| Description | This is an interview with Professor John D. Hargreaves, recorded by Terry Brotherstone, on the 7 February 2002 and 27 March 2003.
TB John, the main purpose of this particular interview is to discuss your career in Aberdeen, at Aberdeen University, and the impact of Aberdeen and the University on you. But I thought it might be a good idea if we started with your origins and very briefly with the process that brought you to Aberdeen. You were born in 1924 …
JH Yes.
TB … and can you say something about what happened between 1924 and your arrival in Aberdeen.
JH Well, a good deal of it had been centred on the University of Manchester. I did my first degree there in the early part of the war at a ridiculously young age. I then went away for war service. I returned and did a Master's degree at Manchester and eventually joined the staff there. In 1952, for reasons I have explained elsewhere, I thought I would like to explore the possibilities of work overseas and I took a job in Freetown, Sierra Leone, for two years. They were very active and enjoyable and fruitful years, but at the end of them I decided for family reasons, and partly for academic reasons, and partly because I was somewhat exhausted with the number of jobs I'd been doing I would like to return to the UK. We came back on a slow boat and I put in applications for two jobs. One was at Durham and one was at Aberdeen. I had an invitation to an interview at Aberdeen and a provisional offer from Durham. I had been working with the University of Durham already, and it had a relationship with Fourah Bay and would have quite liked to have continued that, but I was also attracted I knew very little about Aberdeen but I was also attracted by the idea of coming to work in Scotland. I had never lived there, apart from short periods of military service. And the story briefly well it might not be as brief as it should be, but there is a good joke in it perhaps! I arrived and was put up at the Douglas Hotel and the Secretary, W. S. Angus, who previously had been Secretary to the University of Durham, not that he seemed a terribly sociable man, invited me for dinner. I went for dinner with him in the Chanonry, had a very agreeable evening, and he was extremely illuminating on Aberdeen and extremely indiscreet in a number of ways and it made Aberdeen seem very attractive. And I was waiting for a bus in the High Street and suddenly there was an unexpected noise and a herd of cattle went past on the way to the market at Kittybrewster. This appealed to me so much that it conditioned me to think very seriously about Aberdeen; and seeing they were more generous than Durham had been in recognising what I had done in Africa, I decided to come and see how I liked it.
TB Just before we move on, perhaps to take you back a little bit. Many people from England were to come to Aberdeen in the following period at least. You had a quite distinctive background, didn't you? Your family was quite religious?
JH My family were Methodists and in my adolescence I had followed them and I remained a Christian, an ecumenical Christian. I had recently been received into the Church of England.
TB And you were inspired to study history by schoolteachers initially, is that right?
JH Yes, the man in question was a Quaker, Leslie Gilbert, who was a gifted teacher and had some interesting pupils apart from myself. I think I was inspired to study history partly because of the atmosphere of the time. In 1938 when I was 14, I had an ear infection and spent some time in bed and spent some of it in reading the newspapers and reflecting on the then international situation. It occurred to me that the history that we were doing at that time in class on 19th -20th century Europe was quite relevant to this and that I think was what really pushed me towards history.
TB And that leads up to two or three other questions. One is, you did go to university very young and that was partly because of the war, the war had already started …
JH Yes, I was 16 in 1940. I had got the minimum entrance. My school had had ideas that I would go on and take an Oxford scholarship. Thank goodness I didn't actually, because I think I would have been lost at Oxford at that time.
TB Why do you say you would have been lost at Oxford that is an interesting …
JH Because I think I was too socially immature to take Oxford society and I don't think I was clever enough to stand up with all the other clever people who could no doubt have been there … there was some quite clever people at Manchester in my year, but … probably …
TB But you felt that you would have been not sufficiently socially integrated in Oxford naturally. You would have to have been mature enough without the intellectual stamina to stand up for yourself?
JH Yes, that's what I feel in retrospect.
TB So Manchester brings, at a certain point, the influence of Sir Lewis Namier, doesn't it? He was a very big thing in your life, I think …
JH Yes. Well, he was a big thing in my professional development. He was absent during the war of course working for the Jewish Agency. And my teachers at Manchester, my undergraduate teachers, were a very agreeable and a very interesting lot, I think is the right way of putting it. But there was nobody who stands as of being the quality of Namier. But it was he who supervised in a somewhat freestanding manner! my Master's dissertation and it was he who invited me to … [who] initiated me into some of the methods of research and who offered me my job at Manchester.
TB And in the meantime, then, the other big influence was your war experience?
JH Yes. I had spent most fortunately I had spent 1946 in Malaya and it was a quiet year, it was between … the Japanese were being repatriated and the Emergency hadn't begun. I had the opportunity to mix with Malays and Chinese and latterly to do a low-level intelligence job at Divisional Headquarters and become interested, in a very superficial way, in the politics and society of a colonial state.
TB So where does Africa come in, because your career in Aberdeen is to be very much linked with Africa.
JH Yes.
TB Links between Aberdeen and Africa?
JH I don't know how to begin … Largely, I think, one could say by accident. When I got back to Manchester I had made African friends, one man in particular who was a close friend, a very great man, I think, a man called Eni Njoku, a botany student at that time, and later a federal minister and a Vice-Chancellor, and so on. And it was largely he who interested me in Africa as a continent of which even less … even less was known then by the normal anglocentric historians of the history of Africa ... that it would be interesting too. In 1952, when our son had been born, Sheila and I decided that, if we were going to go and work abroad, we should do it soon. If a job had come up in Malaya who knows what would have happened, but a job came up in Freetown, Sierra Leone, so we went there.
TB You mentioned Sheila, perhaps you could briefly say how you met her, because when you come to Aberdeen you both come to Aberdeen.
JH Yes.
TB Your lives have been very much together.
JH I met Sheila in Manchester on election night, 1950, and we had both been canvassing for the Labour Party not together, I had been canvassing with another young lady and a number of people came back to my flat to hear the radio results, and Sheila was among them, and subsequently we saw more of one another, and later that year we got married.
