I: So, first of all, just say when and where you were born. R: I was born in London in 1940, but I was brought up out of London. I, first of all, went straight to Hertfordshire, because it was the Blitz, and then I spent most of my childhood in Oxford. My mother was widowed, in fact, a month before I was born, and she remarried when I was about four and a half, to somebody who was a Don, an Economics Don at Balliol, and so I spent a lot of my childhood in Oxford. But I went to a boys' boarding school in Oxford, called the Dragon School. And that was a great privilege. There were twelve girls and about 400 boys. And I played rugby, and ¼ you know, learnt Latin and Greek and all these sorts of things, and I ¼ although my parents were very left-wing, I'm afraid this boys' school gave everybody a partiality for going to boarding school at secondary educational stage, so I went to a boarding school. But it was quite a nice, progressive boarding school, in Bristol, where people like Indira Ghandi and Iris Murdoch had been. And the Headmistress had been in the Communist Party in the early thirties. She was retired by the time I went there in the fifties, but ¼ then I went to Oxford. I: I think we should stop there, we’re going too fast, I think! Can we go back to your family background? Were there grandparents around? R: Yes, there were. So when my mother was widowed, she went back to her parents. And my grandfather was a vicar in Hertfordshire. I: Was he a significant person to you? R: He was, really. I mean, he was my primary male parent figure, because although ¼ my stepfather then became quite important later, I think those first four and a half years of one's life, you know, are where the patterns are laid down, really. I: So can you describe him a bit? R: Yes, he was ¼ although he ¼ as a member of the Church, he was only ever a vicar, he had been very prominent in education, and had been a Housemaster at Kings' College, Canterbury, and things like that, and so he was actually quite prominent in the Church educational structure, and was always rushing to London to committee meetings and things like that. But I'm not, I'm not remembering properly what the name of the Educational Commission was, but it was just behind Westminster Abbey. I: What was his name? R: His name was Tower, Henry Bernard Tower. I: And Hertfordshire, where exactly are we talking about? R: Much Hadham. And when I was little, the Rectory was really brilliant. But when I was six, he was still the vicar there, and the Church was beginning to feel some kind of financial squeeze, so it sold the Rectory, and the new Rectory was much smaller. It was still very nice. But this, this place was ¼ well, I think, when my grandfather got it, which was in about 1938, I think the Bishop of London had something to do with him getting it, and he'd said, "This is one of the best livings in the country", and it had a lake in the ground, and a huge garden. And we hired a merry-go-round for my fourth birthday. Imagine squeezing that into a little suburban garden, you couldn't possibly! I mean, this was a great big thing from a fairground. I: And was Henry Moore a neighbour? R: Mmm, he was. And, you know how awful ¼ stories about one's childhood! My grandparents showed them a clay model that I had made, aged four, you know! And poor fellow, he made some sort of fatuous remark like, "Shows potential there!" (LAUGHS) It was a huge great fat bride! (LAUGHS) Anyway! I was not very skilled with my hands! But then, I mean, if I was, if I had planned to show it to Henry Moore, I was erring in the right direction, because it was a very stout, plump bride, the sort of one he might appreciate! I: And what about your grandmother, then? R: Well, she was quite a powerful character, actually, and she had written detective novels, sometimes under her name, but mostly under a pseudonym. I: Which was? R: Which was Faith Wolsey. But she didn't write many more after I was born, and I think that's because my uncle was killed in the War at Dunkirk - again, about a month before I was born - and I think she took it very very badly. And although she ¼ she didn't ever suffer with depression, I think she had a great problem getting over the death of my uncle. And there's something which I don't remember, is that ¼ Sorry, I'll have to explain something else first. Although, basically, I spent most of the time in Hertfordshire, at some point people thought that the Blitz might be going to spread further out, and so my mother took me to a house in the Lake District, which she and my father had just recently bought before he died. And at one point, we were up there, this was three years after Dunkirk, and my grandmother had decided she would wait to see whether my uncle might be captured somewhere, whether he was alive, and she would give herself three years, and if there had been no news of him after three years, then she would decide he really was dead. And, apparently, she put me in a pram, aged two and three quarters, on the third anniversary of Dunkirk, and wheeled me round the lake, and then came back and retired to bed with pneumonia. So I don't know whether, you know, you could say, perhaps, I had some kind of basic emotional training to be interested in depression, because of this experience! But what I can remember ¼ I can't remember that, but I can remember, eight weeks later, on my third birthday, that she had, at last, people were sure she wasn't going to die of the pneumonia, because I can remember sitting in the garden, and calling up to the bedroom where she had been sick in bed, and she was supposed to have gone back down to Hertfordshire, you see, to my grandfather, but she'd stayed up with us for about two months, recovering from this pneumonia. And she called back to me, "Happy Birthday, darling", or something. I had my birthday cake in the garden, you know, at the very end of July. And I can remember that, so that's, that's ¼ as it were, the 'fresh start' side of our research into depression. I can remember that, but I can't remember the ¼ the onset of pneumonia. I: And how was death dealt with in the family at that time? Did people talk about your uncle and your father, and so on? R: Yes. Well, when we were doing the research on early loss of mother, which is our Walthamstow Project, which came out of the Camberwell one, we actually had a scale which ¼ we put an extra point on it, in terms of people made a point of talking about the dead person, you know, it was meant to assess the degree to which people refused to talk about the dead person, and that this would be, in some sense, a depressogenic effect for the child who'd had to live in this atmosphere. But we actually put an extra point on the other end. And I think that's what my family was like, they made a great point of talking about all the dead people, and honouring them. And, I mean, it was probably a little bit of 'de mortis nil nisi bunkun', because I did have this incredibly idealised view of my father. But, I mean, I think he was rather a fine fellow as well. I: Can you say a little bit about him? R: Well, he was a ¼ he was in the ¼ the physical sciences. But at various points, he seems to have been a biochemist and a physicist. And he worked, was there a man called Rutherford at Cambridge? He worked in his lab. But then he also did things like going on expeditions to Spitzbergen, and to collect rocks and analyse them, and so on. But he was also, later, a Don at Balliol, in Oxford. And he was rich, you know, and upper class, and all these things! I: And his parents, you knew them, or not? R: His father was dead, long before I was born. But I knew his mother. She died when I was eight. And we used to go and visit her quite a lot. She lived in Wiltshire. I: What, in a big house, you mean? Where was that? R: That was in a place called Winterbourne Dauntsey. But before that, she lived in a very great place called Ossomley Manor, which is now, I mean, I went to see that a few years ago, and it's all turned into flats now, but it was very splendid when my mother first went there with my father, before they were married. I: And then, perhaps, you could say something about your mother and stepfather? R: Right. Well, my mother was a lovely person. And although, I think, you know, she was hit quite badly by my father's death, you know ¼ again, I don't think she was depressed. I think, I think she felt a little oppressed by the sort of community in Much Hadham, so I think she was quite glad of the excuse of the Blitz to go away and live in the Lake District. And she was, basically, a sort of 1930s upper class young woman who was a wife. But my father had had a colleague, when he was working in Oxford, called Flora Philpot, a chemist, and she came and stayed with my mother and me in the Lake District, and I think she thought my mother needed to be introduced to a lot more people. So we went down and stayed with her in Oxford, before the War was over, I think ¼ something like the end of '44 or the beginning of '45, and that's when my mother met my stepfather. And after she met him and got married, we lived in Oxford. And then she felt she ought to do something with her life, you know, not just be a wife. So she was one of the first psychology students in Oxford. It wasn't actually a degree when she started in 1946, was it? Or perhaps it was even '45. It was a diploma. And after that she became a psychoanalyst, but she didn't train at the Institute, what is now called the British Society, so she was a psychoanalyst without a capital A in the middle. And, basically, she then founded what is now called the British Association of Psychotherapists, which is a group of psychoanalytic psychotherapists, who are not trained by the Institute, you know. So it was sort of ¼ it wasn't part of the inner core establishment of orthodoxy. And that's what she did for the rest of her life. But she died quite young, she died of cancer when she was 59. My stepfather was Hungarian, and he was an economist of somewhat volatile personality! But I was fortunate that he was nice to me. But he, he has terrorised many a poor economics student during their lives, I'm afraid! I: Did you talk about ¼ going back to your mother, did you talk about her work, together? R: Oh yes. Yes, she ¼ she ¼ I mean, she was always very keen to include me in things that she did, and so I was regularly used as a kind of guinea-pig when psychologists wished to show their students, you know, "This is a child doing the Stamford Binet Intelligence Test", you know, and I'd be wheeled out, and do the test! So, as a result of that, I started sort of talking about my mother's work with her, really very early in life. And ¼ I don't know, there's a sort of feeling in our family, I think, that people shouldn't feel they've got to do what their parents do. And I remember my grandmother getting hold of my daughter, and saying, "Whatever you do, don't become a psychologist like your grandmother and your aunt, and your mother!" So actually, Kate, my daughter was quite influenced by this. Although she didn't terribly like her great-grandmother, she took this quite seriously, and she fought a long battle not to be a psychologist, but she's ended up as one, I'm afraid! (LAUGHS) I: That’s another thing! Did you talk about relationships and so on, in the family, then? R: Well, we gossiped endlessly. But I don't think that we ¼ well, I suppose, from time to time, my mother would make remarks about my grandmother, and fit them into some kind of a Freudian perspective, you know, that because of the rigidity with which she'd been brought up, you know, this is why she was not very nice about so and so, or ¼ you know. But, by and large, it was much more gossip when we talked about the family relationships. I: And what about the complications of stepfamilies, were you aware of that as an issue, or not? R: Well, no, as I say, I was very fortunate that my stepfather was very nice to me. I mean, I think it's because I had quite a high IQ. I suspect if I hadn't been clever ¼ you know, he might not have liked me so much, and then I might have felt a problem. But, you know, when, when I got three ¼ half-siblings, two brothers - and then a sister, who came along when I was 17, and was a delight to all of us - and I never felt that, you know, I was put on one side in favour of the true Baloghs', you know. I: Yes, I didn’t ask you his name! R: Well, he was called Thomas Balogh, and he later was quite close to Wilson, and became Minister for Oil. I: Yes, I remember, I’ve seen him! R: Well, of course, you were at Oxford at the same time as me, so ¼ but were you PPE? I: No, I did history. R: Because ¼I mean, you were a great hero, because of the ISIS thing, you know. Didn't you go to prison with William Miller? I: Yes, I did! But, going back to you! I think it would be interesting to know ¼ obviously you didn’t need any more influences, but at school, were there particular people there who taught you, or friends you made, who were influential? R: Well, there were wonderful masters at the Dragon School. They were real characters. But I don't know that they were important in determining, you know, the work that I've done with George. You know, there was Spod, the French master, whose wife ran a dogs' home. So anybody in his class who had a dog, he'd find out the name of the dog, and then we'd all be called by our dog's names! I was always 'Bolo' [short for 'Diabolo', devil], you know, and ¼ really, I'm sure that, without him, I wouldn't have learnt such excellent French. And there was Bruno, who taught English and history, and produced all the plays. And the Dragon School did a Shakespeare every summer, and a Gilbert and Sullivan every autumn term, you know. And because of the lack of girls, it meant that it was much easier for me to be in one of these plays than, you know, for other members of the school. And probably, you know, acting, you could say, to some extent, it makes you have to think about people's emotional life. So perhaps, you know, because I was in all these plays, at quite a young age, acting the queen in Hamlet, and things like that ¼ I: Do you carry on acting at all? R: No, sadly, I don't. Maybe it's the sort of thing one should do down in the country, amateur dramatics and things! I: And what about friends that you made there, have any of them turned out to be of long-term importance? R: Well, I had a very good girl friend at the Dragon School, and she then went to Cheltenham, and then was Oxford at the same time as me, called Sally Bentliff, and she married Anthony Sampson. And I sort of still see her. But probably my closest friend I made at my next school, Badminton School, and she actually did PPE at Oxford, in the same College as me, so we came from Badminton. And it's interesting because, in fact, at Badminton, she wasn't my best friend. My best friend at Badminton was somebody who's now the Editor of the London Review of Books, called Mary Kay Wilmers. But she read Russian at Oxford, and was at St. Hugh's. And because Mary and I both went to Somerville, somehow, from that point, and we were both into sort of social sciences rather than languages, from that point, Mary became my closest friend, rather than Mary Kay. And Mary McCauley is Head of the Ford Foundation in Moscow now. She sort of became a real Russian political scientist, and she learnt Russian after we'd finished PPE at Oxford. But she did her doctorate at Oxford, on Russian Trade Unions. I: And she was in Oxford for a while? Is that the name probably I’m thinking of? R: Oh yes, she was at St. Hilda's. I: Her husband’s at Essex. R: Her husband is still at Essex! Alastair, yes. Yes, no, of course, that period of our lives, I mean, that's always been such a nice thing for me, that we've had the cottage [in Suffolk], because we were regularly passing through Colchester, and so we always were able to stop and see Mary and Alastair on the way, whereas I think, otherwise, we'd have lost contact much more. It would have been relying on when she came to London, mmm. I: And now, at Badminton, were any of the teachers there particularly important for you, in the long run? R: Mmm, now, let's have a think. There was a woman who taught us English literature, who was rather ¼ rather splendid, called Valentine Merrivale. And I suppose one of the things that she did ¼ kind of after ¼ 'O' level, would it be? Anyway, at some point, there was a gap where she thought, "Let's get away from the curriculum". And the way we got away from the curriculum was reading In Memoriam, by Tennyson, which sounds a terrible bore, from the point of view of 2000, the year 2000, but actually, you know, we were all kind of ¼ I was younger than other people in my class, they were all about 17, and I was about 15. But, you know, it was quite, quite good, the way we read it with her, and the way she got us thinking about it. So again, you see, we're back to death and mourning, and maybe that was a sort