Part One: Interview with Ray Pahl held on 30 March 2010 at Keele. R: 1 So I we’ll begin, Ronnie, by thinking back to the very beginning. Could you tell us where and when you were born? That would be a good start! R: Yes, I was born in 6 Manstone Road, Cricklewood, London, NW2. I was the fourth - John, Jack, Doris, Ronnie - that's right, I was the fourth. I was the fourth, and I was the first one to be born outside the East End, providing you recognise Dalston as part of the East End, where my sister was born, because my parents lived in Petticoat Lane, in the East End. My father, when he first came to England, had - well, he didn't have his own barber's shop to start with, but he worked as a barber's boy. R: 1 Where did he come from? R: He came from Plock which is in what was then Russian Poland, and it was just after the Revolution of 1905, and he had been arrested for his part in that Revolution. He was probably 10 or 11 or something like that, and his father had lived on the outskirts of Plock, on a farm, which had a lake, and I don't think the farm produced very much, but in summer it was a place where people from Lodz went to swim and dance in the open air, and so he was actually quite well off. R: 1 And where did he meet your mother? R: Oh, he met her in England, a long time ... R: 1 So tell me something about her background. R: Well, she was born in the East End of London, her name was Barnett - well, her father's name was Zaions, but since no-one in the East End could spell Zaions (LAUGHS) they were always known as "The Barnetts". And she was the eldest daughter. R: 1 She was Jewish? R: Yeah, yeah. R: 1 Right. So let’s get it clear. You have two brothers and one sister, is that right? R: Yes. R: 1 And how did you all get on? R: Well, we were very widely [spaced]. I mean, we all got on reasonably well. I used to quarrel a lot with my sister, who was the nearest to me, but we were quite widely separated in age, since I wasn't born until 1929, by which time my one brother was on his way to qualifying in medicine, another was working with my father in the shop, and my sister - what, she was eight years older than me? Yes. R: 1 But what was the shop? R: Well, it started as a barber in Stoney Lane - mostly shaving, of course, not hairdressing - and people came in for a shave on their way home from their evening's entertainment, and sometimes from the races, and so they went in to have their hair cut, or their shave, and to buy presents, because it would be the only shop open to buy presents for their families - as apologies for having been out all day or perhaps two days! (LAUGHS) R: 1 Did the fact that your brother went into your father’s business, did that make him closer, do you think? R: Well, yes. I don't know whether you remember things that were published so long ago, but my theory of 'Conflict is uniting families'? That was based on family experience! (LAUGHS) R: 1 Oh, really? Tell me more! R: Well, I mean, our family life was a series of angry quarrels followed by total friendly reconciliations on a very frequent basis. R: 1 What was the ground for these conflicts? R: It was usually people coming home so late that their dinner was either burned or cold. There was in addition, when I was first born, my mother already had three children older than me and they had a housekeeper - by this time they were living in Cricklewood - and they had a housekeeper, and I wasn't exactly expected, so they decided to get me a nanny. And the nanny was found by the housekeeper, which I think was quite normal practice in houses. R: 1 Did that kind of ease the relationship for you, particularly, between you and your parents, to have a kind of go-between? R: Well, I didn't really see a great deal of my parents early on. I saw them at meals, especially at weekends, Friday night dinner, and Saturday, and my father's shop was always open on Sunday, and that was the busiest day of the week. But then my mother used to help in the shop as well, and my sister, at one time, and they would all come home for Sunday lunch, often bringing customers who were friends, and we had an enormous dining table, and the social day of the week was, in fact, Sunday lunchtime and Sunday afternoon. And there was another family of the … My mother was, by trade, a buttonhole maker when my father met her, and her partner and her husband used to come to Sunday dinner, which was in the middle of the day as well - four o'clock in the afternoon - every week, and then during the War, by that time, they'd moved to North-West London as well, and during the War their house was destroyed. They heard a noise and went outside, and when they turned round the house was gone! And so they came to live with us and they stayed with us for the rest of the War. R: 1 Well, you raised a point there I would like to pursue - this business about conflict and how far you escaped some of this by having a nanny. What was the role of the nanny in these family conflicts? Did she protect you at all? Or was she the scapegoat at all? R: No, she wasn't. Well, on the whole, it was a fairly quarrelsome family. (LAUGHS) R: 1 But she was the stranger in the group, was she? Or not? R: No, she lived in, as did Hilda - the housekeeper - and there were blow-ups. There was a weekly argument between her and my mother on Fridays, when she presented the bill for the household, because Nurse did all the shopping, or most of the shopping, all the ordinary day-to-day food, the Jewish foods were bought in the East End. But then she would keep a notebook of all of these, and my mother would check them every Friday, and this usually ended up with Nurse sort of trouncing out and saying, "I'll go and make dinner, then!" R: 1 So you were a participant observer in this, were you? I mean, what was your sort of stance in relation to these comings and goings? R: Oh well, you know, it was just - just how life (LAUGHS) - just how life was! My grandmother used to come, especially during the War when the bombing was much worse in the East End than it was in Cricklewood, so my grandmother came to stay with us. R: 1 So, in some ways, it sounds quite a sort of bourgeois environment - with having the nanny and the housekeeper. R2: And a chauffeur. R: Yes, there was a chauffeur as well! R: 1 (LAUGHS) Was there? R3: Johnson. He was called Johnson! R: 1 Johnson? So you had Johnson! So your father obviously had done well? R: Well, it was ups and downs, actually, but I think most people were on the budget of the shop. Well, there were two shops by then, and so because the chauffeur would come and collect my father in the morning, and take him … R: 1 What about your mother, who also worked … R: No, my mother went by bus, on the number 60 bus. R: 1 It’s rather a patriarchal system! R: Oh no, not at all, actually! (LAUGHS) My mother went by bus because she wanted to stop at Selfridges on the way to work, and there she could buy all the things she wanted. Sometimes she used to take me, and also when it was birthday time, to Hamley's. R: 1 Oh well, that sounds very grand! R: Yes! R: 1 Were you closer to your mother than your father? R: No, I don't think so. I was closest to Nurse, [Hilda] actually! (LAUGHS) R: 1 Well, this is what I was thinking earlier on, that - R: I mean, I - R: 1 I did give you a position - I don’t want to put words into your mouth - but being close to Nurse gave you the position of an observer, watching your parents, in a sense, because she was … R: Yes. Well, yes, I suppose so. I mean, I was always interested in what my parents were up to, and I was obviously interested in what they did for Doris, to make sure they did something equivalent for me! (LAUGHS) But Doris went to North London Collegiate School, and then went to work in the shop, and then she married, actually, what my father and mother regarded as unreasonably young, although it was somewhat older than they (LAUGHS) - than they were when they married! She married at 18 to someone who she'd been to school with, and who also lived, well, almost in Kilburn, but … [BREAK IN RECORDING] R: 1 Can we just explore, a little more, the kind of dynamics in the household where, as you say, your mother was out at work and fairly autonomous and independent, leaving your nanny, as it were, in charge, but having the responsibility without the power, was that one of the reasons for some of these difficulties between her and your mother? R: I don't think there were … I wouldn't describe them as being difficulties. I mean, it was the kind of family where people said what they thought, and the central argument that was going on - there were always arguments going on, but the arguments weren't just between my mother and my nurse. From time to time there were maids, as well, for a period … R: 1 Sorry, you called her “Nurse”, not “Nanny”? R: Yes. R: 1 Well, whose side were you on? Were you just observing, or were you really closer to Nurse? R: Well, yes, I knew Nurse much better than I knew my mother! (LAUGHS) Because my mother was always, well, she was taken up with the older children and their possible problems like getting married too soon, or to the wrong person, or to a Christian - which they all did! (LAUGHS) And so if I wanted anything in particular, I would ask Nurse, and if she thought it necessary, she would ask my mother. But I wasn't ever very close to my mother, until she was, you know, quite old and dying. R: 1 So coming, obviously, to the theme that we want to explore - your educational trajectory - who was influential in determining where you went to school and how you got on there? R: Oh, it was my eldest brother who took … R: 1 Eldest brother? R: My eldest brother was only four years older - it was very confusing because my eldest brother was called John, and my next brother was called Jack - and having done that more or less by mistake, they then gave me the second name of Jonas, so that everyone had initials AJ, BJ, and RJ. R: 1 How did he influence the education, though? R: My brother? Oh, he controlled it completely. Well, he tried to control it completely. He didn't actually succeed, because his idea was that I should go to University College, London, the University College Medical School. R: 1 Why did he have that idea? R: Well, that's where he went. He thought, well, he certainly thought I should be a doctor, and he thought the best place for me to do it would be at UCH [University College Hospital], which he thought was the best. R: 1 What age were you, when he was thinking these thoughts? R: I suppose, 13 or 14. It's the kind of thing that Jewish families - as you probably know - discuss around the Bar Mitzvah. R: 1 But before then, where were you at school? R: Highgate. Well, I was just coming to that, actually. R: 1 Oh, sorry. R: Because my father thought - I haven't said this about my father yet, but he was a very enthusiastic Socialist, which is how he came to be in England, because he had been arrested during the Revolution of 1905, because it was his responsibility to deliver the the underground newspaper along the Vistula. The papers were printed in Plock, and my father went, apparently, for an outing frequently to Warsaw, on the water buses, and what he was actually doing was delivering the underground newspaper. R: 1 But how did he manifest this Socialism when he came to England? Did he carry it on in any way? R: Oh - oh yes. Yes, mainly through the Labour Party. But both my brothers were members of the Communist Party. R: 1 And you? R: Well, I joined the Communist Party somewhat later, because, at this time, I was still at school, but I did organise left-wing Groups at Highgate, much to the joy of my housemaster, who was a retired Grenadier Guard! (LAUGHS) But he was semi-disapproving! He thought it showed initiative (LAUGHS) and drive, and so forth! R: 1 But if we could just jump a little bit from your primary school, how you got from your primary school to [Highgate]? R: Yes. Yes. Well, it is quite a nice story actually. My father didn't visit the primary school for a very long time, because Johnson - the chauffeur- would take me there in the morning with Nurse, and then take Nurse back to the house. I mean, it all sounds terribly bourgeois! (LAUGHS) But it wasn't actually, because these … R: 1 These bourgeois Communists, yes! R: (LAUGHS) Yes! It all sounds very bourgeois, but it was actually mock bourgeois, in a way, because, I mean, everybody worked quite hard, physically. I mean, my father just didn't leave the shop to run itself. He had two factories as well, actually. (LAUGHS) One in Slough - well, it was two parts of the same factory. The thing is, when Nazism began, he could no longer look after his razor blade factory in Germany, and so he moved it to England, complete with the Manager and quite a lot of the staff. And he didn't discover until long after the Second War, that the Manager actually was the gauleiter in waiting for (LAUGHS) for Buckinghamshire! And, of course, this man showed no - never expressed it, obviously. He had been told not to. Never expressed any desire to go back to Germany, or enthusiasm for the Nazis, and so he lived happily managing my father's factory, razor blade factory, in Slough. R: 1 What language did your father speak, apart from English? R: He never publicly spoke any language except English. R: 1 Yiddish? Could he speak German too? R: I don't - I think he spoke probably a mixture of Yiddish and German, but he didn't know German. And he brought the factory to England because the slump hit Germany first, at least, that's the reason he thought he'd brought it, because he didn't know until some time after the War … R: 1 But during Wartime, how were you treated? Because, obviously, he wasn’t involved in any kind of military capacity, well, because he was exempt because of his … R: Oh yes, he was quite - my father was quite old by then. R: 1 So it was age that got him out of it? R: Well, I can't remember exactly when my father was born, but he was older than my mother, so by the time the War came, he was quite old. And the factory ran right through the War, but not making razor blades. R: 1 Ah! So was it the war effort? R: It was a war factory, and - what was I going to say? Yes, during the War, all razor blades, for whatever brand, were made by Gillette - they were the only firm that were allowed to make razor blades during the War, in England. All the other razor blade factories made armaments, and that's what my father's factory did. But he didn't realise that the man who managed it was, in fact, a German agent, until a long time after the War, when MI5 turned up in the shop one day, and said, "We've got something to tell you", and showed him - and so Mr. Harkoff was [at last] dispatched the next day! R: 1 But I’m still struggling with your primary school! R: Oh yes! What happened at my primary school is a very nice story. Sorry, it got left out! What happened was, my father thought it was important I should go to the same school as the neighbours' children, so I went to Beckford Road Infants School, and I was delivered there every morning by the chauffeur, in the car (LAUGHS), in the car, but just round the corner. Because Cricklewood was a very poor neighbourhood, apart from a few houses, and so most children were [literally] hardly dressed, actually, so I was a bit different from most of them. And it was the custom in the families - the well-off families, who were mostly Jewish - to send their children to the local primary school so they'd kind of fit in, and one morning there was some confusion about my delivery at school, and although I eventually arrived, no one was quite sure how I'd got there. It was a question of one of our neighbours' chauffeur and our chauffeur having done a deal that (LAUGHS) the other one would take me, and he took me. And something went wrong with my reception, [namely] that the teacher should have ticked me off, hadn't noticed. And so they phoned the house and said, maybe there was an odd item of clothing missing, or something like this. Anyway, the [outcome] was that it happened that I got taken home again by a neighbour's chauffeur in their car! And then my father said, "Oh well, I'll take him back", and that was the first time he'd ever been to the school, and he was horrified because it was a very dirty, crummy school, and the whole place smelt of urine, a really stinky school. And so my father said, "He's not going there any more". "You will go to a private school". So my brother arranged - he was the only with [a higher] education in the family - my brother said, "Highgate is supposed to be very good. Let's send him to Highgate Junior School". So I went to Highgate, to the prep. But it was never called a prep school at Highgate, but other public schools called them prep schools. It was called Highgate Junior School. So that when you went there, it helped to ensure that people stayed on and didn't nip off to Eton or somewhere more prestigious! (LAUGHS) R: 1 Can you say a bit more about the kind of social circle that - you talk about neighbours. I mean, was it very much a Jewish community? R: Oh - oh yes. R: 1 Were your parents sociable in inviting people into the home? R: Oh, very much so, yes. Yes. And the Warm Lane Synagogue is within walking distance, and there was a Jewish butcher on the corner of the road, and several Jewish grocers and greengrocers on Cricklewood Broadway. It was second only to Golders Green - it's very close to Golders Green, of course - and it was people who did well moved to Cricklewood, and people who did very well, like my father's brother, moved to Golders Green, where the houses had bigger gardens and more rooms and so on. R: 1 It’s not really relevant to what we’re talking about, but how the devil did they get the fuel to get a chauffeur during the War? What was the fiddle that …? R: Oh, it wasn't a fiddle. My father had an official petrol ration, first of all to get to his business in London, and secondly to his razor blade factory, which was in Slough, and the razor blade factory wasn't making razor blades, it was making armaments. [The wholesale warehouse was on several floors and two of these had also been transformed into war material factories "womanned" by East End women who worked part time at relatively small presses and the like.] R: 1 Okay. Well, I’d like to pursue that at great length, but I think Paul would get cross if I stayed too long on that area - but I’m just personally very interested! So what we’re interested in now is how your schoolboy mind was developing, and what was interesting you at school? R: Well, I started the Labour Club! (LAUGHS) And I did very well. I went up into the main school when I reached the right age, which, I suppose, was 10 or 11, and started doing natural science [in preparation for either University College Hospital from which my eldest brother had qualified.]