| Description | Interview with Roger Lindsay recorded on the 22 of June 2001 by Jennifer Carter
Transcription of Interview:
[Note: the first few minutes of this interview were lost because of a problem with the tape recorder. We established that Mr Lindsay had a long and distinguished career with the oil company, Shell. He then began to explain why he chose to study engineering at university.]
L …my father was a motor mechanic, so [I was attracted by] mechanical things, but as time went by and I began to learn a bit more about myself, I discovered that my mother had been a civil engineer.
C That's very interesting.
L The second woman engineering graduate in the University of Edinburgh.
C How fascinating.
L Anyway, genes or environment, I don't know, but I wanted to be an engineer. I mean, I knew nothing, lived in a very simple home, no educational background or culture at all, so entering the world of professional engineering as opposed to being a craftsman, was something …
C Totally alien?
L Alien, and it was a time, of course it's so different now, there was no information, you had to scramble around and being in Aberdeen and there not being much engineering, just a few shipyards and so on, but there weren't people to go and talk to, and I did get some leaflets from some careers office or other and Glasgow seemed to be the place to go, to the engineering school. Edinburgh I thought about because of my mother's connection. But then economics were very simple, we had no money so I came here. And in fact lived at home for the first couple of years.
C Commuted from Banchory on the railway presumably?
L On the bus.
C On the bus.
L They did have a spell of running a little electric train, I used that for a while, but basically it was the bus every day, early in the morning and then in the evening.
C Banchory Academy was it in those days?
L Yes.
C And they were presumably not very helpful in terms of giving you background about how to get into university?
L No, no, I mean, they were quite helpful in the sense of well, encouraging, very encouraging. Everybody in my year, in the sixth year went to university.
C Everybody, that's terrific.
L It was the expected thing, if you got past fifteen or whatever it was and did Highers and Lowers or whatever they were, then you might go to Teacher Training College, but the expectation was that you would go to university. But the kind of breadth of people there was basically the arts, the teacher type career, then they knew about doctors and they knew about ministers, and that was a culture that probably hadn't changed since the Victorian times really, and a lot of the teachers at school were middle-aged spinster women. I suspect women whose boyfriends had been killed in the First World War and as a result never married or where the sons of the family had been killed and they were left looking after…
C Aged parents and having to make a living to help?
L And of course, they were very dedicated - like you apparently don't get these days and quite stern most of them, I remember.
C But rather unworldly?
L Yes, very, yes. So that took me here, I got a grant to come…
C Did you sit the bursary competition?
L I sat the bursary competition, and there were some Banchory orientated bursaries, but they were for arts students.
C Not for engineering?
L And I sat the General Science papers and I didn't get a bursary, so…
C So you were dependent on some kind of grant. That would have been a state grant in those days?
L Yes, but as I remember, it was £200 a year, £202 a year I think, but of course we had to pay fees, because I remember the arts people didn't pay fees, but we had to pay, because the science faculty had a fee of I think £50 a year.
C Presumably on the excuse of having to provide more equipment or something?
L Laboratories and that, exactly. So, and then when I came into town to stay in digs, it went up to £250 I remember, and interestingly I kind of felt guilty about this grant and I said, well, I'll try and get a job on a salary, I'll pay it back. That's quite an interesting view with all the current talk of…
C Yes, of paying back your loans and things.
L Loans, student loans and so on. And then, I hadn't been working for Shell very long, and I got a salary statement with an income tax bill on it and I thought, well, if I'm going to have to pay that much tax I will have paid back my grant and more than some in the ratio of time. Indeed, I did, I think, over the forty years that I worked, so I stopped feeling guilty about this…
C Quite quickly. When you were a student, did you feel you had to contribute towards your family's housekeeping as it were?
