| Administrative History | Professor Eric Tait was Head of Department in Geology at the University of Aberdeen. |
| Description | Interview with Professor Eric Tait, recorded on 26 September 1986 by John Hargreaves
Transcript of Interview :
.H Professor Tait, your first experience in Aberdeen, I think, was as a cadet in 1940?
T That's right. It was a scheme which the government had produced that school children who had attained university entrance in their examinations could join the army, stay in the army for a short time and then go to one of the universities as a cadet, as a potential artillery officer. And I was sent here to Aberdeen in October 1940.
H You were sent, you didn't choose to come?
T No I didn't choose to come.
H What sort of studies did you do?
T We did the first year courses in Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics. We also did a little Engineering and quite a lot of work with Colonel Strathdee in the Officers Training Corps. It was a very strenuous thing. we did the first year course in Maths, Chemistry and Physics in two terms between October and April.
H You were taught along with the BSc students?
T Yes.
H Did you ask to go in civilian clothes, or uniform to classes?
T Officially we were temporarily discharged from the army. I can tell you an amusing story with Colonel Butchart. We were not supposed to actually wear uniform unless we were on duty with the OTC, but of course in uniform you got into dances at half price or even less. We went off once and were caught by MPs, reported to Colonel Butchart who gave us a tremendous dressing down, that we'd prejudiced our academic careers, our military careers, and he said 'oh go away' and as we got to the door he said 'by the way, the next time you do it, try and make sure I don't find out'. And indeed, it doesn't really mean anything.
H Quite characteristic.
T We were officially civilians, temporarily discharged from the army, but entitled to wear the uniform of the OTC
H How many of them were you?
T Thirty two I think it was, yes.
H Did you tend to remain together as a group?
T We did actually yes. We were a coherent group nearly all the time.
H Were you living in digs like other students?
T Yes. But again these were provided by the army, but they were student digs.
H And you were on army pay at this period?
T Yes.
H Then you returned as a BSc student?
T For the people who passed the examinations mainly due I think to Professor later Principal Wright he gave an undertaking that anybody who passed this would be automatically given entrance to a degree course at the end of the war should we so wish to come back. My first choice wasn't Aberdeen, it was Oxford actually, but they said there was a two year waiting list so I applied to Aberdeen and they accepted me straight away. I came here in October 1946.
H And went into second year did you?
T No. First year. I did have exemption in Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics but I took the second ordinary Mathematics instead of the first ordinary which is a higher grade. I was a little bit rusty so I thought I'd better take the other two subjects as well. I actually applied to come and read Mathematics. I was in Trieste at the time and I wrote off and asked if I could be accepted. They wrote back and said yes, pleased to have you but you must have another subject, which was one of Geography, Geology, Zoology, Botany and so on. I wrote these down and took a pin and the first one I stuck it in was Geology and that's how I came to be a Geologist.
H Presumably your first year studies in Geology were particularly attractive.
T They were because there was an aspiring senior lecturer, Stanley Westell who later became a professor in Newcastle and he made it so interesting that quite a number of us decided we'd do Geology and traded over from other subjects, Chemistry or Physics, and in my case Mathematics, and went on and did Geology.
H How large was that cohort in the Honours class.
T It whittled itself down actually. There was about twenty in the second year and went down to about ten maybe twelve in the third year, but there were only four of us in the Honours year, three of whom became professors and the other the head of an oil company.
H That's a pretty good class. Your teachers, you mentioned Stanley Westell?
T He was here for quite a long time. He got a DSc just before I retired. He left while I was still a student in my final year and went as head of the department in Newcastle. There was Phemister as head of department. There was Kerr Pringle who was senior lecturer, he eventually went as professor at Strathclyde, and Bill Fraser who stayed right the way through and died a few years ago. And Simpson, he was here for a time and after I left he went to Exeter and became head of department at Exeter.
H In so far as you can detach your memories of Phemister as a student from your memories of him as a colleague, how would you recall him as a head of department?
T From the point of view of a student?
H From the point of view of a student, both as a teacher academically and as a person.
