| Description | Interview with Mrs Madeleine Simms (nee Zimmerman) recorded on 26 September 1986
by Jennifer Carter
Transcript of the Interview :
[Mrs Simms later corrected the transcript and made some additions. These additions appear in square brackets]
C Could we start, Mrs Simms, by asking what drew you to Aberdeen when you came in 1948?
S Curiously enough it was entirely by chance because it was still the period when it was quite difficult to get into university if you were coming straight from school, because there was an ex-service quota and they were given preference. In my school we put in for lots of universities in a fairly arbitrary way in the hope that somebody would take us.
C Of course there was no UCCA clearing system in those days, you applied for each university individually.
S That's right. The first acceptance I got was from Aberdeen. I was terribly excited and I didn't actually know where it was and when I looked it up I realised it was further away from home even than Edinburgh which I hadn't realised I was so ignorant. But I was very excited and I immediately accepted, but it was entirely by chance.
C Home was where?
S In London. I'd never really been that far away from home and Scotland was very foreign in those days. My parents had never been to Scotland.
C They were from Europe somewhere?
S Yes they were. They were central European Jewish refugees so this [Scotland] was a totally mysterious environment, terribly exciting and very foreign. I remember taking the night train and arriving in the morning and somebody had painted a notice on one of the railway bridges saying 'English get out' and I thought that was quite extraordinary because I suddenly realised that this was another country and people coming from England were regarded as foreigners. I met people [Aberdeen students] who had actually been to France but had never been to England. Lots of people had been to Paris but not actually been to London and that amazed me.
C By this date you yourself felt, I suppose, completely English did you?
S Yes.
C You had no memories of Europe?
S No. I was actually born in Vienna but came over when I was a few months old even though I went back to Vienna every summer to stay with my grandparents until 1937. So I spoke a bit of German but by that time I really felt I identified with the English and there weren't awfully many English students [here] then so we formed a bit of a clique I think at the beginning, [in the] first year. And also because so many of the [local] students actually came from the city and lived at home and [while] we were always moving from one set of digs to the other. I remember a joke column in Gaudie which said just at the end [of] every term said "Miss Zimmerman has moved again." I changed digs every single term until my last year when I spent the whole year at the Bridge of Don Hotel.
C Just across the bridge?
S Yes.
C I think it's called something else now.
S Full of students it was then. 'Viewfield' or something I think it's called and that was the only time I really stayed for a full year. It was a very strange kind of environment.
C Did you have problems understanding people? Was the local dialect very strongly spoken then?
S It was certainly a very marked dialect but I think I did understand it quite well. [Even the Shetlanders with Scandinavian names!]
C What was your first impression of the university? Fairly small still in those days?
S Very small. I think, and this is purely from memory, but I think it was less than 1500 students altogether including all the institutes, postgraduates, the lot. The Arts Faculty was really very tiny and I think in my honours Moral Philosophy class there weren't more than six students which is incredible. We were very lucky in that period because we had the ex-servicemen there, they were still around and that gave a lot of interest and depth. I mean they weren't just a whole collection of school children. Of course they tended to run everything, the publications and the newspapers and the entertainments and so on. In my first year anyway there were still quite a lot of them around.
C Did that mean women students took rather a back seat, or was that not one of the consequences?
S Well I think it was part of that generation anyway, women tended to take a back seat, although possibly less in a Scottish university than in the English ones because there were women [students in elective office]. When I was in my third year I was on the Students Representative Council - I was the third year Arts woman representative.
C So you were a reserved constituency as it were?
S Yes. Joyce Baird who was Professor [Dugald] Baird's daughter she was the other [one in my year]. I was hoping she would be here with you.
C No, she's not.
