| Description | Interview with Mrs. Pat Brown, recorded on 1 October 2002 by Jennifer Carter.
Transcript of Interview :
JC So Pat you were telling me that your service in the University is exceptionally long. When you came in 1965 was it kind of your first job or did you come to us straight from college or from another job, or what?
PB Yes, I came from another job, and that was interesting because it was in commerce, and when I came to the University on my first day, I came with a ruler, a pen and a pencil sharpener and a shorthand notebook, because in a private company, these things just weren't provided!. I came to the University and I thought this was luxury, I couldn't believe how nice it was, the office, everything was of the best. You had plenty paper. Everything was provided. You looked out of the window at a lovely grass verge, a meadow kind of place, with roses and trees, and it was just a lovely environment, to work.
JC The University was upmarket in those days, not like now, when everything is penny- pinching.
PB That's right. We had this wonderful parquet flooring with under-floor heating, which was a lovely atmosphere to work in, because you always felt warm, because the floor was warm, and it was really nice. In the days when open -plan offices were not the thing, but we had an open-plan office, which was the general office and all the activity sprung from there, it was the centre, and the professor's room was off that room. So everyone who had to come and see the professor had to come through the room. He was a very shy man, Professor Finnie, and you didn't really just knock on his door. It was by invitation. Interestingly he provided all the work for the office on discs.
JC That was very early to be doing that in the '60's!
PB Yes, he was doing that on disc and for me that was revolutionary, because you sat with your headphones on, and he prioritised. He was very, very organised, and he could you tell you "Of these jobs I am giving you today, this is the order I want it done in". He also told you where to file it and he was very meticulous. So going into a university environment where, you know, some of the language was strange for me, it was made very, very easy because of the way it was presented to you.
JC That is wonderful. Now the Department of Statistics, when you first joined then, was quite small, was it?
PB No, it wasn't! It was quite big actually, because we had these units, the ARC Unit of Statistics was based in Aberdeen, and there were a lot of statisticians there.
JC ARC stands for?
PB Agricultural Research Council, and there was a research group in Bio-metric Medicine, and the people who worked there became internationally famous. One of the people I remember especially was Mick Day who went on to work for the World Health Organisation and became a very, very senior statistician, and it is lovely to think I knew him when he was young, a young man setting out on his career. We met a lot of interesting people. We had the very first IBM punch card machine in the department, and we punched the data, and then you went upstairs to the computing department, which was just on the top floor of Meston Building, clutching your pack of cards, and you put it through the card reader, but when you booked on to the computer in those days, there was a blackboard and you went up and wrote "Pat Brown wants to use the computer at 3 o'clock - I think it will take me ½ an hour"!
JC Lovely informal touch!
PB Yes, and that was all you had to do! You just went up. The cards were revolutionary, because prior to the cards you just tape, and you had to wind it on and make sure that you had wound it all the way back again when you had finished.
JC It was really a kind of unusual secretarial work that you were doing. It was more a kind of technical job in some ways.
PB Yes, we were very involved in the research, because Dr. Anthony Edwards was doing the research on Tristan da Cuna. The evacuation of the people and he was tracing back their history, and it turned out that they had all evolved from a very small nucleus of people.
JC Yes, I think I have heard about this.
PB Yes, so we were very involved in the research and especially, .. it was interesting I think probably because most of it was medical research and to do with people. Apart from the agricultural unit, which again is about food, animals, of interest to people.
JC And I think you told me that all of this was at the post-graduate level. You had no undergraduates at all.
PB No none at all. There were two classrooms, there was an M.Sc course, a taught course, and there were post graduate students as well, taught by research only. But you know, there were loads of them and you know it was very interesting, because they came and talked to you about their research, and we were all involved in their research. I can remember, David Kerridge, typing a paper for him on the gestational age of children. That was very revolutionary in the 1960's. This was a very well advertised piece of research, and I didn't know what gestational age meant! But he would sit down with you and explain, tell you, and that added enormously to the enjoyment of the job, because we were involved at that level.
