| Description | Interview with Mr W. Nelson, recorded on 30th January 1985, by Dorothy Johnston.
This is the first of 5 interviews. Continued on MSS 3620/12, 13, 16 and 20.
Transcript of Interview :
J Well I think perhaps we'll start at the obvious starting point which is your appointment to the office of Finance Officer in Aberdeen University which was in 1948 I understand?
N That is right.
J Could you tell me a little bit about your background to begin with?
N Until I came to the university in 1948 I had been in business at one step removed. That is to say, I had worked for a number of firms of chartered accountants in Aberdeen where I qualified, in London, in what was then termed Ceylon, though its now called Sri Lanka, in Belgium, and I had therefore quite a wide appreciation of business and business methods and business people, so that before I came to the university in 1948 I had been on what might be called the professional side of business.
J I see. Can you tell me a little bit about why you decided to leave business for the academic world?
N Yes, it was quite easy. The war ended in 1945 and millions of men were released simultaneously upon the market and all of them were looking for work. They were all hunting jobs. I had - when I was demobilised from the army - in 1945, I went to the Coal Board which I detested. It had only just been formed and it was in those days an abominable body because everybody was on the make. The antagonisms of centuries between the owners and the mine workers had all been brought in at their full virulence and on the management side, which I was on, everybody was trying to make his job by planting a knife in the back of the man down the corridor and it was really a poisonous atmosphere to be in and I was very anxious to get out of it. And then the post of - it wasn't called Finance Officer then, it was Assistant Secretary (Finance) - was advertised and I applied. There were about 150 applicants for that post, so that the competition was quite keen. I didn't really expect to be appointed but it was clear that there was a pro-Aberdeen element in the appointment committee. This of course is understandable because it is very useful if somebody who has to deal with anything as important as finance does know the north-east of Scotland. Be that as it may, out of the 150, I somehow got the job.
J Were you yourself keen to come back to Aberdeen?
N Yes and no. I hated London where I was working. To me London is the last place on earth, it is detestable, and I wanted to get away from it. So that I was quite happy to come back to the north-east.
J Can you remember very much about your actual interview, who would have been on the committee, and how it was conducted?
N The personnel of the bodies that managed the university were very odd in those early days. They tended to be very strong characters, who hated being contradicted and who indulged in very violent rows between each other. This of course didn't make working for them any the easier, but looking back to the earliest days - without necessarily implying that just because it was a long time ago it was therefore romantic or anything like that - those early days were fun because you never really knew what was going to happen and who was going to do what.
J And this was already apparent at your interview was it?
N It was. There were one or two people on the appointments committee who quite clearly didn't like me one little bit and didn't want me to be appointed and they made their views quite clear. The member of the committee who liked me least was the very famous Dr J.A. Ross, who was the owner of the Crombie Mills, Crombie's cloth is [of]world wide fame. And he was extremely north-east in his manner. He had travelled to America dozens of times, he'd spent long periods in London, all over Britain, and for all effect it had had on him he mightn't have left his bothy in the back woods of Aberdeenshire. He was completely north-east and he was a man - an extremely clever man, most able - but you would have thought from the sound of him and the look of him that he wouldn't have known how many beans made five, but in fact he had an expert knowledge of anything to do with finance and he was a very great benefactor to the university. In his will he left the whole of his really enormous fortune to the university.
J I see. Presumably he was on your interviewing panel as a member of Court?
N That is right. I remember him very well because he didn't ask me a single question. All he did was to sit throughout my interview glowering down his papers and when he was asked by the chairman whether he had any questions to ask he just snapped, `No`. So I got the message.
J Who was the chairman in question?
N I can't remember. I'm sorry, I can't remember. Wait a moment, it was the Principal.
J Any other personalities stand out at that early stage?
N Well the famous or infamous Dr H.J. Butchart, the Secretary to the university. Who was a very rumbustious sort of character.
J Did you form the impression at your interview that they knew what they were talking about, that you were moving into a place where business was already well run and that you would fit in naturally or did you feel they were a bunch of amateurs?
N Neither really. The main impression I was left with, just by my opening interview, was that whatever else the university was, it was very odd. It' was not the same as anything I had been in or known of or that I had had any connection with in the past.
J But you didn't see any great difficulties ahead, professionally for you in working in this...?
N Well yes and no. I knew absolutely nothing about universities before I came here and I had thought that there was no point in my applying for this post because I didn't know Latin. In other words I had some curious idea that people in universities went around talking Latin all the time.
J One other aspect that occurs to me about your coming back to Aberdeen. Did you have any old - well- school friends I suppose I mean, people who you had known in Aberdeen at an earlier stage who were now working in the university and who were potential allies in this new job.
N No. I'd been out of Aberdeen for about twenty years, much of it abroad or in the army, and I really had no contacts with the north-east of Scotland at all. I had to start afresh.
J Well moving on now to your position in the Finance Office as it then was, I wondered if first of all we could clear out of the way some of the routine duties that were part of your responsibilities in the office.
