| Description | Interview with Mr. Tony Short recorded on 10 April 2003 by John Hargreaves..
Transcript of Interview :
JH Tony Short, I think you first came to Aberdeen in 1966. What were the circumstances of that? How did you first come here?
TS Well, we had been in Malaya. I had been in the History Department, for the previous 6 years and it was obviously time for the ex-patriots to pull out because the local products were very good and they were taking over. So we had originally intended going to Australia, but this job …. Well I got a Fellowship here in the department of Politics and International Relations for a year and our original intention was to go to Adelaide after that. Then the wardenship, of this new, as yet un-built, hall came up and I was fortunate enough to get it.
JH You applied for the job, did you?
TS Yes
JB And were you interviewed for it?
TS Yes and in fact it was quite fraught really, as I gather that at the first interview there was a dead-lock and then there was a second interview and as it happened the Rector, Lord Hunt, was here, and he presumably exercised his privilege of chairing the meeting and as a result of that I got the job.
JH Good. Had you any previous experience of hall or college?
TS Not directly, although my first teaching job when I … well I hadn't quite finished my B.Litt at Oxford, but my first teaching job was at Bristol University in the Extra-Mural Department and I was seconded to a college of adult education where I was the Deputy Warden. It was residential, but on a very small scale, 30 or 40 residential students.
JH And these were adult students, were they?
TS For the most part, yes.
JB Now you were also appointed to a post in the Department of Politics, how were you supposed to divide your energies between them? Was there a formula? How did you in fact?
TS Well originally, I gather the terms of the appointment were to be a full-time warden, but it didn't seem to me that whatever I was going to be doing was going to take up all my time and in any event I didn't want to get out of the main stream of teaching and research and so I managed to balance the two. I don't think they ever worked out a particular formula, but I was lucky I had very good domestic bursars, domestic staff and some very good sub-wardens as well.
JH Perhaps we might just have a word or two about the Department of Politics before we get on to the main topic of the interview. What did you teach and how much teaching did you do?
TS Well I did some first year lecturing and to begin with I carried over my special subject from Malaya, which was Britain in Europe in the inter-war years. So that was my Honours subject, plus first year lecturing and tutorials, the odd bits and pieces in second and third year.
JH You trained as a historian in your previous jobs ….?
TS Well more or less! When I came out of the army I was convinced that economics was the answer to everything, so I have an unlikely B.Sc. Economics, which I started at Exeter and finished at the London School of Economics, but at LSE my special subject was International Relations and they also had, Sir Charles Webster was the principal historian there, so I suppose I was drifting into history anyway. Then I had a Fulbright to the States to the University of Virginia for a year and I did a thesis on American Attitudes to European Union after the War, which turned out to be a sort of prologue to the B.Litt that I did at Oxford. Well, Alan Bullock at St. Catherine's took me on and I eventually got a B.Litt from St. Catherine's.
JH And in the department this was the sort of line on which you continued to teach? And you also wrote at least one important book whilst you were in the department?
TS Yes, the first one was the one I had started in Malaya. I had been appointed as the more or less official historian of the communist insurrection in Malaya, so I arrived with some material and more came in great box loads of paper and notes that I was continuing to work at and I finally wrote it up when I was here and it was published in .. gosh I can't remember, 1975 I think, by which time I had moved on to the Vietnam War and particularly the origins of the Vietnam War which was my second book.
JH Perhaps we can go back now to the Halls of Residence. They had not been a feature of life in Aberdeen since the 16th Century I suppose, until 1960! But I was reading the other day that in 1948 Sir Walter Moberly, wrote that they were now "in fashion" and for a time they remained in fashion, whereas now I think they are probably out of fashion again! What sort of institution did you hope to create in Dunbar?
TS Well, it occurred to me that although Aberdeen wasn't that big a university that there were probably smaller components that could be useful. The building itself dictated a community of about 300 people, which in the event it seemed to me was about an ideal number. What I had in mind was… It sounds a bit pompous now … was a sort of community of scholars, where you had a complete mix from 1st to 4th year and certainly in the first year that it opened there were a lot of Senior Honours students who wanted to come into Hall as they didn't want the bother of looking after themselves and the advantages there obviously for them were that they could do this. But the advantage I think, particularly for 1st year students was that they got an idea that university life wasn't all partying and they got an idea of how people worked and drew the balance in between 2nd and 3rd year, but I thought it was very important to have that mix so I… in the days when one actually selected students on the basis of their application form I tried to get quite a fair number of 4th year students in as well as the great rush of Freshers coming in as well.
JH You selected the students did you, personally?
TS Yes.
JH We already had Crombie and Johnston Halls, did Dunbar become derivitory or otherwise different from these in some ways?
