| Description | Interview with H.S.A. Potter recorded on 25 January 1985 by Colin McLaren.
Transcript of Interview :
M You came to Aberdeen in 1936.
P That's right.
M Was it directly from Oxford?
P No. After Oxford I had two years in Princeton, America, on a Commonwealth Fellowship where I was there with people like Einstein and Von Neumann and then after that, that was the depression mind you, I was lucky when I came back to get a job, they were very scarce. The senior lecturer in mathematics at Manchester had been given a year's leave of absence and I had his job for one year and that was the year Wright got the chair here; he gave a lecture in Manchester and invited me to come to Aberdeen.
M He had also been at Oxford when you had been an undergraduate.
P Yes, he was my tutor and so he knew me and so he invited me here and I've been here ever since.
M This was as an assistant?
P Yes.
M Was it purely done by a personal invitation? Were there any interviews?
P No, he knew me already and in those days assistants were appointed by a professor and the professor just notified the university what he had decided to do.
M Now this was a terminal appointment for 3 years extendable to 5. Was this your case?
P Yes. Now in my case the salary was increased by making me a Carnegie Research Fellow and this was a means by which they could increase your stipend. I think the stipend was about £200 as Assistant and £100 for a Research Fellowship and I with Professor Kosterlitz were both Research Fellows at the same time.
M When Professor Wright invited you here, was it primarily as a teacher or was it to some extent from interest in your research field?
P Well, as a teacher - he had no knowledge of that because he hadn't seen me teach. I think it was his estimate of me as a student and also my line of work was somewhat similar to his and with a small department and the range of books available, it would be too ambitious for him to spread out in all sorts of directions, so myself and another man appointed at the same time as lecturer, Maclntyre, he also, we were all three analysts.
M Can you just expand on analysis very briefly and non-technically so we understand clearly what the form of research was?
P Well, Mathematics divides into all sorts of branches and you might say briefly that one branch is analysis, which was an important and thriving branch in Britain, and we all three were working in different parts of that branch.
M What were your duties as an assistant?
P Well, whatever the Professor asked me to do. I took tutorials with Honours students; whenever a lecturer like Wright or Maclntyre were ill, which was pretty well every winter - one was liable to get bronchitis and Wright used to get colds rather severely - I stepped in and did their lectures. I would be ready at a moment's notice, a phone call about 5 o'clock - lecture the next morning, work it up during the night. That was part of it. And also there was no such thing as a departmental secretary in those days there was no money for that. I was also secretary, made lists of students, kept the records. I was the dogsbody of the department; you know, did everything. And also in those days there was no ancillary help, everything had to be done yourself, looking after classrooms, getting [material] for the blackboard, all the things that are now done by technical staff, nothing. Everything was very simple in those days.
M What place did mathematics have in the curricula of the Arts Faculty and the Science Faculty?
P Perhaps the most noteworthy one is the Arts Faculty. The MA (Ordinary) in those days had settled into a sort of mould, a pattern which [we broke] out of after the war. You had to take a course in either Latin or Greek, which was compulsory, and in fact it usually meant Latin because Greek wasn't taught so much; secondly English or another modern language, compulsory choice logic or moral philosophy; then there was a choice of either lower or higher conjoint - the conjoint course meant half mathematics, half natural philosophy and you must do either a lower or a higher in that. So there were two classes in the first year: Wright lectured to the higher conjoint, MacIntyre to the lower conjoint, and I stood in as reserve to either. And all three were writing lectures for the first time and so if I stepped in, I would have to write Maclntyre's lectures to fill the gaps.
M How many did you get of the ordinary class doing the conjoint maths/nat. Phil?
P It was compulsory, also there would be science students in the same class.
M So you would be lecturing to how many?
P Well, it would be about 100 in each roughly. You see, all the students would be there because of that compulsion.
M Was it an orderly class?
P Well, depending on the lecturer. There were some lecturers who suffered disorder and others who didn't.
M Can you remember those who suffered disorder?
P Well, there was a certain (I would rather not mention names) but there was a certain lecturer who would look at the board and write and then would turn round so you couldn't see the board - he had a disorderly class. Wright had a very orderly class, his authority was there. I was lucky. MacIntyre had a mixed [class]; he was an eccentric but a very able mathematician, but a bit eccentric and [had] not [an] atrociously disorderly but perhaps a more relaxed class shall we say.
M So what impression then did you form of the maturity or immaturity of the first-year entrants to the university, compared with those you had encountered in England and Princeton?
P Well, in Princeton I wasn't engaged in the teaching side so I couldn't really comment on that. In Oxford, well, it is just a different educational system so it is unfair to compare them. It's a much broader system, here, which is a good thing. Because in England it was more specialised, naturally they were much more advanced when they arrived in Oxford; and it's also a highly competitive system there, a lot of pressure; and also we were just studying mathematics, whereas here they had three or four subjects in the first year depending on which faculty you were in; so it's hard to compare.
M What was the mathematical standard of the entrants in the Ordinary Class?
P When I came, it was new. I taught in Manchester the first-year class there as well and in both cases the shock - I had to re-write my lectures, I remember, in Manchester and there I would [have to] be writing until about two in the morning each day for a year, because I had eight lectures a week, which would be a shock to people nowadays.