JC How much sort of straight forward typing of papers and that sort of things and correspondence was there, compared to the more technical stuff of running through machines and things?
PB Well it was mostly typing.
JC It was mostly typing.
PB Yes. It was mostly typing and filing and reports. There were agricultural reports that were compiled and sent out all over the country, and the research papers were all typed and of course students had their theses typed.
JC By you, not by themselves!
PB No, no. You see you were typing and you were taking these carbon copies. No electric typewriters in the '60's, and we had a little mount fitted on to the typewriter and the Greek alphabet and mathematical symbols were on like wooden sticks with the symbol on the bottom, it was a nice wooden box, which I think we still have in the department, and you dropped it into this little metal thing and you typed. Now you had to have a key because it was not obviously what was on the keyboard.
JC That must have taken a lot of concentration to do that.
PB Yes, the statistical typing, and of course sub-script and super script, we had to manually roll the roll up and down, you know.
JC When did that change, do you remember. When did you go on to an electric typewriters and then on to word processors?
PB Well I know when I did because the first IBM machine came into the department in 1972 and as I was the Senior Secretary I was the one that got it! And I have still got it! It is still in the department, because I was the only person that really used that one. The other secretaries were doing far more typing than I was doing and their machines wore out quicker, so that is why my one survived really. It was less used. The only letters I did were the confidential ones.
JC The references and such?
PB Yes, the day to day, bread and butter stuff was done by the typists. We had typists who just did that job. It is all they did, and at one time, when the University was very affluent I had my own secretary. In the days when there were Grade 1 secretaries Professor Kerridge had recognised that I was extremely busy and when the establishment of the department was increased he decided to employ a secretary to the senior secretary. Which died of course when she left. Well she was re-deployed, when the University was streamlining she was re-deployed to another department, because we were then deemed to be over-staffed, and you know, that was a luxury. That was a lovely period, because I remember there were 7 academic members of staff, and 7 secretaries. So that was a one to one ratio which was very high, but we got that on the grounds on the high output of research. I think that was pretty unusual in those days.
JC Unprecedented, I would think!
PB And I think that once the University were tightening their belt a bit and noticed, they did something about that, but there was that lovely period when you could do the things when you could complete a job, see it right through to the very end. That was very satisfying. A lot of the satisfaction has disappeared, because you are always, nowadays, prioritising, and you are only doing the bit of the job that is absolutely necessary. Whereas, to use a more modern phrase, if you were to drill down a bit, you could provide a better support, or a better report . But everything is always to deadlines now, and one of the joys of the University in the '60's was there were no deadlines!
JC Absolutely, people just completed their research in their own time.
PB You did the job, and Professor Kerridge used to speak about academics having thinking time!
JC What's that!
PB Can you imagine that nowadays!
JC Absolutely not.
PB People would think you just weren't working. But he believed in thinking time. He believed that people needed to think about what they were doing, before they wrote it down, and that was a tip I learned from him. If I was report writing, and I still do it to this day, I think about it long and hard and then it just comes, and that was part of the training that he instilled in me. One of the other things about the department that I think was unusual was the fact that I was encouraged to take the Statistics courses.
JC Really!
PB That was because of my involvement with 1st year students, because we didn't for a lot of the time, have a woman member of staff. Professor Kerridge.. I always went along to exams for instance, because Professor Kerridge, long before it became popular, or necessary now, he believed that a lady member of staff should be in attendance at exams in case a female student took ill. Because the invigilators were usually men, I just went along, and technically was an invigilator, but most of the time, and obviously helped, put out the exam papers and everything, but I was in attendance at all the exams, and even acted a scribe on occasions, if that was necessary. There came a time in the University, you see, when I was told after the, after the merge actually, so that would be about the '90's, just when universities were beginning to get scared of getting sued, things changed dramatically. I was no longer allowed, for a short period, to talk to students! That was because of this tremendous worry that the students would be given false information, and it could be tracked back to a secretary who didn't have the authority. Now after having done it for umpteen years I found that hard, not being allowed to talk to students, and then I learned to say to a student, "This is what I think. You must go to the Registry and check it out. But this is what I think the regulations are saying" and I always had to preface it by safeguarding the department by not giving advice. Not being able to give advice. That was very hard. But in the early days you were just part of the department and the students came and they would ask me about histograms and things like that, and I went and did the 1st year Statistics course and did it properly.
