NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum. Life Story Interviews

Malcolm Jeeves

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/07

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/07

Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Interviewee’s surname: Jeeves Title: Professor

Interviewee’s Malcolm Sex: Male forename:

Occupation: Professor of Date and place of birth: 16th November, 1926 Psychology Stamford, Lincolnshire Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: teacher accountant Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 11/05/2015 (track 1-4), 12/05/2015 (track 5-9)

Location of interview: British Library, London

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 9 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 7 hrs. 24 min. 08 sec.

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: OPEN with four sections closed for 20 years: Track 1 [34:33-37:03], Track 1 42:00 -43:05], Track 2 [26:46-29:25], Track 4 [43:02-44:02] Interviewer’s comments:

Malcolm Jeeves Page 1 C1672/07 Track 1

[Track 1]

Could you start by telling me when and where you were born?

Yes, I was born in Lincolnshire, a town called Stamford, right at the bottom of Lincolnshire. Interesting place. It’s a bit like St Andrews in the sense that it’s, it’s a very old place, it’s the oldest royal borough in England. And, so yes, I was born there in 1926.

Thank you. And, as much as you can tell me about the life of your father.

My father? My father was born in Holbeach, which is part of Lincolnshire, in the Fens. And, yes, he went into the First World War, and he served throughout the First World War in France and in Italy. And then afterwards he married my mother, who came from Bourne in Lincolnshire, and they settled in Stamford, and he was, nowadays you would call them an accountant but in those days he was called a cashier, in sort of charge of the office of a, of a large brewery in Stamford. And he spent the rest of his life in that job. But he was also very active in civil affairs. He was on the town council for decades, he was the mayor, he was a senior alderman, he was chairman of the governors of various schools in the town. And my memory of him is that he gave as much time to civil affairs, but he was also very involved in the life of our local Anglican church, St George’s Church, Stamford, which is an interesting church because it’s the sister church of St George’s, Windsor, one of the two churches for Knights of the Garter. And so, he was in fact the church warden there for forty years, I think the longest serving church warden. So, he gave a lot of service to, to the community in that sense, yes. Yes. And also, my mother was involved in that she was headmistress of the local church school, St George’s School, Stamford. And so between them they were pretty involved. Since I’m just chatting about them, one interesting thing is that, I wanted to find out where I got my name from, Malcolm, because I couldn’t think of anyone in the family, and, it turns out that my mother was quite a good opera singer at a local, you know, amateur level, and at that stage they had a, an up-and-coming young conductor called Malcolm Sargent, later to become Sir Malcolm Sargent, and he, he and his sister were good friends of my parents, and so my mother sung regularly under his conducting, and so I was Malcolm Jeeves Page 2 C1672/07 Track 1 called Malcolm and my sister was called Dorothy. So that’s where we got, I later discovered, where we got our names from. And later in life, it was quite fun, every now and then I’d get a, a programme from a concert, and it would say, ‘For Malcolm from Malcolm’, from Sir Malcolm Sargent. And we were both at the same school. The school was a, it’s a very old school, the second oldest of what are called public schools after Westminster, but it had its ups and downs. And, I was there as a day boy, but there were boarders as well. But Malcolm Sargent was also there, as s day boy. It had quite a strong emphasis on music. There was another fellow who was there called Michael Tippett, a composer. So there was quite a… And I was taught by some of the same people that taught them, but without any success with me, and great success with them. Yah, so, so that, that was, that’s roughly that sort of background.

[04:25] Thank you. And what do you know of your father’s childhood?

What do I know of his childhood? He was one of a large family of, I think, it would be, it would be, I think it would be nine children. And his father worked on the railways at that time. And, I don’t think I know much more about it than that really. Obviously they weren’t in a position to go very far in education. One of his brothers did, one of his brothers managed to do an external London degree I think, and one of his sons, who is a cousin of mine, became a university professor, he went to Cambridge before me, and he, he’s now retired, lives in Cambridge, he’s, he’s about five years older than me. So, they were a fairly ambitious family I think. But I can’t tell you a lot more than that I’m afraid.

OK, thank you. And did your father say, talk about his, his service in World War I, did he talk about it?

No, this, I, I regretted afterwards, he never did. He used to go down very regularly to his regimental reunions in London, I remember him getting, getting his dinner jacket out and everything to go down to these things. But I regret that I never asked him details of, of what he did, you know. He was in the, he was in the Signals, yah. And… Yah. And he nearly died in Italy, I remember that because on one occasion, Malcolm Jeeves Page 3 C1672/07 Track 1 years later, my wife and I took my father and mother on a holiday in Italy and I remember him saying he’d like to go to the River Po. So I wondered why he’d want to do that. And we got there, and this was where he, he was so ill, he was strapped to the back of a donkey to get him across, and… But apart from that, he never would talk about it, and now I greatly regret it. Yah. Yah.

[06:49] Thank you. And, the sort of early life of your mother, do you have any details of, of that?

She was a, she was, there were two children. She, her sister died, as they often did in those days, in the first year. They lived in Bourne. My grandfather also was on the railway. I don’t know very much more about it than that. I mean I know, I know the church they were married, because in fact, we have a family painting by an Academician of the Royal Academy that was done of their wedding, but that was pinched by my sister so, I don’t have that. But no, they were, they were a fairly upright, god-fearing, social conscience sort of family I would say, yes. Yes.

Your mother’s, your mother’s?

My mother’s parents, yes, mm.

[07:55] Yes. Did you know personally any of the grandparents?

