themes
There are some major themes that run through this collection of life stories - emigration, immigration, duality, war, family pathways, and the formative effect of childhood experiences. Each name mentioned below is linked to its index page.
EMIGRATION
There are many examples of people who left the UK, in several cases from Scotland, to seek opportunities abroad.
Wiliam Bell (born 1792) left Edinburgh to join the East India Company. There he joined the Bengal Artillery, becoming involved in many military engagements including the siege of Djocjaocarta. Colin Campbell Scott-Moncrieff (born 1836) left Scotland to join the Bengal Engineers (part of the East India Company) and later oversaw major engineering works on the River Nile in Egypt. Henry Dyer (born 1848) left Scotland for Tokyo at the age of 24 to lead a key technical institution. Herbert Eckford (born 1867) left Scotland at the age of 17 to become a pioneering rancher in Alberta, Canada.
Roderick MacKay (born 1880) was one of seven children of a Scottish railway station master. He emigrated with two of his brothers to the USA, where he played a leading role in the construction of the great Los Angeles Aqueduct. Cecil Ames (born 1897) became a District Officer, and later a Judge, in Nigeria. Philip Reid (born 1901) was born in what is now Pakistan, because his father (like generations of his family before him) made his career in the Indian civil service. His wife Louisa Reid (born 1906) came from a family that had also made their careers in India. Notably her grandfather William Wedderburn, (born 1838), a pioneer of Indian independence. Alan Macfarlane (born 1941) was born in Shillong, India, where his tea planter father spent most of his career. His mother Iris Macfarlane had been born in India and had been sent back to England for her education. Michael Stern, born in 1922 in Egypt where his father was working as a civil engineer, spent much of his teaching career in southern Africa. Peter Carolin is the fifth generation of a Scots South American family.
IMMIGRATION
Equally remarkable is the number of life stories of people born outside the UK, but who moved to the UK as refugees or to seek a better life.
Eric Hobsbawm (born 1917) was born in Egypt of Jewish parents. Brought up in Vienna, he moved with his family to England at the age of 16. He took his undergraduate degree and PhD at Cambridge University, and became one of foremost historians of the 19th century. George Steiner (born 1929) was born in Paris, where his family had fled from Nazi Vienna. They fled again to New York via Genoa. Steiner took his degree at the University of Chicago, then his D.Phil at Oxford University. Based in Cambridge, he had a long tenure as Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva. Haroon Ahmed (born 1936) was born in Calcutta. His family fled to a refugee camp during the partition of India, and then by mercy flight to Pakistan. They moved to London in 1954. After taking degrees at Imperial College and Cambridge University, Ahmed became a Professor of Electrical Engineering.
Herbert Huppert (born 1943) was born in Sydney, Australia, after his Jewish parents had fled from Nazi Vienna. His university education was at Sydney University, University of California San Diego, and Cambridge University. There he became Professor of Theoretical Geophysics. Both parents of Lisa Jardine came to England as Jewish refugees, her father from Poland, her month from Latvia-Russia.
Hermann Hauser (born 1948) was brought up in Austria. He came to Cambridge to undertake a PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory, and remained there. He was a key figure in the development of Cambridge’s high tech industry. Andrew Hopper (born 1953) was born in Poland. He came to the UK as a child, taking degrees at the University of Wales and Cambridge University. He became head of the university’s computer science department. Hans van der Ven (born 1958) was born in The Hague, Netherlands. A sinologist, he studied at Leiden University, Harvard University, and University of California Berkeley. He then moved to Cambridge University, where he is Professor of Modern Chinese History.
DUALITY
Emigration and immigration produce one kind of duality in those who experience them - reflecting the separate cultures of the country of their birth and the country they have adopted. Another kind of dual life is one in which the individual has undertaken two different careers, or whose life has bridged two different worlds.
Examples of dual careers include include Fred Steadman (born 1911) who followed a successful career at ICI with a second career as a vicar. James Campbell (born 1916) who was a law don at Cambridge, was also an international expert on bagpipe music. Allan Brigham (born 1951) combined a career as a council road sweeper with that of an expert local historian. And Tim Keegan abandoned a long commute as a retail analyst to work from home as a knife sharpener.
When it comes to bridging two different worlds, the collection contains life stories of several people who have made valuable contributions by bridging the worlds of academia and industry. They include Richard Friend (born 1953), Hermann Hauser (born 1948), Andy Hopper (born 1953), Robert Mair (born 1950) and Gerry Martin (born 1930).
