John Bowker Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1672/23
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NATIONAL LIFE STORIES ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ John Bowker Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1672/23 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: C1672/23 Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews Interviewee’s surname: Bowker Title: Professor Interviewee’s John Sex: Male forename: Occupation: Professor of Religious Date and place of birth: 30th July 1935, Studies London, UK Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: teacher Methodist then Anglican priest Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 09/06/16 (track 1-2), 30/06/2016 (track 3), 04/08/16 (track 4-5) Location of interview: Interviewees' home, Cambridge 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 5 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 6 hrs. 41 min. 51 sec. Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: OPEN Interviewer’s comments: John Bowker Page 1 C1672/23 Track 1 [Track 1] Could you start by telling me please when and where you were born? I was born at the Royal Free Hospital in London, and my birth date is the 30th of July 1935. And as much as you can about the life of your father? My father was originally going to be a physicist, a scientist, at Manchester, but his family were a very strong Methodist family in the north-west of England, and he became a Methodist minister. He came to Cambridge, where he played lacrosse for England and did a tour of America, which was rather eccentric in those days, unusual anyway. He then went to India for some time, in Madras, or Chennai as it now is, and there, he got the sense that the interpretation of Christianity was important, but far more important was to educate, help the education of Indians so that they would be able, competently and with enthusiasm, run the independence of India, which he was certain, even, we’re now back in the inter-war period, was right and necessary, and was certainly going to come. And he got involved a bit in that. He met people like Ghandi and C F Andrews, and, was a great enthusiast for Indians taking over responsibility for their country, their lives and so on. He came back to this country and was a Methodist minister, I think, Chippenham or somewhere like that. But found that after the experience in India he did not welcome the control that the local chapels had over their ministers, so that they couldn’t confront the local congregation, and therefore he ceased to be a Methodist minister and became an Anglican priest, and was vicar in a newly-established parish in Barking, and also in the East End of London. Then came the war, and he was actually the first Anglican vicar to volunteer as a chaplain for the Army, although, in his Methodist days he had stood on Tower Hill with Donald Soper and Dick Sheppard of St Martin’s fame, making speeches in favour of pacifism and no war and no rearmament and so on, but he, the problem for him was, as it has remained for many of us, if you become aware of immense evils being done by authoritarian governments, there comes a point where you have to say, do you resist these or do you not resist at all? And that’s always a fundamental dilemma for, for Christians. So, he went off into the Army, and was in North Africa John Bowker Page 2 C1672/23 Track 1 and Italy. And then when he came back he became the vicar of a parish near Oxford, and, he was there actually then until he died. [03:57] What did he say about the decision to move from the ambition to study physics to, to not doing so? That, physics was at that time immensely exciting. I mean Manchester and Rutherford, I know Rutherford moved on, but Manchester was, it was a very exciting place to be. And I think he was captivated by the excitement of discovering what in effect were entirely new worlds. The world as he had grown up, with a picture of the world and the strong Newtonian laws, and, the determinism that seemed to be implicit in it, suddenly just, dissolved. And it was partly the dissolution of the dominant Newtonian view, and he was well aware of the, Kelvin’s two clouds, and so on, and he, he knew what the questions were, and, that, you could say, was more exciting, or should have been perhaps. It wasn’t so, because he suddenly realised that the imaginations and the world pictures of the sciences, while there is immense continuing reliability, say, in the Newtonian laws, nevertheless, the sciences are always approximate, provisional, corrigible, and often turn out to be mainly wrong from a later point of view. And he imparted that to me, and it’s remained a sort of, stamp on my life, that it must be all about informative statements under this subjectivity of, of, it’s one point of view, and they often do turn out to be reliable. So it’s remained a fascination for him, and he passed it on to me. How does it come about that the sciences produce these amazing consequences? Not just in technology and so on, but I mean the, the insights and the transformations of medicine, so on, so on, so on, they produce these immensely exciting, exhilarating discoveries, on the basis of what turns out, in many respects, to have been wrong, that the foundations change, though not all together, I mean, foundation’s the wrong word perhaps. The roots turn out to have been planted in ways that turn out not to be compatible with where we’ve got to now. And so, the question has always remained, it was Veihinger’s Als Ob question, the ‘as if’ question, you, you investigate the world as a scientist as if such and such is the case, and yet you’re investigations turn out often to contradict the very foundations that you were operating on the basis of. So that’s John Bowker Page 3 C1672/23 Track 1 remained an interest to me. I mean how do we get things wright when we start from such corrigible positions? [07:06] And did he, did he then go into his decision not to, to study, the reasons for favouring something else? Yes, I think he found an equal excitement and challenge in the way in which people have to form their lives and live their lives under immense pressures and constraints. And therefore, he found the attempt to be alongside people to be even more important than discovering how the cosmos is. [07:43] Thank you. Did you know the paternal grandparents? Yes, I did. Because, as we’ll no doubt get to, I lived with my grandparents for a bit, on one side, my mother’s side. On my father’s side, there was a grandmother, but, whom I met, but I can’t really remember her. Thank you. Could you… I incidentally knew my great-grandmother. I was taken to see her in 1941. She was ninety-one. And I didn’t know what a great-grandmother was, and she was very Victorian, and when her husband died, she dressed herself in black like Queen Victoria, but the whole room was dressed in black, everything was draped in black, the pictures were still draped in black. And apparently, I was told this later, I don’t remember this bit of it, I remember meeting her, I was told, go and give her a hug, but I didn’t know who she was, and I apparently went up to the aspidistra draped in black and gave it a hug. But her uncle had actually been present as a farrier at the Battle of Waterloo, so we’re going back with one, you know, I’ve shaken the hand of somebody whose uncle taught her how to ride a horse who goes back to Waterloo. And I’ve always been intrigued by these long arcs of time where you can meet somebody whose uncle was present at the Battle of Waterloo. John Bowker Page 4 C1672/23 Track 1 [09:26] Thank you, that’s fascinating. Could you do something similar for the life of your mother? The life of my mother is, is more difficult, because I really don’t remember her, because she died when I was five, and, I really have no memories of her at all.