TB The election results … I mean you obviously remember that night for those reasons. Was this a ... do you remember this as a politically important moment for you, because this is when the Labour government is clearly on the way out, although it just narrowly won that election … and I mean perhaps that influenced your decision to go to Africa? I don't know.
JH No - I don't know. I don't think so. I wasn't sufficiently deeply politically committed to go and sink my sorrows in drink in the colonies or anything like that!
TB I didn't quite mean that, but I thought your idealism might have been diverted somewhere else as a result of the fact that the domestic agenda was changing, or the domestic scene was changing at least, if not the agenda.
JH No, I don't think so. If anything, I suppose I thought that that we still did have a Labour government. It was still pursuing in West Africa a policy which I thought naively in some ways which I thought was a very good one …
TB Well I hope we have probably for the purposes of this stage in the interview at least got you to Aberdeen now. And you have explained the story of your actually coming here. What was your impression of the state of the University of Aberdeen when you arrived? You have come from Africa and you are at the most remote university in Great Britain from the point of view of the metropolis, at least …
JH Yes. It was a very different university from Manchester, which was the only real point of comparison that I had. It was a small university and that meant that it was possible, indeed almost obligatory to make friends and have contacts in other departments and in the community of Old Aberdeen it was quite easy to do so. There was the little Senior Common Room in half of what is now the Elphinstone Rooms and there one met not only merely other Arts colleagues, but made friends and contacts with scientists as well. There was a man called William Wightman, a Reader in History & Philosophy of Science who conducted a … I would call it an interdisciplinary group, which opened my eyes … but also over the first few years, not immediately, people in departments of Economics, Politics and elsewhere with whom I had a lot to discuss and whom I was able to involve in guest lecturing in my course on modern British history.
TB So you would be comparing it with Manchester as you say, and with the intellectual distinction that you felt that Lewis Namier had brought there, and presumably also with Africa and presumably in Africa with an emphasis mainly on teaching.
JH Yes. In the community. I was concerned to spark off the seeds of the research community there.
TB But your main function was to teach?
JH Yes.
TB So, were you making conscious comparisons as far as you can remember, between Manchester and your African experience and Aberdeen?
JH No, I don't think I was. I had accepted, as regards the teaching/research thing, I had accepted that my main duty in Aberdeen, and probably wherever I was at that time, would be to teach. I had also begun research in Africa, which I wanted to continue, and which could be pursued in this country. It bore little relationship to the course I was immediately required to take, but so be it, I took my teaching seriously. I took my research seriously and there was scope to do both and not too much time was taken up in filling up forms, reporting on what I had been doing and intended to do!
TB And trying to make yourself acceptable to the powers that be! Just before we come to the department, that Common Room society, and that Common Room was still in place when I arrived in '68 of course, the big changes were only just beginning to take place then. How far were you aware of being incomer in that community? I mean, was quite a substantial proportion of the staff from Aberdeen? Was there a sense of a division between those who were from Aberdeen and those who came from outside? How did that work out?
JH I wasn't altogether conscious of it at the time, because of those who frequented the Common Room, the great majority were either not from Aberdeen or were not overly conscious of being of Aberdeen, if you take my point. It didn't really matter where you came from. I became conscious that there were those in the University who were less than wholeheartedly welcoming towards those from outside and certainly I became conscious as time went on, that in the city too, as we made Scottish friends quite easily, but a lot of them were either from further north or from further south by origin.
TB You talk in your memoir of Aberdeen having a strong provincial identity and I take that as a slightly double-edged statement.
JH I didn't mean it to be double-edged. I took it as descriptive.
TB Well you might prefer to say regional rather than provincial!
JH Yes… No, I think I said it was provincial deliberately: it was restrictive as well. I was seeing that as a source of strength, given, by no stretch of the imagination, was it … could it be in the immediate future ... a great cosmopolitan university. I took provinciality to be a source of strength.
TB We have talked about comparisons in the intellectual life of different places. What about comparing the student body that you were confronted with here compared with your own experiences in Manchester and then in Africa?
JH Initially they were very much more difficult to communicate orally with than in either place. Intellectually, as regards serious purpose, and solidity of purpose in sense if that's the right phrase at the best, they were impressive. Obviously there were students who were not impressive, there always are. But there clearly was an Aberdeen student.
TB These were largely students from Aberdeen, from the hinterland and from the Highlands and Islands?
JH Yes. The first few years in the department, there were hardly any from further afield. There were one or two, but not very many.
TB And what about the department itself then? How would describe the state of the study of history in Aberdeen in the University when you arrived?
JH Well, George Sayles was a medieval scholar of great distinction, whose scholarship was far beyond my scope to comprehend or criticise, and he was a congenial man, whose view was: 'I am hiring you because there is a gap in modern British history. I want you to fill it. I want to support you filling it with as much distinction as you can muster. But I don't particularly want to be bothered with your consulting me every few minutes.' And that was …
TB So in fact you were in charge of modern British history?
JH Yes, I was in charge of modern British history. There was an assistant appointed at the same time as I was, Philip Bell, who had quite a distinguished later career. He retired as Reader in Liverpool and has remained a ... friend; and he worked with me as well as with the first year class, which George Sayles in modern European history retained the direction of.
TB So the system was that the professor took the whole of the first year class in what was largely a lecture course.
JH Well no, he didn't take the whole of it, but, yes, he took most of it... I didn't take any of it, because it met at the same time as the Advanced Class, so it would not have been possible for him to invite me to take any of it. I think Archie Thornton took the 20th-century lectures in most years, and there were a number of people including me who were involved with tutorial classes in that connection.
TB So you were appointed as a lecturer …
JH Yes …
TB … and Archie Thornton also …
JH Yes, he was also a lecturer in Imperial and Commonwealth history.
TB Who else was in the Department as lecturers?
JH As lecturers - Kathleen Edwards was the Reader in medieval history, Jimmy Henderson was lecturer in earlier British history, and he took the one Scottish element on the [Honours] syllabus. Walter Humphries was lecturer in Scottish history and confined himself to the Ordinary and Advanced courses in Scottish history. Doreen Milne was still an Assistant, but after a while was made up to lecturer. And Leslie Macfarlane was the Assistant in medieval history. I think that covers it, there should be [nine] names altogether.