N Yes certainly.
J Could we perhaps just run through them and identify the areas where you would have been directly responsible. For instance, your contact with students in connection with finance. I can think of several points at which students might have come to you. Perhaps if I just name them you can confirm or perhaps elaborate a little. The first point I suppose is matriculation which coincided with a fee payment. Did the students come to the Finance Office for this?
N No, the arrival of students and everything that happened once they arrived was in the hands of the university registry which for many years was under Mr John Greig. He had been in the army and he returned to the university slightly before I was appointed. I think he came back probably in 1945, because he had been in the university before the war. And so like all university staff who had been at the university before the war they had the option of returning to it if they wished.
J I see. This is rather curious to me because on checking through the Calendars the first time at which Mr Greig is mentioned in Registry is '54. Is that because the operation simply wasn't noted as a separate part of the secretarial office?
N You are asking me about the long past and I may be mis-remembering and if when I say that Mr Greig was there in 1948 when I arrived, I may be wrong, but I don't think so. I rather think as you say the references in the Calendar can't have covered the entire ground.
J That would certainly explain why there are so very few references in the Calendars at that period to any officers in the administration.
N Ah well the Calendar and what it should contain and who should keep it -for years and years there was a running sore and a matter of great dispute. It was thought that the Calendar should be scrapped, that it was just a waste of money or it was thought that it ought to be greatly expanded. I suppose by this time it had settled down on to its permanent level. So I am not surprised when you tell me that there was no...
J That is most interesting. It demonstrates the point the printed documents don't always tell one everything one needs to know. Considering the other points at which students would have come then, I wonder whether they too might have come to the Registry for these functions. The payment of bursaries and scholarships and grants - would these have been points at which students came to you? Or did you actually see students crossing your threshold for this sort of thing?
N Very seldom. While I certainly did all I could to increase contact between the Finance Section and the students - and I worked quite hard at it -there was really very little formal contact between students and Finance. They as I have said, the payment of when they registered, they paid their fees to the Registry and they received their bursaries and scholarships from the Registry on the recommendation of the Faculties through the Senate and from the Senate up to the Court and when the Court approved the proposed list of scholarships and bursaries, then that approval went to the Registry and the Registry paid them out on the basis of the list that the Court had approved. So none of that came to the Finance. Though of course, the fact that money had been paid out came through in the bookkeeping system to the Finance and was picked up.
J And the same would presumably have been true of things like examination fees and class fees?
N Yes.
J At one stage I know that the matriculation registers were actually kept in what was the Finance Office. Would this have been during your period?
N I have no recollection of them. Now this might be because my memory's at faulty, but if I were asked for a short answer it would be that everything to do with students was basically a matter for the Registry.
J Moving on them to the staff, I am curious about the points of contact between your office and individual members of staff. Now obviously operations like payment of wages and salaries would have been part of your function. Can you think of other occasions when the staff might have had to contact you?
N The staff of the finance section was in numbers quite small. It was about 25 or thereby. The average university finance staff is more like forty. This was because as a matter of policy I believed that the academic staff, through the departmental structure, should be brought in as an active element in the financial procedure, and therefore the sums of money that the university allowed to departments, called departmental grants, was [were]made the active responsibility of the departments to administer. The Finance Committee and the Court would approve how much grant each department would get, and then the departments were told what their grant was. The individual departments' grants were kept in finance books, and all the obtaining of the goods that were acquired - and they were divided into two main heads, equipment and materials: the equipment being a solid piece of apparatus and the materials things like chemicals and flex of wire etc., etc. - everything to do with the obtaining of those items was fairly and squarely thrown upon each department. All departments had to put in annual estimates to the Finance Office and on the basis of those estimates their grants were settled by the sub-committee that handled these matters - when I say the sub-committee, the sub-committee of the Finance Committee. And all obtaining of anything starts with a written order form issued by the department and from that point onwards, right up to the approving of the invoice by the supplier, the whole of the transaction was within the hands of members of the departmental staff. This means not just the professors or the senior lecturers it also meant very active participation by technicians, usually the chief technician, though not necessarily. It might be someone who though quite low in his grade was nevertheless a competent and knowledgeable at that kind of thing. But who handled these matters was within the jurisdiction of the professor who was the automatic head of the department, and those who were entitled to sign orders and approve invoices had to be intimated to the Finance Office, who checked that the right person had made out the necessary document. Now the Finance Office, I wouldn't say with malice aforethought but certainly with intent, saw nothing of any of these transactions in departments until the surprise invoice arrived at the office for payment and it had of course to be signed by the person whose name had been notified to the Finance Office and if it was then the invoice was paid. Now this doesn't mean to say that there was no check on what the department's did. There were two sources of check, one for many years there was a university internal auditor. That is not the official firm of outside chartered accountants, the university is now audited by Deloitte. It was a member of the finance staff whose job was to tour round departments and see how all these things were in fact done within the departments and normally it was found that they were very well done. Occasionally they found they were badly done and then knuckles were wrapped and [fir] threw and all the rest of it. The other check in the departments was by the official university auditor. It's firm was known as Leston & Company until fairly recently until it was amalgamated with Deloittes. But their representatives, when they came round to do the annual audit, had as part of their audit programme visits to departments to check the way the handling of goods was done within the departments and usually they found it was good, occasionally they found it was bad and then of course there was uproar.
