| Description | First part of an interview with Dr. Harold Watt recorded on 18 November 1985 by John Hargreaves.
Continued on MS3620/1/33/2
Interview transcript:
H Dr. Watt, it would almost be true to say that you were born into the community of the University of Aberdeen. Would you like to begin by saying a little about the connections of your family and particularly your father and uncle with the University over the years?
W Well, the family involvement really starts further back than the last generation and I might just mention the generation before the last one. That takes me to four out of five Robertson brothers who were all great uncles of mine and who were all graduates of the University. Starting with Charles Robertson, who was First Bursar in 1849 and M.A., Marischal College, in 1853; incidentally, as a first year student he was closely associated with the origin of what became the Hellenic Society. He went into the Bengal Civil Service and subsequently became Secretary to the Lieutenant Governor of the North West Provinces. His next brother, John Grant Robertson, very much followed suit, after Univerity going into the Bengal Civil Service. The third brother had an academic, career George Croom Robertson, born in 1842, M.A. 1861; after graduation he became an Assistant Professor in Aberdeen University, then very quickly went on to become at an early age Professor of Mind and Logic at the University College, London in 1866. Influenced by Professor Bain, he was a founder and first editor of the philosophical journal, Mind. He died in 1892 and in his memory there were founded the Croom Robertson Fellowships within the University. Then there was the fourth Robertson brother, Alexander Webster Robertson, M.A. 1866, who first of all was Librarian at Marischal College and subsequently became Public Librarian in Aberdeen, and he was joint Editor of the two volume Spalding Club publication , the Bibliography of Aberdeen. Incidentally, John Grant Robertson had a son who was Sir Charles Grant Robertson, the historian, who in due course became Vice Chancellor of Birmingham University. Now so much for the generation before last; the last generation we would start perhaps with my uncles: there was Edward William Watt, M.A. with Honours 1898, newspaper man, Lord Provost of Aberdeen, LL.D. from Aberdeen in 1939. He had a son, my cousin, who had another Honours M.A. degree in 1935, and served in the Colonial Service in Sierra Leone. Another uncle was George Robertson Watt, First Bursar in 1896, I think. He did not, however, go in the event to Aberdeen University he went straight to Cambridge where he had a B.A. in 1906. He did, however, come back to be Assistant Professor of Greek at Aberdeen for a short time before being appointed, again at a very early age, as Professor of English and Philosophy at Calcutta in 1908. Unfortunately, he died very soon thereafter out there. And then, sticking to that last generation, my father, Theodore Watt, M.A. 1904, had a very considerable involvement with the University throughout his life. He was Editor of Alma Mater and as such he put together the special quatercentenary number of Alma Mater in 1906. Then his magnum opus was his volume of the Roll of Graduates covering the years from 1901 to 1925. The University gave him an LL.D. in 1938 and he was a member of Court for a few years in the 1940s. One of the many university publications that he had a lot to do with was the Roll of Service of the First War, 1914 1919, giving Miss Allardyce, the editor,very considerable assistance. Then, coming to the present generation, my eldest brother George graduated in Medicine in 1936; he was killed on Naval medical service in 1941. My next brother, Alan, got a wartime First Class Honours M.A. in 1946 after war service in India, then he took an LL.B. in 1949, was a lawyer in Aberdeen, is still in Aberdeen but his sole job for a number of years has been Chairman of Industrial Tribunals. Next in the family was myself. I scraped a First in Classics in 1942; I married my University class mate, Betty Richards, who graduated M.A. in 1941 and whose mother, incidentally, had sung in the Chapel Choir when she attended classes at the University - she sang in the Choir under Elizabeth Christie Brown. Then my younger brother, Donald, got a First in History in 1950, DPhil. at Oxford, followed an academic career at St. Andrews where he now has the Chair of Scottish Church History, not in the Faculty of Divinity, but in the Department of Mediaeval History in the Faculty of Arts. So much for the present generation. Just a word about what might be called 'the next generation', my own family. Our daughter, Elspeth, took an ordinary B.Sc. in 1970, then taught, then got married, and the chap that she married, Alastair Leaver, was a University class fellow of hers who graduated with Honours in Science in 1971. The other member of our family is Peter, who was a matriculated student of the University while on an agriculture diploma course at NOSCA. Then I might just mention in the context of the next generation that my brother Alan's family includes two sons, both of them Aberdeen graduates: Nigel in Law and Graham in Medicine.
H Well, that's an extraordinary record for which there can be very few parallels. I wonder if you could recall at this stage, as you were growing up and at the Grammar School, what sort of picture you had formed of the University community, and whether, when you became a student, there were ever any surprises or were you in a sense going to a place you had always known? Was the student's view any different from the view of the family member?