. R: 1 Was there a sharp division between arts and science? R: Oh yes, very much. There were all sorts of divisions! (LAUGHS) There was a science stream with Science 6A and Science 6B at the top of it, and there were all the usual geographies and histories and things which everyone does. Everyone did the whole curriculum, but if you were intending to be a doctor, which is what John had decided I ought to be, you automatically went up the science stream. And then much later, when I reached sort of 11 or 12, John thought it would be a good idea for me to go to Cambridge, and so it was agreed - and my father could afford it - so I sat the Cambridge Examinations, but I didn't get a Scholarship, but I did get a place. R: 1 Yes, but that’s later on, though. 17 or 18 would it be? R: Oh no. Would it? No, no, it would be … I went in 1947, so yes, I would have been 17 when I went, yes. Which was quite young actually. R: 1 I don’t know what the system was then. Presumably you had to do your ‘A’ Levels? R: [Not as such.] There was a thing called "Higher Certificate". You did "Higher Certificate", and if you wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge, you had to get the top grade in all the [subjects]. R: 1 Plus Latin? R: Plus Latin, yes, in every Higher's subject. But I didn't have - said he, immodestly - any difficulty in doing this! (LAUGHS) R: 1 So obviously you were well regarded at Highgate. R: Yes, well, we didn't know, we only discovered, later, that Highgate actually had a quota for Jewish children. I discovered it, because one day the Headmaster sent for me, and said, "It doesn't really look good when people are considering coming to the School, that some boys don't go in to morning prayers. I think the best thing would be if you and Kessel" - there was another boy - "started a Jewish Society, and then when we're having prayers, you can have your own meetings". And so this was done. [Kessel is now a doctor in Devon, where he stayed after the war and Highgate's return to London from Westward Ho.] R: 1 Because I was going to ask you whether going to Highgate enlarged your social circle outside the world of the synagogue, because obviously the majority of boys there were not Jewish? R: No, when the Jewish Society was - there were disputed versions of this, but this is my version (LAUGHS) - when the Jewish Society was formed, the Headmaster sent for me, and there's a very wealthy family, who are still in Golders Green, who say it was their son they sent for - which it wasn't! (LAUGHS) R: 1 Okay, right. But you got in first! R: And the Jewish Society has separate meetings, but the problem was Wednesday, because Prayer Meetings, normally, were only five minutes on most days of the week, but on Wednesday there was half an hour of religious instruction or services before school, and school started a bit later on. R: 1 What was the subject you took your Scholarship Exam to Cambridge in? R: I didn't get a Scholarship [but Higher School Certificate and then a 2:1 in Natural Sciences in my degree]. R: 1 No, no, but you took the exam, you said? R: Yeah, I did it in Natural Sciences. Yes, and I was accepted. Yes. R: 1 But what did you actually read? R: I read Natural Sciences for two years, Part I, and did reasonably well - not very well though, but reasonably well. And then for the third year, I could choose anything I liked - it didn't make any difference to anyone - and so I chose anthropology. R: 1 Oh! Just like that? R: Yes! R: 1 I must ask what influenced that choice? R: Oh well, because I was interested in anthropology and I knew … R: 1 Since when? R: Well, I suppose - I did biology at school, and anthropology seemed - it was something that wasn't taught at school, and I thought it was an interesting subject. The other thing is, my brother was stationed in South Africa, seconded to the South African Air Force, a lot of RAF people went to South Africa to give training. And he went, and he used to write me a letter every week, an air letter every week, and he was … R: 1 He was your mentor, or boss, really, telling you, planning your career! R: Absolutely! Absolutely! R: 1 How did you feel about that? R: Oh well, I was very grateful to have him, actually. Because I mean, I used to find him very bossy, yes, but, on the whole, his decisions worked out very well for me. I was very pleased to have gone to Cambridge, and Highgate was delighted! And he wrote while he was on his War Service, he wrote to me, every week, an airmail letter, which I [gave copies of to the Air Ministry afterwards]. R: 1 It must have been very influential to have this very strong kind of older brother guidance - closer, probably, than to your father? R: Oh, much. Well, yes, I mean, I occasionally had rows with my father about this and that, which I can't remember now, but I was on quite good terms with my father, but I didn't see an awful lot of him (LAUGHS), because he went to work very early in the morning, because, I mean, his business was very much a hands on business, and he did that Monday till Saturday, and then on Sunday he went to Slough, to the factory, which was an armaments factory by then. R: 1 So you were pretty much on your own, with these regular air letters. What College were you? R: Caius. R: 1 Caius? All the lawyers go there. R: No, no, it's a medical college. Well, lawyers could go there too, but it's mainly a medical college, and so John chose Caius. R: 1 Oh! So it had all been planned for you! R: It was all planned by John, yes! R: 1 What was your social life at university like? Was it the two influences you’ve mentioned so far - Socialism and the Jewish Community? R: Absolutely, yes. I never became President of the Jewish Society because I was defeated by John Rayner. I don't know if you know John Rayner? R: 1 He wrote a book about the middle-class? R: Liberal Rabbi, and it was a terrible shock, this defeat, because I was so much more popular than John, because he was sort of prissy and … (LAUGHS) R: 1 What was the style of life, it was convivial, personally, in your undergraduate days? R: It wasn't terribly convivial, but I obviously drank a lot of beer, like everybody else! And, yeah, I had friends in the Medical School - well, in pre-medical. But of course, Cambridge made a big thing about that their medical students were taught the same science as everyone else, they didn't have a thing special until the last year, when they prepared for, was it called Common Entrance? No. There was a Common Entrance exam, anyway, for the Medical Schools, and so, in due course, the other thing, a crucial thing, was that everyone had to stay in Cambridge three years, so you had to find something to do in the third year after you'd done your anatomy and physiology and natural science Tripos, and so in the third year, under John's influence, I did anthropology. R: 1 Who taught you? R: The real answer is nobody, actually. We taught ourselves! (LAUGHS) But the Head of Department was called Hutton, Professor Hutton, who owned the naked Nagas. He was the first person - I think he was the second, actually - his tutor at Cambridge did the first study of the Nagas, and then Hutton carried them on. And the physical anthropologist, called Jack Trevor, who I saw quite a lot of, because it was terribly easy for me, you see, because I'd done anatomy and physiology in great detail, much more detail than the physical anthropologists did. R: 1 But it wasn’t the kind of social anthropology that we now think of, was it? R: Oh [no], it wasn't. But you had to do both social and physical anthropology, as it was called then, now it's called biological anthropology. And so I did that, and I got an undistinguished 2:1. So that was okay, and then it was at this point … R: 1 What happened? R: I fell (LAUGHS)! R: 1 Now we’ve got a crucial point! Here you are, 1950, graduating. What about military service? R: Well, I was C4, or whatever is the lowest. I had asthma. So that wasn't [an obstacle]. R: 1 Anyway, this is an important critical transition now. You graduate from Cambridge. What now? R: Well, it happened before that, actually, that I read around anthropology quite a lot, and I found this character called Gluckman, whose work I liked very much, partly because of the influence of dialectical materialism on it, and partly because he was really very very interesting. And so I asked Professor Hutton - who was a very remote person, actually - I can't even remember what his first name was! We never referred to him as anything except for [his surname] which was quite unusual for the rest of the Departments, actually. And, anyway, I came across the work of Gluckman's, and I read this, and I decided this was the guy I'd like to work with. And so I asked Hutton, and he said, "Terrible fellow!" (LAUGHS) "Wouldn't have anything to do with him if I was you!" Because Hutton was about to retire, and he was quite overtly anti-Semitic, and he was worried about who was going to succeed him, and he didn't want to be succeeded by a Jew - and he did not make any secret of this, and so when I asked for Gluckman to be invited to give a talk, it was just ignored. So I asked one of the junior lecturers, and I remember it was a woman, but I don't know who it was, and she said, "No, Hutton will never agree to Gluckman coming on a visit". So I wrote to Gluckman, and I said, "I've read your paper on the bridge, and I'm at Cambridge, and about to get a 2:1. I'd like to come to Manchester. Will you have me?" Well, he replied, "Well, I'm coming to Cambridge to have dinner with Phyllis Kaberry". Do you remember Phyllis Kaberry? Phyllis Kaberry was a very key person during the War, because she was Chief Social Adviser to the Colonial Office on behaviour in Empire countries. So Gluckman wrote back, almost by return, actually, saying, "I'm coming to have dinner with Phyllis Kaberry in Cambridge, in a fortnight's time, and we're having it in …" - I forget what restaurant it was now - "Would you like to join us after dinner?" (LAUGHS) He wasn't taking any chances on having a boring dinner with a young ignorant undergraduate! So I went, and a few days afterwards I got a letter saying, "Phyllis says I've got to accept you. I don't much like the idea, because I think you're very young and have no experience, but Phyllis says I've got to accept you. So if you come up, I'll arrange an interview". So I went up, and was interviewed by Bill McKenzie, the political scientist, who was also very involved with Colonial administration, and he recommended me, and here I am! R: 1 Well that’s a very interesting story. But you made this transition, you said rebelling. How did the rebellion hit your brother, or, indeed, your father? R: Well, my father didn't much mind what I did. I mean, he was pleased that I'd got to Cambridge, and he was pleased that I was going to go on to higher education, but he wasn't that concerned what I did. And he as quite prepared to continue to finance me. And Gluckman actually wrote him a letter - which I think I've still got somewhere - saying how promising I was. R: 1 I’m not sure how things were in those days, but arriving at Manchester as a graduate student, were you expected to do course work, or were you just chucked out into a … R: You were certainly expected to do course work, but the thing is that it wasn't - I don't quite know how to put it. I mean, Gluckman got his way. Whatever he said eventually happened! (LAUGHS) But you were called, "Ronnie" from the beginning, and you called him "Max", and if you ever wanted to see him, he and his wife invited you out to their house, and then after dinner you settled down and told him what the problems were. R: 1 That’s hardly course work, though, is it! R: No. [It was, actually. There were of course lectures at the University and examinations.] Oh no, no, no. We did, there were lectures, but there were very few students, you see. [They tended to be informal. I think E-P may have been the external? Other teachers included especially Emrys Peters, Ely Devons, the economist and W.J. Mackenzie, political scientist.] R: Yes, my father was always very conscious of being an immigrant. Almost in an exaggerated way, if it was possible to, to even overstate it. So when I went to be interviewed at Cambridge it was arranged by the School, and I went on my own. And I'm not sure, my father may have visited me at Cambridge once, but I don't think he ever did, actually, because he was always very self-conscious when he was in that kind of situation. Although it must be said, he became quite prominent in the City of London because his business was actually within the boundaries of the City. It was just on the right side of the road in Houndsditch, because Houndsditch is - as its name implies - the border of the City, and he became a member of the Court of Common Council, as did my other brother who worked with him - Jack - and they became quite important, and so it's an odd anecdote, but a true one. When London Bridge was pulled down and taken to the United States, my father gave permission, on behalf of Portsoken Ward to whom it belonged, for it to be moved, and my brother travelled in the boat taking it - because he was also a member of the Court of Common Council - to indicate that it was legitimately being taken, and to present it to the City Fathers of New York. So in the City, my father had become quite an acceptable figure, along with the bankers and so on. R: 1 But that degree of assimilation may not have applied in the same sort of way about how you relate to the schools and careers and Cambridge. R: No, no. Absolutely. As I say, I don't think my father, if he did come to Cambridge, it was only once and very briefly, and I don't think he ever went, personally, to Highgate. I think whenever it was necessary for someone to go and speak to the Headmaster to agree to something, it was always John. R: 1 And John helped you, specifically, to get into Highgate? R: Oh, absolutely, yes. You see, John and Jack had both been to Highbury School, which was not a private school, but was a very respected Grammar School. R: 1 As you went on through life, how did this relationship with your elder brother develop? R: Well, I got on with him quite well, after. I mean, I didn't always like the way that he controlled everything I did, as a child. If there is a sort of complex of hostility between a father and son, because the father tells his son to do things, it was always John who'd told me what to do. But I was also aware that if it hadn't been for him, I wouldn't have gone to Cambridge, and that he also advised my father, generously, how much pocket money to give me at Cambridge and so on! And so John was very much in charge of the family as far as, you know, getting into schools and anything to do with education, medicine, and so on. If any of us was ill, obviously John would say which specialist we went to see, and so on. Whereas in the business, Jack - my other brother, who actually worked alongside my father every day - he would be consulted about things that would never even be mentioned to me or John. R: 1 So, in a sense, the process of moving beyond, if you like, some degree of marginality to assimilation, was made much easier for you by the brother being the … R: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, yes. R: 1 Though you may not have felt perhaps the same degree as he might have felt, of marginality? R: No, no. Well, once he'd become a specialist gynaecologist, he didn't worry about this anymore. Because, you know, they used to call University College - now, what is it? I remember, there was an expression, "Turk infidel and Jew CH", because it was the teaching hospital in London that was most open to accept overseas students much more than anyone else - even the London, actually. R: 1 So, look, I think we’d better move on, given the time. Leave family behind for the time being. There you are in Manchester. You’ve talked, I think, on previous occasions written about the way in which your research interests were channelled a bit by Max, and many people were aware of how you might have gone to the West Indies and didn’t. And you’ve talked about that. And most recently, in your article, you suggested that maybe the people that were advising you, claiming that they were doing it on your behalf, may have been doing it, to some degree, on their behalf. Could you say a bit more about that? R: Not quickly, because I can't remember what I said! (LAUGHS) R: 1 (LAUGHS) I’ll remind you! There is this question of, “What stopped you doing what you originally wanted to do?” Because, clearly, you ended up