| Description | Interview with Dr Janet Adam Smith recorded in the History Department, Old Aberdeen on Thursday 10 July 1986 by John Hargreaves.
Transcript of Interview :
H Dr Adam Smith what was it like to grow up in Chanonry Lodge?
S It was splendid. There was a wonderful garden with a shrubbery ideal for games of red indians, hide and seek, all that kind of thing and a splendid lot of trees for climbing. From early on I was very keen on climbing. Splendid old walls and even roofs, and added to that very tolerant parents who allowed one to fool about in that way. It was a marvellous place for children and one had neighbours, other professorial children, the Arthur Thomson family along the way, any number that we could play with, rush into each others gardens, climb over each others walls into each other's gardens and at that time Chanonry was all down by School Road and down to the sea was very unbuilt up and you could go out to the shore, and you had great freedom. We could bicycle out to Scotstown and of course there was nothing, very little beyond the old Brig O'Balgownie built up and you could bicycle for miles, you could get into the country straightaway. You had a great freedom. On one side I went to a day school in Albyn Place and one side there was the tram going to school up and down dreary King Street, four times a day perhaps, but on the other side there was this splendid garden and this wonderful freedom. We were great friends with the Hays at Seaton too and we had the whole of Seaton to play about in and the Hay children. Then within the family I think perhaps only retrospectively one realised how lucky one was in the kind of visitors who came to stay. A lot of them came for university business, giving different lectures or preaching and I think you could say we took Bishops in our stride. I mean they weren't anything special, they came and went, or Moderators. But there were also old family friends like Arthur Somerville the musician who came to stay a lot and my parents were very hospitable and we had a procession of very amusing and interesting people who came through the house. I remember once being kissed by Dean Inge which it was pointed out to me at the time this was rather a single honour; but at the age of about eight or nine and not much caring to be kissed I didn't quite appreciate it as much as I should. I remember once seeing Hillaire Belloc eating his breakfast on our veranda and why he should be doing this I'm not quite sure except I think it was thought that perhaps being half French a kind of continental air was given by him having his breakfast on the veranda.
H Were there any visitors whose personalities made a particularly strong impression either favourable or unfavourable?
S I remember very favourable impression made by the then American Ambassador to Britain, Walter Page. It must have been some time during the first war, I should think 1916 or 1917, and I remember first of all seeing him as I was … I had torn my things or something, anyway I was dirty and dishevelled and rushed passed him and then realised this was a distinguished visitor, but when tidied up I met him again he was the soul of courtesy, absolutely charming. I remember the Chancellor, the Duke of Richmond and Gordon also delightful. He again was courteous and charming and caused much less stir in the family than the famous visit when he was rector of Asquith because they came seven strong I think, Asquith, Mrs Asquith, two or three children, I mean a grown up son and daughter and at least three attendants and we had to be farmed out for that because otherwise there wasn't enough room for them., But the Chancellor was a delightful guest.
H Your father clearly had an extraordinary wide range of friends and acquaintances, but many of them I'm sure friends.
S Yes he did.
H And not all these guests were university guests?
S No, sometimes they would come as university guests and became friends. Sometimes friends came and then got interested in the university. There was never any division between our family life and the university life. In a way it sort of flowed in one to the other.
H How do you remember your father most vividly?
S I remember several things about him very keenly - one that he loved walking over from Chanonry Lodge, walking down the High Street of the old town and up over the Spital and the Gallowgate to his office in Marischal College and usually accompanied by the Secretary, Harry Butchart and somehow that sort of set him up tremendously for the day. I don't remember him ever talking a great deal about university things at home. That's to say he didn't talk shop much at home but we were very much aware we were in the middle of the university and we used to go to the Chapel on Sundays and we nearly always went to the graduations and today it was a great pleasure to hear Gaudeamus again when I was at this graduation.
H I was going to ask you, perhaps a rather strange question, were you conscious of living in a university community or something a bit narrower, an Old Aberdeen community?