of breeding ground for my interest in depression. But, to be honest with you, I don't think I was interested in depression, I just happened to end up focusing on depression, rather than other sort of psychological disturbances. Because I don't know whether you know, but I'm also a psychotherapist, and so in the morning, before I come here, and in the evening when I go home, I have a private practice of patients. And there, you know, I don't just see people with depression, you know, I see people with kind of eating problems and anxiety, and ¼ and, you know. I've never had a patient with multiple personality disorder but, you know, I would take one on if they presented themselves. So, in that sense, although the work I've done with George focuses on depression, I don't think I was being trained to want to work with that, rather than any other psychiatric problem. I: So you work just with individuals in your own practice? R: Yes, yes. No, I haven't had a group training there. I: And so when did you start that? R: Well, I started the training for that about the same time as I started working with George [in 1969]. I don't know whether it would be appropriate to talk about that now? Or ¼ not really. I: No. Just as you raised that, I thought it would be useful just to understand it a bit. R: Yes, well, I mean, to be honest with you, you know, I suppose I should say this more than once during the interview, because it's a very important point, I think, about people of my generation, you know, working, as well as having children, was quite a thing in those days, you know, in the sixties, and I wasn't quite sure that I would find myself a part-time slot, because I just wasn't going to work full-time when my children were pre-school. So I thought, "Well, if I do a training in therapy, that's the sort of thing that I might be able to do while being a mother". And so I sort of applied to do that when I was having difficulty ¼ I applied for a job, and, you know, it was full-time or nothing. And ¼ this was a job at the Institute of Psychiatry, and I suddenly thought, "Well, my God, maybe I'm never going to find a job until the children are, you know, in school full-time", kind of thing. "So what will I do for the next four years?" And so I applied to do the training, and then I realised that I could work part-time with George, and still do this training, because it was an evening training. And, fortunately, my kids were quite good at going to sleep, and so I'd sort of kiss them goodnight, and rush out to class! (LAUGHS) I: Very lucky! But do you think that that practical work has fed into the work with George? R: I think it has, and I think ¼ I remember when we were collecting some of the earliest Camberwell interviews, we came across a particular, very interesting case, because she wasn't just a case of depression, but she ¼ she had a lot of very strange personality characteristics and so on, and I said to George that I thought it was something to do with the death of her sister in childhood, and the way the sister had died. And George said, "I don't usually hold with all these psychoanalytical notions, but I think, in this case, you might be on to something Tirril", you know, and this is sort of way back in 1969 or 1970, one of the earliest cases. And then, I think, gradually ¼ things about childhood, and how they still affected adults, you know, because we kept finding them in the data, I think George started to believe them much more, and give more credence to psychoanalytic notions than he would have done otherwise. Again, I may be jumping the gun a bit, because what I was going to say is something which, you know, looking back, it's always very surprising to me that the whole way we came on to childhood was just so haphazard. And it's not how people write about constructing theories. Because one day, I said to George, kind of half absent-mindedly, "There do seem to be an awful lot of people in the patient sample, whose mothers died when they were little". And he said, "Well, don't just sit there, do something with it!" (LAUGHS) And so then, because I'd just been reading the psychiatrist's case notes, and so then we actually ¼ fortunately, we had got it in the computer, but we hadn't got it properly in the computer, because we hadn't made a space in the computer for people who had been separated from their mothers [rather than them dying]. We'd only got a space if the mother had died. So then we had to read everybody's life history again, and sometimes we had to actually contact them, because we didn't have evidence one way or the other, about the separation, and do it systematically. But the silly thing is that I had read work by John Bowlby before we collected this data, you know, because he'd published stuff in the forties. And so the theory was around, and we didn't think of the theory and then look in our data, it just sort of emerged in this very absent-minded way, from the data. And then we suddenly thought, "Help! We'd better look at it properly!" I: Maybe you were somewhat against it, because I think ¼ R: No, no, I wouldn't have been against it. I: You wouldn’t have been? Because a lot of people were, at that time we’re talking about - but I’m not sure when we’re talking about? R: We're talking about the early seventies, really. I mean, we collected the data in the late sixties, but we weren't kind of ¼ I wasn't absent-mindedly flicking through case notes until the seventies. I: No. Because I think there were a lot of, particularly Feminists, who were hostile to Bowlby at that time. R: Yes. Yes. No, I was never that kind of feminist. And I don't ¼ I'm not really a feminist, even now, although I can't really say that, because I'm a Chair of Trustees of the Women's Therapy Centre, which was founded by Suzie Orbach and Louise Eichenbaum, who are very ¼ very kind of ¼ manifestly feminist. I: So what do you mean when you say you’re not really a feminist? R: Well, I think I'm into treating women and men as equal human beings, all of whom have got needs. And so I often find myself being a real Auntie Tom, in terms of the feminist perspective, you know, sort of saying, "Well, what about that poor husband there?" you know! "He's really downtrodden", you know, not because of feminism, he's downtrodden because he's married to a big strident woman, who makes him run round in circles for her¼ I: But you did grow up in a family really ¼, by the standards of that time, of very intellectual women. R: Very, yes. I: So one might suggest, possibly, that you took it for granted¼ R: I think so. Well, I think, going to that boys' school, you see, I ¼ in a way, I had a different sort of treatment, you know. I was treated as if I was a boy growing up, and had the right to do all these things. So ¼ you know, and my brothers were a lot younger than me, so there was never any sense that my brothers were getting favouritism or [different] treatment, because they were boys, or anything like that. No. [TELEPHONE INTERRUPTION] I: Could we go back a little to ¼ you’re at Badminton. Now, what were you actually studying in the sixth form? R: The usual! English literature, history and Latin were my 'A' levels. I: But you went on to read PPE? R: Yes. I: So why did you do that? R: Because I thought I wanted to do psychology! (LAUGHS) I: So you were already ¼ R: And I thought that I ¼ in those days, you couldn't start at Oxford with psychology, you had to do PPE and change at prelims. And ¼ oh God, I've just remembered another shameful thing about my life! I was presented to the Queen, and I had to leave one of my prelims exams early, and it was logic, and I failed it. And so the whole issue of me transferring to psychology was messed up. And, anyway, by that time, I was really enjoying philosophy. And I remember Dame Janet Vaughan, who was Principal of Somerville, was so nice to me, she said, "Listen. Don't worry. Just resit the exam, and you'll probably get a first. Because so and so failed her prelims, and then she took it as her special subject, and she got a first. So it'll be all right". And it was all right! I did logic as one of my special subjects for finals, and, you know ¼ despite having failed it at prelims. But what it did mean was that I didn't do PPP. And I was actually quite glad, because I then did psychology at UCL, as a second undergraduate degree, in two years, instead of needing three years for it. And I think it was a much better psychology degree in those days. I mean, we had ¼ really fascinating people came in to teach from outside, for half a term, and we did ¼ Oxford, in those days, was really boringly experimental psychology, rats, rats, rats. And, you know, we had social psychology, we had psychoanalysts coming in at UCL. So I think it was a better course. I: So, now, in either place, were there tutors or lecturers that were an important influence on you? R: There were some great tutors. Great tutors. Mrs. Foot was my philosophy tutor, Philippa Foot, and she was very thoughtful. Miss Anscombe, I don't know if you ¼ she was fantastic! One of my friends, who didn't actually have Miss Anscombe as a tutor, said she thought that the reason that she had such a very individual appearance was because she'd diagnosed her legs as a problem, and she wanted to share [this problem] with us! (LAUGHS) I don't know if you remember, she used to wear really quite short skirts which, in 1959, hadn't quite come in yet. And she had, I'm sure you know the story about the bucket of ash, cigarette ash, when you went for a tutorial in her home! But she had a great mind. She was wonderful. I: And at UCL, was there anyone there? R: UCL. Now, let me think. I don't know ¼ I don't know that there was anybody that really had a formative influence. But there were some great people. Cecily de Moncheaux, who taught social psychology, and was also a psychoanalyst. The statistician, Jonckheere, was wonderful, because he was also an experimentalist. Normally, you get statisticians who are just statisticians, but he was really ¼ he taught us other forms of psychology as well as statistics, and he really made the statistics come alive. And also, he was very much like all the tutors at Oxford were, go for a drink after the seminar, and socialise, and carry on discussing, heatedly, in the bar afterwards. But there were some other tutors who were quite good. Professor Drew was quite stimulating, and ¼ and so on. But I don't think there were any formative influences, no. I: And what about the new friendships you made at Oxford and then UCL? R: Well, isn't that interesting. New friendships at Oxford, yes. Margaret Forster was at Somerville at the same time. And the friend, who described Miss Anscombe's legs, is a translator now, called Judith Landry. And then Henrietta, who married a Professor of Physics at Sussex, called Norman Dombey. I: Yeah, I know her. R: But I didn't really keep my friends from UCL. And I think it's partly because doing a degree in only two years, the first year ¼ I was in the first year, but then I jumped to the third year. And so I didn't see the people I'd begun to make friends with in the first year, so much, any more. But in the kind of strange homing pigeon way, there are two people in the Psychology Department at Royal Holloway, who were in the first ¼ sorry, one of them was in the first year at UCL when I was there, called Elizabeth Valentine, and she married someone who was in the third year. So I've sort of remade contact with them quite a lot later in life. And also somebody called Kate Lowenthal, who was in the first year at UCL, and is also in the Department at Royal Holloway now. And she's used the Life Events and Difficulties Schedule quite a lot in the Jewish community, and the work she's done with it has been very fascinating, because, you know, we've been able to see slight cultural differences between, on the one hand, the work that George and I have done in the gentile communities of London, but also she compared the Hassidic Jews in Stoke Newington with the more Liberal Jews of Golders Green. And, you know, by looking at those different [cultural] groups, you could see ¼ well, just fascinating differences in what was causing people to be depressed. Also, the Jewish men were much more sensitive to various issues of work crises than the various gentile men that we'd got in other samples. So that the ¼ sex difference in depression, between the men and the women, wasn't there in the survey that she did. But she did it at a time when businesses were going through really quite, quite bad crises, in the eighties. I: And when you came to London, were you living in digs at that time? R: When I came to London? No, we ¼ oh God, we got a flat, and I was ¼ cohabiting with Nigel, who became my husband. And we were evicted. We got a flat in really quite an elegant place, because my mother felt that it was terrible to be living in London. She was still in Oxford. My parents hadn't moved to London at that point, and she was all worried about where I might go and get a flat with Nigel. In fact, we looked over a flat very near where we live now, and my mother was terrified, because she saw something called 'Lime Street' on the map, quite near to it, and she thought it was the same as 'Lyme Street' in Wapping, which was a great kind of criminal area! But it was Lime Street, NW1, which means it's perfectly safe! But anyway, she panicked, and she knew some psychoanalyst who was emigrating to the States, and was giving up his elegant flat in Park Square East, and he was subletting from a very ¼ well-known gynaecologist, who was on the Crown Lease, but I don't think the gynaecologist was supposed to sublet. And when he realised that I was living in sin with ¼ and Nigel's half Indian, and in those days, you know, upper class people were even more sensitive to such issues than they are now - he wasn't at all happy! And so after a term living there, we moved to another flat, which was, actually, even closer to UCL. It was in Bedford Square, the flat, Bedford Court Mansions. So we, we ¼ we got married a year later. I: How did you meet? R: At Oxford. I: And can you say a little bit more about him? Personality, what he does, and so on. R: Nigel is ¼ he describes himself as an economist, but really, he's another PPE person, in the sense that, you know, he's taught in Political Sciences Departments, his doctorate's in sociology, you know. But he has, in later life, had to specialise a bit, and he has focused on the economics of cities in developing countries, and he was a professor at the Development Planning Unit at University College London, but, in fact, he retired early, and now works as a consultant for the World Bank, which is very exciting, you know, because he goes to lots of different cities and helps them focus on developing in terms ¼ not just of sewage, housing, garbage disposal, all those sort of mechanical things, but in terms of [the meaning of] the life of the city. What are people going to be employed doing? What should the city think about? Expanding in terms of types of labour, and this sort of thing. A much more organic, economic approach to the city, rather than just as a place to live. I: And he’s been an intellectual influence on you at all? R: I suppose so. I mean, I think we've both influenced each other in all sorts of ways. But ¼ much more ¼ truthful, is really that we went through the same Wittgensteinian chrysalis at the same time, you know, in the late fifties, in Oxford, and in that sense, we had a common influence on both of us. But we were quite political. We were both members of a Trotskyist Group. I: When are you talking about now? R: In the sixties, well, right through till the nineties, really. I: Which Group was this? R: It's now called the Socialist Workers' Party. But when we joined, it was called the Socialist Review Group. Then it became IS - International Socialism. I: And what sort of things were you doing with them? R: Well, I don't know if you're familiar with the Trotskyist routine, but it's kind of ¼ six o'clock, down to the tube station to sell 'the paper'! Branch meetings ¼ "On a point of order, Mr. Chairman", all that stuff! No, we were trying to get people to ¼ you know, stand up for their rights, really. That's what we were trying to get people to do. I: And so you spend quite a lot of time on this political activity? R: Not now. I: No, but you did? R: Yes. Yes. Well ¼ I: I’m just wondering how you had time to at all, really ¼ with children and psychotherapy. R: Well, I think the answer is, not that much time. R: I mean, right at the very beginning, before we had children, when we were still students, you know, Nigel getting his doctorate, and we ¼ because between me finishing my second undergraduate degree, and Nigel finishing his doctorate, I didn't get another job, because we were going to go and work abroad, so I did silly things like work in toy shops and so on. So in those years, we've been a sort of total of ¼ sort of a couple