in Wales not as your first choice. R: Oh yes, that's right. [I was deported from Barbados without being allowed to go ashore, but was excluded officially as a probable subversive. Professor Arthur Lewis, a very eminent but pale brown West Indian at Manchester, was very hostile to me and dubious about Max because he felt the West Indians were being studied as "blacks". My exclusion was official and we thought instigated by Arthur Lewis.] R: 1 Well, just you go over that, go ahead! For the record, what got you to North Wales rather than the West Indies, in your relationship with Max when you were at Manchester? R: I'm not sure I understand … R: 1 I think I’ve found the place. You’ve said, and I’ve heard you say, on occasions, that there was worry about your political involvements and interests, and what you might do if you went off to the West Indies. What you say here is that people decided where you should go: “Perhaps by what our teachers, paternalistically, saw as our, but especially their own, politically sensitive career requirements”. And you thank David Mills for making that point. Now, the implication is that there was a degree of paternalistic guidance, presumably from Max, inhibiting you, or just saying you shouldn’t do what your natural inclination was to do. So I think it’s worth exploring that. R: Yes. You see, there was quite a tense political situation about colonies and overseas territories at this particular time, and Gluckman was thought of as being quite "Red", quite to the Left, so he was very anxious not to make his own position any worse by encouraging Left-wing people to do things. He was very ambivalent. On the one hand he was very opposed to anyone Left-wing - because he was quite Left-wing himself - anyone Left-wing being excluded just on that grounds. He was also leaned on by people like Evans-Pritchard to move carefully for fear that he confirmed that the Reds were trying to get into jobs in the colonies. And this was somewhat complicated in Manchester by Arthur Lewis - the famous economist - who was, himself, West Indian, I think he was a fairly well-off West Indian to start with, and by this time one of the senior economists in the country, and he saw someone going to the West Indies at all, as demeaning the West Indies - an anthropologist, especially, going. A sociologist would have been all right, but he saw an anthropologist going as reducing West Indians to the level of Africans, whom he regarded as primitive, compared with the West Indians. So he was very hostile to my going to the West Indies, and very "I told you so" when I came back after a fortnight. He kind of switched his ground, you know, but he, nevertheless ... R: 1 How did you feel about all this at the time? R: I was very angry! (LAUGHS) I was very angry, but not surprised … I mean, because obviously every young person in anthropology was trying, you couldn't be an anthropologist, at that time, unless you had done fieldwork in a foreign country. R: 1 But what attracted you to the West Indies particularly? Because Max might have attracted you to Africa. R: Well he would have been nervous about me applying to go to Africa, because he would be afraid that it would damage other people's chances, and he'd already had a lot of problems with Turner, because although, by this time, Turner was Roman Catholic - having been dramatically converted when he first came to Manchester. He was a member of the Communist Party, so people who wanted to stop him would tend to say, "Well, you know, he's not really a Catholic, he's just pretending to be a Catholic to conceal the fact that he's really a Communist". I don't know if you ever met Victor? He was a man of enormous enthusiasm. When he was a Communist, he was 200% Communist, and when he was converted to Catholicism, he became 250%! (LAUGHS) R: 1 It’s often the way! So you were a Communist at this time, were you? R: Yes. R: 1 You went to the village in ’53, was it? R: Yes, I went to the village in '53. So [West Indies] it was '52. R: 1 That’s right. So how long did this sort of period of ambiguity or hiatus last, where you made up your mind you wanted to do proper anthropology, to go off to the field in the proper way. R: That's right. There was no other way of doing it. R: 1 Right. Africa was frozen out because you might mess things up for Max. So West Indies was a sort of “try out there, because you won’t mess up Max”. But then Arthur Lewis got at Max. So then Max was stymied because he didn’t want to upset Arthur Lewis. So recreate for me, you’re coming back to base, and saying to Max, “What am I going to do?” you know, “People are stopping me going where I want to go. I want to be an anthropologist. How do I? What happens to me next? What’s your advice?” I mean, particularly as Max had had this meeting with Phyllis in Cambridge and obviously she was encouraging you to go off to the colonies, as it were. He was in a difficult position because he’s sort of somehow betraying you for his own interests. R: Oh no, how was he betraying me? He was quite prepared for me to go to the West Indies. R: 1 But he was leant on, and he accepted the leaning rather than the loyalty to you. R: I don't think so. After all, I went to the West Indies. He didn't stop me going. In the end, he just said, "Oh well, I think you're wrong, but go and see what happens!" R: 1 Mmm. I’m slightly stirring it, just to get you to respond! R: Yes. Yes! I mean, Max was very honest, and also discussed things very much. Well, he was honest and devious at the same time, actually! (LAUGHS) But he discussed these things very much with his colleagues and his students, and nearly all his students were very Left-wing, because Evans-Pritchard, who was also a Catholic convert, wasn't going to take anybody Left-wing if he could avoid it, at Oxford, and everybody knew that Oxford and Manchester were, at that time, the only places to do anthropology. So Max was prepared to ride the storm, and he had close friends who were senior colonial administrators with whom he used to discuss things when we weren't there, but whenever he could - because he also backed Peter Worsley who had a lot of trouble as well, because Peter Worsley, I mean, I was just in the student Communist Party, whereas Peter Worsley had been a very active Communist at one time, and Max took a risk on him too. R: 1 But before you went on the abortive trip to the West Indies, or later to North Wales, what training did you get, if any, in how you should behave once you got there - as an anthropologist? What you should do? R: Well, basically, it was "Go there and do likewise". You know, "Look at my field notes and what happened to me, and try and be as much like that. And don't go around offending. Be polite to officials." R: 1 Pretty rudimentary advice, in fact. R: Yes. Yes. But, people were very uptight about it generally. Evans-Pritchard, in particular, was very worried, because he could see anthropology coming to an end, because people couldn't do fieldwork. Radcliffe-Brown, who was also around in Manchester at the time, always gave the impression of being very aristocratic, although he wasn't. Actually, Radcliffe was a given a name, and not a double-name at all. He was originally known as Mr. A.R. Brown, and then he stretched out the middle name from Radcliffe, because he thought it sounded more upper-class! R: 1 Let’s get you into Wales. You could have done a Bill Williams and gone to the Lake District … R: But he'd already done it! (LAUGHS) And Bill was a bit worried about me going to Wales, because … R: 1 Well, it wasn’t allowed, you couldn’t speak the language! R: Well, I couldn't speak the language, and he thought I wouldn't appreciate how great they were! (LAUGHS) But in any case, you really weren't expected to know the language before you went - certainly in Max's view. R: 1 You had to pick it up, that was part of the learning. R: It was part of learning to deal with that. R: 1 And presumably - let me get the timing right. Alwyn Rees’ book had been published? R: Oh yes. Yes. And, in fact, I knew him, and he supported me. R: 1 But Alwyn Rees is very strong, certainly in the epilogue, about how you’ve really got to be Welsh to understand the Welsh. R: Yeah. Well, yes. I mean, Alwyn was quite friendly towards me, and gave me lots of advice. I think he may have even [visited me in the field]. R: 1 How did you meet him? R: Oh, Max introduced him, because we used his book, you see. You see, Max was a sort of conservative revolutionary, that although he accepted all the principles of anthropology, and you had to [go] really foreign and speak the language and so on, he was also - because he was, after we [Jews] came, so to speak, from the "wrongs", the wrong sort of country - he was very keen on anthropology, very missionary. He wanted to see anthropologists going everywhere and not just in [traditional] countries … R: 1 But you mentioned - and this is perhaps more for my interest - but you said, [as well as] Oxford or Manchester, there was a kind of anthropology at Aberystwyth, that was taught by Fleure and people like that. Did that not count? R: Oh yes it did. It was honoured, but old-fashioned. It was honoured, but old-fashioned. R: 1 But Alwyn Rees came out of that. R: Yes, that's right. Well, yes, we studied Alwyn's book, and Alwyn came and talked to us in Manchester. R: 1 I’m still making the point about, why North Wales? Particularly when people like Bill, and maybe Alwyn too, were saying, “You’re not one of us”, you know, “Go off to the Lake District!” What made you stick to North Wales and decided you to go there? R: It was partly the language. Max and E-P. both felt very strongly that the way you learnt about a society was learning its language. R: 1 Was it a Welsh-speaking village? R: It was, yes, but not only Welsh-speaking. There was no-one in the village who couldn't understand English, they just didn't used to speak it. R: 1 Actually, I’ve missed out a bit, because you went with your wife. R: Yes. [She was born in Manchester (I think) but her mother was a Welsh teacher, and they lived in Cardiff. After I graduated we married and I got a job with an Irish Professor of Sociology and Industrial Relations in Cardiff, Michael Fogarty.] R: 1 So could you just fill that bit of your biography in - how you met her and … and what her view was about going off to [Wales], because she worked in England, did she not? R: But she wasn't an anthropologist. Alison. R: 1 How did you meet her? R: Oh, she was at Manchester … very much on the fringes of the Left. She'd had a Left-wing boyfriend before, and so she was one of the people who knew a lot of Left-wing people in Manchester. R: 1 Did she have any influence on you about what you should do? R: Oh yes. She and her mother were very enthusiastic. Her mother was a village school teacher. Her mother had been widowed very suddenly, and not having had really much education, had gone as an older student to I think it was Bangor Normal College, and qualified as a teacher, and was a village teacher in South Wales. And she wasn't completely fluent in Welsh, but she knew Welsh well enough, you know, to deliver a rebuke in Welsh to a child who talked in the class and so on. And so they were very keen. And also Alison's mother was quite keen for Alison to settle down. R: 1 So there was a Welsh connection through your marriage? R: Yes. Yes. R: 1 So she wouldn’t think it was so dreadful, as it were, to go to a Welsh-speaking place. R: No, no. R: 1 She wouldn’t feel so isolated. Some people would find that really hard. R: Yeah. She hadn't lived in Wales for some time, because her mother - as Welsh teachers have to, or had to, because there were so many of them, there weren't enough jobs for all of them in Wales, and she taught in Stockport. So Alison was brought up in Stockport. R: 1 Okay. Well, we’ve just covered that. So there you were, and at some point you heard Alwyn Rees speak, was that the lure of going into Wales - apart from language? Or was that mainly it, just the language? R: Well, there was a strong feeling that if you didn't work through another language, you weren't really doing anthropology. R: 1 Oh, I see. So that made the strangeness. R: And also, from my point of view, it had to be a place where, in a year or 18 months, you could get some contact with everyone who lived there. R: 1 How did you choose the village? R: Now that's a good question, and I'm not sure I can remember the answer! (LAUGHS) It might well have been my mother-in-law, my then mother-in-law, who suggested it, actually, because it's quite a popular place - or it was - for Welsh people to go on holiday in Glyncereiog. I mean, people tend to go on holiday to the North Wales coast, but if they didn't want a seaside holiday, they would go to one of these hill villages. They're very pleasant places to live. They're very friendly, even to people who can't speak Welsh. And also, there's lots of fresh food, nice country walks and so on. R: 1 Were you at all aware that you were implicitly making a contrast with Rees’s village, which was really not nucleated, there were just houses dotted about. R: Oh yes, I was very aware. In fact, I was a bit ambivalent about a village which was so concentrated rather than scattered. [Alwyn had spoken to a seminar in Manchester, and I came to know him quite well.] R: 1 What made you ambivalent? R: Oh well, partly, it seemed too easy! (LAUGHS) And sort of an unanthropological sort of place! But it didn't turn out to be that really. But when I went there, I mean it was very spread out, and there were satellite villages, and we stayed with a Welsh woman. The other thing is that people were used to taking in lodgers. And so it wasn't too much to ask someone if you could live in their home. R: 1 But what would you have seen as being the equivalent of the District Commissioner when you came into the village? Like if you went off to the Colonies, but what was the equivalent, coming into a Welsh village? R: Well, there was a Chairman of the Parish Council, and one of the first things I did, I think - without looking up my notes - one of the first things I did was ask to meet the Chairman of the Parish Council. And, of course, my landlady, who knew him … R: 1 How do you reflect on the fact that when you know nothing about a place, you get advice from someone who does know, and how do you avoid that colouring the way you look at the place? Can you keep a sceptical distance when you don’t know a damned thing, in order to recognise this is just one informant and not the truth about the place? R: I mean, partly you take it on trust, and partly you don't have to worry about it, because people come to you and say … (LAUGHS) R: 1 Yes, “Don’t believe a word he said!” yes! R: (LAUGHS) Yes! I can't remember her nickname now, but the people would say, "She's not really a village woman at all!" (LAUGHS) "She comes from Ponty …" R: 1 Do you think that you need some kind of - when you’re starting - some kind of template to work out from? You need some kind of way of making sense of what you’re looking at, and if someone provides you with their definition of the situation, that at least gives you something to work out from. R: Yes. I probably did this, I suppose, in picking on the idea of a stranger, because Glynceiriog being quite a popular place for people - especially fishermen - to go on holiday from Liverpool and nearby parts of England, the idea of what was a stranger, and what was the difference between a stranger and outsider wasn't one which I really had to invent, it was one which was very much in the villagers' own minds. Because they were always nervous that people would outstay their welcome, and so many non-Welsh speakers would come there that they would no longer be able to speak Welsh. R: 1 You said that it was a help that they took in lodgers and that helped you to get lodgings, but did it, to some extent, muddy the water, that there were these people coming in on holiday, spoiling the pure little anthropological object you were working on? R: No, I don't think so. Firstly because well, once they knew you wanted to learn the language - I mean, I never learnt it very adequately, I must admit - but once they knew you wanted to learn the language, and far from being impatient, if you were spoken to in Welsh, you tried to understand what they were saying, and answered them in Welsh, this gave you Brownie points. R: 1 So take me back to those very early weeks when you arrive at the place, that you describe in your book, that you sat on the hill, and looked across, and thought, “What the hell’s going on here?” R: That's right! R: 1 Was that a feeling of despair, or was it massive curiosity, “Let’s get in there!” R: It certainly wasn't despair. It was quite worrying. I didn't go straight to the bungalow at the edge of the village where I lived for most of the time there, I went first to a farm on the outskirts, and they thought I was terribly peculiar. They did have summer visitors, but the summer visitors, apart from breakfast, never went into the farm, they stayed in cottages, that had been workers' cottages, but now, in the agricultural depression were empty. So they liked having people to stay, and they were very helpful in graphic detail about all the people in the village who had spare rooms, and who might be prepared to take my wife and I in. [Wales is hot on nicknames.] R: 1 I’m not quite sure of my question here, but it could be said that some anthropologists coming into a place look at how it all fits together as some neat functioning thing, whereas others would come in and say, “Where are the lines of conflict?” R: Yeah. R: 1 Now, given your radical Socialist background, and the experience in