| Description | Interview with Professor Elizabeth D. Fraser recorded on the 14 November 1985 by John Hargreaves.
This is one of two interviews given by Professor Fraser. The second interview is MS3620/34.
Interview transcript:
JH Professor Fraser you would have gone up to University I think about 1938.
EF Yes. In fact I was a year at Glasgow before I came to Aberdeen form '38 to '39 and for various reasons I decided to switch.
JH For what reasons?
EF Oh I was living with relatives in Glasgow because of financial reasons. It was something of a surprise to me to be at University at all. I never really expected it to happen because we couldn't afford it. The grant at that time was so small, about £32 a year from the local authority, and you got £9 from the Carnegie to help with your fees and unless there was some other source of money there was no possibility of going to the university in my case. But I managed to get a grant from the Highlands and Islands by sitting a bursary competition and got £45 a year from that, and with all of those, well my parents thought that it was just going to be possible. But since I had an aunt and uncle in Glasgow and they had offered to put me up, it was decided that I would go there.
JH When did you decide to aim at going to university when it was not originally thought to be possible?
EF Really at only the last two years I think in the 5th and 6th year at school. Before that it had seemed just so remote that it was not really worth considering. But when the possibility of sitting for those bursaries came up, that was sort of in the fifth year, and certainly in the sixth year I was working hard for that, and when I managed to get, I think it was a total of £77, from all sources, it was £71 after I had paid for all fees, it began to be just a possibility.
JH Yes. And why did you move from Glasgow to Aberdeen?
EF Well first of all I didn't like Glasgow set up at all. I had to travel a long, long way, right across Glasgow to University and because of the travelling I came back in the middle of the day and I had no real feeling of belonging to the University and then in the summer following my auntie was very seriously ill and it was impossible for me to go back there, and by pure chance I met a great friend of mine in Inverness who was in Aberdeen and she said, "Why don't you come to Aberdeen, I've got digs there and there's room for another one, and they are very good?". And I wrote to Aberdeen asking if they would accept me, and accept the passes I had had in Glasgow, and ask Glasgow to agree to this, and they did, and I came to Aberdeen in 1939.
JH How did the two universities compare?
EF Oh, there was one enormous difference and that was size. In Glasgow I felt just one of a massive body of people and of course not having enough contact in the evenings with clubs and societies of course, I was really lost in that place. Partly because of the circumstances and partly the other thing about Glasgow, and it was nothing to do with the University, was that it never stopped raining. And I didn't like the climate, and I didn't like the city very much. It was big, it was large, and I felt really out of touch.
JH Did you know Aberdeen as a city or university at all before …?
EF No, not at all. Just by repute, but I'd never been here. You tended not to move around very much at seventeen or eighteen years old in those days. It was quite an adventure to go to Inverness let along to go to Aberdeen.
JH You took an ordinary arts degree in which you seemed to have covered an unusually wide range of subjects.
EF Yes. A good deal of that again was sheer accident. I had intended, when I started, doing either maths or languages. French and Latin were the two that I had. At the end of a year, I had decided against maths but I was still interested in going on with languages and I was looking around for another subject to go with those for my second year and someone said, "Why don't you try Psychology? I did it last year, and I thought it was very good". And that is how I got into Psychology in my second year.
JH I notice that the Psychology Course was called Comparative Psychology in those days. We will perhaps talk more in a moment about the nature of the subject, but perhaps you would like to say a little about the nature of the subject, but perhaps you would like to say a little about the course as it was taught and what attracted you about the notion of further studies?
EF Well, the title is an interesting one, Comparative Psychology, because that was a mistake. Someone in Australia had left a lot of money for setting up a course in Comparative Psychology, but what he had intended, quite clearly, was a course which included Comparative Philology. And it was found very difficult to get a university to accept this money because of the restrictions, and Aberdeen accepted it and Professor Knight, all the time I was a student, very solemnly, once a year, give the lecture on the theories of language acquisition to satisfy the requirements of this lectureship which had been established - the Anderson lectureship in Comparative Psychology. So hence the term. The course in fact was very broadly based, generally approach to Psychology with a good deal of accent on the applications in Education and Clinical Psychology and so on. The other attraction I think was that Professor Knight was, I think without any doubt, one of the best lecturers I have ever heard. He as at his best, I think, with a large audience and in those days first year Psychology had about 100 students which was a big class in those days. And he was quite superb as a lecturer to a body of students of that size.
JH So from that time on Psychology was what you wanted to pursue?
EF Yes. And the following year I was in very great difficulty because I was very firmly convinced that I was going to do Advanced Psychology, but everybody was advising me saying, "If you want to teach languages then you ought really to have English and a science subject, and if you have English then you really ought to have History. And you have got to do either Logic or Moral Philosophy anyway to satisfy the regulations, so there is no room for Advanced Psychology in your curriculum". And I ended up by going all four in that year.
JH Yes, I noticed you had a pretty full curriculum.
EF It was a busy year.
JH I'm sure it was. If you could leave Psychology aside just for a few minutes, were there any of your classes or your teachers of whom you recall particularly happy or unhappy memories?