of years while we were students in London. We had time, you know. And later, although I did go to branch meetings, and I never sold a paper at six o'clock, because I had to give the kids breakfast, you know, but I did go and sell the paper. And the children got quite good at going round Council flats in Camden and, "Hello! We've brought you the Socialist Worker paper this week, instead of mummy!" You know, they'd be on one balcony, and I'd be on the one above! (LAUGHS) I: And do you think that’s had any influence the perspectives you bring to the research? R: Probably, yes. You know, probably, if I had been a conservative, I wouldn't have been happy when we found that there was a higher proportion of women with depression in the working class. You know, that probably wouldn't have suited me, so I might have ¼ I don't know, I might have changed my politics to meet up with my findings. But I might have moved on to change my work to stick in coherence with my politics! Who can say! I: Now, I think that’s probably all about the two university experiences. So shall we go on to you going abroad? R: That's right. I: Can you just say what you did there? R: Well, we went to work in the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. And this was something which my stepfather's contacts with the Head of the Indian Statistical Institute, who was called Professor Mahalanobis, it was very useful that Tommy had contact with him, because he said that we should go there and work, you know, for a year there. And Nigel did a whole report on labour in India, and I worked on the government's family planning policy, in the Demography Department of the Institute. And, you know, I learnt a great deal, I have to say, about collecting data in unsavoury areas, I think that is how to put it in a nutshell. And I think that was probably one of the most important things about me then fitting in with George's plans. Shall I jump to that now, and come back again to India? I: Yes, why don’t you say briefly, and then come back, yes. R: Yes. I think ¼ what happened, in terms of my getting a job with George, was basically that I was very fortunate, because George had put an advert in the paper, and I'd had this experience a few months earlier with the Institute job, and so what I did was, instead of just writing and saying, "Is this a half-time job?" I actually sent my CV, and said, "I'm really keen to work in this kind of a team, doing this kind of work, but I can't work full-time". And George rang me up, and he said, "Well, I'm afraid you can't have this job, as it's got to be full-time, but maybe I can raise funding for you to do a half-time job, if that's what you insist on. Why don't you come along and meet me?" And so I did. And I think it's because of the experience that I'd had in Calcutta, and the way I talked about it, that George felt I was worth creating a half-time job for. I: Fine. And what was it you really learnt about doing fieldwork in difficult areas? R: Well, I suppose, you know, I just learnt how to get people to talk to me, and, you know, it meant I had to learn Bengali, and I had to learn how to squat, and not mind in the monsoon when the drains overflowed and came into the tin, tin shack! Because I was in what they call 'The Bustees', you know, which are the slums, where people, you know, they build houses out of any old bit of cardboard that's fallen off a lorry, or a bit of corrugated tin, you know. And I was talking to the women about, on the one hand, whether they really wanted to limit their families, and on the other hand, you know, how practical was it for them to do it? And here I was, you know, a great white foreigner, and yet I managed to get them to feel relaxed, and I, myself, managed to feel okay, despite the overflowing water! I: So how did you get them to feel relaxed with you? R: I don't know. I think it ¼ I think it was very much because I was so interested in them, you know, and so I'd always start by telling them a little bit about myself, and then talking about the few objects they did have in their ¼ in their little homes, you know. And say, "Well, in England, we ¼ our spoons are not quite like that", or "Oh, what a beautiful copper pan", you know, "We don't have quite such big pans", or "Our pans are shaped differently", or something like that. And you don't have to do nearly so much of that if you're a middle-class Londoner talking to a working-class Londoner, and certainly you don't in the nineties. I mean, things have just changed so much from when George and I did the Camberwell Survey in the late sixties. You know, people's homes now are so comfortable, and they're much posher than my home! I: But do you think, from that experience, or other ones, would you say there were any cultural differences which made for a drastic difference in how you would interview? R: Yes. I think interviewing upper-class middle-aged men, in England, is very different to interviewing any women, although upper-class middle-aged women, you know, might be more difficult. But ¼ but that's something, you know, that one doesn't go to Calcutta to learn how to do. I: What sort of difference of technique would you use with a man like that? R: Well ¼ you'd ¼ you ¼ would have not to be chatty, you'd have to be quite business-like and formal, and you'd have to ¼ I mean, we try to order the questions in our interviews so that the more difficult ones are at the end anyway, when the person's got to know you better. But there might be certain things which are in the middle of an interview at the moment, which I would then take out and put to the very end, because I would think, you know, "This guy still isn't softened up enough to ask ¼ about financial problems", say, which are in the middle. You know, we leave things about sex to the very end, at the moment, anyway, now. But, you know, and sometimes you get a sense with somebody that a particular sort of family relationship, which normally would be quite easy to talk about, that they may have some kind of hesitations or embarrassments about it, and so we would just postpone it to the end. I: And do you think there’s been a change over time, in the kind of problems you encounter in interviewing? R: Problems? I: Well, such as people being reticent about particular things. I mean, just to ask you specifically, you say that you tend to leave questions about sex to the end, but ¼ are those less difficult to ask now? R: They are, they are less difficult to ask. They're much less difficult to ask. I: Have you noticed any other changes in what people will talk about? R: I think, in general, people will talk about more now than they would before. You know, the media have really softened people up, I think, you know, and Oprah Winfrey, I know she's really American TV, but she's been featured on British TV from time to time, and people have copied her, and it's really let it all hang out. It seems to be quite acceptable now, which it certainly wasn't in the late sixties. I: What about interviewing ethnic minorities here, as opposed to in another country? Do you think that things have changed at all with that? R: No, I don't. And I think it's still quite difficult. And what, you know, I think maybe we don't address enough when we talk to people, is how much of our information actually comes because we've trained people who are, themselves, from that ethnic minority. I: So if you have ethnic minority interviews, you have particular training? R: No. No, what I'm saying is that the people who have been on our training courses then, you know, collect all their data, and we keep very closely in touch with them, and you know, often have joint publications with them. And so a lot of the time, when we're talking about this survey here, you know, it's because we've trained somebody from that community, and they've collected the data, because I think ¼ you know, that it can be quite difficult when people feel that you're not on their side. And there is a project at the moment, called the Aesop Project, which is using a lot of our measures, and it's among schizophrenia patients, and it's particularly focusing on the difference between first generation and second generation African Caribbeans, and rates of schizophrenia and so on, and the life events that do or don't precede the onsets, or the relapses. And I'm worried that, although they've got a few African Caribbeans in the team, they're not all African Caribbeans, and I, I think they're not doing a very good job of it. But, unlike a lot of our trainees, this one's quite a ¼ it's a big project, and so I haven't got the same supervisory role with it, and I really worry that it's not doing a good job of it. I: And so how can you sense that? What do you see or hear that makes you sense that? R: Well, my very close colleague here, Tom Craig, the Professor, has his own study of schizophrenia, and he's very thorough and supervises his research assistants very closely, and he's just finding a lot more of what we expected to find, than the Aesop Project is finding. And, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I've got to be scientific. It could be that he's just got a very peculiar sample, because it's much much smaller than this other great project, which spans Nottingham, Bristol, and a much wider area of South London. But I suspect it's just that people are not disclosing the secrets, because, basically, that's, you know, what we're finding in just so many areas of the world, that the things that have preceded depression and, you know, schizophrenic psychoses, are very shameful experiences, and people don't want to talk about them, unless you can really spend time and give them some sort of sense of their [expected] shamefulness not being that bad, and that one is accepting of it, and so on. And all of that takes time and interviewing skill, and you do have to know a certain number of sub-cultural mannerisms to convey that kind of acceptance. And, I think, in some sub-cultures, unless you've got the right colour face, you will always be seen as unaccepting, you know, as the authority figure who will think that it is shameful, what they've done, and so they won't want to tell you. I: So that all came out of the demographic work? R: It came out of Calcutta. Family planning work, yes. I: And you were there for, was it two years? R: No, no, it was slightly less than a year in Calcutta. I: And then you came back here? R: Well, no, we went to Japan for a term, and Nigel taught in a university where they had English as a medium, and I taught English as a foreign language, in school. And then we came back here, and we went to York, and had babies, and I worked part-time in a mental hospital, called 'The Retreat', which, in terms of the history of British psychiatry, it's quite a famous hospital, because [in the early 19th century] it unlocked the doors. Oh, you know about it, you ¼ yes. And we were there for about two years, slightly over two years. Then we came to London. I: But what was it like then, when you were working? R: Oh, it was all right. It was nothing special then. It was outside the National Health Service, it was still a private hospital. But it had some NHS patients in there, in some way, on sort of bursaries or something. And it was ¼ middle of the road, quite progressive. Yes. It wasn't, it wasn't that special. I: And so how long did you work there? R: Well, I probably only worked there for about 18 months, because although we were in York longer, I didn't start to work there until after Kate was born. And so I suppose I was in York for about six months, not working ¼ having Kate and so on. I: And then you moved from York to where? R: To London, yes. And that's around that time that I ¼ didn't get the job at the Institute of Psychiatry, applied to do the training, and then saw George's job. I: What was the job at the Institute, then? R: Do you know, I can't remember now, what it was, but it was to do research on the causes of some kind of disorder, whether ¼ whether it was anxiety or not, I don't know. I: But the training you did was somewhere else? It wasn’t there? R: No. The training was with the British Association of Psychotherapists. I: Yes. I don’t know where that is. R: Well, it's in London. I: It’s the same building as ¼ R: It didn't have its own building in those days. It bought a building in the late eighties. I: I see. And have you had a link with the Institute at all, then? R: The Institute of Psychoanalysis, no. I: Oh, it was the Institute of Psychoanalysis, the job? R: No, no, no, no. I: I thought you meant the Institute of Psychiatry. R: I did, when I was talking about the job. But because we'd just been talking about my psychoanalytic training, I thought you were talking about the Institute of Psychoanalysis, at that point. Have I had a link with the Institute [of Psychiatry]? Not really, no, because I've always worked with George. But because George had had a link with the Institute [of Psychiatry], and because, you know, we had this collaboration with, first of all, John Cooper, at the Institute [of Psychiatry], and then when we did the second round of the Camberwell Survey with John Wing, at the Institute [of Psychiatry], I've sort of been in and out of it, as if I was part of it, for years. Yes. But it was only an informal collaborative link that I had ¼ I, as a member of George's team. Do you see? I: Yes, yes. Fine. And so you’ve come down to London [from York in 1968], and Nigel is doing what? R: Yes. That was the first time that he got into working with cities. And he went to something called The Centre for Urban Studies, which was run by Ruth Glass. I: Ruth Glass, oh yes! R: Quite, quite a difficult lady! (LAUGHS) But he worked there for three years. Then he did a study of the city of Bombay, and this involved ¼ in the middle of that period, he was funded by ¼ oh gosh, what was it called? ENSOR or something. It was a kind of grant which would now be given by DIFID [former ODA, Ministry of Overseas Development], but in those days, it was ¼ I think it was called ENSOR. And we went to Bombay, with the children, for a few months [in 1992], in the middle of that, for him to collect data. And then, after that, he worked for the Development Planning Unit, that's from the late seventies really. I: Now we’ve come to the point, I think, when you applied for this job with George, which eventually he created for you? R: That's right. And the one that he created, was funded by the SSRC, as it was then called, before it became ESRC. But the first time he applied for it, they said, "You'll never be able to collect data like this. The refusal rate will be so high that it won't have any validity". So what we did was a little pilot study, because I was, I mean, you know, this was just the sort of job I'd always wanted to have, so I was, basically, hanging around, hoping that George would create it for me! And so I was quite happy to go out and collect data. And so we had a sample of something like 25. I just, literally, knocked on one in every 15 doors on the Council estates in Camden. Not the ones where I was selling Socialist Worker, mind you! That would have been a boundary problem! And I administered the present state examination to them, because I got trained in that, long before I had an official job with George, you know, when I was thinking of having a job. They wanted people ¼ the person who got the full-time job that I couldn't apply for, because it was full-time, had to be trained, so I was trained at the same time. And so we administered that and the Life Events interview, and it was clear, from these 25 cases, that people were perfectly prepared to do it. But, we also said, "We're only going to do women". I think that was what really convinced the SSRC, that we might ¼ you know, that we might be all right, and that the refusal rate would only be 17 per cent. And that's what it was when we did the final Camberwell [survey] as well. I: So apart from the work in Calcutta, had you been doing interviewing elsewhere? Or was this first interviewing in England? R: No. I had a job, after I finished schools, I interviewed in the most grotesque survey you can imagine! Opinion leaders, about energy. And Nigel loves telling it in an after dinner sort of way! "If you had to heat your house, what would you choose? Electricity, oil, a candle?" It was, literally, this kind of question, you know, and I had to go and ask people this! And then I ticked the boxes for them, you know. It was silly! "Why would you prefer electricity to oil?" "It is cleaner". Also, quite ironically - we had no idea that Nigel would end up working in Ruth Glass's outfit - but again, I think this was half way in the middle of my psychology degree, we needed money in the summer vacation, and we collected data for Ruth Glass on housing in North Kensington. So I had done some kind of data collection in England. I: And had you ever been trained to do that sort of work? R: No. No. I mean, Ruth