your family, were you actually looking for conflict? R: Well, absolutely. After all, Max's motto was "Custom and Conflict", and that's what I went to look for, so to speak, because I had, and still have, the theory that the links created by conflicts are just as, if not more, constitutive of community as anything else. R: 1 So at the time, were you aware, would you articulate that, “Let’s be agents provocateurs and find the lines of conflict”. R: Oh well, not so much agents provocateurs, but I was certainly looking for conflict, and how custom moderates conflict, because that was the big thing you were meant [to look for with] Max at Manchester. R: 1 That was, Custom and Conflict in Africa [1955]? R: Yes, that's right. R: 1 Was that really important for you, then? Because that was just after you’d gone into the village. [And before that] there were lectures that he gave, weren’t there? R: Yes, but it was - I mean, we had hardly any lectures in Manchester, it was all discussion, so that we would take it in turns to give a paper. And the papers were obviously focused on theoretical issues which Gluckman was interested in, and then there would be a deep discussion. And, of course, there was Emrys Peters who was, himself, he wasn't a Welsh Nationalist in the sense that he belonged to Plaid Cymru, but he was very conscious of being Welsh, and very suspicious, at first, of me coming in and taking his line! (LAUGHS) R: 1 My job, this afternoon, is to focus on the pioneering aspect, and you, whilst being a disciple of Max, and looking for the conflict, things came out in Village on the Border’ on which, looking back, you must feel pretty pleased about. Because at the beginning you didn’t know what was going to come out. R: No, that's right. R: 1 So how far was it serendipity that just things happened and you could account for, and how far was there a little bit of pushing towards the conflict? R: No, I don't think so. I don't think it was pushing towards. I think that was how they lived, actually. Well, in fact, I think that's how most people live, but it's not always possible to see that because, sometimes, the conflicts are kept just below the surface, and the situation of Glynceiriog, being a popular holiday resort … Oh well, I mean, I had much closer relationships with colleagues in Manchester than I'd had with my family at home! (LAUGHS) We really lived in each other's pockets. And, in fact, Max was very conscious about this, and so there was a distance in paces away, distant from his house, that you weren't allowed to live [in Glynceiriog]. Everyone had to live [close] because he used to like to have seminars starting at 9 o'clock in the evening, and I couldn't drive then, and a lot of the other people in the Department couldn't. R: 1 But when you were in the field, how close was your relationship links with Max - when you were out in the village? R: I used to write him regular letters, and he visited once or twice - I don't remember how many times - and this was rather nerve-racking, this enormous, very tall man, with his booming strange South African accent, and sometimes getting things wrong, you know. R: 1 But these letters you wrote to Max, presumably they’ve all been lost, have they? Or could one find them somewhere? R: I might be able to find them. I'm not sure... They might be in the archives of the Department [or the University]. I don't know. R: 1 Part of the purpose of what we’re doing now is to provide clues to people in the future. Because that would be a wonderful source, wouldn’t it, to see what you were actually writing. How often did you write? R: I don't remember. R: 1 No. But would you say that that was your process of learning. What feedback did you get from him? R: His letters … I think I might be able to find them. I'll look for them, actually. They tended to start, "I've been talking to Emrys about what you wrote to me. And he [Emrys] says …" and then there would be something about the way in which Welsh people traditionally behaved, and he would always show them to Emrys, and when he replied, it would say, "Emrys says you haven't quite understood …" (LAUGHS) R: 1 That’s interesting. I hadn’t realised Emrys played that sort of role. Did he ever visit the village? R: I don't think he did, no. I don't think so. I didn't dislike Emrys, but I found him very difficult compared with Max. R: 1 He and I worked together for a [while] R: He was quite difficult to work with. R: 1 Well [it was] best to be on his side! (LAUGHS) R: (LAUGHS) That's right! He tended - well, Max and he both tended to talk over you. You know, they started off talking to you, and then they almost forgot you were there! R: 1 Did you have any other kind of peer group? Like, now, we expect that anthropologists, as graduate students, mix with other graduate students and teach themselves things. R: Well, yes. They were mostly older than me, because they'd mostly been in the Army during the War. But people like Vic, and E.D. Turner, we were a very sort of stand-offish group on the whole, and we had our own part of a room in a local pub on the Oxford Road, and people like Bill McKenzie, the political scientist, was often with us, and Eli Devons … R: 1 Oh yes, because he collaborated with Max, didn’t he? R: Yes. Eli Devons was monstrously Right-wing, actually - the economist - and so you had to be careful what you said. R: 1 Did you return from the village to give papers about what you’d been doing? And were they graduate seminars? R: Well, yes, there was Max's Seminar - I think it was on Wednesday afternoon, but it might not have been. Wednesday afternoons were usually when the big seminars were in Manchester. But everyone was invited, in turn, to lead the seminar. And Bill McKenzie, a political scientist, often came, and Eli Devons, the economist. Eli Devons was an extremely Right-Wing economist, but a very close friend of Max. R: 1 Well, they collaborated on a book together. R: They did, yes. But when we lived in Manchester, we had to live within close cycling or walking distance of Max's house, so that he could have seminars in the evening, if he felt like it. R: 1 Going back to the village, I can’t resist my own sort of readings of your book, and thoughts that it encouraged in my mind. There was an “as if” situation, as you described, that they thought they were a united community, and they also thought that they were isolated, which you say is an illusion, because they weren’t as isolated as they thought they were. R: No. R: 1 So you were saying things that they couldn’t see. R: Yeah. R: 1 Now, they would try and acculturate you to their position, presumably, because that was the way they were trying to incorporate “the man from off” as you say! And later on in the book, having said, at the beginning of the book, that “their isolation is an illusion”, as the book goes on, you say, “they are, in fact, in some sense, isolated, and therefore united”. And so there’s a degree of ambivalence you’re adopting? They’ve been holding this [view] for a long time, and to some extent, you started to see it their way. R: Yeah. Yeah. Yes, well, perhaps I could have put the thing about being isolated differently. The thing was that, obviously, if there were a bus strike, or heavy snow - which there wasn't very often - they did become isolated quite easily, and, in fact, food supplies did go down when weather was very bad, because a lot of food tended to be brought in by bus from Oswestry or Wrexham, but they weren't, of course, really isolated. The other thing is that, while now, I should imagine everyone has cars, then [it was only the better-off farmers and shopkeepers]. R: 1 But what we’re dancing around is this Clifford Geertz thing about experience near, and experience distant. That obviously creates the ambivalence, does it not? R: Yeah. R: 1 But how much were you aware of that kind of tension? R: I'm not sure I … R: 1 Well, the tension. You’re coming in as an outsider, you’re trying not to disrupt, but you’re trying to reveal the conflicts that the local people don’t want to reveal, or pretend that they are a cosy community. There’s this ideology that we’re all familiar with. You say, “in order to understand how this thing works, we’ve got to get a crisis, or something that will show where the lines of division really are”. But then, of course, they re-group together and come back. And after a bit … R: 1 I was saying that there’s you coming in as an outsider, attempting to reveal something of reality through exposing conflicts, and the villagers, in a sense, defending what you might call their illusion of “community”. If you succeed, as you did, to reveal some of these conflicts, they would then regroup, eventually, to re-assert their own value system. R: Yeah, yeah. R: 1 So there’s a tension, that you’ve got what you want, and they’ve got what they want. R: That's right, yes. I think this was much more difficult in public situations than in people's houses, because it's very difficult to learn how to behave so that you don't stick out like a sore thumb in a pub with a group of men who drink together every evening, and have done for the past 20 years! There's just nowhere where you can slide into the background, and it's also a place where status is so related to obeying the rules that breaches are very noticeable, whereas if you are sitting in someone's front parlour, and you do something that if one of them did would be considered a terrible solecism, they don't really notice, because they don't expect you to know how to behave there. But it's public, public places, I think, much more … R: 1 Was there any serious attempt to exclude you by simply breaking into Welsh at a speed you couldn’t understand? R: [People said this would happen, but] not very often. I mean, you wouldn't have to speak it very fast for me not to understand! (LAUGHS) But not very often. But there would be occasions in social gatherings, when I realised I'd done the wrong thing, or I hadn't done the right thing - something which I find quite difficult to organise at the best of times, actually! R: 1 Did your wife help you on this? What was her role in this? R: No, no, she got on perfectly well with the people whom we lodged with, but, in fact, she was working as a teacher out of the village, and working [across the border] in Oswestry, at a girls' private school [used by professionals and well-off non-Welsh-speaking agriculturalists]. R: 1 Now, you weren’t just an English person in the Welsh village, you were a Jewish person. R: Mmm. Yeah. R: 1 What difference did that make? R: Well, I think it was more an advantage than a disadvantage, because, in some ways, I think they felt Jews were more close to Christianity than Anglicans! (LAUGHS) And much to the annoyance of the vicar, they tended to refer to the church as the "English Church", although he was Welshest of the Welsh, and always spoke Welsh, but he was always seen as a bit dicey, because he didn't really understand what Christianity was supposed to be, because they were what are called … R: 1 So it didn’t make you a double outsider? It was almost a way to help you to be an insider. R: Yeah, that's right. I think so, yes. I think so. And it meant they could - to my embarrassment - ask me questions about the Old Testament, which I might know the answer to! Whereas an ordinary English person wouldn't. They would just have the wrong answer in terms of theology. R: 1 But we all know that, you know, the Chapel is so important in Welsh culture. How did you, looking back on it, how did you overcome the degree of being slightly uncomfortable, perhaps, about that? I mean, you couldn’t really join in, as some anthropologists have done - I’m thinking of some of the work with Michael Banton who became a member of some sect that was discovered! But clearly you couldn’t go along to the chapel and pretend to be part of them. R: Oh no. Well, I would be invited on special occasions, and sit with the family of the people I was staying with. But the father of the family didn't go very often, he was a very rough and ready road worker, and was uncomfortable in chapel, because he had to wear smart clothes. He never wore a suit, and he didn't really like the idea. But the rest of the family went. And they would ask me advice, about what something in the Old Testament meant, and if I was lucky, I knew! [The local chapel was Calvinistic Methodist which the Church in Wales vicar said was impossible and absurd. He got quite mifted if I called him C. of E.] R: 1 How, looking back, obviously an anthropologist coming into a Welsh village, it’s clearly different from all the stuff you read about going to somewhere in Africa, so there’s advantages and disadvantages. There’s a familiarity that can be misleading, which obviously you had to overcome, but this is where I think the pioneer bit comes, is that you’re moving into a paradoxical story, unfamiliar familiarity. So I was just wondering, I don’t want to turn this into a seminar, because I’m trying to just get your thoughts. But there’s an institutional structure which you go in, and you know that there’s a Parish Council and you know all that, you don’t have to find that out. Whereas if you don’t have an institutional basis, what probably most anthropologists rely on at the end, is the informal, not the formal. There’s something there, if we could get our finger on it, which is the truest pioneering element, because you were the first … R: I think it would have been much more difficult if I had been Church of England, because people would have been so uncomfortable at me going to the Baptist Chapel, and they wouldn't be able to accept it without making some remark. They would say something like, "It must be very strange for you, being a Church person, coming in here". Whereas being a Jew, in a way they kind of push themselves back into the Old Testament, which they have a lot of regard for anyway, and thought, "Oh well, he knows about …" R: 1 From this discussion that we’ve had this afternoon, it’s come through very very clearly, the importance of your Jewish background and Jewish culture, that’s clearly very very strong, and there’s you, coming into a Welsh village where the Chapel background is very very strong, and you would have an affinity with that, perhaps. R: I think so. I think people would see it as a point in my favour, that I came from Jesus's family, so to speak, whereas if I'd been ordinary Church of England, they would have felt I was intruding, because I would belong to a group that had rejected part of the truth. R: 1 So what message, if any, were you able to send back to Max, to explain to him, “This is not like being in an African or completely strange context”. R: My memory is very bad these days, and I can't remember whether Max actually visited me. I think he did. [I am sure he did and impressed everybody by his height.] And I think he stood out like a sore thumb, actually, in that he asked questions which people thought (LAUGHS) were very odd! I think he and his wife came once. But Emrys Peters kept firmly away! R: 1 Well, maybe the best way to proceed is to hold in our heads, as it were, the lessons of the Welsh village on the border, and move on. We’ll have to go on a little bit more quickly, I think, to what happened after that and how far what you learnt, then, affected the way that your thinking developed thereafter. R: Gosh! R: 1 So we ought to go through a little bit of the writing up, because it was, presumably, your Ph.D.? R: Yes. R: 1 Yeah. Did you find that very difficult to write up, when the time came? R: No. It's very difficult to remember after all this time. But I don't think so, partly because I had quite a lot of people to discuss it with, including Max, and I think Vic, and Emrys, who always asked very astute questions even when it wasn't about Wales, but especially when it was about Wales. R: 1 But what was the key contribution that you thought you were making, which you’d have to defend at the viva and so on? What was the main thing that came out of it for you? R: Oh gosh! It's a very clannish thing to say, but I thought it was a big contribution to justifying the methodology of Manchester in general, and Gluckman in particular. R: 1 You’re talking about conflict? R: Yes, conflict and the fact that conflict and cohesion are two parts of the same thing. R: 1 And it happens at your doorstep as well as miles away. R: That's right. And that's how it's been treated. I mean, when people write articles and books about the Manchester School, and particularly on Max's article on "The Bridge" (1) which is the gospel of the Manchester School, when people write about the Manchester School, they quite often include me as a good example, and particularly the point which everything in "The Bridge" starts from, and that is that the people who are there are there, even if they don't seem to be. So that's what Max does in "The Bridge", which was very revolutionary in South Africa at the time, was to say that the anthropologist was actually present and taking part, and being affected by what was going on. R: 1 Yes. Which clearly is shown, yeah. R: And this is why he couldn't go on living in South Africa, because it really smashed the whole system! R: 1 But this is really crucial for the theme of it. So the question many people would want to ask is, “Was there something distinctive about the way you did the fieldwork, or was it distinctive in the Max approach to custom and conflict?” Some people might say, “There’s a particular style of fieldwork which Frankenberg did there”, other people might say, “No, he was working in the Manchester School of custom and conflict”. R: Well, yeah, I don't see a contradiction between those two things. I