EF Yes. Professor Noble in Classics. I did advanced Latin with him, and he was a warm, friendly, very easy approachable Head of Department. English I remember particularly, not because it was of great appeal, but because the course was so unpopular in English Language every Friday, it was a notorious class, not approved of by the bulk of the students who had to attend it. Logic, I remember professor Fergusson, who had the face of an angel and a temper like a devil. Who else, Professor Back, History, not a fascinating lecturer, he had a number of favourite phrases which kept coming up throughout the course work lectures and you know - not a first class lecturer.
JH Most of the teaching was in formal lectures?
EF Yes. No, in History we had by far the most interesting apart by the tutorials and the essays, which I really thoroughly enjoyed. I had Louise Turner as my tutor that year, and she was very stimulating teacher. I began to get more interested in history than I had ever been in my life before, and began, I think in that year, that second and third years, I really learned how to use a library, partly through the essays we were set, not just in history but in the other subjects, and began to appreciate the value of browsing in a library as an absolutely central part of one's education. And this is why I felt one of the great advantages of Aberdeen in the library was the open access, which had not been the case in Glasgow. That seemed to me to be a revolutionary idea that you could walk in and pick up any book from the shelves and read them and put it back.
JH Yes. It's a great idea; it's a great invention. I'm not quite sure when it began but it was certainly …
EF It was established then because I used to spend hours. Not reading for the essay itself, but reading all around and just moving down the shelf from one to another and it was a fascinating experience.
JH Yes. I know in fact that you are a great believer in the ordinary degree and the path in which you do it. Do you think that it's declined, I suppose that bends a question that it has declined but basically it seems to have done. Do you think its decline could have been avoided?
EF Probably not. I think there has been a general move towards specialisation. And I think the fact that there was no Honours degree in Psychology and only way in which I could pursue Psychology was to do a degree and then go on to do and MEd or and EdB as it was then. If there had been an Honours degree in Psychology then, then I think I would have been involved in it. But nevertheless, I think that the Ordinary Arts Degree, particularly as it was then, was a really first class education. It gave you insight even at a fairly elementary level into a wide range of subjects and areas of study. And I think at is best, with its basis in philosophy, basis in classics as well as modern languages, and the science, I think in principle, it is a first class education. What I think would have improved it would have been presentation not of a single science, say Zoology or Botany or Physics or whatever, but a course in something like the History of Science, or the History and Philosophy of Science, to give perspective in scientific developments, rather than trying to insist that every arts student should know a little about on science subject. I think it would have been better to have had a general course in science.
JH Your own science subject was taken at Glasgow in Natural Philosophy, I see.
EF Yes. It was a conjoint. They called it a conjoint.
JH Would that in any way provide the sort of insight into the modes of thought that the mathematician…?
EF I don't think so. It was not taught in that way, and I don't think it was intended to be used in that way. And I don't think that, I'm not sure, I don't think that any of the Scottish universities at that time even considered this kind of approach. It would have meant a separate course from those who were going on to second year maths or whatever, and I don't think that was the intention at that time, although I think it should have been.
JH Well perhaps we could move on the EdB degree. You graduated in 1941 with an ordinary MA and you went straight on to the EdB?
EF Yes, that's right, to the EdB.
JH Did many people take that course at that time?
EF No. In fact in the year 1943 when I had graduated EdB, there were only two of us, but of course this was partly because of the war. The population of the University must have dropped enormously and there were very few men around. But even in the next years it took quite a bit of time, I think, before the numbers began to increase considerably.
JH And of course, you said you went on with it because you wanted to pursue Psychology. Would that be a normal motivation or would it be more professionally oriented, or whether it leads into preparing yourself as a teacher?
EF Well, I think I had the idea of teaching as a back-stop, as it were, because the course included the training at the College of Education, of course, in the first year, so that I knew of I were going on to teach I would have got my training by the end of the year. But by that time, I was beginning to think rather differently about the use of the degree and it was my motivation for doing the course primarily to extend my background in Psychology, because by that time I was completely won over to the subject.
JH But would most people who did that degree have some such objective above the objective of becoming a teacher?
EF I think so. I think some of the people who did the degree thought of moving, first of all, into teaching, then possibly later on into education administration, and I think that became quite a strong motivation late on, a few years after that. At the time, well there were so few of us. It was very much an individual thing.
JH How was the course financed for students?
EF It wasn't. Except that I, the Highlands and Islands people whose bursary I had lived on for the first three years, volunteered to extend it to cover the two years of my EdB and the local county bursary also was continued.
JH And your year when you were at college?
EF Yes, as long as you were a full time student, the local authority gave you the £32.
JH Oh, yes.
EF And the Highlands and Islands people extended my bursary.
JH But it must have been quite a tight squeeze?
EF Yes. This is one of the biggest differences between the present students and the students as we were then. And I think that most people were in the same, and I think a great many students were in the same boat as I was in. You really had to look at every penny, halfpenny, several times over before you dared spend it. It was on the brink all the time. No, it was hard going. You enjoyed yourself, certainly, but you had to find ways of enjoying yourself that didn't cost money and even then, it wasn't too easy. Mind you digs were cheap and other things were cheap. The theatre you could get in for a shilling or something of that sort. But a visit to the theatre was a, that was an event.
