| Description | Interview with Sir John Adam Thomson recorded on 11 July 1986 by John Hargreaves
Transcript of Interview:
H Sir John you were in a sense born into this University, your grandfather was Principal and your father Professor of Natural Philosophy and although you left for Cambridge when you were very young you must frequently have visited Sir George Adam Smith. I wonder what memories you have of him?
T I have many memories of George Adam Smith, most of them are of the last years of his life when he was living at Sweethillocks, Balerno not far from Edinburgh, but I also remember him and his wife Lilian even better when they were at Aberdeen because as you rightly say I was brought up here and also my parents had Chanonry Lodge for a summer when I was young. I think it must have been the summer of 1932 probably or possibly 33 when my grandfather was at Alvie for the summer and I went backwards and forwards once or twice between Aberdeen and Alvie so my recollections are of over a number of years. I remember my grandfather as a brisk small figure with a combination of sterness and humour. He was so I'm told a remarkable preacher. I recall hearing him at least once preach in St Machar's and I remember that as rather a stirring event. I remember being told that he was invited to come and preach in King's College Chapel after he had retired, indeed several years after he had retired and there were those who felt nervous about his performance at that age and that they might feel sad remembering what a good preacher he had been in his prime. But frail though he was, apparently when he got into the pulpit he was transformed and produced a memorable sermon. I remember him as very much of a family man, it was a large family so there was a lot of coming and going. I remember my grandmother for obvious reasons even better and I have thought a lot about her in the last 24 hours or so as I have been in familiar places and I felt that she was probably the ideal consort for a principal of the university. She was a very warm personality who had that knack, which is rare but sometimes exists in royalty and others, of making you feel that she really wanted to speak to you above all, irrespective of who else was in the room. She was a person with a very wide acquaintance. She wrote to an enormous number of people in a fairly regular way. It was her practice, as far as I can recall, to write roughly between breakfast and lunch every day. There was breakfast, then family prayers, and then a certain amount of housekeeping and directions to servants, and then she would settle down to write letters and wrote until it was time for the […] she wrote usually at the dining room table, so she wrote until it was time for the table to be laid for lunch and I'm not surprised that a lot of people both eminent and otherwise have very warm recollections of her.
H Would it be true to say that your grandfather was a slightly intimidating figure and your grandmother not at all?
T That is certainly the way I experienced it, yes. My grandfather I remember as even well into his eighties being very alert about contemporary affairs. He spent quite a bit of time reading the newspapers and journals, and I remember various trenchant comments over meals. I remember him, as I say, conducting family prayers every morning with a very clear moving voice.
H You say he made trenchant comments on contemporary affairs. You may not remember this but did he go on deputations or write letters to The Times about the Government's foreign policy?
T I don't recall that.
H If I could come now to your father and his years in Aberdeen, which you can hardly remember very clearly, but how did your father regard the years he'd spent in Aberdeen during his subsequent career?
T My father not surprisingly was extremely fond of Aberdeen. He had two very good reasons for being so. One was that he met my mother at the very outset of his time. If I recall correctly he was invited to dine at Chanonry Lodge at the time that he was interviewed for the professorship and met my mother on that occasion, although it took him quite some time after that to persuade her to marry him. So that above all was a reason for affection for Aberdeen But secondly he did the work for which he got the Nobel prize at Aberdeen and I think he felt that this was some of the most important and exciting work that he had ever done, and so from both the personal and the professional point of view Aberdeen was a crucial part of perhaps the most exciting part in some ways of his life.
H With the work he was doing at that time, did he feel at all constrained about being in a small university by the shortage of equipment or laboratory space?
T Of course what I'm now saying are recollections of comments he made many years after he left Aberdeen especially during the later part of the war when I was actually at Aberdeen and therefore it was a subject of conversation and when I saw a lot of my father because my mother had died by then and my sisters were still in America and my father made a great effort to see me and my brother as much as possible. I never recall hearing him say that he felt constrained by shortage of equipment and after all he did produce some remarkable results with the equipment he had. Moreover he was, so I'm told, clever with equipment himself and he had a lab assistant a man if I recall correctly called Fraser (but I'm not one hundred percent sure that I've got the name correct) who was extremely good and very experienced and very clever at making equipment that was not perhaps ideal for the purpose but served the purpose. What he certainly did notice and commented on several times, was the geographical and psychological distance of Aberdeen from other centres of natural philosophy and physics. He did feel out at the end of a limb. He did feel that he lacked in Aberdeen what he had had in Cambridge and subsequently London, that is to say easy commerce with other physicists.
