| Description | Interview with William D. Hardie recorded by Roddy Begg on 8 & 9 December 2004.
Transcription: Part 2
WH That is a very good question, because it was pretty unusual when this committee started for the phase II development which was to draw up the functional brief of the new hospital, he needed somebody to be the Secretary of the committee that he was chairing and I was still just a relatively young administrator so this was seen as something that I could I suppose almost seconded from the secretarial department for part of my time to handle this job, so it really was a one off. My normal thing would have been and I did this at the same time, on the secretarial side to service some of the committees and do other general secretarial type administration, but this got me into medical planning, which was pretty unusual, I think, but it was a great experience and the committee was a hand-picked one by him, of mostly young consultants, there was two or three senior nurses and their job was to get down on paper all that was going to happen in the new building, in great detail. The star of that Committee was a chap called Hugh Dudley. H.A.F. Dudley, who was the senior lecturer in Surgery under Professor W.C. Wilson and the phase I building was going to include, as well as operating theatres, was going to include the embedded University department of Surgery and Hugh Dudley who was the Senior Lecturer in Surgery has his eye on the Chair. I think it is not unfair to say because W.C. Wilson was now quite an old chap and so in Dudley's book he was planning his own unit, his own theatres, his own wards and he would come back as the Professor. Now Hugh, Hugh Arnold Freeman Dudley was his name, and he is without doubt the cleverest guy I have ever come across, I mean not only was he a brilliant, I don't know about his technical skill was, but presumably it was great, but he just knew everything and when the consulting engineers came in he could talk to them on their own terms and leave them baffled when they were talking about engineering things and he was hellava clever! But there is always a downside, he suffered not only no fools gladly, but just about nobody else gladly and he trod on a lot of fairly distinguished toes in the Aberdeen medical field, the result was that when the Chair became vacant he didn't get it!
RB This would be wee George Smith then?
WH Correct, George Smith got it and Dudley really within months had gone off to Melbourne, where the Monash University, I think it was starting a new medical school, so he lifted some of the ideas from Foresterhill into Monash and had a successful career there and then he came back as the Professor of Surgery at St. Mary's in London and he hit the headlines in a number of controversial things, but I think he is still with us and he was one of the editors of the book about the history of the Royal Infirmary which Iain Levack and he .. and it was Dudley's surgical hand I know to my cost because I wrote quite a chunk for that and he filleted it and give him his due anything that was essential was in and anything that was in-essential was out! So that was a great experience and then I suppose having had this kind of brush with the building side of hospital life I sort of semi-specialised in that in the administrative side and rose to be Assistant Secretary (Capital Works) and in the course of that I came in contact quite a lot with the University technical staff, notably Jim Kelman and Jimmy Main, because there was a lot of obviously joint interest in Foresterhill. Which is very interesting, some lawyer will have to a thesis on Foresterhill.
RB It is a nightmare field.
WH Quo Diviso!
RB In a sense it has been a boon and a blessing as well in that it has forced co-operation, because joint ownership meant that you had to do everything hand in hand.
WH And I think generally relations have been pretty good, I don't remember us ever falling out in my day.
RB Yeah I think they were better in your day, dare I say, than when the Health Service brought in these macho managers which is what we might come to now, but I think that we are just ending this side of the tape, so I will stop now.
New Tape now recording on 9 December.
Buff when we were talking yesterday you had got to the point when you were describing your role in the Health Board and we were starting to talk about relations with the University in that role, would you like to continue from that point?
WH Well the fact that we were both occupants, the Health Board, and in the early days The Hospital Board, and the University of the wonderful Foresterhill site, the product of the vision of Professor Matthew Hay, which was and remains unique I suspect in health provision the world over, but for the administrators in both bodies it posed quite a number of problems, not least the fact that its legal status was peculiar as it was owned pro indiviso by the two authorities, so which meant that every square inch of the site was owned partly by the University and partly by the Secretary of State as the Health Authority. There was a very precise percentage, I can't remember, it was very roughly 2/3rd hospital and 1/3rd University and then by mutual agreement various areas of the site were zoned for use by one authority or the other. Fairly obviously just by geographical and historical development but I think, you are the lawyer Roddy, but I think it is the case, is it not, that every building that has been built on that site is in fact owned two-thirds by the Secretary of State and one-third by the University.
RB Yes, that is the case. The law of Scotland states that a building which is owned in proportion to the ownership of the land, so this was the celebrated case of the Agriculture building that was put up two-thirds with the Secretary of State's money but it was built on University property, so it became the University's property which greatly pissed-off the Secretary of State. At one stage we did threaten to say "Well let's sell the hospital because we own a third of it!"
