| Administrative History | Dr. Catherine Gavin was a distinguished Scottish writer and graduate of the University. She was an Assistant in History 1932-1934 and 1941-1943, She was a newspaper correspondent, and was awarded the 1939-1945 Star and the France and Germany Star. In 1944, as a war correspondent, Dr Gavin was accredited to Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, and for nine months alternated between combat reporting, and covering the complex political situation in Paris. She was present at the German surrender at Rheims in may 1945, and was later decorated for her war efforts.Catherine Gavin dedicated her book "A Dawn of Splendour", published in 1990, to George MacNicol, the then Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University. Sadly, Dr Gavin died in 1999. Although in failing health, she made a final visit to the University, from her home in San Francisco, earlier that same year. |
| Description | Interview with Dr Catherine Gavin recorded on 13 November 1986, by Patricia Parkin
Transcript of Interview :
P Dr Gavin what was Aberdeen like in your student days?
G First of all it was a very small university compared with the large university it is today. I believe there were just thirteen hundred students and a very small proportion of those ran the university from the student point of view and the rest just stood back and watched and listened and took their degrees.
P Were the academic standards high, low, middling , was there a great range between intelligences?
G We believed it was very high and in certain subjects it was indeed extremely high. In English Literature which is where I was first enrolled, it had always had a very high standard. I went up at sixteen hoping to study English Literature and History Honours. In those days there were no cohorts of people giving you advice and giving you grants. What happened was, your mother went to talk to the professor. My mother did this and they told her that at sixteen I was much too young to start on an Honours course. So I had a great piece of good luck, I did a year studying French and Latin and getting these subsidiary subjects out of the way and preparing for my real beginning as a student.
P Why did you switch to History?
G History has always been my particular passion. I really cared for my History studies much more than for my English Literature studies and admirably as the latter was taught.
P Tell me about the social life at the university? Were you all good girls and stayed in at night or did you go out and enjoy yourselves?
G I think some of us went out at night. But to go back to my start when I was so very young, my parents, and I was living at home, exercised quite a strict discipline on my social life and I was smart enough to play myself in very quietly. First year students or bajanellas as they were called were not expected to start throwing their weight about in any of the societies. I got to go to a few Saturday evening hops and I got right from the beginning to go to the social part of the university that pleased and interested me the most, the Debating Society, the Debater we called it. It was founded in the year of revolutions 1848.
P Who were your great influences?
G Influences you mean academically or socially?
P Academically.
G In those days we greatly respected our professors. They were set far above us. We were there to learn and they to teach. You would no more have dreamed of arguing with them than you would have dreamed of arguing with shall we say the leading Presbyterian minister in the city. They were older men. Sometimes it can happen that a professor's not all that much older than his students. When I became an assistant to the professor myself I was I think two years older than my students. But as for the professors in my day they were decidedly older men. Professor Jack in English and Professor Charles Sandford Terry in History were venerated by us, but above all was the Principal, the great Principal Sir George Adam Smith. We quailed in his presence, we thought he was so marvellous.
P Did you mix socially with the academics, your lecturers and teachers?
G Absolutely never. Professor Jack used to give a tea party once a term which was a terrifying experience because first of all he asked us literary questions. He used to produce pictures of eminent writers of the past and we had to identify them. The only one we ever knew was Tolstoi because of his Russian peasant blouse and we committed the usual kid's sin of staying far too long. We used to come out on the street and say we stayed too long and it was true.
P Once you were ensconced at university and as you were working extremely hard, just tell me more about the social life, how it took place, what happened?