H Did he have assistants who were in the department, academic assistants, who were of value and stimulus to him?
T I have heard him mention assistants but I didn't get the impression that he got much stimulus from that source. I think he got far more stimulus from visits to Cambridge to stay with his parents and of course see friends particularly people in the Cavendish, and also, to some extent, from the British Association meetings and other special events which he went south for. But he did certainly feel that the main drawback of being professor of natural philosophy in Aberdeen was that it was difficult to be in informal conversation and touch with other leading physicists.
H Did he, or indeed before him did your other grandfather, encourage Aberdeen graduates to move on to Cambridge? Did that happen very much do you know?
T I don't think I know the answer to that. My impression was that there was a tradition at Aberdeen, well, at all Scottish university graduates, of considering moving to Oxford or Cambridge in particular. Much less so, I think, to English provincial universities, but exactly how much my father or grandfather encouraged that I do not know.
H Did he have friends whom he valued among the professoriate?
T Very much so. I think he very much valued the professor of mathematics whose name I am not sure that I recall but I vividly recall his stories about him. The professor in question was I think a bachelor or possibly a widower and my father enjoyed calling on him. The conversation was I think by no means purely about mathematics. In fact, probably not very much of it was about mathematics but he was a man of considerable character. My father's closest friend, the person I think he probably most enjoyed doing things with, was the Secretary of the University, Butchart who was a person whose name cropped up in family conversation constantly and whom I came to know quite well myself because he was still Secretary of the University when I came up here in 1943. He was a man of enormous figure, [prescence] almost overmastering figure, which I think must have been terrifying to some people, or at least intimidating. He and my father shared a passion for skiing and did quite a lot of skiing together not only in Scotland, at which time there was nothing like a ski lift but also on more than one occasion went skiing together in Switzerland. And so I remember Butchart coming to our house in London on various occasions usually in connection with going skiing or coming back from skiing, and I remember many a story about Butchart's various exploits. The one that most readily comes to mind is the establishment of the indicator on the top of Lochnagar. My father assisted together with several others, but my impression was that the moving spirit if not actually the moving physical force in this was Butchart and I remember when my father brought me here in 1943 having given me the option when I came back from America of going either to an English public school or to an English university or to Aberdeen and I opted for Aberdeen rather to his surprise. He brought me here and of course we spent a certain amount of time with Butchart who gave useful advice about lodgings and about an allowance I would be required to have and almost the first thing we did was have tea and tennis in Butchart's house in Don Street and there was a magnificent grass tennis court, most beautifully kept I remember, worthy of Wimbledon but not used as much by Butchart personally. He was a man who was extremely direct, as was my father and that I think was in many ways the closest bond that they were each ready to say what they thought and say it in strong terms and particularly I think in my father's case with a good deal of originality and so though there was quite an age difference between the two they were obviously very close and determined friends. My own experiences with Butchart were delightful but totally unsuccessful because I called on him two or three times, he in his capacity as Secretary of the University and I in my capacity as a member of the Students Representative Council, and I was deputed for some reason or another which I don't wholly recall to make representations to the Secretary of the University on some matter or other that the Students Representative Council felt the University should reform, and I do not recall ever succeeding in persuading Butchart to accept the recommendations. Having heard my plea and reason for coming to see him his invariable line of argument was to say, "Well if you were professor of Chinese in this University…" and then he would go on to explain why I would be wholly opposed to whatever it was I was suggesting. I found it a line of argument that was unconvincing but nevertheless I failed to convince Butchart.
H Were there old friends of your fathers with whom you had contact when you came as a student?
T A little bit with Professor Laird who I think was probably the most distinguished intellectual person at the University during my time, but otherwise not. I think there were very few professors here in 1943/1945 my period year who had been here in 1931 when my father left.