WH And that is the kind of thing that quickly dampens down any debate, common sense prevails, and there are some buildings University and some hospital. I remember that we did have various joint committees of the of the two bodies. Two in particular, one the so-called Foresterhill Site Committee, which kind of managed the site and the services there too which I always thought was a very good, working, practical committee, because there was a real job to be done. Then there was the so-called Joint Consultative Committee which was a little more of a talking shop where the two bodies considered matters of joint interest. I think it did have a value, but I think it is the committee which the Principal of the day, Edward Wright and the Senior Medical Officer of the board, Denis Beder, who I mentioned before, had a little falling out which may well have resulted in the committee being dis-continued. But the Principal arrived at the meeting and Denis Beder had put a paper out and in talking to it, the Principal, it seemed to me as a humble committee clerk had got totally the wrong end of whatever stick it was….anyway Beder let it go for a few minutes and then said "If the Principal had read his paper before coming to the meeting he would have realised that what is proposed is not x,y,z, but a,b,c. There is nothing complicated about it". Which was a crafty way to put it as the Principal was then put on the spot and either he could admit that he hadn't read the papers or having read it he hadn't understood something that isn't particularly complicated. So maybe there was a slight deterioration of .. we had generally amicable relations between the two bodies.
RB I mean it worked pretty much at the ground roots level, didn't it?
WH Yes I think it did.
RB So that.. you said that your role in the Board was mainly concerned with the capital development which was quite substantial in your time there, wasn't it? A lot of building went on.
WH Yes the Phases I and II of the Royal Infirmary development, quite apart from other things at the Maternity and what not. So it was a big proportion of my job before I became Secretary. In fact there was a slight excursion into Banff, after the 1974 arrangement, reorganisation, when the three arms of the Health Service, the Hospital Service, the GP Service and the Community Medicine Service were brought together under Health Boards who all had those separate functions and I think that was a very sensible reorganisation and it meant that there was now a Health Board split up into, in our case, three districts and each district had an administrator and I was appointed District Administrator in the north district of Grampian which covered largely Aberdeenshire without the City and most of Banffshire and a wee bit of Morayshire. Then there was the west district which included largely Morayshire and of course the south district which was Aberdeen City which included all the big hospitals and I have to say, gosh this must be my second major disappoint, but I am still disappointed now at not getting that First in 1953, and I applied for the job of south district administrator, well you just applied, it was one of these free for all and you applied for as many jobs as you could and then after a series of interviews the jobs were dished out and I certainly thought it was time that I moved out of the sort of ivory tower of the Health Board Office down to grass-roots level and do some managing of health services near the ground and I thought I was ready to manage the South District which included all of Foresterhill, but the Board in their wisdom appointed me to the North District, which I have to say gave me a pleasant two years in Banff where I cut my teeth in management.
RB Well who did get the South District?
WH Well the South District was a chap called Jack Sapsworth who had been the Board of Management Secretary of the Cornhill Hospitals. A nice fellow up from the south and he was considerably older than I and was long in the tooth and certainly more experienced at the ground level in the Health Service although it was largely mental hospitals that he had worked in, but a very nice fellow and a couple of years after I got to Banff I had a phone call from Bob Batchelor who was the Secretary of the Health Board and I think I am right in saying for almost of all of my two years in Banff I scarcely heard from him. Obviously the Health Board's main concerns were at Foresterhill where there was the new buildings coming on stream and all that and once I got things going in Banff I was really left to my own devices and Bob rang me up one day on some fairly trivial point of business to be dealt with quite soon and then he said "Oh by the way you might like to know I am retiring in what ever month it was" and that was all he said but presumably this was a hint that there was something to apply for, so when he retired I applied for the post of Secretary to the Board and was appointed.
RB And what year was that?
WH That was 1976. So I had just done almost two years in Banff.
RB So did you actually move to Banff for that?
WH No we didn't. Our intention was to move to Banff and we had a look at a few houses and there are some very nice houses in Banff which is very distinguished architecturally, but unfortunately they were all occupied by people! And after a while we decided that although this was before we got the message from Bob Batchelor saying he was intending retiring, which he did, I suppose I already had an eye on his job and knew that he four or five years to go, but he decided to retire a couple of years earlier, so we bought a wee flat in Banff which I occupied Monday to Friday and still lived here at the weekends and of course the great thing was that there was very often meetings through in Aberdeen to come to so that I could have the odd Wednesday or Thursday night at home as well. So that worked out pretty well and Margaret and the children used to like coming up to Banff.