S I think conscious we belonged to Old Aberdeen and I think we perhaps rather looked down on people whose misfortune it was to live in the Rubislaw's or somewhere like that. I think it was a very strong Old Aberdeen loyalty, but I think we were very well aware that the old town and King's was just one part of it and that for one thing as I say my father's office was in Marischal. I don't think we felt that the university was exclusively, or even primarily the old town but I think we all had a great loyalty and because there was a great network of university families who lived there and knew each other better so one had this greater familiarity with them perhaps than with the university families that lived in the rest of Aberdeen.
H To which of his colleagues was your father closest? You mentioned Harry Butchart and that … ?
S Yes, he was very close to him. He was very close to Ashley Mackintosh who was, I'm ashamed to say I can't remember which of the medical professors he was.
H I think he was Professor of Medicine.
S Yes and he was a great friend.
H Was your father closely involved in the establishment of the Foresterhill site which was very much, I think, looking back, a pioneer development?
S I think he was and there was a time when he was going up to London quite a lot to talk to the Minister of Health, who at that time was Neville Chamberlain, about the whole developments on the Foresterhill site. I think that was a major preoccupation. I think perhaps that came after the long time he'd had on the, not to do with the university but on the union of the churches, and that was something that called him away a lot to Edinburgh then but I think this was perhaps one of his major preoccupations afterwards.
H You say he didn't discuss university work a great deal but I wonder if you have any impression if the work of the Principal changed and became more strenuous either during or after the first world war?
S Yes I think it probably did. I think the university was bigger and he was getting older. You see he was seventy eight when he retired and I think probably the combination of the expansion of the university and that I think probably did. I think he probably came home more tired and when I say he didn't talk about it at home I'm sure he talked things over with my mother and my mother was very much involved and if he talked with us I dare say we were not all that interested. The time I was most at home was when I was at school in Aberdeen and I dare say I was thinking about my own affairs but my mother absolutely identified herself with him and with the university. I came across a splendid letter the other day that she had written to him when he was in the States in the early part of 1918, sent out by the Foreign Office to talk on the aims of the allies to audiences in the States. He therefore missed the Spring graduation and she sent him such a vivid account of the graduation, of the Chancellor coming to stay and how helpful he had been, of how all the arrangements had gone and in those days the lunch for the honorary graduates was always at Chanonry Lodge and indeed in the summer the graduation reception was in our garden and miraculously it always seems to have been fine and we had our first strawberries. We had a big marquee up in the garden but my mother on this occasion sent him a very full account, she even sent him the menu, she told him what wines there had been and you always had one or two stalwarts extra help when there was much entertaining and how old Anne Findlay come in to help. She wanted him to know that although he had had to miss this graduation how well everything had gone. She was a vital part of the principalship and which I think the university recognised because they gave her an LLB as soon as he had retired.
H Yes I think your mother has very clearly left her mark. One thing which struck me reading your mother's life and reflecting on the period, that perhaps your parents were rather pioneers in, what later came to be referred to, as staff-student relations?
S Yes, I think so. I think my mother was always very interested in the women students who were prominent in the Students Union. She was simply delighted when Mary Esslemont became the first women to be the president of the Union as a whole. She always took particular care to get to know the women student officers and we had I should think probably a couple of parties in the Christmas vacation when probably the University had started but our schools hadn't yet started, for students. I think they were chosen as office bearers in the societies and so on but my mother always seemed to know more about them, she'd say "You must dance with Donald, he climbs in Glen Coe", and she would know that that would be a link with me. On person she was very fond of was Margaret McIver, who I think may have been president of the Union in the mid thirties.
H I think Mary Esslemont is the only women who has been president.
S She was the only one who had been president, yes. Margaret McIver, my mother was very fond of her. I think she came from Stornoway.
