Geoffrey Hawthorn interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 23rd April 2009

0:09:07 Born in Slough in 1941; single parent family with no money; spent a lot of time with grandmother as mother found it difficult to cope; ended up in a local authority prefab and was living there when I was at secondary school; went to the local grammar school; I know nothing about my paternal side and only found out who my father was when I was in my fifties; my mother's family was downwardly mobile; my maternal great-grandfather was head postmaster in Bristol, his son was quite successful and became editor of a Bristol newspaper; they were Catholics; my grandmother worked as a telephonist among other things; she married through the Catholic church a man who was one of eleven children, son of a farmer from near Frome in Somerset; of those children, six were girls and five, boys; five of the girls became nuns, the sixth became governess to a Catholic family; the eldest boy inherited the farm and the other boys had to seek their fortune; my grandfather became a butcher's assistant in Bristol; I met him a few times although they separated before I was born; a vigorous man but not a hero as he cut off his little finger to disqualify himself when war broke out in 1914; he was clearly a clever man but angry and frustrated, and drank; the family suffered enormously from that in the late twenties; my mother was neurotic but very clever; she got a scholarship to the girls high school in Bath where they were living, but her father would not allow her to take it up; he would not allow her to bring back young men and would become violent; she migrated; at the beginning of the depression work was difficult to find but there were quite a large number of jobs in the expanding pharmaceutical and white-goods industries on the bypasses west of London; she ended up in Slough and got a job as a secretary and produced me; my grandmother did not know quite what to do with herself and she came to look after me; she had to earn money and the only way she could do so was as a residential domestic servant, which she did not like; the advantage was that she could take me with her; I would just sit in the corner wherever we were; the disadvantage was that she was always falling out with her employers; I can remember some of the characters she worked for, and they were pretty ghastly; I remember when I was about five or six, her resigning on the spot, and us being on the pavement with a suitcase and nowhere to go; we would get on a bus or train and get off somewhere so she could look for work; occasionally I would go back and live with my mother if she was somewhere that she could have me, but she was generally living in bed-sits; eventually she got onto a housing list and that is why we went to live in a prefab in  [what John Betjeman called ‘the sordid western suburbs’ of Windsor]; my mother married and I had a stepfather during those years; that was a truly working-class world; he had grown up in west London where he had become a garage mechanic; he had had a successful war, in the sense that he had enjoyed it; he was a mechanic on air-sea rescue boats and was involved in the American move up through Italy, I think very involved in the extensive smuggling rackets; he didn't really know what to do when he came back and never settled; he married my mother in 1950; he and his brother paid their way by washing cars but it turned out there was another racket of stealing cars; in the same week that I went to Oxford he went to Wormwood Scrubs and that is the last I saw of him; my mother then lived on her own until she died ten years ago in local authority housing, a very sad unsatisfactory life for her; the one thing that she did feel as a result of her own experience was that education was important; it was very easy for me; there were two emblematic moments, one was in the Thomas Grey Primary School in Slough when I was nine; a Mrs  Auden came up to me and said I was not good at anything but reading; mother was furious but I said she was right; much later  she was tickled to find that there was a job called Reader, when I got one; the second moment was at Windsor Grammar School - a tremendously important place for me; in the 1950s the universities were not expanding at all and a large number of clever students went into school-teaching; the quality of teaching in that school, at its best, was terrific; they took an interest in you, took you seriously and introduced you to intellectual discipline in various ways; I flourished there on the reading side, but I was not good at science although I was very interested in biology, in the natural world; I thought I might do biology with chemistry; it was a school that wouldn't put you in for 'O' level unless it knew you were going to do well; there were rehearsals including one for practical chemistry where we were supposed to produce some purple crystals; the rest of the form did so but I did not; the chemistry master, whom I respected, said I was the stupidest person he had ever met; this left me with the only option of arts 'A' levels

11:17:10 I wanted to go to the LSE as I had heard about the social sciences in a vague way and read some prospectuses; the BSc Econ at the LSE seemed attractive; then we had a new Headmaster who changed the uniform so it was identical to St Paul's, put the school's rugby results in the Times and said that everybody in the Upper Sixth had to go in for an Oxbridge scholarship; as a result I got an open scholarship to Oxford; I was not entirely happy, but I went and it was academically a complete disaster

12:37:05 All the way through my childhood and adolescence reading was the escape; I never knew quite where I would be living so went to eleven or twelve different primary schools; it wasn't easy to establish friends so I was a solitary child though I don't remember being unhappy; one of the reasons that I became an academic was that books were my life; in early adolescence I was introduced to the school's natural history society by a master who became tremendously important to me; the introduction to the natural world was another escape; where we lived was the area deemed for the most deprived of council tenants - when at Oxford I would go back and fill in social security forms for neighbours who couldn't write; this area was on the edge of town near the countryside where I could cycle when I wasn't reading; the master, Raymond South, got permission for himself and a few boys from the school to wander in private areas of the Royal Parks; one of these is an extraordinary area, which is still closed, an ancient hunting forest established by William I which has never been touched since, there are rides through it but otherwise it is a virgin oak forest; it was a wonderful place to get lost in and I got completely absorbed by the birds, flowers, fungi; remember going on an expedition with Professor Hora from Reading, gathering fungi for him to identify; I was very proud to come back with a fungus that was new to Britain; the two escapes for me were reading and then natural history; by sixteen-seventeen there were girls, then university