RB We will come to Margaret and the children later, but they were at primary, secondary school by then?
WH Now, this is where you really get me. How old are the children? Yes, well 1967 and 1970 they were born, so there you are! John was 6 and Katherine was 10.
RB So you became the Secretary of the Health Board then there was another reorganisation to come but did you become involved in that?
WH No I didn't. That was when the theoretical, I don't know whose idea this was, that the 1974 reorganisation that Health Boards should be run by an Executive group consisting of the Secretary, the Treasurer, the Chief Medical Officer and the Chief Nursing Officer and these four people by a system of consensus management had to take all the major decisions and indeed a lot of the minor ones, and that system implied the existence of four people in these four disciplines who got on so well together that they didn't fall out over anything and I think that was a fallacy which was undone by the next reorganisation which must have been round 1985.
RB So it did survive for about ten years?
WH Yes, and I have to say that it could work but in my two years at Banff, and again at District level there were Executive Groups as well, and I had a very nice executive group at Banff and we got on very well and I suppose I was almost lulled into thinking this system does work, but I think we must have been pretty unusual, then again there was the responsibilities in the North District weren't anything like what they were either in the South District or area Health Board level.
RB And your years as Secretary of the Health Board, did you have much to do with the University? Was it just the annual Joint Consultative Committee meeting?
WH Well I don't seem to remember having so much to with the University as I had done earlier when I had been Assistant Secretary in the Capital works side of things. Now who was Secretary? Was that …
RB That would be Tom Skinner.
WH That was Tom Skinner. Yes that is right. There wasn't the same contact with the University as I had remembered. I think that must just have been a flook!
RB I think that is my impression too. I think that by this time the management of the interface was rather below the level of the Chief Executives, the Principal, the Secretaries, the Secretaries of the Board didn't .. weren't so involved. The role of the Dean started becoming more important as well. So Buff we have kind of held off mentioning the other great part of your life and that was the bit that initially you weren't in any form of gainful employment with but the Student Show had developed into something different in your private life?
WH Yes, that's right. The Student Show I had enjoyed very much and indeed while I was at Cambridge I think that I mentioned having drawn a blank with the Footlights I still contributed a few things to the Aberdeen Student Shows that were on in the two years that I was at Cambridge. So in a sense I continued as a non-Aberdeen student but still as a student writing stuff for the Student Show up until 1957 and then not having intended to do so but having found myself in a job in Aberdeen and settled in Aberdeen I looked around obviously for what to do in my off-duty hours and it was at that stage that I was one of the co-founders of an organisation called the Aberdeen Review Group which tried to flog some life into the moribund body of the form of entertainment called intimate review, which was very fashionable before and just after the War but after had begun to sink. My fellow co-founders of that included the chap Alfie Wood with whom I had shared most of my National Service, who was an Edinburgh graduate who had come up to Aberdeen to work with his wife Pat, who was one of Catherine Hollingworth's speech training department, that's what she was when she first came. I am sure Imogen would remember her too and so they and I and various worthies from the Student Show namely Reginald Barrett-Ayres and George Low and Rola York, we were the group who started this off, although strangely these three that I mentioned very quickly fell out of the group, they had other things to do, but we stuck it and the original membership, there were obviously people from the Student Show, but there were other people as well who were who were non-Student Show people and indeed the Speech Training Department was quite a fruitful source of female performers. Anyway it seemed, it was an enjoyable hobby and it attracted quite a following after two or three years and then there was a bit of a falling-out internally and it looked as if we might have to wind it up when Steve Robertson, who had been one of the stars of the Student Show in the mid-fifties and who had been off doing his own National Service came back to Aberdeen and meeting him in the Kirkgate, not long after his return, I asked if he was interested in doing any writing, which he hadn't done as a member of the student show, he had only just been a performer. So we began writing together around 1960 and managed to keep the Review Group alive and so we kept going till well into the 60s and then all the ladies in the group for domestic reasons decided that they had had enough and so that was the wind up of the Review Group. But Steve was still interested in going to the Edinburgh Festival, Fringe, which he had never managed to do whilst he was a student, if I may say so, disloyally, because he always had re-sits in September!
RB How these re-sits could ruin your summer!