J But if they found it was bad, it was not a matter which was part of your responsibility?
N No it wasn't. There were very few that were bad. And when I say bad I don't mean fraud, I mean slack or just plain incompetence. And neither the internal auditor nor the university auditor found much of that.
J Do I understand you correctly. This was a system that you set up?
N It was. When I came to the university in '48, the whole Finance Section was more or less in the same state that I was. They were just beginning. They were either former Finance staff who had returned from the forces or they were new recruitments, because from the point of view of university activity it would be fair to say that all universities had been sound asleep during the war. Not because they were doing nothing but because their efforts were being directed to taking part in the war and such civilian matters as teaching and research just had to be put on one side. And therefore the numbers of students were small. I don't know what the numbers were in 1948 but they were perhaps 1500 or thereby, they are now, I think about 6000 ....[loses thread]
J You had to establish a system, there was no system in operation when you arrived.
N Yes everybody was beginning and I had to develop the entire financial system of the university and of course keep it under constant review throughout the years and change it as exterior circumstances and facilities changed; for example, the development of computing.
J Perhaps we could leave the computing aspect just for a moment. You mentioned in passing that this was something that you did from policy, the involvement in departments-of departments-in ordering equipment and materials and there are some self-evident reasons why this might be a good policy. I wondered if you would like to expand on that at all. Why did you consider this a desirable thing?
N First of all normally the university office is regarded as a kind of blank, a great big hole somewhere. Nobody knows what happens, nobody really cares. They are usually maligned. Nobody likes officials of any kind and if the academics were dissatisfied with the financial provision made available to them they could always turn round and blame the Office. I wanted to stop all that. I wanted to bring them into the body of the kirk.
J And it worked.
N It did, it worked very well. This of course resulted in financial staff, so far as work went, being distributed not only in the Finance Office but all round departments, say half the time or [a hundredth of] time or whatever of a certain technician in a department would be devoted to work connected with the grant given by the Court to that department. And therefore it spread the financial handling-as far as I could make it, and this was certainly deliberate policy-round the university as a whole.
J [After losing thread)This must have meant that you were quite familiar to members of the academic staff. It made for better relations.
N It made for better relations and it did make for the Finance... Education is a two-way business. Not only did the academic learn a little more about the Office and discover that they were really human after all, but the Office was able to find out the same thing about the academics.
J Obviously desirable. Just on a point of detail. How would these contacts have been made? We are so used these days to people having telephones-or now to people losing their telephones-I mean, was the telephone a normal means of communication or would people drop into the office?
N Oh both. I liked myself to see people who wanted to talk about anything financial because, first of all, you can assess a case and assess a person much better across a desk than over the phone, and I liked to know as many of the academics as possible. The average academic I found-though I don't know that it is really possible to talk about 'average' because they varied so much: some had got a complete grasp of financial implications, others had none and would never have any, their brains didn't tick that way-there were very few, as I found it, who tried trickery or funny stuff. There were some; I only really detested one member of the academic staff in all my years. He was a medical professor and the thing that I couldn't abide about him was the totality and the swiftness of his change from excessive bonhomie to almost viperous venom when he got a no to his request. I just couldn't stick the man.
J I see.
N But by and large they did come wanting help and they were glad to get it and until they knew what the people in Finance were like, they were a bit surprised to find that they got it.
J Just continuing for a moment on these lines-you have contacts with the staff, you see them about difficulties and make decisions, was it often left at that, as a verbal decision, or is something arranged over the telephone or over a desk, or would you tend to record everything on paper?
N I was very particular in this. Everything that was decided had to be down on paper. This of course hugely multiplied the amount of paper but at least it was there as a permanent record and if there were any question a few years later or a few days later or whatever, you could just turn up the paper, and I carried this perhaps to excess, I don't know. I made a point of recording everything to colleagues in the University Office. After say, a meeting of the Court, I had to intimate something to a certain professor, I would always write it, I never rang up and said, 'Oh its all right, its been approved'. Everything had to be down on paper. And as I say it meant a great increase in paper; and this of course was in one way a bad thing because one might say that in business the unit of time is the day, in local government the unit of time is a month, and in the university the unit of time was the session. This unfortunately is all too true and the more you multiply the paper the longer you make the session, or there is a danger that you will. On the other hand I hive never believed in letting myself be tied up by paper, I was always ready to cut the knot.