M Re-writing in the sense of making concessions?
P No. I had [thought] all my lectures out in the summer before I was paid. I'd worked hard preparing lectures and wrote about a month's section and that I just had to scrap, it had been useless. I had to come down.
M How far had you to come down?
P Well, just re-write from the beginning and just take a different level all through. And that taught me a lot because when I came to Aberdeen I was ready.
M So the standard was more or less the same in Aberdeen as you had encountered in the first year...
P In Manchester, yes.
M How popular was mathematics as an Honours subject?
P Well, we had about - it varied - about four, half a dozen or thereabouts, students, I seem to remember. You see, in those days the chance of a job in mathematics - industry just didn't seem to want them. If you did an Honours degree in mathematics, you looked towards teaching as your career, and the rules in those days were that to teach in a secondary school, above the age of about 12 or so, you must have an Honours degree of second class or better, so it became almost a matter of conscience that if a student who might not get a Second and was wanting a job afterwards, a job in teaching at secondary school, then perhaps [he] had better not be advised to go on unless they have a chance of making that grade. So that tended to mean rather an elite group would go through. Otherwise they went through the ordinary course or [would] take a BSc degree and out.
M How did the Honours syllabus that this elite would follow compare with those say at Manchester?
P Well, an MA would be hard to compare because it was a mathematics/ natural philosophy degree, a double degree, half and half of each, so therefore it would be only half a component in mathematics compared with Manchester. The BSc would be all mathematics but oddly enough they tended to want to do the MA and took the BSc as a fall-back degree. I mean, they would switch to the Science Faculty and do the BSc because then they could do just mathematics. If they came down in their nat. phil. in the MA, working towards the MA, in the third year they'd be advised, 'Better switch to mathematics' or 'Better switch to nat. phil' for poor mathematics. So the BSc was like a reserve degree in [the way] it worked. It was partly that with the MA degree they had a broader chance of a job in the schools.
M What opportunities were there for contact between staff - yourself and Maclntyre and Wright - and students, outwith the lecture room?
P Well, the welfare provision then was almost nil. There was a Mathematical Society and I remember Wright giving a lecture there. I went to help him and he was very popular because he gave a lecture on mathematical puzzles which went down very well. The last puzzle was that he would remove someone's waistcoat while they had their jacket on, it was a trick of topology being used, and I remember that he looked to me to be the guinea pig, and I remember that I only had one button at the back of my trousers on and so I refused that; however, I offered to take his waistcoat off and I had [to] put [him] on the floor and because he had to twist round, you know, like this and to have the professor [being] twisted by his assistant was very popular. Well, there was that. Plow the other aspect was that there was a bunch of bachelors, myself and Eric Turner (who became Sir Eric Turner) and others. We rented a house of from the university in Old Aberdeen where we had an establishment and we used to have student parties so we made a certain amount of social contact. We would have country dancing (there was a great big large sitting room in No. 113 in the High Street) and sing songs and so on until perhaps about one in the morning.
M Was this unusual, were you setting a...
P Yes. We thought it lacked something. And apart from that there was athletics and games and so on, and then the university pavilion was built, that helped a bit because there was a squash court there and we played the students at squash.
M How did the students respond to these overtures of informality?
P Well, they welcomed them, I think. We welcomed them too, because we got to know them in a different way from the classroom. But it was a much more austere life then.
M What aids did you have for teaching in the department?
P Blackboard and chalk, that was about all, and the blackboards - when Wright came he got some of them improved, but in the Museum room I had an ancient board which you could swing round, it swayed, you only had to... which didn't take the chalk very well and in one place it was just the old-fashioned easel, you know, the leaning thing just about a yard square. Now for mathematics - mind, at Oxford I have seen that sort of thing in a seminar - but it's very restricting because one depends on writing a lot in mathematics usually. No aids at all. One paid for one's own paper for lecture notes; one paid for everything. I paid for the postage on correspondence and I had to write it out in long hand, you know, and no typing done for me because there was no typist in the department or even in the whole of the college.
M How often, if at all, did students in the department meet scholars in mathematics from other universities? Were they brought up to the Mathematical Society?
P No, no money for that. You see, the cost for that would be too much. On that point, well on a different point, there was a Class library run by Goodwillie, who was an old assistant still on the staff, and there was just a bookcase at the top of the staircase outside the lecture room and students paid, I think, sixpence to join, (that would be 2-1/2p. in modern money) and the money went to buy books for the Class library. When Goodwillie retired about 1939, he handed over to the professor what was left in the kitty and it was about £300, assembled over the years; he'd been too cautious. But you see the students had to pay for the use of the Class library in those days. Oh, it was a different ball-game altogether.
M What is your assessment of Professor Wright as a scholar?
P Oh, first rate. The research he has produced has flowed over the years and even when he's been very busy, he's produced research. Luckily it is his way of relaxing, I mean, to get other worries out of his head and get back to research, and then he is happy.
M Was his reputation international when he came to Aberdeen?
P Well, as a young man he was one of the youngest professors, he was only about 28, so it was just coming up. He had already collaborated with Professor Hardy at Oxford in a classic book on the theory of numbers, but he continued doing research and over the years, yes, he's developed international contacts and he's known abroad, America and so on.