Yes I did. My mother’s father, I used to see regularly, he would come over from Bourne, which was only ten miles from Stamford. And, yes, he was, he was an interesting character. And my, my father’s father as well, didn’t see him so often. But I can’t say I really can remember having any long conversations with them. They were just grandparents, and you rather hoped they’d give you some sweeties each time they visited, you know, it was that sort of a, that sort of relationship I think. Yes.

Malcolm Jeeves Page 4 C1672/07 Track 1

The one who, the grandfather who came over more, the maternal grandfather, what do you remember of his, of his character? You said that he was an interesting character. And…

Well he was a, he was a benign gentleman with a large moustache and, yes, he, he was just, nothing, he was just a nice man, you know, I can’t remember any more than that I think really. But his wife died quite young, and so I only remember her from photographs of this rather, rather severe looking, tall lady, you know, yes. Yes.

[09:12] Thank you. And, is it, so that you lived in one sort of childhood home for most of your childhood, or did you move…?

Yes we did, we lived in Stamford all the time. We lived in one address to begin with, and then, I forget how long, I was quite young when we moved to another address, and we lived there. That was mainly because it had a much bigger garden and my father was a very very keen gardener. And, we moved there, and they lived there for the rest of their lives. Yes, that’s right, yes.

Could you then go back to your childhood and take us on a tour of that house, the second one, that you’re likely to remember more, and sort of, take us on a tour round it, describing it. And if in doing that you sort of picture your mother or your father or siblings in particular places doing particular things, tell us about that. You’ve mentioned a sister, I don’t know if you had other…

Yes. Well, yes. It was a semi-detached house and it had, later they built onto it additional rooms and things. But it had the usual dining room, sitting room, kitchen, you know, these sort of things downstairs, and upstairs it had one, two, three bedrooms at that stage. It had a, a reasonably big garden with a stone wall round it which, as I say, was the pride and joy of my father. He… And, what do I remember of it? Yes, my sister was a year and nine months older than me. She was an absolute bookworm, and my memories of her are of being curled up almost always in a chair with a book. I wanted to be outside climbing trees and doing fishing and active things like that. But she, she was a real bookworm. She, yes, talking of her, she, being a Malcolm Jeeves Page 5 C1672/07 Track 1 year and nine months older than me, she went to the local high school right from the beginning. They thought I could fend for myself, so I went to, as I say, St George’s Primary School, and from there I went to the Bluecoat School, and at age eleven I, I won a county scholarship which took me to Stamford School. But as I say, she had gone through the high school thing all the way. Yes, she went, she went to Cambridge, to Homerton College, and became a teacher, and I can talk more about her later if you like. Because she married quite a well-known scientist, and they lived in London. He was a professor of physics at London. So, but yes, we can talk about that later. [12:13] But yes, yes, as far as the home’s concerned, it was a, because my mother was a headmistress and my father was out, we had a person who came in and looked after us, and sort of, would, would get lunches for us sometimes. And I can remember these girls, one was called Lily, I forget the other one. But anyway, but they, I suppose my parents employed them because they were both out working. But yes, it was a, it was a, yah, it was a… Fortunately it was very, it was a very happy home, yes. Yes.

When your mother was at home, what was she, what did she tend to be doing, where was she?

Well she tended to be doing the things that, around the house that she wanted to be done, or preparing lessons for, the next day for, for teaching. Yes. Or, each year when the local operas were on, she would be, we had a piano of course and she would be practising some of those things. But, she was out in the evenings quite a lot at that time for rehearsals of the local opera. As I say, my father was out in the evenings quite a lot too with the Council meetings and, and church meetings. So yes, it was a… Yah.

[13:47] Could you tell me about, then, your outdoor play which you’ve mentioned?

Well, I, I liked to be running around doing things all the time. I was, I liked to be out in the country, because it was, it was really… Stamford’s not a very big, well it’s Malcolm Jeeves Page 6 C1672/07 Track 1

10,000 people, but you get out in the country very easily, and, I used to like to go off into the local meadows; I used to, when I was old enough to ride a bike, I would be riding all round the countryside with, with friends. Going, in the summer I’d go into the local river and swim or I’d go fishing and… Yah, I wasn’t, I wasn’t a bookworm at all in that sense, I liked to be out and doing things, yes. And that sort of activity level I think continued throughout my school career as well. I was fairly active in school. I mean I was, in most sports I was fairly active, I was captain of the school hockey team and I won the open 100 at sprinting and all these sort of things. So… And I was in the school swimming team. So I, I, yes, I was, I was a fairly active person all round, and very involved in team things, I liked team, team activities, and I was head of my house at school, that sort of stuff. So it was, it was a, it was a very privileged upbringing, I think, to, to have a school as good as that on the doorstep, you know, where… And it was good in the sense that, although quite a lot of the boys were boarders, there were a group of us who were not, so it was a good mixture of, of… In fact there were three houses, there was a house which was a school house, which was the boarders, there was a town house, those who lived in the town, and a country house, those who lived out in the country and came in each day. And in that sense it, it was a very good, very good school. It was a very strict school. In those days there were, you know, the practice of, of discipline was fairly severe, you know, beatings were a standard part of life. But, in my experience they were never used in any way which was not, in the social mores of that time, was not inappropriate. But, yes, and, yes and I, I had some funny experiences of that. I don’t know whether… Oh, I might as well tell you because we can edit them, I mean…