J I see. Well continuing with the routine aspects of your responsibilities, quite apart from policy and planning, we haven't yet touched on your responsibility for general revenue and for general expenditure and I thought perhaps there were one or two headings that we might look at. One can take it for granted I suppose that things like the income from endowments, advice on endowments and investments and on government grants all came directly to you?
N Yes. That is so. Aberdeen University being one of the old ones in the country-and we must remember that for centuries there were only two English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, and for those same centuries there were four Scottish, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, so that those four Scottish universities in particular are very well endowed by bequests under peoples' wills, and Aberdeen University has an enormous fund of money given to it over the centuries and the income from those endowments forms the basis of the bursaries and scholarships that are awarded by the Senate to students.
J Did these tend to run themselves very much or would you actively have to consider them every session?
N What is the they or the them?
J The endowments.
N The endowments, as it were, were fixed facts. Lord Forbes in 1630 had given £10 or whatever for a bursary for a student at Aberdeen University -that £10 had now accumulated to £4000 shall we say, not only by the change in the value of money but by the addition to the capital of unspent income if there wasn't any student who was thought suitable for the bursary... [loses thread]
J Presumably these sums were invested?
N Yes they were all invested and there was a sub-committee of the Finance Committee called the Investment Committee which had to handle all investments and was responsible to the Finance Committee for not only the policy on investment. For example one of the basic policies was with what proportions do you have of fixed interest government stocks and what proportion of shares in companies and in order to handle this properly there was a firm of investment managers who attended the meetings of the Investment Committee and in fact gave a quarterly report on the whole investment portfolio. So that the investments were treated as a whole and were treated with great care and with regular financial advice.
J And you would have been one of the people giving advice on changes in investment policy?
N To some extent, but changes were really recommended to the Investment Committee by this firm of investment managers. Though I and the investment managers would have talked a lot.
J Yes I understand.
N It was at the earlier stage that we would have discussed it.
J Well we have now considered income. General expenditure, just to run through that in the same brief way. Presumably apart from the sums that were given over to departments for them to spend, the main sums would have been routine maintenance and large capital sums which would have been granted to the university by the government for particular projects.
N Capital sums given by the government were given only when the government had approved in very considerable detail the building scheme. When you talk about university capital sums, it is normally buildings, additional buildings or replacement buildings for teaching and research purposes, for example the Chemistry Building, the Agriculture Building, the Nat. Phil. Building, all the university buildings up at Foresterhill where there is a very big university medical complex. It is projects of that sort for which the money is given and the work on drawing up the plans for such capital projects falls on the Edilis Committee, which for most of the time I was at the university was under Mr James Kelman's control. He was a chartered surveyor as I am a chartered accountant and therefore on both those sides that dealt with money there was what might be called a professional person in ultimate charge. But the capital projects were kept very strictly and carefully distinct from the revenue projects which had to do with the turning-out of students and the research by members of staff. Because we must never forget the university exists for two purposes - teaching and research and neither is more important than the other.
J One other item that occurs to me is insurance. Was insurance something that caused problems?
N Well it causes one basic problem. Should universities insure at all? In fact they all do. But I know I used to maintain for a long time that we should scrap all our insurance policies, for the simple reason that, while one cannot take experience as a proper guide, because if you scrapped all your fire policies at once you would have, the next day, you would have a fire and a major building would be burnt down, that's life. But in fact, all universities do insure and they spend a very large sum of money on insurance; - it's a very heavy item, and this is really not so much settled by any committee as really settled within the finance section. The Finance Section really has the responsibility for keeping up-to-date all the insurance policies of the university.
J And how did you assess your insurance liability?
N This again was, as with investments, there was an insurance manager from outside, usually a professional assessor - it was a man from Glasgow who advised on insurance for many years, and he also advised on pensions.
J [I should like to ask you] about the background to the move from Marischal to Old Aberdeen. This is something that you generally approved of?
N I would rather say 'yes and no'. There were many things to be said in favour of it - the main one being moving the administrative office in among the biggest body of departments in Old Aberdeen - though I do have certain reservations about the results of the move to Old Aberdeen. Not that I know anything about it at first hand, because my retirement in 1975 practically to a day coincided with the move of the Office to Old Aberdeen, so I never worked in the Office in Old Aberdeen at all, only in Marischal. But I have heard - and it's been fairly consistent information - that the Office is much less of a coherent whole than it used to be when it was in Marischal, simply because each section is out on a limb in its own little corridor and the contacts between the various sections are, as I understand it, getting less and less and so approval of the move would have that qualification added to it.
J But you had found some aspects of Marischal to be inefficient?
N No, I wouldn't say that. It all depends what you mean by inefficient, of course. I can't really answer that because I worked over in Marischal, so I can't compare it with any other place that I didn't work in.
J In the decision to move the University Office, to what extent were officers of your seniority consulted about the proposed plan for a new University Office?
