| Description | Interview with Angus Thomson recorded on the 20th March 1989 by John Hargreaves. Plus an additional typed script, dated April 1989, prepared by Angus M. Thomson entitled "Aberdeen Years (1937-1965)".
Transcript of Interview :
H Angus, you came to Aberdeen to work at the Rowett Research Institute in 1937. Could you tell us how you came to be recruited there?
T I qualified in Medicine in Glasgow in April 1937 and worked for six months at the Victoria Infirmary there when my boss was Dr O H Mavor who was much better known as James Bridie the dramatist, a very amusing and very pleasant fellow. One day after a ward round and coffee he said to me had I ever heard of a man called Orr in Aberdeen, he was a kind of a dietician he said, and I said no I hadn't. Well this chap Orr was looking for a young physician for some kind of research job and if I was interested please let him, Mavor, know. Well I had another job all lined up when my six months was finished and paid no attention until, in I think it would be late August or early September 1937 I developed an attack of acute tonsillitis and these were the pre-antibiotic days, so I was put to bed and then given a week's leave and expected to come back and have my remaining tonsil removed. Mavor suggested that I might like to spend my convalescence, go up to Aberdeen, see this man Orr and see what I thought. So I did that, I went up to Aberdeen for the first time in my life and made an appointment to see Sir John Orr who promptly passed me on to his senior colleague Dr Isabella Leitch, and quite frankly I had very little idea what they were talking about. It was nutritional technology, it was a thing I was pretty ignorant of at the time but I rather gather that I made a fairly good impression by confessing my ignorance and asking to be enlightened. Anyway I was offered the job which was as number two to Dr John Pemberton in a clinical research team. Boyd Orr had in 1936, with a second edition in 1937, published his best seller called 'Food, Health and Income' which compared what was known about the kind of diets that people in Scotland and England were eating with what were then thought to be the standards for adequate or perfect nutrition, and with the cost of the diets as they were determined by survey and came to the tentative conclusion that a very high proportion, possibly up to half of the population of Britain, was eating sub-standard diets, that's to say diets which did not meet these optimum criteria largely because they couldn't afford to buy them. Now that was a hypothesis that created a great deal of political uproar. In Orr's obituary it said that he was advised that this should not be published because it was against the public interest. But John Boyd Orr wasn't the man to take that kind of advise lightly and he sent his Food, Health and Income manuscript to MacMillans who promptly published it and it became a best seller. But it was at that stage very much a hypothesis and Orr persuaded the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust to finance a nation-wide diet and clinical survey, and that was where I came in as the junior member of the clinical team. The idea was that a sample of families in various communities up and down the length and breadth of the country would have their family diets measured and costed and we the clinicians would go and measure all the children belonging to those families, and in addition to the compilation of the dietary and the clinical statistics there would be a feeding experiment whereby some of the children would be fed extra food to bring the nutritional value of the diets up to the so-called optimum standard and we would see what happened. I had a very happy two years at the Rowett Institute on the Carnegie Diet Survey team. We travelled the country from I think Hopetoun on the Moray coast down to Bethnal Green and Fulham in London and from Wisbech in the Fenn country to Liverpool on the west side of England. It was repetitive but by no means dull work because we were learning all the time and it was very interesting to see what was going on in the various communities and in between specific surveys we returned to Aberdeen to feed in the data we had collected. These were pre-computer days, everything had to be done by hand, even a great deal of the arithmetic was done by pen and pencil and paper. But the Rowett was really a remarkably interesting place to work at that time. I don't know formally what the connection was between the Rowett Institute and the university, though Orr had certainly started I think as honorary professor of agricultural chemistry or something of that kind. But relationships with the university seemed to be very close even when they were informal. I myself in my later part of those two years, when I was in Aberdeen, went down to the physiology department of the university to act as a demonstrator because Orr apparently had his eye on me as a potential member of his physiological staff in due course. Those of us who were unmarried, we stayed in the Strathcona Club out at Bucksburn next door to the Rowett Institute and that was home to a number of the university lecturers. I remember particularly Dorothy Downie who was a lecturer or possibly a reader in botany and was known as 'auntie to all' and it was all very free and easy and informal and Aberdeen seemed to me, coming from Glasgow, to be a small friendly, almost a village where everybody seemed to know everybody. I can't remember how it happened, but I remember one evening being asked to attend a kind of conversazione at the house in Old Aberdeen of Professor Lancelot Hogben, he of Mathematics for the Million fame and being greatly smitten when I arrived there because all the furniture was heavily cubist in design and painted in the most brilliant scarlets and greens. And I gathered from somebody that in fact Lancelot Hogben used to build his own furniture, paint it to taste and when he got fed up with it he simply took an axe to it. The conversation was exceedingly high powered. I was only about twenty three at the time and I didn't understand a great deal of what was going but it was all very interesting indeed. Again I seemed to know a very high proportion of the university staff just through natural, social contact. There was a rather remarkable academic atmosphere at the time. Boyd Orr of course was getting an national and international reputation as a agricultural scientist and more particularly in the field of human nutrition. Lancelot Hogben was both famous and in a sense notorious, he was professor of natural history at the time. After his Mathematics for the Million I remember that his colleague Henry Hamilton, who was professor of political economy, he wrote a companion volume called The History of the Homeland
H And Hogben himself wrote Science for the Citizen.