G Once I'd got into my stride and had even plucked up my courage to speak in the Debater, which of course I wouldn't have dreamed of doing until the beginning of my second year, then I became very active in a number of societies. I was an SRC representative. I was secretary of the Dramatic Society and I did a great deal of acting. A little later time in my career I was in the very first charities show, the big charities show, it was called 'Northern Lights'. I played in the first one of all 'Northern Lights' in the old Palace Theatre in Aberdeen and afterwards we graduated to that splendid theatre, His Majesty's. I played in all in three 'Northern Lights' and I had in the last two shows a wonderful partner called Stephen Mitchell. We played low comedy mostly I'm sorry to say though they often gave me a chance to put on a pretty dress and come out and sing a song with a lot of help from the conductor Bernard Eddie who used to strike just one note to give me the note and then we got on fine with the 32-piece orchestra. Stephen Mitchell afterwards made a name for himself in the London theatre as an impresario. He'd taken a Law degree but obviously 'Northern Lights' was far more important to him than his Law studies. Then I was very active in the political world. To begin with when I went up first at sixteen the university was apolitical you might say. The men back from the first war were not interested in politics. Unlike some other universities they didn't become all socialistic because of what they'd gone through but were in fact rather conservative than otherwise.
P Why was that?
G I don't know. They were older men, they were men in their twenties. The famous Eric Linklater, a great graduate of ours for instance was twenty four when I was sixteen. So we hardly met. Then my day came round and by the time my day came round the university was more political. When I was secretary of the Conservative Club we had a lot of trouble in getting the great Earl of Birkenhead elected as our Lord Rector. In fact we only put him in with a majority of seven votes which was pretty near. Whereas my other great friend and influence at varsity was a man called Charles Brown who was the president of the Conservative Club when I was the secretary and he was my friend for life and also my solicitor and I miss him very much. He was a great influence in the whole legalistic world of Aberdeen.
P Tell me more about the political life of the university. Was it contentious when the university became more political? Was it a rowdy battle between conservatives and socialists or was it mostly conservative?
G It's rather hard to say. I think the result of that rectorial election proves that the left was creeping up. Although it was a difficult election, you had Birkenhead who was an Englishman and a conservative on one side and Sir Archibald Sinclair who was afterwards the Earl of Thurso on the other and John Masefield the poet. So it was a tricky bit of politics because when the left saw they were going to be defeated they threw their votes to Masefield. In other words we learned pretty sharply a few years out from the start of things that you had to play a clever game of politics if you aimed to win.
P Dr Gavin why did you decide on French History as your major subject?
G That was because of the influence of my History professor, Charles Sandford Terry. I should say in all fairness that Professor Terry was more interested in the history of music than he was in the history of our country or of the world. He was a great biographer and celebrant of Johannes Sebastian Bach and of course we had absolutely no conversation together. I've tried to explain, you just didn't talk to them, they were God, they said it and you wrote it down in your notebook and you believed it. But Professor Terry was very kind to me and when I won a Carnegie Scholarship in History after I had graduated and actually sought his advice. I got a first in History and in English Literature.
P How many firsts were there that year in History?
G One, me. Nowadays, I discovered only a month or two ago in 1986, that they don't publish the names of the first class Honours, second class Honours, third class Honours, they're just all lumped together as Honours, because it would hurt the feelings I was told of those who took ordinary degrees. But in my highly competitive youth you had to have that first or perish. Well I got it alright and the scholarship to follow and naturally asked Professor Terry what should I do now. I had been particularly interested in French Studies. The special subject from my Honours degree was The History of France 1815-1871, so Professor Terry said now nobody has written anything about Louis Phillippe, King of the French 1830-1848 why don't you write a thesis on that subject? This was accepted by the Carnegie people and so a life was moulded by a professor's word.
P Had you been to France at that time?
G No never.
P Do you speak French?
G I not telling quite the truth there I had been as a visitor, tourist I will not say, but this was when the Carnegie Scholarship was in prospective and I knew that this would happen probably and it did. I thought then that Paris was the most wonderful city in the world, and the history of France the most wonderful subject in the world, and after that it was very easy to get a reader's card in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and to be admitted to the Sorbonne and from that day to this I've been writing about France.
P A love affair?
G Yes.
P And then?