N Not at all. The pressure for the Office to move to Old Aberdeen came from the academic departments in Marischal. You must remember that the administrative office only occupied part of the granite front, all the back of the quadrangle was occupied by the very large and influential, powerful departments - physiology, engineering, geology, biochemistry, the main ones - all with professors and staff of influence and they were all expanding with the expansion of student numbers, they were all very cramped, and they all had their eyes on the part of Marischal occupied by the Administration. In other words the academics wanted the Administration out of Marischal, so that they could expand their own departments to meet their perfectly right and proper needs. It really came down to this - that in the growth of the size of the university there was no longer room for the University Office in Marischal and so a new building was put up to accommodate the Office.
J Apart from the move, the other main point which I can think of which must have influenced the Finance Office considerably in your last years was the advent of computers generally. This is something that you mentioned a bit earlier. I wonder if at this point we could talk a little bit more about that?
N Certainly.
J The Finance Office was not actually computerised while you remained there.
N I had installed a number of accounting machines, but not computer machines, advanced machines for accounting purposes that immediately preceded the advent of computers. Now when computers first came in they were extremely costly. They are extremely costly now, but they were even more so in comparison with other methods of keeping financial records that were then in existence. But I did not want the financial records to be put onto computers at that time because I knew from having seen and heard of what had happened at other universities, what the result would be and I remembered in particular at one Finance Officer's conference - all Finance Officers met once a year - and this Finance Officer was openly boasting that his was the first university whose finances had just come off the computer and I did not want to jump into that quick sand. What I wanted to do was to wait, not because I objected to progress, but because I didn't think that computers were at the right stage for university office use. That it was quite literally, as I have said, a quicksand. That if the main university computer in Old Aberdeen was fully used, as any such expensive machine should be fully used, it ought to be 24 hours a day at least, 6 days a week. You have got to have some little time off for maintenance, but let's say 6 days a week. And that meant that you had 6 times 24 hours to allot and knowing the influence of academic departments, the requirements of the Finance were not likely to be very high, and so in my view the finance records would have been allotted two or three hours in the middle of the night, two or three times a week, and I did not think that that was the way to run the finance records. I wanted to wait until computers had become not cheaper - I don't think anyone would expect that -but smaller, until you could get a computer on your desk. That was the time for the university finances to be put onto computers. Since then - of course I retired ten years ago so all that's ancient history - since then I believe that the university finance has been put onto the main computer, my successor not taking the same view as I did.
J Did you encounter much resistance to your feelings on that subject?
N Yes. Most of the finance boys wanted to get their teeth into the main computer. Simply because it was an enormous problem which they wanted to master. It is a temptation of the problem. There is one man who was really in charge of the details of accounts, Mr Herbert, Charles, who regarded me as a total destructionist - he was just itching to get the accounts onto the computer - so of course as soon as I retired Charles had his way.
J And what about other administrators outside the finance office. The Secretary for instance? Would he have tried to influence your decision on that?
N It depends which Secretary you mean. I worked under three Secretaries. The first would not have dreamed of consulting me. We needn't talk about individuals just now. The first wouldn't have dreamed of consulting me [just would have gone ahead]. The second would have told me to mind my own business and the third would have let me have my way.
J And on the question of computers specifically. The then Secretary would have been Mr Skinner?
N The third one, that is right.
J And he didn't interfere?
N No.
J It was entirely your decision.
N Yes.
J And in retrospect, you feel the correct one?
N Yes, yes. To have tried to do it earlier would have been a mistake, not only a costly mistake in terms of money, but it would have thrown the records into a shambles, however temporary, nevertheless. There is one thing that has got to be remembered always about a computer, that as long as it goes correctly, that's fine; but if you try to make the most simple adjustment like changing an address, something which normally doesn't take two minutes, you will find that the number of changes that have to be made in interlinking programmes is such that it is a major operation.
J Concluding this section about the routine operation of the Office. It's very apparent that during the period when you were Finance Officer, the place grew enormously in the volume of work that was being handled. Did you find that the system that you had established in 1948 was running smoothly till the end? You had indicated there were adaptations made at various points.
N Not adaptations in principle. I think that in the 1940s and early 1950s probably, I got the system, what I at least thought was right. And after that it stood the test of time. The size of the university and principally the number of students and of course the number of staff increased out of all recognition, but the system stood up to it. And - well it's not for me to say. I always thought that with the system of spreading work round departments that Aberdeen had a better and sounder and healthier financial system than any other university in the country. Though it's not for me to pat myself on the back.
J Would I be right in thinking that one of the things which must have happened was that you delegated more as the system grew in size?
N From the start I delegated very extensively. I didn't ask anyone how he did his job. All I asked was for the right answer at the right time. And he could do it standing on his head on the beach if he wanted to, I didn't care, all I wanted was the right answer at the right time, and I always got it. And unlike any other Finance Officer, I didn't even prepare the annual accounts. I left that to Mr Brebner, who was the next senior to me, and Mr Charles between them to draft the accounts and then I checked them and I checked them in reverse, which I think was a good way to check them. I did not look at how they had made up their figures. All I did was to examine the difference between the figures produced in the latest accounts and the previous years' accounts and took the difference at X hundred thousand pounds or whatever and analysed what that consisted of and that analysis of the difference showed up the correctness or not - and sometimes the draft accounts were not correct - it showed this accuracy up very closely. And I believe that by leaving the senior members of the section to do what was really the Finance Officer's work in drafting the accounts, I believe that I was dead right.