M And how would you assess him as a teacher?
P Again, first rate. He's very clear. He can asssemble it and present it very clearly and he has authority over the class, whoever it is, and they appreciate it.
M And as an administrator?
P Again very good, very good indeed. He wouldn't have been if he hadn't been. And also I think he ran a rather happy department too. It didn't always go together.
M What of your fellow assistants? You mentioned Goodwillie for example. What do you recall of him?
P Well he was a - when Wright arrived, there was this man in his sixties still an assistant. Now he must have reached that before they had this rule of 'here for 3 or 5 years then out' and he was still an assistant. Wright immediately had him made a lecturer. He was old-fashioned: I remember him saying that nothing ever changed in mathematics, so why worry. In fact mathematics was growing very fast then and even faster later but it had passed him by. He was nicknamed [Bonus] Bill and treated quite lightheartedly by the students.
M Why do you think he had been kept on for so long, given this attitude?
P I never heard. He had been the assistant of Hector MacDonald who was very busy on the Court. He pretty well ran the financial department of the university and, I don't know, but perhaps Hector MacDonald wanted this man as a standby, an assistant to keep things going. I just don't know.
M What other assistants do you recall?
P Well, I succeeded a man called Lawrence who was called back to Aden. Aden had been separated from the Indian empire and he had been in the Indian civil service. They wanted him to come back to set up the legal frame for Aden which he did, and then he was knighted - in the same year that Hamilton Fyfe was knighted. So Wright was able to say that he had been bracketed - his assistant and the Principal had been knighted the same year. So when Wright was knighted I recalled this incident to him and he chuckled about that.
M How rapid was the turnover at this junior level in the department?
P Assistant level. Well, in fact I was lucky enough that when, I'd been here about two or three years when Goodwillie had retired and I got that job of lecturer, then of course pretty well quickly came the war and by that time the staff was just Wright, Goodwillie, Macintyre, Mr Roberts (who was lecturer in Astronomy and Meteorology) and myself, that's four; four and a professor; three lecturers, one assistant [and the] professor. Then came the war and mathematics was a reserved occupation because we had to teach radio students i.e. radar students; that was a secret at the time but really [they] had been trained up for that; and also these RAF and R.A. cadets' courses we ran. We had a couple of refugees who helped, a Professor Rogosinski from Konigsberg, he helped, [as an] assistant during the war, and Wolfgang Fuchs, who was also an assistant during the war. He became professor in Cornell after the war.
M How did they come to Aberdeen? Under whose authority did they come here?
P Wright's. What used to happen was there was an inflow of refugees of course of all sorts and they might arrive, say, in Oxford or Cambridge and it was rather like a network of information. Hardy presumably, I think, recommended Rogosinski to Wright. Fuchs - I think he may have advertised for that one, because he was just finishing at Cambridge. He had come as a boy of about 16 to Britain and then went to Cambridge so he had a more normal background for teaching purposes, and then there were other refugees. In that house in Old Aberdeen we had a Jewish refugee who was training to become a rabbi and he went off to Canada and become a well-known rabbi there, I've heard him mentioned on television, this man. But there was a floating population of refugees.
M The training in radar teaching that you had initially, when did that start?
P Now throughout this period it was just called a radio course and one didn't know about radar officially; well, oddly enough, Professor Carroll of natural philosophy he went off to Admiralty at the beginning of the war and I remember him telling me pretty well about radar before he went, just the principles, he didn't give anything away. You see there was a number of staff went off very quickly to various jobs like that: Lindley Fraser of Economics was another one who went off to the BBC to broadcast propaganda to Germany. Coming back to radar - more properly - radio, on our side we just gave the mathematics necessary for the natural philosophy course, it was a joint course we ran, and the students would go off and go to various service departments after their time,here.
M The floating refugee population apart, what other impressions did you form, first of all of the approach to war? Was it, for example, a subject of a debate amongst the staff in the common room?
P The period before the war, 1936-39 there was a lot of bitterness, political matters, things were tense. There was a Left Book Club, Gollancz was publishing a lot of these books, and a lot of propaganda on both sides in these books, and some members of staff were very bitter about the government at the time.
M Are you prepared to name them?
P Well, I'm sorry, I forget. There was a man in natural history he went off to Air Ministry and did some good work, organized distribution of parts for aeroplanes, Maurice Evans, I think it was. He was left wing; Hogben was left wing; a number of others whose names I forget; and then there were more intellectual people on the arts side. There was Bill Davies who was a great friend of mine, he was killed in the Java Seas battle in a destroyer, he was more left wing but much more balanced in his views. It was largely a matter of all the tenseness of the Munich crisis, Chamberlain bringing back the scrap of paper, and how silly it was in a way, and all this talk about rearmament. You see so many of the left wing wanted to stop Germany but didn't want to rearm, they wanted to have it both ways, there were a lot of troubles of that sort.
M And these matters were fully aired in conversation?
P Oh yes, they caused, perhaps, divisions between friends and this sort of thing. So it wasn't a quiet time, not politically. The student side - presumably they had their own discussions, one doesn't know, but I am talking about staff now in these things.
M Before we leave the 30s and go properly into the war and the impact of the war, can we just talk about the university community, the social side of it in the 30s. What were your first impressions of it as a community?