L Yes, I mean that was another issue of course, they were simple people, left school, I think, at about twelve or thirteen, but particularly my Mum had a great belief in education and so there were always books, I mean nothing grand, but there were always books in the house. I was encouraged to read and so on. And I always had jobs and it placed a degree of limitation on my university world having then, even when I was in digs I went back to Banchory at the weekends, I had a job in the garage where my Dad worked, just to make some money. Partly to help me and partly to help them. And in the summertime I always had a job and so all the grand things of long vacations and travel, well…
C Not in your world?
L Not realistic, I had no money at all, and I used to do, what else did I do? Oh, Christmas post
C Christmas Postie and potato harvest and all that sort of thing?
L Yes. All that sort of thing. So it was a, compared to the lives of some of my contemporaries who were from better heeled backgrounds and compared to some of these that happen now and I think compared to my own children who study, it was a pretty narrow existence really, I didn't, this mind-blowing, wide-ranging world didn't, I mean obviously I got something out of it, but I wasn't a debater or anything.
C No, and you probably had a very strong work ethic, you wanted to get your degree.
L Yes, I remember I had various interviews at the end for jobs and one from the David Brown Corporation, which is a big engineering company, and the guy said to me: 'And what did you go to university for?' I said, 'Well, to get a degree' he said 'Really?'
C You were the first student he'd met who said that?
L He'd been at Cambridge and he clearly was by his style from a world apart as it were, so he was, I think my chances of getting a job evaporated completely at that point in the interview.
C Yes. Did you feel very much, I'm sorry to harp on this but it is very interesting, I mean did you feel when you were a student you were operating in a more limited scale than many others, or were there lots of others in similar positions to you?
L Oh yes, we have this great tradition I suppose, or good fortune to be able to be…
C The lad of parts and what not?
L Yes, all that, and I remember one of my teachers saying to the folks 'Don't worry about the money, we'll get him through university one way or another.' There were lots of lads and lasses that I grew up with who lived in council houses and that sort of idea.
C So you didn't feel the odd one out at all?
L No, no, only sort of slightly envious from time to time of some of better heeled lads who roared up in their sports cars.
C I wondered if anyone had cars as a student.
L Very few, very, very few.
C Motorbikes maybe?
L Yes, quite a lot of motorbikes.
C A lot of Aberdeen students then, particularly local ones, would have come from fairly well heeled, comfortable, middle-class backgrounds
L Oh I think that's right.
C There was no separation, you didn't sort of, or was there?
L No, no, I mean I think that the separation was much more between sort of town and country.
C Ah ha.
L There was a great Gordon's College…
C Cohort that came in…?
L Came to university as an extension of Robert Gordon's College in the sense that a lot of the, because the students, I guess the fifth and sixth years at Gordon's were in the Union, they all had pals, they were drinking secretly probably on Saturday nights, so they were very familiar with the University and even although I only came from twenty miles away and knew Aberdeen quite well, very well indeed, I'd no easy familiarity with the place at all. But that was common, I think, to all the students who lived in places like Banchory, Inverurie perhaps, Huntly and the out-lying places. That was the major distinction and then there were very few of course who came from far beyond and I think there were more Norwegians than there were English as I remember. We'd no English engineering students at all.
C So did the country lads and lasses form a kind of cohort too, did you mingle with other people from Banchory and other country districts rather than with the townies?
L Yes, yes, we tended, but of course over time you begin to merge and we had a kind of inferiority complex because we weren't sophisticated and familiar with all these things…
C Must be a bit intimidating?
L Yes, after first year and when you knew how to get to King's College and how to order a pint of beer or whatever, you began to then find friendships and fellowships with people you liked whether they were from town, country, wherever. I think, I don't know how it is now, but one of the interesting things was the separation of the arts and the sciences, because the sciences were essentially at Marischal and we had very long hours. We had Wednesday afternoon off, allegedly for sport, and we had lectures on Saturday, and you know the arts people had lectures in the morning and then free every afternoon. And so we had very little time to do the student thing of sitting in coffee bars supping whatever and gassing…
C Putting the world right?
