Life Story Interviews Martin Redfern
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NATIONAL LIFE STORIES ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews Martin Redfern Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1672/29 This transcript is copyright of the British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] IMPORTANT Access to this interview and transcript is for private research only. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators ([email protected]) The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1672/29 Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews Interviewee’s surname: Redfern Title: Mr Interviewee’s forename: Martin Sex: Male Occupation: Science writer and BBC Date and place of birth: 18th July 1954, Rochester, radio science producer Kent, UK Mother’s occupation: teacher Father’s occupation: oil industry chemist Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 30/8/16 (track 1-2), 27/9/16 (track 3-7), 11/10/16 (track 8-11) Location of interview: Interviewee’s home in Shorne, Kent Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661on compact flash Recording format : audio file 12 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel Total no. of tracks 11 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 10 hrs. 35 min. 15 sec. Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: OPEN Interviewer’s comments: Martin Redfern Page 1 C1672/29 Track 1 [Track 1] Could you start by telling me when and where you were born? Yes, I was born only about five or six miles from here, in Rochester, on the eighteenth of July 1954, at about ten minutes to midnight. And as much as you can about the life of your father? Yes. Well, his dad was a builder, I think his grandfather had a building firm in north London, but my grandfather was about the only one of, I’m not sure if it was four or five children, to reach the age of twenty- five, as a result of TB. And because he had TB himself, in spite of volunteering, he wasn’t allowed to go and fight in the trenches in the First World War, which is probably why I’m here today. For health reasons he was told he’d got to move out to the country, so he moved out to Hertfordshire and had a chicken farm during the war, I believe, and took a weekly vanload of eggs into London. So it wasn’t a particularly well-off family, but fairly comfortable. Comfortable enough for my father to be sent to Berkhamsted School, which was a public school. And from that he went up to Imperial College, London to do chemistry, but by the time he graduated it was 1941 and we were at war, but they thought that chemists were far too valuable to send to the frontline, as it were, and he should be a chemist to help the war effort. He was offered a job with ICI for, I think, it was an annual salary of £400, and was about to accept that when the Anglo-Iranian oil company, now BP, offered him £700 a year if he would go out to the Abadan refinery in Iran, which he did. And indeed, just before he died last year I recorded an interview with him and he describes the trip out there on a boat in a convoy and some of the convoy got torpedoed and he was in the fastest ship, which went on on its own off to Freetown, Sierra Leone and round the Cape and he spent Christmas 1941, I think it must have been, in Bombay and eventually arrived in Abadan and was a chemist at the refinery. But because he was a chemist they thought, oh well, you must know about explosives, so they gave him a sort of honorary military title so if Rommel got there he’d be a prisoner of war rather than a saboteur. And he wired the whole refinery, about the biggest in the world in those days, up with explosives in case the Germans got there, but they never did. And then in 1947 after the war, he’d been home on leave and got engaged and my mother went out to Iran in a tanker in 1947 and they got married in October of that year in Persia. [03:38] Thank you. Could you do something similar for your mother? Yes. She was daughter of one of four sisters. She was born, I think it was near Appledore on Romney Marsh, her father was a farmer there, and I think she lost a brother when he was about six months old or something. I haven’t recorded the interview with her yet, she’s still alive, at ninety-five. I’m not sure if he was older or younger, but anyway, she ended up being the only child, but when she was only one, her father ran off and left them, which was very scandalous in those days, and he went to Canada and my mother’s mother lost what little money she had going to Canada to try and find him and bring him back, and he didn’t. So my mother was Martin Redfern Page 2 C1672/29 Track 1 brought up by a single parent without very much money. Her mother was a teacher. And actually, well, she spent some of her early childhood with the family of her aunt, who had married a schoolteacher in Brazil, in Sao Paulo. And some of it in another aunt’s house in Cuckfield, which is a lovely old house in the High Street, fourteenth century house. But eventually her mother got a job in, up in Hertfordshire, near where my father was living, and actually, I’m not quite sure how the families first met, but my paternal grandfather gave my maternal grandmother a loan to help her build a house in Bovingdon in Hertfordshire. And supposedly my father used to wait for my mother after school, they were childhood sweethearts, I think. My mother did a degree in French, nominally at Queen Mary College, London, but to her joy it was evacuated to Cambridge. And then she did teacher training and tells me that when she was doing her final exam for teacher training in the Institute of Education – not sure if that was actually in Senate House or Bedford Square, anyway, up there – she had to write in the margin each time an air raid siren went off, saying ‘immediate danger’ and they would give her credit if her handwriting got a bit spidery or something. But yeah, she taught French. Then after she married, my mother, well, I became her fulltime job I think mostly, though she did a bit of supply teaching when I was a child. [07:08] Did you have several childhood homes or just one or a small number? When I was first on this planet we lived the other side of the Medway, in Rochester, in Horsted Way. But my father got a managerial job – they came to Kent, I should say, still working for BP, but after the Persians had kicked them out of Abadan and they were building the Isle of Grain refinery here and my father had a job there, first as a chemist and then into management – and he was involved in supervising all the shipping and which jetty which ship should come into and all sorts of emergencies and so on. And in those days there wasn’t an M2, Rochester got very congested and because he was often on call, possibly to respond to emergencies, they wanted him on this side of the Medway, on the east side of the Medway, so that he could get out there quite quickly. So they told him he’d got to move, and they were very good, they helped him with the moving costs and so on. And he looked around a lot, I know, I was four at the time, I don’t remember it very well, but I do remember one old house that they looked at in Frindsbury, where there was a bath standing on the landing not plugged into anything, I just remember that as being quite amusing. But eventually he bought the plot of land which we’re now sitting in, in Shorne. His father was horrified that he’d paid £1,000 for three-quarters of an acre of land, that was terribly expensive. And he designed the house that’s behind us and we moved there in January 1959 when I was four and a half. My parents lived there until 1999, at which point I had separated from my then wife and needed somewhere to live, they wanted somewhere smaller, they couldn’t quite face selling this house, not least getting me to clear up my childhood fossil collection housed within it, and so the only way they could get me to take responsibility for it was to sell me the house.