W So much was taken for granted. We never thought very much, we never had to think very much. Our progress from school, usually from the sixth year (not very many people left in Five, though some did). The usual course, the established, expected course was just to go on to University. In fact I can report that within the last two or three months I have been actively involved in arranging a Fiftieth Reunion of my Grammar School class, and the statistic there is relevant. There were twenty-one of us and out of these twenty-one, I think I am right in saying that sixteen of us went on to Aberdeen University. That was the proportion and that just bears out what I said about its being accepted that we went on to University.
H Was this wholly a good thing? Shouldn't going to university perhaps be a little bit more of a shock and a challenge than this?
W Well, it was always a challenge, and of course the fact of the Bursary Comp. was a very specific challenge all because we all had to go in it was a matter of course that we had to go in for that, and I sat it in V at school and again in VI. I was placed somewhere about the 200 level in V but I think I got up to about 30th in VI. There was plenty of intellectual challenge, I think, about going on to university, but never any question that that was what we were going to do.
H Was there anything that actually moved you at university; was there anything that surprised or disconcerted you in any way?
W Oh, I think there was the very welcome freedom from the disciplines of a school. Everything was very different, it was very free, we were free to do what we liked and shape our own way through our university course, and it was all very welcome, I think.
H How did you use this freedom? Did you join student societies,sporting clubs?
W The greatest pleasure that I got by joining things during my almost four years at the University was participating in the Charities Week ShoW I can say something about that perhaps a bit later. I joined the Student Classical Society; I have got some recollections of that, all happy because of the informality. of the thing. I even played once for the First Rugby XV; more characteristically, I was in the Second XV.
H Did you make many new friends beyond the Aberdeen Grammar School group?
W One was introduced, virtually for the first time, to girls, and that was salutary and pleasant. Inevitably there was a widening of one's male acquaintanceship within the university classes, and it was interesting of course to be up alongside contemporaries but from other, usually North East of Scotland, schools.
H You went up, I think, at the start. of the war? How far did this affect the social life and the academic life?
W Yes, it was indeed in 1938 that I started; 1938, at the time of Munich. The size of the University at that time was about 1100 students, I think, very much smaller therefore than these days. What was our students' perspective on the war when it started in September 1939? Well, the practical things one had to be involved in: one of the very first things I did that September, like other students, was to help take in the harvest. I spent three weeks doing that. And then in the course of the next few years until I was in the R.A.F. in May 1942, I did duty with the Observer Corps; I did fire-watching, involving sleeping overnight in various university buildings, both at King's and at Marischal. I joined the OTC and it was possible, and really quite usual I think, to take advantage of the facility of joining the OTC just as soon as you had left school and so I would have joined in July 1938 after leaving the Grammar School in June. The following summer, which was still before the war, it was July 1939, I went for two weeks' camp with the OTC at Aboyne, and my bell-tent commander, Tent Commander was his official label, was Corporal John Reid, and John Reid, a good friend of mine, was of course subsequently for many years Officer Commanding the OTC Contingent in the University. After two years in the ranks of the OTC, when the University Air Squadron was started, I transferred to it, and Colonel Roy Strathdee of the OTC wasn't too pleased about that. But as a founder member of the Air Squadron I was content to learn the basics of air navigation and meteorology and principles of flight under instructors, Flying Officer Edward Wright, for instance, who later became Principal of the University, and Dr. Alexander Geddes, a very lovable Reader in Natural Philosophy. Then, although it was war-time, Charities Weeks continued and there was the Charities Week Theatre Show, carrying on as usual through 1939, 1940, 1941. I was on the boards twice during my student time and Business Manager of the Show in my third year. The secretary to. the Business Manager that year just happened to be the girl, Betty Richards, who by 1943 was my wife. We were in at the opening of the new Students' Union, seen then to be a most adventuresome departure: one building for both sexes! And for the first time a hall, there was a hall suitable for dances of varying levels of respectability but also for the first time there was a stage for dramatic performances, including variety shows in which we took part. I was on the Union Management Committee for a year or two.
H What about your course? You have told us you took First Class Honours in Classics in March 1942. How were the courses in Classics conducted? Was it very formal teaching?
W Yes, and of course the Latin class was very big: there must have been about 120 or 130 of us. It was usually taken by the Professor himself Professor Noble, Peter Noble, who had just arrived, I think either in 1937 or 1938. The Greek classes of course were very much smaller under Professor Cameron and they were to that extent more intimate. I don't know you are stirring chords of memory, I could go on a long time recalling these classes. My specific Honours Classics course was filled out, aside from Latin and Greek, by taking English in one year and I thought I might perhaps inject myself with a little bit of Economics and I took Economics for one year including Economic History, happily under Henry Hamilton. Then I thought, or was advised, that I should take a class, I think it was a summer term class only, in Comparative Philology, and that was very difficult; I learnt virtually nothing because I found to it extremely difficult to comprehend, or to follow the instruction in that particular subject.