J And this was a decision you'd made for yourself?
N Yes, oh entirely.
J It was presumably supported by the Officers in question?
N Oh they loved it.
J They liked the challenge.
N Oh yes. And one of them was over-particular, the other was slapdash. I won't say which was which. But between two they got the thing right.
J One other general aspect. People often accuse administrative officers of generating paper without too much thought as to the purpose for it. In opting to delegate work, were you ever worried about this happening, that junior members of your department would simply carry on paper procedures which were not necessary and would waste time?
N I checked procedures constantly and was forever stopping things that were no longer necessary. Also the internal auditor - though I have to concede that very often he was put on to work that he wasn't really appointed for but for one reason or another it happened that way - he also examined the system and recommended that such and such a thing should be stopped. But I was very hot on stopping things that really weren't necessary, of asking the question, Why? Why are you doing it? I thought that any document or any figure should be carried out only if something was thereafter done about it. If it was merely put away and filed then one would need to look very hard at whether it need be produced any more.
J Well we seemed to have moved ourselves naturally into the next section which was to be about staff. So perhaps we could look at that now in a little more detail. You had obviously a very small staff establishment when you started in 1948. Could you tell me a little bit about who those people were, in general terms, what sort of backgrounds they had and where they had been recruited from?
N They really consisted of two parts. First staff who had been in the University Finance Section before World War II, who had wanted to return to the university and had done so. That was what you might call the hard core, but in addition there were a number of recent recruitments, who were appointed really from anybody in Aberdeen. The recruitment within the Finance Section was really handled by myself, and I made a number of appointments, really from people who had been in offices. I can't think of anybody who was taken into the Finance Section who hadn't been in an office in some business or other around Aberdeen or the locality. When I say Aberdeen, I mean the north-east - Inverurie [and the like]e.
J So they were people with some experience?
N Yes. But not necessarily university experience or indeed experience in any of the research institutes in which the north-east of Scotland is very strong. It would really depend on whether I thought that he or she was fit for the job.
J And it would presumably have been you who decided whether a particular post required a professional qualification?
N Yes. If you got up to the Deputy Finance Officer, who in my time was Mr Hetherington, who has now moved off to Nottingham University, Mr Hetherington was a chartered accountant and it would have been the Finance Committee who would have approved the necessary qualifications for a post at that level in the Finance Section. But by and large, apart from people like Mr Hetherington, the staff were unqualified in the sense of examinations, it was experience, either in the university or in outside business.
J And that was by your decision? Could you have recruited professional staff or would the salary scales have tempted professional accountants [...] the general office?
N No. The structure is a bit different now. As I say I have been out of the university for ten years, but the person who now occupies more or less the equivalent of Mr Hetherington's post is also a chartered accountant but is a woman. Something of which I approve, because I always pushed women as far as their capabilities would justify.
J This was a conscious policy, was it?
N Yes. I probably leaned over backwards in following it, I don't know. But I certainly did not regard it as any drawback that an applicant was a woman and not a man.
J And would you positively discriminate in favour of women?
N Of course it depends what you mean by 'positive discrimination'. That can mean a world of things. But I'd rather put it the other way around, that I would not consider it anything against an applicant that the applicant was a woman. It would be... One has to be very careful about this of course. There is this indefinable thing of personality. And you can get people who are qualified very well on the basis of experience and exams and that sort of thing who would just be a source of irritation, and that can apply [to] whether it is a man or a woman. But that's the kind of point you have to assess at the appointment interview. And I always found, not that I was ever a member of a committee making an academic appointment - but I always found that it worked, that applicants when they first came into the room had to come through the door, close it, walk across the room and sit down in the chair that was at the end of the table for applicants, and I always found - I was merely their clerk at the meeting - but I knew by the time that person sat down whether he or she would do. Not a word had been spoken but I knew. And unfortunately it worked the wrong way: that many of those who you watched walk to that chair turned out to be inadequate in personality or [had] the wrong kind of experience. But anyway, whatever the ground was, the assessment that you made by the time the applicant reached the chair, I always found was right. Now that may not fit present-day theories of selection but it's still the one that basically is used in the forces in selection of officers. Its what the fellow looks and sounds like, far more than what his answers are, that matter.
J Yes.
N You say that rather doubtfully.
J I am rather wondering if we can relate this to what you said a little earlier about the fact that - you were careful to say that you didn't actually favour appointing women, but that you had no sense of discrimination against it. Do you think that in general women would conduct themselves better in this initial entry. That in coming to interview they would handle themselves better and therefore ....?