S I don't remember as it were campaigning very hard, I think it was a put up job. I think we were lucky too in the ex-service staff we had because we had an unusually brilliant collection of young lecturers who were passing through and I remember John Holloway who was subsequently Professor of English at Cambridge who was a most dazzling lecturer. I remember going to all his Milton lectures for about three years, wherever he was giving these lectures, I would go and sit and listen to it: also [his] Spencer [lectures]. Then there was Denys Munby who then went to Nuffield College and he was an economic historian. A marvellous teacher and very sadly he was murdered in Istanbul on a holiday, a most frightful thing about 15 years ago. He was an interesting man and he also gathered a collection of students together. We used to meet once a week and have cocoa and a bun in his room and just talk about anything. That was really wonderful. It was I think the most educational thing that every happened to me at that age because there were also a few medical students and people from all over the place.
C Self selected or invited?
S Invited by him, but I think people could bring friends along if they wanted to. We met for about a year or two and talked philosophical things about religion and politics and anything anyone wanted to talk about. It really was marvellous because on the whole I found the Scottish students rather reserved.
C I wondered about that, whether the local ones were rather young and rather unsophisticated to your eyes then?
S Yes in a way. For one thing I was about eighteen and a lot of them were seventeen.
C Barely seventeen I imagine when they came up.
S Yes. So I think from that point of view having quite a lot of ex-servicemen was good. But this was a very interesting group. I remember Iain Cuthbertson was in it. He was an actor. [And Sandy Gall, later a distinguished war reporter].
C And has subsequently been Rector of the university, of course, and a very good one too.
S Alan Hall was here who became a friend of mine and a whole lot of interesting people. Then there was Saul Rose They [the university] set up a department of International Relations and it was just him that year and I took that as an additional course and I went to that for the whole year and it was fascinating. He then went to Oxford, he's at St Anthony's, probably retired now. Antony Flew was my Philosophy tutor, who was very dynamic in those days. He's become extremely right-wing and a Black Paper man but in those days he'd just left the Communist party [I seem to remember] and he was very radical and a marvellous teacher. There was one or two other people who were quite remarkable. The extraordinary thing was the amount of time they gave us. Every week I wrote either an English or a Philosophy essay, and they were supposed to give us one hour, and I remember sometimes spending the whole afternoon with either Tony Flew or John Holloway discussing this essay. Such luxury now when you think, but the classes were so tiny.
C You did what, honours in English and Philosophy?
S Yes that's right and I did Political Economy (and that's how I met Denys Munby) as a subsidiary subject and Logic and Metaphysics which was taught by Dr Bednarowski whom I've just been having dinner with. Then I did the International Relations just out of interest.
C You could pick and choose your syllabus fairly freely could you? You were steered through it by advisers, regents or anybody, or did you just make your own choices?
S I came up not quite knowing what I was going to do and the day after I got here decided I would do just Philosophy, Mental Philosophy I think it was called then and I wrote home and told my father. He was actually furious and he wrote back immediately and said you must do at least one thing that's useful, that can get you a job. So I did joint honours with English. Because he said "You could always teach." So he didn't mind if [provided] I did joint honours but he wasn't going to have … and in those days we were deferential to our parents.
C An unemployed philosopher we could do without? Was Donald McKinnon professor then?
S Yes he was. He was most extraordinary, I'd never met anyone like him at all.
C He still lives in Aberdeen by the way if you want to meet him.
S I would love to meet him actually. But he was a most extraordinary person and especially for Aberdeen. I think in Oxford he probably would have passed unnoticed but in Aberdeen he was, and I thought he was the most extraordinary person I'd every met. We used to have these agonised lectures when he used to bang his head against the wall and say 'oh my God, it's all so difficult'. I remember we had one term when we were talking about the meaning of words and he suddenly asked me to comment on the difference between them. He said 'if you do something that gives you pleasure how is that quite different from being detained at Her Majesty's pleasure'? I was absolutely transfixed with horror at having to comment on these …
C Sounds like rather the early days of linguistic philosophy
S It was not in fact [all that] long after the publication of Language, truth and logic so that really dates us. Gabriel Marcel came up and gave the Gifford Lectures I remember, and Richard Hare came up and gave a series of lectures, [and John Wisdom,] and then Tony Flew turned up and of course he was at the other extreme because whereas McKinnon was a Hegalian, Flew was very much a positivist. There was a young man David, can't remember what his second name was, [Wright] he became a clergyman but he was the assistant lecturer in the department at that time, just for a year or two, and it was a very lively department actually.