H Who was teaching that; and what was, as it were, the rationale of that particular class? It was news to me to find that you had taken it. Incidentally, you are recorded as having been at a class in Comparative Philosophy, but it was Comparative Philology.
W Philology, that's it. Now, you've tested me I can't remember the name of the man, although I should remember it. He was a Highlandman with a very soft Highland voice. He was a great golfer and his main interest in life was golf. He knew his languages; all this philology was easy for him but he didn't make it too easy for us.
H This was specifically directed towards Classics students,was it?
W I think it was thought that everybody reading Honours Classics would find this a useful background. Of course Peter Noble would probably have been the first man to commend this idea because of his very wide knowledge of the more outré classical languages.
H But it wasn't, happily perhaps, examinable?
W No.
H What impressions do you keep of your teachers?
W Both Peter Noble and Professor Cameron were heroes of mine, not just through my four years of intimate involvement with them but for as long as they have lived thereafter. Professor Cameron is dead, but Peter Noble is still alive, unfortunately in not too great a state of health, in EdinburgH I had the highest admiration for them botH Their lecturing, I think was of a high standard, and they both shared a very unusual ability to see things from the students' point of view and to get alongside their students; particularly when we were at Honours stage we were frequently guests within their own manses and their respective wives, like the professors themselves, just could not have been more student-orientated and helpful to us students.
H Did you have many contacts with junior members of staff?
W Well, we had a variety of lecturers, some of them in these days would have been called Assistants. One of the most kenspeckle of these was Douglas Young, that sevenfoot tall giant, thin, tall man, giant of a man, with a great big black beard. Again, I could record at length some of his idiosyncrasies, but basically very friendly and a very student-orientated lecturer. He taught us Greek. So did David Murison, and of course that was the start of a life-long friendship with that very friendly man. Then there was Eric Turner, who taught us or tried to teach us Roman History, but his main interest in life I think was more along the lines of archaeology and papyrology papyrology probably mostly and it wasn't a surprise therefore when he went off to London, after our day, to a Professorship there, although I think it was a surprise when later in life we heard that he had got a knighthood from The Queen. It's surely an unusual thing for The Queen to think of a knighthood for a papyrologist; but he was of course very distinguished in his own subject. He was a bit of a character and while we were students we were witnesses to the fact that although he seemed to be getting on in life a bit, he was progressively falling deeply in love with a girl, Taylor: Louise Taylor. She was lecturing in another subject, possibly History, and it was no surprise to us, after what we had seen going on in the Library, that they did in fact get married.
H Did you make great use of the Library as an undergraduate?
W Yes; because we had usually only two classes in a morning - sometimes only one it was just the accepted thing thatone did a bit of studying in the Library and therefore one got to know it very well.
H You took your degree in March 1942. Was your course shortened in any way?
W Yes, by one term; in order to allow me to get it finished,by slightly special dispensation I was allowed to stay on until that March but not until Summer.
H Is there anything else about your student days which you would like to put on record?
W No, I don't think I can think off the cuff of anything else.
H Your war service is another story but when you returned to Aberdeen after your war service and your training as a printer, in the early years back in Aberdeen how much contact with the University did you have when you were learning your trade at the Aberdeen University Press?
W Not so very much, except in the course of my job at the University Press; and I think I might come to that a bit later, because I think some aspects of that are quite interesting. It wasn't, I think, until 1968 that I became a member of the Business Committee of the General Council and that was probably the first contact other than the business contact with the University. If you would like me to say a thing or two about that, it would be joining a starting point just to report that after joining the Business Committee in 1968 I have been continuously on it, first of all under... well, I forget the timing of things but in due course I became Vice-Convener, first of all to Maurice Cramb, the Convener, and then to Eric Morrison, and now to Mollie Gauld. I suppose I attended every single meeting and was a reasonably painstaking member of the Business Committee. I did, in fact, put myself out of the running not many people would know this, Eric Morrison would know it but probably nobody else I put myself out of the running for the Convenership because of the greater need that I perceived that Eric Morrison's very broad university experience should not be wasted, and if I had followed on, as might have seemed natural, Maurice Cramb into the Convenership, then by the time that that four year stint of mine was over, Eric Morrison would not have been eligible to take the Convenership. And so I reckoned that I did the best thing for the General Council by suggesting to Eric that he came in then. Then after his four year stint as Convener I was getting on; I don't think I was quite at the age when the Constitution wouldn't have allowed me to be Convener, but I had had uncertain health and I was very happy indeed when Mollie Gauld, having had the point put to her, was in due course persuaded to take the Convenership on and she is doing quite extremely well. Of course the General Council is only one of the mechanisms for the involvement of Aberdeen graduates in the University. I think it is quite the most efficient one. Every member of the well, of course the point is valid in respect of each of the four ancient Scottish universities, each with its own General Council - every member of the General Council is still in a real sense a member of the University. There is this statutory regular system of communication with them, and it is like membership of a club, but the great thing is that there is no membership subscription.