L Yes, and then we had lots of laboratory notes, you know experiments to write up in the evening. It was a very good work training in it's own right but it was not very conducive to…
C Wasn't much fun?
L No.
C Apart from the academic challenge?
L That's right. There wasn't, whereas a number of friends from Banchory who were in the arts faculty doing Geography or French and Italian or whatever, they had a much more comfortable time and a much more…
C Studenty time?
L A much more what I would call a proper student life. But I think all the engineering students certainly and physics and chemistry and so on all had their noses to the grindstone pretty well all the time and I think particularly those who were of no great means had a kind of fear of failure, I guess, because if you spent three or four years at university and then didn't get a degree you're worse off than if you'd gone to work as a builder's labourer at fifteen.
C Yes, I can see that. And presumably also living out of town meant that it limited your social life as a student, I mean even after classes?
L Yes, that's right.
C You'd always to catch the train or the bus?
L And particularly in the winter nights when the weather…
C You needed to get home?
L You were thinking of getting home. And that was definitely a bad thing because there was another little difference between the country folk who were in town in digs and the country folk like me who went home. And that's why after a couple of years of this I decided to get into digs and I was in digs up in Union Grove or somewhere, within walking distance of Marischal College which was the focus of my life.
C Were you in the same digs all the time from then on or did you move about?
L Yes.
C You just settled on one. Do you remember how you found the digs? Friends or local contacts from Banchory?
L No, it was an advert, now I can't remember if it was in the paper or in the Union on the noticeboard. A lady called Mrs Donald I remember. I paid £2 5 shillings a week.
C And what did that cover?
L It covered dinner, bed and breakfast…
C Dinner, bed and breakfast?
L Dinner, supper-you know, a bedtime biscuit and tea - bed and breakfast, Monday to Friday.
C And were you expected to get out at the weekends?
L Yes, but we could stay, and if we did stay on an occasional basis, it was another 10 shillings.
C And was it warm? Could you work there?
L Oh yes, yes. It was a comfortable family home. The lady was a widow, her family had grown up and gone and she had this quite roomy house up in the west end of Union Street, off Union Street. And so she was quite glad of the company.
C She was a nice landlady, in other words, not a grasping one?
L No, no not at all.
C Did she specialise in students?
L Yes, she'd had a succession of, I mean she didn't have a house full, she only had two at a time and myself and a friend. I can't remember now, two must have finished at the end of the year and then…
C Then she'd bring the next two on?
L That's right. And I turned up and said 'Look, I'd like digs and I've got a friend who's also looking for digs' And so we both finished up there.
C And were you free to come and go, did you have your own latch key or did you ring the bell?
L Yes, we had a key.
C And did the landlady demand that you were in at a certain time and so on or was it fairly free and easy?
L Oh gosh. Well, first of all I wasn't a late bird anyway.
C Yes, you had a lot of work to do, as you said.
L That's right, so I didn't rake around the streets or down the Union very much, I was a very unadventurous guy and so I suppose I've a feeling there was some kind of house rule that we had to be in by midnight but I can't really remember.
C No, it wasn't a serious issue anyway because some landlords and landladies were fairly little domestic tyrants but yours was not.
L And then I wasn't a drinker - I mean I wasn't abstemious - but I wasn't counting the number of pints I could put away as it were, so misbehaviour due to drink never arose, although it did with some of my contemporaries as it no doubt still does
C Yes, I sure. Did you participate in any kind of student social life then?
L Yes.
C Especially after you came into town?
L I was, or even before I came into town, I was a kind of active participant in things, again very student related things, the Engineering Society, which just had lectures and talks and things…
C A continuation of class as it were?
L That's right, so followed that quite keenly. I was very active in the Motor Club, the University Motor Club. Didn't have a car but…
C What did you do in the Motor Club did you sort of go out for drives, like rally driving that sort of thing?
L Yes, that's right, and competitions of various kinds, driving tests and so forth. I had a driving license because I worked at the garage.