H Yes she died in a fire in Stornoway I think? [Interviewer was thinking of Madeline MacIver, MA 1940]
S No, I think she died of multiple sclerosis three or four years ago. At that time there was, at number 11 Chanonry, I think, anyway the house up near the old town house in the Aulton. It was a kind of hostel for women students and mother would always have them to lunch or tea or parties but you didn't feel that it was a duty on her part, she positively wanted to know them. When my parents first went the size of the academic staff had been fairly small, you could get to know them, but after the war it became impossible to get to know people just in the course of ordinary university life. That was when she started the University Women's Club and I suppose it was in about 1926 she started that, which I think has been a continual and great success.
H It has indeed yes.
S That was to bring in, you know all women: wives and lecturers and graduate students, all women […] the administrative staff.
H Which I think was certainly a great innovation.
S Yes.
H When your father entertained students was he relaxed and informal?
S Yes, I think he was. He was very easy. On the other hand he could be very stern at graduations because in those days - I noticed how well behaved everybody was today - but in those days there was a tradition of rowdiness at the graduations and if anything started up my father would rise and looking rather like the prophet Jeremiah would say, "Gentlemen" then quiet would come. He had these two sides, but he was very … I think he found it easy to be friendly.
H I had very much the impression that any earlier entertainment of students was always really rather formal and somewhat constrained and both your parents were very much pioneers?
S I'd say my mother particularly, I think she had great interest in people.
H Yes, she would entertain women students without your father being there?
S She might. Very often students came to Sunday lunch and very often we would have students recommended to us by friends who would say I've got a nephew or I know of some young person coming to Aberdeen and we would help them along. Ours was a spread out family. My eldest brother was fifteen years older than I was so that somehow it was always easy to fit in in a spread like that, it wasn't as if it was just the students and the Principal, there would be young people of all ages including children. We used to sometimes have games with students. We were allowed on Sundays not to play tennis but to play rounders, I don't quite know what the difference was and I remember games with students on Sunday afternoons.
H Do you have any impression as a young lady growing up and watching streams of students pass through? Were there any particular characteristics? How did they compare with your fellow students at Oxford?
S I would say it was much more varied. In my day at Oxford in the twenties the proportion of young men who had been at public schools was pretty high and that meant that in a sense you got less variety. I think it was perhaps the variety of backgrounds of students here that would strike me - the greater variety. You might get a lad from the islands who had practically not been on the mainland of Scotland until he came to university and sometimes I think they found that quite a shock, some would adapt themselves very quickly.
H Were there many English students?
S A few and there were a few from abroad. I remember there were two from Iraq who came to lunch and one of them startled us by arriving in a frock coat. Very grand.
H Perhaps as we're inviting comparisons of Aberdeen and Oxford, you told me just now that after you graduated in English at Oxford you spent a year in Aberdeen and took some courses here. Could you extend the comparison a little?
S Yes. Well it was rather different for one thing. I was doing a class in economics here, Professor Gray, and a class in economic history, Mr Hamilton. Professor Gray was an absolutely delightful lecturer and it wasn't his fault that somehow I never quite got to terms with economics. But what struck me most was that whereas at Oxford the basis had been one's tutorial, perhaps a tutorial a week, perhaps a seminar or some sort of class a week, otherwise lectures would be recommended but nobody forced you to go to them. Indeed, the further on you got the less you went to lectures and the more you worked on your own under the general supervision of your tutor. But here quite clearly the important thing was the class. The class was the mode in which the teaching was done and in Professor Gray's class which was very popular there would be perhaps about fifty. In the economic history which I did we were far fewer, we only about ten, so in that there was a certain amount of discussion, there was scope for discussion and dialogue. But in Professor Gray's class there really wasn't scope for that and I imagine those who went on to do honours in economics then had smaller classes with the possibility of dialogue and discussion. Would you say it was right that for a student doing a past degree then the class was the thing?
H This is very much the impression I have, and often taken very formally.
S Yes, with some professors giving the same piece year after year.