JC Got your DP!
PB Yes, went to the tutorials and did my homework. Found that really helpful because I could look at student's homework. They would come in with it and say " I don't think I can hand this in because I have only got down to their and got stuck", and I would say "a well, let's see what you have done here", and one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from Professor Kerridge about helping students, was to say to them, look at your answer. Does it make sense, is it possible?
JC When you read it yourself. You mark it yourself as it were.
PB Yes, because the biggest thing they seem to get wrong was a probability being more than one! They just couldn't see that, you know! When the Lottery came in, it felt like a god send for statisticians to demonstrate probability. In the early days we had matchboxes and we had all this equipment you know, balls, red balls, and all that sort of thing, and lecturers took things out of their pockets. Very visual, and also during lectures, they would measure all the students, to show them how "tails" work, to show them how you got your average, and how you always had "tails" with outliers, because you would have a tiny student and a 6 foot 5 one! That was all very visual and all prepared in the office, and we would get all the information back.
JC So you were really, in the office, you were really part of the department?
PB Very much so, and involved in analysing homework, whether the boys were better than the girls.
JC Were they, as a matter of interest in statistics? Or was it even-stevens?
PB To begin with it was the boys, then the girls took over.
JC How interesting. Why was that, do you think? That you got a better quality of girl in or what?
PB I don't know. I think it was …
JC They tried harder or… ?
PB I think to begin with the boys were probably better mathematicians..
JC Better taught?
PB Yes. But the girls are much more meticulous and they shone when they had to do a project, or report writing. Boys only write down what they have to write down ! Girls will elaborate. There were no group projects in those days.
JC Everything was individual?
PB Individual, yes. There was no double-marking or double-blind marking. Nothing like that, and I was always involved in all the examiners-meetings. Preparing all the materials for the examiners meeting. The discussion, because by the time they came to 4th year, it was a person you were speaking about and their work overall and there was a judgement made and every member of staff went to the informal examiners meetings, everybody went, and everybody had an input. I always felt justified in saying to a student who was saying "I wasn't feeling well, etc." and I would say "Don't worry, because I have been at these meetings, and I can assure you that you are a person to them. Justice will be done. If you hadn't been very well that day, that is taken account of. They know you and they know what you are capable of, and if you have made a silly slip, it's not going to make the difference in the class of degree". So I always was able to reassure them how meticulous the examining was and how fair, and how they became an individual, and there was a feeling which they then had to convince the external. Again, another principal Professor Kerridge had, and I think this was probably true throughout the University, you can only use knowledge to enhance a result, not take them down. I think that was always good for the students.
JC He was obviously a good boss to work for, Kerridge?
PB He never raised his voice, he was very placid.
JC As organised and meticulous as Finnie?
PB No! He always confessed to not being an administrator! He always felt that the person best suited to do the job was the person who was trained for it. He didn't interfere with what he called the "domestic arrangements" of the department.
JC Which were run by you!
PB Yes, and he always said that he only wanted to know if I couldn't resolve it. So there was a lot of responsibility but given in a way which enabled me to develop as a person. Given every opportunity to be in the department, like the person who the students can come to for, at first year level anyway, for a little bit of help with their work. I was also the Regent for the department. So I saw all the students if they had any problems. It didn't really matter if it was financial, personal, whatever kind. So I was encouraged to go on all these courses on counselling that the university provided.