WH So the time came towards the end of the 1960s when he kept flogging this idea and eventually he found some support in myself and our friend George Donald, who had been a permanent member of the Review group as composer and accompanist and he was just a Student Show person in that he had never been in a show but he had written two or three tunes and Reg Barrett-Ayres at the time spotted this was a talented young fellow, but he lived in Huntly and again for practical reasons that living in Huntly during the Easter vacation he was at home so that was when all the work for the Show was done, as you know, so he was never actually in a Student Show but he had been the back-bone almost of the Review Groups efforts because there so much music in it. So he was still interested and the director of the Review Group shows James Logan also didn't have to be talked into it too much, so anyway the four of us went to Edinburgh with a small show called for the first time "Scotland The What" or rather "Scotland - The What?" because there was a question mark. Of course it was all related to Scotland The Brave, Scotland The What and the theory was that this was a show, now I think it was billed as "Three semi-literate Scots taking a reverend look at their country's institutions" and we thought well we can't .. there was no Doric or Aiberdeen in the show at all, as we thought this was an International audience we have, so there was enough material from the Review Group which had been non-Doric including most of the musical numbers to give us an hour long show. It was at half-past ten at night, so it was a late night review. It just lasted an hour or so and it was in a church hall, which I may say Steve had negotiated, because by this time he was a young solicitor and his firm had an Edinburgh contact and Steve had rung this guy up and said "Can you advise us on any properties that we might get to put on , no he didn't say us, he said " I am looking for a property for a review group to put on a show in the Festival, can you advise" and this guy said "Well I don't know Mr. Robertson, who are these people, are they hippies?!" and he wasn't at all happy but Steve admitted that he himself was one of them. That made the guy even more anxious, however Bill Brydon I think his name was and he did us proud by coming up with this church hall .
RB So what year was that?
WH That was 1969. So we went down there prepared to lose money, it was just for the experience and we were very lucky I think in that we got one or two fairly generous notices, including one from a lovely guy called Neville Garden who you may recall who was writing in those days for the Daily Express and he had come to our show from a long night in the Usher Hall and really he was ready to laugh at anything I think! Anyway we woke up to a Daily Express notice which was only three paragraphs but it said "This is without question the funniest show in the festival" or something like that. What we would have written ourselves! Of course that then attracted people and decent word of mouth that's what gets a thing running. So having expected really to loose money on the deal we certainly washed our face.
Oh, here is .. (some interruption) ….. that's the worst of having doors that don't close in these old Aberdeen properties!
RB Slight hiatus there but we will continue!
WH So instead of being our "swan-song" which was the intention we went back the following year for another hour-long show and Jimmy Donald, the owner of His Majesty's who saw both of them said "Why don't you put these two both together and I will put you on at the theatre for a whole evening" . So we thought very long and hard as the theatre compared with the church hall with a capacity of 250, the theatre without the Gods is 1,000 seats, we thought it was too big for us. But Jimmy Donald said "Well I will meet any expenses and if there is a profit I will split it down the middle". Well you don't get a deal like that often! So we did a couple of nights and again there were so many enquiries that Jimmy Donald with an amazing breech of tradition put us on for the Sunday evening as well and you had to pay a star double-time for a Sunday not what the Donald's like to do! However there we were and he said "Well once you have a new show I will put you on for a week". So there and then we started to work on the new show, but of course it took a long time. It took a good two years before we eventually said to him "We think we have our new show". So that was in 1973 we did a week at His Majesty's.
RB Had you done the Festival again, or did you just leave it?
WH No, we just left it for two years. Then we did a new show at His Majesty's really every two years thereafter. People in Aberdeen say it was every year, but it was every two years. So it was during that period that other theatre managers, maybe stimulated by Jimmy Donald, we will never know, but other theatre managers came and saw us and offered us dates at places like the McRobert Centre and Adam Smith in Kirkcaldy and Eden Court at Inverness. It came to the point where, you know it had started as an enjoyable hobby and it continued to always to be that. That was one of the great things about it, that it was always as enjoyable as a hobby but it was a hobby that started earning a bit of beer money and there came a point where, and we all had respectable jobs, we were all round about our 50s by this time and we all had families. There came a point where it was really going to have…it was a classic crossroads, we had to go one way or the other and after much heart-searching, certainly on my part, my family was the youngest and I was in a quasi-civil service job, which if I gave up that was just the end of it. I wouldn't get any chance of early retirement, I was just leaving and my pension was frozen until I was 60. So that there were, how many years are we looking at, it was 1983, the year of the big decision and the plunge was taken. I was 52, so I had eight years to get through before my pension kicked in and Jimmy Donald advised us that, and he said that if you can keep the material flowing that we would have a good six or seven years. So that was useful advice to get from a fairly hard-nosed theatrical businessman and so as I say the plunge was taken.