Glass gave us a modicum of training, you know, "I hope that you will all be decently dressed". "We do not want to put off the respondents". Stephen Hatch, that's right, he was in charge of that survey. Did you know Stephen Hatch? I: Oh, indeed, yes. I might have met you, then, before? R: Oh, I mean, we could have easily done, yes. I: Yes. But just going back to the ¼ what I’m interested to try and tease out, if one can at all, is how you developed the particular way of interviewing that you did? R: Well, I have to say that it was George's. Absolutely George's way. Yes. I: Well, he feels that you have particular skills, so you must have brought something to it. R: Well, he's just nice, isn't he! (LAUGHS) No ¼ I mean ¼ there are probably things which ¼ you know, I had already learnt about how to interview people, in terms of how to make them feel all right, and accepted. But there would equally well be things which George would teach people, if they didn't ¼ and I have to say that this joke about Ruth Glass and, "I hope you will be decently dressed": quite recently, we had somebody in the interviewing team, in the nineties, and George said he thought that he shouldn't wear a particular kind of shoe, I think it was, when he went to do interviewing ¼ especially because he was interviewing older men again, you know, that he felt that, as an interviewer, he ought not to be wearing those disgusting trainers. And I think, you know, there's a lot to be said for thinking of how you actually present yourself. But, really, the interviewing style that ¼ that we have, was already there, George had [already] set it up. I: And can you give me a picture of George as you remember first seeing him? How did he strike you, and what did he seem like? R: Well, he seemed very modest. Very interested in what I'd been doing abroad. I mean, it's interesting, I think he's always had a thing about India, although, you know, as an anthropologist, he's fascinated by all parts of the world, and had ¼ during his anthropology training, had been focused on Africa. But I think he's actually had a sort of emotional thing about India. And so, you know, I suppose I was taken aback that he was just so interested in what I'd been doing! And, you know, I was terribly interested in what he was doing, so ¼ I think that was how the first meeting went, really. Yes. And ¼ he seemed very democratic, and ¼ you know, later on, when we've worked together, we've often kind of argued and so on, but the arguments always end up all right, you know, and we work something out together. And that's, I think, because he is very democratic, and there are a lot of really quite sort of authoritarian academics about. So ¼ I: Shall we begin with the first phase of the research you were involved in? R: Right. So that was the job that George had created for me, by raising money from the SSRC. It was £1999, to employ me, part-time, for 18 months, and to collect community sample data as a comparison group for the bigger project that he had funded by the MRC, which was Maudsley Patients with Depression. And there were two other research assistants working on the patients. They were Jenny and Freda. Jenny was the person who got the full-time job that I couldn't apply for. And we all met together and, I think, this was really a sort of very important thing. I'm sure George had already done it in his schizophrenia work, getting the team meeting together, discussing ratings, because, in the discussions, we generated lots of ideas which then went into the manuals as sort of anchoring examples of rating points, and perhaps, we thought out new rating scales. You know, I remember ¼ there was a point at which we thought, "Oh yes, we ought to have a special scale for somebody who has reached a transition point in their life", you know, and George thought of the name of it as "turning point", and, you know, then we developed the ratings for that. And we were quite a long way through the data collection, but we'd got so much information about all these events, that it was perfectly possible to go back and re-rate all the first half of the data about the life events, in terms of whether this was a turning point or not, in that person's life. And so in that 18 months, I collected data on 116 people, and we re-applied to the SSRC, and got money for another ¼ roughly 116 ¼ you know, to make up a decent-sized sample. And the first time we published, we published only on the basis of the ¼ I don't know what it was, it was something like 230, that we collected then. And then somebody called Máire, an Irish woman, with a name that's pronounced "Newvollahine" [Ní Bhrolcháin] but it has a big B in it, in the middle ¼ she was very dynamic and intellectual, and she was helping ¼ Jenny and Freda left the Project, and Máire came in to help George analyse the data. That's right. And I'd finished collecting the first ¼ community sample, and we'd gone to India with the children, for Nigel's Bombay book. And Máire said to George, "Really, you need a second Camberwell community sample. A) because of your statistical power", although, in those days, we didn't use that phrase. We just said, "Your numbers aren't large enough!" "And b) because it could then be a replication of the first sample". So, in fact, although we now talk about it as The Camberwell Sample, there were really two - one from 1969-71, or the very beginning of '72, and then the next one, '74-'77. And the next one was financed by the MRC. But what I have left out is that, in the middle, the MRC stopped funding the Patient Project [because it involved interviewing Maudsley patients]. And I expect George has already told you about this. It was really a great shock. It was supposed to be renewed, and it was just stopped. And some wonderful people came from the States, from a private foundation, called FFRP, or something, and ¼ and gave us money for George to carry on with the patient side of it. And I think that ¼ actually, I'm very bad on that date. I don't know whether George got it clearer before he came to see you, but when we were just chatting idly, we couldn't remember whether that was New Year '71, or New Year '72, that it happened. I: And just going back to method. There’s a discussion about samples, and size of samples. Did you talk about that very much? And how did your ideas develop? R: Yes, well, we talked about it a lot, because, you know, to put in the application to the SSRC originally, in 1968, that was the first time that we applied and they said "No". And then we applied again in early '69, and officially, I started in September '69, on doing that. But before we put it in, we talked about it, and we decided it had to be a household sample, rather than electoral roll, because we wanted to have people who might not put themselves on the electoral roll, and who just happened to be living in a place. And so, you know, we had a lot of discussion about it ¼ and how to sample only one woman per household, because otherwise, people might feel that they were being spied on, and that anything they've told, would be passed on, via me, to another person in the same household. So we did have a lot of discussions about that sort of thing. I: And given ¼ the number of people you could interview, per street ¼ Sorry, I’m a bit confused whether you’re interviewing only people who had suffered mental illness ¼ R: No, no. This is the Community Sample. I: This is the Community one, yes. So, actually, you would then choose particular streets? R: No, no, we ¼ we decided that we had money enough to do [a total of] 130 or something. So we took the old Borough of Camberwell, so that's, you know, the Borough of Southwark now, actually, has more old Boroughs in it. And at that time, if we ¼ I remember going through the books. I went to the Borough Offices, and I went through the books, and I just took every 40th house. I: Which books are you talking about, then? R: I mean, this is 1968 ¼ I: When you say the books, though ¼ R: Well, this is how the Rateable Units were kept, in 1968. Now, they'd have them on a computer. But in those days, they were in vellum, green vellum bound books, and only a certain number of streets could fit into each book. So I'd have a pile of about 12 of these books, and then I'd take every 40th household. I: And you did that for the whole Borough, then? R: Yes. I: Yes, I see. Because, you could have ¼ I mean, often, nowadays, people try to cluster in particular wards. R: No, we didn't want too much clustering because, you know, we thought if somebody saw me going into their next door neighbour's house, they'd be just as upset as thinking that I was going to interview two women in the same household. So ¼ you know, it was fine, because one in every 40 ¼ you see ¼ and then, when we came again to do ¼ because, basically, we had, as it were, the first quarter, then the second quarter. And then later, when the MRC financed it, the second half. And, you know, we just had to be careful that we never, by chance, taking one in 40 or, when we went through for the second time, it was one in 20, just make sure we didn't hit the same sort of ¼ next door neighbour to somebody else. So when the second quarter was being selected, the addresses of the first quarter were there, and we ¼ you know, we just made sure that we hadn't done 28 in the first quarter, and we'd sampled 30 Ross Square in the second quarter. We would just not do that. We'd ¼ turn on to the next page, and it would be round the corner, it would be Rillington Row or something, instead of Ross Square. You'd just deliberately not do that. I: And how did you deal with questions of ethics at that time? R: Well, there weren't any Ethical Committees in that time, you know, '69. By the time we were doing Islington, in the eighties, we went to the local Borough that had an Ethics Committee. I: But so you set your own ethical standards. Can you describe what those were? How far were you explaining to the patients what you were doing, and what sort of guarantees about confidentiality? Did you cover all those sorts of issues? R: We certainly guaranteed confidentiality. And we always filed things under numbers. And there was just one address list. And we told them, you know, "Only the members of our team will ever have access to the address list", which we'll be able to put the number to the address list. And if they didn't want to be taped, then we'd, you know, we'd just make notes. That was quite a strain. But, fortunately, very few people objected to the tape. But, you know, it was quite a strain. I: Sorry, what was a strain? R: Well, if you carry out a two-hour interview and, you know, you can't really note enough down, as you go along, without disturbing your rapport. So you'd have to come out afterwards and sit in the car and write an awful lot in the car, otherwise you'd forget people's exact words, and they're just so important, aren't they. But, fortunately, very few people refused the tape. I: That’s quite interesting ¼ were they mainly older people who refused? R: No. No. No, I think the only common characteristic was just, you know, being very private, reticent personalities. And some of them were sort of private and fearful, and some of them were private and hostile, so you couldn't even say that they had that in common. I: And what about people who were reluctant to be interviewed, what did you do? R: Well, it depends what kind of reluctance. I mean, there was one woman who was, literally, "Not today, dear". And I went back 30 times. And then the 31st time, she said, "Okay. Yes, I will. You've come back so often, I think I owe it to you!" But what she said was, literally, "Not today". She didn't say, "Oh, I could never do that", or "I disapprove of that". If she'd said that, then I would have said, "Oh well, fair enough, you know, we understand" [and then never returned]. And so most of the refusals that we got were straight out at the very first contact that we made, they refused. And there were an awful lot of people that we kept going back to, and did [succeed in interviewing eventually]. But I think this was the kind of ethos of the team, and I think it was because the SSRC had rapped our fingers so much the first time round, and said, "You'll never do it. You'll have an appalling refusal rate", and we were determined to prove that we could do it. I: And did you try to get any information about the people who refused? R: No. I: None at all? R: No. We ¼ I mean, how could we do that, Paul? I: Well, Peter Townsend got very interested in refusers and who they were, and just trying to get some impression about that. R: So how did he do it? I: Well, he got the interviewers to make notes about the things that they could observe, but often just asked two or three questions. R: No, I suppose that might have been feasible, you're right. Although ¼ very few people refused on the grounds of being too busy. Most ¼ I think, I think it's because, when somebody said to us, "Oh, I couldn't do that, dear, I'm too busy". We would say, "Oh, it doesn't matter. We can just do a few questions today, and then we'll come again next week and do a few", you know, and before they knew it, they were loving it, you know! And we'd be in there three-quarters of an hour. And then we would go the following week for another three-quarters of an hour, and we'd have got everything we needed. No, but you're [right, really]¼ so the people who refused us, literally, wouldn't want to answer a [single] thing. I: It sounds as if you were exceptionally persistent! R: Well, we were! (LAUGHS) But also, in those days, there hadn't been nearly so much fuss about data protection and junk mail and all this sort of thing, and the media, therefore, hadn't got going on sensitising people on how they should stand up for their rights, and refuse all these boring surveys. So it was much easier to do it in those days. And we've never had quite the same sort of way of getting a sample since, partly because most of our samples have been selected [as being vulnerable], ever since that, you know, and we've never had a completely random sample again, since Camberwell. I: Do you regret that? R: Well, it's swings and roundabouts. Yes, because you can never be as confident in your generalisations as when you have a random representative sample. But if you've selected them as a representative working-class sample, then it's quite representative. So ¼ but I think it's when we started selecting people because they're vulnerable to depression, you know, and that we do, I expect George has explained ¼ but in a nutshell, we send questionnaires out to everybody registered on a GP's list, and according to their responses, we can see who's vulnerable to depression, and so we only select them, and all the others we leave in peace. And, you know, we still get refusals. But, having started out in that way, it ¼ [has to go on we have to accept the results as limited by this selection]. I: There’s one more thing that I wanted to raise with you, which was the process by which you discussed and analysed the material. R: Well, we had what we call, now, "consensus meetings". But it was very much George's way of developing measures, which was to think about them. He was always very keen that they be ordinal, but he didn't want people to think of them as strictly arithmetic dimensions. And so everything was always upside-down. The worst or the best was always 1, and the least good or bad was always ¼ 4, 5 or 6, depending on the scale, because he didn't want people coming along and adding them together, and having scores. And he very much wanted to get a feel from the point of view of everybody in the team, as to how they interpreted the person they'd been interviewing, how other people interpreted them. And so we regularly used to meet. And at the beginning, in '69, when I first joined the team, we used to meet twice a week. But then, later, it used to be once a week. And then, later on, we had all the measures written up in the manuals, or "dictionaries" as we called them, with anchoring examples. And as a result of this, people often didn't need to discuss every single thing that had happened, because it was so like what had been happening to other women, five, ten, even 15 years earlier. And you just could go to the manual and see an example, and know what scale point to put it on. I: But at the beginning, you would discuss every interview? R: Yes. I: And what would happen in the discussion, then? How did it go? R: Well, a person would ¼ at the very beginning, we didn't have strict rules. But as we went along, we realised that we were trying to rate in a so-called objective way, what had happened to people. So we kept all the subjective comments about how [interviewees] had felt, and their emotions, we kept those in the way, we just described, in very neutral terms ¼ "The subject was walking down the street, when suddenly, she heard a noise. On turning round, she saw it was a little boy under a