Well just, you can’t say too much about anything, so…

Let me give you an example. I mean I, I went, I moved into Stamford School when I was, as I say, when I was eleven, and in the, in the first… moved into Form 3A. Now 3A was a very old building, all stone, a very long classroom with benches across and seats that you sat on, and the seats had a support at each end and one in the middle. And I was on the back row of the… But the support in the middle had gone from the one I was on, and so between periods I used to sort of, use this as a, a prototype trampoline and, you know, see if I could touch the ceiling. And on one occasion I was up near the ceiling and the door at the far end opened and the headmaster, Canon Malcolm Jeeves Page 7 C1672/07 Track 1

J D Day, quite a severe-looking man, walked in, and of course all I could do was land. And he had a funny way of speaking, he said, ‘Oop, boy, what do you think you are doing?’ And I said, well, you know… Anyway, he said, ‘Follow me.’ And so I knew what was happening, so I followed him all the way through that part of the school, across the road to the other part of the school, up to the headmaster’s house, into his study. And in those days of course, at that age you wore shorts, at that age. And so, ‘Bend over.’ And I bent over, and, I got five of the best. But my motions overwhelmed me I think at the fourth one, and I suddenly realised, there was a trickle on the carpet. And, I, I, you know, I’d made a mess on his carpet. So I quickly got up and left. That was fine. Years later when I was head of house, and the head of house also used to do the beatings, in fact we would do, be able to beat the boys even when the masters couldn’t, the master had to ask us to do it. Well then, we used to go there ever Saturday morning to have the book signed of any beatings that had been done by the headmaster. And I used to go back, and I used to look in the corner, and I could see a slight stain on the carpet, and I thought, well I got my own back on that occasion. Anyway, that, that’s a bit trivial, but, yes, it’ll give you a flavour. But, it was a… Yes, and the other time I remember getting a beating, again it sticks in your mind, I don’t know what it was for, on this occasion the head of school, the boy, head of school, gave me the beating, a chap called J P Draper. And I remember on his backward swing he happened to hit the light, which made a nice ding, which amused me and him. And that was it. I mention this because, we had great regard for him, and he was on the beaches on D-Day, and he died as a captain on the beaches on D- Day. You know, you remember these people, they were, they were local heroes as a boy, and you don’t bear them any grudges, because, it was just part of life in those days. Yes. And quite a lot of my other friends – he was older than me of course, but there were others in my house who were just marginally older than me, and, as you saw, I was in the Army from ’45, they got in a bit before me, and one in particular who was in my house, a year or two older than me, a good friend, but he was in Arnhem, and, in the Parachute Regiment, and he died there. So, you know, it’s all very vivid in those days, because these were people who you had grown up with, you knew well, and but for your date of birth, you would have been with them. But you just weren’t, and so, by the time I got to Germany, of course the fighting had finished. We can talk about later, but… Yes, I’ve gone off at a tangent there, but anyway.

Malcolm Jeeves Page 8 C1672/07 Track 1

No that’s interesting. The beatings, were the beatings, did they alter according to who was giving them, or, was there a sort of formula that was always the same?

In what sense?

Well, when you say beatings, is it always that, being bent over and, thing?

That’s right, you bend over, yes, and you get, you know, it depends how many you get, depending on the severity of the offence, you know. Yes.

And what was used to…?

Just a cane.

OK.

Just a cane, yes. Yes, yes.

And always in the same place?

Well yes. You used to do it in, in a study, yes. Or, if it was the headmaster, you were taken to the headmaster’s study and it was done there, yes. Yes. Mm.

[21:23] Thank you. Going back to your, your outdoor playing. When you weren’t playing outdoors, when you had to, for whatever reason, play indoors, what did you play with, at home?

I was very taken up with two things, my Meccano, building things, and my Hornby trains. I just loved both of these. Yes. And I, my ideal Christmas present was some additional bits of Meccano or some additional bits of rail or whatever for my, for my Hornby trains, yes.

Malcolm Jeeves Page 9 C1672/07 Track 1

Can you, as far as you can remember it, describe what you did with the Meccano, what you built?

Nothing more than a tractor and a trailer. I sometimes see trailers going round farms here and I think, gosh, that’s what I was trying to build, you know. But nothing more elaborate than that, no.

And what do you remember about your Hornby set-up, if you remember anything in particular?

Well I, I mean, the exciting thing was, when I got double rails, and I was a nuisance with my parents then, because there wasn’t a spare room for setting it all up, so I had to move the furniture all round the dining room, and they allowed me to this so that I could have all the rails going all the way round the room, with sidings and stations and things. Just setting that up and playing with it was, it was, it was very enjoyable. Yes.

And when you did read as a child, what did you read?

I can’t remember to be honest. I honestly can’t remember. Whatever, you know, books happened to be lying round the house. I mean we had all the usual Dickens books and these things. But I frankly don’t remember, I just sort of, no.

Were there comics and magazines and that sort of thing?