TS I don't think so. There was a fair amount of, I think quite healthy, rivalry between us. We used to play games against each other and … disgraceful, snowball fights in which the Warden would occasionally participate! But no, I don't think so, but this is probably unfair, but I don't think I remember it from its conception, but I think Crombie and Johnston began to get a reputation for being rather more like Edinburgh is today, with rather a large number of English and perhaps wealthier students. But I think that is probably unfair but that was certainly the reputation that it had.
JH A small difference I think you were the only, at the time certainly, and probably the only married warden.
TS Yes, I hadn't thought of that. Yes I was.
JH Was there any suggestion either from outside, or in your mind, that Agnes should play any sort of role of the running of the Hall?
TS No, in fact I think it is very much to my discredit that I didn't realise the role that Agnes could play, particularly …. I mean we used to have formal dinners and to begin with we had them once a week. Again I had a rather inflated idea of very high- minded conversations over dinner! I don't know whether there was some sort of built in bias I had assuming that it was going to be, you know, academic conversation, and fortunately I grew out of it, because the point of a high table was that we weren't entertaining, that is we, the Academic staff and sub-wardens, weren't entertaining each other, but I thought it was enormously important that we had to have if possible … if someone, if a student was in Hall for what was then a normal 2 years, they would have at least on one occasion have been on the high table and would have at some time, depending on their particular interest, and who we were having in to dinner, it couldn't be more than that.
JH To come back to the question of the balance of the community, you said there were about 300 students in Dunbar. What about the balance of genders? Was that 50/50?
TS Yes, that was just about 50/50 because the blocks were divided, 4 male and 4 female. Oh, except we had a rather splendid annexe in the Chanonry, and that started off as a girls annexe, then it became boys and it was amazing how a small group, maybe 15 or 20 seemed to converge every year and you might almost say they were the dynamo for the rest of the Hall.
JH You talked about the balance of experience over the years. Balance between Faculties?
TS Yes. I suppose so, although I can't quite remember. I suppose we must have had quotas. My sort of memory is failing. I guess we did.
JH You said you were trying to discourage too many English students, what about overseas students.
TS Oh very much wanted them in. I mean absolutely. In fact I think that was probably the first quota that we would fill. I mean they had applied for Hall, I thought they really needed somewhere where they could feel part of some sort of community.
JH You had an actual overseas quota?
TS Oh gosh! I think so, but my memory fails on that one too!
JH What would it be? 5% or 10%?
TS Probably not. I think it was pretty well automatic that all overseas students applying to Hall were practically guaranteed a place. And it would depend on how many there were and how they were divided up between various Halls.
JH And post graduate students?
TS Post Graduates. Yes. Important, again. I think in those days the number of applications were small, so pretty well every postgraduate could be accommodated. This meant especially students or postgraduate students coming in from outwith Aberdeen.
JH What were the Hall fees in the late 1960's?
TS I have absolutely no idea.
JH What I am getting at is the extra cost of living in Hall, do you think, it made for any degree of the sort of elitism you were I think trying to avoid?
TS I don't think so, because as far as I remember I mean grants would were pretty well designed to take in Hall fees. So I never had the impression there was an elite group coming in.
JH So as far as the figures show you were able to achieve your aim of a balance.
TS Yes I think so.
JH Now duties of the Warden and how you spent your days. The finances, the major finances of the Hall were outside your remit?
TS Yes.
JH And how much financial discretion did you have?
TS Well I won't say it was a constant struggle but the main meeting point between sort of financial supply and demand was on food costs. I soon realised that Macaroni & Cheese were not top of anybody's list of culinary delight! But I seem to remember that the Bursar tried to slip in a couple of them! So I would take representations … I used to eat in the Hall at least once a week and get an idea of what the level of food was and we would try and improve things as much as we could but then there were the financial constraints and Miss Berenson and Miss McGregor knew what budgets they were working on. They were very good on budgets and I suppose they kept to them. I don't know if they had any, or if they had that much discretion, I imagine it was common to most of the Halls.
JH And maintenance of buildings?
TS Yes. I can remember one big item of contention. When the Halls were built and when baths were still in fashion, they put baths in bathrooms, but no showers, and that became quite a sticking point for students who were used to showers and eventually we came round to a major item of expenditure putting in, I can't remember whether it was all bathrooms or one in three, or something like that, had a shower as well as a bath. That took a lot of money out of our budget.
JH That came out of the budget. But general maintenance was that done by the University?
TS Yes that was done by the University, but again there would be from time, there would be sort of confrontations about the temperature in individual student bedrooms, and they obviously …the longer one lasted, or the more time went on, I think the more students were used to something much warmer at home, and were unprepared to freeze in their study/bedrooms, which were really designed as study/bedrooms. But many of them said it was too cold so that is why they would flock to the library. So that was a problem.
JH Furnishings, again? You had a budget or what?