bus". This kind of thing. And then we'd rate what we thought most people of that age, in that class, with that kind of lifestyle, of either a job or no job, either children or no children, etc., would be likely to feel. And only afterwards, when we'd all come to a consensus agreement about what scale point it deserved, then we'd find out what did this particular subject actually feel herself. And we'd call that the "reported severity", whereas the first one we called ¼ initially, we called it the "final severity", but then we realised that was a bit of a muddle, and we called it "contextual", in the sense that what would most people, in that context, with those biographical circumstances, be likely to feel about that experience? I: But, in creating that contextual measure, you were drawing on the earlier interviews, rather than, as it were, consensus? R: Well, right at the beginning, we were just drawing on our experience of other people. And as we went along, then we were drawing on other interviews. And we did change one set of ratings, and that was quite near the beginning. So, fortunately, we didn't have that many colleagues whom we had to communicate with. But this was the rating of an induced abortion, you know, a termination of pregnancy. And earlier, we'd just said, "Well, everybody would be likely to feel at least moderately upset, if not markedly upset, by this". And we interviewed a lot of people, and, I don't know if you remember, around the end of the sixties, the Abortion Law changed and it became legal, and just so many people, who'd already got children, and didn't want a fourth or fifth, were so relieved to have had the abortion, that we changed our standards, you know, we realised that, based on our ¼ our rather limited experience, we'd guesstimated wrong. Now that we had done a lot of interviews, we could change the rating. And so that's what we did. [We put the minimum contextual rating down from 'moderate' down to 'little or none'.] But, you know, ¼ sometimes you still come across very peculiar religious sects, and you need to try and get information from somebody outside the team, who knows about this religious sect, before you can understand whether ¼ I remember when we were in the Hebrides, there was a woman who had a brother who was a Jehovah's Witness. He'd left the Hebrides and come down to, I think it was Wolverhampton, of all places! How I should remember that! And she was still an ordinary Church of Scotland [member], she wasn't one of the "We Free", very Presbyterian ¼ members of the Hebrides. She was still a Church of Scotland [member]. But her brother had become a Jehovah's Witness, down in Wolverhampton. And then, he got ¼ his wife left him, probably because he was a Jehovah's Witness! (LAUGHS) Anyway, we didn't go into that! So we had quite a problem, working out, you know, what we thought most people, who were quite pious Church of Scotland, would be likely to feel, you know, because we mustn't allow this particular woman to bias us in rating that. So, you know, we actually went and asked some more Church of Scotland people, "If your brother had become a Jehovah's Witness ¼" It was quite complicated because, first of all, you know, they couldn't imagine their own brother ever becoming a Jehovah's Witness. You know, "Why would he want to leave the kirk?" you know. Anyway, but we finally got a sense that, actually, because he had already left, then they'd just be upset for him, through empathy. Their religious standards wouldn't be any worse than if he'd stayed in the Church of Scotland. I: And, presumably, there’s a point, as you refine this, with all these different possibilities, when you’re actually ending up with almost like individual cases. R: Oh yes. I mean, there are individual cases, but, you know, I think ¼ what we try to do is to make sure that all the people in the team get educated enough about the sub-cultural differences, so that they can then use their own empathy to make a rating. I mean, this is ¼ I expect George has said this in his own interview, but this is his phrase, that "the investigator is the best measuring rod, on the basis of their own life experience". But there's a caveat to that, which is that, you know, their life experience, occasionally, is not wide enough to have encountered this particular context before, and so they need a little bit of extra experience before they rate it. And this is why when we had the colleagues in Zimbabwe, say, or in Spain, you know, we spend a lot of time talking to local health visitors or doctors, or whatever, to make sure that they really understand the culture. So the Spanish team, I don't know if George has talked about this, but there were two MA students who came from Bilbao, in the North of Spain, to - actually, I think it was Harley Street, it was before we moved to Bedford Square - on the M.Sc. in Sociology there, Medical Sociology. And when they went back [to Bilbao], they got involved with the Department of Health there, and set up this survey, based in the city of Bilbao, in a Spanish-speaking rural area, and in a Basque-speaking rural area, which was probably 150 miles away from Bilbao, whereas the Spanish-speaking village was about 35 miles south. And, you know, we were really worried that they were going to be too Spanish and not Basque enough to understand the meaning of things that happened in the village. And so we took a lot of trouble ¼ first of all, we had to have an [extra] Basque-speaking member of the team, because some of the interviews were done with people who couldn't speak Spanish. Not very many couldn't speak, but once you'd got a Basque-speaking member of the team, then, you know ¼ but secondly, you know, we just insisted that the [research workers] got to talk to local health visitors and doctors and so on, and have their consensus meetings informed by them, you know. I: So why is it that the best measure is not the informant? R: Well, it's a very good question. And, of course, people coming from academic Departments of Psychology, are always very put off by the contextual approach. And ¼ I mean, I think it's because of the particular dependent variable that we have chosen to measure, which is depression, and second most prevalent dependent variable being anxiety, that they are emotions, and you can actually end up in a very silly and boring circle if you say, "Well, people who have depression, claim that depressing things have happened to them more often than have happened to other people". You know, you could say, "Okay, it's because they're depressed. They found it depressing". So what George was dedicated to doing was to show that the sorts of things that these depressed people claimed were depressing, anybody would have found markedly depressing, you know, even if they hadn't suffered from a clinical depression afterwards, they would have found that experience depressing. Or anybody would have found that anxiety-provoking, even though they didn't develop an anxiety state, you know, clinically defined. So I think this was the reason why we had to ignore the individual. I: So it was to establish normal reactions to traumatic experiences? R: Yes. I don't like the word "normal", it's more like average, average. I think the point is that ¼ especially with check-list questionnaires, the respondent's mental style can produce tremendous biases, so if you have a questionnaire, and you say, "In the last three months, has anybody close become ill?" A lot of anxious people define something as an illness worth noting, much more often than very laid back people do. You know, they note down every cold, whereas a laid back person thinks, "Oh, it was just a cold", or "I had flu, but I was only in bed for a day", you know, and they don't ¼ they're looking to heart disease or something like that. And so unless you really specify precisely, you can get anxious people seeming to have much more events happening to them than non-anxious people, just because of the way they answer the questionnaire. And so in a very perambulatory way, I've come round to the answer to your question, which is, George was concerned to avoid bias. That's why he couldn't use the informant as the best measuring rod, because he'd get trapped in this circle, that a depressed person is more likely to define something as depressing. I: But what about those self-administered questionnaires about, you know, sleep ¼ that are used, you know, when you have about 30 questions? Do you use those? R: Oh, that's fine, you see. That's the dependent variable. I: So you do use those? R: Yes. We don't mind. I: Why don’t you think that they’re biased in the same way? R: Well, we only use those as screening instruments. For defining somebody who is clinically depressed, we use a ¼ a clinical interview. And, you know, there are some sorts of questions which are all right, because they're very specific, so ¼ in the probes in the present state examination, to find out whether somebody should score on, say, initial insomnia, you know, not being able to get to sleep at the beginning of the night, you have to have three nights a week, that's the current version of the present state examination, or SCAN, as it's now known, where you lie awake for one hour or more, you get a score of 1, two hours or more, you get a score of 2. But if you lie awake for half an hour or more, nothing, you see. So that's very precise. And it is possible to ask people that in a check-list, you know, whereas the phrase 'seriously ill', I mean, the phrase 'ill' is very ambiguous. Even 'seriously ill' is quite ambiguous. I: Now, I’m talking about those particular things. But we used those with our step-family interviews, and one of the interesting things, and I wonder whether you found this, was that, particularly there were men who answered so that they had no problems at all. And then the interview showed quite clearly that they did. R: They did. I: And you’ve found that, have you? R: Yes. Of course, so much of our work has been with women, that we haven't had as much opportunity to find that as you would have done. But certainly, you know, it's one of those things that's, I think, increasingly acknowledged, that men tend to minimise things, and some women do exaggerate them. I: So that measure, again, you relate to the other interview evidence that you’ve got? R: Well, it's not just that we relate to it, we deliberately probe to supplement. So, you know, we don't just say, "Have you had any problems?" you know, "Have you had any problems sleeping?" We'd say, you know, "How long does it take you to get to sleep at night?" I: And could we just go back to the process of analysing, especially at the beginning, because you started to say how it actually happened. I really would like it if you could describe it. I think you were saying that the interviewer presented an interview. Is that correct? R: That's right. In a consensus meeting, the way they're held now, and that would have developed, really, by about ¼ certainly the second round of the Camberwell Survey, in the seventies, we did it all the time. It probably developed during 1970, with Jenny Franklin and Freda Sklair, myself and George, that we started saying, "Don't give us any reported [feelings]. We've got to do it". And we might have even used the word "final", "We've got to do the final first", you know, and then later we change it to contextual. So the interviewer would just say, you know, "This is case number 33", and give a little brief demographic background, you know, "Aged 40, with three children of 12, 10, and 8. Works part-time in the corner shop. The first event in the year was this", and then a very neutral description. And because she would have had to ask quite a lot of probes, she would give quite a full neutral description. And then the rest of the team think about whether they are ready to rate it or not, and usually they want to ask extra questions, which, usually, the interviewer can answer, she's just forgotten to put them in the presentation. And then everybody decides what they should rate, writes it down, and then we go round the team, read out what we've got, to see what the inter-rate reliability is like. And then ¼ usually it's quite good, but anybody with an outlying vote, sorry, rating ¼ sort of ¼ will either say, "Yes, I think you're right. I've overdone it". Or, "God, I must be in a hardy mood today, I'm under-rating again!" you know, this kind of thing. Or they'll argue and say, "I think none of you are really very sensitive to what's going on", and sometimes, you know, it's like Twelve Angry Men, the outlier convinces the team that they haven't really thought of something crucial and, you know ¼ the others will say, "Yes, I realise you asked that question, but I didn't take it seriously when the interviewee answered it in that way. But you're quite right. For somebody in that context, that would have been very important". You see, and very often, if you get a new interviewer in the team, sometimes she ¼ she ¼ doesn't actually let out some crucial information, and then you rate an event ¼ you're supposed to present the events in the sequence they occurred in the year, so you've got the background context. And you rate an event that happened in January, say, and then you hear another event that happened in April, and you find that very odd. And you ask a question, and the answer makes it clear that already, in December, something was going on, which was the background context for that [first] event in January. So then you say, "Listen, I think we're going to have to re-rate that event in January, because your subject would have known all about this when the January event happened. She'd have known all about the December thing, and ¼ I, personally, want to change my rating now". So, so ¼ you know, and then the interviewer would have said, "Yes, I suppose I should have explained that, when I presented the January event". And usually, it only takes interviewers a few months to learn how to do that. I: And what role did George play in all this? R: Oh, the key role. I mean, you know ¼ and he was very good, actually, at persuading us that we weren't taking the sub-culture of older people into account, because, you see, the team was always women quite a lot younger than him, you know, and gradually, over the years, there have been women quite a lot younger than me as well! And, you know, it was always very important for him to remind us how conservative some of the older working-class were, you know, and the shame about being unemployed and so on, which was still there in 1969. But, you know, for some of us in our early or late twenties, we hadn't internalised it. I: Would he chair the discussions, then? R: Yes. Yes. I: And he’d intervene a lot, or not? R: Oh, a lot, yes. In later years, when he was so busy, and when there were so many separate projects going on, he often didn't attend. And as we developed other measures, I'm talking now about the Camberwell Measures, which were particularly life events and difficulties. But, you know, by the nineties, we were measuring attachment style, and much more psychological things. The self-evaluation he played a key role in, because that was developed in the eighties, seventies and eighties. I: Is attachment style, he’s less interested in that? R: I mean, it's not that he's less interested in, it's just that it grew out of work that was done in the eighties, and the measure that was developed in the late eighties and nineties, was developed by ¼ another member of the team, really. I mean, it, it grew out of ¼ I don't know whether we're jumping ahead too much ¼ because after Camberwell, there was a project which, in a way, was more my project than George's. It was the Project in Walthamstow, and just quickly, to explain to you. In the data there, we looked at some psychological things, for the first time ¼ helplessness and hostility, and nurturance. And when we were analysing that, it seemed appropriate to link up with the attachment theory literature, but they didn't use those concepts. But by building on the measures that we'd developed for those attributes, it was possible to create a pattern of attachment style, which would correspond to the attachment concepts of ¼ dismissive, preoccupied, enmeshed and so on. And so we created a sort of attachment style measure in that project. And the person who worked with me there, I'm sure George would have talked to you about her, she's Toni Bifulco. She came in as my research assistant for that project. And we worked together very well, and we've worked together very well for 19 years, and she was rising in the team and doing what seemed like excellent stuff. And she was in charge of the attachment measure. And then we had this awkwardness ¼ (LAUGHS) I: He did talk about that, yes. Anyway, we’re still on the first project! Maybe it would be an idea to move on to ¼ when you were in the Hebrides. Because I was wondering whether you could describe what