H Well perhaps we could come to the period of your own studies in Aberdeen now. You just said you were offered a choice of coming here or going elsewhere and opted for Aberdeen, why?
T I remember the occasion vividly because I had arrived from Lisbon early one Sunday morning in July 1943 at an airfield somewhere in the western part of England and was put in a train and sent up to London and given lunch at the Berkeley Hotel where my father met me, he come from Cambridge. And over lunch (which cost 7/6d and my father explained to me that this was the maximum that a lunch could cost in those days under war time regulations) he outlined to me what he thought the possibilities were for me. I, having come back from America slightly unexpectedly, that was to say in 1943, there was never any certainty that ships would not be sunk and therefore might not be available for the next voyage. I had been destined for Marlborough and that was really what my Father expected me to say when he laid out the three options for me. I hadn't given any thought to the matter at all although I may have had a little bit of anxiety but not at all sure what was going to happen. Having just graduated from Philips Exeter Academy I certainly didn't feel inclined to go back to school, so the choice really was between Cambridge, conceivably London, or Aberdeen, and my father explained to me that there was no certainty that any of these places would accept me particularly since Harvard University to which I had obtained entrance had changed their form of exam in 1941 or 1942 and it was not yet clear whether British universities would accept the new type of exam. Indeed so much so that I had to sit the London matric. In the end I got entry multiple times because they did finally accept the Harvard exam and I passed the London matric. But I chose Aberdeen as far as I can recall, on the spur of the moment I remember my choice being given as we stood on the pavement waiting for a taxi that took a very long time to come. Because I didn't want to go back to school, because I felt that at the age of 16 I was a bit young to go to Cambridge and I also felt that what ever I did was going to be interrupted because of coming war time service. Finally I chose Aberdeen because of my mother's family connections. I had been born near Bieldside and I had always heard my mother speak so warmly of Aberdeen, my father too, that it seemed to some extent home.
H And what were your impressions after Exeter of the academic quality of the level at which you were being stretched. or not stretched?
T Aberdeen was of course a great change for me not so much in freedom because Exeter was remarkably free and teaching at Exeter was of perhaps a higher standard I have encountered anywhere but first of all I was very impressed by the knowledge that the first year arts students or the best of them had in their chosen areas. I chose History and I found that my fellow historians especially those coming from the Academy were far ahead of me. I found also of course there was tremendous freedom which was very exciting because it was not only intellectual freedom but also freedom in every other sense. There I was living in the town and totally unsupervised.
H Where did you stay, were you in digs?
T Yes I was in digs at 466 King Street where we went, my father and I, recommended by Butchart as I recall and made an arrangement on the spot with a formidable landlady who turned out to be only one of several maiden sisters. My father gave me an allowance of £15 a term and we settled with the landlady for 35 shillings a week for room and board, laundry I think was extra. And so I found Aberdeen very exciting and I think I could have been submerged by the novelty of it all, by the unfamiliarity of it but was saved by two or three anchors one of which was the fact that I was aiming to do honours history and that I found wonderfully exciting and it gave me time, which I'd never had at Exeter, to go more deeply into a subject. In fact I studied History certainly at the expense of the other two subjects I was supposed to be studying namely Latin and Chemistry. Chemistry I took only because my father who had never put any pressure on me to follow the family line of physics finally said that he did think that I should read his best and easiest book and that I should do one science just to discover what it was like. So I selected chemistry and did notably badly in it. The Latin I was rather taken aback with because where I had done moderately well at Latin in Exeter I found that the Latin that I was dealing with here was of a considerably higher standard and that we read Lucretius which I had never been acquainted with before and many of my contemporaries in the class were far ahead of me. But in History, as I have already said some of the other first year historians (and we were a small band because of the war) knew a lot more history than I did. I found them very stimulating and they formed a very good group and by accident of the alphabet there was a group of four of us who consisted of myself, in alphabetical order, a girl called Pat Vlasto and Donald and Ian Watt. And it so happened that first year historians were divided into groups of four for purposes of supervision and by pure accident this grouping of four formed a natural unit and if I recall correctly took the four top places in the exam. So that little group was another anchor for me and then Professor Black, the professor of History, was a very friendly as well as charming man and he certainly took an interest in me beyond what was required from a professional point of view. And we also came to the university at the same time as the new lecturer in Medieval History, Marjory Morgan who was as I came to know later a notable scholar, later Marjory Chibnall. She was very shy and very new and I remember, I suppose it must have been the first week of term, a tea party at Professor Black's house to which all the first year historian were invited, at any rate most of them, and Marjory Morgan as she then was, very shy and ready to blush but when in the classroom a first rate teacher. And Black himself was excellent with his lectures, the traditional lectures to the first year historian. They were a very good set of lectures. So I felt that I had an anchor in history and in the people who taught it, an anchor in my contemporaries, and then a family anchor too because my aunt Margaret Clarke was living in the Chanonry and I went to Sunday lunch there most Sundays and called in there sometimes in the evenings and I just felt comfortable in Aberdeen. I was not overwhelmed, on the contrary I felt excited and stimulated and then had the good fortune to find myself elected to the Students Representative Council.