TS We had, and the dear chap Sam Miller, Furnishings Officer, he, I am sure he need not have done this, but involved me very much in design of one type of blankets we were going to have. Design of cutlery, glasses and things like that and he was very helpful.
JH But these were on your budget or his?
TS They were on his budget.
JH And to come to perhaps more central things, discipline! Was that a problem that occupied much of your time?
TS It was to start with and here I thought graduated response was in order! So I think alone of the Halls, I instituted a system of fines, as it seemed to me that you need a clutch on the reign. I think in the event I only ever fined one person, and that was ten shillings!
JH What was that for?
TS It was on a technicality! He was a senior honours student who I used to play rugby with, Sandy Johnstone by name, and he had a rather lovely girlfriend and the rules were, and these were common to all Halls, that no opposite sex in a study/bedroom before 9.00 am. and after 10.00 or it may have been 11.00 pm. And where my office was I could hear these high-heels trotting up the path beside me and it was about 8.15 and I think in a sort of moment of madness I knew where she was going, I went and knocked on the door and she was exchanging an essay or something absolutely blameless! And I said "Sandy- that's going to cost you ten shillings"! He looked a bit surprised but he paid up, but eventually this got round and the Principal appealed to student politicians and there was a great revolt against it and I remember having to go to see the Principal, I think I was called in, and he said that we won't do these fines. And I said "What do you suggest I do?" and he said "Throw them out". I though that was most unfair. I mean it was a small thing. The matter of noise, for example, became, it fluctuated, but it could be extremely serious where there were really noisy students and parties and you need to have some way of restricting it and just throwing them out on the spot, even after two or three warnings or whatever didn't seem to me to be appropriate, but in the end we sort of bluffed it out and pretended we were going to throw people out. I did on one or two occasions. I remember one, in sort of anecdotal mode now - but I can remember a German student who had a row with his cleaner. The cleaner came in, in tears, to see me and it had obviously been some sort of dustup and I said well if you apologise to him I will make sure that he apologises to you. She was perfectly willing to do that, but I think he was in Teutonic mood at the time and he refused to apologise! He said "it was not my fault" and I wasn't sure, but I thought it was the amicable way of doing it, so I said "well if you are not going to apologise I will have to ask you to leave". And he wouldn't apologise and I did ask him to leave and the upshot of that one is that a few months or maybe a year later there was a knock on our door, we lived in Don Street, and there was a German family, including the grandfather, who presented me with a bottle of Eiswein, which I reckoned was beyond price, and said that throwing him out of Hall was the best thing that happened to him!
JH Congratulations! Returning to the question of sexual mores, which were in society as a whole, in very rapid change in your time. How did the law and this practice change in your time?
TS Well I am sure I was a brake on sexual development in the Hall. But I justified it by somewhat rough and ready scale that if students were your know …if they had their girlfriend or boyfriend in and they were in after 11.00 or midnight, they were likely to be sharing a bed or whatever and I thought they are sleepy or liable to be sleepy and I don't think the pill had taken on quite so fast to begin with and I though there were probably more unwanted pregnancies as a result of staying overnight, …and it wouldn't be if they did it during the day !!!! I am sure this is a fallacy, but that was the way I justified it then and we didn't have overnight guests of the other sex. Indeed eventually we had to get down to the situation where we had to say no overnight guests, full-stop. Although you would turn a blind eye. But I am afraid that I had a terrible system of informants, or cleaners would tell the bursar if someone had actually someone living there. You know razors and shaving brushes and things like that left around. Then I would have a word with them and tell them what the rules are and let us stick with them.
JH And did that remain the rule until your retirement?
TS I think it did. We may have of sort of been turning many blind eyes, but as long as it was in the rule book and they accepted that, then I thought it was fair. I mean there were always some very ingenious people who managed to pretty well had live-in boy or girl friends but I think that was exceptional.
JH And finally, and perhaps the most important. Pastoral care and or academic oversight
TS Yes, I though that was very, very, important and I wanted sub-wardens. They varied but there were some very good ones.
JH How many sub-wardens did you have?
TS Well technically I think we had one for every block. So, that was 8 sub-wardens assisting me. I mean what I really wanted, what I expected, was that they were…, they varied, they were lecturers, some post graduate students, the odd professor even, and what I expected was that during the day they were out, just as the Hall members were out, but in the evening for the most part I would hope they would be there, or at least there would be 3 or four sub-wardens in the hall. We always had a duty sub-warden so that if there was some sort of crisis there would be someone to go to. Although, having said that, an awful lot got filtered through the Hall porters, who for the most part were really splendid. I mean, they were really a sort of 9th sub-warden and invariably their ability to look after students was quite phenomenal. They would push … or if there was something that they couldn't deal with, you know an academic crisis or whatever, then you obviously need an academic dealing with it, or to talk them down and they would go and see the duty sub-warden and on occasions well I can only think of one awful, terrible occasion. A girl who had just arrived in Dunbar and her parents were driving south back to Norfolk and they were both killed in a head-on collision. The police came and I said that I would tell her. That was one of the most awful things that I had to do. But obviously for the most part, nothing like as dramatic as that.