JC I mean, without wishing to sound very cynical, did you get paid commensurate, with all this stuff you were doing? Or were you on the straight secretarial salary.
PB Just on the secretarial salary.
JC Well, I think that the University was actually exploiting you! If I can put a sort of trade union angle on it!
PB Well, I think that at the time, I felt I was being extremely well treated. Because, I knew from my friends in other departments, that they didn't have these opportunities to develop.
JC They most certainly didn't. I have never heard such a catalogue done by.. even people called nowadays administrative assistants, you know.
PB I do remember at one time going for a promotion, and it was turned down on the grounds that the fact that I was doing it, and I shouldn't be doing it, and some of the work should have been done by academic staff. The University wasn't prepared to countenance this.
JC How interesting. So what was your final grade? Were you a 5 or a 6.
PB A 5.
JC Well I think the University was getting an incredible amount out of you for the money, I have to say.
PB I think because it was an educational environment the encouragement was there, but when we merged with Mathematics now I could see the difference, because we had all been encouraged to develop our skills. The secretaries coming into Mathematics hadn't had that opportunity at all. They were timid and they only did what they were asked to do, and they wouldn't question anything. Whereas I had questioned everything all the time! You know, what is this, why do we do this?
JC Well you were obviously and completely a member of the department.
PB Yes, consulted when we were employing people. I was always the first person that saw them. Professor Kerridge kept out of it for the first, and he said now you must make..
JC You did the short-listing
PB Well not as formal as that, but he would say, "Now you see these people first, and you have a chat with them. Give them a cup of coffee, and get rid of their nervousness before the formal interview" and I always did that. And I would.have ..
JC Have your little say afterwards.
PB Yes, and we would get together and Professor Kerridge was always more interested in the academic side, but if it was a secretary he would say "now we have got 4 people - all of equal background, which of them do you think will fit in with the existing staff, because that is most important. A high flyers no use to us, if you can't work together." That was always made clear, that this person must fit in, must be interested. Try and find out what their hobbies are, try and find out what .. You are not allowed to do that nowadays.
JC No indeed. Human Resources keeps a very tight eye on what questions you ask.
PB And I don' think…. Well when my replacement was being interviewed, well when the interviews on my replacement, I found that quite interesting, because I was involved a little in that, and once the 6 people I think they interviewed were selected, they went to the general office first, and the girls in the general office were told they were not interviewing these people, but they were just there to show a friendly interest in them as people. Then they would be called for the formal interview. Then my involvement was that they came to me. I gave them a little tour of the department, and invited them to ask me questions, because it was my job that they were going to have. So I found that interesting, and a nice way of being involved in my successor, although I didn't have any input into their choice.
JC We will have a little word in a moment, because I am about to turn the tape fairly soon, perhaps some personalities, but just going back over a couple of things that we have been talking about. I suppose the nature of the secretarial support work changed again when staff began to do all their own typing as word processors came in. Did that mean that you took a reduction in secretarial staff at that time? Was that how it worked or differently?
PB The merge was a big watershed, because we went from, on the Maths side, they were just left with 2 secretaries. There was a departmental administrator and that vanished, that role. She left, I think she was virtually Professor Patterson's secretary. Heads of departments in those days did have secretaries, although in Statistics, Professor Kerridge never ever referred to me as his secretary, because he believed in departmental secretaries, but in Maths it was different, and the administrator was virtually the Head of Department's secretary.
JC A PA sort of job.
PB And on the Statistics side, 2 of the secretaries got the voluntary severance and 1 was re deployed, so the combined new department was 3 secretaries.
JC Smaller than what each of them had been separately.
PB Yes, and this was obviously a big saving, but it was a sign of the times, because the role had changed..
JC The typing role had almost gone completely? The other parts of the job, no, but the typing role must have vanished as staff must have started to type all their own papers. Probably all their own correspondence as well, to a large extent .
