| Administrative History | Dr. Stephen was a former Aberdeen University student. He was also President of the S.R.C. in its Jubilee year. |
| Description | Interview with Dr James S Stephen, recorded on 5 September 1986, by Dorothy Johnston
Transcript of Interview :
J Dr Stephen perhaps I could start by asking you why you chose Aberdeen as your university?
S Because I was living in the outskirts of Aberdeen, actually in Aberdeen itself, so it was obviously from financial point of view a sensible thing to do.
J Did you have any friends in a similar position who would have chosen to go elsewhere or was that very uncommon?
S It was very uncommon. Certainly a number of my friends did go direct either to Oxford or Cambridge but not to the Scottish universities.
J Had you family who had already been to Aberdeen University?
S Yes. My father and my grandfather were both graduates of Aberdeen and my brother was a three times a graduate, my sister was a graduate and aunts and uncles and one in particular, Fred Stephens, very brilliant and went on to Cambridge and got a first there, so I was surrounded.
J Indeed. Did that make you feel that you knew what to expect when you came to Aberdeen? Fairly confident about entering the university?
S Yes. My sister and my brother were both older than I was and I had lots of connections through them.
J Were they students at the time?
S They were students at the time. My brother was in Medicine and my sister was Honours English. She had just left before I came up to the university.
J What courses did you start with when you came to Aberdeen?
S English and History and I very soon had decided that History was the one in which I might succeed somewhere.
J So after the first year you decided on Honours History?
S Yes.
J You'd had Professor Jack?
S I had Professor Jack for English and Professor Terry. I was very lucky to have a last year of Professor Terry who was an international historian and a very gentlemanly person and he helped us when we came to do the university shows. His music was a great help to us and he came and conducted a rehearsal for us at His Majesty's Theatre which was not the kind of done thing for a professor of history.
J Was your choice of History rather than English anything to do with the personalities of the professors?
S Not really. I thought that my History marks were better than my English marks and I had always had a great interest in History. I preferred to read a biography or an autobiography rather than a novel
J Can you remember anything about any of your other lecturers in the History department?
S Professor J B Black he was very good for me because he was a disciplinarian and said to me now you certainly won't get firsts if you carry on doing as much outside work and running Tory elections so that was very helpful. Then of course we had Dr Cathy Gavin. She was one of ourselves and therefore we could speak to her in a way that we couldn't speak to the professor. Then there was Mr Henderson who was a very erudite man, very exact in everything that he said and did and was but he wasn't inspiring.
J When you said that Dr Gavin was one of you, what precisely do you mean?
S Well, we had known her in university shows and actually half a dozen of us in our togas attended her wedding and were ushers and we made up a choir.
J Would you have called her by her first name?
S No. Not inside the classroom.
J Relations between the staff and the students were always very formal were they?
S Yes.
J When Professor Terry came to the theatre would he call you by your first name?
S He was retired by that time and his great hobby was making rugs. I thought this rather odd when I went down to see him to see this white haired gentleman flicking a knife and producing wonderful rugs. But he was the authority in this country on Bach and the last day that he lectured to us he told us that he had been offered a bust of Bach by a German university I think and he could have it for a thousand pounds. So this produced laughter of course and he said "I didn't take it."
J But he was obviously a popular man with the students?
S Yes he was popular, but not as popular as Professor Jack who lectured in the room immediately above. Frequently there would be a loud burst of clapping or cheering or stamping of feet and Professor Terry would ask one of us to go up stairs and ask if Professor Jack could control his students.
J As far as the students being controlled is concerned can you tell me anything about the custom of ragging?