RB And did all the other give up their jobs?
WH Yes. It was slightly easier for Steve in that by this time he was a solicitor and he gave it up totally, but had it all gone pear-shaped he could have probably could have gone back started up again. George by this time was Assistant Rector at Perth Academy and again he might have returned to teaching in some shape or form. I don't know what I would have done if it had all gone pear-shaped. Presumably I wouldn't have been un-employable but I am not quite sure at what capacity I would have been, and someone who was daft enough to give up a top job in the Health Service and then make a fool of himself on the stage and then fail is not a very happy CV to trot round if you were looking. However things went very, very well and I thought I would start very worried about it and strangely once we started I never really thought about the money side. It was completely different way of life. With the Health Board there was a nice cheque was fed into the Clydesdale Bank on the second-last day of every month then that stopped and some months there as nothing coming in but then there was a good run in Edinburgh and Glasgow and a great chunk of money came in.
RB And how was "Scotland the What" … was it a company or a partnership?
WH Yes, it was a partnership and invaluable to us was our business manager Graham Hunter another Aberdeen graduate who had been a personal friend and who in fact when we went to the Festival in 1969 James Logan was both the Director of the show and just a general factotum. He did all the publicity and everything else but we thought it was too much for us to ask him to handle the business side as well so Graham was recruited as someone who in his own word "Had never seen the back-side of a show before!" Not only was he a very efficient business manager but he was a terrific asset to the show, just in personal terms. He was very popular with all the box office ladies all over Scotland they would always ask us when we arrived there "Is that nice Mr. Hunter coming this year?" and Graham I think used to enjoy waiting say till the Friday night say before coming down say to Edinburgh or Glasgow and enjoying the … well the last two nights as you know these are the big nights for comedy shows so they were always good so he enjoyed being lionised by the box office ladies! But that is the short answer to your question is he was the business manager and was extremely useful both as a business manager and also as an opinion as a Mr. Average in the audience, that if Graham saw something in the house and said "I don't know if I would like that", but you would listen to him, he wasn't always right, but an even sterner critic than he was my dear wife Margaret who was certainly "Scotland the What's" severest critic, certainly most perspicacious.
RB In a typical year in your heyday how many nights a year were you performing?
WH Well I suppose in our heyday we were probably away about a third of year. We always maintained the two year pattern, that we would do a new show at His Majesty's and that used to run for six weeks and that was our core income for that year. The following year we would go to The King's, Edinburgh, The King's Glasgow, Eden Court, in Inverness and various other smaller venues with the Aberdeen show slightly adjusted to take account of where we were going, but never adjusted significantly in terms of the Doric accent which was the emphasis on the comedy side. Obviously before we went full-time we knew that the Doric accent succeeded in both Edinburgh and Glasgow and there was never any problem with it, just the odd word you realised was a bar to comprehension which we altered and we altered references wherever we went. It was a bit like "Worker's Playtime" on the radio, where you mentioned the foreman's name and you get a big laugh. Not quite as crude as that but there were thing like for example E & M's became Jenner's and that sort of thing.
RB So Buff how far afield did you get with "Scotland the What"? You got out of Scotland occasionally?
WH Got out of Scotland as far as London. One or two flurries into England, places like Harrogate where we went to do a cabaret for the south of Scotland Rotary who went to Harrowgate for their annual conference as there were better hotels there than anywhere in the south of Scotland, but we had three or four ventures to London in different venues. One in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and one in the Bloomsbury Theatre and then somewhere, was it St. Martin's Theatre it was then called, and that was organised by the Aberdeen University Alumnus Association, London Branch. So that as you can imagine was an evening, it was just a Sunday night in a small London Theatre and I think that Steve did have the pleasure of using a dressing-room that was currently being used by Sir John Gielgud. He could tell you what sort of gin Sir John favours! So that was just a one night to all Aberdeen graduates. When we went a couple of years later to the Queen Elizabeth Hall we had got a big mailing list from all the Scottish Societies in London, significantly, not just Aberdeen societies but all the Heriots FP's and the Hutchisons FP's which I think reflected the fact that the show had gone down with the middle-classes all over Scotland and I remember one of the nights at the Queen Elizabeth Hall my sister's sister-in-law, how's that! My sister had married this English chap, I think I mentioned earlier, and his sister whose name was Lavender, she lived down on the Thames and I had only met her once at my sister's wedding but we must have exchanged Christmas cards, but we each knew other's address anyway, and I had a letter from her saying that she and her husband, Brian, were coming to the Queen Elizabeth Hall to see the show, which was very loyal of her. So I wrote back and said "Well thank you very much and do come round to the green room, which we gather is large and well stocked up, after the show". So after the show I spotted her and her husband sort of shuffling in, discomforted a little by the hearty atmosphere as you could imagine with lots of Scottish exiles, so I went over to meet them and her words were "How lovely to see you again and that was obviously a very funny show!"