PB Now at that time we used Central Services. I think we were one of the first departments, in statistics certainly, to use Central Services to release resource to do more important things, but when the merger took place the Maths people were still using stencils!
JC They weren't!
PB They were!
JC You amaze me!
PB I was absolutely amazed, and I had to wean them off!
JC Was it because of some particular kind of their work made it desirable? They must have disappeared from everywhere else long before that, surely? What was the date of merger?
PB It was 1989. They were still cranking...
JC I thought it all went out in the 70's or even the 60's!
PB Well it did, well in our department. So we moved forward. It evolved because I was taking over, and the 2 secretaries were from the Maths side, so I had to work at it really quite hard.
JC And be quite tactful?
PB Yes, because we wanted the department to move forward and we wanted to discuss "How did you do it" I knew how we had done it in Statistics, and then together move forward and say "Well we won't do either of these things, let's do this". Sometimes that worked and sometimes one of the ways that the Maths people had done things we adopted, but we did talk about it a lot, to try and merge, to make it a good merge, and I think it was.
JC It worked well?
PB I think it was a good merger. I think the department survived that very well, because it was interesting because in my private life at the time, my church was going through a merger and we were the big church, swallowing up the little church, but in my working life I was the small department being enveloped by the big department, and I learned a lot, because I was able to look at it from both sides. Professor Kerridge said to me, where you have the choice always allow the underdog..
JC Right, you were saying how well the merger had gone, so that was very good to hear, the merger of Statistics and Mathematical Sciences into one unit. One other thing I had been going to ask you though, looking back at what you had said about the way in which your role changed and the way in which you worked, which was very obviously individual, and unlike what many secretaries did. Did you nevertheless involve yourself to an extent in the secretarial representational side, the union side, within the University?
PB Yes, I was very active in that, because in the 1960's we had an Association of Secretaries, which was just a purely social group.
JC Pre union stage?
PB Yes.
JC Who were the moving spirits? Yourself, Ann Gordon, Celia Blacklaws ?
PB Yes, and Elma McGraths from Chemistry, that age group really. We were like the young seniors, if you put it that way.
JC Liz Weir?
PB Not at that point. She came in later. She wasn't involved at that point. But we had a big debate about, you know, about becoming a union. Of course ..what was the first one called, was it NALGO?
JC It was NALGO for a long time, but whether that was the first name I can't remember.
PB I think there was one before that.
JC Probably ended up as AMACUS, did it?
PB No, no. It is UNISON.
JC Oh, yes, I knew it was some very smooth name but I couldn't remember which! UNISON, that's right.
PB I was on the Executive and held several of the posts and became quite involved in the union and enjoyed being involved. I was Recruitment Officer for a long time, and I met a lot of new people coming in.
JC Persuading them to join the union?
PB That's right. I was invited by the Induction, the University Induction, team to talk once or twice during that induction package that new secretaries got. I am not sure if they still do that.
JC Probably aren't enough of them to induct!
PB Ah, well there was an induction and I was invited a few times to talk to them about the union, and there was another time the University invited me to talk to secretaries about their career in the University. You know, how I had evolved with the union. But the structures of the University, unfortunately, I was very lucky, because although I went.. I joined the University in 1965, by 1967 I was Senior Secretary.
JC That was a quick promotion.
PB Yes, perhaps a bit unfortunate for those younger than me, but the career structure in the University at that time, you really had to move departments to get promotion. There was very little ..
JC Of course the big change was when they brought in the grading system.
PB Yes that was about 1974. Most people just moved sideways. It did cause a little bit of ….
JC It always seemed to me to have disadvantages, as well as some advantages, I mean, I suppose the main disadvantage of the old system would be that it was too personal. But the new system always struck as terribly rigid, in that you couldn't reward someone who was working exceptionally, very easily, could you?
