up in 1897) was 3000, by my time it was 5000 and I went up in 1929, now I believe it is something like 9000 you see, it is not entirely [a] post-war phenomenon is it?
M But the growth of staff to service this growing number - this presumably changed the character of the teaching community.
R Yes you get far more permanent lecturers of course coming in. And a good thing too. There was a notorious case in the Mathematics Department where a man who had been Senior Wrangler at Cambridge called James Goodwillie came here as an assistant and remained an assistant till he was about 70. He was called an assistant with a status of lecturer, but I doubt if he got the pay of a lecturer.
M Were there many examples of that?
R No, I don't think so. When Edward Wright arrived as new Professor of Mathematics he soon altered that situation, but Goodwillie was about to retire in a year or two at that time. Oh yes the whole balance of the staff altered entirely. And before the war when I first came there were a great many part-time lecturers, there still are in some subjects, Medicine and so on, but there were far more I think then. Law was largely part-time lecturers.
M Before the war too and certainly in your early days you described yourself as being in digs near the university. With the growth of staff to what extent did the location of staff and their families change. Was there a change in the pattern?
R Oh I expect so, yes. I don't know that I am very expert on this, but after the war of course people would find it difficult to find anywhere. I remember David Reece who came to teach History after Eric Turner in 1948, he had to go for at least a year out to Newtonhill or somewhere outside Aberdeen and then he got one of these little houses which the university had recently built in Tillydrone for a short time, then of course he came to live in this neighbourhood here
M Had the location of university staff at Tillydrone - had the initiative come from new arrivals or had it been something planned earlier?
R Oh no I think the university saw the need for this and built these houses. They were rather small houses but they were at least something reasonably near their work.
M Did you notice a change in attitude or character of the student body in the post-war period the Forties and Fifties?
R At first of course we had a very good class of students. The people came in from the forces, I think they were people who worked hard and were probably some of the best students one ever had to some extent. In a way the standard didn't improve altogether because [in] my own subject eventually the standard dropped, not so much from our fault but because the Latin was not properly taught in the schools. The amount of time given to Latin was so short that before I left people hadn't really a good foundation in Latin at all but that wouldn't apply elsewhere. I think there was fear at about the time when the big expansion was first mooted, say round about 1960, there was fear amongst many of us, to some extent I shared this, that we wouldn't get enough people of the required standard from this vast influx, but I think that was to a considerable extent proved false in the sequel. I think a supply of people of good standard was much bigger than we had imagined.
M To what extent did the view you've just expressed, to what extent did it represent a general view amongst the university staff?
R You mean, they were afraid that the standard would go down?
M Yes.
R Yes I think a good many people were afraid of that. I don't know that I knew enough people to form a real valid opinion about that, but I think quite a few did.
M In the period of expansion, the Sixties and particularly the later Sixties with the impact of Robbins and a whole fresh new discussion of the role of the university - to what extent was this discussed and debated within the university staff?
R Oh it certainly was discussed. It was discussed in the Faculty of course quite a bit and I don't know that I discussed it a great deal with my colleagues apart from that, but it certainly was discussed a lot. Constant discussions. The ideas of how large the university should become kept on being revived, I think it got up to 10,000 at one time didn't it, I'm not quite sure that I remember. It never actually quite reached 6,000 did it?
M And the promotion of new universities was that also a source of concern or a matter which was viewed with enthusiasm?
R I don't know that there was a great deal of concern. Sometimes perhaps there was a little bit of concern. There was a possibility of a university at Inverness, I think at one time, but that might have caused a little bit of concern, doubt whether that could be made viable and so on. The sort of thing one wanted to avoid was the situation in those days between Dundee and St. Andrews: Dundee you know kept on being attached to St. Andrews and detached and so on, an unfortunate business.
M Your department had not of course grown in numbers, in anything like the same way as some of the other departments and indeed some of the newer departments in new subjects in the Social Sciences. What was your view of the explosion of new sciences and new disciplines?
R Well I used to be adviser of studies for some time when this was first started, it was in 1966 or thereabouts and there was this enormous enthusiasm for a time for some of the Social Sciences as you say, but I can well remember one of my Honours people after experience of two or three years of this course saying that he didn't think it had really amounted to as much as he had been lead to imagine.
M On what grounds?
R I think he thought that there was not enough in it.
M In terms of intellectual or academic content or simply a work-load.
R Not a work-load, I think academic content and so on probably. He didn't think it was the equivalent of some of the older subjects.
M Were you a member of Senatus?
R No.
M Purely Faculty. And did you involve yourself in the discussions at Faculty that debated expansion and all these other matters?
R I was never a great committee man. I hardly ever did more than vote in these matters. Our Faculty on the whole was not a thing I had great enthusiasm for.
M That part, is it possible for you just very briefly to identify the protagonists and antagonists of expansion within the Arts Faculty?
R Do you know I don't think I can. I honestly don't remember. No this is the sort of thing which didn't register a great deal with me.
