| Description | Interview with William D. Hardie recorded by Roddy Begg on 8 & 9 December 2004.
Transcription: Part 1
RB So could we start off with you identifying yourself, date of birth etc.
WH William Dunbar Hardie, otherwise known as Buff, born 4 January 1931, at 217 Hilton Drive, Aberdeen. A domestic delivery, in those days, not a hospital delivery, although my mother was in her 40th year and my dad was 47. It wouldn't be a home delivery now I don't think. I already had one sister, Ella, who was 8 years or so older than I, indeed we compared notes some time later and discovered what we should have known that our parents were married in 1915, in 1923 Ella was born and in 1931 I was born, so every 8 years … they were regular in their habits ! I went to Hilton primary school at the age of 5 and then at the age of 12 won a foundation scholarship to Gordon's College. I suppose I had been a clever loon at Hilton primary school and somehow always believed that I was always going to go to Gordon's. There were quite a number of boys around in Hilton who were already at Gordon's, including a chum of mine and I somehow was just in no doubt that I would go to Gordon's. It didn't occur to me that if I hadn't won a foundation there was no way that my parents were going to pay fees for me to go to Gordon's. However the happy ending to this little part of the story was that I did win a foundation and went to Gordon's in 1943. I had 6 years there and again did fairly well I suppose. I suppose the highlight was that at the end of my 6th year I was the first winner of the MacKenzie Shield and travelling scholarship. This was a thing donated to the school by two brothers MacKenzie who were business men in South Africa, in memory of a third brother, William MacKenzie, the oldest of the three, who had been the dux of Gordon's College away back at the start of the century and this for 8 or 9 years, I think, carried with it a trip to South Africa, the sort of equivalent of the Otaki Shield, which was always won by the School Captain, and that was a trip to New Zealand. But here was I in 1949 an 18 year old Aberdeen schoolboy who had scarcely been out of Scotland, I don't think I had been out of Scotland, and most of my journeys had been…. My father , I should have said, was a Railway Clerk, not a well paid job but one that did carry with it a number of free passes on the railway, so we did have, my sister and I did have railway journeys to look back on, trips to Edinburgh Zoo and that kind of thing, but I certainly hadn't been to London, which she had been before I had been born, presumably free railway fare but once you got to London there was a bit of expense, which once there were two children there they just couldn't make the expense. So I am sure the first time I was in London was in 1949 when I arrived there from King's Cross and then took the train down to Southampton to sail to South Africa aboard the Durban Castle. I had two months in South Africa.
RB How long did the boat take?
WH 15 days out and 15 days back, so that was another month. So it was a 3 month summer holiday. It was quite staggering. I am sure that I didn't get the best out of it,
Subsequent winners I have spoken to, more serious fellows did get more, I just enjoyed it and it was a great way to start off. I had, before leaving, had won quite a good bursary in the Bursary Comp, which was a thing that the Aberdeen Schools in particular were very keen on and keen to rate highest, in my year at Gordon's did very well in the Bursary Comp so we left in a blaze of glory! So again I had a bursary to come back on and again rather like the one at Gordon's I had just assumed that as I was one of the, I suppose, leading boys at Gordon's that I would go to University. Go to Aberdeen University which almost everyone did in those days, there was the odd renegade who went to one of the other ancient Scottish universities.
RB It was things like "I want to do Dentistry" was it, that you couldn't do it at Aberdeen.
WH That was the only excuse and certainly Oxbridge, going direct from an Aberdeen school to Oxbridge just wasn't heard of I don't think. I think may be Sir James Robertson's son went to Oxford.
RB Before we leave school and go to university days, Buff, the small thing of the War had taken place, during these school years. What are your memories of the War, or did it just happen on a different planet?