C Were you a mechanic or navigator?
L I was a navigator and we rallied all winter long really, every other weekend I suppose.
C But the driver, the car owner, he would have been a much better-off student?
L Yes, his family had a shop in Banchory.
C So he was a local contact from home as it were? Interesting, and other sorts of societies?
L I'm just trying to think what else I was in.
C Did you get drawn into Student Show or Charities?
L No, I was very untheatrical. I used to go to the hops and things on a Saturday night.
C Saturday night was the hop night was it? Where was that held?
L In the Union in the Gallowgate there. And they were - a good place to meet people. There were no girls in Engineering at all.
C I was just thinking that.
L None at all.
C So if you wanted meet any female students you had to go the hops?
L That's right. And there were some Banchory girls of course - in fact I'm meeting one in half an hour - that we knew of and we used to go to the dances together. And I used to go to concerts, nothing to do with the University, but the Scottish National…
C So you were interested in music?
L I mean I can't play a note, but I liked to listen. And when the Carl Rosa Opera Company came to Aberdeen once a year we use to go along to listen to La Boheme or Car or Pag or whatever was on.
C So you did a fair amount of social things, I mean more once you werein town?
L I suppose, but compared to the guys, I don't know what you would call them, but the folk heroes of the time like Tom Patey the mountaineer, you know he was off climbing in Skye and in the summer vac. he was out climbing in the Himalayas or the Alps or whatever, and then some of the rich farmers sons from Udny, the Mackies, the great farming family, Maitland Mackie, and I guess probably young Maitland, as he was in my time, is probably the old man of the family now. But you know, they were, they just did anything and young Maitland used to go off to America on cattle boats and take cattle, his father sold cattle, pedigree Aberdeen Angus I suppose, and they used to go off to the ranches in the middle of the United States. It all seemed…
C Very exciting and romantic?
L That's right.
C Outside your orbit as it were?
L Absolutely, but I suppose I wasn't, although, as you said, comfortable middle-class people were quite common because of, I think of Gordon's and the Grammar School and the girls' schools, what Albyn and…
C St Megs and the girls' High as it would have been in those days.
L And they were, the population there was very much the well-heeled. They were a lot of people who were in not very different circumstances to myself.
C Did any of this spill over into political attitudes, were you yourself caught up?
L Oh yes. Interesting, my folks, as I say poor as church mice, but they never, well, I'll tell you how much money they had, they died within a year of each other in the early seventies, because they had brought me up, they'd taken me on board as a baby when they were about fifty I suppose…
C Oh, so you'd quite elderly parents, or rather foster parents?
L Yes, and that was inhibiting, I suppose, or put certain attitudes in my mind, but I remember when, my Mum died first and she had £200 of an estate. And when my Dad died he'd £350.
C And that wasn't much in the seventies, was it?
L No, no. I mean a car at that time would have cost you £1000.
C Did they live in a council house?
L Yes. So that's after a lifetime's hard work, nothing. And nothing, no, you know the furniture was just fit for putting on a bonfire.
C Sure. As a matter of interest, when you said you were adopted, why did people in such straightened circumstances adopt you?
L Oh it's a lovely little story. My mother wasn't married and she was working in Albania in 193-, she worked in Albania for a long time.
C She was a Scot?
L Yes, from…
C Banchory?
L No, not from Banchory, her parents came from, well, she was born in China her father had been a banker with one of the banks in China and he came from Montrose. Her mother came from a minister's daughter from a place called Edinkillie near Forres, and she grew up there and did terribly well at school and so on. And, it's a long, long, story, anyway, she finished up through some romance or whatever, I don't know, and I was the consequence. And she had worked in Banchory in the twenties when they were laying the water pipeline from the waterworks at the Invercanny into Aberdeen, she'd been one of the resident engineers and she obviously knew Banchory, but wasn't known in a…
C Yes, I understand yes, she wasn't a local.