H This was at the end of your first year?
T No this was in the first week of my first term. The circumstances like many other things to do with my career in Aberdeen were strange and fortunate. The first year male of students were a very small band because many of those who would have been in the group had already been called up, or were so nearly about to be called up, that they hadn't felt that it was worthwhile starting at the university and I don't recall exactly how many we were but I don't think we could have been more than 12 or so and it so happened that all I think but myself were either from Robert Gordons or from the Academy and there was considerable rivalry between the two and neither group wished to elect a representative from the other and so I was the compromise. And the result of being elected to the Students Representative Council was very fortunate for me. It brought me into touch with other members of the Council who were members of other faculties and without exception all older than myself some of them quite a bit older and it also gave me a training in committee work, in how to make a point, and also some vivid illustrations of how not to and I think I learned a good deal informally from that experience.
H Could I just briefly sketch the outlines of your career at Aberdeen and I consulted the records before this so there seems to be a little ambiguity about it. You graduated in '47. Did you take Honours History?
T Yes I am not at all surprised that you may have found some ambiguity amid the records. I should suspect that a certain amount of it was deliberate ambiguity through your distinguished professor Black. What happened was that I set out on the course of honours history in 1943 at Butchart's recommendation but there was of course no real expectation that I would complete this course, which when I thought of my struggles with Lucretius and Chemistry was not displeasing to me. And I did first year honours history and took the normal exams and that was alright and I started second year honours history and did a lot of work with Marjory Morgan. She had a very small class maybe eight of us altogether which is almost the Cambridge tutorial system and then I left in I think April of 1945 (might have been March) to go into the navy so that I did not complete the second year of honours history and did not even take the exams at the end of the second year but Professor Black, and I suppose Marjory Morgan together, somehow or other squared it with their consciences to assert that had I taken the exams I would have passed them and I understand that I was recorded as having successfully completed the second year honours history and then the regulations at the time provided that a certain amount of war time service or military service would be an adequate substitute for a certain amount of academic work and I can no longer remember what the regulations were but somehow or other it was arranged by Professor Black that I took my degree. But as I say I am not totally surprised to hear that there is some ambiguity in the records.
H You didn't return to the University?
T I did not return to the University. I left the navy in December, I suppose December 1947 and went up to Trinity Cambridge immediately in January 1948. One of the very last things I did at Aberdeen was to take the scholarship exams for Trinity Cambridge. Indeed I don't think that I came back to Aberdeen after taking those exams. I left Aberdeen in as I say March or April I can't remember quite which and travelled down by train to Cambridge, took the scholarship exams and went I think straight on to the beginning of my strange naval career which promptly sent me back to Cambridge for six months, beginning of officer training. The scholarship exams remind me of another debt I owe to Professor Black who told me afterwards that my father had consulted him as to whether I would be scholarship material or not and had expressed great doubt about it and Professor Black had assured my father that he thought I would get a scholarship. I had been totally unaware of this and had quite independently decided that I was going to try for a scholarship but without telling my father this and I well remember posting the application from the post box in King Street and feeling a little bit wicked about not telling my father that I was doing this. However I of course had told Professor Black and somehow or other my father came to learn of this but Black's confidence in me was certainly an element I think in my success in the exam. The teaching I had here was in no way a specific preparation for that exam, but I think probably I had the advantage over some of the boys who were coming straight from history teaching in English public schools and probably I had a, perhaps, more mature outlook. This was not due only to Professor Black and Marjory Morgan but it was also due to the people I met at the university and I think one person more than another in particular who was George Richardson who is now the head of the Oxford University Press and who has remained a close friend since Aberdeen days. We used to do a certain number of hill walks together and he was a little bit older and certainly a lot wiser and many of his comments both philosophical and political caused me to ponder a good deal and I think probably improved my scholarship papers.