P In the King's part we were happy enough. It was very formal: there were more [gowned] lectures. I remember that, for instance, if I saw the Principal in the street, I would raise my hat: [that's for] manners. If in the common room in King's (which was the side room in Elphinstone Hall: there was no department room; one came in and hung one's coat and hat on a peg, put one's gown on and went off to lecture; there was no place where you could sit, but the only place where you could gather together was that side room at King's) in that there was a fire and one might go and perhaps sit by the fire and chat to someone if a senior came in, like a professor, one would never dream of sitting, one would stand and make sure he had a seat; you know, nowadays they would just ignore [him]. That was the rule in manners; so one deferred to authority, to seniority; and the same would happen at all levels. But nevertheless it was happy, playing tennis with Wright. There was a group of people, younger members of staff, professors and others, that met and played tennis and socially that was very nice; and Wright would have you to his house. All that departmentally was fine. One heard of other departments where things were a bit more tense.
M Which departments were these?
P I heard that Lockhart in Anatomy, he was a rather big tartar. His staff had to clock in at 9, be there throughout, on duty; things of that sort.
M Were you invited to professors' houses and encouraged to meet other colleagues from other departments?
P Anew professor was normally invited out to other professors' houses; that was tradition. You see, lecturers and assistants were to some extent a new phenomenon, finding a place in the university life. The professors were the thing and their assistants were just the servants. Here's a story [about] Professor Harrower, professor of greek, a story told to me by a lecturer in chemistry, that he had met him [Harrower] somewhere and then at Balgownie golf course in the club house, he had said 'Hello' to Harrower and he heard Harrower later say to his colleague, 'I've just been accosted by that man'. Now, it wasn't the thing - this was my old style of professor. Wright would never have done that, of course; of course, he was a younger generation; there was a cut-off then. One might say the Adam Smith days were formal and then when Hamilton Fyfe came in things easied off a bit, and Hamilton Fyfe did a lot in that way by having tea parties and so on and inviting staff to tea parties.
M Did you continue to live in 113 in the High Street?
P That's the house yes.
M Did you stay there for most of the 30s and 40s?
P We [rented] there about 1938. First of all I had been in lodgings in Ashgrove Road West; then we started this place in '38; then people were being called up, members of staff; and finally I moved into Don Street, a small house, No. 78 Don Street, with just about two or three of us then; and so that phase was over at the beginning of the war; in fact, there was a stage when we were bringing in serving men to fill in the gaps [just about anyone who came looking] for lodgings, naval officers and people, army men.
M Was most of the university community concentrated in the Old Aberdeen area?
P No. It was only the manses in Chanonry and the High Street, College Bounds, there was that, and that was for professors. There were a few other houses where there might be a lecturer living but in the main they had to live somewhere in town and that was it. Incidentally on that side, the social side, the AUT - at that time, there was a Scottish AUT which was quite different from the English AUT, they hadn't been joined together - in Aberdeen an important function of it was to act as helping social cohesion and, one thing (I was on the committee throughout the war on that body) we used to arrange lunches in the Imperial Hotel to try and get the Foresterhill people, the Marischal people, the King's people to meet together and we would have lunch perhaps in the autumn. Another thing was we ran these Christmas parties for children, which still go on, I believe, again attempting to bring people together, and we had talks to bring people together.
M What sort of talks?
P Well, anyone we could get to talk about - do they not still have them? I'm out of touch now - any speaker who was available and could give a talk, you know at that time we had no equipment - even to get a lantern lecture would have been difficult to arrange.
M What was the professorial view of the AUT, or the Scottish AUT, in this embryonic form?
P Well, they were just becoming to be recognised; the Court looked on it with [rather] suspicion. I remember going to Principal Hamilton Fyfe's room, 1 arrived before the others and we were chatting, and I think he was quite willing and happy to make this [join] and at about that stage, just about the beginning of the war, it was being accepted. Before that I think it was regarded as being an alien thing, better mind your own business and not interfere.
M You said earlier on that you weren't absolutely certain to what extent the students had an awareness of the political and the social problems of the 30s, but of those you encountered at 113 and elsewhere, can you not form some impression of their involvement?
P Well, at the parties we weren't being serious, we weren't discussing that sort of matter, so I can't really recall. I no doubt talked to them, you know, but not particularly enough for me to remember.
M Were you aware of the domestic circumstances of the students you encountered, for example the level of poverty or comfort that they lived and worked in?
P I imagine at that time that Wright would have more contact than I did; they would go to him if they were in trouble rather than a lecturer or an assistant. I knew on the side, some people who took students, and some of those were - I think students who went there would be lucky; there were a whole stock of landladies there who - some were motherly and looked after them as their own sons (looked after the students) and at those places [they] were probably happy but no doubt others might be different.
M What impression did you form of the value of the bursary system to the students at that time?
P Oh, it was much more important than now. You see, there was no State grant. The education was paid for by the parents and the university depended on that money for running things. The money that the university got from the State was almost non-existent, I believe, before the war. There was this - I don't know if you know, in the Depression, Glasgow University nearly went bankrupt and as a one-off thing the State gave a grant, to bail it out as it were, and I suppose they felt they couldn't give it to Glasgow alone, so the other three Scottish universities got a grant as well; and I remember when I arrived hearing the outrage when they found they got a smaller grant compared with what St. Andrews got and it was explained that the Court, Hector MacDonald and the Court here, had run the university in such an abstemious way, such a careful way, that we were in good funds, and also he had invested well, and when the shares collapsed in the Depression he had got out of these dicey shares, and in fact with the money, that was actually how the Elphinstone building was made, the money that he managed to amass from that.