17:50:09 I remember reading very intensively and rereading, particularly nineteenth and twentieth century poetry; I loved the language, music and imagery; for a child who was a dreamer it was wonderful; I thought of doing English at university but I had a puritan, utilitarian streak, and didn't know what I would do with it; the poet I loved was Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I read a lot of modern novels, particularly European novels; growing up in the way that I did didn't produce any great affection in me for England; I liked the English imagination and countryside but I didn't like much else so was drawn to Europe; French was the foreign language at school so I liked its literature, and would read other literature in translation

20:16:05 There was no escape into religion; I don't think I have much religious sensibility; it has been a defect of my intellectual life that I hear the importance of it in other people, I read about it, but I have great difficulty feeling it; my mother had left the Catholic church and was moving left through the Protestant denominations; when I was eighteen she was a member of the Elim Foursquare Fundamentalists, an extraordinary church in Slough; the congregation consisted of three sets of people - people like my mother, the dispossessed,  a large contingent of Welsh who loved the singing, and Sikhs who had left Sikhism; this was difficult because the first two were deeply racist; the total immersion baptism was a regular trauma for my mother; I would go to a service with her occasionally where there would be speaking in tongues, and there was a lot of true or simulated ecstasy; my most direct experience of religion otherwise had been a rather unfortunate local Pastor who came into to give us religious instruction in grammar school, and would tell us that Darwin was mistaken; so what was presented to me was not appealing

24:29:08 Am interested in the sociology of religion, and now in mysticism; am just writing a review of a biography of Max Weber and one of the arguments is how important mysticism was to him; intellectually I am an atheist, but socially a tolerant agnostic; I can recognise religious feeling and need, and I am curious about it; attending memorial services shows me that we have no other way of collectively expressing  our feelings, of collectively acknowledging a life; I am moved by the services which surprises me

28:39:18 I don't like Dawkins’ views but also I don't like the public manifestations of Catholicism [and certainly have no truck, as Graham Hough put it, with ‘what goes on at the smoky end’]; I have become increasingly sceptical of the use of intellectual positions to deny other peoples lives; I have come to appreciate the radical cultural contingency of things, so that things that are done in the name of any belief I react against; I have become much more pragmatic, and more sensitive to the non-rational in human life; in that dispute as in other ideological disputes I find myself not merely disinterested but angry

30:56:06 Oxford was in some ways a disaster; I took an open scholarship in geography, the subject I was best at in school; went to Jesus College; realized very quickly that this was a mistake as there was nothing of intellectual interest in the subject for me; the really intellectual part of it was geomorphology but human geography was superficial; I realized that I wanted to look more deeply at social things and the wish to do social sciences at LSE was still there; I asked to change to PPP but at that time they only took twenty-eight people a year and were full; I then asked if I could change to PPE and the College refused; at that time quite a number of the geography scholars had changed out of geography, and the last one to graduate had got a fourth; I then decided to leave assuming my open scholarship carried an automatic state scholarship, and go to the LSE; they said I needed a letter from them to transfer a state scholarship and refused to give me one, so I was caught; the quality of teaching in geography was quite appalling and I am still very angry about it; the Professor was a man called Gilbert who had written very little, but had written a book called 'Brighton:  Old Ocean's Bauble'; we all thought this very odd as Brighton is not on an ocean; in his lectures, in passing, he mentioned that Salazar, the dictator of Portugal and then in power, was the most enlightened ruler in Europe because he was the only one to have employed professional geographers to carve his country up into administrative regions; it was not hard to get a good degree but the question was how to pass my time in Oxford; I got involved in left-wing politics, not because I was particularly left-wing but because it was intellectually exciting; I was saved by Günter Hirsch who came from a long line of rabbis in Worms; he had fled Germany in 1938 and ended up in Cornwall where he had got a job as a farm labourer; he found he could not stand the hard winter of 1940-41 and left Cornwall hoping to get to London; could only afford to get as far at Didcot and got a lift to Oxford; he got a warm job as boilerman in the Agricultural Economics Research Institute; in 1944-45 Colin Clark realized that he knew an enormous amount about European land law as he had been a lawyer; brought him upstairs, invented a job for him as University Demonstrator in Rural Social Organization, and he became an academic; he did not have many students but my Tutor at Jesus put me on to him; I explained my predicament and he agreed to talk with me on a fortnightly basis; he would suggest a whole range of literature and we would just talk about it; he glowed in my eyes because he had been to some of Max Weber's last lectures in at the start of the 1920s; he had a broad European education and opened my eyes to all sorts of things; he made it clear to me that I wasn't going mad and what I wanted to do was reasonable; after Oxford, in 1962, I didn't quite know what to do or where to go; quite a lot of people had gone on to do the diploma in anthropology, so I went and had a conversation with the anthropologist, John Beattie; he asked me if I wanted to study small groups of non-literate people who were depressed and diseased, and who in my lifetime would have ceased to exist; put like that, I did not; I had a picture in my mind of the Tchukche of north-eastern Siberia, whom I had read about, and already had a plan to work with them; Beattie had never heard of them and thought the Russians would have killed them all; thus I did not do anthropology; Günter suggested I go to the LSE; he persuaded my local authority to pay for another year; I spent a year doing a qualifying exam and then stared a PhD; I had a sociology plan because the new universities had been announced and they were going to set their face against the traditional subjects; they were to start in 1964-5 and I thought that if I did graduate work I could then teach as I wanted to be an academic; in Spring 1962 I had read a profile of Alan Little who taught sociology at the LSE with whom I identified; he was assigned as my supervisor but after three weeks he suggested I applied for a job in sociology at the new Essex University; I applied for an assistant lectureship and got it, so went to teach at Essex at twenty-three with no qualifications whatsoever for the job