G Then, Professor Terry having started me off in this career had come up to the time of his retirement and a new professor reigned in his stead whose name was John Bennett Black and he was a great influence on my life and also a great influence on historical studies at the university. He was the first man who ever suggested that American History was a valid subject, and another professor who assisted later became Professor Andrew Browning from Glasgow, he had the same idea and these two men were pioneers in their field. It was quite absurd how professors used to go on and on for ever about the Asyrians and never said a word about the Americans. All we knew about the Americans was that they'd had a revolution, naughty fellows, and had had a civil war, serves them right, and that was all. But Professor Black made it a subject for his Honours students right from the start, that there should be a class, an Honours degree in American History, or an Honours subject and I'm glad to say that I made a bequest to the university for a prize in American History because I married an American and I think it's nice that we should have some sort of reciprocal arrangement. My husband has left a prize in French History to Princeton University so it's a type of counter fertilisation. But to go back to me all those years ago, Professor Black became the professor and he found me as an appendage you might say, he had to supervise the finish of my PhD and he was very good to me. I got the PhD and also to my huge surprise I got an offer of publication for what I had written. I didn't try to do a thing. At that time a publishing house called Methuen had a talent scout, very well known, a Dr E V Rieu known sometimes from the poem as the gallant Rieu and he was what they called a talent scout. I knew nothing about him, out of the blue came an offer to publish. I remember the advance on royalties was £35, a fortune. In 1933 a fortune and of course a great asset to be published.
P What was the title of your thesis?
G The title of the book was called Louis Philippe, predictably Louis Philippe, King of the French. Then Professor Black asked me to be his assistant, it all worked round from there. I was always very very interested in politics and shortly after that I stood for parliament and was predictably defeated by the great James Maxton. All my life from then until the beginning of the war I tried to play off these two things one against the other, the academic life and the political life. It made for a very active and very full life and I enjoyed it immensely.
P Could you tell me about the impact of the war on the university and on you?
G I certainly could. I was in Glasgow when the war started so I can't tell you anything about the first year or two at Aberdeen, but shortly after that Professor Black asked me to come back to him once again as his assistant. Of course in those days you had to have a job or perish and teaching, school teaching or university teaching was a reserved occupation and I thought I'd do much better going back to Professor Black than teaching school kids in Glasgow. So back I went and then I found that the scene was changed indeed. In this respect the venerated Sir George Adam Smith had retired and his place was taken by a man called Hamilton Fyfe whose brother was a famous left wing journalist in London and the Principal had imbibed a great deal of his brother's theories. Because the first thing that Professor Black said to me when we were reunited in the old common room, the history common was this, you'll have to watch out he said the Principal's got a whole new idea which is very popular with the students, that they are all victims of the previous generation, that this war has come upon us because he and men like him, and who would say no had done so many silly things that the children are now being the victims of. I was quite stunned. It was the very first time I'd ever heard of the generation gap and the generation quarrel and I said timidly I don't think that's good history, sir. And he said, no of course it is not good history, but it has been extremely popular so watch out. I assumed now was an occasion for watching out because now the left had triumphed, now the only country in the world that mattered was Russia. We had some very painful scenes with the professors wives who all seemed to suffer from corns on their feet, tromping up and down the old High Street, shouting "Open second front now" and any fool could have told them the second front was not possible at that time. In other words the left had triumphed. That was one big difference. The second big difference was this, that the old respect and veneration for the teaching class had completely gone and for more than one reason, not just because of the wicked generation, but because the law required firewatching to be engaged in, especially to protect the medieval fabric of King's College part of the university. The firewatchers were all mixed together, teachers and taught alike. I don't know how they slept because I was firewatching in another part of the city, having arrived rather later. I was firewatching in my own residential neighbourhood. But I do know that they all got to talking and complaining and bitching about Mr Churchill and the government and all the things they were doing wrong and how the Russians were actually absolutely top people. They called each other by their christian names if you could believe such a dreadful thing. They were all mucking in together, or as they say in Scotland 'we're aw Jock Tamson's bairns'.
P You have very strong feelings I think about de Gaulle?