No, not comics. We took, we took newspapers, and I read some of those. But not, not, there weren’t comics that I remember, no. Interesting. But of course, in those days, particularly during the war years, we, we were very diligent listeners to every news bulletin, and we, usually at six o’clock in the evening we would sit round and listen to the news, and again at nine o’clock, and, you know, see what was happening in the world. Because we were to some extent in the line of fire, I mean we had a few bombs dropped round us, and, certainly in my bedroom, which I used to… When… The Germans would come over and they’d bomb our industrial base in the Midlands, and on the way back they’d be chased by our fighters, and I would look out of my Malcolm Jeeves Page 10 C1672/07 Track 1 bedroom window and watch them coming. And at that stage, they would drop anything they had left, and that’s the only reason we got, I think, a few bombs locally. Again, silly things you remember as a schoolboy. We had a 2,000 bomb, it was a very big one, dropped just beside the school, and that was great because we had three days’ holiday, because the whole area had to be cleared while bomb disposal people came, and, they finally released it. The only other bomb I remember being dropped in the town was… Oh I should have said, my father was an air-raid warden, and the town was divided into four areas, and he was the head warden for one quarter of the town. And I can remember the day another bomb dropped, and it dropped in his area, and so, I went off like a shot to see where it was, to see what he was doing. Again, mercifully, although it exploded, it didn’t hurt anybody. But there were other occasions when things would happen. I remember one afternoon I was, I was saying earlier, I was, I used to have music lessons, piano lessons, I did that for about, eight years, not with any great success, but, I passed exams and things, but… The lady who taught me, I remember one afternoon, in the middle of the afternoon – late afternoon, having a lesson, and suddenly there was a distraction because, a terrific sound of machine-gunning. This, this German plane came down the street outside where I was playing, machine-gunning all the way down. That was very exciting. And then it went off somewhere. And I couldn’t wait to get out of my music lesson because I wanted to see what else had happened. And I leapt onto my bike. And in fact, it had gone down and machine-gunned a factory, the only factory in the town, not too far from where I lived. And so I went down and had a look at the bullet holes all the way through the factory. But you had these sort of, exciting episodes, and then it was all rather dull again until the next one. Yes that’s right, another thing we used to do, you see, going out in the country. After the bombers had come over, the Germans being chased, we used to go out and collect incendiary bombs. A lot of them they dropped in the fields. So we used to go out and collect those. I don’t think they were dangerous, they were just incendiary bombs, but… Yes, because near to us, right next to Stamford, there was… We were surrounded by Royal Air Force bomber stations and a fighter station, Wittering, and so the fighters went up from there, and so, and there was a lot of activity from there all the time. So that, that kept life for a small boy quite interesting, you know. Yes, so it was… Mm.

Malcolm Jeeves Page 11 C1672/07 Track 1

What did you see of that? I mean for someone who hadn’t lived near a, a sort of, military airfield during wartime, what sorts of things did you see happen?

Well we’d see the planes taking off and landing, we’d see them going off to chase the German bombers. We’d just see a, a lot of activity. And also, we’d see the bombers going out at night. Four bomber stations, Luffenham and others around. They’d go out, and then, you would hear them coming back, and sometimes, you would realise from the sound of the engines that there was something wrong, but, yes, so you, you would hear them coming back. And Stamford being not too far from the coast, and The Wash in particular, during those years you used to get these rumours that the, that there’d been a German landing on The Wash, and I remember some occasions when this happened, and there was quite a state of concern when we’d heard that there had been, you know, a German landing, but of course it never was. But, these rumours would circulate because of our proximity to The Wash and to the coast. Yes.

That’s really interesting. Where did the rumours come from? Is this people talking to each other, or was it on the radio, or…?

Yes it tended to come because of the radio, yes. You know, that there’d been movement of boats seen out in the North Sea and so on, and, this of course, through the process of rumour, got turned into a landing, particularly just after Dunkirk when we were expecting a landing, and that’s when, that’s when, that’s when… Yes. And of course at that stage, at the school it made a difference, because one of the first things we did… The school had very very extensive grounds. One of the first things we did, we all had to go and dig our own trenches in the field – in the grounds of the school, away from the building, that we’d, that we’d have to go to and get in in the event of an air raid. And I remember going back years later and seeing these trenches, of course filled with water by now. But yes, so we had to dig our own trenches, and, to, to get in. And we used to have these episodes when there was a, a false, when there was an alarm given, so we all had to, in a very disciplined way, troop out from school and go along, across the playing fields, and go to our trenches ready for, just to make sure the system worked, yes.

Did you have your own sort of, spot in the, in a particular trench then in the…? Malcolm Jeeves Page 12 C1672/07 Track 1

No, you just dug your own, looked like a little grave, everybody dug their own. You’d have this little trench that you dug that you would get into. Yes.

[30:17] And was there at this, at Stamford School, a cadet corps that you were…?

Oh yes there was.

Can you tell me about that?

A very serious one. I was very much involved in that, yes, I was. And, yes, in those days of course, if you were in the Cadet Corps, and you, right, during the beginning of the war, if you did… now what was it called? There was a particular exam you took. But if you took that exam and passed it, which we all did as we went through, then, in those days, in the early days, that would almost certainly take you straight into a commission in the Army. Later on of course, you had to go through a long training, as I did, for an officer, but… But we all did this, Certificate A it was called, we used to do a Certificate A. So yes, and it was all taken very seriously, and, yes, the Army Cadet Corps has always been a very strong part of activities at that school, it had a long, it had a long history of this. Let me think, a recent one. Oh, the chap who was, now what was his name? The fellow who was in the Kosovo thing, and was head of the General Staff. General Sir Mike Jackson, he was at the school. Quite a number of people like that. And, it was all taken very seriously. And we, we used to do, we had a wonderful, charismatic chap in charge called Captain Pollard, later he became Colonel Pollard, and he, yes, he made us work very hard. I mean we did a lot of drills, and we were out in the country on activities. And for boys of course it was exciting. It wasn’t just sort of, it wasn’t sort of, just for play, we had camps, and we were firing real guns with real ammunition at real targets, you know, it was… But this is because it was during the war and life was for real, we weren’t sort of playing and then forgetting about it. And, of the not inconsiderable number of people who, who died during the war, they would have gone through this, and, had that training, yes. Yes. It was taken very seriously. Yes.