JH Did you take any part time work at any point?
EF Well, during the summer, I did voluntary harvesting for the war effort. It as very unusual, even then, for part time work to be available except on a voluntary basis and for this we were paid something like 27/6d in old money a week, out of which you had your food and board deducted. It wasn't exactly a way of making money for the next term.
JH Things were very different then. What about the EdB course? There seemed to be quite a bit of individual components to it?
EF Yes. It was very much an individual tuition business. Obviously there were set courses. There was the education side. There was the Psychology side. There was the practical Child Guidance group work side as well as a few, there was a Biology course which was not really very well integrated into the rest of it. It was on the side, it was a requirement but it was not really a very valuable one, I don't think. We were thrown in with another group of students to do this course on biology, but there was no pretence that it was especially designed for the purpose or anything of this sort. But the rest, we did quite a lot of practical work. Professor Knight and Dr Walker ran a small Child Guidance clinic on a Saturday and we used to join with that and help out with testing children and so on. We experimented, and carried out experiments and measurements and so on, using other students as subjects. It was a very, very wide ranging course which had a fair element of practical, use of practical preparation in it. And of course, in the Child Guidance side, we came across a range of problems, difficulties, handicaps of all kinds, in the children who came up for the experimental work, or who came up for guidance.
JH Then on graduation and before your return to university, what did you do after graduating…?
EF I graduated in July, and in August I went down to London to a job in the Air Ministry, which was in a department which they called Training Research, where two Canadian professors had come over - two Psychology professors - to help with the business of selecting aircrew and cutting down the failure rate of those pilots who were training and aircrew generally who were being trained abroad. We found, for example that of every 100 pilots who went for training, and they didn't train in this country - they had to go to Canada, Rhodesia, South Africa all over America and so on - that only 30% came back trained. The others had fallen by the wayside and failed their flying training. And of course, once they had failed their flying raining, there was no way they could get back to this country to take up some other occupation, to take up some other role because the pressure on shipping space was so enormous and they were left all scattered all over the world, untrained and not capable of redeployment, so our job was to find ways of selecting ahead of time, so that they could have a better chance of completing their training satisfactorily by weeding out the people who were not going to make it, on the selection tests and tests which would predict any likely failure before they even got into the air. And I was working very closely wit Professor Myers from Toronto on this and particularly on pilots, and we were able - and he was able - and I joined him later on, to cut the failure rate almost to zero as a result of a fairly simple battery of selection tests which tested co-ordination, reaction time, hand, eye, foot co-ordination and so on.
JH And your study at Aberdeen had been a good preparation?
EF Oh, yes indeed, yes.
JH Perhaps we could go on now and talk about a few aspects of student life over the whole period. You stayed in digs, you said?
EF Yes, I was in digs at the Bridge of Don. Just over the Bridge of Don - Donmouth Crescent with this friend of mine from Inverness, whom I had known all my life and we shared. We had two rooms, one sort of bed sitting-room and the next a bedroom. And we paid somewhat above the odds for that time, I think it was 25/- a week, all in, full board.
JH Including lunch?
EF Including lunch. Oh you didn't have lunch out in those days. No. And weekends, all the way through ten weeks of the term. 25/- a week and that was not the cheapest I think.
JH Your whole student days in Aberdeen must have been in wartime?
EF Yes.
JH You must have come up just after the outbreak of war?
EF Yes, just the following month. And we were instructed in firewatching and fireguard procedures. I remember crawling in terror around the roof of the Chapel, all round the King's College Quadrangle, on the roof in the dark along planks which seemed to be only two or three inches wide, but I'm sure it was more, finding our way to all the places where bombs or fire bombs could have dropped.
JH Do you think those of us who are in the same boat, who had our student says in wartime, lost a great deal or do you think we gained anything from it?
EF I think a bit of both. I think it was a rather unfortunate time from the social point of view, because there were very very few men students around, and it was a very biased student population at the time. That was one factor. On the other hand, there was a seriousness and a sense of purpose I think at the time, it was important for that reason and for others that you did well and as well as one could. And there was in some ways an anxiety to get over and get on to do something more useful or more constructive towards the war effort. No, it was a bit of both.
JH What about extra-curricular life. Did you join societies, or were there societies…?
EF They were reduced, I think, almost inevitably, but we certainly joined societies. The Lairig club was […]. They did a fair bit of climbing and hill-walking really and climbing, a little. The societies associated with subjects, of course, went on. And the Union was a very active place, but didn't have anything like the range or the facilities I think that it has now. And of course again all these things cost a bit, because they didn't have the grants from the University or the UGC that they do now. If you went anywhere, say on a trip to climb Lochnagar, you had to pay for it and you know the bus didn't come out of the funds. You know it all had to be balanced against all the other things, but it was. On the other side, of course, you knew everybody, in a way that I think students can't possibly know now. Almost everybody in the Faculty of Arts you knew by name, because the numbers were so much smaller, and beyond the faculty, of course, you met them in the Union and outside.