H You were lectured to by Professor Black and you were taught by Marjory Morgan in second year. Were there other teachers in history? Was Jimmy Henderson there?
T Yes, he was indeed. I attended some of his lectures. He was a very nice man but didn't make the same impression upon me as a historian as the other two I have mentioned. I found the lectures of the reader in economic history, Hamilton, very stimulating and economic history was a totally new subject to me and I had barely been aware that there could be such a thing as economic history before I came to Aberdeen. I hadn't thought that I would be particularly interested in it. I was very decidedly interested in political history and to some extent military history but Hamilton's lectures and what I was obliged to read to keep up, I found extraordinarily interesting and it was reinforced by Trevelyan's Social History of England which came out at I think it must have been early 1945 or late '44, I found Hamilton, who in some ways I think gave me the impression of being a somewhat disappointed man a very good teacher and he took a good deal of trouble with me. I would certainly say I owe him a debt even though I have not become an economic historian.
H Were there other senior members of the university you remember? You were taught Latin by Peter Scott Noble?
T Yes. A vigorous and slightly intimidating man whom I did see a little bit of socially. He was very nice but I didn't know him well. I saw a certain amount of Douglas Simpson who was a notable figure as he stalked round the library or round Old Aberdeen very frequently and oddly wearing his uniform as in the Observer Corps I think, which I recall as a dark blue uniform with a beret, which he seemed to wear whether he was on duty, or off duty and he was a very dry, very academic figure who rather surprised me by his amusing stories and warmth when I came to know him better long after I had left Aberdeen. I attended some informal lectures that he gave on archaeological matters and they were very good.
H Did he fire your interest in castles?
T My interest in castles antedated my arrival in Aberdeen by a long way. I was interested in castles from almost the time I could crawl. My father made me a castle when I was very small, which I still have, and I played with soldiers a great deal, so Douglas Simpson's lectures and writings appealed to me but they were not an original stimulus.
H Did you see anything of Principal Fife?
T Yes I did. Not a lot but he kindly had me to tea on two or three occasions and I also saw him once or twice in his office. Why I can't recall but I suppose probably in connection with the Students Representative Council. He was a very urbane [scholar, seemingly more an Oxonian than an Aberdonian. It was from him that I first heard to Toynbee.
H You referred to your work on the Students Representative Council, is there anything more you remember about the student body at that time?
H The student body was of course very unbalanced because of wartime conditions so that the medical faculty was strong, both men and women. The science was strong and there were indeed extra scientists sent to the university by the government as part of their training. There were a group of people called radio bursers - my great friend George Richardson was one - whereas the arts faculty was hopelessly unbalanced between the sexes. I suppose there were what would have been a normal number of girls but a very strange group of men, some very young like myself, some who were returned invalided warriors, and some a little older than myself but who suddenly disappeared in the middle of term or between terms to go into the services. So it was particularly at King's an unbalanced group: lots of girls, not many men and some of the men very much older. The war was of course a constant backdrop to everything in the university I refer to Douglas Simpson wearing his Observer Corp uniform and the whole town and neighbourhood of course was very concerned about the position of the Gordon Highlanders so many of whom were in prison camps in Germany and there was a good deal of collecting of funds or provisions to help them and then there was all the excitement of the ups and downs of the fighting in different parts of the world. So the war was a preoccupation and it came out sometimes at Saturday evening hops at the Union where you would hear some of the older men, the medical students in particular, having agonies of conscience about being in Aberdeen studying at the University while their contemporaries were serving in the field and from time to time they heard news of the death of somebody they had been at school with and they found this very poignant. I mean why should they be safe at home when their school fellows died on some foreign field. But at the same time the university was full of life and you had to work hard to keep up and I think there was also a certain feeling that for this particular reason you ought to see that you worked hard.