don't think I would make a distinction, because I think that the whole approach depends on your seeing yourself as part of a process which is going on, in which you're involved because you're there. R: 1 Yes, but the question I’m putting is, could another anthropologist, with different theoretical perceptions or guidance, come up with different fieldwork? R: Oh, I think so, yes. I mean, I've explored this a bit in Communities in Britain, because if you see yourself as observing from outside, then that's what you do! (LAUGHS) That's what you do! And it's a big paradox, really, isn't it, because if you see yourself as observing from outside, all you observe is yourself. Whereas if you allow yourself to be part of the situation, you're sharing the experiences of people. R: 1 So that’s a distinctive style of fieldwork? R: I think so, yes. And you can see this in a lot of studies that are done by people who have learnt the language very well, stayed there a long time, gone to everything, and you still feel that they're standing looking at a picture from outside. I think in a way it was more difficult for me to have done that, than to do what I did. And it's also the case, of course, that although nearly everybody, apart from me, spoke Welsh as the native language, they also were bilingual, and they were also very used to dealing with English people who didn't understand Welsh. R: 1 Yes, because of all the visitors, yes. R: There were visitors. Well, the Vicar, actually, as it happened, was much more like a Baptist Minister than a Vicar, because he was Welsh-speaking, and very much part of the people in a way that most vicars in Wales aren't, actually, and so was really part of it. R: 1 Yeah, if you’d really been systematic in seeking out a particular kind of village to do your research in, you couldn’t have done better than what you actually ended up with! R: No, no. No, no, absolutely. But I mean, the title of the book gives it away! (LAUGHS) R: 1 Now, look, in order to move on, I wondered if you could, for the sake of the tape, just run through the next stages of your career, without commenting, just saying what you did, so we’ve got it clear. R: I've actually brought this! Well, this is my CV, you see, and I thought I'd bring it! (LAUGHS) R: 1 Well, I think, for the sake of the tape, then I can ask you questions about it afterwards. R: Yes. Yes. R: 1 Well, firstly, start with your first job. You’ve got your Ph.D., how are you going to get the money? R: No, it's really difficult to remember back. Can I just look at this for a moment? Where do we get to actually living? Yes, it starts there. What year are we talking about when I was … R: 1 Well, there was a gap, wasn’t there. You started your Ph.D. in ’53, the book came out in, what, ’57. R: Yeah. Then I went off to work for the National Union of Mineworkers in South Wales. Partly because I thought this was a dream job - to work with the miners - and partly because my then wife's family lived in Cardiff, which was the headquarters of the South Wales area. So although I was rather odd - I mean, there haven't been many ex-public school, ex-Cambridge people … (LAUGHS) … R: 1 Not the obvious background! R: Not the obvious background! But I got on fairly well with the leaders of the Union. And also the classes were the best teaching experience I've ever had. I have written a piece about this somewhere, because there was an amazing incident which was orchestrated by my brother John, as usual, although unconsciously in this case, is that by this time he was married to a Dutch woman, whose father was the mayor of a small town in Holland, and he was very curious as to how local government worked in Britain, and so my brother asked me if I could arrange for him to meet the Lord Mayor of Cardiff. And I did this, and it was rather hilarious, the experience, because the reason I was able to arrange it, was that my driving companion - because I hadn't learnt to drive, and I couldn't afford to drive everywhere with a driving instructor from BSM - my driving companion was not only the sister of the man who disappeared in South America, whose name has gone for the moment, but also the widow of the Chief Constable! (LAUGHS) So there was this extraordinary meeting in Cardiff Town Hall of the Mayor of Deventer and me, and two MI5 agents (LAUGHS) to watch me, and the Chief Constable, and so on. R: 1 It seems a very curious situation! Here’s a budding anthropologist from a relatively bourgeois background, but very radical, and jumping outside of the obvious career profession … R: Yes! R: 1 Was it a kind of romantic thing about it? R: No, it was just a job which I - I love teaching, actually, and it was a job that I could do well, and it so happened that Bill Paynter, the President of the South Wales Miners' Union thought I would be very good at it too. So I just got on with it. R: 1 How long were you doing that? R: How long was I there? It was a couple of years, I think. And the other strange thing about it was, by this time I'd married someone who comes from a very English family - well, it's difficult to say she comes from an English family, but she was English, and I met her at Manchester University, but she had a lot of aunts who were [head teachers, part of the Cardiff aristocracy]. R: 1 But how did you get the jump? Because I think, from there, you went to Africa, is that right? R: That's right I'd always wanted to do fieldwork in Africa, but hadn't succeeded, and a job came up as Professor of Sociology in Northern Rhodesia, wasn't it? Lusaka, yes, that's right. And Max helped me to get that. R: 1 Professor? R: Oh no. Well, did I do something else in between? I probably did. Let's have a look. R: 1 Oh yes, because when were you writing Communities in Britain? That was he early sixties. We’ve got this breakdown between 1957, then you go for two years with the miners, so that’s 1959, and then you’ve only got a few years, because I remember reading your Communities in Britain in draft, in about ’63. R: Yes. By that time I'd gone back to Manchester. I went back to Manchester in 1960. I was with the miners from '57-'60, and then Max managed to find a job for me in Manchester, as Senior Lecturer and Reader in Rural and Urban Society. R: 1 Oh, that was quite a jump up, wasn’t it? R: Yes. Well, I was a lecturer, you see, and then I was a Lecturer in 1960, and eight years later I was Senior Lecturer, and then I got the job as Dean of Humanities and Professor of Sociology in Zambia. R: 1 Oh, I see. So let’s get this clear. Your work on Communities in Britain, arose out of the time when you were lecturing at Manchester? That makes sense, doesn’t it. You’d be reading the stuff, and that would be bringing it together. R: Yes. That's right. And then I came back from [Africa] to Keele. Much to my surprise, I had no wish (LAUGHS) to come to Keele! I thought the whole idea of the Keele experiment was quite dreadful! But what had happened was that [new universities were looking for sociologists, but if possible not from LSE!] R: 1 You were only two years in Africa? I think we should talk a little bit about that before you come back to Keele. R: Yeah. Where are we? You see, I worked with the miners until 1960. I went back to Manchester, and I was seconded from Manchester in 1966, so I was still, technically, a Senior Lecturer in Manchester, but I was seconded to be Foundation Professor of Sociology and Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zambia - a sort of pooh-bah kind of job! R: 1 It sounds either hard work or not! R: Well, I also [soon] became Acting Dean of the Medical School, because they couldn't get a doctor to come and do it. And then became Chairman of the Committee which built the Medical School. R: 1 Did that period in Africa influence, in any positive sense, the development of your anthropological perspectives? How did it influence you, as an anthropologist, as opposed to fixing committees - or was that the same thing? R: Oh well, it was partly the same thing. It was something that Max was very interested in. Max was a very close friend of, as I've said before, Bill McKenzie, who was Professor of Politics in Manchester. I don't know whether you know of him, he was quite a distinguished character, and he recruited Max to help him get integrated social sciences - he was Dean of Social Sciences. Max, rather surprisingly, in some ways … I mean, Bill McKenzie was easy to work with, but he was also very close to Eli Devons, who was extremely Right-wing. R: 1 Right-wing, yes. But these people were obviously your seniors. Who were your mates in this period? We’re talking about the sixties now. In fact, to be personal about this, I remember you talking about your work to Maurice Dobbs in a seminar at Cambridge, in the Communist Group there. Presumably you were working still with Communists … R: Yes, but it's … R: 1 But who were you actually working with as mates, colleagues? R: Well, they were mostly older than me. They were people like Peter Worsley. And that's because I wasn't of the age, during the War, actually to serve in the Army, even if the Army had wanted me. I was too young. And most people were very conscious, people like Peter Worsley and Vic Turner, were very conscious that I was a schoolboy during the War. R: 1 So it’s interesting this. It’s unusual, I think, compared to many anthropologists today, where they’ve got a peer group of similar ages that work with them as their graduate students. You had these father figures, almost … R: That's right, yes. R: 1 Were they father figures, or elder brother figures? (LAUGHS) R: (LAUGHS) Well, they were very much elder brother. They behaved like elder brothers, and, of course, I was used to being bossed about by (LAUGHS) an elder brother! I mean, that was the story of my life, is having older brothers that told me what to do! And now I had Peter Worsley and Vic Turner. Peter, especially, was quite acidly critical very often at my naiveté. R: 1 And how did your politics and your anthropology intermix, in this period - before you went to Africa? R: Before he became a Catholic, Vic Turner was a very active member of the Communist Party. And Peter, before he more or less started his own policies of his own (LAUGHS) was also much more enthusiastic. R: 1 Did we have a common friend in Lionel Mumby? Does that ring a bell? R: No, I didn't know his name. [This is not rue, I knew of him.] R: 1 He was a colleague of mine, and he was in the Communist Party in Cambridge. R: Yes, I remember him, but I can't remember much about him. But I know of him. Not in Cambridge, I belonged to the Socialist Society and went to meetings, but I was totally insignificant. R: 1 But at Manchester, was there an active Communist Party group that you would have belonged to? R: Yes, there was, I belonged to it. And my then wife was, who is Joyce Leeson, who was and is a medical doctor, who married one of the [local] leaders of the South African Communist Party, and they now live in Lancaster. Yes, I mean, I was always middle to very Left-wing, this was always the story of my life when I was at home, because my father was an active revolutionary. R: 1 So how did this experience of being with older people who were very radical, and then you suddenly found yourself, in the later sixties, in Africa with all these rather serious responsibilities of being Dean and Chair, that seems to be a huge jump in terms of personal style, really. R: Yeah, well, I had to, I had to be. And that's how I lost (LAUGHS) Joyce to Zola, actually, is that I was never there. Because it seems a place like Zambia was a bit like somewhere after an earthquake (LAUGHS), that everything was up for grabs, and nobody knew how to run it, and so you got drawn in. R: 1 It was still Northern Rhodesia, wasn’t it? R: No, no, it got its independence in 1964. No - where is it? [CV] Yes, that's right. '66 it was. "Seconded Foundation Professor of Sociology and Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zambia. Acting Dean of Medicine, Acting Director of the Institute of Surgery." (LAUGHS) R: 1 It is a bit pooh-bah, isn’t it! R: (LAUGHS) It was! Oh yes! Well, I mean Zambia was like that, because there wasn't anyone … There were about five people … R: 1 My remembrance of that time is that the Rhodes Livingstone Institute was a very serious place. R: Oh yeah. R: 1 So was that still flourishing? R: Well, you see, I think I was (LAUGHS) Director of that as well! But it was no longer called the Rhodes Livingstone Institute! (LAUGHS) Yes, it was called the Institute of Social Research for the University of Zambia, but I think I was in charge of it for a period. But, I mean, as tends to happen in new countries, everyone who was doing anything was very young. I mean, although Kaunda managed to make himself appear much older than he was, he was actually quite a young man. R: 1 I couldn’t imagine you being a heavy managerialist sort of person. I mean, you there, as an anthropologist, did you feel comfortable in playing these roles? R: Yeah, I think so. I mean, one of my colleagues at Keele will still have nothing to do with me. He's just retired, on retiring age. He's a chemist, and he and his wife were in Zambia. He was a chemist and she was a social worker, and I was Head of Social Work as well, and they had no time for me at all. They consider I'm a complete insensitive tyrant who didn't care anything about his subordinates' happiness or job satisfaction, and they still hold it against me, the things I did in Zambia. It was partly because it was part of my job to make sure that Europeans, including myself, were replaced by Zambians as quickly as possible, and this meant backing things which Zambians did, as long as I thought they would work, even if they weren't what their expatriate colleagues [thought]. R: 1 Now, think how old you were. R: In 1960, I was - God, I was only 30! Yes, I was quite young. But Africa was like that. Also, the Africans who were able to do things, tended to be quite young as well, because it was a bit like Eton in the 19th century - all the leading figures in Zambia had been to the same school, because it was the only grammar school in the bloody country! And it's called "Munali". [Shades of the Coalition!] R: 1 And did you really enjoy that time, despite everything? R: I did, yes. R: 1 You’d no children then, though? R: Er, yes, I - yeah. R: 1 So you had a family life out there as well? R: Yeah, well, I didn't have much family life, because I worked very long hours, and unknown to me, Joyce, who was my family, and Helen, our baby, were spending all their time with this guerrilla leader - whom she's now married to! R: 1 So how many children did you have with Joyce [Leeson]? R: Just the one. But Joyce had two other children from a previous marriage, who were - this was the sort of Communist Party incest from Manchester. R: 1 So, wait a minute. There was Alison. R: Yes. Alison was my [first wife]. R: 1 How long did that last? Well, it was a very short one, anyway. R: Yes. Oh yes. There were two children. They both became academics. One of them died in India, very young - Ruth - and she was a lecturer in an American university, on secondment, when she worked in India. And then Rosanna, my youngest daughter by my first marriage, is a general practitioner in Suffolk, who is married to a university professor, and who is coming here next week. R: 1 So the medical connection is still there, yes. So just to get it right. You had two children with your first wife. R: That's right. Both girls. R: 1 And then with Joyce, you had one … R: One child, yes. Helen, what's she doing? I find it difficult to remember! It's something academic in East Anglia. R: 1 Are you happy with the way that they’ve turned out? R: Oh yes, they're all splendid. And they all come and stay - except for Ruth, who died. Ruth died very suddenly. I can't remember exactly what it was called, but one of these sort of galloping fevers that carries you off in a very short time. R: 1 Now then, you’ve also mentioned, before, that your son, who is from which partner? R: He's here. He's upstairs, working. He's Pauline's son. He's my only male offspring! (LAUGHS) Oh, he's great! He's going to be a rabbi. But at the moment, he's finishing his … He's got two degrees, so far, from Manchester, and he's doing a Ph.D., he's just finishing his Ph.D. in Manchester. And then the first part of the rabbinical training is six months in Jerusalem, at an English institution. [He is now in Israel training to be a Rabbi in North London. Back next week.] R: 1 In this very varied life that you’ve had, and we’ve only taken it up to about 1970, have you had time to do anything else apart from your work? Have you had other hobbies or enthusiasms, or interests? R: No, it's terribly boring! (LAUGHS) It's terribly boring! But I don't think I have! (LAUGHS) But I've regarded my work as a sort of hobby, because I've always had extremely enjoyable jobs! I mean, my father always said, "You haven't got a job. You've got a permanent holiday", about all my jobs (LAUGHS), because he'd fought his way up from being a barber's boy to owning a wholesale warehouse! R: 1 I’m not quite sure how to handle the next bit, which is Ronnie at Keele, really, isn’t it. That’s a very big lump of your life. R: Yes. R: 1 When you look back on it, what do you think the best thing is that you’ve done during your time at Keele? R: Oh, I did quite a lot, actually. I didn't want to come to Keele at all. I regarded Keele as a silly bourgeois mistake, that it ought never to have … R: 1 How did it happen? R: Well, I was coming home from Zambia, wasn't I? Yes. And I was going to be interviewed at Lancaster, because the wife who went off with the guerrilla leader - who I didn't know had gone off - I mean, one of the reasons she went off was that she never saw me, because I was being Dean (LAUGHS) - Dean, and that! And so I didn't actually realise I hadn't got that wife, when I came back from Africa! So I was intending to go to Lancaster, where she comes from, and live in the bosom of her family. But the Vice-Chancellor of Keele, who'd read an article that I wrote - I can't remember which it was - and he was a sociologist for education, wrote to me in Zambia, and said, "Will you call on the way? We've got a vacancy. We're going to establish sociology, and we'd like you to come and do it". And my first answer was, "No. I want to go to Lancaster". And then he said, "Well, Keele's on the way to Lancaster, why don't you call on your way?" And so I called and to my … (LAUGHS) And anyway, I came and there wasn't really any discussion, it had all been fixed up in advance, and I just saw I think it was the Vice-Chancellor, who hadn't met me. The Vice-Chancellor was an educationist who was very interested in sociology, and he thought that - quite correctly, I think - that Keele would never succeed unless they had a Department of Sociology, and he couldn't find anyone that he thought would do it, and he knew that I had a lot of administrative experience. [He also wanted to avoid anyone from LSE.] R: 1 You were a professor to a New University. You had a considerable influence on what kind of sociology was going to be taught - that’s evident - and you’re coming to it as an anthropologist with experience of South Wales miners, and running many Zambian academic institutions. So what kind of experience would you hope that the students who came through your Department, what kind of a sociology would you hope that they’d acquire? R: Well, I think this is actually a real description of the situation. Sociology hadn't been much developed at Keele. There was one professor before me, he was called Howard Jones, and went to Cardiff, who actually didn't know very much sociology. He was basically a social worker, and he had been disastrous, which is why the Vice-Chancellor was behaving like this, because he wanted to get someone to replace him, and then sack him, which is, in fact, what he did. And he went to Cardiff, where he'd come from, and he didn't live a great deal longer. He was older than me anyway. So what I set out to do when I came, was to try to develop a Sociology Department which was concerned with society as it was, and [so that the students] studied it, and did it for themselves. And so I abolished all lectures and replaced them with discussion groups, which I, or another member of the Department chaired, and I did it in such a way that while other members of the Department stayed with one discussion group, I moved around them all. And what I did is, I asked these - there were, I think, eight people in each group, and before I went to them the first time, they had to think of a topic that they wanted to study - "the sociology of" - with a certain amount of discouragement from it being social work! (LAUGHS) Because what I saw my job as being, and what the Vice-Chancellor wanted, was shifting it away from a Department which taught you what to do if a woman came to you and told you she wasn't married, and was expecting a baby. They were just dealing with practical problems at a very pragmatic level. And so when I met a class - and eventually when some other lecturers came, they did the same, because I told them they had to! - when I went to a class, I asked them to talk for a bit with me about things that they thought they might learn from sociology. Then I told them to go away and talk amongst themselves. And the next time I met them, to tell me what they would like to study. And they obviously agreed to do this, because they weren't in a position to refuse! (LAUGHS) And also it was very much in line with the general ideology of Keele, with self-directed studies. R: 1 How long did those procedures continue? R: Really until I left. I think so. I wouldn't be sure. I'd have to check on that. But it worked very well. I mean, the Vice-Chancellor had backed me very strongly, but a lot of other people on the staff, in general, thought that the students weren't capable of doing this. But they did. R: 1 Who worked with you? Who were on your staff at that time? R: Well at first, (LAUGHS) it was just me! I had to appoint them. But there was a very good Lecturer in Social Administration, called Joyce Warham, and a very lively young woman who, I think, had just come from Cambridge, called Maggie White. R: 1 When did John Law come? R: Oh, John Law was already there. Afterwards, of course, he replaced me when I retired. But he … he's … I don't know if you know John, but he's quite - well, he wouldn't have started off suggesting this way of teaching for himself. He worked with it and was one of the best. R: 1 Well, it fits his approach to methods, I suppose. R: It does, yes. And he really worked as Senior Lecturer, and then succeeded me when I retired. But he was very good. Gordon [Fyfe] was there as well, and he and I are very close friends, actually. Gordon just loved this kind of approach. And so it was a very good Department, and when I retired, it fell into (LAUGHS) it fell into the hands, not of thieves, but of social workers! (LAUGHS) R: 1 I don’t think we need to go there! R: It's just beginning to recover. They were very good social workers, they just had no interest in asking questions, you know. But now, somebody is coming, who wants to get it back to be a more intellectual Sociology Department, and have Social Work independent. So Keele was- I mean, I've been terribly fortunate that, really, most of my jobs have been very exciting. R: 1 So during this period at Keele, which was a major part of your career, what was your main personal and kind of intellectual trajectory in terms of research? R: Ah-ha! (LAUGHS) What was it? I'm not sure. It must be here somewhere. … R: 1 Did you make the jump to Medical Sociology at Keele? R: Oh yes, I did. That's right. That's it, yes. That's right. Well, yes … R: 1 I think it’s very interesting, given your brother’s [career], the fact that you end up in Medical Sociology, I think, is just too neat to be true! R: Yes! [I hadn't thought of that, but you are right!] Well, yes, I was already a Medical Sociologist when I came to Keele, actually, because I worked very closely with my former wife, Joyce Leeson, in Manchester, and also this was the point when the man with the long double-barrelled name - what's he called? Fraser-Brockington was Head of Social Medicine at Manchester. But there was also Mervin, a South African man, and they were a very powerful intellectual group who saw Sociology of Medicine as the centre of medicine - that healing people is a social process. If you want to teach doctors, you've got to teach them to work in a social way. And Joyce, who - as I say, married, and who left me - was absolutely brilliant at this, and she worked with two … Mervin and Zena Susser … you know, there's this textbook, Susser and Watson? And they taught round Susser and Watson, which is a highly theoretical but extremely practical book, which really raises the level of doctors' understanding. I mean, it's commonplace now, but at the time, to tell doctors that they were engaged in a social activity, they regarded social activities as going to parties! (LAUGHS) R: 1 I have to say, Ronnie, that I can’t see a clear thread - not that there necessarily should be - of intellectual progression from the Welsh village to the Medical Sociology. But I’m missing something, perhaps? R: Yes. Yes, I think so, but I'm not sure I know what it is! I think it was Africa. I think it was realising that if you just taught people what happened, or even what to do in a particular situation, you didn't really teach them anything. You really had to teach them how to analyse what the situation is. R: 1 Knowing you, over the years, in all kinds of ways, Ronnie, it seems to me that there’s a Talmudic element to a lot of what you do. R: That's right. R: 1 Just when you think you’ve got it right, Ronnie’s switched it and seen another angle on it. Which is a very kind of Rabbinical kind of style, may I say. R: Yes, I think it is. I was very surprised to discover this, because I had a very poor Jewish education, and my father was much more concerned with revolutionary politics and business management. He never wanted to be a businessman, but when he became one, he put himself to it, so I never really … But I think that's the case, and now we've become quite interested in Judaism, and now I can see the Talmud is really like a prolonged sociological seminar, isn't it, because people just sit down and discuss actual situations which could occur. By analysing the situation, looking at other situations which might possibly be similar, so that sociology fits in quite well with Talmudic [tradition]. R: 1 I think that’s one of the most profound things you’ve said! R: Pauline arrived at that conclusion, independently, as part of her experience of being a sociologist. R: 1 That’s really interesting. If you looked at your whole working career, and there’s bits of it we haven’t really got into yet, what would you be most proud of? R: Well, I think I did a really good job in the Miners' Union. But I also think I did a very good job at Keele. I suppose the best thing I did was attach myself to Max Gluckman! (LAUGHS) And the whole idea of "Custom and Conflict" too. R: 1 Yes, I think that is great! Yes. That’s right. R: He was an incredibly charismatic teacher. He didn't have any particular mannerisms or rhetoric, but he was just very convincing. And the other thing is, he allowed you - he knew where he wanted the discussion to go, but he never forced you in that direction, he waited for the logic of what everybody said. R: 1 So, if you were summing up your life as a whole - looking back, you know, at the age of 81 - what have been the worst, and what have been the best things? R: I think the worst thing was when I first went to Highgate. Highgate School, which … well, first, I was going away from home. Then I didn't get on particularly well with the other boys who came from - I mean, I came from a technically bourgeois background, whereas they came from a real bourgeois background - they lived in houses on Bishop's Avenue. And they've stayed like that all their lives, actually. When I go back to school events, they don't seem to have grown up at all! (LAUGHS) They're all still like that! I never thought I'd ever go back to school events, actually. But I was very miserable at Highgate. Since then, for the most part, apart from the period just after Joyce went off with Zola, things have been very good. R: 1 So, the best things? R: Well, I'm very glad I got into - I know my sociology tends to veer back into anthropology, but I was very glad of having found a way to sociology, because it allows you to sort of creatively problematise so many different … R: 1 Well, it’s very interesting, actually, because Communities in Britain was, in some ways, more a sociological book than an anthropological one. You could argue about that. R: Yes. I think so. The material was rather forced into pre-decided themes. Bcause most of my raw material was other people's books, for the most part, I could only use their kind of approaches. But I did sort of try to ask new questions. R: 1 I think you did a lot to introduce ordinary students to ideas about networks and just concretised it in particular instances and contexts. R: Yes. One thing about Max, as a teacher, was that he had this endless curiosity about how things worked, arising from having been brought up in this crazy society of South Africa, and also being Jewish, I think. And he found people who could develop alongside him, like Elizabeth Bott, for instance, and to some extent, Vic Turner. I think, in many ways, Vic was more able than Max. R: 1 And Derek Allcorn. R: And Derek Allcorn, yes. R: 1 Valdo Pons. R: Yes. Yes. Yes, I think Valdo was one of the … in a way, great successes, because he came - unlike most of the rest of us - with a really good grounding in sociology to start with! R: 1 He scared me because he did the village next to mine in Hertfordshire, and it’s hard to keep up to that standard! Look, we’re coming to the end now, and we haven’t actually mentioned Pauline. I think we ought to bring that element in - the work you’ve done with her. How did you get together with Pauline? What was the background to that? R: I think you'll have to ask (LAUGHS) Pauline! I can't remember offhand! (LAUGHS) Gosh! That's a good question! She's just been there for a long time. R: 1 When did you get together, roughly? R: Oh God! I never know quite how old Adam is. I think he's getting on for 40, 35 or 36? Well, we met first through the Communist Party, actually. That's how we met. And we just got on! (LAUGHS) R: 1 I mean, it’s a different element which we should have perhaps spent more time thinking about - of collaborative work which you’ve done with her. Perhaps you’d just reflect on how significant that’s been to you, working like that? R: Oh, I mean, very significant in this case. But I mean, I've never really done anything completely on my own, although it doesn't sort of show too much in either of our work, I suppose. Valdo Pons and I worked very closely together when we were in the same Department. I mean, we would fertilise each other. R: 1 But you did the [project] in Tuscany together? R: Pauline and I, yes. (LAUGHS) We worked very well as a team, but I don't think we knew why, or how. R: 1 Do you speak Italian? R: Yes, sort of. I mean, I couldn't - if an Italian came in now, they'd have to stay for a week before I started talking fluent Italian to them! But in Italy, we met Hugh and Marion Faulkner, Hugh Faulkner was a general practitioner. I'm not sure whether anyone's written a history of this, but, in fact, there are a lot of general practitioners who, although they're general practitioners, have played an enormous part in shaping modern medicines, and quite often are much more noticeable for what [they do] than what the great names do, because sometimes the great names are so remote that they don't have much real influence. Their houseman has a lot of influence, but they don't! (LAUGHS) So we met the Faulkners and stayed with them, again, through the Communist Party, through the Italian Communist Party. And we lived with them for a while when we first went to Italy, in a house called "La Galera", because it was just Italian for "prison" - it was an old prison fort, where rebels were imprisoned - round, with stone walls, and crenellated. R: 1 Any parallels between Wales and Italy? R: Yes, I have suggested there are, yeah, it has the same kind of combination of intense local patriotism, and intense consciousness of nationality, which, of course, fits in very well with all the "Custom and Conflict" ideas. R: 1 I think we’re both - at least, I’m speaking for myself - getting a bit weary now, it’s been quite a long afternoon, but is there any particular theme or topic that you think I’ve missed, in our really quite lengthy conversation? R: Not that I've noticed. You've been very kind in not revealing my doubts about what sociology actually is (LAUGHS), and whether I'm a sociologist, because it's only recently I've got the courage to say "I'm a sociologist", and I have been introduced to people at sociology meetings as, "This is Frankenberg. He claims to be a sociologist, but he's really just an anthropologist!" (LAUGHS) R: 1 One of the sadnesses, Ronnie, I have to say, is that the joint Departments have fizzled away, the ones that were there, Anthropology and Sociology, like at Swansea or Hull, because maybe that’s where you really fit - in a joint Department. R: Well, insofar as I belong to any Department at all now, it doesn't really affect me very much. R: 1 Surely, if you’re in a Sociology Department, how many of them really want to talk about Max Gluckman? That’s surely the point. That’s where your heart is. R: Oh, very much so. But, yes, I think the important thing about any field of study is to recognise that when you successfully answer a question, you always raise a new question that you've got to look at, and I think sociologists are more likely to forget this than anthropologists. R: 1 Well, I’ve tried to keep it away from being a seminar, but just to get the flavour of you as you, and how your life has developed, and your approach to your work. One of the things that would be quite useful to put on the tape, or you could perhaps let us know later, is what documentary evidence you might have to illustrate this. We talked, earlier, about letters you wrote to Max, and whether there are any other records that you have here that might be archived. R: Yes, I will. I will. It's something I've thought I ought to start thinking about. R: 1 Well, because this goes into the National [Life Stories at] the British Library, but, you know, there is also the Qualidata Archive, and maybe things that would be useful there. R: Yes, that's right. Yes, we found some things as a result of your impending arrival, but I think there are other things around. R: 1 Well, I mean, an interview like this has prompted your memories, and maybe other things will come back, and there’s no reason why, if you think it would be helpful for me to return on some other occasion, if you say, “Look, you know, thinking back on it …” We’ll give you, of course, a transcript of this when it’s done. But otherwise, if you’re content, and I must say I admire the way you’ve kept going! It’s been quite a long and exhausting afternoon, but I’m very grateful to you, Ronnie. I