JH Do you think the war made any difference to the relations of men and women within the student community? You've just mentioned the depletion of men. Do you think, I don't know quite how to put this, was there any sense in which women students were still in the process of attaining full equality of status, or had that happened already?
EF I don't think it every really occurred to us at the time that there was ever really any lack of equality. I think the men students had a kind of urgency at the time to complete their degree, because they knew that they were going to be called up fairly soon. Quite a number of them were trying to complete a four-year degree in three years or three years in two. And there was this kind of push, as it were. The women probably were less affected in that way, but there was still that, urgency is still the only word I can think of. But from the point of view of lack of equality or awareness of inequality, except in so far as there was this feeling that the men were at great more risk than the women, I don't think there was any great awareness of that. Not that I remember.
JH What about political activities, or political attitudes in a broad sense, or attitudes to social questions among the students. Was there much talk about politics or post-world-war international order, party politics and I suppose …?
EF Party politics, I think had been pretty jettisoned as far as I remember. There was certainly a great awareness of war news and Professor Knight, for example, used to lecture once a week at the Training College on the developments on the war front, which he did for Ministry of Information and these were always absolutely packed out and many of them were students of the audience. But I think everything was subservient to the war and what was going to happen, because then I started in 1939 in Aberdeen, the first year, of course there was the phoney war, then there was the '40 calamity, and developments in the war, I think, were the main political feature that was of concern.
JH My recollection of students life in Manchester, was that about '42 or '43, there was resurgence of broadly socialist activity and the NUS, or SUS was becoming very …
EF Leaning towards the left …?
JH There were a number of communists in particular, young communists ...
EF Well, this was of course leading up to the post-war election when there was certainly a very, this was really when they were over the hump as it were or getting, or thought they were going to get over the hump ...
JH Yes, before and up to your departure [in '47]?
EF I wasn't aware, no.
JH What about relations with senior members of the University with staff?
EF Again, they were in a small group and it's always easier, I think, to have close relationships and relaxed relationships with members of staff in that situation. In the earlier years, say 1939 to '40, '41, we had very friendly relations with the junior members of staff because they seemed to be almost our own age in some ways. But there was always a distance between the head of department and the students. You never thought of calling Professor Knight anything but Professor Knight ad the thought of calling senior members of staff by their first name just didn't arise. There was that very clearly defined gap. With the junior ones, the assistant lecturers and so on, that was less true and in the Latin and Greek departments there were quite a number, you know, quite a few who were as I say only a few years older then we were and they were very good friends.
JH Did they entertain socially?
EF Yes, they did. There was a place up at the top of the High Street along the left where there was a kind of boarding house for members of staff and they used to have parties up there which were for junior members of staff, particularly the Classics Department where I seemed to have more friends in the Classics Department then anywhere else and they had these parties there which were great fun.
JH And did you have relations with the town or was your life very much contained within the University community?
EF I suppose primarily it was not divorced from the town in any sense because we had friends who had families that we used to visit in the town who were not connected with the University at all, but obviously I think most of my friends had connections with the University.
JH Is there anything else about the student period that we haven't touched on that you'd like to put on record?
EF I can't think of anything in particular … not really. There is just one difference, I think, that I have noticed, that the University used to be, at least in my early days, much more a regional University than it is now. You didn't have the overseas contingent of students. You didn't have even very many students from the south, nor very many students from the south of Scotland, and this was indicated, I think, by the four nations - Mar, Buchan, whatever they were - where one whole nation was anything south of Stonehaven which seemed to give an idea of the extreme geniality of the University. I don't think that's true now. Not apart from that, no, there's not very much, I think we have covered most of it.
JH Thank you.
Side Two
JH Perhaps we should go on now to talk about the development of Psychology in the Psychology Department in Aberdeen. First of all, would you like to say something about the content of your own undergraduate courses, perhaps to the ordinary and advanced level?
EF Yes, you mean when I was a student myself?
JH Yes.
EF Again I think the accent in the department here always has been, on a very broadly based coverage of the subject, and of course as more people have come into the department then we have had more opportunity of teaching on a broader base even now. But by and large I think the accent has been on Psychology and its applications an in Aberdeen I think this was certainly true. I think Professor Knight was really fundamentally concerned with what psychologists could do in a variety of fields. How they could contribute to a whole series of problems for a solution to a whole number of problems, investigation of human behaviour in its widest aspects, and I think there was always this accent on practical applications where he was concerned. And of course, he and Margaret Knight, his wife, had both been employed by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology in London before they came up here. So there was a practical side, it was not totally theoretical, although both of them were interested in a philosophical background of the subject, but his accent on practical applications and usefulness, I think, was the most fundamental to their thinking. So we had in study of say, Educational Psychology, what broad education psychologists did, how they cold contribute to problems in education, Clinical Psychology, Industrial Psychology and so on, as well as the underlying theory of various terms.
JH The teaching of ordinary class was basically by lectures?