TB And the Assistants were very clearly assistants at that time. I mean later it became just another grade as one progressed towards being a lecturer.
JH They had no security of tenure. The AUT was always pressing that they should have more of that, but the same was true in Manchester, assistant lecturers had no security. One colleague at Manchester, in another department, who had been allowed to go as an assistant lecturer, turned up as a lecturer and eventually as a professor in another department in Aberdeen and pursued his career with distinction.
TB Who was that?
JH Roy Mellor. In Geography.
TB So did you think that things were all right in Aberdeen. I mean did you feel that students were being given a good experience in terms of gaining their history degrees, or were you critical and thought that they needed to be reform in how things were done?
JH Well … I am trying to recall what I thought at the time, and not what I thought when I would have a chance to do something about it. I was impressed by the care, which the Faculty gave to what was then called staff/student relations. They had the Regent system, which, given the large number of ordinary degree students, was an attempt into which, I think, most Faculty members entered very seriously at the time to see that students didn't miss out altogether in the gaps between the courses. That I think was a good feature of Aberdeen.
TB By 'the gaps in the courses' you mean …?
JH In the past, students had attended their seven courses over three years, and amassed their class certificates, and gone away with an array of class certificates. If they got as many of them certainly did get a university impression, it was largely formed outside the University, in the way that Robert Anderson has described in his study. And that there might not be an opportunity for … a student might in the course of this meeting he might discuss the English Civil War with one tutor, and he might discuss the novels of Jane Austen with another, he might do practical zoology with another, and never have an opportunity of interacting with a senior member on any wider scale than that.
TB I see … So were you happy at the university, with Sheila, at Aberdeen when you first came, or was there a long period of adjustment?
JH There was a period of adjustment, and the first year was particularly difficult. We had a - it was a hard winter - ... very cold, really rather unpleasant flat in Bucksburn. I went down with mumps about three weeks into my first course, handed over what I had prepared to Philip Bell to take the lectures because I had never taught a formal course in British history before and I think, around March, we were probably beginning to look at the advertisements! But we were appreciative of the friendship of many people. Fraser Noble and his wife in particular were extremely kind at the personal …
TB What was his position?
JH He was a Lecturer in Economics... And so, in the summer we bought our house in Hamilton Place and we made friends outside as well as inside the university community and became very much happier.
TB I mean, that must have been a point, because the house in Hamilton Place, which I recall well, was quite palatial … Was that an advantage of being in Aberdeen?
JH You could call it that. The fact was that the Hamilton Place houses at that time were the cheapest which you could hope to turn into a family house and this was because none of them had central heating, and the central heating technique wasn't up to it. So I don't think the palatial aspect was entirely an advantage.
TB It was quite large though, wasn't it?
JH It was quite large. We eventually installed four closed stoves. If all went out together that was a major part of the morning gone!
TB Trying to recover it, yes. I think we are just about coming to the end of this side, so it is an idea to have a quick break at this point and we will turn the tape over.
Tape 1
Side B
TB So, how would you, John, characterise … well, I suppose … the first decade of your life in Aberdeen. I think you had a number of visits abroad during that period, but this was to turn out to be the run-in to your becoming the Professor of History in the early '60s?
JH The visits abroad were … There were a number of short visits to Paris, which were basically research visits and I was down in the archives, Monday to Friday at least. Then, in 1960, … we went to Schenectady. It was a small Liberal Arts college. It had a special relationship with St. Andrews, and a colleague at St. Andrews planted the seed that they might welcome an exchange with Aberdeen and I thought it would be a … I was beginning to get interested marginally in American history, particularly the history of black people in America, as a sort of offshoot from African history, and I thought this would be a interesting thing to do. So we did that. The exchange was arranged with a man called Neal Allen, who taught here for a year and subsequently became a very good friend.
TB And was this an unusual thing? Was it welcomed by Sayles and by colleagues in Aberdeen? I am wondering what role you feel you might have played in internationalising the scholarly community in Aberdeen.
JH I never thought of that. Sayles saw … no objection. I don't think he was terribly thrilled, because of course he wasn't able to interview Neal Allen or anything like that, … but Neal was a good scholar and I am sure … I don't know … I don't think I was the first person to do anything like this by any means.
TB But it was very much a first in the History department presumably, was it?
JH No, I don't know that it ever did happen there. In the University as a whole … there were people who had international contacts and international experiences. In English, both the Professor and the Reader, Ian Duthie and John Lothian had both taught in Canada, for example and there was a Canadian connection there.
TB So Aberdeen was very much, at least on one version of the international scholarly map. You didn't feel …
JH Oh no! Oh no, not at all as far as the total University picture went. Thomas Taylor was a European figure … Hamilton Fyfe had been a considerable pioneer in university education in Africa. His son Christopher was already a close friend of mine …
TB He was in Edinburgh already?
JH No, he wasn't. He was still working as an independent scholar in the history of Sierra Leone. So, no, no, there was no sense that Aberdeen was a little place tucked away, and I now know historically there were lots and lots of connections, mostly I think at professorial level. But then, generally, there were not so many opportunities for younger people to go abroad at that time. These opportunities were opening up everywhere.
TB I am partly asking you that, because I know that when the big expansion took place in the mid- to late '60s, coming from a Cambridge background, I certainly had the sense that people who'd been educated in Oxford, Cambridge and London were beginning to look to Scotland as being on their scholarly map as it were. But Antonine's Wall still seemed pretty firmly held. Not many people were prepared … Glasgow and Edinburgh, yes. St. Andrews had its own particular reputation. But further north than that was going pretty well beyond the Pale! That is perhaps purely an Oxbridge perspective, rather than really one that would apply coming from elsewhere.
JH Yes, it is a southern English and an Oxbridge perspective. On a slightly different thing, I remember when we held the annual conference with the African Studies Association here in 1970: there were quite lot of … And then in the same year I helped to organise a Foreign Office closed seminar on Africa with John Thomson, who was an Aberdeen graduate in the Foreign Office, and ... quite a lot of ambassadors; and Oxford dons came up and were quite astonished to find that we were not living as Eskimos!
