| Administrative History | Mrs. Jones was a former Aberdeen University student |
| Description | Interview with Mrs Margaret Jones (nee Manson), recorded on 7 September 1986 by John Hargreaves
Transcript of Interview :
H Mrs Jones why did you decide to come to Aberdeen University?
J I decided that war was breaking out and Aberdeen was a very safe place to be rather than coming to Glasgow or Edinburgh and also that I had had a great grandfather who had been a student at the university about 1800 who had walked across with a bag of oatmeal on his back and became a student, he and his brother in the name of Inglis.
H He walked across from Fettercairn?
J He walked across from Glenesk and they walked to the university and he had a bag of meal on his back and there is a family letter from his mother saying don't waste your money on buying such trash as apples. That was I would say about 1800.
H So this was a little family tradition. Your parents were graduates?
J No, neither of them were graduates.
H You came up intending to read Chemistry?
J Yes I wanted to read Chemistry and I wanted to go to ICI.
H You had already decided?
J Yes I had decided and that was my ambition.
H That was a very precise ambition, how did you form that? Was it the advice of teachers or family?
J No, I think I was interested in industry. My grandfather had a flax spinning business and I'd always been interested in industry and agriculture, my father was a farmer and a girl wouldn't have done agriculture at that time.
H So you took ?
J Chemistry. After all I went to ICI Billingham and we made fertilisers there so that's an association with farming.
H Did you find that your university course was a good preparation for your career with ICI?
J Not particularly. Professor Findlay was due to retire in 1939 and Professor Melville was called to war works. Professor Findlay carried on and he became president of the Royal Institute of Chemistry in London and he spent most of his time going up and down to meetings there so I felt that he really wasn't running the department.
H Who was doing most of the teaching?
J We had Dr Clows, Dr Watson, Dr Humphries and who was the other one, I've forgotten his name. But I found that when I went to ICI the equipment they had there just didn't match the university's at all. I really learned such a lot there. There was no research going on in the Chemistry Department at that time.
H You feel it would have been different if Professor Findlay had been more concentrated?
J I think it would have been better if he had retired in 39, but I don't blame him because after all he was due to retire in 39, he was sixty five in 39 and he carried on. It was getting the presidency of the Royal Institute of Chemistry which I'm a member of, that meant that he spent most of his time at their meetings which were in London.
H The teaching you were getting was old fashioned?
J Yes. I was with George Burnett, we graduated the same year. He died sadly.
H Yes he did.
J He was our most brilliant graduate.
H Some people say that they learn as much from their fellow students as they do from their teachers? Would that have been true in your case?
J Yes I would say so. I played tennis, I played squash, I played hockey.
H But also you actually learn from them academically?
J I learned an awful lot at ICI because there I met graduates from all the universities, particularly from Oxford and Cambridge which really opened my eyes.
H I heard Principal Wright say once, it was probably when he was put in a corner, that there was an advantage in having teachers who weren't quite up to it because it made you do the work yourself. Was there any truth in that do you think?
J Well it was war time, things were very difficult. It was very difficult getting text books and most of the lecturers put in all their own books and we just had to borrow them. It was very dry and then at nights you were wakened up by air raids, not necessarily on the city, but they used to give air raids for shipping out at sea. Then the landladies, it was difficult studying because the lights were poor, then they had no coal. I remember sitting in the lecture rooms with coats on because the heating went on until about twelve o'clock. Particularly when we got to four o'clock, five o'clock with Geology, it was getting very chilly by that time.
H Are there any teachers, not necessarily in Chemistry, who you do remember with affection or as having been …
J I think Professor Carroll in Physics, he did try very hard and he tried all sorts of different methods of teaching us and Professor Wright in Mathematics. He was very young wasn't he?
H Yes, he was professor at twenty nine.
J Then Geology. I enjoyed the Geology course very much and I have still kept that up as a hobby.
H Coming on to the extra curricular activities you mentioned that you were active in sports. Anything else?
J I did the scientific presidency, the Scientific Society. Politics - I really got going in ICI because all we did was discuss politics there.
H But not at university?
J Not at university so much as at ICI.
H What was the line of ICI politics?
J In the 1946 [1945] election they were Labour … and I got a great insight into trade union and the working man.
H But you hadn't acquired an interest in politics at university?
J Not at university, no, but definitely at ICI. That was our main topic of conversation in the labs was the politics.
H Where did you live? In lodgings?
J Yes. In Esslemont Avenue
H You referred to war time ?
J Yes. We'd quite nice lodgings with a Mrs Jones with two other Arts students
H Was it restrictive on work apart from the light being poor?
J Yes it was a little bit restrictive, but that was war time. It was a funny thing, some people didn't like you being students, they thought why shouldn't you be in the army, our sons are in the army and our daughters are in the army. There was always that little bit underlying it
H Was the chemistry class by 1943 largely female?