H Was there much interest in the future shape of post war politics at home or abroad?
T I would have said not very much. This did not really apply to me and the small circle of people whom I have already mentioned. We did discuss the future shape of politics, what we wanted in our lives and how we saw our lives in the post war world, but I certainly felt that we were in a minority. I may be quite wrong about this but most of the life at the Union was not forward looking. Indeed the first year I was at the university there was not even a debating society. I helped to establish one in my second year. I think we managed to have two debates which were popular and well attended but there was not a great deal of discussion I would have said about the future in the national sense. I had a good deal of discussion about it with a rather remarkable lady called Mrs Campbell who was the adviser to women students, but talking about the future with her tended to involve talking about the Irish question and that became a rather prickly and touchy subject on which she felt passionately. It was an early introduction to me in the wisdom of avoiding having anything to do with the Irish question if possible.
H Would you like to attempt any comparison, so far as it's possible, between your experience at Aberdeen and your later experience as a student at Cambridge?
T Cambridge had of course the advantage that it was after the war and things were beginning to be in a sense more normal despite the inordinate continuation of rationing and other war time activities. Cambridge was very exciting because there was a great mixture of people at the time I was up at Cambridge and there was a wide range of ages a wide range of experience, and I was that much more mature having spent two and a half years or so in the navy on the lower deck largely, and so the range of person and situation that one met at Cambridge was far greater than had been the case at Aberdeen. But I go back to my small group at Aberdeen whom I have already mentioned and they were very stimulating to me so that although I had at Cambridge a much greater range I'm not sure that the effect on the formation of my intellectual interests and personality was any greater at Cambridge. It was at Aberdeen that I had the excitement of discovering that I could be a historian. By the time I got to Cambridge I already knew that so I had the great satisfaction of the historical work at Cambridge but I don't think that the teaching I had at Cambridge was by and large any better. Certainly the best teacher I had at Cambridge was Steven Runciman who was really an outside teacher who came down to Cambridge for one or two evenings a week to supervise a small number of people. So Cambridge was far more cosmopolitan, far more open, many more distractions, and going back to your question about talking about the future and talking about international affairs or national affairs totally different from Aberdeen, but I think as things happened for me as a particular individual the stimulus of Aberdeen even during the war was probably crucial.
H Perhaps I could go on from there to take you onto a rather more general ground. Like other Aberdeen graduates you subsequently had a distinguished career in what you might call imperial service but you are somewhat exceptional in this. There have not been very large numbers in recent years who have done this. Now I have an impression that Sir George Adam Smith did believe that Aberdeen University could make a distinct contribution to the British Empire. I think he would have put that it could have been an imperial university which would exercise influence in the world, and that were he to return to the university he might feel that these expectations had been in some way disappointed. Would you agree with such an impression and if so why was this?
T I'm not surprised at what you say about Sir George Adam Smith and his view of the university though I can't confirm it from my personal recollection. I certainly felt even during my time at the university that Scotland in general and Aberdeenshire or at any rate the area which drained into Aberdeen was broadly connected [with the world]. I remember in particular one gentleman who one might have thought from accent and appearance had never strayed far from a Buchan farm and who had the great merit actually of keeping bees and providing pots of honey from time to time who I learned to my great surprise was, had been, if I recall correctly, chief secretary to the government of Bengal. I was surprised about him but I learned not to be so surprised that there were that sort of people in the North East of Scotland. I think the connections between Scotland and the British Empire were enormous but I didn't learn that to the full extent until much later until I was in India. I had had some inkling of this much earlier in my career because at first it seemed to me just a matter of chance that several people I met in the service were Scots, particularly amongst the junior branch of the service that is to say the people who would not normally have an expectation of reaching ambassadorial rank and the people who were clerks or cipher officers. There seemed to be in my early experience quite a high percentage and this was very much confirmed when I was private secretary to Sir Derrick Hoyer Millar as he then was now Lord Inchyra when he was Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office. At that time the system of positive vetting for all members of the foreign service, as it so was, was being introduced and he had the very tiresome, though I suppose important, job of going through every file and finally signing the document to say that the person in question was cleared and there was no security risk in employing them. And so as his private secretary the files, of virtually everybody in the diplomatic service came through my hands. It was far too much paper to sit down and read these files one only just got an impression of them but I was struck by what a disproportionate number of them appeared to come from Scotland. Disproportionate in the sense of the Scottish proportion of the total UK population.
