| Description | Interview with Professor Michael Meston recorded on the 29 August 2000 by John Hargreaves.
Transcript of Interview :
H Michael Meston, you graduated I see in the Faculty of Arts in 1954 and then in the Faculty of Law in 1957 and that I think used to be a much more common pattern of legal education than it is now. Do you regret the change in any way?
M Yes I think I do. It always was possible for people to do a law degree directly from school and indeed in my own year there were at least two came at age 16 straight from school and finished their law degree at 19 and indeed finished their apprenticeship by then as well: they couldn't qualify until they were 21. But the regular route was to do an arts degree first and it was not possible to have the LLB degree without a prior arts degree. The degree for those who came straight was the BL degree for which the minimum requirements were less but anybody who wished to practice obviously had to do exactly the same course. It's unfortunate, but the change, when it did occur, made it possible for full-time study and therefore able to work in libraries as opposed to working in your office as well.
H When did the change take place?
M That was about 1961 when the change to a full-time LLB degree meant that you could no longer insist upon a prior MA because in addition to the full-time degree you then had to face an apprenticeship or traineeship after the law degree instead of doing it as we did concurrently with a law degree. It had great merits because it meant that the apprenticeships could be served in any part of the country after the degree and it was no longer limited to the very small number of firms who were within range of the University.
H Was there pressure from the profession to make that change?
M Yes. They were involved in it. Partly professional desire for a full-time apprenticeship so that the students weren't always nipping out to classes, or at least saying they were nipping out to classes, but it wasn't satisfactory. The system here that Tom Smith had arranged in law was really more civilised than elsewhere in Scotland. We were at the University here all morning and in our offices all afternoon but when I went to teach in Glasgow University a few years later the system still was that there was a class at 8.30, which had been a relaxation from 8 am, and possibly another at 9.30 and then they were into their offices in town and came back for classes at 5 and indeed on one occasion I was lecturing at half past eight in the morning at Gilmorehill in Glasgow and at 5 pm in the Faculty Procurators Hall in the centre of Glasgow between 5 and 6 and every bus in Glasgow ground its gears outside the window of that hall between 5 and 6.
H To return to your own undergraduate days, would you like to comment on personalities in either faculty who impressed you one way or the another?
M Certainly in History, I was there with John Black of course was the professor and Professor Sayles came in my final year. In law clearly we had a very distinguished group with Tom Smith and the then David Daube, Peter Stein, all of these very eminent people indeed.
H Did their eminence come through to students, it doesn't always happen?
M It doesn't always come through but it certainly did then, we were well aware of it and conscious of ? well looked after and indeed they were excellent teachers as well as being genuine scholars. I know that doesn't always happen.
H And the Faculty of Law was small enough for …?
M It was very small.
H What about tutorial supervision in Arts? Did you feel you were well looked after there?
M There wasn't very much in the way of tutorials in either. In history we simply had classes in the advanced and the honours year. The classes became small enough though to be virtually tutorials. But in law, our year was enormous, we had double the usual, we had sixteen in our class. The normal then was about eight or nine but the result was we were dealing with small classes. We used to meet in St Mary's of course.
H It was a very, much more intimate University in those days as is apparent on the other interview which you've just recorded. Were you active in student affairs?
M Not particularly, no. I knew everybody but I wasn't much involved in the SRC or any other activities. I must have been one of those disgusting swots, though I played sport.
H If we could go on to your career as a teacher of law. I'd like to introduce this if I may by reading part of your CV back to you and you can correct me if I've got it wrong because there seems to be an interesting, very frequent change in terminology. When you graduated you became a part-time teacher in private law.
M In public law it would have been if there was a title for it.
H I think it was private law, I've been in the Calendars.
M They've got it wrong.
H It should have been public law?
M It's very difficult to say because there really wasn't that kind of division and I was helping teaching a variety of subjects to be fair.