C Sounds as if you got a very good academic bargain actually?
S Amazing. All my friends in London said what an extraordinary thing to go to Aberdeen, it's miles away and what do they teach up there. Actually a lot of my friends went to London University. David Wright, he was a very nice man. We also used to have some evenings of discussion and so on with him. My closest friend was at LSE and she never saw, although ostensibly taught by very eminent people like Laski and so on, she never actually saw or spoke to any of them. Whereas we had oodles of time from all these very bright young men who didn't stay very long, but this was the post-war period, they'd come back from the army. I often look back and think what good fortune. We also had some very eccentric teachers. There was Bickersteth who was professor of English and who hated women. He used to say these awful things in lectures and of course he said if any of the ladies want to walk out they can. That was before I became a feminist. But looking back on it from now I think I would have stormed out. He would have been crucified if he'd said half the things, the awful jokes he always made about women.
C Worse than John Vincent?
S I think so yes.
C That's all fascinating. As I say it sounds like a good academic environment, what was it like socially? Was it a bit plain and dull?
S Yes. It didn't exist socially. I was used to quite a lot of social life in north London.
C You were North London Collegiate were you?
S I was at St Paul's which was a very kind of sociable and gregarious place and a rather intellectual place. Social life [here] just didn't exist, [except for] it was high tea. I couldn't get over that, so I joined all the clubs I could and that was a sort of substitute social life. In no time I was running the Socialist Society, the Philosophical Society and curiously enough the Peace with China Movement. There was a communist called Bob Hunter, he was much older, he was an ex-serviceman and he found a nice wet Liberal like me and he made me chairman of the Peace with China Movement to my astonishment. I remember leading an extraordinary march down Union Street. We all had banners. Alan Hall was just remembering that we all had banners about Peace with China. Then we got together and formed the 'Robeson for Rector' Committee. There was a very eccentric man called Lionel Kenner, and Alan Hall and myself and a whole lot of other left wing kind of intellectuals and there was this extraordinary rectorial battle they had in the Marischal Quad. It was all men of course, the women didn't go along with this. There weren't very many Robeson people but they did rather well, they managed to lay out everybody.
C He was allowed to stand as Rector was he?
S Yes. The point was that it was during the McCarthyite period and he wasn't allowed to leave America and the point of trying to get him elected Rector was that they would have had to give him an exit visa to come an accept the honour, but of course he didn't win. I'm trying to remember who it was [who the candidates were]. There was a local landowner [Captain] Farquharson Lang of Inver[cauld] something, Captain Farquharson and there was somebody else - Jimmy Edwards, he was a comedian and he won. We were furious.
C Why I was surprised about Robeson was the point about British nationality and that wasn't raised evidently?
S No, not at all. It [the university] was I suppose a rather conservative institution in those days but I think the students were allowed a lot of latitude. There was the Students Representative Council which had a certain amount of power which I think compared to most English universities at that date was pretty advanced. In my third year I joined that and that was great fun, we bossed everybody around.
C Did you hold office on the SRC?
S Yes I did. [I was on the Grants Committee and] I was Director of Vacation Employment and I had a great time at the Royal Highland Show. I used to provide beaters for people who went shooting.
C Did that mean that you stayed up during vacations as well?
S Yes, sometimes, just for a few weeks. But the digs were all very basic. When I tell my children now how we lived then they just can't believe it. £2.50 a week we paid for bed and breakfast and evening meal. I think I even paid less in my first year. I went along today to one of the places I lived in, was in Albyn Place, that was in my affluent period because that was a rather posh place to live, and that I think was £2.50. It now seems to be [offices of] a firm to do with the oil industry.