H I think so yes. I think this was partly the tradition and it was probably also partly dictated by the numbers and by finance. I suppose your father as Principal accepted that this was how it had been and how it had to be?
S I should think so yes. I imagine so. I don't know what discussions there may not have been but after all he had been himself at Edinburgh and I imagine it was the pattern in a Scottish university.
H I think the combination of tradition and financial constraints would be pretty decisive.
S Yes and I imagine that always the honours students moved on to something a bit more in the way of personal tuition and discussion.
H It's perhaps difficult to compare social life in Aberdeen and Oxford because presumably you were living in Chanonry Lodge. Do you have any impressions about extra curricular life?
S One thing that did strike me was, how on earth did we put up with all the regulations at Oxford and I'm talking about a non-permissive age in the 1920s and college regulations. In the women's colleges, though I must say it added a spice of life that you were constantly breaking these rules, but we had all sorts of rules about you couldn't go to a young man's rooms unless there was a chaperone who had to be a graduate or married women or over 25 or some absurd category like that. In a sense there was an air of still being adolescents in an institution. Even that went for the men. The men had all sorts of regulations whereas the students here seem to take much more responsibility for their own lives. Obviously, as it was not a residential place, I mean there were no halls of residence then, and as it was not a residential university you could not impose regulations but it did strike me that they were much more responsible for their daily lives here than we were at Oxford.
H In fact the average student would be younger here?
S Yes. I think it's such a good thing now that so many people have a year between leaving school and going to university, earning some money and going to Patagonia or whatever it is. Because in my day when the pattern was to go straight from your last summer term at school to your first autumn term at Oxford, I think it ended with a lot of people being very immature by the time they left the university. As you put it at Oxford it's all, as you put it, in statu pupillan instead of in a way getting on with their lives responsibly.
H Could we go back for a minute your memories of your father and his friends and particularly close colleagues within the university. Would you like to say a little more about Harry Butchart who was clearly a very important figure?
S He was a tremendous right hand man. I may say he was a right hand man not only to my father but to my mother. There were four of us daughters and we were all married in the college chapel. My second sister Kathleen was married to George Thomson, then a professor here, and it is their son who was getting an honorary degree today. Certainly my wedding, I was the last to be married, and mine was a smaller affair. I'd been working in London for years and I didn't have the same lot of friends up here by that time but the others were all quite big weddings and who did the admin for that - Harry Butchart. There was quite a lot of arrangements to be made and he was tremendously helpful. But in university matters, I think he was absolutely invaluable to my father. Remember these were the days, it was a long time before my father even had a secretary and he did all his letters in his own hand.
H Is that so?
S Yes he did his letters in his own hand. I think it was only in the twenties that he got a secretary. I dare say quite a lot of the letters he discussed with Harry Butchart, and Harry Butchart then dealt with them but he wrote an immense amount in his own hand. I remember he took a little time to get into the way of dictating to a secretary but I think Harry Butchart was an absolute tower of strength.
H Harry Butchart was your father's choice as University Secretary?
S I believe so. I think the previous one Mr Thom … I just have a much clearer impression of Harry Butchart who … I mean I always thought of Mr Thom as rather an elderly man, I dare say he was only in his fifties. I think that Harry Butchart fresh back from the war and so on had a kind of dynamism which was obviously very necessary in a time of change.
H Do you remember before he became University Secretary he was lawyer?
S Yes. He was a man of tremendous energy. I used to play a lot of tennis with him at one time. He was into … - and climb, and so on, he was always on the go.
H I can just remember him as a very energetic man, even at an advanced age.
S He was a pioneer skier in the Highlands. I remember one holiday when I chaperoned my sister Kathleen and George Thomson up to Braemar with Harry Butchart and we all stayed there and took out our skis and Harry Butchart tried to teach us how to ski. But I think probably the University owed him a great deal for the sort of general smooth running. I'll tell you another tremendous support to my father was J E Crombie who was the Chancellor's Assessor. Well he was the Court, as you might say, and I think probably my father found academic matters as discussed in Senatus more congenial to him than financial administrative matters as discussed in Court and there I think J E Crombie was a great help to him. Father was very conscientious and he would always go over the meetings ahead of the agenda very thoroughly with J E Crombie or Harry Butchart or whoever it was.