S There was an unfortunate incident in ragging in Marischal. This ragging, I don't know how long it had gone on but for many many years it was tradition that first year students would be ragged in some way or another. Unfortunately this student who was being dragged down the steps to what's called the Anatomy Department and his head was hitting each stone step on the way down and he was severely damaged. So the Court as well as the Senatus brought the matter up that ragging must stop. Now we had people like Gilbert Hamilton who was agin the government and a very strong personality who was the editor of Gaudie, creator of Gaudie I think, and they made it very difficult for me as president of the SRC taking up a strong stance that we were not to be dictated to by the Senatus and that ragging was to go on. So I thought of the idea if we could get the backing of the first year students then the famous Downie slaughter incident might be a point which would be popular with the students. What we did was that we marched them out to the cairn past King's College where Downie was supposed to have been interred or at least it was a cairn in memory of Downie. We took the first year students out there, some marching, some in lorries and we were all dressed up. I cut a lock off each student's head and we ceremonially placed this in front of Downie's cairn to show that the students were the bosses.
J That was your own idea was it?
S Yes. The first year students all co-operated with this. I spoke to them in the Union and then we dressed them up in the Union and painted them up and then we had like a torch light procession.
J Painted them?
S Yes.
J In war paint?
S Yes.
J Court and Senatus accepted this did they?
S Yes.
J I don't know the site of this cairn, can you recall where it is?
S It's where the late Dr Douglas Simpson stayed. The something Tower [Wallace Tower]
J Yes. It has for the moment escaped me too. I know exactly where you mean.
S It was quite a bit to go and it was quite an impressive thing. It wasn't carried on but it made the point and I happened to resign so to speak.
J So that happened one year?
S Yes and I don't know what happened after that.
J That was your last year?
S Yes. That was when I was president of the SRC.
J I think we will return to that in a minute. For the moment perhaps could I ask you about your living accommodation? Did you stay at home?
S I stayed at home.
J This presumably would have been the normal thing to do?
S Yes. About 90% I would have said.
J Did you live close enough to go home for your meals?
S Yes because I cycled from Queen's Cross over here and there weren't classes in the afternoon. Possibly 10 o'clock, eleven o'clock so there was no worry about that. Afterwards I borrowed my father's car quite a bit. We lived out in Cults and that was a bit further so the bicycle was not sufficient.
J Would there have been many students coming as far afield?
S Just about that distance, round about Bucksburn and Hazlehead and as far as Culter I would say.
J They would have come in generally by family transport?
S Yes. Frequently by bus because we had Bydaud buses and another and they used to race each other in from Culter. It was very exciting.
J How did you support yourself as a student?
S My parents did until I came back and did Divinity and my parents were dead and I had to live in digs in Carden Terrace and I was lucky to get a Drum bursary and that was vital.
J But you didn't have Carnegie money or …?
S No I didn't have a Carnegie grant just the Drum bursary.
J Was money something that students would tend to talk about much amongst themselves?
S Not really. There was the bursary comp and those with the better grades got the better bursaries. Then some people got bursaries from their schools and …
J I wondered about other students who were in the university at the same time, were you aware of some students not having enough money and being in hardship?
S Yes, but there weren't very many and I think that most people managed. There was support from the home and very often from families to help out. But I wouldn't have said that in our generation that there was a poverty line and that anyone had to give up because they hadn't enough money.
J Presumably they wouldn't have gone to the university in the first place had they not been able to see their way through?
S Yes I think that's correct.
J Were students generally concerned about how they might find jobs when they were finished?
S Very much so. I qualified as a teacher but I never got a job apart from part-time work with Tudor House School which is now Angusfield and I deputised for a number of months for the headmaster. Little did I think at that time of becoming a prep school teacher. I think I would if I had another shot. Then I had quite a spell at Aberdeen Grammar School where I'd been a pupil when there was an epidemic of measles and the school boarding house had to close down and I was employed there to teach the lot from six years old up to eighteen. That was quite an interesting experience. Then I had a spell at Robert Gordons College just to keep the balance. I had six months there and that completed my teaching career. It was quite helpful to becoming a minister.
J Would you have carried on with teaching at that point had you got an attractive permanent post?
S Yes I probably would have.
J Did you want to stay in Aberdeen?
S Not particularly. I did apply for jobs outside Aberdeen.
J Was it something that your fellow students had strong feelings about?
S Yes. We all had because we were all pretty well on the unemployed list as far as teachers were concerned.
J So you would all have travelled if you had found jobs elsewhere?
S Yes.