C How did you find these digs? Was there a system for helping students or were you on your own?
S We got lists but they weren't terribly useful lists, because usually the people had died years ago so one tended to have to come up and rush round or try and grab somebody else's [digs] somebody who was leaving. Some places were very basic indeed, they had no hot water and it was incredibly cold.
C Did you tend to have single rooms or was sharing the order of the day?
S We did have single rooms. But I remember the cold because there was of course no central heating or anything like that and they didn't like you to use much electricity either. I think you were rather restricted and you had to be in by certain times. Landladies were fairly tough in those days.
C No keys?
S I don't think we had keys, no.
C You literally had to get home for the high tea or miss it, or get a great row from your landlady if you weren't there.
S That's right yes. You had to be in [even] if you went out afterwards to all these clubs and things. I always had to be in by half past ten or eleven. I was recalling that there was just one coffee bar that stayed open late that you could go to after these meetings, and that was in Holburn Viaduct or Circus or …?
C Or perhaps in Holburn itself because there was one I remember when I first came still there.
S But it's gone now.
C Donald's Ice Cream Parlour was the great place there too.
S Of course there was Jack's but that was in Old Aberdeen.
C So Aberdeen as a city was somewhat behind London which by then I imagine was well into coffee bars was it?
S Yes. There was actually nothing apart from Jack's and of course the hotels which we couldn't afford but after the Philosophical Society meetings Dr Bednarowski used to lead us off to the Caledonian Hotel. We would sit for hours having one cup of coffee but students themselves wouldn't have gone to hotels because they were too expensive.
C How well off or ill off were most students of your acquaintance?
S They were very badly off. Although I never thought of myself as being well off at all, I think compared to most of the Scottish students I probably was better off.
C Did you have a London scholarship or did your parents support you?
S No. My parents supported me but they weren't particularly well off but Aberdeen was so cheap compared to London. Wages were so depressed, it was years before oil. I think I probably had about £4 a week or something to live on of which £2.50 went on the digs, but you could live quite comfortably on thirty bob a week and student union meals were 1/11d I think.
C You ate at the Union then did you?
S Yes or at Old Aberdeen where I think it was in the Elphinstone Hall.
C Oh that system was already operating where staff and students all went in, more or less promiscuously as it were, and sat anywhere?
S Yes that's right.
C That was a very good system.
S It was great yes.
C Stew and mince and things?
S That's right and I seem to remember rabbit and fish fingers. It wasn't a great diet but it was alright. It was incredibly cheap.
C What about entertainment then, there was virtually nothing? The cinema was that popular?
S There was one or two cinemas but I don't ever remember going to them. What I do remember is that one of the cinemas in Union Street had a very genteel tea shop above it and we used to occasionally when feeling enormously rich, go and have a sort of Fuller's cake type tea. It was all waitress service.
C Did students wear togas in those days to help keep warm?
S Yes they did. We wore them in our first year but you bought them second hand and then rather discarded them. When I was on the SRC I then had to retrieve a toga because there were certain, I don't know, processions but I think it was beginning to die out then. Although I was pleased to see the students here wearing them.
C They only wear them now for special occasions. Was there feeling between King's and Marischal College or didn't that exist in those days?
S Curiously enough we lived on the whole such a very insulated life at King's. I was in digs every now and then with medical students and occasionally with engineers and foresters, all of whom seemed to be drunk all the time, I don't remember any of them ever being sober.
C So they had enough money for that?
S In fact there was somebody sent down my first year for distilling his own whisky in some digs in town, his enraged landlady discovered it. But [my friends among] the Arts students lived almost entirely in Aberdeen [digs] and it was very kind of incestuous really, we all knew each other very very well. We spent four years in this small group and we didn't really mix an awful lot, which I think was a loss. I think that was a great shame because it so happened that the things I did later brought me back to Aberdeen about 15 years after, about in the mid-60s I came back.