TB Yes, to add to the literature of people who suddenly turn the corner in the road and find this wonderful jewel of a place sitting there. Perhaps we could just pick up a little bit. We left you primarily teaching British history but researching … establishing international connections and researching on African history. Had you begun in the 1950s to teach African history?
JH No. When I came back from America in 1961 I had been taking a special subject on Edwardian Britain, I think, and I changed that into one on the partition of Africa.
TB And that is the first?
JH That is the first.
TB And by that time were you still teaching the British History?
JH Yes, until I got the chair in 1962. The only other thing I had done was the occasional extra-mural lecture on African topics, not so much on African history as on 'Africa today' sort of topics.
TB Yes… Because I am just thinking, the 'wind of change' is just happening at this point and presumably there is some interest in Africa developing in the University as a whole, within Politics and so on …
JH And in the universities as a whole. A few dates which were recorded in this memoir: 1960 was the formation of the Journal of African History, and 1962 was the third International Conference of African Historians and, I think, the foundation of the African Studies Association UK. 1960, when I was in the States it was fortunate for me as it was the year America discovered Africa in a sense … The Kennedy administration and, ironically now, America's discovery of its own black population. The Black Muslims, the existence of the Black Muslims, although a Nigerian historian had done quite an interesting thesis on them already, but to most Americans, the first they knew of that was the demonstrations against the UN building. So 1960 was, both academically and politically, a crucial year for African studies.
TB I should perhaps clarify for the tape that the memoir that we are referring to, or when I have referred to John Hargreaves' writings, we are talking about a manuscript memoir, which is deposited in the Special Collections at Aberdeen University Library, which you wrote last year.
JH: Yes.
TB: How did you feel about the state of the teaching of this core subject of British history, both from the point of view that Whig history was still the kind of history that glorifies the story of British, largely English … the development of English parliamentary freedom, was still probably the orthodoxy, only beginning to be challenged; and the fact that you were in Scotland and how one recognised that Scotland was part of Britain when very little Scottish history was being seriously written?
JH Yes, I was increasingly … I won't say I was immediately conscious of this … but I was increasingly conscious of this anomaly, and in a way it was almost a re-run of Sierra Leone, where there were courses … which had not given any recognition to the existence of African history in some respects … And of course there was a great shortage of books in so far as political history was concerned. There was a beginning of a … probably more than a beginning … a body of studies in Scottish economic and social history, and Henry Hamilton had of course been a great figure of this.
TB He was a lecturer in Aberdeen.
JH Hamilton had been a lecturer in economics and had become he was then the Professor … Sorry, he was lecturing in economic history and had become the Professor of Political Economy, while remaining essentially a historian. And Malcolm Gray joined that department in Aberdeen …
TB … who wrote about the Highland clearances …
JH And much more. And was a very serious and valued colleague. So, in economic … well, if you like, fitting the Scottish experience into the industrial revolution story, however you told it, it was not too difficult. Politically, that was more so … The only really serious modern book on the subject was by a lawyer, Scottish Democracy …
TB Laurance Saunders' book. It was a rather oddly titled book!
JH It was. I devoured that. And I think that all I can say was that ... in lecturing, turning out the three lectures a week and in setting topics when I got the opportunity to take in a Scottish dimension in readily accessible sources, whether they were biographical sources or whatever, I would do this. For example, for my Special Subject on Edwardian political history, I persuaded students to look at the Scottish election results of 1906 and 1910 which represented distinctive features, and you could relate these to some of the biographical materials and so on. Indeed with 18th-century political history, I recall I really knew nothing about this, except that Namier had taught me the importance of patronage, of looking for patronage. Therefore one was able to suggest that the captive battalions had been able to serve a sort of Scottish interest despite the mode of their election. But it was essentially in this sort of throwaway comment and sideline rather than a real attempt to …
TB Scottish illustrations as it were!
JH Yes. And the other thing was … I suppose … I also encouraged students who were going on to research to take on a Scottish topic. Now, with James Kellas, I had a terrible job to persuade him that it would be even if he had to go to London to do it it would be worth looking at the Scottish Liberal Party in the 19th century, and James said: 'Ah, if I do this it would mean that I would only get a job in a Scottish university.'
TB Ah, yes, James Kellas, who we are talking about, is one of the pioneers of the modern Scottish political history who really went into the realm of political studies and went on to become a professor.
JH He took a joint degree here in History and Politics.
TB I have heard him tell the story slightly differently, which was that he I am not saying by you necessarily … But when he wanted to do a Scottish topic he was warned that it might well mean that he couldn't get a job anywhere but in a Scottish university.
JH He'd been warned by somebody. I suggested that he might think differently about it …
TB I have certainly heard him say that. Yes I wonder before … just one point maybe me coming from a personal angle. I mean, I have often wondered how it was possible for a serious pupil of Lewis Namier to teach history at all. How did you square the fact that surely at that time the basic text books and so on in British history, really in English history, since the 18th century … were informed with this sweeping Whig story, and the one basic critique of it was from this very specific-interest-driven point of view, which made it very difficult to have a grand story at all. And you had to produce these three lectures a week. Were you conscious of this being a problem that Namier was such an inspiration, but the basic story that you were working with surely a very un-Namierite story really?
JH I was, I guess, half-conscious … but I think I probably still taught a fair amount of Whig history without realizing it …
TB I think people still do that…
JH Yes, I'm sure they do... [Namierite] research was very ... period-specific [focused on ] the 18th century … I wouldn't claim originality for this ... [but] I think that ... when ... [talking] about elections in the 19th century, one was beginning because of Namier not to say 'Gladstone's great eloquence in the Midlothian campaign swept the board' and saying: 'What features were at work there?' … And certainly in the Special Subject, I suppose, I was applying crude Namierism to the parliaments of 1906 and 1910.
TB Yes, it would apply to a Special Subject better, no matter the period … Perhaps that is for another time in a way … I am wondering, before we kind of move on to your period as Burnett-Fletcher Professor, if you could say something about how you feel you were able to play a role in the wider University from the early '50s through to the early '60s. We, kind of, left you arriving, making friends, but what was the broader University like and what role were you able to play in it?