WAR
Many lives in this collection, particularly of those born in the 20th century, have been touched - sometimes fatally - by military service and war.
John Jack (born 1780) was a soldier from Aberdeenshire. He served in the Peninsula War and in the Battle of Waterloo. William Bell (born 1792) joined the East India Company and the Bengal Artillery. He took part in the Third Mahatta War.
Some, such as Cecil Ames (born 1897), served in and survived the First World War. Others did not survive. For example Alf, the father of stained glass artist Gordon Webster, died of his wounds in France at the age of 32, leaving two small children.
Some served in, and survived, the Second World War. James Campbell (born 1916) was awarded the MC while serving with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Italy. Philip Reid (born 1901) was serving in the Royal Navy at Singapore at the time of its capture by the Japanese, and spent the rest of the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Sumatra. Michael Stern served with the Royal Signals in North Africa, Italy, and Greece. Others did not survive. Russell Lyon (born 1922) was a Scottish Spitfire pilot who was killed, at the age of 21, during operations over France in 1944.
The Second World War also touched indirectly many of those not serving in the armed forces. Hilda Reid (born 1898) served as an Air Raid Warden, and her sister Lesley worked at the code breaking centre at Bletchley Park. Aeronautical engineer Austyn Mair (born 1917) on graduating from Cambridge, spent the whole war engaged on in-flight research into military aircraft including the Spitfire. Ista Stoddart (born 1911) was pitched into running the family farm while her husband was away in the Army. Louisa Reid escaped from Singapore with her two small children in 1941; she undertook a hazardous wartime journey by sea to South Africa, and another onward to England. Lisa Jardine (born 1944) was born in Ruskin College, Oxford, which had been turned into a maternity hospital during the Second World War.
After the Second World War there were several who undertook national service. Thomas Bingham (born 1933) served in the Royal Ulster Rifles in Hong Kong. He also remembers, as a child at preparatory school in Surrey, having to sleep every night in the cellars due to the risk of flying bombs. More recently, Alex Reid (born 1941) and David Baston (born 1942) served as helicopter pilots in the Fleet Air Arm of the Royal Navy. Baston survived the sinking of the Atlantic Conveyor in the Falklands War.
FAMILY PATHWAYS
Many of the life stories depict family continuity. Field Marshal John Fox Burgoyne (born 1782) was the son of a general, and his own son served in the Crimean War. Duncan Mackay, managing director of the Cambridge engineering firm of Mackays, follows in the footsteps of his father Donald Mackay (born 1926) and of his grandfather, who founded the firm. Gordon Webster (born 1908), a distinguished Scottish stained glass artist, had as his father the equally distinguished stained glass artist Alf Webster, who was tragically killed in the First World War. Robert Mair (born 1950) , a professor in the Engineering Department of Cambridge University, is the son of Austyn Mair (born 1917) who was also a professor in the same department. David MacKay (born 1967) and Simon Schaffer (born 1955) are other examples of professors who are sons of professors.
Conversely there are interesting examples of social mobility. John Meurig Thomas (born 1932), the son of a Welsh coal miner, went from grammar school to Swansea University. He did his PhD at Cambridge University, where he progressed to become a Professor of Chemistry, and Master of Peterhouse. He was also Director of the Royal Institution. Fred Steadman (1911), also the son of a coal miner, got to Oxford University via a special scholarship for the sons of miners, and went on to a senior career in ICI. Fred’s son Philip Steadman is a professor at University College London.
CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES
Contributors have particularly vivid memories of their childhood. And several write of the ways in which their education, and incidents within it, shaped their lives.
The artist Eduardo Paolozzi (born 1924) was taken at the age of three to visit the village in Italy from which his parents had emigrated to run an ice cream shop at Leith in Scotland. He writes: ‘Because I was a first-born, and a son, and because my parents came from the same village, I was taken to the village there to be shown off, What I remember of that time was being horrified at seeing a pig being killed, so it might have been February, which makes sense for an ice-cream shop, because February would be the slackest month for the shop’.
William Gallagher (born 1942) has colourful memories of his early childhood in Ireland during the Second World War: ‘My father had an old car on blocks in yard, no petrol to drive. Uncle Jim buried a hundred gallon tanks of petrol before the war to be prepared for shortage but never found them again. We had a tea chest full of tea (hoarded) disguised as a pouffe in the children’s bedroom as everything was rationed’.