H How effective if I could take that up a bit and perhaps make a slightly critical comment how effective is the mechanism of the General Council as a means of keeping the body of graduates in this way? It certainly provides an opportunity by which graduates who, like yourself, have a great deal to offer can participate. Do you think the General Council really can be said to represent the whole body of graduates in the involvement through their representatives in the government of the University?
W The unwieldy size and nature of the whole body of graduates has a number of limitations, but the wisdom of the years has gone into the specific mechanics whereby the General Councils are run and how they operate; and although the Business Committee also operates under limitations, I think that it is in general an efficient means whereby the University can be in receipt of whatever assistance might be available from ex students with their rather distinctive perspective on their old University. Of course, there always have been a certain number of General Council sceptics, people within and outwith the General Council who believe that it is a useless body and performs no useful purpose at all. To these sceptics, as and when they have been vocal with me, which hasn't been very frequently, I have said, "Have you ever read Louise Donald's History of the General Council? It's in, it's part of, the volume that was published in 1960 called The Fusion of 1860 and there is an extended history of Aberdeen's General Council. If you read that through you will get a measure of the usefulness, not in any very dramatic ways but in sundry, quiet ways, the usefulness of the General Council to the University."
H Could you perhaps update Louise Donald's article by suggesting one or two examples of its being effective during your own association with the University?
W The most obvious answer to that is the answering of the need of what has had to be started in recent years, namely the Development Trust. If the Development Trust is going to succeed in its purpose, it has go to engender a very definite involvement on the part of the graduates of the University. They are the people who have had the intense interest and involvement in Aberdeen University; they are the people who have gone out into the world, and some of them have made money and that money is going to be useful, to say the least of it, to the purposes of the Development Trust.
H Are there any issues of university policy or government on which you think the views of the Business Committee of the General Council should be given more weight than, shall we say, the views of the Senate?
W I have got to say that the General Council is an extremely privileged body within the tota universitas. If I can just look up, as I am doing, the wording that is built into its terms of reference: "The General Council has to assemble twice a year and can take into their consideration all questions affecting the well-being and prosperity of the University and make representations from time to time on such questions to the University Court." And so there is the most broad term of reference possible, ''taking into consideration all questions affecting the well-being and prosperity of the University.'' And there's an edge to that power by virtue of the next phrase which lays down by statute that the General Council can make representations to the ruling body of the University about virtually any aspect of the running of the University. And it's able to insist that it gets a rational and acceptable answer, and the Court would be unlikely to fly in the face of any strongly expressed view on the part of the General Council. There have been recorded by Mrs. Donald in her history a number of instances where there has been some degree of victory on the part of the General Council, vis à vis the Court, but in my own time I can't recall anything so exciting as that; but the great thing is the potential that is there, and if anyone were to complain about the mechanics of the General Council being ineffective, then I think they are quite off-beam because it has got tremendous potential to keep an eye on what's going on within the University. Then as far as the General Council Assessors on the Court are concerned, again what a privilege it is that four assessors from the graduate body can be in on the deliberations of the Court. In my experience we have always been accepted civilly and used, I would say, constructively; it has never been made obvious to us at any rate that we are a nuisance or outsiders in any sense. No, we have been seen, I think, as in a sense independent spirits who, by virtue of not being on the payroll of the University and for other reasons, can be seen potentially to have a reasonably detached view about virtually anything. But of course the General Council is only one of a few means whereby graduate involvement with the University can be attained or retained. Another mechanism is the Alumnus Association of whose Management Committee I was Convener for about six years, I think. The Alumnus Association was only formed about 1937, I think. Its conception is excellent but it has had its practical difficulties, and there will, I forecast, require to be some changes which I needn't go into in detail, but they have relevance to the whole matter of communications between the University and its graduate body. Some of the changes are going to be necessary because of the advent of the Development Trust; and the Development Trust and the University Principal and the University administration are all currently involved in active discussion about the starting of a Graduates' Newsletter going out regularly to all graduates. If and when that gets off the ground, depending on its scope, it may take over from the University Review what up until now has been a function of the Review, namely the chronicling of graduate activities careers and so on. Of course the Review bas been a creature of the Alumnus Association and so it is going to be involved in these discussions as well. The Review's policy and publishing arrangements will in any case require reassessment, I think, when the present editor retires, as he is going to at the end of 1986. From the close involvement of my father before me, and myself, amongst the few people have who had every issue from the start of the Review in 1913, I say with conviction, what a corpus of good stuff, mostly local, but much of it more than local, and of general, almost universal interest, there is in the Review; and what a thousand pities it would be if in fact the continuity of publication of the Aberdeen University Review were lost.