EF Yes. With some practical work. But the practical work, certainly when I was a student, was limited because of the facilities and, of course, by the number of people available. When I look back on the number of lectures that professor Knight and Margaret Knight, between them, gave in a year, It would shatter any junior member of staff now, because he taught not only at the University but he taught at the College - at the College of Education - as did Dr Walker in the Department of Education. And their teaching load was horrific in those days.
JH What sort of practical work did you do?
EF Again, I think it was on problems of say, advertising: How do advertisements work to alter behaviour, to affect behaviour in buying and selling and so on? Can you tell the difference, or can you tell by looking at a face whether the person has criminal tendencies or not? Is there any evidence for the suggestion that you can recognise a criminal by looking at a photograph? It was this kind of approach, real life situations, as well as experimenting or practising, for example, giving of various tests of mental measurement, giving intelligence tests, giving tests of co-ordination and so on. The whole role of measurement of human characteristics was again part of it.
JH You did this in small groups?
EF In small groups. But again some of these experiments you could take away and do in your own time. Some of them you did in class, but others you had to do in small groups. But the number of experiments that you could to do in small groups was limited.
JH What then in response to advertising, do you remember going away and questioning consumers about responses to advertising?
EF Yes, that was part of it, or you could try to extract the common elements in a series of advertisements to find out what the advertisers were trying to do.
JH Did the advanced course differ in its approach from the ordinary?
EF Well, it was a much smaller class of course, and then at that stage you could do much more appropriate experiments, or much more controlled experiments. It covered again in greater depth areas that we had touched on in the first year and involved a great deal more reading then we had time for in first year, but it also looked more into the underlying theories more closely, into different approaches to the subject, different theoretical approaches, a wider range of subjects that we hadn't come across.
JH Did you write essays in either of these courses?
EF Yes, yes.
JH And Professor and Mrs Knight between them marked them?
EF Yes.
JH Or were there any other tutorial staff?
EF No, no, by the time I was in my, no they were alone.
JH Yes, I see what you mean about the staff today! Psychology was then accepted both in Arts and Science, was it?
EF No, Science, I think it was admitted to the Science Faculty later. I think after I came back as a member of staff. It was accepted as a second year subject, one that you could not count for first years. In fact what happened was that those who wanted to go on to second year Psychology were invited to take the first year concurrently with the second. Later on it was accepted as a first year subject but initially it was joined in at the second year level.
JH So in the '40s? with classes of a hundred or so quite a high proportion of Arts students were taking Psychology…
EF I think seventy per cent of all Arts students took Psychology at some time. Of course, there wasn't the range of subjects available that there is now but nevertheless it was a very high proportion.
JH In 1948 you came back to Aberdeen as a junior Research Fellow. What was the background to that?
EF Well, Professor Knight wrote to me. I was working at the time in Cornwall in the education field with the Cornish County Council, doing work on selection for secondary education, and he wrote to ask whether I was interested in a research fellowship that he had just been given in the department, and at the time he also said that there was a junior lectureship going at St Andrews and was I interested in that, and I said I was interested in the research fellowship and I applied for it and I was awarded the fellowship. And of course that entailed registration for a PhD. It was, it had to have a social element in it, a social Psychology element.
JH Who was funding the fellowship?
EF I think it was the University. Yes, I know it was, and since I was interested at the time in the educational side and of course I had been, EdB of course implied that interest, I thought I would like to combine the educational background that I had with the social element by looking at the effect of social background on educational achievement and in particular the effect of family environment and factors in the home on the educational progress of children and that's what I eventually did my thesis on.
JH Had there been much work on this field at that time?
EF No, very, very little, practically nothing. That was one of my problems that then I tried to go into the bibliography there was nothing, it was almost non-existent as a topic. People assume that there effects of home environment and a lot of statements made but there was no [evidence of any] sound evidence to support them. So I was really out on my own in tackling that problem but I must say I got enormous help from the education authorities, the Director of Education and from the schools that I was concerned with, as well as of course from the parents because I had a population sample of about over five hundred children, a cross section of the whole of Aberdeen whom I had to follow up and investigate, interview in the homes as well as follow up educationally and that meant that a great many people were involved.
JH How did you divide your sample because I imagine sampling techniques were not refined as they are now?
EF They weren't. I couldn't do it on an individual basis, you know take every hundredth child of a given age in the city because that would have meant enormous problems when following up in schools so I had to do it on a school basis and what I did was to, by trial and error really, work - select about half a dozen schools which together gave me a sample of population of children with an average IQ of approximately the same as the city, a hundred, with the spread of IQ that you would get in the city and on a number of other counts seemed to represent as closely as possible the whole population of Aberdeen and the sample were twelve year olds and as I say it was really a mater of getting the best fit from a reasonable number of schools and I think six were the final number. And then taking all those in a class of that age in that school [of that age] and on the whole it worked out reasonably well. It took a long time to juggle the combinations to get the right one.
JH You were saying you'd chosen the research fellowship in preference to the junior lectureship at St Andrews. Any particular reasons for this? One might have thought the lectureship would have given you more career prospects.
EF Yes, I think that certainly was the case. I didn't feel that I had enough experience to warrant standing up in front of the class and lecturing about Psychology at the time. I thought I needed more in-field experience. I certainly had the experience in the Air Ministry and a couple of years in Cornwall but it didn't seem to me to be enough to warrant setting up as a lecturer at the time.