JH As far as formal structures were concerned, none at all. I never sat on Faculty before I became professor, I think the year I was due to was the year I was in America, and so I missed my turn; and junior representation on Faculty was much … It meant I had to catch up on the folk-lore when I became professor, but I don't know if I missed a great deal by not doing it. I was active in the AUT [Association of University Teachers], I was active ... as a delegate to AUT Conference, but also to a university conference of some sort on … I can't remember what it was about … and I had a good time drinking with John P. Mackintosh. There was a body called the inter-faculty group, which was quite interesting which was, I suppose, an offspring in a way of the Wightman seminars except that it concerned itself with university topics. And I was a secretary or something, John Nisbet was one of the chairmen and John Porteous was one of the active members. And, yes, we submitted memoranda to the UGC and so possibly had a similar …
TB Independently of the University …?
JH I think … I am pretty certain, that we were allowed by the University to do it. Perhaps we had to do it through the AUT. But we produced our little reports and they were circulated.
TB And what was the state of the AUT the Association of University Teachers in Aberdeen at that time?
JH I don't know what the proportion of membership was. It was well supported. It was concerned with salaries, but it was concerned with issues of University policy as well. It certainly wasn't a radical body, but it was an active …
TB It was still very much a professional association rather than a trade union at that point?
JH Yes, it was.
TB And had the system, presumably then, where it only really met once a year?
JH No, no. I can't remember, but it certainly had … I think it probably had formal meetings once a term, at a guess, and it certainly had discussion meetings more often than that, and social activities.
TB Yes, some of the histories of the AAUT stress this that it took its social role very seriously at that point. And did you meet people through the AUT that you wouldn't have otherwise met …?
JH Well, I think that I would have met them somewhere. I would have met them in the common room or somewhere else.
TB Were you ever an AUT official or just a member?
JH A junior one. I was on the committee, yes …
TB Do you think the AUT was able to accomplish very much that wouldn't have been accomplished anyway in Aberdeen in particular? Obviously much of AUT's work was national salary negotiations and so. In Aberdeen particularly, did you feel that it accomplished things that would not otherwise have been accomplished?
JH Well, I can't pull an example out of the air, but I would have said 'yes'. If it wanted to take up an issue about the working of the Regent scheme or something like that, then it would go directly to Thomas Taylor, who was quite receptive.
TB The Principal would meet directly with the ….
JH I think that was probably what would happen. But certainly as regards salaries and so on, it was national negotiations.
TB I suppose, just one other background thing. I know again from reading the memoir we have referred to, you were quite influenced in the late 1940s by the Moberly book on the crisis in the universities? And then when we get through to the early '60s, there is beginning to be stirrings about university expansion and universities planning a role in this much more optimistic view of what was possible in democratising British society in terms of opportunity and not just in terms of formal politics and so forth and so on. Did thinking about the university the nature of the university, what it was like in Aberdeen and what it was like in the system as a whole did that play a big part in your intellectual life in the 1950s, or was it really African history …?
JH … I think it did. I think I was quite concerned about it and, yes, I was conscious of it. The Moberly book I'd been associated with a group in Manchester, which called itself the Moberly Group basically they were concerned, I think, with democratising an elitist conception of the university and bringing it up to date, and making it a more vital part of culture. At the same time, as a member of the Labour Party, I was eager to see greater participation. There was the famous Kingsley Amis dictum that 'more means worse' as Amis stated. There was discussion of that. And I remember obviously not as clear as I might when I came back from the States, I wrote a piece for the little house magazine that the AUT had on this theme the merits and de-merits of a more open, not necessarily more democratic, but a much more open, university system.
TB Because by the time you become professor … presumably also you would have had a sense by that time that you were going to be dealing with some kind of expansion …
JH Yes, and I had no doubts in my own mind that expansion from what we had nationally was desirable, I didn't need to wait for the Robbins Report to convince me of that.
TB And were there particular aspects in Aberdeen? Was there a particular sense, do you think, in Aberdeen University that perhaps not so much that more means worse, but that more may in some way vitiate this strong regional or provincial identity, and change the character of the University in a way that some people might not have wanted, do you think? Do you think there was a particular Aberdeen aspect to the story about the battle over university expansion?
JH There are two answers to that. I think Tom Taylor did have that sort of apprehensions … I think he overcame them a bit reluctantly before he died.
TB He was another Labour Party member, I think.
JH He had been in the Labour Party, yes. I don't think, I don't know which way he would have voted after the war, but he was deeply into the Old Aberdeen community, keeping it small and intimate. And he was, I think, a very reluctant expansionist, but I think he was intellectually and politically convinced it was necessary and wouldn't have been an obstacle. The interesting case of course is Reg Jones …
TB This is R.V. Jones …
JH R. V. Jones, the physicist, yes …
TB … who had played a big part in Bletchley Park during the war and wrote a lot of books …
JH No, not Bletchley Park, but in the Cabinet Office, in Defence and I've interviewed him for this series. Jones in the '50s was all in favour of expansion. He wanted to expand the Science Faculty, he wanted to extend his department. He thought this was important - and all the Barlow arguments … He was very proud of the standard of the Physics Department, in which he had had some very distinguished predecessors. He thought his students when he came to Aberdeen in '46 were a great lot. He was pleased with his colleagues and he wanted to expand them into a major research establishment. When he discovered that not so many students of the same quality were coming forward, and that also that it was not so easy to have staff of a quality he wanted, he did a complete turn-round and it was 'more means worse'! And there were long debates about that, and he made himself extremely unpopular. I think I was one of the few people … a very sad man really, very lonely latterly … After all his time in higher reaches of politics, and he was the most inept academic politician I have every known! And he was a very lonely figure. I mean, I was never a friend of his, but I was one of the few people in the Arts Faculty who he would talk to and who sympathised with him.
TB He did become a bit of a 'what I said to Winston' bore, didn't he?
JH Yes.
TB And he had his troubles at the end as well … I think though … is there anything else about that first decade, let's say, based in Aberdeen that you feel we should put on the record here?