WH I have fairly vivid memories of the War. I remember, it must have been about the 1st September 1939, where there were already black-out restrictions on the go, if only as practice, and I remember an officious Air-raid Warden shouting at my mother for switching on the kitchen light also without having drawn the blind and I also remember Neville Chamberlain's broadcast of which how often have we heard it since, and not realising what this was all about and it is interesting reading the politics of the situation, here we were only 20 years or so after the slaughter of the First World War it is no wonder that there was a mood of appeasement, I think one can understand that, with this retrospective look at it, so the War duly started. I suppose we as a family, the impact on us was that my elder sister had married a sort of childhood sweetheart I suppose, a Grammar schoolboy who was killed on the Normandy Beaches, so there they were, he was certainly under 20 when they married, he might just have been 20 when he was killed, but these two youngsters ….. he was a faithful correspondent when he was abroad, and I didn't realise that when there was no letter from Charlie today, the worries my parents and my sister had, for some reason although I claim to be fairly intelligent schoolboy, it didn't click with me that Charlie wouldn't come home. So that was an awful thing to happen.
RB At least being a late child, your father wasn't threatened with call-up himself, as he was well into his .. beyond that.
WH Ella, my sister, just to get her out of the way, she having been widowed during the war and she left, she had gone to the Central School and she had worked in the Public Library but after the War she decided that she would go to University and I think there was some kind of War Widows grants, that sort of thing, which made it possible for her, and while she was there she met a lovely guy called John Bruce, who was a Forestry student, and she married him and they had a very happy life out in British Columbia, where he was in the BC Forest Service. John died in 2000 but they are well over 50 years married. So it was a happy ending.
RB Your sister is still alive?
WH Yes, still alive and still out in British Columbia.
RB Well unless there is anything else from these years at school and the War we turn to the University. You said it was going to be Aberdeen but you had at least decided that it would be the Arts Faculties.
WH Yes, and I suppose at school I had been very good at Classics, Latin and Greek, and didn't really give it much more thought than that is what I will do at University, and the chances are that I would do reasonably well, but I think another instance of my not giving it enough thought, but that said, I really did enjoy 4 years of Classics, in the course of which I met and became very friendly with a chap called Eddie Fraser, James Edward Fraser, who had been the star classics boy at the Grammar School and we had come across each other in inter-school debate, but that was all. I always remember that this was an inter-school debate, Gordon's and Grammar, on the subject of "The Artist is preferable to the Scientist in Society" or something to that effect and Eddie was speaking on behalf of the artist and he began his speech by saying "Cos squared plus sine squared always equals unity" and I cannot remember where he went to from there, but I thought that is quite a good opening and fairly typical of Eddie of whom I wrote a glowing biographical note for the Aberdeen Grammar School Magazine, when he was president of the FP club and our friendship which began in 1949 at the University continues to this day and I suppose he was amongst the most influential people of my life.
RB Of course he had a very much younger brother, John, who is a contemporary of mine. But we said at the beginning, commonly known as Buff, was it at University that you became Buff?
WH No, I was already Buff before I got to University. Not even the University could erase it. Couldn't get anything more scholarly! But the reason for this is .. it perhaps sounds a little more exciting than it was. When I was a young boy at Hilton and I was a member of a gangy, and quite a number of the boys in Hilton in the 1930s were William and known either as Bill or Billy, as indeed as I was and when my gangy played cowboys and Indians I was Buffalo Bill! It was shortened to Buff I suppose at the age of 9 or 10 and it stuck. It says something about who you are.
RB It says something about the fact that all of your class at Gordon's came on to the University of Aberdeen and kept the name going!
WH I suppose so. There were quite a few of them, as I say, a lot of them won bursaries. In fact there was an Annus Mirabilis for Gordon's College!
RB Ah, I see. I think they still do very well in the Bursary Competition, even today, 40 plus years later.
WH It was a very Gordon's College attitude, very competitive, the must win bursaries.
RB Sadly they are also very competitive about how many get into Oxford and Cambridge! So they don't all come to Aberdeen. You said, Classics, but who were the professors of Latin and Greek in your day?