M Nevertheless, you were kept, as you described, very short in terms of secretarial and whateverelse assistance. Did this breed any sense of resentment amongst the junior staff?
P No, because one didn't know anything else. You see that's a post-war phenomenon, having all this. There was only one phone in King's -that was, you know that passage between the main quad and the pavilion, that sort of glass cubby-hole on the right, that was the Sacrist's lodge; in there, there was the only phone in King's, apart from the library. Douglas Simpson had a phone, but apart from that, that was the one phone. So if the Secretary - Butchart - wanted someone, to talk to anyone, say Wright, the phone would go to the Sacrist, the Sacrist would go along, up the stairs to Wright, and Wright would come downstairs and along the quad, perhaps in the snow, and talk in that cubby-hole where students were passing. And throughout the war I had to do that as well because I was head of department. If it was confidential I would have stop talking while the students were passing, there was all that.
M The war came. You described the involvement you had in teaching the radio so called course; how else did the war affect your career here? Were you here for its duration?
P Yes. There was a call-up of members of staff. Many of the arts people went. The science people, there was a selective call-up there, and there was an assistant called Taylor, he was soon called up, went to the RAF and he was killed in North Africa. There was Pitt, who became Sir Harry Pitt, he went to Air Ministry, did good work there. The refugees, of course, didn't. Incidentally, they were carted off to the Isle of Man when Hess was dropped and there was a scare about Quislings; and another incident was Douglas Young, who was assistant, he was taken off, he was taken off to the police court because they thought he might be a Quisling, but he was soon released. Then came a point about 1943 when Wright went off to Air Ministry. I remember a discussion, which should go, him or I; he decided he would go and I would look after the department. So he went off to Air Ministry to work with Jones, in probably Intelligence I suppose, and I stayed to look after the department. I had a lecturer, MacIntyre, his wife, Violet Cane (another assistant) and these two refugees to help me.
M In the middle of the war period [you were] in sole command of the department. This was now on full lecturer status?
P Yes, I was made a lecturer, I think it was '39, just before the war began.
M Did that involve the full formal interview and everything else that had not been present at the assistant stage?
P Actually, no, because everyone knew me by that time. Everyone on the committee of appointment knew me so I wasn't called. I was surprised but I wasn't called. I remember the rival applicant was Dr Bronowski, you know, of The Ascent of Man fame. He didn't get the job [...]
M What are your impressions now of the impact of the war on the university community as a whole, not just upon your own department. How did things change?
P Oh, a lot, I think; perhaps more after the war. The war was a time of freeze, salaries were frozen and there was a pulling out of a lot of staff to various jobs. And also students, there was a four-term year, two-year course for students, things like army cadets and RAF cadets, all these extra things. And also most people were involved in the side things: for instance, being air raid wardens and whatnot or fire watchers. That was another thing done: to protect the university buildings, there was a system of fire watching.
M Were you personally involved?
P No, I had to look after the Seaton area as area warden, post warden for all that area. No, but people like Rogosinski, he was a fire watcher, and I remember he revived the Mathematical Society, talking to students there. It had gone dead for a year and was brought up again. What else was there? Yes, if there was an air raid, the rule was that you had to lead your class to a shelter, and in the library there was a place underneath - no, beside the library, where they the seismograph, that was a place for the Mathematics Department students. So I would take them there and then I would go off to my air raid post and in the end perhaps come back and so on. There was a black-out problem too. Rooms had to be blacked out, that made problems: the Elphinstone Hall, that big place there, they pasted black paper over the windows; the result was, when the sun came, expansion problems happened and they cracked; they hadn't thought of that. You see, it was all very hastily-done actions, leading to all sorts of consequences. One had to improvise, that was the main trouble - thing. I think that before the war there was stable methods of doing things, which was static, not much increase of staff, everything was level, not much inflation; then you had inflation-type problems, which bring problems; not money inflation, that came after the war; but during the war the freezing problem, the moving of students, changing the whole system of teaching and the shortages, blackout, rationing, all that. And also an important thing - the call-up meant [I] have committees to deal with students who had conscientious objections. All this meant committee, committee, committee, more regulations and more regulations. And remember this -that in the faculty meetings then, there were no faculty minutes prepared beforehand; it was all done by the secretary of the faculty reading out the minutes of the last meeting, reading them out, we listened to them and said whether they were correct, and if they were correct they were signed as being correct and that was it. The result was, when Wright went away and I had to look after the department, no minutes to refer to; all these war regulations and I had no copy of them, left to cope without material to cope with, and it's hard. I had to go to Marischal and look them up myself and work on material just that way.
M Do you recall a time or a date at which the university started planning for peace and for a resurgence of learning?