PB I remember being involved in talking to people through the Union and one of things that came out of Personnel at that time was that if you were typing a letter you were typing a letter, and that was Grade 2 work, and it didn't matter who you were, or who you were writing it to, or if it was confidential! If it was typing a letter, it was typing a letter, and that rigidity that you were talking about was very inflexible in those days and I am not sure if it is any better now.
JC Well I am retired now, so I don't know.
PB I think around the University you still really have to move to get promotion and I feel that is a bit of a draw-back because the University is losing expertise within a department. I was very lucky when I was due for retirement, really, that I had the opportunity to speak to the Dean, and, informally, over ...
JC Was this Torrance, Robertson?
PB No
JC I am on the wrong Faculty probably aren't I ?
PB Yes, we are Science & Engineering.
JC Houlihan?
PB No, Albert Rodger.
JC Right, I am with you at last!
PB He was a very new Dean, and he ..
JC Very nice man.
PB Yes, a very nice man, and we were invited to meet him for Xmas pie and a glass of wine, and I met him, and of course he just started chatting, and I said to him about I felt that the University missed out on a lot of expertise, and I used myself as an example!. Someone who had been in the University a long time, you know, coming up for retirement, and all this information I my head, which I wasn't going to have the opportunity to pass on to anybody. Because the people who are remaining in my office did a different job to me, so they weren't really very aware of what I was doing. He listened, and while my successor was being appointed we had an overlap, which allowed me to brief her and she was coming from an environment where there had not been any teaching. It wasn't a teaching department. She came from the Elphinstone Institute. She is very, very good, but she had no experience of a teaching department and I had that opportunity and I found that very satisfying at the end of career, that I was able to pass on what I knew. So my impression of the University is that they are good employers, I felt, I feel, I have been very well treated and as I say people listened and the Dean listened and I was really quite surprised that he took it all on board, but he did, and he saw the value of it. I was just speaking to Rob Archibald, who is the present Head in Mathematical Sciences and I just sent him an email and said to him I hoped that he felt that the overlap had been worth while, and I got back the message saying "Oh yes, very much so". Everything had gone so smoothly. I think that is just a question of people taking the time to talk to each other, you know communication. Communication is so important, isn't it? Some times I used to go home from my job and say "my goodness, what have I done today? I have talked to a lot of people, you know I have sorted out a lot of problems, but what have I actually done?" It kind of used to worry me a wee bit, but then you can't evaluate that can you?
JC No, I mean that is just such an important part of the job, isn't it? That people should be communicating, and not just by email. Useful though email is!
PB Yes, but the actual power of a one to one with a student who you can see is distressed, you know, or not coping.
JC Or indeed with a young member of staff, or an old member of staff.
PB Yes, I have had that with staff, and even when you know when these assessments are taking place. This happened with a very senior, senior lecturer, who went to pieces, because there was this person in the room while he was lecturing and he came back and he was devastated because he had made an arithmetic error that he had never made in his life before. It had an enormous impact on him and I just felt now what are they doing here? I am not sure about these assessments. Do they do any good, and certainly the last one we had, which was supposed to be a teaching assessment. They never went to listen to any lectures, all they were interested in were procedures. Did we have all the right bits of paper. Have you done this, have you done that. Have you gone through the procedure, and if you had gone through the procedure it didn't really matter if it didn't work! Now that is not my idea of …
JC Measuring excellence in teaching?
PB Yes, that is right. That is different.
JC That must have become a very big part of your life, latterly, getting all the boxes ticked.
PB Oh, yes. In fact that was the main bit. The administration and the paperwork. The technology was meant to cut down on the amount of paperwork, but in fact it just generated more!
JC The very fact that you can count certain things that would not have been possible before?
PB I don't know if it is .. I can't see that is better, because the whole ethos has changed. You know, in the 1960's we were concerned about failure rates, now it is about pass rates. It is a subtle difference!
JC It is.