it was like to work together in that particular context? R: Okay. Well, there were two islands that we studied. The first one, North Uist, in 1975, it was, really, at the suggestion of Una McLean. Has George talked all about the way it came about? She liked the social origins of depression paper that she, because this was all in sort of ¼ very early '75, and the first paper hadn't even come out in Sociology, but she'd seen it in manuscript after she met George at a conference. And they, they started talking about it, and she set it up really quite quickly. And we went just for a month in the autumn of '75, to North Uist, and we all lived in the Lochmaddy (?? - 256) Hotel. There were about five of us - myself, two Sue's from the Second Camberwell Survey, George, and a psychiatrist, Ray Prudo, who was at the Institute of Psychiatry, in the Drug Dependency Unit, in those days. He later moved to Canada. And, well, it was ¼ it was great, you know! It was like a kind of anthropology expedition. And we'd go out and do interviews in the morning, and then have consensus in the evening and, you know, we had a map, and we had little red dots for anxiety cases, and blue dots for depression, and yellow dots for normal, all over the island. And we went on picnics on the weekend, and fell in bogs, and, you know, that sort of thing. I: Did you go to church? R: No. We didn't go to church. Well, we thought, you know, we weren't Church of Scotland, and that they would have been very shocked. But what we did do was, we didn't hang out our washing on a Sunday. We were very strict about that. We realised that they were Sabbatarians, and would be shocked. I: This would have been one of the times when George did most interviewing, probably, wasn’t it? R: Yes. Yes, it was, really. He did ¼ at the beginning of the Islington Survey, he did quite a bit to get it off the ground. He didn't, I don't think he did a single interview in the Camberwell population, and not very many of the Maudsley patients. I: So how do you see him as an interviewer? R: Well, I think it's very difficult to be a man and interview women about these things. So I see him as taking rather longer than necessary, when he does interviews. But I think this is because he doesn't want to be intrusive. And I think it's, perhaps, not very fair of me to have that kind of criticism. One of the Sue's in North Uist, was lovely, and equally sort of hesitant and gentle with ¼ with her women, as she was in the second Camberwell [survey]. But I remember, once, I did three interviews in the same village, and climbed a mountain, before she finished her one interview! But then again, it's not fair, because all three of my women were not clinically disturbed, and she had somebody with mixed depression and panic disorder, who had to get her husband to pick her up in the car from the farmhouse door, and drive her across the farmyard to the byre, to do the milking of the cow, because she couldn't, she couldn't bear being outside. So she was very disturbed. So I'm not being fair on Sue Pollock, either! And also, when we went to do these interviews, the women would pile our plates high with scones and pikelets and Scotch pancakes and so on, and I think poor old Sue was trying to get through all these cakes! I: Not so much whisky there? You weren’t given so much whisky? R: No. No, we ¼ we did buy a range of whiskies in the Lochmaddy Hotel. I: I had trouble with the whisky ¼ it was a problem for me on my fishing project! (LAUGHS) R: Right! In fact, I think we probably drank more whisky on the Isle of Lewis, because Ray Prudo, and another research assistant [Jan], specially employed for that project, who actually came from New Zealand [with her husband Mark], they were up there for nearly three months, and Ray [and Mark] got in with the rugby team, and ¼ George and I just went up ¼ well, George went up for a week, and I went up for a fortnight. And at the end, you know, we kind of had a dinner, inviting the rugby team home to the croft, where Ray and Jan had been ¼ no, they had two crofts, side by side, because Jan's husband was up there as well, and he played rugby. So Ray and Mark were in the rugby team, and there was more whisky up there. I: So was that focused on a small area, or the whole of Lewis? R: No, it was really North Lewis. It was ¼ a practice that was ¼ I think the practice wasn't in Stornoway, but it might as well have been, because it kind of went out to the west ¼ no, the east of Stornoway, and up to the top, to Tolsta. And it was a big, a big joint practice. But down towards Harris, we didn't interview anybody there. I: Well, I wonder whether there’s anything else on that first stage that you feel would be good to talk about? R: No, I don't ¼ I don't think so. Maybe it's important to say that, in North Uist, we didn't collect the life events properly. We got ¼ for those who had onsets of depression, we did collect them. But for the general population, we were in a hurry to get through in a month, and I think we did something like 158, or something, interviews altogether, which isn't bad, with five people, in a month. So we weren't doing it in as much detail. Whereas on Lewis, they did 204 in three months, and that was just Ray and Jan, with ¼ Sue Davison went up for a fortnight, and I went up for a fortnight. So, you know, it was hard work for them. I: Mmm, sounds very hard work, yes. Anyway, so in ’74, you have this [Mental Health Foundation] Fellowship? R: That's right, yes. I: Would you like to say something about that? R: Yes. Well, it's ¼ it's an awkward career, a research career, really. And I've been terribly lucky. I mean, just so lucky, to be able to work with George in the way I have, for so long. At a certain point, you know, people are getting too senior to be somebody's research assistant any more. But, somehow, it was all right for me to carry on like that with George. But, in '74, it ¼ it seemed appropriate for me to do something on my own, because, at that point, George was going forward to develop measures which were to be used in the Prospective Study, which wouldn't start until later on in the ¼ you know, towards the end of the seventies. And, in fact, in practice, it wasn't until 1980, really. So Milou Kevelin, and Patricia O'Connor came in to help him develop these other measures. And I was still around, very much in the Unit. But I wanted to look at the role of stress, measured in George's way, but for somatic conditions. And actually, I didn't get the Fellowship until after '74, I think. I: That’s curious, because you’ve put it down as ’74. R: No, no, it is! It was '74. You're quite right, it was '74. It's just that I carried on collecting data after my Fellowship had run out. In '78 I was still collecting data on that, although I was also collecting data on the Walthamstow Study. And I wanted to look at disorders which would be particularly relevant for women. I wanted disorders which would have an onset, which was dateable, and, you know, a number of things like pre-menstrual tension, for example, people seem to have had them forever, and it's, therefore, very difficult to look at what's been happening before the onset. So I took two menstrual disorders which are easily dateable, one's secondary amenorrhoea, when the periods stop for more than two months, with no obvious reason. And one was menorrhagia, which is fairly easy to date. I mean, it's more difficult than secondary amenorrhoea, which is very simple. And I just used the same measures that we'd been using to look at depression, namely the Life Events and Difficulty Schedule, and the Present State Examination. And that was very, very interesting, yes. I don't quite know what, what more you'd like me to say. Would you like me to say what I found? I: So you interviewed people? R: Yes. It was exactly the same system. I, obviously, needed to have extra questions about the onset of their disorder, their physical disorder. But then I asked them about the onset of any depression or anxiety they might have felt, and the life events and difficulties that had happened in the [twelve month] period preceding the onset of their menstrual disorder. I also asked quite a lot of questions about gender role. This was a set of questions based on a lot of ¼ schedules which were being developed at the time. I think there was one by Benn, which was just about developed, on gender roles. I: So what did you conclude? R: And because ¼ the psychoanalytic literature was full of things which were still being believed in the early seventies, about women who had menstrual disorders were rejecting their feminine role. And, you know, it was quite early, in terms of Feminism, when I was thinking about this, you know. And I didn't think it was going to turn out to be true, that the women, who had these physical disorders, were rejecting their gender role any more than the women who didn't. And, in fact, it didn't turn out to be true, from the work that I did. But I didn't actually publish about gender role, mainly because I then got caught up in this Walthamstow Study. But I did publish about onset and life events, and ¼ I: And what did you conclude, then? R: Well, it was actually quite nice to have done both the menstrual disorders, because they, as it were, complemented each other, going out in opposite directions. And I used the Camberwell Sample as a comparison group, because we knew, from the Camberwell questions, we knew who had menstrual disorders or not, so I had to eliminate some of the Camberwell Sample, because they wouldn't have been suitable as a comparison group, because they had these menstrual disorders. But not very many of them had to be eliminated. And, in a nutshell, women with menorrhagia, very often had severe events of the kind that preceded depression, in the year before they developed the menorrhagia. But if you just looked at the one month before it, there wasn't a particularly noticeable difference between them and the comparison group. On the other hand, they much more often had depression than the 17 per cent that we found in the comparison group. So it looked as if these severe events, say, 10, 11 months earlier, led to a depression, and then maybe that changed their hormones in some way, so that they would then [later] develop menorrhagia. By contrast, the women with secondary amenorrhea didn't have a raised rate of severe events at all, but ¼ in any period, but what they did have was a raised rate of events [usually minor] within the one month before the periods stopped. And if you looked at those events, they were of a special kind. In another group, namely the schizophrenic patients that George had sampled in the sixties, they also had a raised rate of events in the one month before onset or relapse. But they weren't like these events, necessarily. I mean, one or two of them were, obviously, but in the main, they weren't. The secondary amenorrhea events seemed to embody a situation of challenge. They weren't necessarily very dangerous, but they were, you know, kind of rite of passage events, like ¼ taking on a great deal of responsibility of a kind one had never had before. And, you see, one of the things is that secondary amenorrhea is very much among younger women, whereas menorrhagia is often among older women, and they didn't have depression, or even anxiety states, as clinically defined, but they often had a lot of very minor symptoms, like muscular tension, not getting off to sleep well, feeling very tense, and so it looked as if challenge events, leading to borderline tension states, in the month before, were related to women's periods stopping. And that was a sort of complementary picture to the depression events, taking a long time to lead to the periods becoming very much heavier, and a problem in that way. I: Interesting. Gender. So when did you, yourself, first become aware of this as an important issue? R: Well, I suppose ¼ really, people already knew that the rate of presentation in Psychiatric Departments for depression, was twice as much among women as among men, and ¼ I think the very sort of minimal epidemiology that had been done already in sort of Lundby, and the Leightons had done work in Nova Scotia, you know, there was this for depression, that there was [that for] gender difference. But I suppose, you see, I can't remember if I talked about this, but I was training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, at the same time as I was starting to work with George. And, you know, you read all this psychoanalytic stuff, which doesn't have a lot of evidence base. But some of it makes intuitive sense, and you think, "Well, it's about time we got round and provided an evidence base". And some of it didn't. Some of it sounded like, you know, elderly male psychoanalysts letting off steam! (LAUGHS) And blaming women for not being a good girl and accepting your rightful place as a woman, you know! And so I was, you know, it was in reading that that I thought, "Well, how can these people get away with these ideas? You know, we've got to investigate it properly". I: So where did you first start reading Feminist writing? R: Right! You know, I didn't, until quite late. It wasn't ¼ I mean, although I support Feminism, I can't claim to have been a proper Feminist, because ¼ did we talk about politics last time? I think we did, briefly. I was a member of the Socialist Review Group, which then became the International Socialists, which then became Socialist Workers' Party. And, you know, Feminism is secondary to class position in that theoretical perspective. So, actually, I was quite late in reading proper Feminist literature. But there was all sorts of stuff around about being a woman, both in psychoanalytic theory and in ordinary sociology, people were quite aware of gender, without having any axe to grind, as a Feminist thing. And, I mean, at one point, there's something called Marxism, and, you know, and it started out like Marxism '78, or something, and it happens every year in London University, organised by what is now the Socialist Workers' Party, and sometime in the late seventies, somebody said, "Well, really ¼" you know, sorry, what happens is that they take the University of London Union, about the second weekend of July, for the four whole days, and outlying buildings, and you have simultaneous, probably 20 simultaneous sessions. So they were looking for speakers. And they said, "Why don't you do psychoanalysis and Marxism?" So I did. And then a few years later they said, "Well, maybe you should do psychoanalysis and Feminism and Marxism", and that's when I started reading it. Very late! Really late! I: Do you think, in terms of the research, that it’s been wise to focus so exclusively on women? R: Strictly speaking, no. But I think I was saying last time, that we had so many outlying colleagues who have trained in our methods and have done research on men, that it's always possible for George and myself, you know, when speaking or when writing chapters, to cite their work, and in some sense, use that to bolster the plausibility of what we're saying about psychology in general, rather than having it based exclusively on our own data. You know, our colleagues are very generous in letting us quote them. I mean, maybe generosity isn't the word, because, obviously, it's good for them too, if we quote them. But, for example, Tom Craig, who is the Professor of the Department in St. Thomas's, where we are now, he joined our team at the time of the Islington Survey, and he was working on another physical disorder ¼ problems of the gut, a huge range, some of which were clearly organic, and some of which nobody could find an organic reason for. And so he collected a lot of data on men, both in a comparison group and in his patients group. And later, George did some work with Michael Marmot, on heart disease. And they too collected a comparison group of men, and then the men with the myocardial infarctions. So we did have these comparison groups of men, from projects which ¼ now, actually, I suppose they really were both financed through George, but other colleagues were carrying the torch for them. So people tend to forget that they were George's projects! I: No, I just wonder ¼ in a way, it’s slightly curious, that over all those years that you didn’t want to expand to include men, yourselves. It’s not the same, really, is it, as encouraging somebody else to do it. Can you see a particular reason why you didn’t do that? R: Well, I mean, you could say, why ¼ you know, why did we choose to go the way we did? Which was to select ever more [vulnerable women to further our special insights] ¼ R: Why did we not keep a foot in classical epidemiology, and have representative samples? And I suppose the answer is, you know, we were pursuing particular hypotheses, and they led us in an ever more specialised directions, you know. So, having started with women, we went on and on with women. But, as I was saying the other