WH Well two great men, Professor Peter Noble who was the professor of Humanity, which is what Latin was called in those days and professor of Latin lived in a house called Humanity Manse and I remember Peter Noble saying to us one day "People think it is a home for fallen women"! He was a great man who went off to be Principal of King's College, London, which he did in our time, to be succeeded by W.S. Watt in our final year. Peter Noble was a very popular figure amongst the student body not just in the Classics Faculty. He was a very warm and human man, in the days before there was formal counselling, or whatever, he would dispense good, affectionate and sound counselling on an informal basis to all manner of students. One of his most endearing qualities, if it is a quality, is that he had a "wobble-u"! Like Roy Jenkins I always remember that was quite pronounced. So his L's and his R's all sounded like "W" and we were doing a Latin text with him and he discussed a variant reading that there was a word in this text that was either "rectissima" or "lectissima" and of course in discussing it when he said it, which ever way he said it, it was "wectissima" and the aforementioned Eddie Fraser, who was rather mischievous, and with a look extremely scholarly, which he was, and said "And which do you think it was?" And to that the professor said "Oh I have no doubt it is "wectissima"! and we all solemnly noted this down in our notebook. He was the professor of Latin and I liked him very much, but the professor of Greek, Archie Cameron, was an absolute star. Whether that was the view held in the University circles, but as a human being and indeed as a scholar, I think I am right in saying, he was Glasgow University and Balliol and I think he had got a lectureship in Leeds or one of the northern universities, but before he was 30 he was appointed to the Chair of the Greek at Aberdeen and he held that post I think.. did he retire or did he die in harness, he died sadly I am sure of lung cancer as he was never without his cigarette, but what an absolute gent he was and he gave his Honours students a tutorial, individual tutorial, once a week and I will always remember this one at the start of our 3rd year, and he said this was the practice and he said " Now I want to do this 10o'clock slot I am right in thinking that none of you have lectures at 10 o'clock and perhaps we will start filling in", so he said "Right 10 o'clock Tuesday" and I think again Eddie Fraser put his hand up, and Archie Cameron said "Right Fraser 10 o'clock on Tuesday or shall we say five past ten!" I think that summed up Archie's attitude. But he was a wonderful guy and I think also I am right in saying that having come to Aberdeen as really the white hope of classical scholarship, in Scotland maybe, once he was in Aberdeen and in the Chair the only thing he published was a monograph on angling, which was his hobby, but I think he also played the Stock markets and put his great intellect to very good material use. I think his widow survives and I think will die a very wealthy woman. The other thing about Archie Cameron was he devoted his great intellect and sympathy to the community and …
RB We have just been interrupted by a brief telephone call, but can we resume talking about the Classics department. How many other students were there in your class?
WH There were four of us all told when we started, one dropped out, leaving myself, Eddie Fraser and a chap called Willie Taylor who was from Peterhead. I think there was a general feeling that the three of us were all going to get Firsts. I have to say that the other two did! But I did not and it was in the days before 2(i) and (ii) so a Second was a Second, was a Second. I think it must have been a 2(i), but it wasn't a First which was a big disappointment to me, because I was very swatty and I suppose I had by this time had already won a scholarship to Cambridge and maybe that lulled me into a sense of false security because I had intended, as most people did in those days, not having anything to do with the Student Show, which we may come onto, but it has this effect in my career even at that stage that I couldn't stay out of the show and I didn't do the work during the Easter vac that I should have done.
RB Even in your Senior Honours year?
WH Yes. I didn't actually go into the show, but I was persuaded to do some writing and of course that got me involved in rehearsals and so I might as well have been in it!
RB Well that was how Derek Brechin got his Third as well! But perhaps as the show has come up naturally, the show became part of your life in your first year or [later]?
WH No, in my second year. I don't know why I didn't go into it in my first year because I had gone to see the Student Show in the theatre in my last couple of years at school and I thought "that looks a good thing to be in" I suppose I had always had an interest in humour, if you could call it that and I was looking forward, but for some reason which I can't remember I wasn't able to go into the show in my first year, but in my second year, and maybe my enthusiasm was on the wane, but I thought "well I quite enjoyed just going seeing it last year, maybe and perhaps it clashed with the cricket season which was another of my pre-occupations. Anyway in my second year the afore mentioned Eddie Fraser was the show administrator, along with a character called George Sinclair who was of course the great old man of the Student Show for years and he was doing an Ed. B. at the time and they were the two administrators and on the first day of the Easter holidays I had been having a coffee with Eddie in the Union when this beetle-browed figure approached our table and I was introduced to George Sinclair. George said to me at the end of our conversation "Are you in the Show then?" and I said "No" and he said "Why not? Come along to the gym tonight" Well there it was, you didn't say no to George Sinclair. So that was the start of it and I was in that show which was called " A Spring in your Step".
