Robert Hinde interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 7th and 20th November 2007

0:09:07 Born in 1923 in Norwich; father was a GP who had married a nursing sister at Guys where he had trained; youngest of four children; mother was Isabella Taylor from a family in Kirkby Lonsdale, Westmorland; her father had died early and her mother had brought up six children by starting a cake shop; several of the girls had courageously left to work elsewhere; my mother was very loving and I got a great deal of her attention as the youngest; think my security stems from having had a very good relationship with her; father was a  conscientious GP with an intense interest in natural history and also the ancient history of the Middle East where he'd served in World War I; sure that his encouragement of my natural history instincts were important

3:35:20 Went to Oundle school at eleven which was too young and I hated it; I made no real friends there; known from early on as "the professor" as I wore glasses; not myopic but father mistakenly thought I had a squint aged two and had to wear glasses; not very good at games; I was entered for School House as the head of house, Kenneth Fisher, had an acquaintance with Kirkby Lonsdale; first boy to go into a science school certificate form where the form master, Ian Hepburn, to whom I owe an enormous debt; moved to his house where he was a wonderful bachelor housemaster where there were concerts on Sunday nights; he was a keen naturalist and wrote a good book on flowers of the coast for the New Naturalist series; took boys rock climbing and took me bird watching a lot; Fisher was also a keen birdwatcher and also took me out; at the end of my time at Oundle the war was beginning and the wife of his son, James Fisher, the famous ornithologist, came and taught me English and was a great influence; she made me not just a scientist by supplying me with books to read during the war

8:56:07 Hepburn was a chemist; I was not allowed to do biology at school as that was for farmers; no good at Latin but did chemistry, physics and maths; other hobbies included fishing; collected butterflies; another master who was good to me was Capt. Collier M.C. who had retired from the Indian Army and was a butterfly collector; from Oundle got a great deal of encouragement from the staff; made few friends and was bullied a bit by the boys

11:03:00 Attempted a scholarship to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and did reasonably well in chemistry and physics but failed on maths; after I had been in the Air Force for about six months the Headmaster arranged a closed exhibition to St John's; had signed on for air crew at seventeen and a quarter but not called up until the end of 1941; stayed on at Oundle and then worked for the Young Men's Christian Association, driving a van taking tea round to the anti-aircraft sites in Norfolk; also worked with James Fisher who was doing rat control research in the Port of London; while working with him remember going to the telephone in London Zoo and being told that my brother was missing; he was the eldest in the family and an RAMC doctor and his troop ship was torpedoed; parent had no news of him for several months and eventually found a letter in a Liverpool newspaper listing the survivors; father got in touch with one of them and learned that my brother had died a very horrible slow death of wounds and exposure in an open boat in the Atlantic; effect on my parents was exacerbated a couple of years later when they heard that I was missing; the effect of bereavement is not often talked about in the context of war; in my childhood I lived next door to a family with children about the same age and were very close; Graham, my immediate contemporary also died in the war, shot down in 1944, and this influenced own later interest in war

16:24:24 Later interest in religion was not influenced by work with YMCA at that time; called up and sent to Southern Rhodesia to train as a pilot; went on to flying training school and flew tiger moths; group of us were selected for Coastal Command and sent down to George in South Africa to train as a navigator; came home on a troop ship via South America; took months and months despite being on a fairly fast troop ship without an escort, having to keep watch for submarines; I was then a mild sceptical Christian but the man I was on lookout duty with was a passionate atheist; talked for weeks and weeks and when we got to England, he was a Christian and I was an agnostic; eventually joined a  Catalina crew, flying boats, and posted to a squadron operating in the Indian Ocean from Ceylon with an outstation in the Maldive Islands; we were looking for the Japanese fleet and submarines; meant very long trips over the sea of eighteen hours or so; not especially dangerous; glad to say I was never involved in killing anybody; the dangers were either running out of fuel, bad weather, or while in England, flying into a mountain in bad weather; one crew did find the Japanese fleet and just lasted long enough to get the radio message out; came back to England and trained as a Sunderland pilot; did a few operational trips but then the war was over; because I had an exhibition at St John's I persuaded the Air Force to give me early release and came up to Cambridge in January 1946