think there’s some really interesting material there. Really interesting. R: Oh good! R: 1 Thank you. R: Yes, I - I don't regret having abandoned medicine for more intellectual (LAUGHS) tasks, although I never really fully abandoned it, since I did go back to Medical Sociology. R: 1 We’ll leave it there. Thank you. Part Two: Interview held on 6 July 2011 at Keele. R2: 2 I wondered whether there were any school teachers who were particularly influential in the way you developed later? R: Yes, that's H.J. Gibbons. R2: 2 H.J. Gibbons? R: Yes. And he had been in the Guards (LAUGHS) and I wrote a limerick about him which, believe it or not, I've just remembered! Which was, "The average Grenadier Guard, is really a rum sort of Guard. If you say that again, I will give you some pain, and show you that I can hit hard!" (LAUGHS) The school was Highgate, and in a way, a lot of the things that happened seemed like almost preparations for becoming an anthropologist. Because, of course, it was wartime, and I've realised, recently, that I really had more upbringing in the country than I did in London, because I was evacuated at first to Westward Ho! R2: 2 Westward Ho! In Devon? R: Yes. In Devon. And then to Hartland Abbey, where we lived with Sir Hugh and Lady Stucley, and a lot of deer and horses! (LAUGHS) But the other thing is that after that, when we'd come back to London, when the doodlebugs began, I went, with a friend from the school, who had a rather mysterious origin. He was called Peter Jacobson, and although he spoke perfect English, he had German family connections, and I think it must have been during the doodlebugs we went to stay with someone who had been associated with his rescue from Germany, who was called General Peter Windsor. And we stayed, lived in the country, in this enormous country house with him. R2: 2 So you had very aristocratic connections. R: Well, no, it wasn't so much they were aristocratic, although that makes them seem aristocratic. I think it's that I seemed to have been totally urban, but, in fact, because of wartime conditions, I had quite a lot of experience of farm life. So I'd actually learnt to ride and things, which someone in Cricklewood [wouldn't normally do]… (LAUGHS) Actually, as it happens, one of my elder brothers was a very keen rider in Hyde Park. But I had a lot of experience, living on farms, looking after horses. So I had really quite a rural background to add to Highgate and Cricklewood. R2: 2 That’s interesting. Another thing was - which I read in the transcript [of Part 1] - you mentioned that the letters that John sent from South Africa led to you wanting to do anthropology. But I couldn’t understand why. What was it about those letters? R: Well, well, I think I just got an interest in the rest of the world, much more than would have been expected, being focused on natural sciences. Because I was intending to do medicine, which I did start when I first went to Cambridge - I was a medical student - but I didn't get on very well with it! (LAUGHS) So I switched, and I met Gluckman. I think that meeting Gluckman is in the [interview] I must have another look at it actually, because in the original, I gave you the wrong woman anthropologist. I gave you Mary Douglas, whereas it was actually someone else - whose name will come back to me in a minute, or which may be written in these notes - who was actually advisor to the War Office and the government, on anthropology, who was a much more [famous] than Mary Douglas, although Mary Douglas became a great favourite later on. And I can't remember how much I said about this. R2: 2 No, I don’t remember that. R: The thing is, I went to Cambridge as a pre-medic. R2: 2 You’ve covered that. That is in the interview, definitely, about going to Cambridge and then switching to anthropology. R: And switching. Oh, it is. That's all right, then. Yeah. R2: 2 So maybe we could move on to the most important topic for today, which is about how you did your fieldwork, and start with Glynceiriog. R: Yes. Where to begin with that! (LAUGHS) R2: 2 You’ve got some notes here. R: Yes, that's right, but these notes aren't completely accurate actually. R2: 2 I like the thing you said in Communities in Britain, “In my early days in the village, I would often climb a hill and look down, sadly, upon the rows of houses of the housing estate, and wonder what went on inside them”. R: Yes! Yes. Let me just start reading through this. Meeting Gluckman is there in the papers you've got. R2: 2 Yes, that’s right. And also we have the story of why you ended up doing a project in Wales. Do say it again, if you like. You wanted to do one in the Caribbean, didn’t you? R: That's right. Yes. That's right. I was going to the West Indies, and I did, in fact, go to the West Indies, all but half a mile! (LAUGHS) At that point I was told I wasn't going to be allowed to land, and had to stay on the boat, so I never actually set foot in the West Indies. R2: 2 Who was it said that you couldn’t land? R: The Immigration Officer of Barbados. He had been informed, from London, that I was a dangerous Communist, and it wasn't safe for me to land. Did I tell you about [Arthur Lewis] the Professor of Economics in Manchester? R2: 2 I’m not sure. R: Oh well, I'll tell you now. (LAUGHS) He was Arthur Lewis, who is famous. I don't know if you've heard of him - probably not these days. He was a famous economist, a West Indian, and he was very angry at my going to the West Indies because he felt this was reducing the West Indians to the level of Africans if anthropologists went to study them. Whereas Max Gluckman's whole idea, and Eli Devons, who was Max's great friend, who was a famous economist also, their idea was that anthropologists should study people anywhere in the world, and this idea that anthropologists should only be interested in Africans or "natives" was completely wrong. And the suspicion, in Manchester, was that … Arthur Lewis had pulled strings and arranged with the West Indian High Commission that I wouldn't be allowed, because he felt that being studied by an anthropologist reduced you to the level of being a native. (LAUGHS) Strange! Strange! R2: 2 Absolutely! Yes. So then you came to Wales instead? R: That's right. I wanted to modify a bit about this because this relates to something which I think - which is somewhere in the papers - which I think you quote. You say that interviewing people is not participant observation, and I disagree with that. (LAUGHS) Quite strongly in fact, because successful interviewing means that both sides, the person being interviewed and the interviewer, actually almost change themselves into each other in the course of the conversation. If it's to be successful, the person being interviewed must, to some extent, identify and understand where the interviewer is coming from, and so it's a form of participant observation which is created in the process. That seems, to me, quite important in writing about these things. So that it never occurred to me at the time, or, I think, to Max, that I wouldn't be doing participant observation, because I'd be asking formal questions. Can I persuade you to accept … (LAUGHS) R2: 2 No, that’s all right! R: So to interview someone, you have to get to know them. And how I learnt this is actually quite significant, because when I started on the farm, first of all I lodged for a very short time in the village, and then I actually went to live in the farm of my first informant. Yeah. Now, in order for us to talk to each other, we really had to get inside the other person's way of life, so that one isn't interviewing from outside. One is getting right inside. And one of the things which - it isn't in here [in the interview transcript], actually, because I only thought this out afterwards - is my intention in going to the farm and working from there, was to do all my work in the farm. But, of course, since the farmer wasn't just taking me as a lodger, but part of the job of being a farmer in North Wales was, in fact, letting out your spare rooms in the summer to visitors. So when the summer came, I had to get out from the farm to make room for his regular visitors, because the same people came every year to all these farms. As again, Max and Emrys [Peters] did, they had particular farms in North Wales, not in this village, as we avoided those deliberately, they had particular places where they took their family in the summer. So that this kind of interviewing wasn't just the thing that you did in an afternoon or in a couple of hours, you moved in and became part of … And most of the farmers - well, it's probably rash to say "most of the farmers" - but certainly many of the farmers in North Wales, at that time, had got part of their income by having people come and either camp or live in spare outbuildings and so on, for a period in the summer, and the same people came back every year. So that my role as an anthropologist and interviewer living in a farm wasn't something new, it was something that quite a lot of people did, although they didn't usually write it up. R2: 2 I see. Did you keep notes, then? R: I'm sure I did, yes, but where on earth …! (LAUGHS) R2: 2 That’s another question! And you were learning Welsh while you were on the farm, were you? R: Yes. Well, I started learning Welsh before I went, and in the house in the village where I lived at first, and continually through the whole process of the research. I was never a very fluent Welsh speaker, but it was more important that I could understand in depth, what people were saying to me, than they should understand, in depth, what I was saying to them, as long as what I said was convincing enough for them to go on answering questions. I mean, they were sort of baffled and amused, and slightly flattered. And the vicar put in a good word - (LAUGHS) a good word for me, and helped to explain what anthropologists did, and why it was good that anthropologists and sociologists should know what they did, because it meant they would understand what their problems were, and so on. R2: 2 So in terms of observation and doing these informal interviews, you did that on the farm - and then where else? R: Oh well, first of all I lived in the village, and then Mrs. Evans said, "Oh well, you should go and talk to Farmer So and So, because they always take in summer visitors as holiday makers, they might as well take you as well". (LAUGHS) I mean, the people who stayed in village houses would perhaps stay for a week or ten days or less, whereas the people who went to the farms, came back year after year, and their children went there. Of course, the farmers had fishing rights and hunting rights and so on, so that they could have a good sort of active holiday. And people like Max Gluckman and Eli Devons, and [Arthur Lewis] the Professor of Economics, had done this for many a year. And my argument would be that in order even to do this, never mind write about them afterwards, you needed to do some kind of anthropological study to know when to go, when not to go, because the farmers - and the farmer's wife - were going to be too busy with the cattle or whatnot, to deal with you - and where you could go fishing, and what fishing rights the farmer had and so on. So I think this must have been written about! R2: 2 But you also focused, I think, on the Football Club, isn’t that right? R: Oh yes, that's right. R2: 2 And what did you do with them? R: Well, I think I kept them - all these people hated writing, especially (LAUGHS), especially in English! Yes, especially in English. So they were glad to have someone who would take notes at meetings, and produce Minutes which they could then use with their funders or with their members. Because farmers, on the whole, didn't like writing at all. They could all read and write - at least in Welsh - but they were very self-conscious, so people would show me their invoices or letters they'd written to visitors who were going to come, and ask, you know, if the English was all right - because they were very self-conscious. R2: 2 And while you were doing that, you were trying to understand the sort of divisions, the points of conflict within the Club? R: Yes, yes. That's right, yes. And also, I'm not sure, but I think I was actually a sort of junior Committee Member, and helped keep Minutes, and to explain any problems about travelling, when they were going to away matches and so on. I never played, because playing football was something I avoided at school! My Housemaster was very worried that I didn't get enough exercise, and so he arranged for me to play knockabout tennis, within the view of his bathroom, so as he could watch me while he was shaving! But after a week or two, he said, "You're such a rabbit!" he said! (LAUGHS) "It isn't really worth your trying!" But then he said, "I don't usually read my Times before breakfast, so if you like, you can collect my Times from the front door, and while the others are playing tennis you can read that, and it will help your studies"! That's how I became a Times reader! R2: 2 That’s very nice. Going back to the village, you also looked at the choir and the brass band, I think? And how did you manage that? R: Well, by this time I had become very well known as someone who was interested in village life, and then that's how I introduced myself. So, you know, they thought it was crazy that some English university would want to know about the village life in North Wales, but they accepted that the English were crazy, and universities were very peculiar. And so it was agreed, people agreed quite happily I could come along to meetings, and they explained to me what was … R2: 2 So you just attended, you didn’t take a part, like with the Football Club? R: Not that I can remember, no. And I also, with the churches, well, the chapel was quite interested in having a Jew around, because they had a sort of awe (LAUGHS) awe of Jews as being Jesus's tribe, so I was equivalent to being Welsh, only way back! (LAUGHS) And I would give little not very well informed talks to the chapels and so on about what Jews believed and what they didn't believe, and about the customs, religious customs, which people were interested in. People were looking, actually, I suppose, all the time for ways to spend the evenings, especially in winter, when it was dark, and probably raining, there would be meetings in the chapel, or even in private houses, about social life elsewhere. R2: 2 And you also, though, in a very different kind of way, you did a survey, didn’t you, of the housing estate. Why did you do that? R: Well, it was a kind of thing, it was a natural thing for an anthropologist or a sociologist to do, to find out who lived where, and how they got their living. I mean, Gluckman was fairly Left-wing, but by no means Communist, and there was just a general interest in how people managed, and in what sort of ways they might manage better, what one could do to help them. So that all the senior staff of the University - and there were quite a few apart from Gluckman and Devons - who spent their summers in North Wales, would sort of give a quid pro quo by helping people to manoeuvre their way through the school system, what sort of subjects they ought to do at the Grammar School in Oswestry, in order to be most likely to be able to follow the courses in a university, which would help in the subjects they wanted to do - whether it was agriculture or some other subject which wasn't so useful, but which would get them Brownie points in getting into a local Grammar School, or going to the Grammar School over the border in Oswestry. R2: 2 But do you think that household survey was important for your interpretation of the village? R: Oh yes, I mean, because it meant I'd been - unlike anyone else - I'd been in every house in the village, and most of the farms roundabout. I mean, obviously I didn't pass on - at least I hope I didn't - I didn't pass on gossip … not that I needed to, because they were very good at passing on gossip themselves! (LAUGHS) But I knew, by the time that I left, I knew all the villagers by name and they knew me by name, and they asked my advice on this and that. I get confused with the different batches of fieldwork I did, but I think the person I was married to then [Alison], she was working in a school in Oswestry. So she was a useful source of knowledge for the villagers as the best way to get their children into schools other than the ordinary village school which they all had to go to because it was compulsory. R2: 2 So do you think, then, that some kind of exchange like that is really important in anthropology? R: Oh absolutely, yes. Absolutely. That's why I question the statement which implies, that anthropology isn't giving anything back. People in North Wales, and certainly when I went on to Africa, people in Africa are very glad - or were - very glad to have an anthropologist who had regular drinks with the District Commissioner or someone like that, to get a sort of feel … In other words, the kind of [local] people that anthropologies - and the anthropologists as well (LAUGHS) - [were] using the anthropologists to learn how to deal with people who are useful - to deal with, like, local traders and British colonial officials and so on. R2: 2 That’s very interesting. [BREAK IN RECORDING] R2: 2 Do you want to go through [your notes] then? R: Yes. Yes. I won't read it all out, and you can take a copy away anyway. Yeah, the first part was about the specific problems of the West Indies. And the avoidance of Africa, because that's where everybody went. R2: 2 And then you’ve got down here, you’ve got the method in Wales. It’s interesting, you say, there, about how you started with the