T That's right. So then there was this kind of intellectual in-group, feeding each other ideas and I found it as a young and impressionable youth very easy to feel that Aberdeen really was the centre of the academic universe. We used to call John Boyd Orr's nutritional philosophy the Gospel According to Sir John. The atmosphere he created there, he very much dominated the place, was that of an extended family. He was the great patriarch at the time and everything seemed to go … I found it a fascinating job to do until in the long run war broke out and I felt I had to join the army.
H Do you think there were many university staff involved in any way in Boyd Orr's own research or in the research that was going on in the Rowett?
T I don't think so. I think Orr found it expedient to hire his own staff and to make sure that they had a kind of, either an official or an unofficial affiliation in some sense with the university, in the sense that I've already said I was encouraged to act as a demonstrator in physiology. In fact I did a, the details don't matter, but I got a bee in my bonnet one day about some research on dark adaptation and told my seniors that I thought that the measurements we required could be better done if an apparatus was designed along the following lines. Now I had no knowledge of how to do the designing and the construction but I was promptly put in touch with Harry Griffith who was then senior lecturer in physics and Harry and I got on splendidly. We designed the apparatus together, put it to work and published papers about it. That was the kind of initially informal contact with the university that I think was taking place practically all the time but how far it was formalised I don't know and my feeling is that it was quite unnecessary to formalise it, it just happened.
H In later years there have sometimes been research students jointly supervised at the Rowett and Aberdeen, there probably weren't many research students at all then, but did you have any notion of that ever happening?
T Not really. You must remember that when I was doing the Carnegie survey work I was away for two thirds of the time and there were certainly research students, including foreign ones. I remember a man called Makaros [?], a Greek, was working there, now whether he had any formal connection with the university while he was doing, presumably his PhD or some sorts, I don't know.
H During your war service, Boyd Orr was appointed professor of agriculture in the university and for a time held the two posts together until he went off to FAO. I suppose this would only be speculation, but have you any idea how that link might have developed had Boyd Orr stayed on with what he might have wanted to do as professor of agriculture as well as director of the Rowett?
T No, I have really no ideas at all on that. In fact I didn't know that he had become a professor of agriculture during the war years. I was in India during the time so very thoroughly out of contact. I think I'm right in saying that Boyd Orr had been started work as something in the agricultural faculty of the university back in the time of the First World War. That was when the Rowett's foundation started. I'm surprised if Orr had very much time for the university, because my wife worked for about a year and a half at the institute during the war years and as far as I can gather John Boyd Orr was practically never there, he was always trotting off to London or to foreign conferences abroad and so forth which all built up to the food and agriculture organisation of the United Nations.
H The university submission to the UGC in 1944 did lay special emphasis on developing agricultural studies to serve the region and it made a point of the eminence of Boyd Orr as it's professor, but I don't think it was very specific about the direction of research.
T I simply have no knowledge of the extent to which Boyd Orr actually did any hands-on work with the university. I think it's perfectly fair tactics to use his undoubted eminence, after all he did become Lord Boyd Orr not so long afterwards. It was fair enough for the university to use his eminence but you would have to find out from other sources what in fact have been involved in the ground.