21:49:08 Did a lot of bird watching and the first academic lecture I gave was to the Oxford Bird Club on the birds of Southern Rhodesia; I had started to take an external London degree by correspondence in zoology and subsidiary chemistry and I took and passed the latter so I only had zoology to take; eventually finished it immediately after my Cambridge degree and got a class lower in London than I got at Cambridge; thought I would get an extra vote but they had abolished university seats in Parliament; at Cambridge I read Natural Sciences, initially physiology, chemistry and zoology, then part 2 zoology; I got a 2:1 in my first year then a first in the two following years; spent a great deal of time on the Cambridge sewage farm watching migrant birds; organized watch at different sewage farms all over the country to see how migrant waders behaved; during that time fortunate to come across a bird on the Cambridge sewage farm that had never bred in Britain before, or so was believed, and that was the moustached warbler; the record was accepted by the British Ornithologists Union committee until last year when it was questioned and has been removed from the British list; was important to me as it got me my first job; talking of Cambridge, I did make a number of friends among the ex-servicemen; what was extraordinary was that we never talked to each other about our war experiences; the man with whom I shared a room had shot down three Junkers 88 in fifty minutes and was a D.F.C. and an Air Force Cross which he got after the war for flying planes through the sound barrier; another chap had no legs and I have a vivid memory of us all going to the pub and his not being able to keep up and calling him peg legs, but never knew how he lost them; I have reflected on this more recently; why? partly not wanting to shoot a line, partly guilt at being a survivor or having killed

27:25:17 I had two supervisors in St John's in zoology, Frank Hollick who was very shy, and each would sit on the edge of our chairs in his room and neither of us say a word for what seemed ten minutes at a time; he was very interested in the aesthetics of animals but not a very good teacher; the other was Colin Bertram who had been in charge of fish cultivation in Cyprus during the war to feed the troops with carp and about that time became secretary of the British Genetical Society and was always talking about people being from good breeding stock; lovely man, Palmer, taught me chemistry; was incredibly old; Benians was the Master at that time, a classicist; Jack Goody was there but we didn't know each other then

30:04:06 David Lack, the ornithologist, had been to see the moustached warbler and offered me a job as a research assistant in Oxford with the possibility of doing a D.Phil.; he wanted me to do a comparative study of the feeding behaviour of rooks and jackdaws; struck me as boring, it was in relation to Gause's hypothesis that no two species with the same ecology could exist together at the same time; David was moving from robins to studying the ecology of great tits at that time; suggested instead doing a behavioural study of the great tit and that is what I did; lovely time, working in Wytham Wood just outside Oxford; I wandered round with a notebook and field glasses writing down what I saw;  so happens that my daughter is now a research fellow at Newnham and is also studying great tits but she has incredibly complicated apparatus; what has been nice for me has been to work as her unpaid assistant counting eggs in nest boxes; Lack was not a good supervisor; he corrected the English but wasn't especially interested in what I was doing; lucky in Oxford because Niko Tinbergen came to Oxford when I was a D.Phil. student and as he had no students of his own I had his undivided attention for a while; he was the person who really influenced me; he was a very charismatic man who did everything himself

34:02:13 Lorenz, an Austrian, did some very interesting work in 1930's and in a sense got ethology going; Tinbergen was working independently in Holland and got into contact with Lorenz shortly before the war; Lorenz was taken prisoner of war by the Russians; Tinbergen was taken into a hostage camp by the Germans and had a rough time; I was at the first conference where they met after the war and they tried to have a good relationship with each other, but Niko said to me that the thing he couldn't bear was hearing German voices in the corridor outside his bedroom; although they were both passionately interested in animal behaviour, Lorenz was an ideas man, Tinbergen was an experimenter; there were really two ethologies, Lorenzian and Tinbergian; I was very much influenced by Niko;; Lorenz was very kind to me until I wrote a paper criticising his model of motivation and then he used to speak of Niko and me as the English speaking ethologists as though we were a separate race