JH No I don't think there is. I think you have pulled my memories.
TB Presumably …
End of side B of tape 1
Start of Tape 2
Side A
TB John, at the end of the last tape, I had just asked you if there was anything more that you had to say about the 1950s and you thought we had covered it fairly well, and then I asked you if you, in the late 1950s, early 1960s particularly, when you get back from the States, and the chair becomes available … Sayles has presumably announced his retirement?
JH Yes. I think he announced it in 1962 when he got this research fellowship … He had intended to go on until he was 70, and he was offered a research fellowship with American funding, and had to go in 1962.
TB Was that in Oxford?
JH In London.
TB So obviously you make the decision to apply. It has just occurred to me that this might have been a moment in your career where you and Sheila might have thought, 'a decade in Aberdeen is a good time, we will move on somewhere else'. Was that an issue or were you very integrated into Aberdeen by that time?
JH It wasn't an issue. I had been thinking I'd like to move on. My first big book was due out, and had been accepted in '62. I had applied, prematurely I think, for one or two chairs and got nowhere. I had been asked if I'd like to go back as a professor in the University of Sierra Leone, which had changed its nature. It was not unattractive, but I think time-wise it would not have been right. Perhaps I should say this. One thing that worried me I think perhaps this had better be put this under closure … but, no … well, now he's dead now … I had never really got on with Archie Thornton. We had good, hard and fruitful academic discussions, but he was not a scholar in whom I had great trust and there was a belief around that it was his intention to try and come back to the chair in Aberdeen.
TB Because he had left and gone to …
JH He had left, and gone first to the West Indies, and then to Toronto.
TB That was in the '50s.
JH And I would not have been happy working under him and this gave me … rightly or wrongly, this gave me itchy feet!
TB Is that because his work was rather more speculative and less archive-based and so on than you felt …?
JH Not because it was speculative in itself … I like the speculation, but I felt it lacked the sort of substantiation that there ought to be and that there was not I may be wronging him but personally, although we never quarrelled or anything we remained perfectly civil I didn't like that thought.
TB So you were thinking that to stay on in Aberdeen not as Professor was something you might not have wanted to do for too long at least. It was very important for you to get the Chair obviously. Was that a difficult and traumatic period? I mean was there a lot of doubt?
JH Well, I remember one day, I don't know, there had been some straw in the wind that suggested that it might be going to … They were taking a very long time in deciding to interview … and probably they were waiting to see if they can get Thornton … and I remember walking round Hazlehead and saying, 'This would be bloody awful'. But anyhow … Equally, I mean, I had had my own application in … well, they hadn't done anything about it. I thought they probably hadn't heard from him. So from that point of view it had its troubled moments.
TB In the event, was there a big competition for it? As far as you are aware.
JH I don't think … I think there probably wasn't. I know one or two people who were in, but I don't think it was very …
TB There wasn't a kind of week of interviews or something, where you were conscious of everyone else who was in, or something like that?
JH No. I think what happened in the end … I was getting a bit fed up, I'd got this approach from Sierra Leone and this hardened up, though I thought I probably wouldn't take it. I think I mentioned to Angus that I had it the Secretary and I wondered when the Aberdeen chair would be settled, and an interview was called very quickly.
TB Well, that technique remains …! (Laughter) So you were wholeheartedly wanting the chair?
JH Yes. By this time we were very happy in Aberdeen. We were happy at the prospect of going on. There was obviously a case for a change of scene, but no …
TB There were no internal rivals were there? I mean, you were the …
JH I don't think so. I think Kathleen Edwards probably applied, but the … physical …
TB Kathleen Edwards became Reader in Medieval History.
JH She was already, and she was a very good scholar and a very good academic …
TB She was physically disabled …
JH It was Still's Disease, which became worse.
TB She was responsible for the pioneering lift being placed in the Taylor Building it has just been upgraded, just last year I think …
JH So Kathleen may have been a candidate, but I think probably not. And Leslie Macfarlane, although he proved a far better scholar than I am, had not shown it at this time. I don't know whether … I don't think he applied.
TB Well, I don't know about the better scholar, but certainly a different type of field altogether. So now you get the chair. Were you … What was the nature of the interview, if you recall? I mean was there a remit to do something with the department or was it purely about your research and how your publications were going to proceed, or what?
JH I don't remember it very clearly at all.
TB You weren't, kind of, asked … I mean, I am just thinking when Alan Macinnes was appointed technically your successor but one you know, it was very much on the basis changed times and very much on the basis of a sort of a business plan for the department.
JH Nothing like that. I may have indicated, in general terms, certain things I would like to do, but I certainly wasn't asked to produce a manifesto.
TB But you do produce a kind of manifesto when you give your inaugural lecture and this is still commented on, and in that it seems to me you tied together a lot of things from your past experience.
JH Yes.
TB Particularly your reflections on the state of Scottish history, which must have come, as we already said, from the teaching of British history in a Scottish university and your experience in Africa, and also a very serious attitude, it seemed to me, towards studying something that we've rather lost in terms of teaching students, at least at the moment … towards the history of discipline itself and having to be self-conscious about that in order to take it forward as it were. Did you see that inaugural as quite a missionary statement as it were? Or was it a matter of getting something together to do the thing?
JH Somewhere between the two I imagine! (Laughter) Seriously … I don't know if I would have said 'a missionary statement'. I remember the previous week I had not been feeling at all well and I had got these notes, and I forget if I got some sort of stimulant, maybe a bottle of whisky! But Sheila still remembers coming into the room or somebody else coming into the room, saying, "He's tearing up his lecture!" I think I did this …
TB You were frustrated with it, and actually tore up the draft of the lecture.
JH I suddenly realised that the draft I had got wasn't … well it bore some relation to what came, but it wasn't good enough …
TB And how long was this before it was delivered?
JH A couple of days! [But see account in footnote 3 - T. B.]
TB And of course these were the days before word-processors! This is presumably a typed or written manuscript that you …
JH I think it was … I forget when it went into type. I probably was typing rather slowly on the typewriter.