L So she came, and I was born in a local hotel. And later on I got her old passport and I was able to, and 1930, you know just before the war, I was able to trace, because they stamped everything, her journey from Albania, which started about the beginning of February, and I was born on the 25th, and it's all by boat or train, first across to Italy, train through France and there's a stamp at Calais, and then a stamp in Dover and I was born on the 25th, and I think by something like the middle of March, less than a month she was back in Albania.
C Goodness. And she had left you with a local couple?
L No, she left me with the district nurse who went round the village I'm told, looking for a home for this little baby.
C And these kind people whom you afterwards regarded as your parents took you in?
L She knew my folks, I can't remember for what reason, their family were grown up, and she said 'Would you take Betty Lindsay's baby?' Now in the twenties when she'd been this young engineer, she scandalised everybody by riding a motorbike, and when she left to go, I think to go to Albania, my Dad bought her old motorbike and I remember, Mum used to tell me this story, and she said 'Well I just said to Nurse Diack, well, we've just bought her motorbike, so we might as well have her bairn.'
C Lovely, a wonderful story, isn't it?
L They were magical people.
C And did you take their name, or did you keep your mother's name?
L No, no. She kept in touch and sent money occasionally, but we never met. And I've learned bits and pieces over the years.
C Did she have a successful career as an engineer?
L Did she? An interesting career but I suspect not too successful because she finished up as, she was a great linguist as well, and she finished up as head of translation in the Air Ministry.
C How intriguing.
L So, people said that she spoke eight or nine languages…
C And all of them beautifully, yes?
L In fact when she was at university, she did an MA as well as a BSc. so she clearly was a very bright lady but engineering, it would have been very hard…
C To be a successful female engineer in the 1920's?
L She was a Field Engineer.
C What a wonderfully romantic story, very interesting.
L Goodness knows what took her down that route, because again there's no engineering at all in the family, in her family, and she was born in 1897 I think, in 1900 her father died and her mother took her back to Scotland. By 1910 her mother was dead and she was brought up by her grandparents who by 1915 were both dead.
C Goodness, so she was on her own?
L So she was on her own.
C So that makes also a kind of pattern in her being prepared, as it were, to abandon you.
L Yes.
C It's interesting isn't it, fascinating. Goodness me. Well, that's miles from your student days, but very interesting.
L Not much to do with the University. But I think she was a kind of, I mean I had, as you can imagine, a romantic vision of her, and that really was what took me into engineering.
C Yes, I can see that. So what was engineering like as a course in those days, it was what a four year or a five year course?
L It was three years for an ordinary degree, and then if the Prof liked you or you did well in exams you could go on and do an honours year, but you had to get your first degree first and then it was very much a kind of school atmosphere, very sit up on the benches take notes…
C How much hands on stuff as opposed to theoretical stuff?
L Almost none in the first year, oh yes we did the General Science course in the first year, physics and chemistry and that chemistry turned out to be very useful for me, and then in the second and third years we did more and more and in the honours year we had a big project to do, so it was a very practical degree, but I think again judging by people I met in later years, in academic terms very, very sound as well. We weren't known as an engineering college, but it was a course that stood comparison with anybody's including Cambridge.
C That's very interesting. Who were the leading lights in engineering then, I'm not sure I know?
L Well, there was Professor Allan.
C Yes, I know his name, Jack Allan.
L Called Hydraulic Jack because he specialised in dams and reservoirs. The Reader was a man called Grassie, J. D. Grassie, who was a Civil Engineer…
L …as I did and the electrical people did half their course at Robert Gordon's College.
C RGIT yes.
L It was a man called Hampson who was the head of Mechanical Engineering and he was a lecturer, he was head of Mechanical at Gordon's and a lecturer at the University as well, and he was a very practical man, he'd worked in industry for a long time and later on we'd a very interesting man, a man called Ogston who'd worked with Frank Whittle on the very early generators. So we'd very good people.