H If I can proceed this is relevant to what I am going to suggest. After your postgraduate studies in Chicago you taught Scots Law in Glasgow, you came back and taught Comparative Law as a senior lecturer in Aberdeen, you were Professor of Jurisprudence for three years and finally you did become Professor of Private Law. Does that represent exceptional versatility on your part or …?
M Of course I would say that but I doubt if it really means that. Certainly coming back to Aberdeen, Comparative Law was a department in its own right but that wasn't enough to keep me occupied so I was also in the Department of Jurisprudence.
H Comparative Law was comparing what?
M Well you can make it mean what you care to tell it to mean but obviously it involves some comparison with other legal systems, how things are done in different areas and when I came back here I did some general survey of major legal systems in the world and then picked a topic which has probably been the theme throughout the inheritance, wills, succession and property and used that to examine the different methods in different countries. That seemed to be reasonably successful.
H Is Comparative Law still a subject?
M Yes. Obviously we have that and a lot of international contacts now with the various outside universities
H And one can see how that led you on to Jurisprudence.
M Yes. You're dealing with …, well again Jurisprudence can mean what you tell it to mean but it's thinking about law rather than necessarily expounding rules of a particular system.
H Was that the first time Jurisprudence was separated from Roman Law as a separate chair?
M No, it always was a chair of Jurisprudence.
H Yes I know, but …
M When I became Professor of Jurisprudence I was responsible for the teaching of Roman Law as well. It was all part of the same department.
H But Geoffrey MacCormack was …?
M I brought him in as a Senior Lecturer to teach the Roman Law.
H Yes.
M I doubt if I would have trusted myself to be up to scratch there.
H Because I had the impression that in the days of David Daube and Peter Stein whom I knew better, Roman Law was in a sense the lead feature.
M Yes. Their main interest was the Roman Law side mine was more the Jurisprudence side, but it was always the Chair of Jurisprudence.
H Then the shift to Private Law was a definite shift in your own responsibilities?
M Yes.
H Why did you make that shift? Did you seek it or were you pushed?
M A bit of both. I obviously had been interested in the hard law, the wills, succession, property area, that family law. I had been approached from Dundee about the possibility of applying for their Chair of Scots Law. I swithered about it and went to speak to Ronnie Ireland who was then Professor of Scots Law here and he said well if you're interested I think you have a very good chance since as it happens I am one of the outside assessors for the Dundee chair but secondly you may wish to know that I am leaving, I'm going to be appointed as a Sheriff full-time. So on that basis I ended up staying and was indeed appointed. It was an unusual ….
H Yes, a happy, happy arrangement. Does your own trajectory have anything to say about the way the law degree as a whole in Aberdeen has been changing, because there are considerable changes.
M There are enormous changes. One of them obviously being the fact that the original part-time nature of the degree has changed. As I was saying we were here at University all morning and in our offices in the afternoon and of course Saturdays and vacations and you were doing a full range of business in the office, but it did mean you really had very little time for reading the law. Indeed, until we agitated the law library here was not open in the evenings and most legal firms did not have a decent library. It was a very difficult situation, but the full-time degree had many merits but it does of course mean that it takes longer over all.
H But there has also been a big expansion in numbers.
M Oh yes, enormous.
H I suppose this also reflects a change in the student body. In your time as a student probably most people were looking towards practice, would that be true?
M Yes, the large majority would have been expecting to practice, but difficult to talk majorities on numbers like sixteen, but that certainly was true. I think it's actually still true, but many do other things. A number of our students have gone to politics for example, local government, public relations, all sorts of different things, journalism, they've done a variety of things. I think the majority still at least want to keep the door to practice open and therefore go through the whole degree and the diploma in legal practice which was introduced, just to keep the door open.
H Yes, I suppose that's an indicator, how many do not go on to take the diploma?
M The diploma here, the last figures, I forget, must be of the order of 90 or 100 out of a class of possibly 150, it's that kind of proportion. And of course some of our students are taking their diploma in other places, like Edinburgh or Glasgow.
H Is there a larger element, not proportionately larger, element of practical legal knowledge as compared with Jurisprudence in its wider sense?
