| Administrative History | Mr. Low was a former Aberdeen University Student. |
| Description | Interview with Mr Sydney Pratt on Friday 26 September 1986 by John Hargreaves
Transcript of Interview :
H Mr Pratt, why did you decide to come to Aberdeen University?
P I think in my time it would have been most unusual not to go to the local university, unless one had particular connections outside the area, it was the standard practice.
H Teachers and family assumed this?
P That's right.
H They didn't talk to you about the advantages or disadvantages?
P Not at all.
H Were you the first member of your family to come?
P I was.
H What course did you follow?
P Modern Languages, French and German.
H You came up from school with that intention?
P That's right yes. Because these were my best subjects at school it was standard practice that you follow a subjects related course. There was no thought to do anything else.
H Looking back have you ever thought that you might have read anything else, started another subject for example?
P Yes. When I came back from war service I did Economics, or at least Political Economy as it was called, and I think probably by that time in a sense I was launched on a Modern Languages course but it wouldn't have taken me much to switch to an Economics course at that time.
H You did one year in 1943?
P Yes and then went off and came back. I didn't get back in time to start a full year so I slipped in two terms in 1947 and did a bit of a refresher of my first year French/German and managed to get a first year in two terms of the Political Economy course. Had I had a full year I think I might well have switched at that point.
H Had you been abroad during the war? What were you doing?
P I was in the Air Force and I did my flying training in the United States so that was the extent of my 'overseas service'. Very comfortable.
H How would you rate your education at Aberdeen? Did you enjoy it?
P Yes. I think probably as far as I can judge the German department was just about the hardest working department, certainly the whole of the Arts Faculty. French was a little less strenuous but German was very hard working. I think we probably got academically as sound an education as one could hope for.
H That would be Professor Witte?
P Professor Witte yes.
H What about the rest of your teachers? Who do you remember most kindly and who least kindly?
P Well of course Dr Barber in the German department. And one remembers with great affection Professor Roe who was not perhaps … he was almost a complete contrast to Professor Witte in that everything with Professor Witte was meticulously planned and organised. Somehow I think it might have been the difference between French and German in a sense. Professor Witte always immaculately dressed came into lectures absolutely on time, finished with a flourish, absolutely on time. If you didn't hand in your work on time there was trouble. Whereas Professor Roe would meet you in the High Street and say 'yes yes yes yes how are you enjoying your first year' and you'd say 'actually I'm in my third year' 'oh yes nice to see you anyway'. He was a lovely man, a scholarly man, but also a very warm sort of person.
H Did you regard any of your teachers as friends? Did you visit homes of any of your teachers?
P Dr Barber particularly was a friend to the young men and he used to invite us round for beer and sandwiches and a chat. Yes we would go out together. Apart from that no, I don't think we had close contacts with any of the others. Except perhaps through the clubs which were organised, the German club, the French club and to that extent we got to know the staff fairly well. But no we didn't go to their homes as a rule.
H Did you notice any great difference in university relations between staff and students, between your first year when you were a young student and it was war time and you returned as an ex-service student and there must have been many other ex-service students as well?
P I think our attitude, certainly, was different. I'm bound to say that in my first year it seemed very much like an extension of school and some of us had very much the reaction of the normal schoolboy school we were a bit rebellious and we went through the motions. It's fair to say too that we couldn't see the end of the tunnel of course, we were there for a year and we didn't … in a sense there was no real motivation. But when we came back we were certainly more mature and we were more prepared to treat our lecturers, our teachers, as equals or at least as adults.
H Did any teachers have disciplinary problems with ex-service students in your experience?
P No. In fact the ex-service students by enlarge were extremely well motivated, very hard working most of them.
H Where did you live in term time?
P I lived in digs.
H Can you recall how much you paid at any particular time?
P I do remember my first digs cost me exactly one pound a week. That was down off King Street.
H That was supper, bed and breakfast?
P Yes it was and weekend meals. But I can't honestly remember what it cost once I came back. I think it was something like two pounds ten.