JH Did you feel that you were able to know … 300 students is a lot … all of them? Most of them?
TS Some of them. I reckon by the end of the first term I could recognise most of the people in Hall and then with any luck I might know perhaps 50% of their names by the end of the year. The problem was when we became a sort of transit camp for first year students, who would just come in for a year, in large numbers, I mean this is where they sort of swamped the idea of quotas or balance between first, second, third and fourth year. Although to begin with we offered them a chance of having their first year in and their final year in. Second and third year, the idea was that they would be out. So you might tend forget who was out. But then recognise them again as soon as they came back. But yes, it was amazing how, also perhaps rather artificially, that we used to have about 6 and ten students on a high table for a former dinner, and I used to do quite a lot of homework on their cards and forms so that I knew who they were exactly where they were from and what they were doing, and that helped to gel things in my memory.
JH What about any formal structures, committees and so on involving students?
TS Oh yes! They were awfully tedious, well they were for me. There was a Halls Committee and ….
JH Just before the tape finished you were about to tell of the various committees in the organisation of the Hall.
TS Well in the.. we had, when things got a bit more formalised, there was a Hall Committee.
JH Was that in the early 1970's, a period when students were demanding representation?
TS My impression was that it might have been a bit later, when you had student politics in 1968 onwards, that tended to be the student politicians, the SRC, and there were occasions, although I couldn't give you any instances, where a Hall Committee would decide on one thing in opposition to what ever it was that the Student Representative Council thought was the norm or model for the Halls. The other committees, the University committees. I can remember some very, very good students, but sub-committees of Hall matters I must confess I found rather boring. I wasn't very good at it.
JH You didn't have any committees of that sort from the start but there was a JCR, I suppose, from the start?
TS Yes there was.
JH And you let them get on with things.
TS And they used to organise, I remember some of the jazz-band balls they used to organise. They were absolutely superb.
JH What about sport in the Hall?
TS Well I was still playing games in those days, so we had … I was particularly interested in the rugby team, and I guess one or two more rugby players got into Dunbar than should have strictly speaking! But again I suppose, I remember the early years best and I do very well remember going down to Edinburgh on the morning of an International and Dunbar took on Stirling University's first 15 and beat them. And I think some of our players hadn't sobered up till half-time. And we played hockey against other Halls and football, although I didn't know much about that, except that there was always an annual JCR versus SRC football match but those were the principal games and I enjoyed it very much.
JH Cricket?
TS No, I don't think were any good at cricket. I think that was the History department!
JH When did you retire as warden?
TS Ah, well for a historian I am not very good on dates, but it would be about I guess, 1989. I think it was, or early 1990.
JH This was because you had reached retiring age?
TS No. The University, as you know, was looking to make savings, and I was really quite expensive, on a Reader's scale, plus a warden, plus a house, and when I mentioned the possibility of taking early retirement both from the department and leaving the Hall, I think the University just jumped at it.
JH And what happened to Dunbar Hall then, immediately?
TS Well they appointed another warden, a member of the administrative staff. I think it worked pretty well for a while. Now it is no more, but the circumstances I don't really know. I thought it was rather sad, but presumably residential accommodation isn't what students want nowadays.
JH Did you have any sense before you retired that it might no longer be as much in fashion?
TS No I didn't.
JH Well we can't go into the circumstances of its final closure. Perhaps some other interviewer will take that one up. But just to try you out with a leading question. It is possible, I suppose, that a future historian of the university might say that Halls like Dunbar and Crombie and Johnston too, were really a reflection of a vision of what a liberal university education might be, which flourished between 1950 and 1980, perhaps a bit later, and would be seen to have come to the end of its time. Do you agree with that or do you think you would ever see Dunbar or Hall revived in other circumstances?
TS Well, probably not, as you just said, the ideal of a liberal university, I was absolutely overwhelmed, enthused, by something called the Niblet report, which was on University Halls and what they could become and there was a rather nice little book by one of the University Halls in Manchester, St. Anslems.
JH I know it well.
TS And I liked the style that was presented there. But the Niblet report was what really got me going and I used to ask, well I don't know if they actually read it, but I had one or two probably illegal photostat copies of it, and I would give it to sub-wardens coming in saying that this was what I would like Dunbar to be. But if it has come to an end does one say by the same token that collegiate life in Oxbridge is coming to an end as well? Our youngest daughter there said definitely not and that the college was wonderful. She felt part of that, whereas she never felt part of Cambridge!
JH Well I think we will leave that question hanging open. Thank you very much Tony.
TS Fine John.
END OF INTERVIEW
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