J The period that you were at university and of course your own involvement in the SRC must have brought you into contact with what was going on in a wider sphere. Do you think that the students when you were there were politically aware?
S Yes we were very much politically aware. We had supporters of all the parties and we had debates and when it came to the rectorial it was really a political fight. We tried to make it on personality but it always turned on politics.
J Were the candidates themselves normally associated with different national parties?
S Yes and no. Because the first one that I had to deal with was Sir Arthur Keith, well he was outside politics and when we came to Chesterton he was a Liberal and Walter Elliott was a Tory of course though his wife was a liberal.
J And people would know this and that's the basis on which they would make their decision?
S Yes. Of course we always had a debate at which colours were pretty obviously shown and then the SNP they came up as an alternative.
J You said that you had run the election campaign?
S Yes. We had a committee of which I was chairman to the two ones in which I was chiefly interested. I was just in my first year when Sir Arthur Keith was elected. I remember the SRC was invited to a lunch in Kennaway's. I remember that and it was Chesterton and Walter Elliott, that was a very close run thing. But it was very much political, although the Liberals were not fighting as Liberals they were obviously for culture.
J Personality and culture?
S Yes.
J You were involved in that presumably ex officio as SRC president?
S No, it had nothing to do with the SRC.
J It hadn't?
S Not really, it was individuals
J So how was the committee chosen?
S Pretty well a group of friends would decide.
J So you would decide on a candidate you would like to invite?
S Yes.
J And then you would campaign for him?
S Yes. Or her. When we were Divinity students we had Sybil Thorndyke, when in the middle of the war she was not a very each one to work but it was a very interesting one, and of course a question of pacifism came into it because they knew perfectly well that she was a pacifist. We didn't say that she was a pacifist and we didn't say that she wasn't.
J But you knew that that was the way?
S Yes and that was very interesting meeting her personally in Edinburgh.
J Was she keen to …?
S She was very keen and promised to come to Aberdeen. She was a very charming person.
J In that particular activity did you have to co-operate with the college authorities? Would they have to be aware of who you were asking to be a candidate?
S No.
J It was entirely up to the students?
S Yes.
J We have really not touched at all on your extra curricula activities, partly because I know there is so much to be said, and I know of your SRC involvement of course. I wonder if you could say just a little bit about the camps that you mentioned in your letter.
S The camps at Carrbridge were something entirely new. It had never come up before and never been considered and Douglas Emslie, who was in charge of travel I think in the SRC, he and I went up to Carrbridge. First of all we went as far as Inverness and we met the captain or secretary of the Boys Brigade who agreed to hire all the equipment, tents, everything and we laid out our theory before the SRC and then we corresponded with the other universities. The commandant of the whole thing was Neil Campbell who it is very interesting to note - he was one of the guys who ran with Eric Liddle in order to break that wonderful record. He became the big chief of the whole thing and we had a good contingent from Glasgow and Edinburgh and a few from St Andrews. The St Andrews people were very enthusiastic and we got this field, which the Boys Brigade hired every year, and I suppose we hired it for three or four years and then the war came.
J How long did the camp last?
S About a week and perhaps a couple of days setting up. We got two cooks from the army in Aberdeen and they stayed with us the whole way through the four years of the camp. Just tonight Tom Hutchinson said to me you know I always associate you with Carrbridge and these camps it was a wonderful time that we had and we mixed with other universities and we had our own concert which was a good thing of course to the people of Carrbridge to go to.
J When exactly did it happen in the year? Was it in the middle, early vacation?
S I couldn't tell you. I think it would have been July. Of course we climbed the various peaks and that sort of thing.
J And the finances always worked did they?
S Yes, it's was amazing how things just seemed to work out pretty well to the last penny. We didn't have much to carry on from one year to the another.
J You would have to cost it fairly accurately?
S Yes. There are so many funny stories about it as to how one young lady who had friends in the fish trade. They sent out fish every day to us and not to hurt her feelings in the dead of night one or two of the boys dug a hole and buried the fish because it didn't keep.
J I think that perhaps we ought to …
S It's enough
END OF INTERVIEW
|