44:00:05 At the LSE, Ernest Gellner made an impression on me; David Glass was very remote but I had a certain respect for him; Donald MacRae made one remark which stayed with me, that sociology meets its match when it has to deal with religion; I could see exactly why; it stayed with me because I thought it true but also because it put its finger on a weakness of my own, that I didn't understand religion; at the time I took him to be saying that sociologists can forget that religion is founded on a faith; sociology has its origins in the regressive rationalism of the eighteen-century, so people not best fitted to understand religion; I think now what he may have been saying something that I only came really to understand later in life, that sociology was in danger of being a reductive subject - it would take beliefs and emotions and reduce them to other phenomena; when I read Durkheim's 'Elementary Forms', I thought it a clever book, but I could nevertheless see what MacRae might have meant; just in the last month I have come to understand Weber's interest in mysticism and can now see what he may have been driving at

48:29:03 Starting at Essex was utterly terrifying; I was the first non-professorial appointment so I was on every committee to plan everything; the first year teaching, on the social structure of modern Britain, didn't worry me very much because at LSE I had done some extra-mural teaching on the subject; I had taught in Brixton with West Indian immigrants; that was a good education for me because these people did not have an academic interest in the subject but wanted to know how Britain worked; there were four members of the sociology department at Essex - the Professor, Peter Townsend, Herminio  Martins, Paul Thompson, Ernest Rudd, and me; the department started a master's course in the first year; the week before it started, Townsend came to me and said that Rudd wouldn't teach the methods course, would I; I had been to a methods course at LSE which was wonderful, run by Claus Moser, Ernest Gellner and Ronald Dore; I had to teach it and can remember that first class; all these students had done social science as undergraduates so feared they knew more than I on the subject; it was fun until 1968 and the revolution when I found myself in the middle; I thought the University authorities were behaving obtusely in reaction to a student protest, and it was better managed elsewhere, such as Sussex; on the other hand the revolutionaries' demands were ludicrous and fantastic; because I had the ear of both sides and was sympathetic to views on civil rights, Vietnam, but also to progressive forms of university governance; found myself having to chair meetings trying to bring the two sides together; also chaired meeting between students and the townspeople of Colchester; later in life I read something by David Daiches who was at Sussex in those years talking about their educational philosophy which was to concentrate on the modern world but not be subject to the tyranny of the present; I didn't put it that way to myself at the time but realize that was exactly what I felt at Essex; it had decided to teach sociology, politics and economics, but not history or philosophy, or English literature; I thought that this was going too far, that the curriculum together with the force of these events of 1968 suggested that this place was subject to the tyranny of the present; I was also politically lonely and emotionally lonely; the Sociology Department was huge by then with twenty-eight people, twenty-seven of whom were married; I was getting rather fed-up with being introduced to people at dinner parties, and in fact I met my first wife in London when I was on leave from Essex; I decided to leave and come back to an older university; there were jobs in Oxford and Cambridge for which I applied; the Oxford interview was first, and the sociology job was tied to my old college; as I had made myself unpopular in the past there, I was told that all the University people had voted for me, all the College people against; was offered the job at Cambridge; the interview was in the Old Schools, February 1970; there was a power cut in the middle of the interview and candles were found for the rest of the interview; remember that Meyer Fortes was on the committee, asked most of the questions, but also answered them all himself; Leach gave the impression of being asleep then asked how I thought men were different from animals; the job was a university lectureship in sociology (statistics), to teach methods; I didn't really want to do this but I wanted to get out of Essex; John Barnes very politely asked if I knew anything about statistics, which I said I didn't; in the darkness I stumbled out of the room followed by an administrator who asked me how much I was being paid at Essex, and told me I was being grossly overpaid; I think in the darkness they must have made a mistake, but anyway I got the job