P No, I think one could not. Once America came in the war, one was confident ultimately of winning - at least that's my feeling; up to that point it was [dreadful]. It was a matter of living in hope for -and a matter of enduring it after, but when it would come was hard to predict. Yes, once they had landed on France and got really a firm base - and then that was the next stage, of knowing it's coming, but then there are all the hold-ups, then the Japanese war at the background, the Germans were beaten first and then the Japanese. So, no, one couldn't predict. No, one just lived from day to day, that was the only way to survive.
M So the immediate post-war problems of austerity and everthing else more or less require fresh improvisation?
P Yes.
M So can we then go to that period and can I ask you what your impressions are of the university in the immediate post-war period?
P Wright came back and I continued looking after the department, letting him get his feet, as it were, until that session was over and he took over. Then came the release of the men from the forces. Now, they came on top of the normal stream we had, so for a time we had a double stream, meant they inflated, a sudden influx. There was another thing on the side, that the Americans had the same trouble. You see, it was better than that [in] the first world war: they had a bit better organisation. They released them in a more orderly manner. And the Americans had the same problem, and they had a system whereby their forces in Europe were given a chance, like officers and so on, to go to a course in British universities and we had quite a number of them doing courses, just to give them something to do, I suppose. But all these new problems coming in to be coped with, and improvising, and all this improvisation taking on on the basis of rations, shortage, I mean a shortage of all sorts of things, and also a shortage of fuel so being cold and having to cope with perhaps working with an overcoat on. And you just couldn't - [there was] a shortage of books. I remember the learned societies, you couldn't get things published, printed, because of the lack of printers, and for years after the war, [I was] on the committee of the EMS (Edinburgh Mathematical Society). One had problems about sending our stuff to be printed. Our normal printer was in Edinburgh: well, some university societies would send it to Japan and to Belgium to print, find somewhere in the world where they could do the job, because of lack of printers.
M What impression did you form of these rather more mature students who came up to university after their demobilisation?
P Well, we had, I would say, a vintage group. As a matter of fact, that vintage group - partly they had the commitment, they wanted to get back into it, that was the important thing, commitment there, and they were intelligent, they had come back to finish their degree - and that group, in fact, they said we shall meet in 10 years time, which they did, and again in 10 years time, invited us to their dinner, 10 years time, after that I think it was (98) 5 years, because we are getting older, and we still know them and they are scattered about Aberdeen and also in various parts of the world. There is one a Professor in Harvard and one is Sir Alec Smith, he was the Principal of the Polytechnic there in Manchester, he's Principal of that.
M Of course, as a result of the war and everything else, I imagine the whole nature of mathematics must have changed very rapidly and very dramatically. Now, how was this to be reflected in the work and the teaching of the department?
P Well, it was gradual. You see, the development of the subject has been vast, I can't remember another subject - presumably in other subjects too - but in mathematics it has been vast, the development.
M In what ways?
P Well, creation of new branches of mathematics and the deepening in the existing branches.
M Can you give examples?
P Well, some things like topology [general] and algebraic topology and control theory, functional analysis, oh, it can go on and on, computing (an important one), numerical analysis developed tremendously, partly because of the possibility of the technology, it opened new possibilities, all these. And it has also been recognised after the war, it wasn't before, how vital mathematics is for the understanding and use in these other applied sciences. So all this has changed the whole thing. And also because of the amount that has been put into research, the amount of money. Before the war there was poverty of research, very little money spent and very small staffs, so the output of research, not only in Britain but the rest of the world as well, and as the usual measure of [indicating] in mathematics, Mathematical Reviews, where all research articles are reviewed, and one starts say this [demonstrates] for 1936 and now like that [demonstrates] for a year, you know, it's vast. So much so, that you have the trouble that it is swamping the human mind. Now, I think mathematics is perhaps different from other subjects in that it's purely an abstract mental thing, in an experimental subject, it's a material thing, and one feels that yes, there is a theory behind it but a lot of practical stuff too, which can be done and is done. But in mathematics - because it's very complex and it's very abstruse, it's now come to the point that a leader takes a long time to reach the frontier. It's one of our troubles in teaching an undergraduate course, there is no hope of you starting straight in research as used to be possible. You have got to get up to nearer the frontier and the frontier you would reach would be a frontier of only a narrow sector and the leaders in that sector - it becomes like a life work -and they can't understand a leader in another sector. If they went to a seminar in another department - of mathematics, mind, not mathematics alone - it's [so] very involved and complex and requires such a deep understanding that one would just be lost from the beginning, which brings difficulties. I mean it's a case where, perhaps, human thought is reaching its limits and yet somehow it would seem to demand more intellect to get to that, so you have a scarcer population who can do that. Now, I don't know, I suspect that the problems perhaps are not - are less acute in other subjects. I can't see that theology has developed much in the past few years, or philosophy for that matter. Chemistry, physics, possibly, but there again, I think, they can't understand each other.
M Could we anchor this to practicalities, though, and ask first of all how did Wright and yourself and the other members of the department cope with the problems of the increase and the increased specialisation, in transmuting this into syllabuses and courses?