End of side one
H Now tell me something about your long experience on the University Court.
W Since 1970 I have been one of the General Council Assessors, and now, in the last year of my fourth term of four years, quite soon I will have an awkward, rather private decision to make, to make it known that I am prepared or not prepared to submit myself to the will of my electorate for a fifth time. What I can say is that I have from the start enjoyed the work of the Court; every bit of it is interesting, but perhaps especially the sub-committee work, and there is plenty of that. Amongst the sub-committees I think I have taken special interest in the work of selection committees than which there could be no more important function, the getting on to the staff of the right people, the people of the right calibre. And then there have been the promotion committees, the work of the promotion committee has been equally satisfying and of course it is vitally important. Since 1970 I have sat under Edward Wright and Fraser Noble and George McNicol, and have of course observed their respective styles. A very general comment is that I admire, greatly admire, the mechanics of university policy-making, just as much as I positively admire the mechanics of university administration. Now there may be and no doubt there are qualifications even in my mind about these rather bald statements; but the fact is that those who have the responsibility of making university policy and those who have the responsibility of carrying that policy out in practice, between them, because of the basic soundness of the mechanics, nobody can get away with much within the university. There's a built-in massive consultation involved all the time in what has to be self-government. No one else is going to govern the university, it has got to govern itself; and within this total consultation process it seems to me that are there are built-in checks and there's, to use this popular phrase, 'peer review' of every staff member's move and action. I also have leant what a tremendous quantity on of cerebration seems to be going on all the time throughout the campus. This is understandable when one reckons that on the academic staff there are good, trained minds - minds trained to apply themselves logically and rationally to whatever comes under discussion - and indeed this cerebration is sometimes too slick, it operates too and quickly for my slow brain, and I think occasionally with unfortunate results. Sometimes academics are too quick in coming to a conclusion. If that happens, then General Council representatives do occasionally have a useful function here: "Hold on, have you thought of so and so? What's the perception or reaction of outsiders going to be to this, that or the other decision that you've come to?''
H So you think that the Court has been a pretty effective body. Is there any way in which you would like to see its membership or its powers changed?
W In the fifteen years or so of my being on the Court I've never spotted a respect in which I have wanted to rush to suggest that there should be a change in the various Court mechanisms.
H Would you care to comment on the contribution which you have brought to Court under the three different Principals whose style you have mentioned?
W Well, I could make one general point, going further back than Edward Wright. This century, I think it is fair to reflect, with hindsight, that Aberdeen University has done well, it has done wisely, in its choice of Principals. It has, in fact, seen to it that at the beginning of the century there was a divine, in the form of Sir George Adam Smith, as Principal. Then there was Hamilton Fyfe who should be called a humanist, at any rate a great supporter of humane subjects. Then there was Tom Taylor, the lawyer; then there was Edward Wright the mathematician; then Fraser Noble, the economist; and now George McNicol, the medical. And so no Faculty except, I suppose so far, Science, can complain that they have had an unsympathetic Principal by virtue of his experience of academic life. As far as the last three are concerned, I have said that I have observed their respective styles in the Chair, at the Court, and at other meetings. Whether I want to give any other view about them I am not so sure. I feel that the University was well served by each of them in their different ways, with their different styles.
H What sort of a role have the different Rectors played on the Court in your time?
W Each of them has been prepared to see the good sense of handing the conduct of Court meetings over largely to the Principal who knows the agenda, must know the agenda, in ever so much greater detail than a fleeting Rector. In practice, I think each of the Rectors since 1970 has taken the Chair at the beginning and then quite soon handed over for the meat of the business to the Principal of the time. Each of the Rectors in my recollection has been extremely sensible on the Court, constructive, reticent about barging in on discussion of matters that they may not have learnt very much about, and I have nothing critical to say about the conduct on the Court of the successive nominees of the student body.
H On the substantive policy issues, you came on to the Court when the great expansion of the University was already under way. Looking back from the viewpoint of 1985, do you in any way regret the scale and speed of that expansion?