week, getting men from the general population, is quite a problem. I: I know you did say that, yes. R: And, you see, recently Tom Craig, well, recently, in the second half of the nineties, Tom Craig did what we called 'The Brothers and Sisters Project', which complemented a project that was being done by George and Toni Bifulco, 'The Sisters Project'. And, you know, the way to get the men from the general population was through their sisters. Do you see? So if we'd just gone out for a random sample of men, on the one hand, we'd have probably got a penal rate of refusal, and secondly, their representativeness might have been more of a problem, because we would have really had to have sampled prisons, you know, and doss houses and things like that. Somehow, women don't get into prisons and doss houses to the same extent as men. I: And now, by ’77 ¼ you’ve come to Bedford College. Were you working with George during ¼ with the Fellowship? R: That's right. The Fellowship, I had to be located somewhere, so I was located in the team. And I continued to attend all the consensus meetings. That's why, when you said '74, I was thinking, "Well, surely, not as early as that!" Because, you see, I was always there for the end of the Second Camberwell [survey], and I was always in the consensus meetings, even though, strictly, I was being paid on the Fellowship at that point. I: I see. Anyway, this was the point when you all moved over to Bedford? R: No, no, no! We moved to Bedford Square. I: Bedford New College? R: Yes. No. Let's, let's start from the other side, which is what's happened to Bedford College. Bedford College amalgamated with Royal Holloway in 1984, and left Regent's Park. So, at that point, we had to leave the lovely building we had in Regent's Park, where we'd been since 1981, and we went to Bedford Square, which was an annexe of the Bedford College amalgam with Royal Holloway, in Central London. I: But what about arriving there, that’s what I was asking? R: But it had always been Bedford College. George went to Bedford College in 1967. I: Of course, I’m sorry, I’m confusing ¼ I think the difference was, it was renamed The Socio-Medical Research Centre. R: Maybe you're right. I have to confess that I don't know when that name came about. There was all sorts of things going on in the Sociology Department, you know, and it kept being a new name, like Social Policy, or ¼ Sociology, or whatever. But the Social Research Unit - SRU - is what Margot Jefferys called it, and George joined that in '67, and I joined that with George in '69. And it was always in an annexe building, it was never in the main Regent's Park. It started out in Peto Place, which is on the edge of Albany Street, then in ¼ let me try to work out exactly when it was. I think it was '75, it moved to Harley Street. And '81, it went as close as possible to the main College, it was in ¼ Frazer Lodge, which is one of those white buildings near Queen Mary's Garden, in the centre of Regent's Park. And we were there for three years before we moved to Bedford Square, when Bedford College was amalgamated, and most of the College moved down Egham, where Royal Holloway was. Now, when [exactly] the SRU became the SMRC, I couldn't promise to tell you. I: Okay. Well, anyway ¼ R: In fact, I think it went through an interim phase of being the SMRU, because people were very unclear about the word "Centre", and what it meant. I: So you were there till ’99, anyway? R: Well, the point is that in '99, George and I went to St. Thomas's, because of this unpleasantness. I don't know how much he's told you about it? I: He explained about that, yes. R: But, basically, [in mid-1999] the College felt that we should no longer be in the same building as Toni Bifulco, and they wanted to move George and me, and the people working with us, across Bedford Square, to a top floor, which was one room. And we had 40 filing cabinets of data, and three other people besides George and me. And the Principal kept saying, "Oh, it's all right, we'll put up partitions", you know! So that's when we decided to move to St. Thomas's. And I don't know whether George explained to you, but right from the beginning of the nineties, we were thinking about what would happen when George retired, and we wanted Tom Craig to, really, direct our Unit. I'm hesitating, because I suddenly realise that you don't realise that he was part of our team from 1980 to 1984. And we wanted him to carry on being part of our team, but the MRC cut its budget very radically in '84, and it was the sort of height of Thatcherism, and several of our projects that we'd put in for, at the renewal of the Programme Grant, were not financed. And this meant Tom had to get another job. And so, but we always kept very close touch with him. He carried on being the Psychiatric Consultant, and then when he became too busy, one of his juniors became the Psychiatric Consultant, and came to our consensus meetings on symptoms, during the 1990s. And so there was always this hope that he would come in and run the Unit again. And we explored it with the MRC, and, basically, I think, we asked for too much, too early, and they said no. And once that had gone wrong, we were kind of hesitating about what to do next. But the thing is, he'd always been in the background. And so when, in '98, the Principal said, "You've got to move across Bedford Square", we said, "Well, no, we won't. There's not room for us". And it was at that point that, also, that you [Qualidata archiving] came into our lives, and we realised that we didn't have to hold on to the 40 filing cabinets forever! That you could help archive it, and so on! And we ¼ and Tom managed to find this, you know, little annexe, as it were, in St. Thomas's, for his Department, and so he said, "Well, come here. At least you've got five rooms, you know, small as they are, they are separate". And so that solved the problem, really. I: This kind of planning, you know, putting grants and signing away ¼ is that something you've worked with George on over the last 20 years or so? R: Oh, very ¼ well, not 20 years. Oh, I suppose it is, actually, because the Walthamstow Project on Early Loss, started at the end of 1978, and that, obviously, had to be written into the grant application. So from the end of '77, I was involved in helping George to write the application for that, and that also included his Islington Study. And it also included a study that was looking at how depressed women experienced the treatment by their general practitioners, with Susannah Ginsberg, that study was done. So, you know, and I was very much involved in doing interviews and the consensus meetings and everything, at the beginning of the Islington Project. So, yes, I suppose I have been for 20 years. But during the seventies, during the early seventies, George used to do it all himself. I: What’s it like, trying to write things with George? R: Well, it's probably good for one. And the thing is, I've always been very ¼ I've always had such a good relationship with him, that I've been able to be very open with him, and, you know, kind of ¼ I used to joke with him about how, you know, he felt like a dog when it sees a lamp-post! He felt he had to scribble over everything that anyone had written, you know! And that this meant that he had really participated in it, and ¼ it was his paper too, and so on! But the converse of that is that, as a junior author, it is very easy working with George. [Because] when you have suggestions, he is very receptive to them, and very laid-back, and doesn't mind you being critical. So, you know, when you graduate to being the senior author, and you have all his scribbles, you know, it's ¼ well, it's wounding to your ¼ well, there's pride, but, you know, it's very good. And, I mean, I, now, will never talk about different sorts of projects, or different sorts of ¼ He said, "It reminds me of liquorice allsorts!" he said. So I always use the word 'types', you know. I have a kind of phobia about the word 'sorts', because I imagine George crossing it out! It's perfectly good grammar, but I just know he doesn't like it. I: So they’re quite sharp, some of his comments, then? R: Yes. And some of them are very good, you know, especially when something ¼ I mean, I have a terrible tendency to long sentences, as I'm sure this tape will show, and, you know, he's very good at making it clearer for other people ¼ spelling out intermediate steps that I may have just taken for granted and assumed, and that a new reader won't understand. You know, it's good. But it is wounding, you know. At least he doesn't use red pen! (LAUGHS) Blue, black, green, pencil! I: So, you have worked for him for an incredibly long time, haven’t you? How do you think you’ve managed to do that? R: Well, I suppose it's because he tolerated me, you know. We've tolerated each other! And I think it's also because we are, basically, very dedicated to what we're doing, and, you know, we have this kind of curiosity about people's lives, and how people work, and so on, and in the end, that takes priority. And somehow, I mean, I don't know really, about whether ¼ I was going to say, "We've made room for each other". And I thought we were making room for Toni. And I don't know, really, whether somehow we didn't make room for Toni. But I certainly think there was a point at which we genuinely had, and then something went wrong. And once it started to go wrong, I think she believed that ¼ that we were trying to kick her out, when we weren't. I mean, she was the one who said she was going to resign. And I actually went and talked to her alone. George didn't want me to talk to her alone, during '97, very much, but when we got to the autumn, I said, "I think I ought to go and see what's going on. I just don't understand, you know, when you talk with her ¼ this, that ¼" And we nearly, we nearly seemed to have settled it. And then she said, I remember, I was sitting in the room when George phoned her. And he said, "But that's not what you said yesterday". And she said, apparently, she said, "No, I've changed my mind". So, somehow, we didn't make room for her. I: So that’s something you’re pretty upset about? R: Yes. I mean, at the time, I was even more upset about what was going on with the colleagues in the Institute, because Chani Kumar, you know, over the years, he and I had had a good colleagueship, and we'd talked about life events, and I'd been very interested in his work, and he was working in a biological medium as well, trying to combine all these approaches. And it was going to be a great project, this European project on post-natal depression ¼ sorry, I say "European", because it was funded from the EC. But it had wider ramifications, in terms of colleagues. For example, there was a Japanese colleague who was working there. There was somebody from Africa. And I don't really know whether they've got off the ground or not, because everything was just so awful after that, that we've had no communication with that project. And I was really sad that ¼ the way George played it was to say, "I'm leaving that project". I: Was that a project that Toni was involved in as well, or not? R: Yes. It was set up from 1996, and at the time, there was four of us from our team, who were in collaboration with Chani, and we helped him write the grant application to Europe. George put in a lot of work, helping him on that, at the end of '96. And the four of us were George, Toni, myself, and a visiting post-doctoral Fellow from Canada, called Odette. She had come to work very closely with Toni on a measure that Toni and George were developing, I had hardly anything to do with, called "The Adult Life Phase Interview" [ALPI]. And there was a junior ¼ well, she was actually quite experienced, but she was junior to Chani in the Institute, who was already collecting data in England, along the sort of lines that they were hoping to collect data in all these different sites, you know - Portugal, Italy, Sweden, England, and possibly Japan and Africa. And this English colleague had consensus meetings, and it became Odette's function to sit in on these. And the point was that Odette had done her doctorate on post-natal depression in Canada, and George was giving her this opportunity, you know, to be part of this great European team, partly because, in terms of finance, she already had the Fellowship, and she could have the time to go and travel, partly because it was a great stepping-stone for her career. So she was very closely involved in consensus meetings with Chani's assistant, Maureen, who was already collecting data in England. And the grant was going to start at the end of '97, or the beginning of '98, to develop measures to use all over the world. So, you know, in some sense, already using some of our measures, and having consensuses, was premature, because the grant was to develop the measures. But anyway, this was all going on. And when we got news that the grant was going to be financed, we got the news in May, I think, or April of '97, and so George and I, who had been a little bit in the background, sort of came forward to start to meet together with the other two, and looking at what they were thinking of doing. And we said, "This is great, but the way you're doing it, you're not going to make a distinction between somebody's husbands have difficulties, and somebody's husbands ¼ interpersonal difficulties between the two of them. So we need to change the measure so that you can make that distinction, because it's proved so important in all our other work". And they said "No". And so we tried to persuade them, and we showed them this and that. And then they sort of made various efforts, and Chani's team said, "Oh no, that's far too complicated". And then it became clear that the reason they'd said that was because they thought George and I had done that. And we said, "No, our proposal was to do this one thing". And anyway, whatever it was, it really just blew up. And at the beginning of August, George went to meet Chani and Maureen, with me, and not bring Toni and Odette, because, at the beginning of May, he'd met Chani and Maureen, with Odette, and it had just been so terrible: the atmosphere was so terrible. But actually, I think it was probably a bad move, not to take Odette and Toni along. And ¼ it was a long long meeting, it lasted about four hours. And, in fact, I was having to catch a train to come back here, and ¼ at the end of the meeting, we were just getting nowhere. And George said, "Well, you know, if you are adamant that you are not going to make this distinction, I think I'll have to pull out, because I can't have a measure go forward as if it's mine, which ignores all the findings I've had about the crucial importance of inter-personal difficulties for depression, and the relative lack of importance of other people's health difficulties, you know. I must make this distinction". And Chani said, "All right. Pull out. And we'll keep Odette and Toni", you know. I: So how does George handle a really tense situation like that? R: Well, he's quite good, you know. He minds about it, but, you know, he made up his mind, and, you know, we had both independently made up our mind that it would be like denying our own findings, to go along with this messy measure. I: No, I was just thinking ¼ you described these meetings as explosive. I mean, does George explode in these situations? Or what do you mean? R: Well, the meeting with Chani, Maureen and Odette, I can only report back on through George's report to me. And it sounds as if they were very hostile. But sometimes, I think, George may be quite adamant quite early on in a discussion, and it's often, it's often quite helpful ¼ both Toni and I have, in our time, adopted a kind of mediating role, in the sense of explaining to other people why George has to be so adamant. He doesn't explode, but he is quite firm. And I suppose, because neither Toni nor I were there, there wasn't this element of being able to explain to Chani and Maureen, what was going on. And, you see, I think they were desperate to keep Odette, because they didn't have to pay her. She was going to do all this work as part of her Fellowship. So, in the end, we ¼ you know, it's not cherchez la femme, it's cherchez l'argent, I think that's what it was really all about. And I think they, they got the completely wrong idea, because Chani could have persuaded Odette to make this tiny little change that George and I were proposing, and he just didn't want to. And I don't know why he didn't want to. I don't know whether he and Odette and Toni had talked behind the scenes and ¼ you see, I think they thought that they would give this measure a new name. I mean, basically, it was George's ¼ George's thresholds, and George's rules, but they were going to call it the 'CAME' - the Contextual Assessment of Maternal Experience. And I think they thought that they would own it, and that this would give