JH Would there not I think have been many research students in the Aberdeen Department of Psychology or perhaps in the Faculty of Arts at all at that time?
EF I was the only one in the department. I think there were two in Economics and I think that was about it. It was a very, very small number. There were a few others who were doing research of course and PhDs at the same time but they were assistant lecturers on the staff but not [research] official postgraduate students in a normally accepted sense.
JH Was it a lonely Iife?
EF No, I don't think so. It was certainly not lonely doing all those interviews. Lonely in a sense that I was on my own in a field that there was no one else around that you could really get down to talking about the problems with. I was alone in that sense, but apart from that, I had as I say a lot of help from a variety of people who were interested in the problem and wanted to get the answer.
JH Did you feel you were back in the University community and involved with students or a member of staff
EF No, I didn't feel like a student at that stage I don't think. I don't think I felt like a member of staff either but probably closer to being a member of staff than a student. For one thing I was being paid.
JH Yes makes a difference.
EF But the difference between doing research then and now, the availability of facilities was unbelievable. Of course it was before computers and when I think of the calculations that I had to do by hand. Oh, there was a calculating machine but massive calculations of correlation and all the rest. No availability of computer programmes.
JH You didn't work on the old punch card?
EF Oh yes, I worked on cards of that sort but no, it was the calculations, they took months and months to do. And now then I think you can put them in the morning and get them out an hour later, it's horrific!
JH In 1950 you were appointed as a lecturer …?
EF As a lecturer, yes.
JH Was the post advertised?
EF I don't know. I just don't know.
JH But you didn't apply?
EF I was asked, I was invited to apply but whether it was advertised or not I've no idea.
JH And how large the staff of the Psychology Department at that time?
EF Three, I think apart from myself. There was Professor Knight, Mrs Knight and there was a Dr Fred Smith, who was an Australian. And myself, four.
JH And did you have special duties on your appointment?
EF I was given, I was appointed in August I think, or late August, some time before, shortly before term began, and I saw Professor Knight and he gave me my programme for the first term for the first year and I had ten lectures a week onwards right through the year to, not to first year, to second year, third year, fourth year and postgraduates. All different lectures plus running a laboratory class for the third year, helping out with the theses for the fourth years, the final years, and tutorials.
JH We have now got an honours degree in Psychology obviously. How many candidates were there?
EF There were quite small numbers at that time. It started off as a joint honours degree first with English and Economics and Philosophy, I think. There were three possible combinations but I think nearly all of the people who did it, did it with English. Philosophy didn't really get off the ground very much because it involved three departments, Logic, Moral Philosophy and Psychology and that was very tough thing. I think there was one student who did the Economics/Psychology joint course but again it was not a frequent one. But English/Psychology was the favourite but the numbers were not high initially. Three or four possibly and then working up to maybe seven or eight. I think Psychology as a single honours course came in 1952 I think.
JH If I could just take up here something I was going to raise later, the question of joint degrees. Now Philosophy/Psychology is the only one that's left on the books and as you say it's not very popular, although there are disciplines with which arguably one might, like Sociology, with which would suppose might be closely related? Possibly also in Science with Physiology and yet Psychology doesn't seem to have gone in for joint degrees very much. English/Psychology degrees were abolished a few years ago. Have you any comment on that?
EF Yes, I think, if you call a degree a joint degree when you put two bits of two subjects together, quite without any attempt to integrate them in any way, I don't believe in that as a joint degree. I think there are some subjects where a joint degree makes sense but it needs a lot of work put into it from both sides to effect the marriage, as it were, of the two subjects and to use one subject to throw light on the other and vice versa. Philosophy and Psychology I think are the ones that are most likely to operate in that way and I think a genuine attempt was made in the case of the Psychology/Philosophy degree to do this by having a paper which was supervised by people from both departments and there the relationship between he two subjects was really pointed up. That was never really done in the English/Psychology degree. I think the reason for doing the English/Psychology degree on the part of many students was that if they did that, they didn't have to do the language side of the English honours degree and they didn't have to do the statistics experimental side of the Psychology degree and that seems to me the worst reason for doing a joint degree that you can think of.
JH And the Historians were of that view too?
EF You mentioned Sociology. I don't think that Sociology/Psychology, although they may sound similar in content and so on, they have similar problems maybe, I think they are very different as subjects and I think they are less likely than one might expect to effect a really good marriage.
JH In theory, I would have thought they might effect it and perhaps it was a question of orientation which different departments give to their studies.
EF Yes, I think so, and I think the orientation in our department has always been a very strongly experimental one with the accent on evidence and accumulation of proper evidence and analysis of that evidence. And I think in this particular situation I was not very enthusiastic I must admit in pushing for joint degree although it was mentioned on a number of occasions as a possibility. I didn't feel that with the orientations of the two partners it would necessarily be a good idea.
JH Perhaps you could say a little about the changing state of studies after you became the fourth member of the department. In the '50s there was an appreciable expansion in the size of the department so we and think about the period up to 1964 when you became head. How would you describe the development of the department under Rex Knight's leadership?