H Among the professoriate you mentioned Professor Ashley Mackintosh are there any others?
S Professor Jack comes to mind very much. He was a very congenial friend and Professor Terry, your predecessor in the history chair.
H There he is on the wall.
S Yes, wonderful. Professor Terry and his tin lizzie, did you know about that?
H No.
S He was an early motorist and he had your genuine tin lizzie. A high up Ford and it had a kind of contraption of basketwork for his stick and umbrella at the side. He was a tremendous character. My mother was very musical. As a girl in London she had gone to concerts, had singing lessons. It meant a great deal to her. My father was not musical and I think that Professor Terry and she were tremendous chums through music and of course he was very active in getting up musical things in the University. The one Professor with whom, as a family, we were not intimate but in great awe of were the Harrowers. Because Blanche Harrower, the daughter of the former Principal, Principal Geddes was a tremendous grande dame and I think she probably thought my mother was too free and easy and friendly and informal. Blanche I'm afraid … in the family we used to have little jokes about Blanche, I mean, irreverent children would. Possibly our closest friends were the family of J Arthur Thomson. He was a marvellous character, slightly absent minded, wore a grey bowler, a green neck tie or would it be neck cloth, because it wasn't tied but it had a gold ring round it and his wife helped, she was a very scholarly person, she helped him a great deal with his work. He was a great populariser of natural history and I think she helped him with his book and they had this son who struck awe into us because by the age of 21, Landsborough Thomson had written a book on British birds and their nests. My father professed to be utterly horrified when he came here to find what professor's families were like when he heard about the Thomsons. The youngest David became a biochemist, Vice-Principal of McGill University. He was my chum, he was a little older than me. In the war, he was at the Grammar School and they were sharing the school with another school so he used to come home at two and have lunch then and be free the rest of the day and I would slip round to the Thomsons round about then. This was when I was about 10 and he was about 13 and we would then have tremendous games of one a side hockey in their garden or more climbing of trees and walls or games with his battery of toy soldiers. It was a very free and easy life in that way. But the Thomsons were a great part of our life then. Then there was dear Professor Davidson, Logic, I think he was the one who was alleged to give the same lecture more of less all the time.
H I don't think he was the only one.
S He wore a tartan bow tie. He was very kind. But in those days somehow you knew … it was a sort of university family in a way you were rather expected to know, you might know some more than others but you were rather expected to know them. And of course there was the rather grand Sir John Marnoch, the great surgeon. There was one day quite early on in the first war when Prince Albert as he was then known, later George VI, was then a midshipman on a boat, developed appendicitis and had to be put ashore in Aberdeen and was operated on by Sir John Marnoch. I expect Sir John was also the surgeon when they were at Balmoral but anyway he did it. He asked if he could bring this lad to tea, so he came to tea and at that time an uncle who was very good with his hands had made little boats for my sister and me, little model ones, so we brought these out to be christened by the Prince. I think I still have one called the Prince Albert or Princess Mary or something on it. Somehow my parents gave us the feeling that whoever came, I suppose we'd had a Prime Minister Asquith, I don't think we made much distinction between those who were very grand and those who weren't.
H Talking of those who weren't, were you conscious of the junior staff, of the assistants?
S I think some. I can't myself recall very many.
H Many would be transient?
S Many would be transient. I do remember a philosopher Oliver de Selincourt coming, not for very long. When my sister Kathleen married George Thomson, they would have a lot of … George was very young for a professor, he was only about 32 I think, and they would have a lot of the junior ones who were their contemporaries out. That was not really at a time when I was much here but I do remember occasionally hearing about them. I think that probably the lecturers as far as we were concerned, as far as we children were concerned, were … I mean we were friends with the children of professors and probably lecturers didn't have children. Probably they'd be much younger or they hadn't yet married.