RB Didn't understand a word!
WH And her husband, Brian, said "George is a wonderful pianist".
RB Oh yes, so you weren't tempted to take the show abroad?
WH No. We did examine the possibilities of going to Canada. I mean everybody from Canada said "Your show would be wonderful in Canada". We reckoned that it might go in Canada but the exercise would be to get 500 people in the same place in Toronto or wherever and the overheads and by that time we weren't going to slum it. We liked staying in reasonable hotels and we couldn't have travelled without at least 5 people, the three of us plus James Logan plus somebody else to do all the donkey-work and as the roadie. So that was 5 people and I think I was also put off as I was in the car one day and I heard the Corries giving an interview on a Scottish programmeand they had just come back from a Canadian tour and there were only two of them plus a lot of instruments, as you may recall, and the enthusiastic presenter said "Just back from Canada, 4 weeks that must have been terrific?" Canada and the States it was. "No it wasn't" they said "It was one hotel, then another hall and then another hotel and start again" They were really very un-showbizzy about it and I though that may well be what we feel like, so but largely it was very difficult to see.. it wasn't going to be productive in terms of an organisation where Steven and I particularly needed the so-called unproductive time to write next years show. The whole thing was like that we wrote a show for every two years and the time came and round about 1994 when we had written the last show and Steve said ….the great thing was of course the key to whether the thing was going to work or not that we were generating our own material. It is not as if we had taken a flyer into showbiz and just hoped to get parts in some shows or some plays, we were generating the material and there came a point where are we going to go back on this treadmill for another two years and we thought by this stage, and I certainly felt by the time that phase of the last show I would be very near my 65th birthday when I would be retiring anyway, so we decided that 1994/1995 would be our final fling.
RB And you billed it as such.
WH Yes, we did bill it as such through out Scotland and at His Majesty's that was our final fling. It finished at His Majesty's in December 1995 and so the final was the final fling and we drew a line under it and never really regretted it. People say "Do you not miss it?" You do up to a point. I think that we were all different in that Steve was always more keen on the performing side and I was always more keen on the writing side, but I enjoyed performing and he enjoyed writing. I suppose I kept up my writing by doing the infamous "Dod & Bunty" column in the Evening Express, just to keep my hand in.
RB George used to do his own concerts.
WH George's talents are such of course that he can deploy them almost anywhere. He was in a very nice group, contemporary with "Scotland the What" called the Music Box, with two opera singers Linda Ormiston and Donald Maxwell and they did high-class cabaret's . George's gifts are such that he can really accompany any one, so he has kept doing things.
RB But nobody actually went back then. Steven didn't go back to do anymore?
WH No. One night in His Majesty's when he reached his 70th birthday, he did a show.
RB Oh yes I remember that.
WH "Steve at 70", which he did for charitable purposes, but I have never been tempted back. The only time we came back together after we retired was when Alex Ferguson got the Freedom of Aberdeen and we did a cabaret at the Civic Dinner in the Beach Ballroom after it and I felt that night "Oh, I was right getting out". It looks a simple show to do but you have to really keep your wits about you and I think no, I have told my assize in this.
RB I saw many of your shows from the stalls and I appreciated the great skills involved. We have mentioned in passing, Margaret, several times, perhaps we should put it on the record. Your wife, Margaret Simpson?
WH Margaret, Elizabeth Simpson, she was called after the two princesses. Well Margaret, I don't need to tell you was one of the most accomplished female performers ever in the Student Show in my totally unbiased view, the most.
RB And a very serious actress as well.
WH Very, yes and anyway in the days of the Review Group I suppose that we head-hunted and the Student Show was obviously a fairly fruitful source of acting and singing abilities and we, by which I mean James Logan, and George and Steve and I, I suppose were all of a mind that.. there were two girls in the show that we thought would be useful in a revue group. Margaret and Glenys Wallace, you remember Glenys, they were both recruited. In fact I think Margaret turned us down first time, because she had exams or something, it must have been her second year and you say what exams could anybody have in their second year. She was doing Honours English but she must have been very conscientious.