Malcolm Jeeves Page 13 C1672/07 Track 1

Could you describe one aspect of it, and that’s the, the rifle shooting, how was that set up?

Well, two things. We had our own range, riffle range, for firing .22 rifles in the school, and so, you did regular training on that. And when you went to camps you then had automatic weapons, and I remember Sten guns, where you would fire at targets, you know, they were in a quarry actually, so the bullets didn’t go astray. This is interesting to me because, we get on to this later, when I was in the Army, I was an Infantry officer, and each Infantry battalion has what’s called a weapon training officer, and, I was selected to be trained for this, and so I was sent back from Germany where we were serving to do a two-month course at Hyde in the south of England. Or Hythe was it, Hythe I think. So I became the battalion weapon training officer. So I spent the last part of my career doing nothing but training people to, well not, not only train them but making sure everybody was up to scratch with rifles, Bren guns, mortars, machine guns, pistols, the lot. I mean that, that was my… And I thought back to the days when, from school, you know, I’d, this is not new to me, I’d learnt all this at school, but, so it gets you off to a, it got you off to a head start, once you were called up into the Army, because, other people called up, it was all new to them. If you had been through the corps, and I was a sergeant in the corps, you’d done it all before, and so it made getting on in the Army much easier. Mm.

[34:26] Do you remember, from this period as a weapons trainer, the sort of specifics of a particular weapon that you had to train people in using? […] [37:03] We did lots of interesting things, we were in Hamburg, and we, I joined my battalion just inside Germany, at a place called Delmenhorst, and then we moved up and we became a garrison battalion in Hamburg. And one day I was called by the adjutant and told to go and collect some war criminals, you remember the trials of the war criminals, who had been found guilty of death, and, I was told that these were war criminals whose offences had been mainly against Poles and Polish Jews. So I was told to… And I took my platoon with me… And we collected, I forget how many, could have been eighteen of these war criminals. And I took with me also our battalion intelligence officer, who was senior to me, and, so when we signed for these Malcolm Jeeves Page 14 C1672/07 Track 1 things, in the Army you sign for everything, he said, ‘Right Malcolm, I’ll sign for all of them but this one.’ I said, ‘What about this one?’ He said, ‘You sign for this one. And don’t take your eyes off him until we get him safely into the hands of the Polish army.’ Because he was the second-in-command of Auschwitz concentration camp, a man called Aumeier. I’ve still got a photograph of him that was taken at the time with me, and me. And so, that, that really made me think, you know, we didn’t know all that much at that stage about the concentration camps, but in later years, as I read more, I realised, this man was described as having been responsible for the death of two million Jews in Auschwitz. So, you had, you had experiences like this that made you realise the, you know, the reality of life. And my, my roommate, I can still remember, my roommate, there were two of us in each room, of junior officers, and, I remember on one occasion he drew the short straw and, he had to go and do a firing squad. Well that’s not a nice thing to do, you know, you, you take, you take a section of twelve men and you, you have to do a firing squad. I remember him coming back and, and I said to him, ‘Peter, what was that like?’ And he said, ‘Well look,’ and he showed me this little white disc with holes in it where the bullets had gone in. Now I don’t know whether this affected him deeply, but interestingly, not long after that, I was at that time already a practising Christian, and, I, I heard that there was going to be some event, a house party up in Schleswig-Holstein that a couple of Anglican clerics were coming out to, Cuthbert Bardsley was one of them, he became Bishop of Coventry. I, I thought I’d go to this. And I said to my roommate, this chap Peter Absolom, who wasn’t a Christian, ‘Look, I’m going to this thing. Would you like to come with me?’ And he came with me. And to cut a long story short, I don’t know whether this firing squad affected him or what, but not long after that he became a Christian. And to cut an even longer story short, he finished up becoming an Anglican parson, and he did that very faithfully for the whole of his career, and he died a few years ago, before me. But, so yes, these, these, those days, these were quite, these were events that, sort of stood out in your memory, because they were, you know, not part of everyday life, they’re fairly traumatic, some of them; others we can talk about another day, but, yah.

[40:55] What was the, what was the white disc that he showed you, how did that relate to the…? Malcolm Jeeves Page 15 C1672/07 Track 1

Well you put the disc over the heart of the chap you’re going to shoot, so that they all get the bullets in the right place. The interesting thing about a firing squad of course is that, all but one… Oh, one of the people had the blank cartridge, so, of the twelve soldiers who have to take part, you can always think you were the one who didn’t shoot him, because you had a blank. But of course, being the weapon training officer, I knew that all these chaps knew when they were firing a rifle whether they were firing a blank or a real one, so it was really a farce, I mean, you knew whether you’d got a blank or not. But in theory, you could say, well I wasn’t the one that shot him, all the others was. But anyway, that’s…

What was the difference then in the, in the feeling of shooting a real, a live round and a blank?

The way it hit your shoulder, when you, yes, the recoil, the recoil, yes. Mm.

[42:00] […] [43:05] Thank you. We’ll come back to lots of these things. Could you, though, although they were very busy, as you’ve told us, I’d like to know about your memories of time spent with each of your parents as a child. So, when your mother was not preparing lessons, or, or not doing other sorts of community and church things, what do you remember of time spent with her as a child?

[pause] Nothing stands out. They were just happy, relaxed times I think. Yah. Yah.

Did you, did you go particular places with her, or do particular things with her?