H You described in a memoir which you've agreed to deposit in the archives along with this interview circumstances in which you transferred to work in the university under Sir Dugald Baird in 1947 and the work which you did in collaboration with him, and you also told the rather sad story of your transfer to Newcastle in 1965. I don't think we need, that being so, go over this period again. The memoir does tell a rather sad story, the break-up of that unit, but I'd like just to ask a little about it. It occurs to me that one possible explanation which has been suggested in other quarters is that the unusual extent to which the medical faculty in Aberdeen was involved in public health care in the region may have led to a divorce of clinical from research responsibilities generally. I don't know if it would seem to you that that general thesis at all helps to explain the circumstances of the break-up or if it was a phenomenon you'd observed elsewhere in the faculty?
T No, I'm sorry I can't agree at all that it was a question of a divorce between the clinical and the non-clinical thing, aspects of research. Dugald Baird himself was absolutely certain, and I think he was dead right, that the kind of research we were doing did depend on very close contact with clinical medicine and that is why he was very keen to have his research unit built-in with the bricks of his university department. I started work with him there as a university research fellow, I think a senior research fellow, and then he got me appointed as a lecturer in his department. Incidentally, as a lecturer in obstetrics and gynaecology though I was neither an obstetrician nor a gynaecologist, but he thought that part of the public health aspects of human reproduction depended upon nutrition. I had had a fairly extensive nutritional experience by the time he took me on, both in the Rowett Institute pre-war and during the war itself in India where for about three years I had the rather formidable title of Assistant Director of Nutrition in the army headquarters in New Delhi in India. So I came back here to continue in nutrition work and it was always my idea to get in with the clinicians from the Rowett Institute to continue work on human nutrition but that didn't work out because research administration was becoming a little more rigid and I understood from Sir David Cuthbertson, Boyd Orr's successor, that in fact the Agricultural Research Council would have no truck with direct support of work on human nutrition, it's job was agriculture. It probably would have worked, the original scheme, if for example we'd managed to get money out of the Medical Research Council and for reasons that I don't know, but I have had it direct from David Cuthbertson, that he and Dugald Baird put their heads together and arranged for me to be transferred to the university department as a research fellow and to work inside the clinical department. Now that continued right to the end and I think that the reason for the eventual break-up of the unit was really a perfectly simple administrative problem which was not successfully overcome plus the fact that Dugald Baird, who was a genuinely great man, in some ways perhaps the greatest man I've worked under, took the rather lordly view that he'd found it all worked perfectly smoothly with the whole shooting match, research unit and the clinical department and the teaching department all welded together under the name of the professor of midwifery as it was then, his successor would just do the same thing obviously, should become ex-officio the director of the research unit as he would be by appointment, head of the university department and of the clinical unit. Well the trouble was that the research unit had no obstetricians built-in as its permanent staff. We were not a conscript army but a volunteer army. That's important because we were very happy indeed to work under a man that we liked and respected and admired greatly, the likes of Dugald Baird, but I myself felt, and I'm sure that my senior colleagues felt in the research unit that we weren't prepared to say in advance that yes certainly we would be quite happy to work under the future direction of some man that we couldn't even name and couldn't even size up. Incidentally the administrative side was that the unit by that time was funded and run from London by the Medical Research Council which had perfectly straightforward rules and procedure when a director retired or resigned or fell dead or some such. Its procedure was that about five years before the current director was due to retire it would ask him for his opinion particularly about whether the field for research was likely to remain fruitful and secondly had he any particular views on whether any modifications should be made to the existing arrangements when he retired. The MRC would then sit back and, it was quite explicit about this, it would decide ab initio what was to happen, in otherwords is was quite free to decide that this particular line of research was running out of steam and we would break up the unit and deploy the resources somewhere else. In particular it appointed its own directors and that's a thing which has rather faded in these more degenerate days but the MRC's policy was quite explicit then, that it appointed people to head its research units on the grounds of their individual performance. They were backing people rather than specific programmes. The programme was only defined in a rather broad and generalised way. I couldn't see the MRC agreeing to it. Yes certainly the new professor, regius professor of obstetrics in Aberdeen university, whoever he may be would automatically be acceptable to the MRC. In any case I didn't feel like it, I thought I was probably capable of running my own unit, and if the MRC thought fit to let me continue running the unit as I had virtually been doing in a kind of managerial capacity for many years, I would lean over backwards to work with the new professor but I wouldn't be directly responsible to him in matters of research, but I was quite absolutely clear that the clinical connection had to continue otherwise it would all get burst. Now that is not to say that there was some new strands in the research beginning to come out in very many directions which took us away from the heartland of obstetric research where the whole thing started. For example, Raymond Illsley who was in charge of the sociological division was beginning to get interested in aspects of social policy, aspects of social research which they might start with an obstetric problem or a medical problem in general but didn't necessarily end there and he naturally and correctly and properly wanted to be able to continue to follow that research wherever it led. Equally if I was working personally on a purely nutritional problem and I had by this time began to develop certain interests in tropical clinical nutrition, I wanted to be able to pursue that even though it perhaps had no direct connection with work on obstetrics in Aberdeen. These were the kind of threads that I think underlay the decision but I'm sure that the final break-up was simply because no proper arrangements were made in advance to decide what should be done when the new professor was appointed.