H What about town and gown relationships?
S I remember father was very fond of Lord Provost Taggart who was Provost for most of the war I think, Sir James Taggart. He used to lunch quite often at the club in Union Street, Town & County and made lots of contacts there and at one stage he was given the freedom of the city. I would have said, again as children you don't know, there may have been all sorts of tensions that we didn't know about, but on the surface I don't remember my father coming back and saying "Oh lord it's the Town Council again!" or something like that.
H And he would have many contacts from his days at Queen's Cross?
S Absolutely, that was it. He had all these good friends like for instance Sir Thomas Jaffray of the Savings Bank who was a friend from his Queen's Cross days. He was a great family friend.
H Could I put to you some rather broader questions on which you might or might not like to comment? Your family is very properly featured as part of that famous anatomy of the British intellectual aristocracy which Noel Annan wrote about in 1955.
S The 'Annan Debrett'!
H But isn't this close relationship between Aberdeen university and the readers of national life rather exceptional? How many other Aberdeen academics might feature in an extended 20th century Debretts? I'm saying wasn't your father really rather an exceptional person for Aberdeen?
S Yes. I think he came to Aberdeen already, with a reputation far beyond the academic. He had made his name as a young man by his biblical scholarship and particularly his book on Isaiah and, of course, he had his reputation as a minister from his year at Queen's Cross. Then the Historical geography of the Holy Land established him as an outstanding scholar and so he had experience of … and this led his work on the prophets and his historical geography, led to him being invited again and again to go to America and he gave lectures at Yale and all over. Somehow when he left his chair at the Free Church College in Glasgow to come to Aberdeen, it wasn't just an academic moving from one job to another, it was somebody who already had a reputation and who was known. I think by that time he had got degrees at both Oxford and Cambridge, certainly he'd had his Cambridge degree by that time, so that in a way he came back to Aberdeen which he'd known as a young minister as a man with a very wide experience of a world beyond universities and with a reputation beyond universities.
H I have acquired an impression and it ties up with something I'm professionally interested in, that in a sense your father may have seen Aberdeen as what one might almost call an 'imperial university' as something with a role in the British Empire. Which perhaps he never quite fulfilled?
S He was always very jealous of the reputation of Aberdeen and I don't think he ever wanted to go on anywhere else. But again, I think with one foot planted in the University and one foot outside it as you might say, after all he was Moderator during the time he was Principal too, I think he always saw Aberdeen as a place from which you went out to get things rather than an inward looking place.
H Would, and here I'm really asking you for an impression, it was often suggested that Aberdeen is perhaps an exceptionally provincial city and provincial university and this is something which has both and a good and a bad side, I don't know if you'd comment on that?
S I can tell you that one of my father's favourite - you could hardly call it a story - but it was something that he liked to bring out from time to time was that there were two headlines kept in type in the Aberdeen Press & Journal. One was 'Honour to Eminent Aberdonian Abroad' the other was 'Theft of a Washing Tub at Inverurie' and illustrating the local provincial interest but also the fact that Aberdonians did go abroad. I may say one of the most absurd extremes to which this kind of local patriotism went was when George Thomson was the professor here and J J Thomson, discoverer of the the electron, Nobel Prize winner etc. etc. he got some honour in America and the headline in the Press & Journal really was 'America Honours Father of Aberdeen Professor' and I think he was still do it. I think the local press is wonderful at bringing everything now to what they now call the NE, the north east. I even saw that NE cats won something at a show.
H Yes it still continues.
S In my father's day, through the bursaries and through the Carnegie grants it did weight the balance very much towards what you now call the catchment area being local.
H Yes and I think this would be true of many of the Scottish universities. Did your father take pride in this, did he take pride in the province as well as in the Empire?