C Is this when you were involved in abortion law reform?
S Yes. And of course a lot of these chaps were consultants [by then] and I met a lot of them and I thought what a shame I had never really known them. I didn't even know Sir Dugald Baird in those days although when I came back I stayed in his house at 'Fae-me-well' outside the town [at Dyce]. He was just a sort of name to me [then] really. We lived rather compartmentally and it was a strange form of existence I suppose because I didn't have any local connections at all. When I came back to London the reality of having been here almost receded in a curious way, I sometimes wondered if I'd really been here because it was such a separate existence.
C Did you ever go into local peoples homes for example?
S Very rarely. I remember there were two people, Michael Jamieson who went on to [teach at] Sussex and George Henderson who is now I think professor of History of Art at Cambridge. They had a joint twenty-first birthday party and we had a great dinner at Jimmy Hays it was called in those days, the Royal Athenaeum, which was a rather elegant and beautiful kind of place.
C Subsequently burnt out.
S Yes, very sad. There were one or two occasions like that, special celebrations, which were great but there was really no social life in the way that there was in London. I used to think how strange. People occasionally met for high tea and of course one drank an awful lot of coffee at Jack's in groups.
C The men must have gone to pubs, or where to get their drinks I wonder, which obviously you were not involved in, as I imagine women would not have gone into pubs in Aberdeen then?
S No, and they were pretty sleazy I think some of them. I remember there was one down from the Students Union, St Machar or something. I mean no women would be seen dead in any of those places. I suppose I must have gone to one or two pubs but I don't actually remember, it wasn't normally done.
C Apart from the activities you've described, the SRC and the Philosophical Society and so on, what else was going on that you either participated in or observed, for example was it a sporty university, or a religious university.
S Oh yes there was quite a lot of religion. I found that [the owners of] my first digs were a very Calvinist couple, and they discovered that I was Jewish and they found this much more acceptable, that they said 'so glad you're not Catholic'. I thought that was very funny and then I could see why, the sort of Old Testament culture really pervaded the house. I felt very at home there because they were rather tee-total and in a way it had certain similarities with my own home which I could recognise. [But] It was much more sabbatarian. On Sundays everything closed down and that was quite difficult for students in digs, because there was nothing much to do. I joined the Cairngorms Club, we used to go walking, that was lovely. There was a riding stables, I used to ride sometimes, that was at Hazlehead. I used to go for long walks a lot. I remember thinking then how very beautiful Old Aberdeen was and then I wondered when I was coming up [here] whether it was because I was young at the time, I hadn't seen a lot, but I must say coming back now it is so beautiful.
C You were right in your perception.
S I was right. All my memories of things have turned out to be right, I think that is quite interesting.
C Suggests you have very accurate recall too which is good.
S Not so much of the specific things but what I felt about them at the time. Certainly the quality of life in Old Aberdeen is just superb, those wonderful parks. I remember the Botanic Garden and that lovely park, Seaton Park, beautiful. One term I was in digs somewhere round there and I used to walk [to King's] every morning …
C Probably when you were at Bridge of Don you walked down through the park.
S Yes and I remember thinking how incredible to have this, and there was never anybody there. Indeed when I went there today there was nobody there. I thought fancy having all this to ourselves.
C Coming back to this religion thing, was the chapel on Sunday a sort of feature of university life?
S It was rather yes. I didn't go except once … when I was in the SRC we processed around …
C The kirking of the SRC or something of that account.
S That's right yes. I've got a picture of that at home. Do you have a complete collection here of those sort of photographs because I've got a lot at home lying around.
C I think the Archives would be extremely interested if you could spare them. I've no doubt that we've got a lot but whether we've got a complete collection I don't know.
S There are some interesting old photos, I should have sorted them out.