G Yes. General de Gaulle. He was my particular contribution to the confusion of university life at that time because I was against de Gaulle from the very first day that he started his bid for power. On the 18 June 1940 he made a speech on the BBC saying how he was going to fight on, France has lost the battle she has not lost the war and he was going to fight on the side of Britain. That of course made him a hero. I didn't like the sound of that at all. I really hadn't been studying French history all those years without knowing where the mischief was and I thought it was General Boulonge living again. Boulonge was a man who in the 1880s thought to usurp to reserve the power in France and make himself an American style president, and so did the poor French Consul General in Glasgow whom I knew very well. All of us who knew anything about France said this is Boulonge, but Mr Churchill took him up. Mr Churchill's incurably romantic spirit made him see this man as the constable of France he called him. Don't misunderstand me, I think Mr Churchill was the greatest living Englishman of this century but he had made his mistakes and that was the great one. He afterwards regretted it. All the correspondence now published between him and President Roosevelt shows that he knew his mistake, that he would have chucked De Gaulle again and again and that Mr Roosevelt never wanted to have him at all. But he had been sold by his publicity agents, sold completely as a hero that it was very difficult to break the spell. I tried to break the spell. I tried to adduce historical reasons why Charles de Gaulle should not be regarded as the saviour of France, the constable of France. But a young history lecturer five hundred miles away from the seat of power doesn't really cut much ice in London and I certainly didn't. What I did do was get into a pack of trouble at the university. Senatus for example thought that this woman should be dismissed rather than go on saying these madly unpatriotic things.
P Were you speaking or were you writing articles?
G I made one speech outside the walls of the university because in those days you didn't do politics inside the university. I believe they do it now but we didn't do it then. I made one speech against de Gaulle which got me into a lot of disfavour. But I had one tremendous supporter who was my boss, Professor Black, because he knew that historically I was right. He knew about Boulonge, he knew about the whole situation and he stood up to the Senatus and said the lady is my appointee and she will remain as long as I have need of her. As I say that was my contribution to the general infelicity of the time. That's some unusual ways I think I've told you about how the impact of the war made upon Aberdeen. Never quite got back from there. The intimacy between teachers and taught, the belief that Russia was top dog, all that worked together to first of all an anger with the Royal Officers Training Corps and so on and yet it was at the same time the law which said these boys and girls must do national service of some sort. I realised how lucky I had been as a student in the twenties, that happy period when there was never going to be a great war again, compared to what those kids were going through at that time. I used to go before my classes and I would see the girls who had been working in children's shelters for instance or in the ARP division or in this famous firewatching, nagging with their teachers and so on. Those girls were just so tired that they couldn't quite take it all in. But worst of all was one class I had teaching 19th century history and I had some young men in that class who were going straight from that class to their OCTU and from their OCTU into the army. Somehow it didn't seem to me to make any sense to be standing talking about the Congress of Vienna 1815 to boys who were living it through with me in 1942.
P Did they think there was sense in it, could they see the irony?
G No, they were very good. The old Aberdeen tradition of forbear the teacher, do what's right and so on was very strong with them besides they had to get that truncated degree or else.
P As you say the different mood, presumably in the Senior Common Room and in the classroom was by then very apparent?
G The Senior Common Room was at that time quite a joke. You've never seen so many divisions. In those days it was one very big room and near the fireplace in the two best armchairs sat two professors who had been rivals from their schooldays onwards. They were the professors of Moral Phil and Logic. I've never quite understood the difference between those two and I don't know if they did either but they argued and argued away just as if they were back at whichever seat of learning they had adorned in their young day. Then there were the middle grade ones, the straight professors, not quite so venerable and they fought about the war. There were some very very painful scenes between the professor of French and the reader in German who was German born, especially after the professor of French got bombarded on the cliffs of Aberdeen by a stray Gerry pilot coming back in from Stavanger. That was a very dramatic day indeed. Then there was the riff raff, people like me, the junior assistants. We didn't get to sit down, there wasn't room. We put our hips, if you'll excuse the expression, onto the edges of chairs and tables and that and we fought too of course about the way the war was being run. It was not agreeable, it was not pleasant, but it worked out somehow. The socialistic Principal in due course took his retirement. After that we had a Principal who was a lay preacher and very interested in Sweden and it switched all the anger off. Then there came the great night, this was important, when the Germans did raid the University, did drop bombs on the medieval fabric and thanks to the system of firewatching, so often rehearsed, it paid off. It was rather amusing to think that the two men who had organised the whole thing were each the sons of German mothers.