RB English Language would it have been. It was a dreaded exam.
WH Well she turned us down but we were persistent and in her third and Junior Honours year where she had been very good in the Show, Student Show, and we invited her in and she joined the Review Group. So I had known her just to speak to and had spotted her, in fact I do remember that in her very first show there was a happy tradition, whether it still goes on, that in the last Friday in rehearsal if you were an extinguished luminary of the show you were invited down just to provide an audience for the last run through and so I had been invited down. Now what year had that been? Must have been round about 1961?
RB 1961? Margaret's first show I think must have 1961.
WH Well the late Derek Brechin had a lot to do with that one and he I remember that I met Derek and one or two others in the Kirkgate for a drink before this run-through and Derek said to me "There is a comedienne in the Show this year" and I said "Oh for goodness sake, save us from comediennes!" That was the first thing I ever said about her and then in the course of the rehearsal in fact, that had been the first time I had ever saw her, I thought Derek was right, there is a comedienne, who had this great gift of being funny without being grotesque, which isn't given to many female actresses, so she was good in the Show, into our Review Group show and so we enjoyed..
RB And you did the BA Show?
WH Yes, well that was quite interesting. Well just to complete the saga. We were together in this show rehearsing for a month or so before hand and then enjoying the show and after I think I asked her out for lunch and then we had one or other dates and a fortnight later we were engaged.
RB That was pretty good!
WH Pretty good. The BA Show in 1963 we were married in August 1963 and the BA Show rehearsals started the following weekend.
RB We had better put on the record that this is the British Association coming to Aberdeen, which it did every 30 years or so.
WH That's right and the Student Show organisation was asked to put on a show in the theatre and it was called "Element of Surprise" and it was produced by Reginald Barrett-Ayres and Margaret and I were in it along with various other Student Show past and present, including the great George Reid, who if Margaret was the best ever female performer, George must have been well if he wasn't the best he was very near it, best male performer. But I always remember that one of the numbers involved a honeymoon couple and Margaret and I were coming back to rehearsals from our 3-day honeymoon in Pitlochry I may say and Reg said "Honeymoon couple, Buff and Margaret" and I said "Reg I have often found fault with your casting but no body will believe that we are a honeymoon couple!" But he insisted.
RB So your were married in?
WH 1963, Margaret was in I think three Review Group shows before the big wind up of the Review group and her function in "Scotland the What" I have to say as well as being generally supportive was that of our fiercest and most percipient critic and one of the features of our history was that when we got a new show, in a very rough state, we used to take it out to "off Broadway" to Aboyne, Stonehaven Town Hall and Ellon Academy and just do one night stands of the new material, which was of course extremely valuable. Just exposing it to any audience and they were what we called the "loved ones" previews, because the "loved ones" i.e. the wives and a few close friends, like Graham Hunter and others, came and we would then go back, to generally James Logan's house and have a post-mortem, and these were the most harrowing experiences.
RB And did sketches get dropped at that stage?
WH Oh yes, either dropped or perhaps amended and this was really extremely valuable because it meant that by the time we came to the theatre the show was pretty well run in, in a way that so many amateur shows can't afford to be and then the big mistakes become apparent in front of a theatre audience which is hard luck and very often at that time it is too late to change.
RB The programme has been printed?
WH Yes, that's right or there are other reasons for settings and changes, costume changes, that you can't drop something, so these were extremely valuable and Margaret was always so percipient in the her criticisms and it was quite funny that she then got this reputation for being such a hard task-master. If we were doing the show in Glasgow or Edinburgh she might come down towards the end of the week and I would say to Steven and George "I have some bad news for you, boys, the butchers of Broadway are in tonight".
RB And we have mentioned your two children, John and Katherine. They have both followed you into Student Shows, have they?
WH Yes, they did. Katherine was… Katherine did her law in Aberdeen and she was an enthusiastic member of the admin team and the dancing chorus and as I said at her wedding, to the assembled congregation, I thought she was better than Ginger Rodgers as a member of the admin team! Which was very unkind, but true, but she has become a very successful lawyer in Glasgow and has presented us with two delightful grand-daughters, and John, who, I can't remember why, he did his law at Edinburgh but then returned and did the Diploma year at Aberdeen and he is a partner in a firm in Aberdeen and is carrying on the tradition of intimate revue as a member of the group called "The Flying Pigs".