H From Scottish universities?
T No not from Scottish universities for the most part. No not many from Scottish universities. They were Scots but not from universities.
H Yes well this I think is in a way the point to which I am tending. Is there a centrified tendency in the university system which draws talent towards a fertile crescent which tends to be reinforced by success which the latest policy of the University Grants Committee may well tend to accentuate; reward success. And Scotland and Wales, while they have their successes, relatively failed to succeed. This I think is the question. The connections of Scotland in the imperial service are very clear.
T Yes, well I'm not sure that I understand your question precisely but my experience in three and a half decades of government service has been that there have not been as many Scottish graduates at least on the international side as one might have expected and the people whom I know best almost all, if they went to a Scottish university went on to Oxford or Cambridge, usually Oxford. I'm thinking of Ian Sutherland who's sadly just died and was a contemporary of mine up to a point here. He was a little bit older and became ambassador in Moscow. I'm thinking of George Richardson who joined the diplomatic service and it was largely quite a lot due to the fact that he was accepted that I applied. He very rapidly resigned to my great dismay. Two or three others but not many. I think this goes back to your earlier question when you asked me, was the future much discussed and was there a great political interest in the university when I was here in the forties. My answer was by and large "no" though a few individuals were interested and those individuals did tend like Donald Watt, for example, to go on to Oxford, I went on to Cambridge, George Richardson went on to Oxford, Ian Sutherland went to Oxford. Otherwise I can't think of many who went straight from Scottish university into what one might call international or even national affairs. I think it was parochial.
H Yes, or provincial. Now provincial to my mind is a word which has a good sense and a bad sense. Would you care to reflect on those few senses in your experience of Aberdeen?
T Yes I think Aberdeen was provincial in both senses. In the good sense, I think it was a strength for Aberdeen to have a definite North East of Scotland character and not only North East of Scotland but the islands too. I think this gave it roots, gave it an assured body of certain coherence and a certain pride. All those I think were good senses of provincial and perhaps there were certain faculties, I'm thinking of Forestry for example that were strong because they were in the North East of Scotland. But I also think the university was provincial in the less good sense. I've already referred to the way in which my father felt that the chief drawback of being a professor of natural philosophy here was that he was cut off from the conversation of his peers in his own subject and I think that the concerns of most of the students when I was up at Aberdeen were, I was going to say, did say, parochial. I don't think that there was very much interest despite all the excitement of the war. I don't recall exciting ideas being generally discussed except again for this small group of people but we did feel that we were rather a small group. I could mention a few others but there was very little in the way of an attempt by the faculty to raise an interest in this and looking back on it now it seems to me slightly surprising that there were as far as I know no members of the university staff trying to hold discussion groups other than for professional reasons. So I think Aberdeen was provincial in the less good sense as well as in the good sense and I think this probably has had quite an effect upon the expectations of Aberdeen graduates. I did at one point, something like twenty years ago perhaps, make an enquiry as to how many Aberdeen graduates applied for the diplomatic service. I no longer recall the figures but the number was staggeringly small and judging from the fact that the small group of people I've mentioned by name did get into the diplomatic service and did rather well in it there seems to be no particular reason to suppose that going to Aberdeen in any way disqualified you from being successful in the diplomatic service and I could only put it down to the fact that Aberdeen graduates were neither encouraged by their professors to think of applying nor did they have the confidence to think that if they did apply they might be successful. I certainly had the feeling, I came here once for three or four days about the period I'm talking of and talked to a few of the more obvious professors and with I think the university secretary and certainly did have the feeling that Aberdeen graduates didn't feel that it was worth their while to apply because they didn't really stand any chance of getting in which is of course the beginning of failure.