RB So what year was that?
WH It would have been 1951. "A Spring in your Step" which was written by a great friend of George's, Colin MacLean, he had written the whole of the show, a proper little Cole Porter, words, music, script, everything and it was an original musical, set in an Aberdeenshire village, would you believe, and so I had about two lines in it. I played the part of a Torry cyclist and it was something about the local farmer shouted to us "Get oot among my neeps, ye toons dirt" and I had to say something like "We are nae touching yer neeps, mister, dae ye hae ony eggs" (which became my catchphrase), but I had just so enjoyed it that there was never any doubt that I was coming back next year which was a show called "Easter Fair" in 1952 where again Eddie Fraser was the administrator and he it was who asked me if I would join the script writing team for that, which I did. So that is how much influence Eddie has had. The genesis of this so-called career in show business!
RB You mentioned that cricket had competed a little for your time, was that the other main non-academic pursuit or did you do other things?
WH I didn't play cricket for the University, but I played cricket at school and latterly for Gordonian's but it has been an abiding interest. You see these yellow books? It has been an abiding interest and remains so and much to Margaret's despair, however it makes it easy for her at Christmas time, just a cricket book will do and keep me quiet.
RB But you did play. What as?
WH Wicket keeper and stuffy, but unglamorous batsman, but difficult to shift!
RB Of course cricket was Eddie's brother's great passion.
WH But not Eddie's. No, Eddie has no interest in cricket at all, despite my attempts and perhaps John's attempts to get him interested.
RB So that takes us kind of up to graduation which was in 1953 with the disappointment of not a First. Was your graduation memorable? Did you graduate in person?
WH Yes.
RB You had to then, I guess.
WH Yes, I suppose Sir Thomas Taylor must have conducted it, he was the Vice Chancellor, I don't know who the Chancellor was …
RB The Chancellor was, I can't remember his name, but he was a politician who used to never turn up…. Johnstone! Tom Johnstone.
WH Well I remember that much about it. I hadn't really got over the disappointment and it was a real disappointment and I… they probably got it right, because I used to think I wasn't as clever as Eddie but I was as clever as Willie but I didn't do as much work as Willie, and Eddie didn't need to do so much work as Willie, so I reckoned that they probably got it right. I think that having three and giving three Firsts would have been pretty difficult for them, although it shouldn't be, should it?
RB No it shouldn't.
WH And all the way through the University we were similar and it so happened that one of us was first in an exam, sometimes another, and over the 4 years there was usually very little to choose between us.
RB Might it have made a difference in the sense that you might have been a professor today, if you had got the First, would you have been led into an academic career?
WH I don't know, but as I said, by that time both Eddie and I won scholarships to Cambridge because there was quite a regular traffic between the Aberdeen Classics department and Cambridge and I think this was Archie Cameron's doing, because he had an old chum who was a Don at one of the Cambridge colleges and I think he encouraged the final Honours year to have a go at the Cambridge Scholarship exams which happened in December and I remember both Eddie and I both went down ..
RB That would be in your final year, the beginning of your final year.
WH Yes, so that would be at the end of 1952, and I think we were both of a view well it would be interesting just to go down and have a few nights, you were put up at one of the colleges, and if nothing comes of it, well that will be an interesting experience. In fact we both won scholarships, he to Christs College and I to Sidney Sussex College, Oliver Cromwell's College. The only distinguished person who has ever been there! What did he do for the continuation of the monarchy? Anyway we both won this and there was a picture in the Evening Express of the two of us and I fear that from then on that the First was going to be, it was not that I eased up on the work but, I didn't think I did, but I think maybe going into the show ate into the Easter holidays in a way ..
RB But you said that you didn't go into the show, but you wrote for the show?
WH Yes, well that seemed easy, but again "Oh well I will go down and watch rehearsals" and got involved in having the coffee afterwards!
RB Eye off the ball I suppose.
WH Slightly, so there was maybe some kind of poetic justice, there you are.
RB Did the issue of going straight to Cambridge or doing National Service first come up? Could you apply for deferment?