H Yes, I think I wasn't suggesting that within Dugald Baird's time there had been any sort of conflict but I wonder if in appointing to the chair at that time if there wasn't an assumption in the Medical Faculty that the first thing to do was to get a good clinician and that the research orientation was not taken sufficiently into account? I have heard that suggested elsewhere in the faculty in this late period.
T It may be but this was a matter that should have been planned out I think between the university, I suppose the Secretary of State for Scotland would have been involved directly or indirectly because it was a regius chair we were talking about, and the MRC of course which was financing the research thing was very much concerned. Now if there was some mechanism for them to put their heads together and say yes this is the terms of reference we want in future under the new man and this is the way in which we want it run, I for one would have listened to it with great interest and jolly carefully but I wasn't involved in the top level policy discussions if there were any. All I know is that Dugald Baird took the very simplistic attitude that the answer to the problem is dead easy, make my successor director of the unit. Well, for reasons I've already touched on, I didn't think that would work or could work and nothing was done as far as I know to safeguard the situation and it got to the position when Dugald finally retired that the situation had become irretrievable and it all happened terribly abruptly as far as I was concerned.
H Just one more question I think. The one consequence of the changes in 1965 was that your nutrition unit moved to Newcastle but the sociology unit remained in Aberdeen under Raymond Illsley. Do you think that physical divorce was in any way to be regretted from the point of view of your unit in Newcastle, did you feel the loss of the sociologists?
T Yes, very much so. You see research is done by people first and foremost. It isn't something abstract and arid that I think is just done by a team without specific individuals being thought of and in Aberdeen we had built up I think a very effective and very friendly multi-disciplinary team. Being a multi-disciplinary team, it's not easy to keep that as a coherent, consistent, self-sustaining entity for the simple reason that if you are going to be multi-disciplinary, for example when we hired Raymond Illsley as the sociologist of the team it was my job to decide what should he do and how should he do it and I took the very strong line right from the beginning with Illsley in sociology, with Billwicz in statistics, with Frank Hytten who was a doctor and in effect the sociologist of the unit, that if you are going to get anywhere in the long run, you've got to be … well Illsley should be a sociologist's sociologist, Billewicz ought to be a statistician's statistician and so on. Because if they see themselves entirely as a kind of technical hand maidens to obstetricians they would get nowhere in the long run. Remember when all these questions of how we run the thing and where we should direct it were building up we were young men in our thirties and we had a long time to go. I myself was given furiously to think when Harold Himsworth who was then the secretary of the Medical Research Council said to me when I was about 35 or 36, well Thomson what do you want to be when you are 50? Well at 36, 50 seems inconceivably far away and I had never thought about the thing. I was very busy, very happy, getting on with work, but it suddenly dawned on me I can't get any higher than I am already. I'm a lecturer in obstetrics and gynaecology who is not an obstetrician or a gynaecologist and I could be the wrong kind of animal in the wrong kind of environment in the long run. I've got to decide for myself what I'm going to be when I'm 50 and later. I decided my job was preventive medicine so I went and took a diploma in public health with gave me a paper qualification and my idea was to leave Dugald Baird's team and probably join a department of social medicine in some university, simply where I would be the right kind of person with the right kind of label. Then Himsworth decided they wanted the research unit in Aberdeen and one of the conditions was that I stayed put, so I stayed put, but that left all the problems with what happened when Dugald Baird who was the great unifying force had to disappear because of age. And that problem was never thought through properly to my mind.
END OF INTERVIEW
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