women. R: Oh yes. R2: 2 Do you think that’s usually a good approach for an anthropologist? R: Well, it depends on how the division of labour is organised. But on the whole, most places where anthropologists - well, it's not true, actually, in Africa, obviously often the women did the work anyway, so that you'd talk to the men because the women were busy working in the fields! (LAUGHS) But certainly in Britain the women are at home during the daytime - and while I wouldn't want to be quoted on this - are not always as busy as men might be. I mean, it's quite difficult to talk to a farm worker, you might have to interrupt his work, but to talk to his wife, you can do it while she gets on with her work, you can follow her round the house and stuff. R2: 2 Well, this is a nice bit too. R: Oh yes, that's right! That's right, because they were very curious about this strange man who appeared not to work for his living, but just wandered around talking to people, and they thought, "Well, if these other people are talking to him, maybe he's interesting to talk to", and, "I can give him a cup of tea and a sandwich, and see what he talks to me about". R2: 2 So you became very welcome really? R: Oh yes, very much so. But as I've said, this was really nothing knew in Glyn, or in North Wales in general, because a lot of the people of the sort of intellectuals and managers and so on in adjoining areas of England, spent their holidays there, so having the odd fisherman … R2: 2 They were used to it. R: Yeah. So they catered for them. There were two quite good hotels in Glyn, so I went there to drink, but apart from that I didn't have much to do with them. But it was an essential part of farmers' income to have people come on their land either to shoot or as walkers, during the summer. Because, agriculturally, it wasn't a terribly prosperous area, and any extra cash you could get by your wife giving afternoon teas, or you renting a stretch of your stream to a fisherman, and so on, was all part of the necessities of life. R2: 2 Well, I think that’s very helpful about your North Welsh study. But I was looking at the series of things that you’ve done, and was reminded that the next one you did was actually a steelworkers village. I’d be really interested to hear you say something about that, because we’ve got Michael Fogarty, wasn’t it? R: (LAUGHS) Michael P. Fogarty, yeah! Yes, he was quite a character. He was Professor of Industrial Relations at Cardiff, and a pioneer of - how shall I put it? Sort of open industrial relations done by actually going to factories and talking to the workers and managers, rather than looking at the statistics of numbers of days lost through strikes and so on. And he was also - which made him popular with some, and a person of great suspicion with others (LAUGHS), a very devout, practising Roman Catholic, which is not always a good thing to be in Wales! Even in Cardiff! But he was also a well-known pioneer of a sociological approach to work and employment problems. Very active, not only in the Catholic Church, but I suspect probably in the Labour Party, but certainly in local politics. R2: 2 And what was your role in that study, then? R: Oh, I gave some lectures and did some teaching, but the research I was doing wasn't really related. R2: 2 Oh, that was when you were working for the Union, was it? R: Yeah, well, I worked for the Union, but I also did some studies of mining villages and so on before. R2: 2 On your own, was that - the mining villages? R: Yeah, yes. On my own in the sense I was the only person there, that was actually there asking questions, but Michael Fogarty, as an expert in industrial relations - his field was industrial relations - was very glad to have me do this, as were the local miners, because they knew I was on their side, so to speak, because I also worked for the Union. R2: 2 But you didn’t live in those villages, did you? R: No. No, I lived in Cardiff. I had - I'm not quite sure what to call it - (LAUGHS) - a high social position in Cardiff, but I was quite a figure in the town - not through any merit of mine - partly because my then wife was related, as a niece, to the Headmistresses of all the most important schools in the area, who were, especially the Heads, very influential in Cardiff. And also through Michael Fogarty I had a link to all the Company Directors and people who were important in industry. And also as a former official of the Miners' Union - I was Education Officer of the South Wales Miners, I was well-known there. And I also had some other very useful connections who were related, somehow, to very important people, not only in Wales, but also in London, because they were Welsh women. R2: 2 Did anything come out of your research in the mining villages? Did you publish a book? R: I didn't publish a book, no. I really can't remember. I probably wrote the odd articles. Oh yes, I did have a book, of course, but it doesn't have my name on it, I have got a copy of the final version, which was The Life of Arthur Horner, who was the leader of the miners. The actual donkey work was done by the daughter of the Professor of Economics at Keele, and they turned out to be a very tragic family, because the father, the mother, the daughter, and another member of the family, all died in about two months. They'd left Keele, and were living in South Wales, and they - I mean, it's not possible to make any analysis - they all died with different things, but they just all died in a very short time. And she left behind a manuscript - which I've got upstairs - on the history of mining, it's quite vast, which was published just after she'd already died - she was very young - which was on the life of Arthur Horner. R2: 2 And what was your role there, then? R: Well, I wouldn't want this to be published, but it was really re-writing it actually, because it had to be done very very quickly, because she was already known to be dying, and Lawrence and Wishart had agreed to publish it, and we just managed to get it to them before she died. Because although she was very good, she was economics, and industrial relations, she didn't write very well. So if you're interested, I've got a copy of it. I've got a copy of the final version, which I worked on, I haven't actually got a copy of the final printed published version, because I was waiting for the price to go down (LAUGHS) and it never did! It's the size of two Ph.D.s. It was a book that was published by Lawrence and Wishart to distribute to a list of people who they knew were interested in it. It wasn't the sort of book that goes to every bookshop. I think Keele Bookshop sold a couple of copies because everyone knew her and her father and mother, and some people in Cardiff bought it, but it wasn't exactly a best-seller. I'll show it to you later and you can see how it couldn't have been a best-seller! (LAUGHS) It's [several inches] thick, and totally detailed. So it's a book that if they can find, it will be very valuable to people who are writing on the rise and fall of the coal mining industry, but it's not bedside reading! R2: 2 Maybe we could jump on, now, to - because you mentioned about working in Africa, and you did, I think, a community study of a place called Materlo with Joyce Leeson? R: That's right, yes. R2: 2 Is it the same kind of method? R: Yes. I don't think we actually lived in Materlo. We did - yes, we did, actually. Both Joyce and I were very productive in Africa. I was supposed to - we were, I think we were married - if we weren't married, we were just about to get married: and we were supposed to go and live in Lancaster with Joyce's parents. But I never actually got there, Because I was sort of Poo-Bah in Africa, people tended to be, because they were very short of people who were educated, and so I was Dean of Medicine, Chairman of the University Hospital Building Committee. And Joyce and I had a house built for us in Materlo Township, where there were virtually no Europeans living. The only people who lived there were people who were either workers or people like us who'd had a house built for them because they were carrying out some function for the government. But we were both terribly busy, and so apart from the night, we hardly met. And she used to go and help the South African National Congress people who were living in Materlo Township, and she fell in love with one of them. So when we left Africa to come back to Britain, she said, "Oh well" - actually, she was going to marry Zola. (LAUGHS) R2: 2 Zola? R: Zola he was called. And she was going to divorce me and marry Zola, and, "Goodbye. It hasn't been particularly (LAUGHS) nice knowing you", which was a bit - it was, well actually, it was entirely unexpected at first, but then I realised it had been brewing for a long time. And so when I came to Keele, she didn't come with me. In fact, I was offered the job at Keele, and was going to refuse it because I was supposed to be going to Lancaster in a Department there, I can't remember what Department it was, and Joyce was going to resume her career as a medical teacher. But then I received two letters on about the same day - one from the Vice-Chancellor of Keele, saying "We would like you to be our Professor of Sociology. Would you like to come?" So I replied "No". And then I had a letter from Joyce saying, "I'm going to marry Zola and live with my parents in Lancaster". (LAUGHS) So instead of coming back to a post in Lancaster, which I'd expected, I came to Keele. … I don't think it's terribly relevant to what we're doing here, but there was a sort of crisis in sociology at that time, because all the sociologists that were qualified and available to take university posts, had been trained at the LSE by the same small group of teachers who are not well-regarded outside sociology, so Keele very much wanted a sociologist, but didn't want to have one who'd been trained at LSE. The reason they wanted to have a sociologist was that Lord Lindsey thought they ought to have social sciences, so the Vice-Chancellor wrote to me and said, "Will you come and be our first Professor of Sociology?" And I said, "No, I'm going (LAUGHS) to Lancaster". And then a couple of days later, when I had discovered the real [situation] the Vice-Chancellor said, "You can stop off at Manchester airport on your way to Lancaster, and I'll talk to you". By the time that day came, it was clear that Joyce was going to divorce me and marry Zola, and so I came to Manchester airport, and was duly met by the Vice-Chancellor, and given the Chair in Sociology - just like that! (LAUGHS) That's the way people used to do things in those days! (LAUGHS) ... R2: 2 Yes. Anyway, so you came to Keele, and you did another study, right at the end of your time here in Keele, in Italy, and we were hoping you could say something about that. You’ve made a note here that it started because of a friendship with … R: That's right, Hugh Faulkner... He was a retired GP who was in love with Italy, and he, like me, originated in Hampstead, and decided to go and work in Italy. And actually, we went to this place called Tabernelle Val de Pesa, and lived with Hugh and his wife in a retired castle, well, anyway, a retired sort of castle! R2: 2 What did you do in terms of fieldwork research for that project? R: I haven't thought of - it says here, "With the help of a research assistant, Monica" - that's Monica, was a local student - and I interviewed members of Catholic and some Communist families. R2: 2 About health, was it? R: Yeah. Yes, it was mainly health. And then later, [Pauline] and I went back, and it was then we met Hugh Faulkner, who was a well-known GP in Hampstead... R2: 2 So the children went to the school and local events? R: Yeah, they went to school in Italy, yes. I had actually lived in Italy before, when I - I haven't mentioned that - when I left school. I didn't go straight to [university], I was signed up to go to Cambridge, but there was a gap, and during the gap I went to Siena, to learn Italian. My Housemaster thought, "It's always useful to pick up another language, boy!" (LAUGHS) So I went. R2: 2 And you say, there, that you did keep diaries. You definitely kept diaries in Italy. “I kept diaries of all these interactions - that’s the fiestas, religious parades, communal theatre, children in the junior school …” R: Yes. R2: 2 So that material exists somewhere. R: Yes. Somewhere in this house! R2: 2 Well, I think that covers your research methods. It’s very useful to have all that extra information. And the other thing I hoped you might say something about was that you were Editor of The Sociological Review from 1970-1994, and I was wondering whether you could say something about what you were trying to do as Editor? R: Well, one of the reasons the Vice-Chancellor asked me to come to Keele, was to take over The Sociological Review, and Keele owned The Sociological Review, and since it didn't have any sociology, didn't teach sociology at that time, so it tended to be edited by geographers, and the V-C ... thought it would be a good thing if they had a real sociologist (LAUGHS) to edit it. And he also wanted to start sociology as a subject at Keele. So he asked me if I would come... R2: 2 Going back to the Review, what was your idea, did you want a broad eclectic kind of journal of sociology, or did you want to push some [definite line]? R: Well, it was political with a small p, for us on the Editorial Board, and for Keele, which was to wrest the control of sociology away from the London School of Economics! (LAUGHS) ... They thought it would be good for Keele, as it has proved to be, to have The Sociological Review at Keele, and it would be good for sociology to get sociology out of the hands of all these people at the LSE! (LAUGHS) So they looked round for someone who could be seen as a respectable sociologist, and gradually edged The Sociological Review away from the geographers who were running it at the time. Although the main geographer was W.M. Williams - Bill Williams - who is actually a very good sociologist as well. But also there was a general feeling amongst the people who controlled universities, that sociology should be encouraged, but not allowed to stay at LSE. And I think they had a good case actually, because it was very much dominated by some not very stimulating (LAUGHS) scholars, or not very activated at getting out into the world and seeing what went on scholars. There was a general feeling that it would be good to have sociologists in other places. R2: 2 So you wanted, partly, to publish people who weren’t from the LSE? R: Well, to employ, first, people who weren't from the LSE, and then to start a broader view of sociology, and take it away a bit from its statistical focus to more descriptive and more practical - what Lord Lindsey and the then Vice-Chancellor of Keele [saw as] more in touch with life kind of sociology. And they had Bill Williams who was here as a geographer, but was actually a very good sociologist, and they brought me in as someone who looked more like a sociologist than Bill (LAUGHS), and Bill and I were quite friendly actually, and we edited The Sociological Review jointly for a number of years. I can't remember the names of the people at LSE, but they were very statistically-minded, that wasn't necessarily a disadvantage, but they were very unimaginative on the subjects they studied, and they were also very much - perhaps you knew them (LAUGHS) - they were very much a little clique of people. So there were a lot of people who wanted to broaden The Sociological Review, and the Vice-Chancellor of Keele, then, wasn't technically a qualified sociologist, but he'd been interested in sociology for a long time, so he was looking round to find someone who wasn't just going to produce pages of numbers and graphs. R2: 2 So it was a platform for qualitative sociology? R: It was, yes. I think it still is, to some extent. I left the Board a couple of years ago. R2: 2 Well, I think I’ve asked you what I hoped you might talk about. Do you want to add anything? Let’s see whether there’s anything more in your notes here... Ah, particular people. Do you want to say something about Dr. Herxheimer? R: Well, I don't mind saying something about him, but I don't think he's very relevant. He was the world authority on asthma - and recently I had some breathing difficulties, and went to the Health Service here, with them, and they produced, with great pride, their spirometer - this marvellous thing for measuring breathing - and I didn't rudely tell them, but I indicated quietly that I was one of the first patients ever to use a spirometer, because it was invented by Dr. Herxheimer, who was forbidden to practice as a doctor, but who had an unpaid post at University College, London, during the War, and was also the school doctor of Highgate where I was. So he used to try out his (LAUGHS) new inventions on us! R2: 2 And you mentioned Kyffyn Williams? R: Yeah, Kyffyn was a well-known artist, and he encouraged me to take an interest in Wales. At school. He was the art master. R2: 2 Oh, I see. I think we’re pretty well finished. R: Yeah. And Bateman was a physicist, he was physics teacher at Highgate. R2: 2 A pacifist? R: Oh yes. R2: 2 That was an influence? R: Not where I put him. He was the physics teacher, and just after the War it was very difficult for schools to get science teachers, because they were all still working for the government, and Philip Bateman, since he was a pacifist, refused to work for the government, and so he was available to be a science teacher. R2: 2 Well, I think we could finish there. And thanks very much, that’s been really helpful. 
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