| Description | Interview with Professor Donald MacKinnon recorded by John Hargreaves on 2 October 1985.
Side A of this recording has been deleted, or did not record. due to recording machinery problems. The interview was re-recorded as interview number MS36201//40. Side B of the original interview remains intact.
Interview transcript:
JH Donald, if we could now go from your experience in the Philosophy Department to more general aspects of the academic community in Aberdeen during your thirteen years here. Did you find it a stimulating community to be in?
DM Yes, I did. I did. I mean, my earlier years here was in a way greatly affected by the presence of Professor A.S. Ferguson in the Chair of Logic. Now, I have written about Ferguson. I wrote an initialled article in the Scotsman when he died in 1958. I wrote The Times obituary and I also wrote a full length article in the Aberdeen University Review and I'd venture to suggest you look at that. I say look deliberately because there's an excellent photograph of Ferguson. Ferguson had been in St. Andrews originally as a student, later at Oxford, and he was delighted to receive the St. Andrews Doctorate of Laws. It meant a great deal to him. I don't know if you know the St. Andrews LL.D. robe, but it's the most beautiful academic robe I've ever seen. It's a [?] type cassock in silk with red buttons and a cape. Ferguson looked superb in it. He had a face rather like John Locke and this photograph which I got from his sister, his wife was by then dead, for the Review tells you a great deal about the man. There were those who wanted to have his portrait painted. Ross, the mighty John Ross, the Ross of Granholm, University Court, one of the great benefactors of the University, admired him immensely. And I had some talk with Ross about a possible portrait, but Taylor was against it because if you had one professor painted, why not the rest? Ferguson was a man of absolutely astonishing learning and talent. He was much older than I was, remember I was only thirty-three when I was appointed, thirty-four when I came. Ferguson had become professor here after a period in Newcastle and before that in Canada, in 1927, what time I went up to Winchester as a scholar at the age of fourteen; and this gap of years was psychologically very important. I deferred to him too much in certain respects and that, of course, when you do that and you know you've done it, creates a certain tension. Also, of course, and this I hinted at in the obituary in the Review . No one could understand why Ferguson was so difficult, if you didn't know the continual strain he was under with his wife to whom he was devoted, but who I suspect was clinically insane. She was a daughter of Bradley of the Oxford Dictionary . No one who didn't know Ferguson could appreciate the burden of learning that he carried which practically crippled him, and led to his published work consisting almost entirely of very important but extremely obscure articles on technical aspects of the platonic interpretation. He had it in him to write a very remarkable book on Plato indeed, which would in its way have been unique. And there was a draft of this but it never saw the light. Some of the manuscript is in the Library. He served the University devotedly and his curatorship marks a watershed in the history of the Library. I am thankful he didn't live to see the abandonment of King's College Library. If you go into the old Library, as you will have done many, many times, you will see the tribute rightly paid, the inscription to Crombie, Crombie of Granholm. It was Ferguson who activated Crombie. When I wrote the obituary, I asked Douglas Simpson for some account of Ferguson's curatorship. Simpson said that it was a great curatorship but of course there were casualties. There were members of the Library staff at that time who rather queened it, you see, and disdained the undergraduates, the students, who were reduced to tears; but it was Ferguson who made that Library the workshop of the Arts Faculty. I mentioned it when we were talking before I began. Saul Rose, you see, when Saul Rose came here, he found the Library remarkably strong in the field of international relations and politics. Why? Because Ferguson had seen them as a growing subject. And he established a committee, a book sub-committee that dealt with the provision of books for areas which were not departmentally represented. Well; he could do this because of the astonishing range of culture that he commanded. How far he was a good professor of Logic, I cannot really say and I don't think I should. Alan Robertson, the former Chaplain, now Warden, could tell you something of the impact he made on Alan, who was a good post-war student, of his Logic lectures. And of course then Bednarowski was with him, and then Bednarowski carried the load where you might call the teaching of Logic was concerned. Ferguson was incidentally a very good friend to Bednarowski and did his best to secure an appointment here for Bednarowski's wife which, if he had succeeded, might have saved their marriage. There was a human side to this man even though he could be savage in Faculty and Senatus. I'm talking about him because in the history of this University in this century, Ferguson his one of the most considerable professors.
JH That's very interesting. Who were the other persons to whom you were particularly close?