M One has the impression that in the late Sixties and the Seventies standards of Latinity in schools had declined. To what extent is this a true assumption?
R Oh yes, very much so. Here, because nearly all the schools are in the state system. It had declined, I think that one must say that it had declined quite remarkably, partly owing to the attitude of those in charge - I don't mean the teachers but the administrators probably more - as to the amount of time that should be given to Latin. The only people we were getting towards the end of my career who were able to make competent Honours scholars were people who had not been to that sort of school but had been to some sort of school like St. Leonard's at St. Andrew's, independent schools. They kept up the standard of the Classics; otherwise not, I'm afraid.
M Can you describe the means by which Professor Watt and presumably yourself and the rest of the department tried to meet this problem. To what extent was there a restructuring of the syllabus?
R The restructuring did not take place much until after Professor Watt's day I think. For instance, Professor Watt did not go in for introducing Latin for beginners. That had been done in the Greek Department by Professor Cormack who believed in this, but in fact did not get many candidates I'm afraid. It was only after Professor Watt had retired that this was tried in Latin and as far as I remember - this was just about the time that I myself gave up - but as far as I remember (or was told, perhaps it was) that for a time they introduced a double Ordinary Latin class, first-year Latin class: one for people who had already done some Latin and the other for beginners. But they found that even the people who had officially done Latin preferred to go into the beginners' class because I suppose they didn't feel they had sound enough foundations from what little they had done at school. This was rather revealing.
M In retrospect, to what extent would you think the earlier introduction of a beginners' class or indeed a class in translated Latin as in our times might have enabled the subject to retain popularity with the students?
R I don't know that a beginners' course would have done a great deal of good; in the case of Greek as I say it didn't attract many people. On the other hand the Classical Civilisation class, I haven't heard the numbers very exactly since I left, only once or twice I think, but that certainly has been a success: often classes of 50 or so taking that. We were not very smart in introducing that here, but I don't know that we were very slow in introducing it. It came in in 1973.
M Was it a move that you yourself approved of?
R Oh yes, certainly yes. In a way I think Classics has tended to - Latin has tended to be too narrow. Now for instance Noble's attitude was to make them read lots of Latin. His formula for the syllabus for the Advanced class which he introduced was to read five books and have lectures on all of them and apart from that there was nothing but unseen translation and Latin prose. He did, however, enable me to introduce to that class what we called a course on Roman Life, which was sort of social history you see. They did ordinary history in their first year and didn't need any more of that but I think there was a lack there, according to his scheme, of any broad view. I mean one can't read Latin very fast. If one just reads five books of Latin, say thirty pages each, it doesn't take you very far and tell you a great deal about the ancient world. I think there was room for this wider course which would look at various aspects of Roman life. In fact if you simply rely on books to find out about Roman housing or what have you, you have to read a great many; I mean the evidence is very scattered and you can find a passage here and a passage there but just by reading five books you won't get very far you see.
M Can we just deal with some of the personalities. We've mentioned those close to you within the department but what of the Principals under whom you served? Can you characterize them? Adam Smith I think was the first.
R Oh well Adam Smith was by then very old and he just survived for a year. I really hardly spoke to him.
M So Fyfe was the one.
R Yes, Fyfe was the one. Fyfe introduced some improvements straight away particularly in the amenities of King's. Now he, for instance, was the man who introduced the grass in the Quad at King's. It used to be when I came - chuckies, granite chips, and one rather ploughed one's way through these wretched things; and that was when that well-head was first put up, when they found the well. And I don't know if you know this but the boiler for the central heating at King's, when I arrived, was in a terrible corrugated-iron tall but place which stood somewhere near where the Periodical Wing of the King's Library was built afterwards. It was a horror really, it was sort of perched there at some odd angle to all the other buildings and it was supposed to be painted but obviously needed repainting and Fyfe immediately set to work to try and disguise this in some way. He got them to plant a row of poplar trees so as to screen it from the playing fields and road. In ways like that he began to get things improved immediately. Actually that boiler house didn't survive very long after that because the boiler later on - in this general improvement in 1939 just at the beginning of the war - the boiler was moved to the basement of the building that we were in, which came in very handy for us when fuel got short, and so we had more heat than most. I remember Stanley Potter, who was in the Mathematics Department at the far end of King's, complaining in the bitterly cold winter of 1947; even I who had been in the Mediterranean climate for some time found it pretty cold but at least we had a boiler house underneath us, it was some advantage.
M Was Fyfe a politician?
R I don't know that he was a great politician. He sometimes was reputed to put his foot in it slightly but I think he did quite well. Of course a lot of stuff, which was planned by the university before the war started and then put off, was then got going again - the movement of departments from Marischal to King's. Geography must have been one of the first to arrive; that had arrived quite early after the war, it may have been actually the first year after the war. They moved to the old church, St. Mary's. Fyfe was eager to get all this going again.
This is the first part of an interview, continued on MS 3620/7 |