S Yes I think so very much and reminded us that his ancestors or one lot had come from a farm in Morayshire, a farm called Sweethillocks after which he called his retirement home in Balerno. I think he felt an identification with the area but I think he would always want students here to have broad …
H Did the provincial side of Aberdeen had anything to do with your own decision to go to Somerville for your degree?
S I think that this was really my mother's decision. My mother although her name was Buchanan and in a way she had as good a Scottish ancestry as my father. Her father was a doctor, he was the Chief Medical Officer of what was then the Local Government Board and she had been brought up in London. Her father was a great believer in women having proper education. One of his daughters was the first women classic at University College London and another became a very distinguished scientist also from University College and my mother went to Bedford College having been sent to Cheltenham, then a fairly new establishment under Miss Beale, because partly her health, it was thought would be better outside London, and also a really sound education. So she was always determined that we should have a good education, a proper one, which would fit us for going to universities if we wished to. I went to Cheltenham when I was fourteen and then it somehow became, I think she always thought my eldest sister had been to university here but I think she thought that it would be … I think I thought it would be a very nice thing to go to Oxford. I remember when I got some kind of scholarship to go to Cheltenham and she said when we heard the results of that she said "Well perhaps some day you'll go to Oxford" And I thought I might. I think she was very keen we shouldn't be provincial. I think she was very keen that some part of our education should be not in Aberdeen and she had wide horizons
H If I could go and take this just a little bit further, your own very distinguished contribution to Scottish letters and Scottish literature has been made in England as has that of many others. Do you in any sense regret this or do you think your father would in any sense have regretted this?
S Regret that I went to Oxford?
H Not that you went to Oxford but that you, as many other distinguished Scottish scholars and scholars of Scotland
S No I don't think there was any feeling about that. I think that they were very glad when my first job after leaving Oxford was in the BBC under John Reith, whom they knew because they had known his father well in Glasgow. Being very patriotically Scottish didn't ever mean being anti-English, no feeling of that. Again, my mother was very keen, she liked the idea of girls having careers and was very pleased that I should be having a proper job in the BBC and becoming assistant editor of The Listener and that kind of thing. I think they were both pleased that my very first book should have been a short life of Stevenson, which came out, goodness me, fifty years ago. Of course, both of them had died by the time I did my work of the collected edition of Stevenson's poems or indeed my life of John Buchan. But in a way there was the sort of link because it was John Buchan's, our relationship with the Buchans was really very odd, because it was John Buchan's father who was then minister of the church in the Gorbals, Free Church, and the minister of Ullapool who had my father up for heresy in front of the Free Church assembly in 1902 I think it was because he had said that Isaiah was written by two people which I believe is a gross underestimate by current standards. Then John Buchan was the person he was then in the Ministry of Information in 1917 who with the Foreign Office asked my father to go to America for that series of addresses that I told you about and through that I used to see a lot of the Buchans when I was up at Oxford, they were very hospitable to me and became friends with all the family. John Buchan was extremely kind about my little Stevenson book and that led to his wife and his sons asking me to write his life
H The link with the Buchans was as much through your own connections at Oxford as through the family?
S Yes. I knew the Buchans much more intimately than my parents did but they'd had this rather odd bizarre encounter.
H Perhaps just one last very broad question which you may or may not have anything to say about but it might give you the opportunity to say anything on your mind. Have you any idea what your father might have thought of Aberdeen University in the 1980s with these tall buildings we see all around us, now some of them unfortunately being emptied?
S Startled. I have to think. A reasonable man, and the reasons for them being as they are explained no doubt would have been tolerated but …
H Not altogether happy?
S No. On the other hand I'm sure something that has given all a great pleasure has been in a way the rehabilitation of so much of the Old Town and all those really terribly slummy little wynds and closes off the High Street in the Aulton. Now that place where the MacRobert, that sort of astro-lab thing. But they are all so well done and I think it has restored the Aulton to the kind of dignity it should have.
End of Interview
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