M That has been one of the major changes with the introduction of the diploma in legal practice. The ideas was to take a lot of the purely practical material out of the degree to leave room for the academic side, but that certainly has worked, though there are always concerns about whether the diploma does exactly what the profession wants, but that's inevitable I suppose. There are modifications, but in principle this had to be a sensible move to make space in the degree for the genuine academic study.
H And it gives more scope to the teachers to follow the academic lane.
M Of course there are huge developments in things like human rights acts in that sort of area that would have to be covered in considerable depth.
H Besides your teaching of law you've been active in a number of spheres. You've been convenor of the Library Committee and you were much in demand as say chairman of ad hoc university committees, and we'll talk about one or two of them in a moment. Have you any memories of having been particularly happy or being particularly useful in …?
M I was among other things convenor of the Museums & Galleries Committee at one stage. I suppose what may have been quite useful was when I was convenor of the Safety Committee because that was when the Health & Safety at Work Act was coming in and a major change of culture was needed to try to improve the position there, so I think that involved quite a lot of work, but I think that was useful in getting a new system at least begun. There were some oddities in that. Oh I had many of these. The Library Committee I think I did enjoy the work there, we were able to see developments when Mike Smethurst was the Librarian particularly introducing the whole computerisation of the catalogue that kind of thing.
H When were you convenor/curator?
M Yes, it was curator at that stage. Precise dates I would have difficulty in putting …
H But it was after the Queen Mother Library?
M It was opened, no it would have been opened after my time. The planning for that was certainly one of the major things we were involved in. The extension to the original Science Library, it was an act of faith, because what we spent a large sum of money on was a doorway, but the point being to set it up so that more space could be built on in the end, changing the focus of the original one and that proved in the end of the day to be well worthwhile, but it was a bit of a gamble at the time. It didn't actually add much to the usable space at the time but it made it feasible for the future.
H The committee I would like to talk about a bit is the Committee on University Government which you chaired between 1973 and 1977.
M As long as that, I suppose it is.
H Yes, I know I've got the dates of your report right because I've got it here but I think it was set up in '73.
M I remember that. I remember it being proposed in the Senate at some study, I think it was Henry Hargreaves made a proposal that something of this sort should be done and somehow I found myself in charge of it. It was quite a difficult thing, it was difficult to know precisely what was wanted but they expected a review at least of the academic governments, it wasn't intended to review the University Court or the business side at all.
H Exactly. Reading it again and recalling my own memories, (of course I chaired the Arts Faculty Committee but I didn't take a view) was that the emphasis was very much on participation on the flow of information, but it was not at all, in my recollection, (nor on a quick reading of the report) on more effective machinery for planning.
M No, it didn't even purport to look at that, it was the academics and the participation/involvement of personal professors, the various matters of this sort were discussed at a number of meetings and the report at the end of the day was the attempt to set up something more suitable for the future. But in particular the non-professorial staff involvement in various committees was important.
H Yes, it was indeed. Jennifer Carter, in the series we had in 1989, said your report now looks like a very cautious document.
M Yes, I think it was very cautious at the time. We were feeling our way and there was certainly no desire to suggest immensely radical things that could be done quickly. Maybe we should have been bolder at the time.
H No, I think at the time, it would be true to say people had the emphasis on this. The AUT and others were voicing a sense of powerlessness almost ?
M Indeed I had been president of the AUT at one stage.
H The actual government of the University perhaps took a second seat.
M Yes, I think that's right. Certainly the business at Court and that side was simply treated as not in our remit. I remember saying at Senate that what we are looking for was therefore the academic elements and involvement in the University.
H Yes, it was the Committee on Internal Academic Government. Bearing in mind what happened afterwards would you, in a sense, regret that that limitation was put upon you and accepted by you?
M It would have been a very different inquiry at the time and I think would have had to have quite a different composition for it to be done. Probably it was necessary, well it could have been valuable to do more and I think there was enough in that side, the internal academic side, to keep us totally busy. I think there may have been a need for a wider review of the whole system then I think a different body would have been needed.