Well we used to go over sometimes to Bourne where her parents lived, you know. We didn’t have a car at that stage, during the war, we went by bus. But yes, I, I would, I would go with her to things. I don’t remember a lot more than that really, no. But my father, he, he, I was going to say, we, he was a regular churchgoer, and we’d go to church in the morning and in the evening. But in the summer months he Malcolm Jeeves Page 16 C1672/07 Track 1 was very good, and in the afternoon he would take me off down to the local river, the River Welland, and we’d have a jolly good swim together, in the, in, you know… And then we’d get back in time to get ready for church, and we’d go to church again. So he, he was, we led, led a full life, yah.

[44:39] Could you then tell me about your experience of Christianity as a child, both sort of, at home and at church?

Well, at home it was… We didn’t, at that stage, say grace at meals, I mean, it was just taken for granted, it was part of life. But at church, it was an interesting church in that it was what in these days would be called Low Church Anglican. What I didn’t realise until later was, our rector had been, his first degree was in science, and his second degree was in theology from Oxford. And his name was the Reverend Rees- Jones, a Welshman. And I often wonder, looking back, whether my understanding that there’s no necessary conflict between science and Christianity had its roots in this very thoughtful and highly intelligent man. I can’t say, looking back, he preached sermons which I can remember or which grabbed me; at the same time, he certainly didn’t preach sermons which provoked me to say, how on earth can you believe that? So I suspect, in a sort of, in some sort of way, and he was a lovely man, I mean I knew him and his family well, I also had quite a good voice actually, and I, and I, I was the leading sort of, soprano or treble in the, in the church choir, and I did a lot of, of that at school as well. I mean I can talk about this later, but… So yes, I, I used to enjoy being in the choir; I used to enjoy doing the, at Christmas time we’d do, whatever they do, you know, in church they’d do a, some sort of, a little story of, of the Christmas thing, I used to enjoy doing those things. Yeah, I think I used to enjoy going to church. I mean I would… Certainly, every family has its apocryphal stories, but, because my father was church warden he had a special seat the back, and, I would sit between him and my mother or beside them. They’d tell the story, I don’t know whether it’s true, of, at one of the harvest giving, Harvest Thanksgiving, when the whole church is covered with all the produce, you know, and at one point during the service, during a hymn I think, they looked down and I had gone, and they heard a rumbling noise. And they found I had collected all the potatoes from the bottom of one of the pillars and I was using these sort of, as a sort of, a, as a, playing bowls Malcolm Jeeves Page 17 C1672/07 Track 1 down the aisle. So I used to amuse myself, I’m sure, in those sort of, as any small child would, I mean you don’t, you don’t listen to everything that’s happening. But, yes, I, I enjoyed it, but… [47:49] And it certainly wouldn’t have been till my early teens that I began to give any serious thought to what it was all about, you know. But when that happened, it was not so much because of the church, because, the headmaster at the school, and it’s a public school, for reasons I don’t understand, I think he was a, he was a bit concerned at the Christianity that was being taught. Because, every day we all had to go into school chapel, every day began with school chapel, this was all part of it. That of course could become quite formal, and I suspect he may have been concerned about it, because, surprisingly, he invited in a very enterprising man who came in to run, on a Sunday afternoon, a Bible class for anybody who was interested in thinking more seriously about these things. And quite a lot of us went to it. And, it was really through this man that I and quite a lot of the others like me found that we got a better understanding of what had been a rather dry academic subject and its real meaning and personal relevance. And it was through him… I mean, as you know, in the Anglican Church you’re baptised, and then when you’re about twelve you’re confirmed, and I went through that as we all did in the school chapel. But the reality of that didn’t really dawn on me until I was about fifteen, as I began to think about it through the influence of this very open-minded and thoughtful man who was, you know, teaching us about these things. And it was through him really that I, I decided that, OK, yes, I did… I didn’t have any great hang-ups, but I hadn’t really had any sort of… I’d made no personal commitment to this at all. And at that stage that I, I sort of, nothing unusual at all, I mean, you know, I just made a personal commitment, and, sort of, it went on from there really. Yah.

Before that point, did you pray?

I certainly prayed in church, you know, you prayed the prayers that you all prayed, you said Amen, and I did this. Yah. But I don’t remember, in inverted commas, ‘saying my prayers’ each night as some children did. I don’t remember that. I think I might have done in the first part of the war, because quite a lot of us did then. Yes, yes, mm. Malcolm Jeeves Page 18 C1672/07 Track 1

Do you remember your parents praying at home, before the point that you are thinking about these things?

Not at home, no. No, they, they were very, they were very, they were very reserved about their faith. A real faith, but they were very reserved about it. Yah. Mm.

Could you then say more about this man who took the Sunday afternoon Bible classes?