N Well, women I feel are normally at least outwardly more self-composed, more master of the situation sort of thing. I think, though it is very difficult to say of course, I think men tend to be more outwardly nervous and to interview badly just because they are nervous. In other words, women are better at the con-trick.
J But you did make a specific point of saying that you were in favour of women being appointed ....
N I am and I think that, by and large, in many respects and particularly in the top posts - and I am not talking about the administration just now, but in the academic field also - universities are somewhat backward, in medicine, law, accountancy, just to name three professions. The number of women who have reached the top [is] much higher than the number who have reached the top in universities. You have many women who are senior lecturers, but precious few women who are professors and so far as I know, not a single woman who is a principal or vice-chancellor.
J And would that sort of consideration have been in your mind when faced with say, men and women candidates of equal paper qualifications, with very little to distinguish between them, would you ever have thought, 'this woman deserves it because she is a woman'?
N No I wouldn't. I would like to repeat what I have already said, that while in general universities have been rather backward for whatever reason - and they may be perfectly sound reasons, such as family commitments or whatever - in the appointment of women to top posts, at the level of the Aberdeen University Finance Section, I sought to judge it purely on suitability by qualifications and experience and their personalities. Because there is nothing that is more harmful to efficiency than abrasiveness. The sort of person who rubs everybody up the wrong way is just a dead loss.
J In making appointments to your section, the appointing committee would have consisted of yourself and who else?
N Probably two members of the Finance Committee. Probably the Convener of the Finance Committee and one other member of that committee. Though there again it depended on the level of the appointment. If it was a purely clerical post the appointment might just be made by myself. I had the authority to do that. Because there is no point in taking up the time of members of the Finance Committee who .... many of the most active of whom were businessmen. For example, [for]much of my last years the Convener of the Finance Committee was a practising lawyer and clearly he couldn't take more than a certain amount of time off from his business.
J Once appointed to your section what were the opportunities for movement for a member of staff, either in terms of promotion within your section or movement to another department in administration?
N Well in theory promotion was open to everybody if they could make the grade. But not very many could reach the leading posts in the section because for that you had to be a chartered accountant or another of the accountancy bodies, but you had to have an accountancy qualification, and if they had such a qualification they would only have been likely to have applied for the post of Finance Officer or Deputy Finance Officer, by whatever title it might happen to be called.
J Do you recall any members of your staff having done further training in post. Were they encouraged to go away on courses?
N Encouraged, but they didn't do it much. Not because there was any opposition to it. If anybody wanted to go away I was only too delighted, but most of them, quite genuinely found themselves too busy. Now this wasn't because I drove them too hard. I used to drive myself very hard and I expected my staff to do the same to themselves. Which of course doesn't quite fit with being able to find time to go off on courses.
J No. If they had wished to do so, would the university have funded them?
N Yes. Perhaps I ought to qualify and just say that one or two people did go off, particularly when we come on to the computing business. Because you can't know anything about computing without very thorough and careful training courses and a number did go for that.
J Were there any other aspects of technological improvement or methods, procedures in the office, which would have required staff to go away for training?
N Only short things. Let us say at the time I left there was a battery of National Cash Register machines which were manually operated, not electronically operated as a computer is, and they required short courses of training three days or something like that, but they were sometimes run in Aberdeen, sometimes if I remember rightly in Glasgow or places like that. But staff were certainly encouraged to go on those courses because they had to know how to handle their machines with maximum efficiency.
J In the growth of your staff establishment over the years, did you take the initiative always in asking for new staff?
N Do you mean replacement or addition?
J No, growth, expansion.
N Yes. But only within certain limits which may perhaps bring one on to the question of the five-year estimates or the quinquennial estimates as they are called, where staffing requirements had to be forecast ahead. And those - perhaps you are going to ask about those.
J Yes perhaps we could ....
N Yes well perhaps we needn't touch them at the moment. But they had a major effect on the freedom of anybody to ask for additional staff. Of course you might have external developments like computing or many other things, such as increase in student numbers, which directly causes not only more work in the Finance Section but requests for additional staff simply to handle the additional volume.
J Moving from that aspect of your staff to the other more personal and social angle. I wonder if you could very briefly comment on that. You have already talked about Marischal and how by the nature of the building it encouraged you to know other members of your own office and the other university officers. How well in fact would know them? Would you have had coffee together, lunch together?
N Now we are entering into personal matters? I unfortunately am unsociable and I do not have coffee readily with anyone, but that has nothing to do with the system. There was a staff club at Marischal, to which I never went just as there is one now in Old Aberdeen. My successors were much more sociably inclined than I was and my immediate successor was a very sociable man and his successor is sociable too. So I expect both of them to be much better at that side of the job than I was.
J But in your own experience, would you, for instance, have known all of your staff by name?