them prestige, and that if they made any concession, suggested by George and me, that then, somehow, they would have to let George and me part own it. And I think they wanted ¼ Toni and Odette wanted to own it themselves, and not have us as part of it. Which was a silly thing, because the only reason that they were involved in the collaboration, was because Chani had approached George. There was a way - I mean, they might have been able to ditch my name off it, because I was quite willing to do that. And, in fact, now we come to the attachment measure, I have never pushed for my name to be on that, even though, you know, in some sense, it would have been more sensible for my name to be there than George's, because it was out of the Walthamstow Project, where the chapter that was written about attachment style, was senior authored by me and Toni. It was out of that that Toni then got sent on a course by George [in 1989], and developed the other measure. But, in fact, that paper [of Toni's] still hasn't come out, Paul. You know, she's been developing it since 1989, and ¼ as far as we know, the British Journal of Medical Psychology wanted her to write it into two papers, and we still haven't heard whether it's been accepted or not. And in the latest stage, she has taken George's name off it as well. Now, I've published papers and chapters in '97, '98 and '99, referring to this measure as, you know, 'Bifulco, Brown, Moran, Bull', in manuscript. And yet, when it finally comes out, it's not going to have George's name on it. And he said ¼ you know, he's just gone along with that, because he's so fed up with the whole business. I: So is that the worst kind of conflict that’s happened, of that kind of academic conflict, during the period you’ve been working with him? R: Yes, I think so. I mean, to come to a stage where, you know, you're more or less chucked out of your own building is ¼ bad. I mean, you know, there are always rivalries between people, but his relationship with John Wing, in the end, was not a bad one, you know. And I don't know ¼ did he talk to you about Aubrey Lewis? The Head of the Maudsley ¼ I: Yes, yes. R: But there was, I think Aubrey Lewis was a bit unfair, in that something which George was really the ¼ not only the inspirer of, but the main worker on, because it was going to come into John Wing's M.D. thesis, somehow John had to be the senior author on the book. I: He did talk about that. R: And I think that was unfair. And as a result of that, there was, you know, difficulties between him and John. But it didn't mean that they couldn't continue to work together. I mean, all of that was before he came to Bedford College. And the second round of the Camberwell [survey], you see, the psychiatrist colleague was John Wing. The first round, it was John Copeland and John Cooper, but by the time of the second round, they'd become professors in Liverpool and Nottingham, and so the second round, we worked with John Wing, who was still in London. And we used to have consensus meetings, and chaff each other. I remember teasing him about ¼ I mean, he teased me about, "Well, any psychoanalyst would call this a case, but I wouldn't" you know! And I'd say, "But look at the woman! She can't do this. She can't do that. She's functionally impaired". And then the two assistants to John Wing, you know, are now Senior Professors ¼ Julian Leff and Sheila Mann, actually went along with George and me, and agreed that this woman was rather functionally impaired. I think she's case 926 in Camberwell! And we were allowed to call her 'a case'. But John was reluctant. And he had a very high threshold for what he called 'a case'. And later, he brought it down, actually. I think it was as a result of the second Camberwell Survey. Did we talk about this last time? I think we did. But, in a nutshell, he used to say, "Clinical cases were only levels 6, 7, and 8 of his Index of Definition" [of the PSE]. And then after that, he said, "Well, they're on levels 5, 6, 7 and 8". And one or two people, using the PSE Score, said, "Well, really, it should be half of level 5 are cases and half are not. And those with a score of 16 or above, in level 5, are clinical cases. And those with a score under 16, are not cases". And that's more or less the threshold that John Cooper and John Copeland had set with us in the first round of the Camberwell [survey], that, you know, some of level 5 were, and some of level 5 weren't cases. So ¼ I think the intellectual disagreement rumbled on. But actually, it came to quite a successful resolution there, and over the years, they maintained a sort of ¼ you know, mutuality of colleagueship which was ¼ was okay, even though, in the sixties, there had been this kind of awkwardness and rivalry and so on. Whereas the recent one with Toni Bifulco, you know, it just couldn't be amicably settled. And I think it was very badly handled by the Vice-Principal of ¼ of Royal Holloway. Very badly. I: So why do you think that she couldn’t, in the end, work with George, but you’ve been able to? What’s the difference between you? R: Well, she did work with him for a long time. And I think when she was working with him successfully, it could be that she was modelling herself on me and, you know ¼ I: In what way? R: Well, being laid-back and flexible and ¼ and so on. Do you know, I just ¼ I don't have a final diagnosis. I have a number of hypotheses. And, in fact, one of the most plausible was something that George put into his submission to the MRC, when we were having all these problems at the end of '97/'98, which was that she was anxious about what was going to happen at the end of that programme grant at the end of '99. And that, because of that anxiety, she was kind of pulling in a ¼ a prematurely independent way, and making out that he had never given her any scope or any freedom. But actually, in a way, he'd given her too much, because he hadn't supervised her enough, and he hadn't made her aware enough, of ¼ of all the problems that were going to come. And, as a result of that, she could be as irrational as to think that this amendment we were suggesting to the measure to be used with the European [Perinatal] Project, that she could think it unimportant. It must be due to the fact that he hadn't supervised her enough. So ¼ I do think that she might have been preparing herself, you know, for the time when he'd no longer be getting the new programme grants, you see. And it had always been agreed that she would put in for a programme grant. So after we moved to St. Thomas's, you know, all she was doing was carrying on what had been agreed originally, that she would be putting in for the programme grant. And I don't know if she didn't get it, and I don't know whether one of the reasons she didn't get it was because the MRC would have been aware of all the kerfuffle that had been created a year earlier, at the end of '97, because they would have been considering it, you know, sort of Easter '99, they would have been considering it. I: Just to switch a little bit. In the eighties and nineties, were there important changes, do you think, or not, in the approach to the research? R: Well, a lot of new measures were developed. First of all, the self-evaluation measure was developed, and it was done alongside a number of other very much more sociological measures of things like role commitment, role conflict. And the work on social support was elaborated, because in the original Camberwell Survey we just looked at something that we called "intimacy", and basically, it came from one question, which is, "If you had a problem of some sort, who would be the first person you would want to talk about it with?" And all our other very detailed measures of degree of contact, and nature of relationship, you know, "Is it in a pub? Is it in a Club?" you know, all these very kind of structural things, just were unassociated with depression. Whereas this more qualitative thing about confiding, came out trumps. It was the most important vulnerability factor. And so that was what was being elaborated on in the social support side of the SESS. Do you know that? That's the second measure after the LEDS - which is Life Events and Difficulties - there's the SESS - Self-Evaluation and Social Support. And that proved very important, you know, and it confirmed that the hypothesised role of self-esteem that we'd had in the Social Origins of Depression. Then the second important measure to come out was to do with childhood, and this came out through the Walthamstow Project on Early Loss of Parent, that I set up and ran, between '77 and '80. And that was, really, trying to follow up another of the Camberwell vulnerability factors - early loss of mother - and why did it make people more vulnerable to depression? And in the process, what emerged was that it wasn't the loss per se, but it was the quality of care that people had as children. And, basically, it was like saying, you know, confiding in intimate relationships in childhood set you on a conveyor belt to better or worse relationships in adulthood. And it's that aspect of relationships in adulthood that's crucial for depression. So you can see why we were so hot under the collar when somebody wanted to blur in one simple little measure, the fact that their husband was ill, and the fact that they might be fighting with their husband. You know, not to distinguish the two, would have made a mockery of all the findings that we'd had before. So quality of care in childhood, and during the eighties we called it 'lack of care'. But towards the end of the eighties, two very important research associates in the Islington team were using that material to develop ideas of their own. Bernice Andrews, who - a name you will have seen on a number of George's papers - was very interested in violence. And although she was very interested in the marital violence, of course she was also interested when we started to look at childhood, in physical abuse of children. And another colleague, called Susannah Adler, had done her Ph.D. on rape, and so she was interested in sexual abuse. And the late eighties, people were starting to talk about it. You know, we'd come across it in our Early Loss of Mother Study, because a lot of people who'd been sent to institutions and separated from their mother, for that reason, it was because their father had been abusing them sexually. But we hadn't made a big thing of it, because, somehow, in those days, it wasn't fashionable, and it was also very difficult for people to talk about, and so on. So we'd just seen it as a major lack of care. But it became very important. And so the lack of care measure that we talked about in the eighties became the neglect and abuse measure that we talked about in the nineties, and that we're still talking about. And the ¼ the sort of responsibility for that measure, George and I gave to Toni. So it's called 'The Childhood Experience of Care and Abuse' - the CECA measure. And, you know, she senior authored that paper with George and me, in the nineties. But we'd been working on it, really, during the eighties, in the Islington and Walthamstow Projects. I: To what extent over, say, the last 20 years, would you think that you’ve been able to draw personal life experience in to understanding? R: The last 20 years? I: Well, longer, if you feel ¼ R: Well, I think in the last 40 years! Oh, I think, a lot, you know. I mean, I've had lots of relatives who have died. And, unfortunately, I've had relatives who have squabbled over inheritances. And friends whose marriages have broken up and, you know, friends whose marriages haven't broken up, but whose husbands have had affairs. And, you know, one, one weaves that into all the ¼ interviews that one's done oneself, and listened to interviews that other people have done. And I suppose, in my case, because Nigel has travelled so much in the course of his work, and because I've been so lucky to have often accompanied him, I have a tremendous sort of ¼ experience of different cultures. And those two years before, you know, between my undergraduate degree and finally getting into an English career, I was in India and Japan, and that already gave me a lot of experience. And we drove to India, so we passed through a lot of Muslim countries on the way to a Hindu country and so on. So I think I have been quite useful to the team, because I've got such a wide experience of cultures. And I'm always telling people, "Stop and think", you know, "This is not someone from ¼ from Hampstead, that you're talking about", you know. "This is an immigrant", or "This is somebody from Scotland", you know. So, I suppose, yes, that would be my life experience, really. I: And what would you say that you were most proud of, to do with your research? R: Well! Now, isn't that interesting! I don't know. Yes, I think ¼ I think the model that we developed in Camberwell, I think that's what I'm most proud of, because it was my idea, not George's, the generalisation of hopelessness, and it tied in so well with other theories that were getting going at the time, that it kind of crystallised the link between sociology and cognitive psychology. And, you know, I don't often go on about "This was my idea, and that was George's", because so often they were together. But that was definitely my idea. I can remember exactly the spot that I thought of it, outside Westfield College, which, in those days, still had an independent existence! And it just made so much sense. And it also linked in ¼ and self-esteem that was me pushing self-esteem, all the time. Because ¼ between the first round of Camberwell, and the second round of Camberwell, you know, in about '73, you know, we were trying to make theoretical sense of it, and I kept saying to George, and Máire Ní Bhrolcháin, an Irish lady with an unpronounceable name, I kept saying, "Surely we should characterise these events in terms of self-esteem?" And I think I'd read a psychoanalytic text which had influenced me a lot, by Otto Fenichel, and he, of course, used all this bogus German language about narcissistic supplies. But if you translate that into Anglo-Saxon, it was just the importance of self-esteem. So I was pushing that, and that pushed me to this thing about the generalisation of hopelessness. I: Did you find that you generated ideas in conversation between you, or was it more that you both would be thinking separately and then come in with an idea? R: I think it was both. I think we generated a lot. I mean, one of the things which is definitely George's, which he generated on his own, is a story about a waiter, who's actually a woman disguised as a man, by some Russian, whose name I never remember, Alexander Dublin, or something, and he's often cited it in various chapters. And I think that's wonderful, the idea that ¼ it's only when you tell somebody the story of your life, that you can really feel it. Because this waiter, apparently, gets chatting to a customer at a table, and at the end, bursts into tears, and says, "I never realised how tragic my life was", you know. And I think George is very very full of insights about the way that people do and don't understand themselves. So, but, there are other ideas that, you know, sort of came together. Like the idea of a reappraisal forcing situation, which George then renamed 'reassessment-forcing' experience, you know. And I think we generated that together. I: Well, one last question. Supposing that I was in a position to offer you a very large sum of money to do another five years, at least, of research: can you see which direction it would go in? R: Very easily, Paul, because I have re-drafted, at least three times, the application that I would love to be funded! In fact, at this moment, yet again! I would like to take our insights into general practice, which is where most depressed people, men and women go, to help doctors, you know, within the terrible constraints under which they work, the ten minutes session and so on and so forth, to help depressed people better than they do at the moment. Because, at the moment, they are following guidelines which are still pretty mechanical, and don't really build on the insights that we have. I think, possibly, before we finish, I should mention the Befriending Project, because that was one way in which I wanted to push our research into practice. And we did, actually, raise money to fund a service, as well as getting the [evaluation] money from the MRC Health Services Research Committee this time, it wasn't on George's programme grant, it was another grant that he and I got together, to see the impact of befriending on chronic depression. And again, it was all women, and we found a significant impact, that, you know, the befriended group, 61 per cent of them recovered, whereas only 41 per cent of [the control group did. And we have several intervention projects currently under review]¼ 
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