EF Well, he was I think an unusual, well not unusual, but remarkable in that he attracted to the department and went to look for, people who were quite different form himself and had different orientations. He was always on the lookout for really able people who would develop areas which were not his interest at all. We had, for example, Dan Bertyne who was one of the, became one of the most distinguished professor of Psychology, he finished up in Toronto, while an outstanding individual by anybody's standards whose line, well had had a number, but particularly he was involved in learning theory, in human curiosity and so on, a number of topics about which he wrote extensively and, although I think you could say that his approach to learning theory was not one that Professor Knight would necessarily be sympathetic to, he was nevertheless quite willing invite and encourage Dr Dan Bertyne to come and teach in the department, which he did for a number of years. We had Peter MacKellar from New Zealand who was at the opposite pole of interest. He was interested in the borderline, fringe areas of Psychology, imagery, you know, completely the opposite field and he was a member of staff for a number of years, again selected by Professor Knight, What he did, I think, was to open up from what was started off as being very narrow, necessarily because of the number of people involved, narrow-based group into a broad very wide-ranging curriculum across.
JH Was it his policy to get hold of able people whatever their field or did he have any notion that he would like to develop learning theory for instance?
EF No, I think he was interested in people first and foremost. And then he gave them a reasonable degree of freedom. They had to do their stint of the run-of-the-mill stuff but he gave them, within that, a reasonable degree of freedom to develop their own particular line and to extend the curriculum. He kept control so that it didn't become unbalanced but by and large I think he had the idea of getting the good people first.
JH And these lines were pursued after Bertyne and MacKellar left?
EF Oh, yes, it was continued.
JH Would you like to add any more personal comments on Rex Knight and the contribution both to the subject and to the University?
EF Oh, I think his contribution to the University was enormous and to his subject because I think you could get some idea of this at that time. In a great many universities Psychology was regarded as a sort of freak subject which it never was in this University and that was almost entirely due to him because he himself was such an eminently sane, stable and very able individual and he had so many excellent contacts with the city and other institutions, particularly the education departments, the College and so on. His relationships with those, with outside bodies, with parents and so on, teachers, were excellent and it was because of this, I think, that Psychology was accepted as a subject, and a respectable subject, in Aberdeen long before it was accepted in other places. One never had to fight against the kind of prejudice you came across in many places and I think this was due to his personality and he worked hard at the social relations outside the department. Of course, his lecturing was one of the mediums in which he did a lot of this work. He was such an astonishingly effective lecturer that he could win people over with very little trouble at all. The other thing about him was that he was a superb chairman of a meeting. I've seen him act as chairman over a group of people who seemed to be wandering in every direction of the compass and when he thought the time had come, when he'd given them all their say, he would pull the discussion together with about six points and say 'Now this is what we have to decide' And bring it to a close. His judgement of when to do that was immaculate. He was a first class chairman.
JH You've obviously a very high regard for him personally. Was it universal among your colleagues? Was he a popular head of department?
EF Oh yes, I think so. [I don't think] he as not highly regarded as a research psychologist, he wasn't at all in a sense. He was a practitioner. People had a very thorough respect for him but not as a research man at all, that was not his forte and he never claimed it but that didn't stop the members of staff from having a very, very sound respect for him. No he built up the department; there's no question about that.
JH This being so, I don't quite know how to phrase it but perhaps colleagues elsewhere would not have a high regard for him as a researcher?
EF Yes, I think that's probably true.
JH Well do you think of this as a handicap to the growth of the department?
EF Not to the growth of the department because it grew at an alarming rate. No I don't that was a handicap. It may have been a handicap in attracting outside funds later on, but then of course, at that time there was no big shortage of research funds because, if you remember, if a postgraduate student wanted to do research, since it was an Arts department he could get a grant from the SED, and there was never any shortage of support of that sort. It may have been a little more of a handicap when we became entirely dependent on the SRC and the SSRC but that I think was more because of the practice of having depended on the SED first. It became the pattern for our students to get SED scholarships rather than to go to the SRC and the SSRC.
JH What about funding for staff research?
EF Again there seemed to be funds available - not to the extent that it's funded now, I think, but it certainly wasn't the habit to go out of the University to attract money. It could be got through Carnegie and other local sources. I think we were well off as a university, so well off that a lot of people thought it was not necessary to look for money outside and then things changed, it was quite a shock to the system.
JH Well I think this is true. It was a point I was going to take up at a later date - in our next interview. I think we could come back to that point in the University context, rather than the Psychology Department context. But on the whole research done by you and your colleagues in the '50s was not expensive research?
EF No I think that's true. I think that research has later become much more equipment oriented and obviously become much more expensive, and with computers taking over a great deal; certainly research that I was doing was not expensive. And that was true of the majority.
JH Well in 1964 you succeeded Rex Knight as Head of Department, did you consciously set yourself objectives for development of the Department, then or shortly afterwards?