H I'm just reminiscing personally which is not what a good interviewer should do but I think some of the frustration which I felt from my colleagues came not merely from the structure of committees but from the fact that even within a department, and even an autocratic head of department, could not actually do a great deal. He could put in representations to a planning committee and the effective planning came top down.
M That undoubtedly was true, yes, that with such planning you were simply told that you had this kind of money to do that or you didn't or this would not be possible. Yes, that certainly was true.
H But you weren't conscious at the time of that.
M We reckoned that what we were really dealing with was the limited area of the purely internal academic arrangements so we didn't set out to be a general survey of the whole university government system. Maybe it should have been done but that wasn't our remit.
H And no sooner had you completed that when you went on the Court and in 1979 found yourself Vice-Principal.
M Yes.
H Was that at Fraser Noble's nomination?
M Fraser Noble's, yes.
H And how did you feel when he approached you?
M Somewhat startled but I happily undertook to do that. I had two and a bit years as Vice-Principal with him then of course I continued as Vice-Principal for a further year when George McNicol came.
H During the Fraser Noble period, did he give you a brief, a sphere of activity?
M No, at that stage I think it was rather different. I joke nowadays about I was the Vice-Principal and now they need however many, three or four, but in fact I had no particular sphere, simply I continued as head of department and teaching and all the rest and had simply regular liaison and attending things on his behalf, this kind of thing. There wasn't a sphere of influence.
H So that was it, you had no committees that were your committee?
M No, it was really stand-in, substitute. It led me to things such as the first meeting of the board of BP. The first meeting outside London was in Aberdeen and I found myself attending that as Fraser's representative. What I didn't realise, until very late in the proceedings, like too late, was ? I didn't realise that I was supposed to speak at this point and it's rather difficult to do that, completely off the cuff without warning, however I survived.
H That's interesting that you were, in a sense, a substitute Principal, because Ken Walton had taken on the first open day and there are those who say it was that which killed him.
M Yes and of course I succeeded Ken.
H Well perhaps learning from bitter experience you were not given any such ad hoc tasks.
M There was nothing of that nature that cropped up at the time and of course in the last year major cuts in university funding were coming.
H Yes, we'll perhaps come to those in a moment but generally you found this a very nice informal, easy relationship?
M Yes, a very easy relationship. I'm still regularly in touch with Fraser Noble.
H When did you first become aware of coming emergencies? Can you think of any?
M It was in the course of Fraser Noble's last year that it became clear that funds were going to be extremely tight and in the end of the day the announcement of the budget allocation to the university involved a 23% cut in recurrent income.
H Had you had any hint that it would be of that order?
M No, we had not expected it to be like that but it was clear that there would be something coming but we had not expected that. With three weeks warning before the start of the new financial year a 75% labour intensive business this is serious, so that would have been somewhere June I suppose that the actual figure emerged.
H Of 1981?
M Yes, that would be right.
H Or 1980? Fraser had a year …
M He was just finishing his year.
H Sorry, it would be '81, yes.
M It would be June '81 and George McNicol inherited the problem.
H How did Fraser Noble respond to that? Were you involved in the response?
M I was partly involved in this but eventually over the summer he prepared a plan. He said, look my own feeling for which departments are over-staffed in that sense or better placed than others, he drew up a plan but quite deliberately said I'm not involving you in this on the grounds that I will take the smell away with me and it won't be your fault. And I think he passed on that plan. It was very largely the general nature of the scheme that had to be employed thereafter.
H And that plan assumed that we would continue to do more or less everything that we were doing and would not axe departments.
M Yes, there was no question of axing whole departments at that stage, it was simply to see if we could slim the place and still run on that limited basis. It was a difficult spell, especially in the course of the next year. I reckoned it was rarely before 3 in the morning before I got to bed.
H So when George McNicol arrived what were your initial relations with him like?