C It was a very decent department in other words?
L Very good people. I mean small, I think we were about fifty when we started and then by the end of the first year we were down to thirty. And then I think in the Honours year for the whole department, Civil, Electrical, Mechanical, I doubt if we were, we went to a dozen I don't think.
C Goodness yes, and Aberdeen, of course, as you said earlier, is not a city which is noted for engineering because the shipyards were presumably away by then…
L Hall Russell was on it's last legs, yes.
C So was that a handicap in the course, did you have to go and…?
L Well, we used to go on trips.
C Study tours elsewhere…?
L To see things, so we went on a trip to ICI at Billingham, we went on a trip to the new road bridge over the Forth, just as they were doing it and we had a very interesting day there. We went to the BP oil refinery at Grangemouth and I can't remember what else.
C And those were all organised as part of the academic course, it wasn't just the Engineering Society?
L Yes.
C So from the start you were deliberately building experience which was not available locally?
L That's right. So I think it was a, well I know from say, comparing my career with fellow engineers in Shell, it was a very good course, a very good course indeed.
C That's very nice to hear. And what were the relationships between the staff whom you've mentioned and students, was it fairly formal and schooly or did you get closer to staff as you became more senior?
L A little bit but it was rather formal. Prof Allan was always very much, he called us all gentlemen, and he stood at the lectern or at the desk or the table and we sat there and it was always very correct. Grassie was rather similar.
C Did you have tutorials or any small group teaching?
L Yes we had tutorials taken by the PhD students who were in the various departments and they were more informal and easy going and the like. And then of course in my first year we had the delight of RV Jones as physics and he made a bigger impression on me than all the rest of my university teachers.
C What sort of an impression, because he was such a man of the world, or a brilliant scientist?
L Yes, it was, what was the word, you know…?
C The dimension of the man?
L Yes, he covered everything. In fact I was so taken with him, you know, in my life that when he died, I wrote an obituary, there had been an obituary in the paper, in the Independent but it was all about his war time thing, codes and the V1's and the V2's and so on, so I wrote about him from a student's point of view.
C How interesting, I wish I'd seen that.
L And they published it, to my great surprise. And that was born out of a kind of love for the man because he really was a bit special and a great, great teacher, explaining things, and at the end of a lecture you could go down, he'd stand around and you could chat about something you'd come across, but I think the thing he did for me was just wonderful, he more than anybody got the notion of a scientific method as a kind of core of any science-based activity, that this whole process of the scientific method and he used to talk about Occam's Razor which I hadn't heard of. I now live about three miles from Occam, the village of Occam in Surrey where William of Occam came from.
C Propounded his theory, yes.
L And he was also one of the school of - you get principles understood if you can demonstrate them and he used to do experiments to measure the speed of a bullet.
C With his revolver.
L And he had the revolver and bang, bang and all that and various other things, and of course he was great fun, and occasionally, I mean things got out of hand. He'd been on television on What's my line? or something or other with Isabel Barnett and those people. There was a rumpus when he came back, somebody started playing a trumpet up at the back and he got a bit ratty, which was very unusual but he got a bit ratty, and he chucked out the back row, and they all trouped out, but then the trumpet carried on because it had been passed down and eventually it came so far down and he got his hands on the trumpet which he played for us, played some jazz
C Lovely! Was that sort of student behaviour, let's not leave Jones for a moment, incidentally there's a very good obit. for him the proceedings of the Royal Society, you'd be interested, because that I think did him more justice as a scientist…
L Yes, he was a very, I realised afterwards that his work on measurement, for example, was absolutely outstanding.
C Well, I've forgotten, I should remember, but I've forgotten who the author was, but he was a fellow physicist, a chap who was the current Secretary of the Royal Society and it's a very good obit in the Transactions it came about two years now. But thinking of Jones and his trumpet, was there a lot of sort of carrying on at lectures generally, was it rowdy was there a kind of tradition of boisterousness or not?