TB Well you certainly can't have torn up all the notes, because you couldn't have reproduced that material …
JH No, no. I had a text in front of me. It might have been more than two days.
TB Yes. Did it have any impact? I mean these things can be very frustrating, and they may come to seem significant later, but at the time …
JH I got a lot of very kind letters from other people in Scotland, and other people south of the border. James Burns, who had been my half-colleague as political science, he was half in and out of the History Department he had now moved to London. He wrote a very long and appreciative letter.
TB And in some ways … I mean it's my impression that, coming from that sort of position at least, it is one of the first public calls for a serious development of a scholarly Scottish history, certainly for the modern period.
JH I believe it is … apart from, 'what a shame our children don't know more about the history,' I think it probably is. There was a lot of that of course … plenty of people saying, beginning to say, 'why do our children have to learn all this English history at school?' So in that sense there was an easy target to respond to.
TB My recollection is that what you were taught in school at that point was rather before you got to any sort of public exam stage. You were taught about the Wars of Independence and you were taught about African missionaries having a strong Scottish content and that kind of thing, but largely I think at primary and junior school stage, rather than when you were doing Highers. Higher history was very much at a discount at that time in the Scottish exam system because it didn't fully count as a Higher! It only counted as a Lower, I remember, in the Scottish School Certificate! I am not quite sure when that changed. It can only have been round about then.
JH I thought we'd got past that. There certainly were queries …
TB Well, when I was doing my Scottish School Certificate, which would have been round about in 1960, I think, you didn't do History as it wasn't worth doing, you did Higher English and you did Lower History.
JH Yes I'm afraid I've forgotten the detail. There was this … it was discussed in the Historical Association, and we talked about this with Molly Gauld.
TB And what about …? At that point what was the state of the teaching of Scottish history in the Department? It was Walter Humphries doing an Ordinary …
JH Walter Humphries, doing Ordinary and Advanced, and Jimmy Henderson doing, I think it was called Scottish History 1660 to 1707 sorry, it would be 1560 to 1707
TB as an Honours Optional?…
JH no, as a compulsory Honours course. There were no Options. So they all got Scottish history in this sense …
TB How long had that been going on?
JH Years.
TB So that was under the Sayles regime?
JH That was under the Black regime …
TB Back to Black?
JH If not under the Terry regime …
TB Right - so … it was a compulsory course. So, how did you set about to run the department basically? What was in your mind, what were the opportunities? What were your fears when you took it over as the Burnett-Fletcher Professor?
JH Putting them in order … That is a little difficult to …
TB Well, what did you perceive as the main challenges? Let's put it like that. Were there things you thought had to be improved?
JH (a), I thought there had to be a different Honours syllabus with a wider range, and this would of course involve personnel, but I had a chance to replace myself, which was Jennifer …
TB Jennifer Carter?
JH Yes.
TB Who had an African background?
JH Yes, that is right … had an African background, and in a mild way she proceeded with back-up teaching …
TB But her field was British constitutional history …
JH British, yes. But she wasn't appointed because of her African background, but because she was the best candidate. She was actually appointed with Sayles in the Chair, but absolutely with my support. And then next year there was the first new appointment, which we made with Paul Dukes. I'm not sure when we had the first department meeting, but I decided earlier on that we needed a more collegiate approach and began having departmental meetings.
TB So up to that point there had been no departmental meetings. Everything was just decided by the Professor.
JH Apart from examiners' meetings.
TB Yes, apart from examiners' meetings. Was this something that was coming to the University as a whole?
JH No. I think we were the first department as far as I know. I mean, there may have been departments doing it in varying degrees. No, I take that back. I don't think it was general, but I can't say any more than that.
TB So when Paul Dukes was appointed, was he the first real, kind of, fully overseas history specialist as it were?
JH Yes.
TB His expertise is Russia.
JH Yes, his expertise being Russia. And his appointment was … there were two reasons for it. One we were not strong on European history at all. The basic first-year course, for which I now became responsible, was European History, so we needed back-up in that. But (two) I had already I am afraid students will have to go to the minutes to get the sequence of this I decided that we wanted to have more Honours Options. I began to teach the Modern History of Tropical Africa now that would be in '64 by which time we had got two more jobs, which were Roy Bridges and Don Withrington.
TB Roy Bridges, an African expert; Don Withrington the Scottish equivalent?
JH Then it must have been in 1964 that the new syllabus came in, with the principle of Optionals introduced, and the formula was that there were four groups of Optionals … I forgot I've to backtrack on the overseas history. Archie Thornton had been succeeded by Philip Haffenden, who had moved from teaching Imperial history to teaching American history, and that post was vacant, Philip moved to Southampton in 1962. We had a one-year appointment from Columbia, an American, for one year; and in 1964 Ted Ranson was appointed as an American specialist.
TB Yes … I was thinking about someone who was a specialist in aspects of European history other the general teaching of the European course. Yes, there were links with African history and American history.
JH So the diversification principle was that there were four groups one of which was American history on its own, one of which was a period of Scottish history. I can't remember what choice we started out with. The third one was non-Western history, in which Russia fell, Africa fell, and later Ann Williams's Mediterranean history fell; and the fourth one was an allied discipline which were approved courses from other departments.
TB And that, plus a Special Subject, was the Honours offering?
JH Yes.
TB Was this modelled … conscious reforms taking place of the syllabus was it modelled on something in particular? I mean, how was the reform decided upon?
JH I think it was decided upon how given existing and immediately expected resources what was the best way of providing this sort of offering to students.
TB Was there discussion with other Scottish universities?
JH No.
TB It was done on an Aberdeen basis? People must have had some idea what was going on?
JH They must have some idea what was going on in Edinburgh at least. I don't know it extended further than that. I had examined in Edinburgh and had contacts there with Sam Shepperson and others. That was the university I knew best, so …
TB But really you, in discussion with colleagues, were putting this in place. I mean very different from all the External-telling-you-what- to-do and everything like that that we have today.
JH It was.
TB I mean, I am thinking this must have been really quite an exciting period…
JH It was.
TB You have always been a pioneer of African History and in a sense that has been justified, because you have got the … At the time when you got the Chair it is presumably clear that you are going to be doing much more as an Africanist rather than …
JH I would have thought so.