WH Yes, I could have done, but I think that would have meant going, I would have, at that stage I would still have had to do National Service after Cambridge and so I opted to do National Service from 1953 to 1955 and take up the Cambridge scholarship in 1955.
RB Would you like to talk about Cambridge and then we can go back to National Service? It was two years, you got a year remission for your degree.
WH Yes, what was the name? Some kind of student you were called if you had a degree already, because I had another first degree. Most of the people who had gone from Aberdeen to do Classics did another Classics degree at Cambridge, but in the two years in National Service I must admit that I didn't travel with a copy of the Iliad in my knapsack! So I decided enough is as good as a feast of Classics so I switched to Law, again without any realfeeling about what I was going to do with it! Of course it was a totally academic course at Cambridge but I thought there was some tie-up between Classics and the Law and I would do Roman Law as one of the subjects and I think in the two years that I was there I did four subjects the first year and five subjects in part two of the tripos. And I enjoyed them all with the one exception of Roman Law, where everyone thought I would have an advantage being a Classics graduate, but I found Roman Law extremely difficult and I never really got my head round it. I must have done well enough I suppose, but I found it very difficult and not at all as interesting as some of the other branches of the law in which I had some wonderful teachers and the Cambridge system of the lecture supplemented by supervision of small numbers of students I found a very satisfying one and the great thing was if you had a good lecturer that was fine if you had a duff lecturer you just didn't go! The supervisions were excellent and I was at Sydney Sussex where the Law Fellow was a chap called John Thornley, J.W.A. Thornley, who was probably the best authority in England on Real Property and he was much in demand by other colleges as a supervisor on Real Property and that gave him great clout in choosing for his students in the other Law subjects the best people, so we had some very good people supervising us, unfortunately I didn't have in Criminal Law the great Henry Barnes. Henry Barnes was an Irishman who was the University lecturer in Criminal Law and one of the great characters. It was said, as with Levis at the time, that no Cambridge education was complete without going to one of his lectures, which you could do, because in the big lectures you just rolled up and went in, and this was said also of Henry Barnes, so we had potential engineers and medics all coming along for the odd lecture from this Irishman, Henry Barnes, who lived in a squalid flat across the road from Sydney Sussex College.
RB Tell us more about Barnes.
WH Well Henry Barnes was an Irishman and he was the university lecturer in Criminal Law and rumour had it that he had been a Fellow of Jesus College but he was expelled, or whatever happens to Fellows, after he had punched the Master's nose on boat race night! Well I never tried to find out if that was true I just wanted it to be true! He was just a great man and one of my recollections is that he announced one day that he wouldn't be lecturing on Wednesday or Friday, whatever it was, because he had been summoned for jury service in a Crown Court case in Cambridge so great thumping of feet at that and he reflected, he had this lovely naive streak about him. He said "I suppose since I am a barrister they will make me Chairman". Came Friday and he didn't appear so the next week he came in at the start of the lecture and of course everyone is wanting to hear what he was going to say about the case and he knew that and he just started his lecture as usual and we had been going for 3 or 4 minutes and he said "None of you are not paying attention, you are all wanting to hear about the case. Well the blighter pleaded guilty!"
RB A moment of glory - stolen!
WH He was very anti-American and he said that in his colourful career he was supposed to have led the Mexican forces at Veracruz, whatever that meant. But he said "If the Yanks knew that, they would hang me". So that was Henry and sadly not long after we graduated I read his death notice in The Times and although he appeared to be this gnarled old man, he had only been in his mid-60s when he died.
RB So you obviously had a very happy time at Cambridge, did you continue with your stage career at all?