36:41:05 At Oxford I was newly married and didn't have much time for college life although I was a member of Balliol; did a D.Phil. in eighteen months; another piece of luck, Bill Thorpe of Jesus College, Cambridge, was wanting to start an ornithological field station to study the relation between instinct and learning and he asked Lorenz to come and be the curator but he had another job; he then asked Reg Moreau who also turned it down, and then he asked me; I came in 1950 to Madingley and worked there until I retired; we spent the first year putting up a perimeter fence and aviaries; we had no building except for a small Nissan hut which had been left by the Home Guard which we used as a food store; the University had just acquired the whole of the Madingley estate and that is why Thorpe had been able to establish it there; I did more work on great tits and finches for the first few years; then did a little work on imprinting; Thorpe was interested in how birds learnt to build nests or whether they did so instinctively; a problem still not fully solved; I got slightly diverted into studying the endocrinological basis of nest building because I wanted to have canaries that would breed all the year round; we could show the interaction between changes in the external world, like daylight, the endocrine changes in the bird, changes in the behaviour of the bird which produced new stimuli to which it responded, which produced new endocrine changes in the bird; I was working at the same time as Danny Lehrman who was an important influence on comparative psychology and ethology was working in Rutgers in US and he became one of my closest friends; he was a very overweight New York Jew, very clever, very verbal, and his work on that topic has been carried on in the Institute of Animal Behaviour in Rutgers to this day; at that time we used to see each other about once a year; remember once arriving at five in the morning and Danny keen to go bird watching and by ten o'clock we'd seen fifty-one species

42:15:19 I was extremely fortunate that it was so easy to get money then and I had one grant application turned down because I had not asked for enough money; was in contact with a Colonel in the United States Air Force based in Brussels and he came to see the work that I was doing with canaries; as a result he wrote a grant application for me to the American Air Force and I got support from them for three years; he did a follow up application on sensory deprivation in canaries; he was a cardiac physiologist whose aim in life had been to see what he could put across the generals in Washington and I was his second best; the best had been a study of Indian fakirs on the grounds that they could help American airmen if they came down in the sea

45:38:50 During this time I was existing for several years without a proper job, then I was made a senior assistant in research and eventually made assistant director of research, but I never had a proper lectureship; applied for a demonstratorship in psychology and didn't get it which was all to the good as it would have involved a lot of teaching; much freer to do research of the sort that I wanted to do; had been working  on imprinting in parent-offspring relationship in birds; this came to the ears of John Bowlby who was a psycho-analyst; at that time he was very concerned with the fact that parents were not allowed to visit their children in hospital except in visiting hours; felt this was bad because before the war he'd worked a lot with adolescents who had got into trouble and found that nearly all of them had had a separation experience from their parents; this was only clinical evidence and he wanted experimental evidence to try and confirm his thesis; I used to go to seminars at the Tavistock Clinic in London which he ran; we had nothing theoretically in common but an interest in the parent-offspring relationship; taught me an important lesson that it is not the theory but the problem; after a year or two John helped me get money to set up a rhesus monkey colony in Cambridge; we had six groups of rhesus monkeys each with a male and three or four females and their young; we spent a lot of time working out methods of recording behaviour which were subsequently used by primatologists in the field; we were able to show in the end that ten days separation could produce effects that we could pick up two years later in their inability to cope with stressful situations; this research took about ten years and we were able to contrast what happens with situations comparable with mother goes to hospital-infant stays at home, infant goes to hospital-mother stays at home, both go to hospitals together, both go to different hospitals; symptoms were exactly the same in monkeys as in young children but the details differed because of the different social structure of monkeys; made me realize both the value of comparative studies and their great danger; in humans the child is less affected if mother goes to hospital and he stays at home in a familiar environment; in monkeys it was the other way round because when the mother came back she had to re-establish her relationships with all the other group members and didn't have any time for a demanding infant; the social factor made the difference; however it did help Bowlby to get the hospital regulations changed; my second wife works in attachment theory still; have not personally looked at bringing up children in different cultures; Mary Ainsworth's work on the Buganda; [Macfarlane comment on Western child rearing compared with Japanese]

54:37:18 During that time offered a Royal Society Research Professorship which has allowed me to follow my research interests wherever they have led me; got it in 1963; Louis Leakey had come to the conclusion that the secret of man's origins lay with the great apes and that women were better at studying them than men; he had found Jane Goodall and wanted her to get a Ph.D. and wanted someone to supervise her; Professor Hall at Bristol was the only other person working with monkeys in the United Kingdom and he had died from a monkey bite; I got the opportunity to supervise her and later Dian Fossey on gorillas; spent time in their camps getting all the excitement and pleasure of their research on chimps and gorillas without having to do any of the hard work; subsequently advised many students who worked in their camps; although I never did any fieldwork on non-human primates I have had a considerable number of students, some of whom became distinguished, who worked on their sites; memories of supervising Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, neither of whom liked writing academic papers; they taught me that animals are individuals and not just members of a species