P Dr Gavin when did you leave Aberdeen and how did that come about?
G I began to feel that I was a kind of supernumerary there. I didn't want to shout out for "Open second front now" and all that and I felt that the whole scene had greatly changed but above all I was influenced by my students and of course it works both ways. I was closer to my students than I had ever been to my teachers. I had a class of girls and I had a class of boys. It just so happened that way. They were mixed classes but it so happened the ones I was lecturing in which of course was French History in the 19th Century and so on, different years, a first year and a second year group and I felt that I was getting nowhere as a University teacher and I wanted to get closer to the seat of power. I had been for some years doing free-lance journalism, first just free-lancing for the Glasgow Bulletin - very nice newspaper now defunct and then for the Glasgow Evening News which was one of the Kemsley Group, the Thompson Group now, and as the war went on after I went back to Aberdeen I was writing more about the war, more about politics. I had done travel before, women's subjects as they were possibly called, but now I got into the hard stuff about the conduct of the war. I remember writing quite a lot of pieces about the new Education Act which considerably altered education in Britain. That was our Butler's Education Act and that put me into rather a different class of writer, a more serious writer. Finally the head office in London of Kemsley's made me a wonderful offer which was to go to London and become the first women leader writer ever. This was because a lot of men were at the war. I doubt if I'd have gotten the job otherwise. We were a curious lot in the leader writer's room. There were some quite elderly gentlemen, one or two famous names which had slipped a bit and me. That was of course a whole new world for me and I was very thrilled at being able to do it, confirming the job. I had to be confirmed within three months or else I would be drafted into a small arms factory because remember I'd come out of the protective umbrella. Don't' every forget that in connection with University teaching. You were in a reserved occupation and there you could stay and sweat out the war if that was what you wanted to do, but I wanted to take the chance. I didn't see myself in a small arms factory, I thought I would be Hitler's secret weapon quite possibly if I'd had to make small munitions. Anyhow I got through, I passed the test, I was confirmed in my job at the end of three months and within a year a dream of my life came true and I was back in liberated Paris as a British war correspondent.
P Tell us how that came about because there was a lot of competition.
G Yes, but then remember Aberdeen in my young day was a very competitive university. I'm told it isn't now. I'm told that what the kids want is to get good jobs when they go down and plenty of money. There's no longer the competition in the Debater. The Debater's almost finished they tell me. I'm sorry to hear it. The SRC doesn't matter as it used to matter but the inbred northern spirit of competition, that never dies. So I competed for the job and I got it. Another year passed and then I had the supreme triumph of being present at the German surrender at Rheims and reporting in my own words the defeat of my country's enemies. More years passed and then I saw the defeat of Charles de Gaulle when the French got bored as they always do and kicked him out. But while all these things were going on I still had one great love, my childhood days. I loved King's College, I thought the University of Aberdeen was the very greatest and I've always kept very close to it, class reunions, dinners and finally membership of the Committee of the University Development Trust.
P And you have been honoured recently I gather by the University?
G Yes I have.
P What did they give you?
G DLitt they call it. When it's spelled out it means doctor of letters. It was rather an ordeal having to sit on a chair in front of the whole Senatus and in front of the whole student body and hear my early novels talked about, the ones I want to forget. But that's part of the deal I suppose and it was a day of great honour and thrill for me.
P You still feel your ties with Aberdeen?
G Absolutely. My parents are dead, most of my relations are dead, but I was born in Aberdeen and I believe in the city and its future and in the future of the university still.
End of Interview
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