DM Well, Rex Knight, in Psychology. And I had better relations than some with Bickersteth. Incidentally, Ian Crichton Smith, the poet and novelist, has published a few weeks ago in the Scotsman a rather bitter poem about Bickersteth. I don't know if you saw it?
JH No, I didn't
DM Name not mentioned, but it was Bickersteth. He mentioned, of course, Ian Crichton Smith, in this poem the fact that Bickersteth had lost a son in Burma during the war and how this, he thought, had left him emotionally very dry. There he was wrong. It affected Bickersteth very deeply and I know this because he had another son who survived the war and was reading Greats without very much success at Oxford whom he asked me to see him during the vac to talk philosophy. Between his finals and his viva this son was struck by lightning in the French Alps and killed and I was down in Oxford at the time and I heard about it on the journey and I checked it at Christ Church which had been his son's college and I wrote to the old man. Had a very moving letter from him. If I see Ian Crichton Smith I will tell him that although Bickersteth was in some ways a bad professor of English for Aberdeen, he was not emotionally dead. He was a man who could be very deeply affected; but of course he did have a view of English studies. Well, I can illustrate it by saying I found this Moral Philosophy/English Honours option when I arrived here and discussed with various people the possibility which was supported by some good people like Ronnie Hepburn for instance, and a girl named Madeleine Zimmerman who was later known as Madeleine Simms, (she is a great abortion campaigner, you would probably know her name; did you know she was an Aberdeen student? She came from Hampstead.) Now we decided we'd have a bridge paper and this would consist of certain authors studied both from the philosophical and the literary point of view. We included John Stuart Mill because of his great influence on the nineteenth century; but we also proposed the names of Edmund Burke, John Henry Newman and I put in, strongly backed by Alec Parker in the Spanish Department, T.S. Eliot. But Bickersteth had vetoed this because Eliot was still alive. Now this is incidentally worth mentioning because I think a man whose memory ought to be held in honour in the University, with whom I had a lot to do with in the later years was Bickersteth's successor, Ian Duthie. I mean my wife and I know a lot about Duthie's difficulties, partly because he was our neighbour in the Chanonry. But what I think needs to be mentioned was Duthie's courage and his vision. You see he saw, although this was contrary to the bias of his own training, that there must be an English option open to those who wanted to study Literature only, bearing a token regard to language. I mean learning a little but not being expected to offer Beowulf at the honours level. I mean that had had a devastating effect on the record of a whole number of excellent post-war students, like Gordon Anderson later in the Secretariat, who was very good in Moral Phil., Sandy Gall, and another man whose name I forget who had the curious distinction of being Crawfie's stepson. You see, they'd all lost their first pretty well on the fact that they were bored stiff by Language. Duthie say that there must be this option and he went for it and that was a piece of real intellectual courage and I think probably helped the English Department. He saw that English with the decline of Classics was going to be the central Arts, Arts, subject and this, together with his calibre as a Shakespearean exponent. A very good student for the same course in Cambridge, the same course Stewart Sutherland took who is a Moral Philosophy lecturer in Glasgow now, Angus Mackay, he came to Cambridge where he did exceptionally well from Glasgow, but he had a year in Aberdeen for some reason, one of the four of this, and he said that in his Scottish academic experience, Duthie's Shakespeare lectures he would never forget and I think because of the tragedy of his premature death, that sort of tribute should go on record. He said to me moreover, that when he was at Glasgow he showed the notes of these lectures to honours students in English at Glasgow in their final year and they said they'd never had anything to touch them. And they were offered to the Ordinary class in New Kings. I say this with some passion because I know quite a lot about Ian Duthie and so did my wife and when the Aberdeen University Review, which I took in Cambridge, paid no tribute to him at all. This was the one moment at which I intervened from Cambridge in Aberdeen affairs. Morrison had just taken over the editorship and he said it was too late for an obituary; but would I write a tribute and that is there in the Review if you want to look at it. But Duthie had in him, if he had not become addicted to tobacco and it was cigarettes that killed him, after he had overcome his other problem, he could have been a very great professor. That's of course the later years but as your asking me about relations I'm bound to mention this.
JH Yes, Did you find, apart from the persons you've mentioned with whom of course you had departmental relationships, did you find you had good relations with colleagues in different disciplines, or different faculties?
DM Yes, I did. And of course here the coming of Wightman to the Philosophy and History of Science department was very important.
JH I was going to ask ...