H Were you comfortable in digs? I don't mean just physically comfortable, able to work?
P Very comfortable yes. There were three girls and two men and we were extremely well looked after by a family. We could study and the food was good. Yes, very comfortable.
H How did you support yourself both in your first and your second period of studies?
P My first period I had a county bursary of some sort, plus the usual Carnegie, plus a local scholarship which I got through the bank manager, plus what my parents could contribute obviously. When I came back then of course I had the student grant. But in addition to that I worked every summer on a farm. I had to really to make ends meet.
H Can you recall what the student grant was for ex-service students?
P I can't.
H Did you feel you were comfortable with it?
P No. It was very tight.
H Just as tight as before?
P Yes I think so.
H You spent your vacations essentially working?
P Yes I always worked, whether full-time or not I always had to work. As part of my course I did go on summer vacation courses to Europe.
H I was going to ask you that. It was summer vacation courses - you didn't do the year abroad?
P I didn't, no.
H What summer courses did you do?
P I went to Zurich for a summer course and I went to Strasbourg for a summer course and that was it.
H You were a student, you were basically attending lectures in German and French ?
P Yes.
H Was that valuable, apart from beyond practising your language?
P Yes, from the point of view of giving you some background knowledge of the countries. You couldn't get to Germany of course or at least with difficulty so it had to be Switzerland and France. Yes it was extremely good.
H Did you manage to visit Germany at that time?
P I didn't, no. Some of my contemporaries had actually served in Germany but I didn't.
H What about extra curricular activities in Aberdeen?
P We felt, and I see no reason to change the view, that we were extremely hard worked in Modern Languages but I always played football, soccer that is.
H Did you play for a university team?
P I did yes. Not always, the first year I was here I played for one of the teams in town and then for the university. That was twice a week usually. Faculty games on Wednesday and very often away from home on Saturday. In addition to that I normally attended the French and German class and that would be the extent of my extra curricula activities.
H What about social activities, union dances?
P Yes. Usually a dance on the Saturday night.
H Drinking with friends occasionally, or couldn't you afford it?
P There wasn't a lot of drinking went on.
H Not even socially?
P Saturday night yes you had a few beers and then went to the dance. But I could honestly say, partly from the fact that I, I wasn't a fitness freak but I like to keep fit, so I didn't drink as a matter of principle, well it was a matter of economics really during the week. But Saturday was the night when we let our hair down.
H That would be fairly general?
P I think so, yes. There weren't many people living it up through the week. If they did they didn't survive usually.
H Were you or do you think your contemporaries were, as a body, were much interested in politics at that time?
P No, not really. I remember being berated by some enthusiastic young student for saying that I wasn't interested, but I couldn't afford to be interested, I was too busy. No, there wasn't a lot of interest, particularly amongst the ex-service men who felt that time was slipping away.
H Had you been more interested in politics as an airman?
P No, not at all.
H On graduation, did you train as a teacher, training here at Aberdeen?
P Yes, having looked at other possibilities, may be half-heartedly, I don't know.
H What other possibilities?
P Industry generally. At that time things like the Anglo-Arabian oil companies, there was lots of recruiting going on, and I went for interviews to all sorts of places without I think really being convinced that that's what I wanted to do. In fact I didn't really know what I wanted to do.
H Did you ever consider the Colonial Service as such?
P I did in fact. I had an interview for the Colonial Education Service at the same time and as that came up first so I took it.
H This was after you'd taken your teacher training?
P Yes. I hadn't thought of the Colonial Service as such before I took my teacher training.
H Was the course at the College of Education a good one, looking back after a teaching career?
