| Description | Interview with John Ross recorded in Crombie Hall on the 23 of June 2001 by John Hargreaves.
Transcript of Interview :
H John Ross, when did you come up to Aberdeen University?
R In 1957.
H Why did you choose Aberdeen University?
R Because it was the normal university for people from the north unless you wanted to study a specific subject.
H Where were you from?
R I came from Invergordon Academy and we normally came to Aberdeen, if we went anywhere of course, in my time not many people came to university.
H And the school encouraged this?
R Well, both my parents were graduates.
H Of Aberdeen?
R Of Aberdeen, so in a sense although it was normal for my school, it was equally assumed in my family. I don't think we'd a graduate from any other university at all, all the people in the family who were graduates in both my mother's and my father's family had been to Aberdeen.
H What courses did you take at Aberdeen and why did you choose them?
R In my first year, I did Latin, Greek and English. I thought my interests lay in Classics, I found out that my performance did not and I had to re-sit both subjects and I didn't have to re-sit English so I thought 'Stick with English and do something else' and did Philosophy and Psychology in second year and then went on and finished the degree in English.
H English, in a sense an accidental choice, or had you been guided that way at all in school?
R No, I'd a very, very good English teacher at school, a man called Donald Macfarlane who was probably the best of his year in Edinburgh, and he was a very stimulating English teacher, but I just didn't think of English as a career subject, I though it was fun, and I thought Classics was serious. There was another reason, my father was a Classicist, but when I got to university, I actually did find English stimulating in a different way, in school it had been too easy, and it wasn't that it was so difficult at university, but it had more bite to it than school English.
H Which teachers did you find most stimulating?
R That's a hard one. Probably in Humanity, Bob Coleman, who taught us as much Greek as Latin in his Latin lectures. Watt was pretty good, and Archie Cameron was lovely, great fun. In English, I suppose the one I found most stimulating was Walter Keir. And that was because, while the others to a large extent taught you the subject, Walter taught you to think about the subject, if you can take the distinction. He was an extremely difficult lecturer to understand, the other lecturers were models of clarity, with Walter you never knew what he was going to say, and you couldn't even predict what he was going to say in the course of a lecture, and you might get nothing and you might get an awful lot.
H Which other teachers do you remember favourably, or indeed any unfavourably?
R Oh no, I mean, Mackinnon taught me Philosophy and that was quite an amazing experience. The Psychology was just different altogether because the Psychology Department was all over the place and we weren't taking it seriously. You had to take a sixth subject, so 2 o'clock in the afternoon that's fine. A break between lunch and coffee.
H What was teaching like at that time? Was it largely, you've indicated something of Walter Keir's methods, was it largely a matter of lectures and note taking or…?
R No, no, the movement was starting to move over to tutorial teaching, sometimes in small tutorials, sometimes in individual tutorials and that was quite different, what I was talking about was my first two years, my ordinary years. In honours you picked and chose lecturers and you had tutors and you might have a tutor only for one term and then pass to another tutor, so that the tutors weren't getting bored with you, you weren't getting bored with the tutors. Which you could do in a small department with a small number of students, considerable flexibility. And that way you never learnt to play to your tutor's weaknesses, you had to learn their weaknesses before you knew how to write an essay they would like.
H Yes, exactly.
R And that meant also you got to know your tutor quite well and they got to know you quite well but as I say you couldn't afford to do it probably with the pupil-teacher ratios there are now, and also the increased complexity of University regulations and degree structures and so on.
H Was the student body well-disciplined and obedient in those days?
R Oh no, oh no, no, we…I don't know, we were talking about it amongst ourselves, how we felt about it, and you've got to remember for most of the boys it was a way of keeping out of the army, because you got deferment and you didn't have to do National Service. You didn't come to university with a thirst for learning, you came out of it to avoid square bashing and being sent to Cyprus. You got caught up in the atmosphere. I mean obviously there's a big change, a culture shock, moving from a small town secondary school in what was for us in retrospect a small University but then it was a biggish community, there were four hundred students at King's.
H Had you travelled much outside the North before you came to Aberdeen?
R I don't think I'd ever been south of Edinburgh before I came to Aberdeen, certainly never been in England.