RB I attended their show two weeks ago. Wonderful.
WH There is some great talent in that show, modestly not just John, but most of the writing is done by Grieg Gordon who is now a member of the University staff. He is also a lawyer.
RB Craig is a great performer.
WH Yes, Craig Pyke.
RB And this has not been, I mean 1994 was the sort big wind up time, it was also I think the time you were awarded the MBE and the M.Univ. by the University?
WH Yes, we were all awarded the MBE and M.Univ. I think we were the first to get the M.Univ which was instituted for services towards the N-East community.
RB Yes it was very much for the N-East.
WH Our old friend and svengali if you like, Jimmy Donald, was the other one person who got it that year, so that was a happy conflux.
RB And that was all part of the winding down of "The Scotland the What" team, but you since then you have continued your contact with the University, through the Business Committee.
WH Yes, I have really enjoyed being a member of the Business Committee. Is it heresy to say that I am not sure if it is that valuable as a contributor to the University.
RB I think that would be fair!
WH But I think in the years I have been there, there have been number of things …it is quite interesting if you have spent 25 years of your working life dealing with Committees and being on them and the great thing is on the Business Committee by the end of the meeting you do know that it is not you who has to do the Minute of this meeting! I think that is what I like about it! But I think that it is interesting, the dynamic of it. I can't recall us having a lot of real arguments about things and there was never, or very rarely any attempt to get any kind of consensus. It is very much a consultative committee isn't it?
RB Yes it is.
WH If one or other of the members has got a strong view about something and a useful view about something then that can be presented back to the University but it is never said this is the considered view of the committee but it is a comment that the Committee are happy for itself to make.
RB Some of the lawyers on the Committee used to insist that their personal views just become the views of the Committee communicated back but it is .. I think it is a real safety valve. I mean it can wave a red flag and if the University is sensible which it hugely is, it takes note of it if it is going to upset the graduates kind of thing.
WH I think that is a good way of putting it, waving a red flag. I do remember that a year or two ago, thanks largely to the late David Kelbie, and what a loss he was, I think that we, i.e. he, supported by the rest of us made a very real contribution to the matter of certificates of fitness to practice, you remember that one, the Medical Faculty, where it was quite interesting, where the people who came before us, which the Medical Faculty had done, was a group of doctors who knew what they were talking about but there was no way they could frame guidelines and that sort of thing and I think that after a few of us, particularly after David's saying that you just can't say this, he pretty well took it away and re-wrote it. I would like to know , I thought that was a real contribution that the Business Committee made and indeed did that not go to other Scottish Universities?
RB I think it may have actually gone back to the GMC, General Medical Council.
WH Because it is a pretty vital thing these days.
RB Well it was a new legislation that had to be implemented in each university Medical School by a change in regulations and there was no central guidance about how it should be done. No, I think that is a good example of where the Business Committee has been. Done a useful job.
WH Although I have to admit that my appointment to it is maybe worth recording. Some years ago I was in Waterstones browsing and I was aware that the guy beside me also browsing was Dr. Iain Olson, who was then the Convenor of the Committee, and "Hello" he said and we had a very pleasant chat for about ½ and hour and then we parted and in the course of the chat I must have said, well he must have asked what was happening with "Scotland the What" and I had said that we were winding it up and we were just going to be retired gents. That night the phone rang and Margaret answered it and she said "It is Iain Olson for you" with a note of query in her voice, what the hell is Iain Olsen want, because .. I said I didn't know what he could be wanting. Then it just occurred to me and I picked up the phone and the first thing I said to him was "I am not joining anything" but by the time we had finished another ½ hour conversation I think I had not only joined but got the wave in that the democratic process made sure that I would get in if I was prepared to be a member. So I am glad I met him that day in Waterstones.
RB Originally you were co-opted weren't you?
WH I think so.
RB That is often the way. He was the Chairman and the Committee had said we have two co-opted vacancies or something, but anyway it has been great to renew our friendship through that small monthly or whenever it is meeting from time to time. Buff, this has been a marvellous opportunity to chat to you and of course you think you know your friends, but you learn so much about them in these circumstances. Is there anything before the tape runs out that you feel that we have missed?
WH The minute you go out the door I will remember something, but I can't just at this moment.
RB Well I think we have done pretty well and I am sure this will be a fascinating interview for historians in one hundred years!
WH Well I would like to think so. Boring old scholar!
RB Well thank you, thank you very much indeed.
End of Interview
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