H I think this has been true. Having been concerned in trying to promote it, I think it has sometimes been a little less negative than you imply. There has been a sense throughout that the diplomatic service has somehow become a metropolitan institution with metropolitan attitudes and that in so far as there are provincial inputs, as clearly there have been Scottish inputs and North Eastern inputs down the years, into the business of empire the business of policy making that these have somehow become at a discount. I think it's not entirely lack of personal confidence
T It's not a lack of personal confidence entirely in that people were not confident about their abilities but I think there was a lack of confidence that those abilities would be accepted and be presented in a way that was attractive to the examiners who of course were the civil service commissioners and not the diplomatic service as such. But it struck me as strange and still does strike me as strange that there aren't more applicants from the Scottish universities, because the last time I enquired into the shape of the intake into the diplomatic service it was clear as it had been on previous enquiries that the intake was very much proportional to the applications. There is nothing inherent in the education received at Oxford and Cambridge which should dictate that there should be twice as many Oxford graduates in the diplomatic service as Cambridge graduates which is approximately the situation, but that reflects the fact that there are twice as many Oxford applicants as Cambridge and I think this is the same for Scottish universities. The number of successful applicants is roughly in proportion to the total number of applicants.
H Do you think I could ask you a question following on from this? Do you think that in any sense the cause of British foreign policy suffers because of this in that there could be Scottish contributions? If I could put to you one suggestion which in fact doesn't primarily concern the foreign office but recently been looking at the origins of the Central African Federation in the early fifties where it seems to me very clear that there are a number of things which were very well understood in Scotland largely because of church connections which I can recall being very widely discussed in Aberdeen university in the middle 1950s and which were overborne on a different set of assumptions and which we could call metropolitan, without analysing too far what it means and which now seems to have been thoroughly mistaken. In other words I'm saying is it not merely Scots who are losing out on this but it is the country.
T It's hard to give a precise answer to that because it seems to me it would depend enormously on who in particular held which job at which crucial moment. I have no particular knowledge about the Central African Federation but accepting your premise I would think that the failure there is to some extent a failure of government to look outside itself. It is very difficult when you're in government and I'm thinking here particularly of the civil service and you're hard pressed and you've got an interesting and big job, to find the time to consider outside views. I've often been surprised that there has not been a greater diversity of view on many matters within the civil service and because there is a great deal of diversity of a talent and opinion when you take the individual civil servants. I put it down to the fact that first of all we do all, come out of more or less the same academic background and training, and here you may have a point that not very many of us do come out of the North East of Scotland and Aberdeen background, but then it goes on that we are all shaped by the same sort of experiences in the civil service and then we literally read the same things so that the input is rather similar. This seems to me to produce rather more uniformity of outlook on a problem than I think is ideally desirable. It was one of the reasons why I so much enjoyed my time in the foreign office planning staff because I regarded it as one of my tasks to try to make connections between the Foreign Office and people who were expert in one subject or another that the Foreign office was dealing with but who saw it from a different point of view. I think there has and to some extent continues to be a failure in policy making in this way.
H Would you like to add any concluding impressions or thoughts on returning to Aberdeen after a long interval?
T Well it has been a great pleasure to return to Aberdeen and it's once again a feeling of coming home. I am certainly struck in the last couple of days with the sense of affluence in the city compared with my student days. I'm struck by the way in which the city has less of a medieval aspect; that is some of the grimmer, taller slummier buildings have gone. There is more light and the city certainly looks more attractive. I have to admit that I had a certain fondness for it as it used to be and I don't think I even now ever encounter the scent of coal fire in a rather raw early morning without immediately being called back to the old town wherever I happened to encounter this. I certainly don't sense that I would be very likely to meet it in the old town today. The city seems to me to have had a certain I would guess civic pride. I'm very interested to see how some of the better buildings - I'm thinking particularly some of the churches have now been opened out in the sense that you can see what the architects concept was much more clearly than when they were hemmed-in in my time in the forties. I also get the sense that the University is much more universal than it was, the number of subjects covered, the range of experience represented in the faculty and the range of interests represented from the student body are all from a very superficial view but they all seem to me to be distinctly less provincial in the pejorative sense than they were. So I get the sense of personal pleasure in coming back but a sense of Aberdeen moving with the times and improving with the times.
H Thank you Sir John.
END OF INTERVIEW
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