L Not much, again there were in some of the medical people.
C It was the medics was it?
L The Engineers were pretty quiet, pretty staid. Chemistry, we were in this building up here with Professor Chalmers and we were all terribly well behaved.
C No stink bombs, no stamping of feet?
L No, no, we used to when we had laboratory practicals we used to do mischievous things with dissolving things and this that and the other but nothing outrageous.
C Nothing significant?
L The only outrageous thing I remember doing, or not really, just about, I mean we also didn't do things like climb the Mitchell Tower I mean there were mountaineers and I suppose it's a matter of luck which faculty they're in, but there was a lot of that going on at that time, I don't know if there's any of that now.
C Very little I think.
L Church spires were the more difficult, the more fair game they were, and a guy called Grassie got caught climbing the Eiffel Tower, up the outside, one summer vac. and so on. The great relief valve every now and then was the fight.
C The Rectorial? How many Rectorials did you live through?
L Two.
C Two in your time. Were you interested and involved?
L Oh yes, and it was quite fun.
C Who were the candidates?
L Lord Hailsham, was he the first?
C Versus Bannerman.
L That's right.
C Peter Scott I think was the next one.
L That's right, Peter Scott.
C I don't know who his opponent was.
L And I can't remember either, but the Hailsham-Bannerman one was a big fight, I mean it was a fantastic fight in the quadrangle.
C You took part?
L Yes, I did.
C On which side?
L On Bannerman's side. I thought Quentin Hogg was a pompous so and so, but I mean I think his heart was probably in the right place whereas the young one who's around now seems to me to be a pompous so and so with not much else to offer. And of course Bannerman was very much the Scottish Nationalist before Scottish Nationalism wasn't he, and had a great appeal and of course he'd been a rugby player so he had all the…
C Rugby Club?
L Not that I was a rugby person, but he had that kind of aura…
C I bet you won the fight though?
L Oh yes, I couldn't believe it, you know, until I took part. They said 'they get a load of offal from the slaughterhouse', and there were huge bits of organs, whole livers being flung about and lungs on the end of trachea so there's whoopings going on, and somebody, maybe the Mackies, had been storing rotten eggs for months and months and these were being thrown about…
C You really enjoyed that?
L And then the smell for weeks afterwards was terrible!
C It must have been dreadful for the Sacrist to clear up too.
L I think the cleansing department came in. So that really was a highlight, it was a time when Butler got plastered by Glasgow.
C I've got pictures to this day.
L This man with this egg dripping down…
C Wonderful photograph.
L Of course, Sir Thomas Taylor was very fierce as a Principal. You didn't want, I'm sure a lot of people they wouldn't want to be up in front of him. And I remember there were a crowd of students, again not people I knew, who were making, I think they were medics, and they were making hooch of some kind from turnips…
C The famous Larrack case, yes
L That's right, and he threw them out of course, and there was a girl who - very sad - there was a girl who had been a very talented arts undergraduate but her family belonged to one of these weird Closed Brethren…
C Who wouldn't be yoked with the unbelievers, that one?
L From Peterhead and so on, and she wasn't allowed by her parents to come to the graduation and Sir Thomas said 'Right, no come, no degree' and that's how he was. And I remember he talked to us all on the very first day and he said 'Those of you who are not at home, you'll write once a week' and we all had our orders as to how to behave and not to forget our parents and so on.
C All very well meant but a bit avuncular?
L Yes. But maybe instilled a sense of respect and so on. Somebody said to me years later that he thought the Victorian age ended in about 1961 and I thought, well that's a bit funny, but now I realise that that was exactly right.
C Because that's when Tom Taylor died.
L And when Harold Macmillan came in and said 'You've never had it so good.' But my folks' values were entirely Victorian.
C Yes, I can see that.
L And I think no different from the time of the First World War and back into the previous century. So I grew up and having older folks as my parents, I grew up with that. So Thomas Taylor was very much a revered species and as the Principal someone you had to keep out of the way of.