W Well, as recently as the 1970s, as recently as the late 1970s the Government's policy was expansion. The Government's instruction to Aberdeen University through the UGC was 'Plan for rapid expansion', and that was quantified, I think near the end of the 1970s at about 10,000 students. 'That's your target, that's got to be your objective' we were told. 'Get on with it, and don't worry too much about money. The resources for new buildings which will inevitably be required will be found.' And one of the practical results of that then Government policy was what became known on our campus as The Edward Wright Building, intended to be new accommodation as a general-purpose Arts Building. The Court appointed me as a committee of one to be responsible for every aspect of planning that building, liaising with the architect, Robin Dunn, seeing it built, seeing it furnished. I believe that we finished up with a civilised building and haven't in fact heard it seriously criticised. It certainly transformed the previously rather bleak aspect of Dunbar Street. Now of course that 10,000 student target seems to have been a politician's pipe-dream, and it is ironic that saving space and buildings closed down, for instance the teaching block, seem to be the order of the day just noW But it is at least the unlovely and I think unloved teaching block that may be vacated and not 'my' really rather civilised Edward Wright Building.
H You think the University really had little choice, given the Government attitude, but to go in for expansion? It would not have been practical politics to do, as Professor Jones suggested in Senate, a go-slow on expansion?
W I think the answer is that it would not have been practicable. Again, in theory at any rate, it's peer judgement that rules. The UGC is not some outside body, its not Government; it's peer academics; and do you run in the face of what your colleagues within the academic world say you must do?
H How well do you think the expansion was carried out? From the point of view of buildings you have given your view, which I would share, of the Edward Wright Building. Would you like to make any comments on campus from design, or perhaps from the more important point of view of the effect of growth upon human relations within the University community?
W. I am not critical, I think, of any aspect of our campus at Old Aberdeen. I think the 'tinkering' that has had to be done at Marischal has many limitations in its results, but I think the University has probably done its best and continues to do its best, the best of a bad job. There was a great misfortune of course in the vast amount of money that had to be found and then spent so unproductively as it had to be in the case of the reconstitution of the Medical Building. As far as the more general effect of the expansionist policy of the 1970s is concerned, of course it was just a continuation of what had already ruled in the 1960s; and these two decades of growth together have inevitably made Aberdeen University a less intimate place in some respects, more impersonal, probably, in a number of ways. On the other hand, I don't think it is right to pronounce too adversely in that sense, because post-war there has been the massive development of university residences and residential life for students; and what may have been lost in terms of personal-ness about the University campus has surely been more than compensated for by the very great increase in opportunities for social intercourse than ever existed in pre-war days.
W. How much damage do you think has been done to theUniversity by the heavy cuts of 1981?
W I am tempted to say that the result of the cuts has in many ways been salutary. Any observer of the University post-war must have recognised that there was scope for economies and that retrenchments of one kind or another were possible. That's a fairly general comment. I wonder if I could be more specific without sounding too detached, because I don't feel detached. In 1981, having recently gone through at the University Press, my business, like most businessmen in the country, having gone through a process of severe retrenchment, retrenchment for survival, for sheer survival as a business, including huge redundancies, all as an inevitable result of literally and historically unprecedented inflation which was bound to have its repercussions, I took a rather sour view of the academics who, in 1981, wanted to maintain or seemed to maintain the lofty-seeming and really quite untenable view that academics should be wholly immune from the misfortune of redundancy. Those who held to that position seemed to me to be letting their reputation as rational people down: their reputation as people who were thought to be endowed with higher-calibre minds than most of us. I also thought, and I think, they were in the event quite extremely lucky, and their treatment at the hands of the Government very generous indeed, compared with what went in the world of industry and commerce as a result of these days of unprecedented inflation. Morale, of course as we are all aware, morale on campus undoubtedly suffered and no doubt is still suffering and looks like being dented at the least once again in 1986, but I can't help just putting on record my view that a good deal of the injury of 1981 was self-inflicted.
H What about the effects? Would you say that damage has been done, or would you go so far as to say that the effects have been constructive?
W The latter.
H Could you specify that at all? How would you see that as being true?
W Everybody `s thinking is more constructive. The whole conduct of the University is on tighter lines; that goes for administration; it also goes for the conductance of each and every teaching department. I suppose it probably also goes in the context of research because tighter research resources must be an incentive to produce as good value for a smaller amount of resources, if at all possible. But of course as a complete layman in these matters I can't pronounce definitively.
H Could we talk a little about relations between the University and the community of the City of Aberdeen and the Grampian Region generally? How do you characterise these relations, and how have they changed in your own experience?