In another Irish life story Michael Mahon (born 1945) recalls childhood summer days at Brittas Bay: ‘My Dad was in the building business and the traditional builders holiday was the first two weeks of August. We were a family of five children, but had many aunts and uncles and myriads of cousins. As there was not enough room in the cars to transport us all to Brittas, my father got a long low loader truck on which he built a frame and covered it over in canvas, it was like a large tent on wheels. The adults travelled by car but all us kids were bundled into this contraption . We were delighted. We fitted it out with cushions, rugs, old car seats and beach towels and set off in convoy for Brittas Bay. Sometimes there might have been ten or twelve of us plus a few dogs’.
Alan Macfarlane (born 1941) is a Professor of Anthropology at Cambridge University. Several of the Live Retold life stories are adapted, with his permission, from the transcripts of autobiographical video interviews which he has recorded over the last fifteen years. His own immensely detailed autobiography runs to over 3,000 pages. In it he writes of his formative schooldays: ‘When we moved on to the fully liminal or out-of-the-normal and cut off world of the boys public schools, there were five years when we were subjected to the full force of the English elite educational system. We started right at the bottom, as ‘fags’ or menial servants for older boys, and worked our way up to become prefects or minor rulers in our houses. We learnt how the English system of power, class and wealth worked through our progress up the various ladders of games, studies and classes. We internalized the mental, moral and social rules which underpin the kind of individualistic and capitalist system which we would have to operate in when we were adult. We learnt the rules of the game we were to play through our lives’.
Others recall childhood incidents which set their life off in a particular direction.
Eric Hobsbawn (born 1917), a lifelong Communist who became one of the 20th century’s foremost historians, said: ‘I thought of myself as a Communist from 1932 (aged 15) when I declared myself as such in my German school. A master said that I clearly did not know what I was talking about and that I should go to the school library. There I found the 'Communist Manifesto' and was converted both to Marxism and history’.
Hermann Hauser (born 1948), a serial entrepreneur who took his PhD in Physics at Cambridge University, said: ‘I developed a love for physics because of my uncle who had studied both physics and maths at university. There were few jobs for mathematicians after the War so he became the local jeweller and watch repairer in Wörgl. When we went on mountain walks together he would tell me about physics and maths, that you could turn lead into gold but that no sane person would do it as you needed an atomic reaction. He talked about atomic physics in particular and the discoveries of quantum mechanics’.
Richard Friend (born 1953), later to become head of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, said: ‘The event that sparked my interest in physics was my first Meccano set aged five. Eventually I assembled a great collection of gears, cogs and pulleys, not bodywork. I worked my way through the sets and beyond set 5 I used to go and buy pieces individually’.
George Steiner (born 1929), who became one of the world’s leading literary critics, paid tribute to the role of the New York Public Library in his schooldays: ‘The New York Public Library is probably one of the great universities. They let in young students, and they help you and they guide you. It was at that time an incomparable instrument of learning’.
Lisa Jardine (born 1944) writes of the key role played by a public library in the life of her Jewish refugee father: ‘My father learnt three words of English on the boat and was tipped into the Central Foundation Boys' School in London where he struggled with the language. He went to Whitechapel Library, took out 'Midshipman Easy' and 'Masterman Ready' and learnt his English entirely from them. He became a mathematician as many immigrant children do as there he wasn't disadvantaged by language, and gained a scholarship to Cambridge’.
John Meurig Thomas (born 1932) wrote of his days at his South Wales grammar school: ‘Teaching was excellent; brilliantly taught by a physics mistress, Irene James, who told me about Michael Faraday. I kept in touch with her until her death. She had the gift of not just telling us what physics was about but adding biographical details of great scientists. Michael Faraday became my hero. One of my greatest joys was much later to occupy the Chair that was created for him and to do the job that he did at one time as Director of the Royal Institution. Irene James was sitting in the front row for my inaugural lecture there’.
David Ford (born 1948) describes how he accidentally I picked up, for a school prize, a paperback copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics. He says he read it with fascination; that it was beyond him in many ways, but it was clearly both intellectually very rigorous and highly practical. It sowed for him the seed of the idea of what good theology might be like. He later became Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University.