N Well here again, yes and no. Because perhaps I am not sociable, I tend not to notice people as closely as I should and I won't say that I didn't know whether some little girl coming down the corridor was one of my staff or not, but sometimes I had doubts, but I used to say 'Good morning' just in case.
J Were there any points at which your department would socialize together, if a member of department left, for instance, would you have had a gathering of some kind?
N A farewell do and a presentation with speeches all round.
J And you would have involved yourself in that?
N Oh yes. If it had been a member of my staff, I'd have, as it were, chaired the occasion.
J And this would have been what? A tea party?
N Drinks probably, after work.
J What about Christmas?
N Yes, there was always a Christmas do and in fact that was the only occasion really when I made a conscious effort to let my hair down, just once a year, and let it down to the extent that the Christmas do was on me. I paid for it.
J And what form would that have taken?
N Dinner, drinks in some hotel or perhaps in the staff club down in Marischal, but again a comparatively brief thing after work on one evening round about Christmas. And they were quite good do's actually. Unfortunately I'm not a party man, I'm not at my best at parties, not in the slightest. I always felt like the spectre at the feast, well one used to clear the floor and dance and all the rest of it.
J Is this something that continued right until the point of your own retirement?
N And I think it continues now. There have been two Finance Officers since I left and as I say they were much more sociably inclined than I was and so I would be very surprised if they didn't have this every year. It was quite an institution.
J Again making the obvious point, when you came to Aberdeen you had a small staff establishment, when you left it was very large. Did that in itself make much difference to the social life of the department? Were you aware of things becoming bigger and more impersonal?
N No I don't think so, because about 25 or thereby when I left and 25 isn't too big to keep in touch with. Though I think I mightn't have been very good in the social line, I knew all my staff and I knew what was doing and I knew if there was anything happening that wasn't really very desirable and I stopped it, so I think a pretty good idea of what was afoot.
J Well we have been talking about the extent to which you would socialize within your own section. I wonder would you like to say a little bit about whether you socialized outside the section?
N I had one or two personal friends among the academics, but I didn't really socialize with the academics as a whole, partly because I was an unsociable type and I didn't like it, but partly because I thought it was unsound. One shouldn't be known as being on good terms with Professor X and therefore more likely to favour his application than that of Professor Y, whom I didn't like and was known not to like. So it was far better that I should know neither. Also I found it - for the short period I lived in Old Aberdeen - I found it a bit distasteful that I couldn't go out into Old Aberdeen High Street without being taken by the arm by some academic who would say, 'I'm sorry for grabbing you like this, may we just talk for a second about such and such'. So I quite quickly moved out of Old Aberdeen, out into the country twenty miles away where I couldn't be got at and taken by the arm.
J What was your response to such people?
N Well, one of my closest friends wasn't an academic, it was the Librarian, Dr W. Douglas Simpson and just after he died there was a memorial service in King's College Chapel and as we came out of the chapel, we were barely through the door, this particular professor whom I could not stand, whom I mentioned earlier, took me by the arm in a most genial fashion and started to ask about some application for money that he had asked for, and I cut him much shorter than short. As I say, I couldn't abide the fellow, but never mind.
J But this would have been an exception, you would normally have been tolerant at the time of such impositions?
N Oh yes. As I say I didn't like people talking business out of business hours.
J Did you find that happened when you lived in Old Aberdeen and entertained?
N No I found something quite different then. My wife and I quite often in the Old Aberdeen way threw a small party for half a dozen people, the so-and-so's and so-and-so's, and because my background had been outside business rather than university we mixed the party. And let us say we had six people there, two university academics and four non-university people and the conversation would have been about all sorts of things, but because the numbers were more non-university than university the conversation was more non-university than university and what we both noticed was that the university people there sat silent because we were not talking about university matters. They had nothing to say. They could have talked nonstop for 24 hours about university matters, but beyond the university they showed all the weaknesses and drawbacks of the closed community, whether it's a university or an army garrison town or a cathedral city.
J There is an implication of what you are saying, that when they talked about university matters, they didn't talk about intellectual matters, but about university gossip. Am I correct?
N University shop. And with a tinge, just a small tinge, of scandal.
J Is that what happened when you went to their houses?
N Well when we went to other houses, there were only academics.
J And what was the nature of the entertainment?
N Well, drinks, small eats and gossip, university gossip.
J Did your wife find this to be generally a problem in Old Aberdeen?
N Yes, as I did. So we were at one in wanting to move out into the country.
J Yes I can understand. And when you moved out into the country your contact socially then with staff was presumably limited to Marischal and chance encounters.
N Yes and indeed to prevent anybody ringing me up to ask about a grant, we broke all the legal rules. We inserted a switch into our telephone circuit which, when we put the switch up, the phone bell in our phone didn't ring, but the person who was ringing us could hear ringing at his end, so he assumed we must be out, instead of which we had the switch up.
J This was in your home?
N That's right. In other words we regarded the telephone as being there for our convenience not other people's. As I say we were thoroughly unsociable.
End of Interview
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