W I was in business in Aberdeen for 36 years and during that period for quite a large number of years I was closely associated with the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce and therefore had a reasonably accurate ear to the business ground over that period. I held office as President of the Chamber for a couple of years, and on a fairly superficial kind of point, I smiled, and I continued to smile from year to year, at the time-honoured tradition whereby there is a formal evidencing every year of the Town and Gown relationship by virtue of the Kirking in King's of the Seven Incorporated Trades, and the reciprocal gesture on the part of the Seven Incorporated Trades in the matter of dining the Principal or his representative at their annual banquet. I think that there is an element of the comical in this whole relationship because it's pretty superficial; and those who make up the Seven Incorporated Trades have their own functions; they were very unrepresentative of the whole sweep of industry and commerce in the area that Aberdeen University serves. The Incorporated Trades would be the first to admit to a very great unfamiliarity with the people concerned with academic life and academic ways. Fundamentally, their organisation is one of self-interest, self-help, slightly introspective, all in contra-distinction to the function of the Chamber of Commerce. It's much more outward-looking, it's much more public-spirited, it's much more objective; it concerns itself in a much more practical way with practical things like commenting constructively on legislation before it becomes law, discussion with local government, discussion through London representatives with national government, on matters hingeing on the economy of the whole of the country. In addition, its particular local role, or its main local function, is to do what it can, something rather than nothing, in the direction of improving the business climate. And of course the Chamber recognises the fact that is not always recognised that the University is one of the biggest employers, if not the biggest employer, in the neighbourhood, with a great interest in the business climate of the neighbourhood. The University also has a spending power in excess of most organisations' spending power locally. Very wisely, the University maintains its membership of the Chamber of Commerce and the more that it can in fact have people available for participation in the work of the Council of the Chamber of Commerce the better. That is all a statement, or mainly a statement, of potential, because there hasn't been a great deal of coming and going between the University and the Chamber of Commerce, some but not a great deal. Aside from the Chamber of Commerce, there have been rather fitful attempts on the part of the University to engage local businessmen in aspects of its concerns, the University's concerns; in particular there was for a number of years a committee with a title something like University Industrial Liaison Committee. I think that that has rather fallen by the wayside, and more emphasis has been put by the University on its own industrial endeavour, namely AURIS. The most recent move there I think is very hopeful indeed, getting into the Chair of AURIS a first-rate, very experienced, very level-headed, very down-to-earth businessman. He succeeds one who was a professional gentleman, very estimable, but the new man knows everything about, at least he knows a very great deal about, business and I think the future for AURIS is now much brighter than it has been in the past. By virtue of General Council Assessors sometimes having been picked from the ranks of local businessmen, there is an input there of business-thinking into the counsels of the University, and that can't do much harm; potentially it can always do some good.
H You don't seem to feel that the ties with business have been in the past as strong as they might be. Would you say that the saying one hears is true, that Aberdeen is a particularly good example of a regional university which has ties not just with the business world but with the society, urban and rural, of its region, to a greater extent perhaps than most others, or is this a myth?
W It's not an aspect of the thing; that I can enthuse about. I can only express my view rather negatively. Since, say, 1970 I can't recall any rumpus or severe quarrel between the University and the Town. On the other hand, well I think from time to time, there have been evidences of some warmth of relationship, but together they don't seem to me to have accomplished anything very dramatic. There are other aspects of Aberdeen life in which the University continuously involves itself: one thinks of the musical life of the city, a very positive contribution is being made there all the time by virtue of public performance of University music. What else by way of involvement? I feel that there is not a great deal else. I don't think, again negatively, that there is anything other than reasonable goodwill on the part of the citizenry towards its university. There is a good deal of private pride, I think, in our ancient university, but my own hope is that the novelty of the appointment for the very first time in Aberdeen University of a Public Relations man will have a good effect of interesting the populace' more continuously in the undoubtedly manifold, exciting activities that are going on all the time all over the total campus.
H You have yourself had one rather unusual relationship, or non-relationship, with the University for many years as Managing Director of the company called Aberdeen University Press. I wonder if you would like to say a little about that relationship and whether being in that position you felt any special responsibilities towards the University?