Yes. His name was David Tryon. He, he was, I suppose he appealed to boys because he was a very athletic, very good sportsman. And as well as these activities he, he also ran camps in the summer where you did all sorts of outdoor activities which appealed to boys. But he was a very undemonstrative in one sense man. He never put pressure on anybody at all. I remember a story about this from a friend of mine who became quite a distinguished professor in Canada. I remember chatting with him once about, about this. He had become a Christian through this same chap. And we were at… I said to him, you know, ‘How did you become a Christian?’ And he said, ‘It was on one of the camps,’ and they’re called camps but they were at a, they were, they were at various halls, it was at a place called Morton Hall, and we were staying there. And this, this friend of mine was obviously interested and impressed with what David Tryon had said at evening prayers. And, so he went up to David Tryon afterwards, he said, you know, ‘I really am very serious about what you’ve been saying. I’d like to become a Christian.’ So David Tryon, you know, said, ‘Oh well, you know, I’m busy at the moment. I’ll see you in the library when we finish coffee – or cocoa,’ you know. And so this fellow went into the library after cocoa and David Tryon came in, and David said, ‘What do you want?’ And this fellow said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I, I’ve thought a lot about the Christian faith, you’ve been talking about it, and I’ve decided, you know, it make sense to me, and I want to become a Christian.’ And so, David Tryon said to him, ‘Oh well, get on with it then, I’ll see you at breakfast. You know what to do.’ Now he told us, you see, if you want to become a Christian, it’s a matter of personal prayer, of personal faith in Christ. And so he didn’t make a big emotion. He said, ‘Well, all right, you know what to do, get on with it. I’ll see you at breakfast.’ He didn’t say, ‘Well now, come on, let’s kneel down and let’s Malcolm Jeeves Page 19 C1672/07 Track 1 pray,’ and… ‘Get on with it then.’ It’s a matter-of-fact thing. And he was that sort of person. And that I think is why people who came under his influence, many of them went on to a real Christian faith throughout their later lives as well, and I can think of some who became quite well-known figures. But, yes, it was a sort of, it was real but it was matter-of-fact. There was no pressure, no emotionalism, none of this massive evangelism stuff about it at all, which of course I don’t like anyway, so, yah.

[54:01] And in the Sunday afternoon classes, what was the content of those, in that, because you said that they differed from what was happening before in the chapel?

Well he would, he would just go through, sometimes a story, a series of stories from the Bible, and he would relate these stories, and draw out their significance. And we’d sing, some slightly more lively hymns than we were used to doing when we were singing psalms in chapel. So these appealed to us as well. I tell you who also went there as well. And… There was a… What was the name… Inspector Morse, you know those books, written by Colin Dexter? Now Colin Dexter was a, when I was head of house, he was a small boy in my house, he was four years younger than me. And because I went to this Bible class, as happened some of the other boys went as well, and he went as well, and so did his brother, John. Both, both of his brothers, through these Bible classes, became very definite Christians. And I remember meeting up with Colin Dexter years later when he was quite famous, and, we met up at a nice hotel in London, had dinner together, and we’d had a few bottles of wine and we were, you know, rehearsing these things. And he began to talk about David Tryon, and he said, ‘Oh I don’t know,’ he said… He said, ‘It was all a bit emotional.’ So I said, ‘Come on Colin, that’s rubbish, you know, you know it wasn’t emotional at all.’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘you’re right, it wasn’t at all, I quite agree.’ And his brother John, who became… But Colin by this stage had not turned his back on it, but he, he sort of felt he didn’t want to go along with it then in the way he had done when he was at school, although his brother… They both read Classics at Cambridge, and his older brother remained a very committed Christian throughout his life, but… Colin’s still alive of course, and I’ve got seen him recently but, yah, he… So, you know, there were quite a lot of people like that who were influenced by this, this chap David Tryon, and… So I think it was an influence for good, and as I say, I think it was, it Malcolm Jeeves Page 20 C1672/07 Track 1 was credit to the headmaster who was a, a canon in the Anglican Church, to bring, be willing to bring in somebody to present the Christian faith in an informal way that wasn’t tied. So, it wasn’t tied to college, to school chapel all the time; it was something that was real outside a school chapel.

Ah, this was the first instance of the discussion of Christianity outside of chapel then in a sort of group or a…?

Yes, that’s right, yes. Yes, that’s right. Yes.

[57:08] And you, you went to the camps at Morton Hall?

I went there, yes, and, and, and they… We also had camps under canvas, real camps under canvas, in Anglesey, at a place called Benllech Bay, and I used to go there as well in the summer. Yah.

Could you tell me in detail what happens on…?

Well at those camps, they’re, it’s really outdoor activities. I mean I, I climbed Snowdon three times. We used to go out hiking, swimming, exploring. There were games in this farm, field. We were living under canvas. It was really the sort of things that young boys like to do. And then in the evening we would have a sort of singsong, and at the end of the evening, after we’ve had our cocoa, there’d be a three- minute epilogue given by this chap, and that was it. Yah.

The three-minute epilogue…

Would be about various aspects of the Christian faith. Yah. And we’d sing some, what were called choruses, which were rather jolly Christian songs, you know. And, yah, and, quite a lot of us, you know, were influenced by it. And, certainly after I came out of the Army, years later, and I was up at Cambridge, I occasionally went back and helped then, and I took along friends who, from Cambridge days who, who found them quite helpful as well. But then as leaders rather than boys, you know. Malcolm Jeeves Page 21 C1672/07 Track 1

But there were a number of ex-service people like me who had been in the Army who went back to help out. So… And it went on for years, I mean I didn’t go all that much longer because I, you know, I was all over the place, but, overseas. But, yah. And, I couldn’t tell you whether they’re still going on, I don’t know.

And did the Morton Hall camps differ from the…?

They were the same, except they were, they were in a school building, sort of… Morton Hall was I think at that stage a prep school, you know, so they rented this prep school. The only difference was, that was in a building and the summer ones were actually, they were camps, they were under canvas, the bell tents, you know. Yah.

And did, is it David Tryon?

Tryon.

Tryon. Tryon, that’s right.

Yes.

Did David Tryon actually take part in the climbing and, and the outdoor stuff during…?

Oh yes. Yes he did, and he was a very good, he was very athletic. And I thought I was quite good at tennis at one point. I remember playing him at tennis in the vacations and he would just tan the hide off me every time, he was… In fact he used to, he used to, he used to go and compete in the pre-Wimbledon things when he was a young man. Yes, he was a… So he was a, he was an outdoor, friendly, uncomplicated sort of person, you know. Was a no-nonsense sort of person as well, yah. Yah.