J One. For honours chemistry I was the only girl and the other six were men with George Burnett leading us.
H It was still unusual, in other words, for women to study chemistry?
J Yes I would think so. It was unusual when I went to ICI, there weren't so very many of us. I think it was harder because you had to justify yourself more than a man had to. You had to be better than a man.
H Yes, I understand this. Did you feel within the general university community that women students were still at a disadvantage in any way?
J No, I don't think so but we were kept very busy. A science student is more or less occupied from nine o'clock to 5 o'clock, there was a lot of practical work to put in, a lot of lectures done and then in Geology Saturday mornings it meant going out and doing field courses. I really enjoyed that. If I hadn't been a girl I wouldn't have minded carrying on doing Geology for a second year instead of doing Physics and Mathematics for the subsidiary subjects.
H Why do you think being a girl made a difference? Because the field courses were too strenuous?
J At that time you couldn't have gone abroad, they wouldn't have had a woman out in the Gulf for instance. I think even now it's not all that easy to be a woman geologist.
H Could I ask you what you recall about finance?
J Finance? We were very very poor.
H Can you recall?
J My father died of cancer in 1940 but I found when I went down to ICI in Billingham how lucky I was to have got to university. If I had lived in England I would not have got a university education.
H You got your grants from …?
J From the Angus Education Committee and the Carnegie Trust. I would not have had a university education if I had lived in England and quite a lot of the lads I had as research assistants were definitely university standard. Some of them did … eventually went and did external in London but living in Scotland I was given a university education which I am very thankful for.
H Can you recall how much your grant was?
J Very little, would it have been £50?
H It could well be, that seems a not untypical figure. Can you recall how much you paid for your digs?
J I can remember that, it was twenty five shillings a week and I think by the end it went up to thirty shillings and that was full board. We had full board, lunch and breakfast.
H So if your grant was £50 that would leave you a very slender margin. Did you have any other sources of income?
J No.
H Of course your father had died.
J Yes, my mother was widowed and my brother was seven. My sister was at university too. She came two years after me to do science as well.
H Did you work at all in vacations?
J Yes, a little bit, picking raspberries and potatoes, but there wasn't a great deal. I did volunteer to go down between but I wasn't called and I don't think my mother was all that keen because in London the bombing was on and it was tough so I wasn't encouraged to do that. Of course we did a summer term.
H Yes. You did that in both your years?
J We did that in 1942 just the one, so we graduated on 1 April 1943 instead of graduating in June.
H Yes, I'm a contemporary of yours.
J So one year there wasn't any time really for … When I was at school you would never have thought of … Nowadays people think of going to the top, they have a try for Oxford and Cambridge when you would never have even thought of it in 39, or even to go to an English university. You wouldn't because your school only went up to the Higher standard which is not the standard of the English A levels.
H It wasn't A levels it was Higher School Certificates so I think you might have got into an English university but I take your point.
J It was too expensive, you couldn't have afforded it. You had to choose one that was near. That's what strikes me about students nowadays, you're cutting down grants and you send students three hundred miles away. That's an obvious way that you could cut down the cost.
H You said earlier there was at least a choice among Scottish universities. You went to, would it be Laurencekirk Academy or …?
J I went to Brechin High School.
H Did most of the pupils from there go to Aberdeen or did they tend to make a choice?
J No, they went to Dundee. I didn't want to go to Dundee because … I would have gone to St Andrews but St Andrews didn't have all the courses. I came to Aberdeen because Aberdeen had everything on the campus. If you'd gone to say, St Andrews you wouldn't have been associated with the Medical School or Dental School where in Aberdeen all the faculties were represented, that's why I chose Aberdeen. I wouldn't have thought of Glasgow.
H Because it was too far?
J Glasgow is a little bit of a rough city isn't it, or it was at that time and most of the students in Glasgow were home based, more so than any of the other universities and Edinburgh was probably too expensive for me. With the course in Edinburgh it would have been better but it just happened because of the cost.
H Because living in Edinburgh would have been …?
J It would have been a lot more expensive. Aberdeen was reckoned very cheap to live in it because the landladies used to take summer boarders that was one of the reasons being a reasonable university. That's how I rejected St Andrews because … Most of my friends went to Dundee to teacher training so I wasn't really interested in doing an ordinary degree and then doing teacher training.
H You've given on the whole a slightly grim war time picture of your students days. Would you want to add anything to that?
J I think compared to student life now you can't say that we were particularly affluent.
H Certainly not.
J And the facilities, we had to go in any old digs and we had to find them.
H But leaving aside the comparison, would you say that it was a grim time in your life or a happy time?
J It was a happy time, yes. It was a happy time for war time. You must remember other people were having a very grim time and relative to that we were having a good time.
H Thank you very much indeed Mrs Jones.
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