M It simply worked on much the same basis but obviously there were a vast number of meetings, finances. I managed to maintain my teaching which was fortunate I had moved to 9 am, there were relatively few meetings before 10 and I found the continuing teaching, at least the one course was a haven of sanity in the proceedings. But thereafter I would be leaving my room with a bundle of papers for the day and I believe the staff were taking bets on whether they would see me again that day.
H But during that year, this was George McNicol taking over the Fraser Noble plan but basically implementing it. You weren't aware of a moment when he said we need a stronger surgical knife?
M It grew, it became obvious as we went along, and there came the stage when it was clear and we attempted to get voluntary severance but it became clear we weren't going to get enough to meet the severe recurrent problems for the future. There were a number of posts needed to go. We then had decided we would have to face the possibility of compulsory redundancies and indeed the initial buttons, you've got to notify these to the appropriate authorities sometime in advance and the initial thing had to be done, so that button was pressed and it was beginning to roll. But then the uptake improved, became nearly the number, and we decided that we could not face the compulsory redundancies for the limited number that were now left but the next problem was that means you can no longer protect any individual department. You must simply must let vacancies occur where they fall. We got through it eventually. It wasn't easy. Partly of course, it's probably not as Vice-Principal technically, but I was convenor of the Buildings Committee and Edilis and that area was my responsibility and that took up quite a lot of time. It was a difficult spell.
H George McNicol encountered, as we all know, a lot of criticism, do you think any of it was justified? How do you think he handled what was obviously a terribly difficult time?
M A terribly difficult situation and in the end of the day he produced a solvent university which was never going to be easy, but I do think it could have been dealt with more sensitively, but you did need somebody tough and hard to be able to drive through the changes which were certainly necessary. Whether they ought to have been necessary is another matter, but they were.
H Did it ever occur to you at this time that perhaps your Committee on Academic Government could have prepared for this?
M It really didn't at that stage, no. Really we had not envisaged that type of scenario at all.
H Absolutely not, no.
M And I must say you were too busy reacting to events then to think back. I think at that stage you were just trying to cope with events as they came, it was a desperately difficult spell.
H After you demitted the Vice-Principalship were you involved outside the Faculty very much in the McNicol and subsequent period?
M Not really, I had fulfilled my assize, no, I was in various things but mostly Faculty business, that and some outside work.
H Would you like from your present retired or semi-retired state to make any observations about what's happened, perhaps first to the Law Faculty and then to the University of which you've been associated so long?
M It's been a long time certainly, I first came here in 1950 as a student. Yes it's around 50 years precisely now since I first appeared, with excursions to Glasgow and Chicago. Certainly the nature of the students I suppose has changed. There are vastly more of them, a splendid thing, does mean that you have different attitudes and reactions, fine. I am little concerned recently that they are becoming so worthy that they desperately write down anything you say and you can no longer make a facetious remark and expect them to recognise it as such.
H One did hear that comment even in the '50s.
M Yes. I was aware that you could do that but, alright they have changed, expectations change but really I'm finding that it's excellent. I'm still involved as an external examiner in both Dundee and Glasgow. Really I've no regrets, the thing has gone well, there is change there, what is being taught has changed, but I think it's for the better.
H And the standard of students from the point of view of, not so much of legal knowledge, as of intelligence, literacy and so on?
M Sometimes you do wonder about the literacy. You find in highly qualified students who've come with the best sets of highers you can get writing 'I should of gone', this kind of thing, but sometimes the handwriting is of course appalling but then I assume that was always true of students. But no, there are different expectations, different background of reading that you might expect, in fact sometimes you wonder how much reading there has ever been done. I know some of my students first year looked a little startled when I used to try them by pointing out 'You're here to learn, not to be taught' and that rather startled some of them, they expected everything to come, and indeed I have had students telling me that nobody ever told us that so how could I know this. I said well you try standing in front of a court and tell them I didn't know they had changed the law last year.
H Yes, this is a very familiar thing.
M Yes, but I think that everybody finds that. I really think there has been an improvement.
H Good. Well on that note Mike Meston, thank you very much.
END OF INTERVIEW
|