DM I mean I think he did a great job in Aberdeen. I really had the pleasure of seeing him once in Cambridge. We were both serving together on an advisory body. I entertained him to lunch with Gordon Anderson who came across. And he looked back on his Aberdeen days with great happiness. He was not a good lecturer but he was quite admirable in the way of promoting inter-disciplinary relations.
JH Well, those seminars of his were certainly ...
DM Oh yes, they were outstanding.
JH A notable feature ...
DM They were outstanding
JH Did you ever join bodies like the AUT's Inter-Faculty Group?
DM Yes, I did, though actually I'd much more to do with the AUT in Cambridge than here. I was Cambridge chairman for a while and came around meetings a lot. I used to see Aberdeen people and actually when they came to Cambridge the Aberdonians were accommodated in Corpus and I saw quite a bit of them. My AUT days are more associated with Cambridge than with here. If you like it was something I brought to Aberdeen from Cambridge.
JH What about your younger colleagues particularly in Moral Philosophy ...?
DM Well, of course, Tony Flew whom you may remember, he's often thought to be difficult and he is in some ways but he was a marvellous colleague. He did a very great deals for the department in years when I was a very, very difficult and unsuitable head of department, I was in a bad state altogether. This you will have to, I mean we'll bowdlerise a little, but I must pay this tribute to Tony because of the criticisms that were often made of him. No man in a time of personal difficulty and ill health, who was still capable of functioning, sometimes better than others incidentally, no man in such a situation could ask for a better number two. I differed from him profoundly in all sorts of ways but I must mention this. I've mentioned it to a lot of people. I almost convinced Bernard Williams who was at Cambridge with me [?] allergic to Tony Flew. Ronnie Hepburn, of course, did very well. Ferguson never forgave me for making an appointment within the University. He was very much opposed to this. This was an occasion of real tension and he never really acknowledged Ronnie, he treated Ronnie very badly.
JH Was that a convention generally observed in the Faculty at the time?
DM No, I wouldn't say that. There were special reasons why I appointed Ronnie. I won't go into that but of course his subsequent career showed that he was intelligent and justified at least in seeing that he was a man of very considerable promise.
JH I think the ...
DM We needed from the beginning a much larger department. I should have gone for that. Ferguson was against it you see, and his influence was naturally strong but if we wanted to develop an effective philosophical life in Aberdeen we had to have more people teaching the subject. That was a bad mistake.
JH I have the impression arriving almost at the mid-point of your service in Aberdeen that his was a time when relationships between professors and junior staff were changing from a Scottish model which was very much of a professorial type ...
DM This was, again, to reach a kind of crisis point when I was Dean and I remember discussing, I don't want to go into this one, this issue with James Burns, whom you'll remember. We both knew Denys Munby who was very active in promoting the lecturers' right to be represented in Senatus, not always discreetly so, I mean, I'd known Denys for a very long time and we knew him when he was an undergraduate and therefore he sometimes talked to me, pleasantly, freely to me, but he had a chip on his shoulder about this; but I remember saying to James Burns that could he, as a political scientist, see any way between maintaining some sort of representative system in Faculty and in Senatus, and I'm thinking about a Faculty, and having a situation in which the Faculty became a public meeting to which committees, which would often be manned or womanned by the same people, reported and he said he'd tried to get Denys to see this but he couldn't. That was something I became increasing aware of; but you see our Department of Moral Philosophy was a small department and therefore our relations were quite intimate and George Duthie, who succeeded Tony Flew, he was a gentle man of wide-ranging interests, as a teacher incidentally, marvellously effective with the weaker vessels. I've never know anyone who could do more and I had to restrict the amount he did because I didn't want him to do too much of this; but he really could transform their performance. I often thought that in an ideal world he would have been a superb teacher in a special school. I just mention that about min because I think the University needs a few people like that.
JH We've talked about tutorial relations. How far did social relations with students compare with your Oxford experience?
DM They were shy. They seemed to like being entertained, came in groups. It was only of course the honours and advanced students that we really got to know but I was struck with the warmth they still show when you meet them. Of course Cambridge was so different because there, professors are inevitably at the personal level most concerned with advanced pupils. Many of them of course by the time I went there were married and a different sort of ...
JH On relations with students if I could ask a somewhat impertinent question perhaps. Are the legends that you would occasionally conduct a tutorial under the table true?
DM In my earlier years in Oxford I was foolish in that sort of way, a bit too uninhibited
JH But you didn't practise it in Aberdeen?
DM No, nor in Cambridge
JH The regent scheme was of course operating in your time ...