T At first impression a very forbidding character. He was one of the old type of professors. He'd been a professor for a long time. A man who was obviously a brilliant man. Sometimes he was away above our heads and in the lectures we did get confused but he encouraged and always asked us to go and see him and I found I learned far more by going to him afterwards and saying I didn't understand a word of that. He would sit down and within ten minutes he'd carefully explained it. He was very good on a man to man basis, not quite so good lecturing to a large class but when you got him one to one, which he always encouraged, he never turned you away.
H Would you say that man to man relations in the department generally were good between staff and students?
T I think so. Of course I was much older than most of the students, I was twenty four before I came here and people like Bill Fraser - he was only probably seven or eight years older than I was, and Kerr Pringle, about ten years perhaps. I became life long friends [with them] as students. In fact we used to go out together in the evenings and knew each other socially while I was still a student.
H That would have been rather unusual as regards the younger students?
T Yes. The younger students didn't do that at all. But I found it very satisfying and it made no difference as far as the student/lecturer/member of staff in the department. I knew very firmly that they were the lecturer and I was the student but socially we were on Christian name terms.
H Would this be at all common in the Science Faculty at large with the ex-service generation do you think, this sort of relationship?
T I honestly wouldn't like to say, I just don't know.
H Where did you live? In lodgings again?
T In lodgings yes, there weren't any halls of residence at that time. As a student there were various lodgings which one got full board for two pounds ten or two pounds fifteen a week. I had an army grant, or it was a grant given to me while I'd been in the army, which was £184 a year which I suppose was a lot of money in those days.
H Did you feel you were comfortably off on that?
T I did very well, yes. I probably had more spare money than most of my fellow students.
H Did you have good lodgings, were they conducive to work? As a geology student I suppose you don't do too much of your work in a chair.
T Yes you do, there is a lot of theoretical work. I found them satisfactory. I always was able to get a room to myself, I never had to share a room. As you became more senior as a student you were allocated a room in the department and you could work whenever you wanted to. Not a room to yourself, just the four of us had a very large room with microscopes and all the equipment you wanted.
H You'd do quite a lot of your work there in any case?
T Yes and we'd work two or three nights a week up until eight or nine o'clock.
H What about extra curricular activities?
T I'm afraid I never took part in any, apart from the obvious ones, to go to the union hop and so on, the dances in the Mitchell Hall, the Geological Society, the Student Ecological Society but that was all. I was never much of a sportsman, I didn't join any sports things. I really wasn't interested in the student politics or anything
H Were many of your contemporaries politically or socially conscious?
T Not my own personal friends, no. None of them.
H You weren't conscious of lots of student demonstrations or political campaigns?
T I don't think there were any, I can't think that that happened in those days. I think the ex-service students were very much more serious than the younger students. We really knew what we wanted to do and when we were working we worked very hard and when we weren't working we enjoyed ourselves.
H Were there many women students in Geology at that time?
T One I think, that was all. Very few, of course there still are very few.
H I suppose it is feeling that career prospects may be difficult.
T Their career prospects are nothing like as good as they are for men. Most Geology graduates have got to go overseas and of course sexual equality is not understood by the Arabs or the African. Saying that of course my daughter has just graduated in Geology this year.
H Is she going to go overseas?
T I don't think she knows what she's going to do yet. She's wanting to do a PhD but so far, although she's been accepted, we couldn't get a grant for her.
H You yourself went overseas ? Was that a deliberate choice or for want of opportunities nearer at home?
T No. There were various jobs available.
H You went on government service?
T Yes. I was not exactly asked but it was hinted to me that if I applied for a job as assistant lecturer in the department I would probably get it, but I didn't want that. For one thing they paid what £450 a year and I did want to go abroad. I'd been abroad in the army quite a lot and I had enjoyed it and the Colonial Office offered me a job at £1200 a year so there wasn't really much choice. I wanted to go abroad anyway.
H You wanted to go abroad, to live abroad or because there were likely to be particularly good geological opportunities?
T A bit of both. I like travel, I like travelling and I like being abroad but of course you always had your base in Britain. You never emigrated in any way. Your base was British and you were there for a certain tour of duty and then you came back again, which suited me very nicely.