PB You are told to get your pass rate up, and that is not the same because of standards. A subject like Mathematics for instance, the students coming in from school have to be aware now of the changes in the school and that has changed so much.
JC O yes. I mean they are taking in a much wider selection of students than we used to in the old days, which is fine, provided that you realise what is happening.
PB That's right, but it is difficult for more senior members of staff to teach at that level. Very difficult for them. Because they don't want to lower their standards, and the other thing is you really can't say across the board for every subject, the standard of a First Class Honours Degree can be the same, and that's what they are trying to do.
JC Yes, to routinize, regularize everything.
PB And judgement has gone, hasn't it, it has come down to numbers, and if you know anything about number-crunching ..
JC Sadly I don't, but you do!
PB Well number-crunching gets rid of all the edges, and the edges are the interesting bits, aren't they! Well of anything.
JC Sounds like we have a very similar philosophy about University, and so on. But finally to sort of wind up, Pat, we have talked very interestingly about you and your job and so on, are there any particular people whom you have met in the course of your time in the University that you would like to tell me about. You have mentioned the heads of Statistics, but were there other, either striking personalities or interesting people you have come across among staff or students. Would you like to put something on the record about that?
PB One person I really enjoyed meting was Dougal Baird. He came to the department to do some research with Professor Kerridge..
JC Of course he headed the Medical Statistics Unit, at Foresterhill, at that time, didn't he?
PB Yes, that's right, a very revolutionary, world famous, and he was a delightful man. He came into my office and he said to me, how tall I was and how nice it was to meet a tall person, and was I from this part of the world! I said I was. He sat down and he said did I know that Aberdeen had tall children but small adults? And I said "Really". "Yes" he said, and he put this down to ricketts of the pelvis. This was his theory, and he went on to explain about if one goes to Marks & Spencer's you will see all these stands for the shorter women. Of course that made me more observant, and I started having a look, even round the department. Professor Kerridge's own daughters were tall children, but they are small adults. Now wasn't that interesting.
JC They were Aberdonians, were they? They were born here?
PB No they weren't actually born here, I think they were about 2 when they came to Aberdeen, but they were brought up here. I looked at his children. So he was one of these people who could communicate with someone like me and have you fascinated by his research and his enthusiasm, and his work with the babies. Very remarkable. The other person that stands out is Ritchie Calder, who came to talk about the population explosion that was going to take place in 2000!
JC And has it? Remind me.
PB No!
JC I thought not.
PB It didn't, because of all the things that he said that should happen, did actually happen. Isn't that interesting, having heard him in the Debater, and that was another interesting thing about the department, we were invited to go along to the seminars, because that was the department research. Anybody that had been at a conference had to come back and give a little spiel about, and every so often there was like a non-statistical one, like someone who had been off on a sabbatical. Richard Cormack, latterly the professor at St. Andrews, I remember when he came back off his sabbatical, he gave a talk about what had happened in America, and everybody went, you know the whole department.
JC Just shut the office and staff, students, everybody went.
PB Postgraduate students, the Honours students and all the staff went, and that was a socialising thing that is missing now, isn't it. So there were lots of memories of interesting people coming to the department and having the opportunity to speak to them, because we were part of the department. We were just treated all just exactly the same…
JC That is very unusual in the University, or I would think in almost any university.
PB Yes, I think it was, and I didn't appreciate that because I had always worked in the same …
JC You were in that environment from day one.
PB I didn't realize that I was any different from anyone else until I was a bit more mature..
JC Until you started doing your union work and found out what was happening elsewhere.
PB And finding out - gosh, there was some really bad environments. Bullying, you know, which you wouldn't call it bullying in those days, but now I would say to myself that is a form of bullying, which I had never experienced. We were too good. Professor Kerridge used to buy chocolates, and he would say to me, … We all got one, the cleaner as well,
JC All got Christmas presents
PB All got chocolates
JC For Christmas?
PB Yes, if we got, and he didn't single me out because I was the Senior Secretary, we all got the same. Now I think that is nice, isn't it?