WH Not at all, but I played at lot more cricket and I got my College Colours for Cricket for Sydney Sussex College and found that the wonderful atmosphere for study at Cambridge very different from Aberdeen where you had a either to work away at home or else go down to library or whatever, but somehow or when, and going from home to the university library was quite a journey, in fact it was a walk from Hilton and buses didn't go near, but in Cambridge you could go to a lecture in the morning and have a game of cricket in the afternoon and then half-pint with the boys before dinner and then do work afterwards. Somehow it all just happened as a continuum and everyone was doing it. Everybody was seriously working and I did seriously work and happily I wasn't trying to get a first at Cambridge, and I got a 2:1, which was great, because I said "That does mean that my Aberdeen, if they had 2:1 at Aberdeen, I would have got one" But that wasn't too bad and in fact I got a nice letter from John Thornley congratulating me on getting the 2:1. So he must have thought it was grounds for congratulations. There must have been about 12 of us reading Law at Sydney and the brightest, well I don't know if he was the brightest, but he was the best guy there and he got a First and he was the only one of our group that got a First and it the last time I saw him, which I suppose was my last day at Cambridge or so, and we didn't know what we were getting but he was very, very worried because he intended being a solicitor and he was now going to find the money to get himself articled to a solicitor in Grimsby, or somewhere in England, and he was going to be struggling another two years before he started making any money and he was the brightest. On the other hand a very nice guy who was, it is not unkind to say, not the brightest, and who in the event got a comfortable Third. He was the son of the biggest solicitor in Bath and he was going to go back into his old man's firm, he had no worries. Stewart Coulson I remember was the clever guy, he was very worried and I suppose when he got his First it didn't make things any easier for him, however I keep seeing his name in Sydney magazine, so he has done alright, I think.
RB I mean, everybody who goes to Cambridge it seems, rub shoulders with somebody who went on to be something very, very famous. Were any of your year .. became any great politicians, actors or anything of this sort?
WH Well I think that maybe the answer is no! From these 2 years that I was there, I am sure that a lot of people had a very successful career, but no politicians that hit the headlines, there were a couple of very good amateur actors, Peter Woodthorpe and David Burke who both acted in the University Dramatic Societies and other societies and Peter Woodthorpe in fact was one of the original cast of Waiting for Godot which he was one of the tramps in the original Peter Hall production. So he left to go into acting without graduating and had a successful, never actually, I mean he didn't become Gielgud or Olivier or Ian McKellan or .. Derek Jacobi, he wasn't at that level, but he had a good working career.
RB I think I remember him as in Pinter's first … he .. yes I do remember him.
WH A rather ugly man, Peter and he had a regular role in I think was it in Morse, where he was a pathologist ? He always played ill-tempered, grumpy people and he recently died, as did David Burke, who was more a classical actor and had one or two big successes, but again never became a household name. As regards my own interest I submitted one or two things to the Footlights and never heard anything about it and they were probably not much good and not a lot of Doric is spoken in Cambridge Arts Theatre! But I do remember that the two years I was there and Jonathan Miller had just gone down and he had been the Footlights star the previous year and people were still speaking about him, but because he had been such a great star that didn't make his successors people of the same calibre and they rather thought they were! Which is of course a danger. Peter Cooke was not quite there yet, he was coming in the next year or two after I left, so I think I saw a very fallow year of the Footlights.
RB But before we go on to what you did go on to do we skipped over your National Service years, 1953-1955. Was it 18 months you had to serve Her Majesty?
WH No, two years.
RB It was the full 2 years. And where did Her Majesty instruct you to go?
WH Well she began by instructing me to go to Stirling Castle and the reason for that was that … the army had a reputation for putting square pegs in a round hole, I suspect with me they got it right, because they put me in the Education Corps and one of the things that the Education Corps people had to do was, for ten weeks you actually had to be a soldier and you did ten weeks basic training with an infantry regiment so I and three other graduates were with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders at Stirling Castle and did ten weeks infantry training which was an experience like no other I have had in my whole life! It was just something else, but happily it passed. And we were all, the four of us, were along with two dozen guys from other infantry regiments came together at Catterick where we got a two months course. It was like going to TC, we were given a two month teaching course, much of which we sat in lecture rooms and we were lectures by two guys from Leeds University and it was utter bliss. We were given one stripe each so there was this odd looking squad of about 30 Lance Corporals. We had to march from the barrack room to the lecture room and to other places. But of course Catterick was a huge military establishment but in the middle of it there were quite civilised shops and a huge Esoldo Cinema which was good news for the Education Corps lads and at the end of that we were all made Sergeants and posted to various units in the UK and indeed abroad in some cases but I and two or three others were sent initially to Chillwell in Nottingham and from there a few weeks later we were posted out to small units and I was posted to a unit called 10 Wireless Training Squadron, Royal Signals, which was near Loughborough in Leicestershire and there two Education Sergeants there and the other one was a guy called Alfie Wood, who you may remember and Alfie was an Edinburgh graduate and he had been very much involved in Edinburgh Varsity Vanities, I would say their equivalent, their inferior equivalent to our Student Show.