DM Yes
JH Did you think that was ...
DM I thought it was good. I never was involved in it personally but I was concerned in it as Dean. And I remember saying with Rex Knight that it did enable us, the Faculty as a whole, to do something about a problem category I mentioned of those who went through university as a take.
JH Would you say that during your Deanship this was you main concern?
DM No, I had no main concerns, so to speak, I mean there were just certain problems which continually recurred but I think and I found that we were just dealing with things as they came along but certainly and I hope overall you might say that getting the priorities of the Faculty sorted out was something with which, with Rex Knight, I was very much concern and the problems of public relations that went with it over the discontinuing and so on. And with the working of what we used to call the Committee Anent Students, that was a very dominant and general priority.
JH You mention Rex Knight once or twice without saying a great deal about him. Would you like to add any more?
DM Well, I got to respect him more and more for his humanity. He was my predecessor as Dean and he demitted early and therefore I had to take over a year early. But we were often on committees together and I came more and more to respect his humanity. Of course he died quite soon after, he died in 1963.
JH What about town and gown relations in Aberdeen?
DM On the whole, they seemed to me to be good. One of the things that Aberdeen University had to guard against was being too much caught up in let's say, the local whirl, you know what I mean. Provincialism was the danger. Hamilton Fyfe fought that by getting the most generous terms for travel of any of the staff of any university from the UGC, for going to learned society meetings in the United Kingdom. I don't know what the situation is now but I happened to be travelling south to London for a committee, a Ministry of Education Committee, when the UGC was leaving after their quinquennial visit in 1951 and I'd been there with them on the train and they said they were continuing the most generous provision for staff travel to meetings in the United Kingdom of any university, for Aberdeen, because Fyfe and, following him, Taylor, had convinced them that that was absolutely necessary. This was one antidote to the provincialism.
JH Yes indeed, but beyond that of course there were fruitful relations ...
DM There were fruitful relations.
JH Would you comment on your own activity in civic life? In the Labour Party for instance?
DM I did quite a bit in the Labour Party and a lot of extra mural teaching in my earlier years which I gave up latterly. Other commitments. I did an occasional extra-mural lecture or couple of lectures. That latter I think is very valuable indeed and I'm struck with the number of people who simply return to Aberdeen and have spoken to me about the classes they attended. I mean the director of education when I came to Aberdeen was a man called Scorgie who was very good and he used to allow an advance class in philosophy for those who had taken the old elementary class, or had taken philosophy at University and wanted to resume even though we only had between ten and twelve people. And those classes were very, very good. I mean they were, we tackled really difficult things, we tackled Kant's Critique of pure reason and I recall this because he was so generous in not demanding the usual conditions.
JH Finally, perhaps, I wonder if you'd care to make any comments on the two principals, and particularly of course on Principal Taylor?
DM Well, Taylor was certainly one of the most remarkable men that I've never served under. I know that his puritanism grated on the students. I mean there was bad trouble around 1952, the Jimmy Edwards rectorial. But that was only part of the picture, there was humanity, there was vision, he understood the problems of the University in relation to the community in a remarkable way. He would have mourned what we notice increasingly, the decline of the old town community. I mean a clear example there is the state of Barbour's former house which was Witte's house, Ferguson's before that, in Don Street, which is a disgrace to the University. He would have seen the deep change to a kind of campus pattern in the old town without the substructure of a community. You can allow me to add one or two...
JH Yes, indeed, certainly.
DM I've thought a lot about what I should say and in forty-two and a half years in university teaching, of one thing I am absolutely clear. When I was so to speak on the circumference of the University during the bad time of troubles two or three years ago, I thought that out the year's experience that the one thing that matters before all else in the University is the quality of the staff. And if the administration by its act succeeds in alienating the staff so they are deflected from their primary concern which is the advancement of their subject and its expulsion into almost whole time political activity, that is bad administration. Now when I say that please don't think that I regard myself at all as having taught well. I've taught many people badly and I have taught very badly at certain times. There are people like Paul Streeten, whom I mentioned, who have learned something from me and I'm glad of that; but I do know that nothing can compensate for very bad, for poor staff failure, and the administration fails the staff if they are deflected and alienated as it were from the University. I hope that doesn't seem too improper.
JH No. Is there anything else you would like to undertake?
DM Are you reasonably satisfied with it?
JH Very much so, and it's been very ...
END OF INTERVIEW
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