JC Yes, very nice.
PB Because it was nice for the other people, because..
JC Because it shows real thoughtfulness, and particularly including the cleaner as well, doesn't it.
PB Yes, the cleaner. She was part of the department as well. She was our cleaner. Now you see what we have now is over-night cleaners, we never see them.
JC Half of them are students by the way, when you do see them.
PB Really! You have got to communicate with little post-its, you know, you have to post it in a place where you think the cleaner will see it. You do get a reply, but there is no family feeling like there used to be, because the cleaners were still there when we went in. They did the offices whilst we weren't there in the early part, and then after 9 o'clock they did the corridors and toilets, and the main corridors, but they were there. You could talk to them, and you could ask them to do things for you. Or you could, if you were having a new member of staff, you could ask them to "spring-clean that room" and get it really nice! All that sort of thing is gone, hasn't it.
JC In fact I am not sure if the University may not have contract cleaning now, it may have, but I don't know, but certainly even when I was still working 4 years ago, I think if you went into the office very early you might see these wretched students, you know, Phillipino ladies, or people trying to make a bit of extra money, or student wives, you know, overseas students' wives. But there we are. Given your very long time in the University some of the students you knew when you first came must have gone on to make careers and so on. Have you kept in touch with any of them?
PB Yes, we were very active about doing that. We had a reunion in 1995, where there was a lot of contact made and we decided to have a Statistics reunion and I was part of the organising team for that, and that was wonderful, because we had loads and loads of students who came back from all over the world. From America and Australia ..
JC Have any of them made particularly striking careers?
PB A lot of them, especially the statisticians, tend to do well. We had one student who was the first student from non-Oxbridge to win the top award as an actuary, and Prof. Kerridge was invited to Edinburgh to the ceremony, because it had never happened before, an Aberdeen graduate! Wonderful. That sort of thing, and we had one student he got a job with Rothschild, which was quite a prestigious job, but he went to America and became the top executive of a phone company, which he still is.
JC How surprising.
PB Another one started a clinic. He married a doctor..
JC A medical doctor?
PB Yes, and they went out to America and they started a clinic, and he continued his research into medical statistics, and of course, she was supplying all the data. He became quite well known for his research. You know just the students that have kept in touch. Aberdeen Asset, there is one student there comes regularly and he has done extremely well. Head of the project.
JC That is a very satisfying aspect of working in the University isn't, seeing the people who you knew as callow youths, and nervous young women!
PB You will remember the "milk rounds".
JC Oh yes!
PB Well that was a lovely time, because the students went from being students to coming in with the executive suits, you know the interview suit, and the hair cut, and I would say "Oh, mother will be proud of you".! And you could see that that was the shedding of the student and moving on. There were some of them who were reluctant to move on, they had enjoyed being at university so much.
JC And they were not at that time incurring huge debts every minute they were here!
PB That's right.
JC That's another sadness.
PB Obviously there were students with money problems, but it wasn't a big problem. One of the big problems, of course, that we had for a wee while was drugs, but I am happy to say that has disappeared again, as far as I am concerned. I have been talking to people who say it is now a social drug, it is an accepted social drug, and you don't see the effects of that.
JC And they have usually gone through it at school!
PB Well I haven't thought of that, that's true.
JC Before they come to University. They have got it out of their system. Those who are going to get it out of their system.
PB Because in the old days that's when ..
JC Yes, it was a big issue at one time.
PB It was and very hard. Not that I ever felt threatened by them. You just really felt that they weren't doing themselves justice, that was hard.
JC Well Pat is there anything that we haven't covered Pat, that you think we ought to, or that you would like to put on the record?
PB There is such a lot happens, isn't there?
JC We could go on forever, but very, very interesting, rverything you have said, and I thank you very much for giving your time. Thank you very much indeed.
PB It has been a pleasure.
End of Interview
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