H And where did you live in Aberdeen?
R I first lived up Rosemount Viaduct, in lodgings. And in fact in all my student life I lived in lodgings, never went into a flat until I was a post-graduate student but that was abroad.
H What sort of lodgings did you have, did you have a room on your own?
R I shared a room in my first year and my second year. In my third year, when I went into junior honours I thought I'd better get a room of my own, so I shifted lodgings again and lived down Dee Street and lived there for my two honours years.
H And you had reasonable conditions of work in those?
R Oh yes, the only reason I shifted is that I could make my own work pattern, I didn't have to accommodate someone else's sleeping pattern.
H Thank you. We haven't spoken much about your experience, you've told us how the honours course differed from the… what teachers in the honours course do you most remember with favour or dis-favour?
R I remember my own tutors all favourably but for very, very different reasons. In the sense that some of them like Patricia Thomson, taught you very much the subject in hand, whereas on the other hand people like Walter who was my tutor in my final year, and John Lothian, while they would teach to your essays, they would then add on a sort of second part tutorial about anything. Anything at all, and sometimes with Walter it was 'right, come on, let's go to the pub and see who is there' and there would be people from other departments, but you'd be invited to join in the conversation, you were that day's undergraduate in conversation. So sometimes it wasn't the actual teaching of the subject but teaching associated with the subject, but off the point.
H Were there other tutors who had similarly good personal relations, I mean not necessarily in the pub but in coffee parties were somewhat the vogue at that time, did you…?
R Well no, I was different because I was involved in the Left Movement in the city and for that sort of thing it was more the economists, people like Ken Alexander. We used to go round to Ken's house for discussion groups and study groups. So apart from in one or two cases I didn't socialise much with the department when I was a student. In that sense my social life was much more concerned activity both in the Socialist Society in the University and in the movement that went towards setting up the Left Clubs and so on in the city.
H Had you been involved in the Left in Invergordon already or at school?
R Well, not quite. Yes, I carried a card in the Labour Party, but I'd been politicised by the invasion of Budapest and that for people of my age was a very traumatic experience, the arguments were pretty intense on both sides.
H Now, I know this was absolutely true in the Left, would you say that was true of the student body as a whole?
R The student body as a whole wasn't very political, I mean that was part of the trouble being active in student politics was trying to make the rest of the people interested. I'm not saying that they didn't have a political opinion but I think they thought we were a bunch of clowns, you know, running around making too much noise and membership of the political societies was relatively small. On the other hand, there was a curious camaraderie among the student politicians, they were your opponents but you were all together against the indifference of everyone else.
H Did you take part in the Debater very much?
R I was on the committee at one point and had to speak in the political debates but this again, you got to know the people who were speaking for the Conservatives or speaking for the Nationalists, and you got to know them and learned that you might have different opinions but that didn't mean that they were necessarily bad people.
H Yes, right.
R And that was something that I suppose did stick with me and has stuck with me ever since.
H What about CND?
R Well, we were premature CND, I mean the student left in Aberdeen, we actually had a public meeting in the Music Hall before CND was founded and we were very keen on that and again that led you into lots of arguments and certainly into a lot of trouble with the Labour Party. There was one move at one point to expel some of us from the Labour Party over our CND activities, and it was a close-run thing but we weren't expelled. But we thought we were going to be.
H You say us, who were your comrades?
R It was a group of people either from the…well, the League of Youth in north Aberdeen didn't disband when it was supposed to disband, so technically they were Young Socialists but it was North Aberdeen League of Youth and the University Labour Club and Bob Hughes was the leader of the group, the man who went on to be MP and Peter Henderson was the leader of the students and I was one of the acolytes. But there was an attempt to expel us, but it didn't work. I'd have had a quieter life if it had.
H Did you have other extra-curricular activities?
R I worked as a reporter and as a sub-editor for Gaudie and became editor in the course of my second year, edited Alma, one edition. Didn't really do that much else. Got involved very much in the McDiarmid rectorial campaign, which I shouldn't have done because it was my final year but luckily it was in the first term. And apart from that just the usual, Union life - snooker and beer.