P It's all a problem of selection. One could only select and one had to throw out large chunks of the traditional mathematics that was taught before the war. Mind you, privately, I wanted to do that long before; and after the war, when I became head of department, I did make big changes. But one's conscious all the time when you're throwing things out you have to be very careful that [what] some sections want others don't, and it's a dilemma that whatever you put in, something else has to stay out, and there is much clamouring to go in, so much - more than students can take; and its a nice point of selection. Whatever you do is not going to be perfect and there has to be a continual changing and changing to try and adjust and partly meet the needs of the university as it develops, that is, allowing more for statistics, things like statistics and computing. (Statistics was non-existent before as a subject in the university; well, there was a lecturer just before the war, he had a little room down in Marischal, but there was no course.) And in computing as well. All these things have developed. And also the needs of other sides - of chemists and so on - is [are] different. And [to] try and compromise all on this - what one wants, the other doesn't want, one can't please them all. So I sympathise with the present head of department. One just makes a selection and tries to cope as best one can. And also it depends on the students at schools and what they teach, one has to build on that.
M Well, before turning to that point, can I just ask since you mentioned computing on more than one occasion - now you left us in the 30s with this description of merely blackboards and chalk, but I suppose at some point after the war, with this increasing complexity of subject, aids were required, computational and whatever else. How soon were they in arriving?
P Well, again in mathematics the actual aids - well, one sort we got was an overhead projector, a simple thing, and that helped purely the teaching side for certain problems. But on the more mathematical side, things like desk computers, well, the trouble there was that it started with the old hand - where you turned the handle, expensive, cumbersome and slow; this was way back in the 40s and 50s. And then there came a stage next to it, when it was still mechanical but it was more a typewriter thing, still mechanical though and slow; and then getting a bit more electrical, where you plug it in for power; but the pocket calculator, that came much later; and the electric calculator which was fast came later. And also the pricing of this, there were problems: and so for the first stage we had to do all our teaching using - avoiding the stiff calculations. The other factor was that we couldn't just suppose that the students would have money to buy things for themselves. And also the money available, although increasing, was still not enough to buy, say, 100 desk calculators. One had to be practical in this. And so it was more theory we taught, leaving it to the applied sciences, like the Chemistry Department, to use their - to provide for the natty-gritty of the actual calculations side. We had to hold off that part until things became much cheaper and they got these pocket calculators now and everyone has them.
M How prepared in the late 40s and 50s were the schoolchildren who came up as your ordinary students - how prepared were they for this new and more complex form of mathematics that you were going to present them with?
P Well, there was a change. In fact, I gave the first course to teachers to try and brush up their mathematics before they taught the new syllabuses, and it was a shock to the teacher and then a shock to the pupils and of course mistakes were made. One told them about certain ideas and some of the teachers took it so seriously that they all plugged it, you know, they made a big thing of it when it shouldn't have been made a big thing of, so there was certainly the first stage of initial distortion of the teaching, they were putting too much emphasis on some things and that upset the balance, which is always a danger when you do alter a syllabus. I think it improved later and [there were] the same problems in America and Germany in these matters, and in France, [problems of] adjustment.
M Were there outside pressures on you to change syllabuses, from the State in any way, to prepare students more directly for industry.
P Not the State as a State. There are the examination boards where they have committees and where they suggest syllabuses for various Higher Grade certificate and the 0 Grade and one was on these committees at certain times and these were revised periodically. There was a certain amount of awareness of the needs of other parts. One had reports about what engineers wanted, what physicists wanted and so on. It's a complex business this interplay of pressures: it can lie dormant for a time then suddenly some pressure will arise to do something. There was the first aftermath of the war, there was that stage, lasting up to about, shall we say 1964, that was about the time of the Robbins report, I suppose, starting, the Robbins expansion; that was a new phase, post-Robbins expansion.
M Well, we will come to that.
P Yes, I was thinking about before that, before that I am trying to remember. I remember being on the Brunton Committee before that to try - you see, there was a shortage of mathematics teachers in the schools and that was becoming critical. The teachers who had been trained in the old pre-war system of having an Honours degree at least of second-class level, after the war (the people with a second class) wouldn't think of becoming a teacher, they were going off to industry and to do research and the better ones were going off to America - the brain-drain - so the schools were getting others and there was a panic that the people who [were] of the pre-war type, the good mathematics teachers [were] coming towards retirement. In fact we had figures of the percentage of people in these various groups, and unless we could do something about it and encourage more teachers into mathematics, it was difficult. But one can't force people and this committee met term after term to try and devise various ways of coping with the problem and the answer wasn't clear. You see, it's a relatively scarce talent. It was scarce before the war but before the war it wasn't needed by others and so they [mathematics graduates] were forced into teaching. After the war they were needed by all sorts of people [so] that [they] didn't want to teach and now I believe even others don't want to teach. It has become [wide] spread, this distaste of teaching, for perhaps other reasons; unruly classes, I believe, is the big deterrent.
M As head of the department, I imagine, you took the prime responsibility for the changes that had to be made in the syllabus and so on. Was Wright involved in this or was he more or less preparing himself for higher office and being involved in the Principalship?
P During the war I was head of the department then Wright came back. When Wright came back he became head of the department, resumed as head of department and he was therefore responsible until 1962 when Tom Taylor died, and then Wright became acting Principal and I became acting head of department until '65 when I became professor. So until '62 he was looking after things and there were certain changes in the syllabus. In '65 I made bigger changes to the syllabus; for '62 to '65 was more like a holding period.