W This is a subject very much along the lines of my own heart. I had the very great good fortune, for an Aberdeen University graduate, of being allowed by circumstances, both to live and to work in Aberdeen, really on the doorstep of my old University. My own viewpoint over all of these years, my own perspective, has really been very close, locationally: my place of business was for many years just across the road from Marischal Quad. Locationally and otherwise, by virtue of the printing service that the Press was able to provide the University with, there was therein a very close and continuing contact. From the time that I started I personally had a great deal of close contact with very many members of university staff, both administrative and academic. Each year someone from literally every department of the university had to visit the Press in order to arrange for its examination paper printing which over many years was the responsibility wholly of the department concerned. There was no question of in-campus printing of examination papers. Apart from that category of printing work, every year there was the General Council Register to be printed, reissued; there was the University Prospectus, the University Calendar, the Court and Senatus Minutes, and then we mentioned the University Review, and then in my recollection there were special jobs of printing which had their own congeniality in the course of execution. Before my day there was the 1914 1919 Roll of Honour, but in my day there was a repeat of that, incorporating the Roll of Honour of the Second War. Then there were the degree scrolls, works of some art perhaps, and these honorary leather degree leather scroll holders which were also fabricated in our book-binding department. Amongst university people that I personally required to have to do with were each of the Principals, each of the Secretaries - Butchart and Angus and Skinner in succession - and there was the redoubtable John Greig and his predecessor who was a chap who really shaped John Greig in his well-known role as a bit of a dictator: I have just forgotten his predecessor's name but he was an equal dictator to Greig. There was Douglas Simpson frequently to have contact with over Spalding Club publications and the University Studies series. There was G.D. Henderson, that cocky little man who nevertheless towards the end of his time mellowed very materially and we got along well together. I had to do with him, for instance, at the time when he was writing his history of aspects of Marischal College. Then there was the succession of editors of the University Review; by far and away, I think the most lovable, Nan Shepherd, and of course there was her tremendous achievement, her coup in the form of the Centenary Issue, that is to say the issue of the University Review which helped to celebrate the centenary of the Fusion in 1860. That tremendous achievement of writing up something about every Head of Department, every Principal, every Secretary: a tremendous contribution to the history of the personnel of the University. And if she is categorised by me as being the most lovable of the University Review editors, then I would classify the present editor, soon to retire, Eric Morrison, as quite the most efficient, because he was never a day wrong in his ordering of the preparation of an issue. Then there was Professor Bickersteth, the Professor of English; his magnum opus, his massive translation into English terza rima of the whole of Dante was produced by the Press; I had everything to do with him and although he was an Englishman to the finger-tips, in the course of his stay in Aberdeen, he became almost the perfect Aberdonian in tie terms of his loyalty to Aberdeen and Aberdeen University. He was absolutely clear in his own mind that he wanted Aberdeen University Press to publish his book. One of the specifications that he insisted upon was that his book should have uncut edges, as was a style of things that was fairly common, of course, in the last century, possibly still quite common in France but almost unheard-of in this country. Now the book, I think, was published in the 1950s and in recent years I know that the Press has, oh I don't know, perhaps on twenty different occasions, had a copy of this book returned to it by the bookseller who ordered it, with some such snotty remark as 'Imperfect copy' or 'Misbound'; the current generations' of booksellers apparently don't know about the style of binding that is called uncut edges. Then also there were lots and lots of congenial contacts with members of staff. There was Professor Lockhart: my contacts with him were sometimes through his secretary, a very nice-looking girl called Miss Hadaway, I think with one 'd' if I remember rightly, Miss Hadaway; and I remember one occasion when she came across from Marischal to discuss something on behalf of Professor Lockhart, and she was on one side of my desk and I was at the other, and we just got on with our business and it was quite a pleasant discussion. It finished when she declared, greatly to my surprise, "Oh, Mr. Watt, I do love your hands." Why she she said that, I cannot think; I can only think that her interest was purely anatomical. And then of course over the heads of the production of the Rolls of Graduates, the University Press physically produced Volumes I and II; of course my father got his own Press to produce his own volume from 1901 to 1925. John Milne, of course, got his own press to see to the physical production of the third volume, the Mackintosh volume, but then I had the great pleasure of working with Louise Donald and latterly with W.S. Macdonald over the massive job of getting the fourth volume edited and out. While on the subject of the A.U.P., and really on reflection I don't think any Aberdonian could have had a more congenial job in the business world than I had in the A.U.P., I can't forbear from mentioning the perhaps surprisingly happy, certainly quite unique, relationship between the University and the University Press that bears the University's name: a relationship going back well into the last century. Evidence of the warmth of this relationship on a personal plane well, I can think of three evidences: one, the Brough portrait in the Picture Gallery at Marischal of a predecessor of mine, John Thomson, Managing Director of A.U.P. through the turn of the century; the portrait by the Aberdeen artist Brough is of John Thomson poring over galley proofs as I did in my time a great deal. It was he who funded the John Farquhar Thomson Lectures in memory of a son of his who had been First Bursar, took a First in Classics and then died when only twenty-five years of age. Another bit of evidence of the warmth of this relationship, simply that another Managing Director of the Press, my father, became the, needless to say, proud recipient of an LL.D. And a third such evidence the fact that I, likewise, after I had done my stint as Managing Director of the Press, was the proud recipient of an LL.D. from my University.
Interview continues on MS 3620/1/33/2
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