C Because Principal Taylor it would have been in your day, he was a very sort of strong church man, wasn't he?
S That's right. I remember once he gave a reception or party or something for the SRC, I think he did this every year and it was very formal indeed and we were all on our best behaviour and we wore very respectable clothes and all the men wore white shirts and dark ties. We stood in a circle and shook hands and spoke in very low voices. Such social life as there was was very formal and people dressed up for it.
C Even the good contacts which you mentioned earlier with younger staff didn't on the whole extend to going to their homes it seems?
S No, not very much. Except for Denys Munby but that was in a sense almost a seminar, it wasn't really a social function at all.
C Because in some generations of the university there was obviously a lot of entertainment by the staff for students in their own homes but this wasn't obviously a feature of your time.
S No, I don't think so.
C Possibly because there was still rationing in 49 was there?
S I think there probably was, yes. I used to go regularly to John Holloway's house, he lived in College Bounds, opposite King's, but that was for tutorials. I don't ever remember being entertained socially.
C Or meeting the families or anything?
S No. In the four years with Donald McKinnon I never remember, I knew he lived in Chanonry, but I never remember going [there]. They called us Miss whatever and we always called them Professor. It was very funny because it so happened that many many years later I got a Leverhume Senior Scholarship, about 12 years ago, when I was in my mid forties and went to Bedford College London to do a degree in Medical Sociology and I was absolutely stunned by the professor on the first day saying call me 'Margot,' - Margot Jeffreys. I though how extraordinary, it was so informal.
C On first name terms?
S Absolutely, within a day. It was so different. But it was delightful because there was this great informality. I was the oldest person there by years, most of them [the students] were young enough to be my children, although they were all postgraduates, [doing] MSc, but they were all very nice to me and I though if we'd had a middle aged women among us students we would have thought this was most extraordinary and you couldn't have merged in the way …
C It would have worried you as a student?
S Yes, because I think the distinctions between age …[of the differentials] It was a very hierarchical society [then]. A tremendous distinction between the professors and the lecturers, and the assistants and the postgraduate students and the students. It was a real hierarchy and you knew your place and kept it.
C One last area, how politically conscious were your compatriots? You described yourself variously as a wishy-washy liberal or as one of the lefties.
S It's quite a complicated story. There was the Socialist Society and in the second year I became the secretary of it and somebody came down from London from the Student Labour Federation which was Communist, but it was a Communist front in order to make sure that we were keeping left. I was actually rather right wing Labour and there was a tremendous row and the thing split into the Socialist Society and the Labour Club. Actually this happened in the year after, it was dissolved in my year and I remember Joyce Baird and Stanley Strachan and myself broke away with a group of people and this women came from London, from Camden Town where they had the office, called June Jacobs and she was sent to bring us to heel and we had the most fearful to do. She stayed in Aberdeen for a week and left in a furious temper because we hadn't come round and we had a great correspondence which I must have somewhere at home. This was of course happening all over the country at that time.
C That's very interesting that there was at least a small group that was political enough to attract London attention.
S There was the Robeson Committee which was in fact a Labour group and of course the Peace with China which was a mixed popular front thing. I think it was actually a very tiny proportion. It was the same hundred students really who did all these things.
C Were you the only politically active group? People were conservative - this was small c Conservative?
S I remember hearing Robert Boothby speak at the Conservative Club, he was very charming and delightful, and I remember him saying that he had been thought of as a promising young man all his life and here he was middle aged he said and they still talked about him as a promising young man. There were Liberals too but they weren't terribly active. There was the Scottish Nationalist Group too and there was a man called Oliver Brown, [who was a national chairman] perhaps I just like marching, I remember marching with them down Union Street. [I can't think why now.]
C Any aspects of your student days that you would have liked to talk about and we haven't? It's been a most splendid series of reminiscences.
S I think we've covered quite a lot.
C Most grateful indeed, thank you very much.
END OF INTERVIEW
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