M I just wanted to be clear about who actually was in charge in that late 50s period. In what other ways now, going beyond the department, had the war had an impact and how was the university coping with austerity in the late 40s and then in the 50s?
P Well, there was still National Service, students still being called up after the war in the 50s. You're talking about the Robbins expansion? Well, they had extra accommodation and all sorts of things, classrooms, extra labs were needed, halls of residence. You see, the ethos, apart from St. Andrews, in Scottish universities was to have a university where they stayed in lodgings or lived at home and that was thought to have value but then, with the increase, we knew that housing accommodation in Aberdeen, lodging accommodation, wouldn't cope, so they started building halls of residence. That was one problem. First of all Crombie and then others. And then there was the chemistry lab built and the nat. phil. lab - department. And also we had to have extra staff. Now all this provision lagged behind the students actually coming, so we were always having to make do in rather overcrowded conditions. That meant a better planning of the timetable to use classrooms - lecture rooms - more by re-constructing the timetable to get more people in and so it wouldn't be lying empty and that way to get more efficiency. Now, this means a lot of work administering, having to adjust and cope with every change to meet -you see, October comes and until the students arrive you don't know what they are going to do, what the choices are going to be in detail, and so you have to face an unknown problem and then somehow manage, and manage with the staff you have got. Again, if you are short of staff, you have less choice to be flexible - in arranging lectures for instance. Now, it so happened that mathematics was the sort of subject that was short of staff. They all had the problem that expansion came at a time when the graduates from universities who wanted to do teaching weren't enough for the demands that we needed for the expansion, and what there was being produced of the quality needed would usually prefer to take a job near London, Oxford or Cambridge or down there where things were happening, and then next thing might be at Manchester, yes, Liverpool, yes, then perhaps Edinburgh even, yes; but if possible not Aberdeen, shall we say. It was like a pipeline which was filled with oil, as it were, so far, but the far part starved. Now that was general - it wasn't just mathematics; perhaps more so [in] mathematics, of course. People feel even more lost if they can't keep in contact there, because [with] a thing of the mind they must know what's happening, which often comes by talking to people, so that was a big lack. Aberdeen recognised this, so it was more generous in giving grants for members of staff to go to conferences in the South, but even that wouldn't be enough to attract them, so throughout most of the expansion, when one advertised a job in mathematics one might get about half-a-dozen applicants at the beginning, at the early part of the expansion. Towards the end it was going up, because the universities - other universities - had filled their needs and when I gave up I was finding I was getting about fifty applicants. Now things have changed again.
M In the period between the austerity period and the expansion I rather form the impression from what you have been saying that there was a lull, as it were, before expansion happened rather in an explosive form. Is that correct?
P To some extent yes, because it was the expansion and the money with it that brought the money to do more things. There was that benefit. At the cost of a lot of upset, of a lot of administration. Unfortunately in all the stages there has been a lot of administration: in the wartime, war regulations, all that making-do was a strain for administration; the post-war with shortages [was a] strain for administration; then the movement of expansion [brought] the strain of expansion. All this required changing: what we did before wouldn't work, so we had to change, and you had to adjust the structure of the university in all sorts of ways. Things which worked for one period wouldn't have worked for the next period.
M How flexible and how ably do you think the university responded to the problems that Robbins and expansion presented?
P Well, I think that in a way it's remarkable it did as well as it did because, you see one felt that certain parts of the university go on quite happily, seem to avoid the muck-up, and other people are taking perhaps more than the normal load.
M Would you like to identify which parts you mean?
P Well, I should think that the ideal job in the university is not to be head of department, perhaps to be something like a senior lecturer, because there, at that time anyway, you didn't have much responsibility; you got a fair salary at that time; and you hadn't yet got such a load of committees. Now, another point was lecturers weren't on the faculties until about 1939; and then after the war committees increased in number and then they came on - more lecturers came on. Before the war you were appointed to the committee by faculty; after the war it became a matter of, straight after the war, you were elected and they had a sort of rots system for going on and the number increased and so more people were involved in this. That meant that most of the time more things had to go to discussion and that, oddly enough, means more work for the head of department because he has to go through [it] all again and again and again and has to explain again and again and again. Before the war Wright would talk to the three of us in the common room and chat about things over coffee and things would be settled. At faculty meetings, - you could [do] two faculties in the afternoon before the war; after the war they would be taking a whole afternoon to do one faculty.
M What was the response of the professoriate to this new and growing involvement of non-professorial staff in areas of university debate and action?
P Before the war I think it was reluctant in some parts but I arrived, I think, at a point of change between Adam Smith and Hamilton Fyfe. I think a change was happening then [when] older people, older professors, were very aloof and formal but there was a bunch of new professors who were anxious for change and things were changing then. Then, of course, the war came and that shot away - that changed things, so many of the professors had to go and we were left with a depleted stock of professors; and then you had lecturers like myself on the Senate and it was a different ballgame. And after the war again that tended to happen, so that was established. And again especially with the Robbins expansion - more and more committees. Then came in '68 the student riots in Paris, the student unrest, the demand for more representation. They had students on various bodies. All this happened.
End of Interview
The rest of this tape was erased at the request of Professor Potter, made on the 28th January 1985 and performed by me Colin McLaren on the 5th February 1985.
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