P No. Without wishing to be too unkind I think a lot of the fault lay in the fact that we ex-service men particularly and we graduates generally, tended to be treated in the same way as the little girls coming up from school to do their three year teaching and we resented it a bit. We felt that we ought to be able to sometimes skip a lecture or express ourselves in some way. It was a bit cramping and restricting. The other thing was that we felt that in many cases the staff were just a little bit out of touch with reality in the classroom particularly. In my time one did the secondary teaching qualification and primary. I did enjoy my primary with the small children and I felt that in that particular area the lecturers knew what they were talking about. They were all experienced teachers and they had lots of advice to pass on. Further up in the secondary area, I don't know, perhaps it was my fault but I wasn't very enthusiastic about what we got.
H You applied for Colonial Education Service and also for Achimota . Why did you think in terms of going abroad to teach?
P Two reasons. One was that my father had been in India a long time and I'd grown up with this background of thinking it natural and normal to go off to the colonies.
H The Empire was part of your consciousness.
P That's right and I think also regretted not having got to serve abroad like so many people did. I went to the United States but that didn't really count. I think I felt I was missing out on something. Perhaps there was a third factor too which was that jobs weren't all that plentiful in Scotland. I remember saying if I've got to go to Benbecula then I might as well go to Africa. It was that sort of situation.
H Had you applied for jobs in Scotland?
P No. There was a kind of cattle market at the training college and I didn't like the whole business at all. It seemed to me that we were being offered the most awful jobs and we were supposed to be grateful and snap them up. There really wasn't much going so I thought I won't even bother.
H Who interviewed you for Achimota Did you go to the Colonial Office?
P Yes. It was a man in the Colonial Office who knew Achimota and had that served in the Gold Coast as it was then, I can't remember his name, but he knew the country and conditions, because the conditions of service were basically Colonial Service conditions. It was basically a Colonial Service interview that he conducted.
H You were appointed to teach French and German?
P Just French. Although in fact I did teach some German because we had pupils astonishingly who came in from Togo whose parents spoke German. In fact the first President of Togo was a chap called Olympio who was later assassinated and his children were in school and when I met him he switched happily from French to German to English.
H You'd grown up with an Empire background and you were going to Ghana in the days when Nkrumah's star was in the ascendant did you feel any qualms about that or were you excited by it?
P I was excited. It was a very exciting period to live through and having gone back several times since, I'm bound to say that however much I criticised Nkrumah in his later days it's the only time that anything much has been happening.
H But you enjoyed you time in Ghana?
P Very much.
H Did you feel that your university education had been a good preparation for teaching in a foreign country?
P Certainly the degree as such was a good teaching degree, no question about that, very sound academically and a good teaching tool. I'm not quite so sure about teaching abroad. Yes, I think the experience that I'd had in the schools here, in spite of the criticisms that I've made, the background that I got at training college was a good preparation. Better I should say without being too chauvinistic than most of my colleagues who came straight from English university and had no teaching experience or qualifications at all. I thought that I certainly had an edge on them in that I had some kind of fundamentals to fall back on.
H Were there other Aberdeen graduates or indeed other Scottish graduates?
P No Scots at all.
H That's a little surprising.
P Yes it was.
H University College would still be on the same campus at that time?
P Yes.
H Did you have much contact with them?
P Lots, yes. They used our swimming pool, we played cricket with them, we would join in. We had a common nursery school where my son went. We used their common room, we were allowed to have additional members. There was a lot of interchange because of course the University College had grown out of the secondary school so there was still lots of links and I enjoyed that.
H I'd like to talk more about that, but is there anything more you remember specifically about your time at Aberdeen that you'd like to recall and put on the record at this time?
P We've been reminiscing and one of the things that one recalls is that in my first year in 1943/44 in the English class, I don't know how many women there were, maybe sixty or something like that and a dozen men. We were very heavily outnumbered. It was from certain points of view very good but from other points of view one felt slightly beset by a monstrous regiment of women.
H That would be changed, of course.
P We were very raw; there was nobody very old and certainly when we came back it was a very much better place. That view was certainly supported by the teaching staff who I think people like Professor Witte would say that he never enjoyed teaching so much as when we were around, not just our year, but the post-war years.
H Thank you very much Mr Pratt.
END OF INTERVIEW
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