TB So you kind of established the principle that … Because there weren't that many chairs in African history, were there? They were beginning to be established …
JH No, no. There was a chair in London, and about the same time John Fage came home from Ghana and got a chair in African history in Birmingham …
TB But of course you are not in a chair of African history …
JH No, I am not in a chair of African history. These were for a long time the only two. Tony Low, a few years later was Chair in Asian and African history in Sussex, Sam Shepperson was Imperial and Commonwealth history in Edinburgh, and gave it an African emphasis and helped to build up the African Studies Centre there.
TB But, I mean, I wonder if there were any other heads of departments who were Africanists in any other British university? Probably not.
JH No, I don't think there were. Godfrey Davies, who had written on the Royal African Company got a chair in Bristol, but he was really interested in this as an aspect of British economic history.
TB So my point is that this … that you kind of had this recognition, here in Aberdeen, you have a department. It is clear it is a moment of expansion and I suppose one thing about being Head of Department and an Africanist, is that you, obviously, had to think, 'well, I can't just insist everybody does nothing else but African history!' You have to think of a whole syllabus.
JH Of course, of course. I wouldn't have wanted to do that.
TB Of course not, but this set of challenges must have been a very remarkable opportunity.
JH Again, I was also very lucky. We didn't have a lot of applications for lectureships at this time, and I was very lucky when these two posts came up and I think there were two applications for each. To have Roy, who was not only into African history but was an extremely valuable man on the general European history. And Don, who was so versatile on Scottish history.
TB So you're almost creating a new department, although … I mean you have worked with a number of colleagues who are still there … and then you are creating over the next few years … doubling the size of the department really, aren't you? If not more?
JH Yes. We began with nine, I think there were probably about 18 when I handed over and then it went up to 21 or so.
TB And that was about the maximum before we started juggling around with what the department was to make it look bigger after the big cuts. Was that a happy period?
JH I found it a very happy period. Very exciting. I don't think that's merely in retrospect. I was doing … it was exciting to build up the department. Departmental meetings became more interesting as time goes on! (Slight laughter)
TB I was going to say, because it is … the other thing about it is, it is a relatively short period. I mean, let's face it, a substantial part of your career, I suppose … but this great window of opportunity is rapidly challenged. First of all by students dis-satisfaction, or the sense that dissatisfied students can express themselves, which was presumably very much not the case in the 1950s. Was the student body palpably changing very much? How did you perceive the changes there were?
JH Yes. Well the student body I think had been getting, from the point of view of the History Department … the student body had been I think improving for some time in numbers, and there had been a few extremely able students in the '50s Bruce Lenman being one who was terrifyingly bright … But often there were only as few as four students in the department doing Honours in the '50s.
TB As few as four!
JH Yes, as few as four! And at least on two occasions I think it was …
TB So much of the main teaching was servicing the Ordinary course …?
JH It also meant that you had more time to spend with the four. There had been some good students then, and some years which were a bit better than that … a year, for example, when James Kellas and Nicholas Phillipson were both there.
TB Yes, both of whom went on to become university academics.
JH Yes. There was quite a lively year when I came back from the States, when we did my Special Subject on the partition of Africa Tom Barron became a lecturer in Imperial history at Edinburgh, and a man called David Ross, who went on to teach African history at the Simon Fraser University in Canada. But then … yes, it was very splendid. The first year in the chair was a year which I well remember Duncan Rice and Allan McLaren and Ian McCalman, and several other extremely able students came into the Honours class, into the Junior Honours class; and I think from that time onwards I was always conscious that there were a few students of real quality, there and they are almost always in reasonable numbers. There were eleven students, I think, in that class and soon afterwards we are getting up towards 20 and 30.
TB How did you perceive the question of relationships with students? Because the radicalism that affected the universities in the late '60s, I mean, there was … there were manifestations of it in Aberdeen.
JH Yes. Relatively mild. There were those … I remember having … I can't remember the background to it, but I remember a day when I think I did it on my own, I don't think I asked anybody to join me I would meet the students and take questions. I remember a confrontation with now my very good friend Jim Hunter, who was taking me to task about there not being enough Scottish history. Of course I had just appointed you to be our Scottish historian!
TB I turned out to be the wrong type of Scottish historian, the wrong type of snow on the line! So that is nearly into the early '70s or late '60s.
JH I think the late '60s. In fact, I am sure it was the late '60s.
TB Yes, I have forgotten. Yes, I think Jim was in the second year when I arrived in '68.
JH Jim graduated when I wasn't here in '71.
TB Yes, he would have been in the second year. But was that something that disturbed you? Or that you welcomed?
JH No, no! I tried to take all complaints seriously and I thought it was very good. It was very good that there was a bit of an eruption. I sometimes got cross with this and that …
End of side one of tape 2
Tape two
Side A
TB So just at the end of the last side we were talking about student unrest in the '60s, late '60s, and you were saying that you welcomed that. Did that distinguish you in the professoriate in the University? I mean was there a lot of discussion and differences about how to tackle … the students, as it were?
JH There were differences. But I think what was important was how Edward Wright handled it …
TB The Principal. He became …
JH He was by now Principal … in '62, the same time I became a professor …
TB He had been a professor in the University?
JH He had been a professor since 1930, I think, or 1936, and he was extremely good at consulting with SRC leaders and even those who had been elected as very 'Young Turks' at taking their concerns seriously. There was a lot of concern about failure rates, I remember, and he set up research into that, and we did a little research in the department on our own account too. I think on the whole that period of student unrest wouldn't feature very prominently in UK-wide histories of student unrest in the '60s! But I think it was regarded as a basically salutary phase in the history of the University of Aberdeen.
TB Do you say that because you think the University perhaps … I mean … wasn't handling the expansion all that well, or do you see it as a tribute to the University that it was able to produce students who had this salutary effect on things?
JH Yes, I think it was a tribute that the University could have it, and that it could take it. There were those who manifestly thought it was awful, that the students were getting above themselves in this way. Maybe the University defused it all a bit too easily. I don't know.
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