H We mentioned on the way up that I think I met you at a SCM … what was the SCM like from a student point of view in those days?
R I joined the SCM when I came along I went round the stalls and joined a number of things that I never went back to, went along to the SCM … SCM in those days was very much what I might call the liberal and social wing of university student Christianity, and I felt quite comfortable in that. We had some very fascinating meetings and, if you remember, these weekends at the Burn. It was very stimulating, you met people who were roughly of the same cast of mind, but not exactly the same cast of mind as yourself and it was… it was just that becoming involved in Gaudie and the Labour Club you'd really no time for anything more, I didn't leave the SCM I drifted…
H Did something else, yes. Who were the leading spirits in the SCM?
R That I don't remember, because I, I didn't feel that there was that sort of thing, I suppose there must have been but the way that the actual meetings were structured you didn't get the impression of a pyramidic structure and as I say I was in my first year and I tended to think that things happened anyway, no notion about how student evening meetings were organised and then I had to start organising them and found out!
H How did you support yourself during your studies?
R Grant. And working in the summer.
H Was the grant sufficient?
R No. And I got money from my parents. The grant regime changed in my junior honours year, for two reasons: one that the grants became better and the other was my kid brother came to university, so suddenly the dual parental contribution was cut in half. But in the summer I'd go away and work somewhere.
H What did you do, what sort of jobs, farming?
R I did farming the year before I came to university and forestry but when I came to university the first year I didn't, I'd to go home and swot because I had two re-sits. But then I tended to go to London, and that wasn't so much to make money but you could go to London and you'd time to go and see plays, see films you might not see in Aberdeen, you know, the sort of alternative cultural life was available in London, you'd get to go the galleries and yes, have a bit of spending money. And I didn't expect to save money over the summer, but to cover my living expenses for the long vacation. I did other odd jobs, one winter I worked over Christmas and New Year in a chicken factory but that wasn't anything to write home about. And then the year I graduated I got a job as a van boy in London and that was very distinguished, I was learning parts of the city that tourists never normally see, if you go London from Scotland you see Central London and here we were in Kinghtsbridge and we were down in Balham and Wandsworth and making deliveries all over the place.
H Did you travel abroad during your student days?
R No, no, couldn't afford it. And again, I'd never been to England before I came to university and I was seeing not just London, but the travelling up and down you did by hitch-hiking so you saw York or you saw …
H Was there any division between students who were if not actually impoverished, at least living on, scraping on their grants, and any sense of a group of richer students, any sense of a social divide amongst students?
R No, I don't think so. The only divide I was conscious of, were, there was a division between the Aberdeen group of students and those of us who had come from outside because the Aberdeen ones still had their own, Aberdonian, non-university social circles that they belonged to as well as their university ones. The rest of us had nothing but, when we came here, but the University, though of course through the party I developed links with the city, but in a different way. There were other divisions, there was the language ones between the Gaelic speakers and the non-Gaelic speakers…
H Are you a Gaelic speaker?
R No, no, though I knew quite a few… there were no hard divisions, I mean we got to know Aberdeen-based people, we got to know people from the Islands…
H What about medical students, did they…?
R No, they were away at Foresterhill all the time, I did a year on the SRC so I knew some of the medics through that but because the medics spent nearly all their time at Foresterhill and we were spending all of our time at King's you hardly ever saw them, and even then most of the hard science boys were down at Marischal, you didn't see much of them, unless you'd been at school with them, or known them before you came to university.
H And in the Union you tend to be with your own circle so to speak?
R When we went to the Union, it tended to be… you were going for a meeting and then you'd socialise with some of the people you met at the meeting. Or, if you just went there for a drink it was usually after an evening in the library, so it would be one of the mates from your class, you'd be working together on an essay and so on and then we'd go down. Eventually that became formalised, in my last year I went to the Union virtually every day in the early evening to play snooker and then went back to the library and then went back for a pint and it was almost always with the one guy who lived quite near me.
H What about the other difference between men and women in the student body?
R Och, in that sense I got the impression that Aberdeen University was very much a continuation of school life - that you weren't really very interested in the girls in your own year you were a lot more interested in the girls the year behind you and the girls the year behind that, you know that sort of thing, two year age difference thing.