Interesting that we had the same sort of interests and we were about 18 months together at this small Signals Unit, which was an interesting unit in that most of the guys who were posted there, the point of the unit was that they were being trained in the Morse Code and to do that you had to have some kind of qualifications and it ranged from graduates down to people with quite a good handful of A levels and O levels and you may say what function did the Education Sergeant have and other than doing work on the permanent staff, the cooks and the bottle-washers, we still had to do for those of the signals trainees who did not have a certain level of higher education qualification, they still had to sit a thing called The Army's Certificate of Education, first class and second class, which for most of these guys was very easy with the result that we had the highest pass rate in the, probably in the UK, certainly in our north Midlands district and this used to come in every now and again and the CO as he saw it and initialled it down to us would say "Well done, congratulations", so our activities also involved putting on a couple of shows and we wrote a pantomime that we called "Dandorella" which we put on in the Town Hall at Loughborough and again there were a lot of very talented young men and two or three quite talented young girls who were working in the NAFFI. So meeting Alfie Wood there was an interesting thing because after that we didn't quite lose touch but I went off to Cambridge and he went back to Edinburgh and then just as I was coming back after National Service, he and his wife came up to Aberdeen to work and that was the genesis of the Aberdeen Review.
RB Oh, right. So if we finished with your National Service and Cambridge slightly in a different order, you had in 1957 you had to make this great decision about which career you were going to follow?
WH Yes! And I have to say that having started doing the Law degree at Cambridge without thinking very much about what I would do except that whatever else it was I wasn't going to be a lawyer, because that was my friend Stewart Coulsen who got the First and he was not going to earning money for some time and likewise having done a degree that was largely English law I wasn't going to find myself going into a law office or anything like in Scotland without doing some more.
RB And you didn't have an uncle who was going to hand you out a partnership.
WH That's right, so I suppose, I don't want to be too po-faced about it I suppose, but having benefited from the education system in this country to the extent of having been at a great primary school, a good secondary school, two great universities, there was just some nagging feeling about putting something back, or whatever abilities I had, and I wasn't sure what they were at that point, still not too clear! But I should put them to the public weal in some way, that said had I, I suspect, got an offer of a big job in a big industry making a lot of money I would have found it hard to turn it down, however, it so happened in 1957, which is where we are now, the North Eastern Regional Hospital Board advertised for a trainee administrative officer, with prospects. There was a thing called the NHS Trainee Administrators Scheme which was run on a national basis, a graduate scheme, and quite a number of the guys I met later in my health service career were on that but this was a North Eastern Regional Hospital Board's own thing and it was the brainchild of Lady May Baird, and Lady Baird is someone of whom I became a terrific fan. I thought she was just wonderful, only slightly coloured by the fact that when I applied for this job, there were quite a few applicants, but there was a small sub-committee who appointed me, but she wasn't on the Committee, but when I turned up and attended the first meeting which she attended and she was introduced to me, she said to me and I will always remember this, she said "I am delighted to meet you Mr. Hardie, you have the kind of gifts that the Health Service needs" and I thought well! I wonder what they are! However, she wasn't wrong about many things, she may have been wrong about that, but that sort of set me up and as I very quickly as I got into it it came home to me that NHS was a dammed good thing, and I still feel that despite all its troubles and tribulations at the moment, but clearly an organisation that .. its founders who thought once we have got this National Health Service there will be no more illness and maybe it will have to be wound up! I think did Beveridge think that, but I don't know, but the complexities are such that the greatest possibly good for the greatest possible number, which is the principle on which it has always operated, it means that there going to be, given the predelection for complaining as well that we now have, there are going to more and more stories I feel and bad news, but given that serving a 24 hour service for 50 million people, there must be a lot of very good things happen that aren't covered because it is only no news that is only bad news that is news isn't it?
RB Was the fact that it was in Aberdeen an accident or did you want to come back?