EF I think at the beginning I consciously decided that I was not going to do anything but sit back and watch and see how things went for about a year before making any major changes. What I did want to do, as soon as we could manage it I think, was to increase the experimental component particularly in the first year because up until that time, as I mentioned earlier, the experimental work had been limited by the staff available, and by the time and facilities and the rooms experimental, and I felt that it was a pity that they didn't start their practical work under much more controlled basis right at the beginning. So I think that was one of my early moves, to make the practical class into an essential component of the first year because it seemed to me that a lot of the students who did only the first year, and were then going out into schools, say as teachers, could benefit from some kind of preparation - knowing how to measure various human abilities or behaviour of different kinds, and something of the idea of measurement of all kinds of human abilities, would be a good kind of component for a degree, not necessarily for people who were going on to Honours but for people who were going to do only one or two years of the subject. Apart from that, I obviously brought in my own interests, I think, into the teaching because from '63 onwards I was teaching first year, or much more than I had been before, and there were some areas in the course in the first year that I didn't feel too comfortable with and there were other areas that I thought were un-represented, so there was a bit of change of the structure of the first year course. And that works through to the later years; a much more controlled teaching of methodology in Psychology and Statistics of course, which I had been doing before, I still wanted, I think, to keep the whole course - the Honours course - right through, as a pretty broadly based coverage of Psychology. I was opposed to suggestions that were made that we should concentrate more on certain areas and to leave large gaps in the course. And I was also rather opposed to the idea of giving a very great degree of choice of papers among students. We had seven final papers, and all students did all seven initially, over the choice lay in the thesis in which they had a free hand. We later introduced a bit more choice, but I thought that choice should be limited. A load of people didn't agree with me on that point and I think now there is certainly a lot more concentration, specialisation and of course, consequently, a great many more gaps for individual students. It seems to me the specialisation could reasonably come at the post graduate level rather than the undergraduate.
JH And it was of course a period of still more rapid expansion in the Department as in the University?
EF The difficulty then was finding members of staff. We had on a number of occasions advertised for staff and not had one single reply. Not one applicant, which was a horrifying situation to be in, because our staff-student ratio at that time was, I don't think ever better than 19 or 20:1, and on occasion went well beyond that.
JH Did this ever lead you to make appointments which you wished you hadn't?
EF Yes.
JH You could specify?
EF Although in principle I was very much of Professor Knight's view that you went for some really able person and you didn't appoint unless you got one, there were times when the situation was so desperate that you, that I, or the committee, appointed people who, in retrospect, were a mistake. I think everybody discovered this. And of course on some occasions when you thought we had got somebody really top notch and they turned out to be rather less and vice versa.
JH In this process about making appointments in times of scarcity, did you find that the appointments you made had affected the weighting of the Department at all in one way or another, that the best people happened to be Educational Psychologists or …?
EF I think there have been times when that was a danger, but at the same time, I think one had to be aware of the need for balance. For example, you might find that in one period, you could get three top class ex- psychologists in one field, and nobody else in the other. You can't appoint those three all in the same field, you know. Although I'm of the opinion that everybody who is appointed to a teaching post in the department has got to be able to do a reasonable amount of teaching of a general nature, there is a limit to which you can go on that one. It is very difficult to keep a good balance and pick the best people every time. Things don't come up that way.
JH I know it. You had large expansion in Honours students?
EF Oh yes, and in first year.
JH Yes.
EF At one time our numbers went up to I think it was 550 in the first year, which was a very difficult situation because there was not theatre in the University which could hold that number, which meant that we had to give every first year lecture twice over, which had its own problems apart from the time concern.
JH That and the MSC together?
EF Yes.
JH Supposing, and this is a separate question, supposing you had to choose whether Psychology went into the Faculty of Arts or the Faculty of Science, and your dual membership was excluded. Facing this distressing choice, which way would you go?
EF Oh, that's a very difficult one. My heart would go along with an Arts subject. I'm not sure if my brain would. It is difficult, because in a sense there's a possible advantage in being a subject like Psychology in the Faculty of Arts. There are probably only three, two or three subjects, which are rather like ourselves - Geography is the one which springs to my mind - where there is a strong experimental component and where you need labs and you need equipment and so on, and they are by and large the expensive subjects in the Arts Faculty, and are just the bottom of the heap if they were in the Medical Faculty.
JH Yes.
EF There are advantages in being a relatively expensive department in the Arts Faculty. In the Science Faculty, you are one of a group of Biological Sciences who are competing very hard with each other for funds, and I am not sure if that is an advantage. There are some advantages, I think, because if you are regarded by the UGC as a science subject you may get a slightly better deal there, but I'm not convinced that that outweighs the other advantages.
JH Leaving these very important practical questions aside, from the point of view of the academic interests of staff and students, would you say that more is to be got from a complex of Arts students or the Sciences?
EF I think it depends what sort of Psychologist you are. There are some people, some lines of research where I think it would be a very considerable advantage to be able to talk on equal terms say, with a Biochemist, if you are dealing with the bio-chemical theories of psychosis for example, a relationship with a bio-chemical department would be very valuable indeed. It very much depends on the kind of Psychologist that you are. I don't think you can give an overall answer to that question.
End of Interview |