H But as regards to your own crowd you say you weren't interested in socially, did they participate fully in the work of the department and did they participate fully in the Labour Club?
R There were girls who were in the Labour Club, well, it came to be called the Socialist Society, we changed the name to make it more inclusive at one point, in fact I was engaged and married to one of them, and we had two children, but… it's difficult to characterise what the attitude was because I think again Aberdeen was moving from a university culture where men and women had developed differently with the separate Unions and so on, but they still had the Women's Union, but they were using the one building, we were meeting one another in class, we were meeting one another in the coffee bars, we were going to the dances, but there was still a hint of the older system, it hadn't completely unified.
H Did you have many women on your staff in Gaudie or Alma?
R Yes. Well, not Alma, Alma was a totally amateur production and in essence you were the editor and the only person that helped was the retired former editor and that was it, it was a scissors and paste job. But on Gaudie, yes, we had women that came into help, you had to because it's reporting and you had to get reports on women's sporting activities as well as the men's sporting activities, you had to get theatre reviews, you had to get film reviews, and also, actually making the paper up because what we did was you would get the galley sheets printed and we had to cut them up and paste them up and it really was a job that required neatness you know and we were taught by a man who had been a journalist and was a mature student how to do it, but it took quite a lot of people to do it, because it had to be done, get the paper pasted up, get it to the printers, get it printed and have it on the streets by half past eight on Friday morning and it was handy to have women on the staff because you could discuss the stories: 'Is this a good story, or a bad story?' you weren't relying on your own judgement, ok the editor's say is final but, you were trying… the paper lived or died by it's sales in those days because it didn't carry much advertising.
H Yes, I remember. It sounds a bit though, perhaps this is jumping to conclusions, as if Gaudie was a men's thing rather, was there a woman editor in your time?
R Not in my time because I started under Jim Gorie when Jim was editor, then worked for Stuart Middleton when he was editor, now I know Louie Urquhart was involved but I don't think she became editor, partly it was the way in which the editor was chosen, because sometimes there was competition for it and sometimes it was 'Oh my God, who will we get to do it?' and in my case I think it was that nobody else wanted to do it at that time. But I'd been the assistant editor, my assistant editor was Alec Winpenny and Alec succeeded me, so in a sense there was a running thing, you started as a reporter, you got taken on as assistant editor and then unless there was someone else you became the next editor. But Patricia Thompson had edited Gaudie in her time and that was ten years earlier.
H Yes, and somebody else I remember who'd done it a bit earlier was Marion Cowie.
R So there wasn't a thing against women editors…
H But basically it tended to be…
R It tended to be… the difficulty is that a lot of people who came in to work as reporters, came in, did it, and got bored and found something else to do, but the people who got the bug stuck with it.
H What did you do when you graduated?
R I emigrated to Canada. I took a Master's degree in English and taught…
H Where was that?
R In the University of Alberta, in Edmonton in Alberta. And then I came back to Britain.
H And you've been a university teacher ever since? What sort of degree did you get?
R In Aberdeen?
H Yes.
R I got a first.
H So it was not too difficult to find a…
R To find a place for a post-graduate and post-graduate finance.
H The finance came from Canada, the University of Alberta?
R The finance came from a scholarship from the University of Alberta. I think it was probably topped up by a grant from the Provincial Government, but the money was paid to me by the University and it was paid as an assistant lecturer's stipend. So I taught one class…[?] when I did it.
H Did many of your classmates who didn't get firsts have any difficulty finding employment at that time do you think?
R I don't think anyone had any difficulty finding employment. I'm not sure how many found the employment they wanted, but remember of course, quite a lot went on either to post-graduate or to education. So, I don't think very many were actually going straight into paid employment. But I'm afraid when we graduated we dispersed, with no real idea of what people did.
H Well, the last question is a nice open-ended one, what value did your university education have for your subsequent life and career?
R Ah. That's almost impossible. I certainly know that the work I did, and the things I've done since then, professionally, I could not have done without a formal university education. On the other hand some of the most satisfying things that I've done in my life have been in politics which I'm not sure how much my education had any bearing on whatsoever, except the informal…
End of INTERVIEW
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