H Did the Colonial Office come down to Aberdeen looking for recruits for the geological service?
T Yes. Quite a few people did. The oil companies came round, the Colonial Service officers came round and mining firms came round.
H Why did the Colonial Office get the edge over the mining company?
T I really don't know.
H You wouldn't to give yourself out as being particularly an empire enthusiast or idealist?
T No. It was just that in those days Nigeria was a very nice country, I'd never been there but I knew people who had and they said it was very pleasant. One of my fellow students had been in Nigeria for one of his summer projects and I did happen to know one person in Nigeria who was already there and it seemed to me just the sort of travel I wanted.
H It was survey work?
T Geological survey yes.
H You remained in the North did you?
T I was in the North from 1950 till 1956 and then I was promoted and took over in charge of the survey in the eastern region as it was then in Enugu and stayed there until 1961 and then I came home. They got their independence in 1960.
H Were you concerned with petroleum surveys at all?
T No. Shell-BP, the company was known as Shell-BP, it was a combination of the two, had been in Nigeria for about twenty years doing some exploration and I was involved with one of their geologists in the North. I went round with him but that was just by chance. But when I went to Enugu in the eastern region where the oil was I really was the government link man with the oil companies. I had quite a lot to do with them and I had to monitor the oil exploration licences and so on.
H But they were doing research?
T They were doing all the work yes and I was just the link man. There's nothing really I could have done in the exploration of oil, most of it was drilling.
H Was your education at Aberdeen a good preparation for this sort of work?
T It was, because Phemister, although he was very much a petrographer and crystallographer and didn't think very much of the other side of geology that's the palaeontological and zoological side of it, he did give us a very rounded course and we did a lot of work in all aspects of geology. He did turn out what was a very general geologist that really could take up any aspect of Geology he wanted. So the answer's yes it was. Excellent. I did find that I had done things in my undergraduate career which many of my colleagues had not done and was quite surprised that they didn't know much about. I won't mention what universities they came from.
H What for example?
T Certain microscopic equipment we were using. I mean what is know as the universal stage which was where you have a slide, thin section that you can turn in any direction you want to. To most of the people there that was a research tool and was only used by research students whereas we used it routinely in our Honours year. There were other things. Some of the theoretical aspects of geology which we were given, which I don't think they were given, and I think at that time we had a very good … in fact Phemister had a very, very fine reputation. When I went for my interview for the Colonial Service there was a colonial administrator and one other chap, I don't know he didn't speak, and the deputy director of the Overseas Surveys and when he was invited to speak he said "If Professor Phemister has given you a good degree that's good enough for me". Which I thought was quite a compliment.
H Yes indeed. Did the Colonial Service give you any special training or induction?
T None at all. We just jumped in at the deep end. In fact with my first job I was just told the area I was going to do and what they wanted me to do and I went off and was on my own for five months, but there were always people who would help if you wrote in. It was very good training too you learned very quickly. It's much more difficult actually to do something than it is to tell somebody else how to do it.
H We seem to be missing primarily about your work as head of department in Geology but if there anything in conclusion you would like to make any reflections about how the life of the geology student or the quality of geology students may compare in your later days in the chair from your period as a student?
T There's very much more specialisation nowadays. That's of course partly due to the fact that the staff is very much larger. The staff was quite small, four people, which meant that you didn't really have any great specialists, they had to teach all the subjects. When you have a staff of as I had at the end, twenty three, you can afford to have a very narrow specialist on the staff such as a geophysicist or micropalaeontologist which we had so the students do get the opportunity if they so wish to specialise quite deeply though we tried to encourage them not to do it too much but they did have that chance. Although they still did all aspects of Geology, it was a very wide ranging subject, we vary from mathematical crystallography to botanical and zoological work with palaeontology. They do the lot but in the final year they were able to specialise. Apart from that get much more sophisticated equipment and much better laboratory facilities. One thing I know Professor Phemister never had any money, he was always desperately hard up for money whereas during the sixties or seventies the universities had almost all they wanted, too much at times possibly. Not that I objected I took what came.
END OF INTERVIEW
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