C Delighted to hear you thought so highly of your degree, both at the time and subsequently. Did you get a job easily, straight out of university?
L Yes.
C No problem?
L I'd several offers of jobs. I wanted to go into the car industry, they didn't come recruiting up here and didn't take on graduates I discovered, really. But I went seeking and got an offer of a job from the Rover Car Company, from Perkins Diesel, the diesel engine people, from, not in cars, from Metropolitan Vickers in Manchester, the big engineering company, and I'd gone to a Shell interview, just for fun, not really thinking, well Shell no, not really a mechanical engineering company, and I put my name on the list and I got a date to see the guy and there were two people there and it was amazing ,we chatted away and this guy telling me about Shell and so on, and the other one, and I've done recruiting for Shell myself subsequently and they tend to send out somebody to their own university just to try and make a bond of some kind.
C Very sensible, yes
L And this chap, a sort of middle-aged chap, and he quickly discovered that I came from Banchory and he said 'Do you know the Laings?' and I said 'Yes' I said 'My Dad works at Laing's Garage' well we then spent about forty minutes reminiscing about the Laings, nothing about whether I knew any mathematics or anything else, and then three days later I got the offer of a job.
C Wonderful!
L Well, no the offer of a second interview which was…
C More serious?
L More serious and quite unexpected on my part, but anyway I went to the Shell laboratory near Chester and saw all sorts of people, of course, no idea who they were how important they were or anything else. All I remember is going there, and I'd broken my glasses the day before I went, and I'd a bit of sticking plaster holding my glasses together, and I then I had a board that turned out to be the top three people in the laboratory.
C Goodness.
L Just three guys as far as I was concerned and again we got talking about racing cars and I was trying to build a car with a friend of mine. So we talked at this interview about building cars and the problems of engines and this that and the other and then three or four days later I got the offer of a job.
C And you've stayed with them for your whole career?
L Yes, and I've had a super career because about every three years, never more than three years, I've had a different job. Not, widely, it was always in a related field but one thing, and then another thing and then something else and then I went overseas and for twenty odd years, I travelled. I didn't stay, I lived abroad only once, I lived in Brazil for five years, but prior to that and subsequent to that, travelled on two or three week trips all over the world, I mean I just had a super time.
C Great.
L And met the odd Aberdonian.
C Here and there.
L When I went to Brazil they said to me they'd arranged for me to see a guy at Perkins, Brazil in Sao Paulo - I was in Rio - so, 'What's his name?' 'Oh it's Smith' Well one of the guys in my class was Iain Smith, I said 'Not Iain Smith?' they said, 'Yes, I think that's his name' and so this was 1980, so twenty odd years on from student times. Went into Mr Smith's office, Chief Engineers Office, and there he is, Iain Smith.
C Who you'd been in class with in Aberdeen? Very nice. Great, well it's been super talking to you, is there anything we haven't covered that you would have liked to add?
L What else? No, I think that's probably pretty well covered it. It's kind of a matter of some regret to me in a way that I didn't have a more adventurous student time - oh I did try to join the Air Squadron, I wanted to fly, and I had to sit the aptitude test I remember one evening, sat that and then interview - a board - on the following Saturday. And I passed the both, but I had glasses, and they said 'Well we don't normally have people with specs, we prefer candidates who don't have specs, but if your marks are really very good …' Anyway, they weren't really very good so, that was the end of that and I never did learn to fly.
C But that's a very small regret with all else you did?
L Yes, and then one of the young lads from Banchory who was about three years younger than me, he was killed in one of the University planes.
C An Air Squadron accident? Oh dear.
L But oh yes, I would have liked to have been more like Maitland Mackie than I was!
C We can't all be born into that background.
L I'd probably like to be as rich as he is as well, but I don't mind not being so.
C Very nice to meet you, thank you very much.
L Nice to meet you.
END OF INTERVIEW
|