WH Well by this time my dad was pretty ill and my mother wasn't too good either, so it helped them that I was able to stay on in Aberdeen, although my dad died at the end of 1957, but yes, that was another, in fact, you have maybe put your finger on it Roddy, maybe that is what drove me less than the public spirit!
RB No, no..
WH A bit of everything.
RB It is amazing how many Aberdeen graduates either chose to stay in Aberdeen or have chosen to come back having made their careers elsewhere. So your initial appointment was as an administrative assistant, as tends …. I remember when I was an administrative assistant my aunt wasn't too worldly wise and she thought it was a shop assistant I had become and which shop was I serving in!
WH When you became Secretary at the University did she think you took letters?
RB She thought I had learnt to type, yes, and been promoted and indeed the Secretary to the University at the time, not the time I was appointed, but at the time that Tom Skinner was appointed appeared in the Press & Journal under "Office & Shop" in their advertising section. But was this a job in the hospital?
WH No it was based at.. the Regional Hospital Board were the policy making body for the North Eastern Region, which was pretty well the current Grampian Region but plus Orkney and Shetland and then the actual hospitals, there were 12 so called Boards of Management, which managed the actual hospitals the day to day basis. There were 3 such Boards of Management in Aberdeen, one did the general hospitals, one the so-called Special hospitals which was the Matty and the Children's hospital and Glen O'Dee and Tor-na-Dee and the City hospital and then there was the Mental Hospital Board which subsequently became, when the Aberdeen Mental Hospital became renamed for pc reasons even in those days, The Royal Cornhill Hospital, this became the Royal Cornhill and Associated Hospital, but they were the psychiatric, so these were three and the sort of outlying areas were divided into Orkney, Shetland and Moray and then two bits of Banffshire and three bits of Aberdeenshire. They quickly found out that there were too many of them so they were reduced in number for the day to day management, but the Regional Hospital Board, of which there were only 5 in Scotland, was providing that kind of service and Lady Baird was the Chairman of it for 20 years and was a formidable figure and the St. Andrews House civil servants had a healthy respect, amounting sometimes to fear! But I thought she was a wonderful person and made a masterly Chairman of a committee, the benevolent dictator which epitomised her. I thought that she was real prime-minister material, but she was just 20 years too early, but she had everything that Maggie Thatcher had, including compassion, as well as compassion and a sense of humour. She enjoyed a chuckle.
RB And of course a full married life with a big, quite a large family, I think there were four children, were there not?
WH At least three, two boys and were there one or two girls? And of course Sir Dougald… there was a time when she was the Chairman of the Hospital Board, the Chairman of the Town Council's Health Committee and Sir Dougald was the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and rumour was that at every meaningful decision in Aberdeen on health services matters was taken over breakfast!
RB Over breakfast, mind you of course there was Mary Esslemont who was another formidable woman doctor.
WH A different kettle of fish from May. The other person that I found influential on me and my health service chunk of my life was a chap who is almost totally unknown in Aberdeen. His name was Dennis Bedard. Dr. Bedard.
RB Oh yes, he lived opposite us. We lived in Albert Terrace and he lived in Carden Place, just opposite.
WH Then he moved to I think it was 13 Rubislaw Den South, which is where Jimmy Donald lives now.
RB He was the SAMO wasn't he?
WH Yes, Senior Administrative Medical Officer and he was a terrific guy. The pair of them with May being the Chair and he being the Medical Officer gave the North Eastern Regional Hospital Board a terrific impetuous and I think this meant that this part of Scotland has had better, certainly better hospital services than anywhere else in Scotland, which I think means therefore in Britain! They were behind all the Foresterhill development and I was lucky enough to be Secretary to one of the professional planning committees that did the phase I and phase II buildings and Dennis Bedard was the Chairman of that and he had terrific style. It seems almost unkind to say that first, because he had a lot more, but he did have the style that went with his great abilities and he looked not unlike John Kennedy, JFK, and it was about the same time and I certainly had this feeling that we were in Camelot in 1 Albyn Place, with Bedard and Baird there.
RB Did you work for him or with him. I mean was it .. how was the relation between the lay administrator and the medical administrator?
Part two of transcript on MS 3620/1/186/2
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