What memories do you have of what he sort of looked like?

Malcolm Jeeves Page 22 C1672/07 Track 1

Oh. He was, he was, about six feet tall. A well-built, athletic-looking sort of person. Friendly demeanour. Yah, just, just a pleasant sort of person. Yes.

[1:00:36] Thank you. Could you tell me now about the, the first time when you felt that you were learning science at school? And I don’t know whether this happens at the pre- school, at Bluecoat, or Stamford, where, but when do you…?

I think Stamford School, when I, when I went there, and I think it was then you began to do laboratory work in physics and chemistry. This is when it, you know… And mathematics of course. So, I think, yes, I, I was reasonably good at mathematics and physics and chemistry and these sort of things. And I enjoyed them a lot, but to be honest, I didn’t really get a clear idea which way I wanted to go, in fact when I took… In those days there was a thing called the School Certificate, and you took subjects right across the board, and after that you were put into the, the arts sixth or the science sixth. And to my horror, when I went back after that, I had done well in everything, I found myself in the arts sixth. So I went to the headmaster, I said, ‘Look, you know, I really want to go in the science sixth.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘if you want to into the science sixth, go into the science sixth. It’s just that you did well in, you know, in your languages and all these sorts of things, so we thought we’d put you in there.’ And so, I went into the science sixth and sort of stayed with it from then on.

Were there parts of science as a, as a school age child that you found interesting in particular or enjoyable in particular?

I always found experimental work in physics and chemistry the interesting part, yes, I loved doing experiments. Yah.

Are there school experiments… I know this a bit of a tall order, but are there school experiments that you can remember in detail, experimental work that you did at Stamford?

No, not really. I mean, you did all the usual chemical things, inorganic, organic, you know, you, you produced all the usual bells and smells and that sort of stuff, and… Malcolm Jeeves Page 23 C1672/07 Track 1

No, I can’t remember all that much more about it. My final year I worked very closely with a chap who was much brighter than me called Norman Mabele. He was a brilliant chap, he got an open scholarship at Oxford as a chemist. But he was a very interesting chap, because he was also a Christian. But anyway, we, we were very good friends, and, he went off into the Navy and I went off into the Army. Then afterwards he came back and got a First in chemistry at Oxford. Then, interestingly enough, he decided to get ordained. So, next time I saw him, many years later, he was chaplain at a, and a science master, at some school in London. So… Yes, but he, he was very bright indeed. Yah. But he didn’t, he wasn’t a sporty sort of person at all, and I always had difficulty in dividing my attention between academic things and sport, and, sometimes academic things lost out against the sport really. But, yes, we’re all different.

Did he, that is Norman, talk about that at the time, the fact that he was a Christian and a keen young chemist?

We, we talked a bit about our faith, because, by that stage, you know, about to go into the services, and I remember, after we’d taken our final exams and things, going for a long walk with him – he lived in the country – walking along beside a river, we were talking about the future. And, he, he just talked about, we just talked naturally about the fact, you know, that, this is part of our lives. We didn’t know what the future held, but, time would tell. And as best we were able, we, we felt we wanted to remain as, you know, committed Christians. But, we didn’t know what it would hold. We’d wait and see.

Did you, either of you, perceive or feel that there ought to be some sort of tension between science and Christianity at that age, at that school, at this time?

No, I don’t think we did. No, that never really came up. It all seemed, it all seemed part of life, you know. It just seemed, you know, science, we were learning all these things about the, the world we lived in through our physics and our chemistry. It all made good sense. We knew the sort of questions our science was attempting to answer. I suppose we were aware of the fact these weren’t the sort of questions that you ask if you’re portraying the world through art or music or religion. We realised Malcolm Jeeves Page 24 C1672/07 Track 1 there were different sort of questions. And so, somehow it never seemed to occur to us that there was, where the conflict was. We didn’t see it.

[1:05:58] To what extent was your interest in science or your learning in science continued out of school by reading, by listening to certain programmes, by talking to people who weren’t teachers or other pupils about science?

In those days there wasn’t a lot. There was no television, there was very little media, very little on the radio during the war about science. So I think the answer to that is, very little, because very little was accessible, really. No.

[1:06:33] And, schoolmasters in the science subjects, physics and chemistry…

Yah.

Would they, in class, or out of class, ever raise questions of the relations between science and religion?

No, they didn’t. And what happened during the war was, in the latter part, we got a physics master and a chemistry master who, I think, looking back from these days, I think both of them were, were Christians, because I think they went to local churches in Stamford. I say I think, because, this was never part of their remit as a science teacher. But, there was never the slightest hint in the way they taught science that there was any sort of a conflict between this and their, and their personal faith, I don’t know what denomination they were. So in that sense I suppose one was fortunate, you didn’t have any, they weren’t raising questions and so on. No. No.

[1:07:33] And to what extent was the biological science and, perhaps even less likely, human science, part of the curriculum at Stamford School?

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We didn’t have any biology. That was missing. And I didn’t really get into that until I went up to Cambridge after the Army to read my Natural Sciences, and I continued maths, physics and chemistry. And then, I added in zoology, and, which was a very important part of my later career in evolutionary psychology and so on. So, but we didn’t actually have that at all; it was only the physical sciences.

And do you have any sense of why that was?

They couldn’t get a decent master. There wasn’t anybody to teach it.

And had you had any biology or perhaps natural history at an earlier stage in school life?

No. No. No.

Did you have any outside interest in sort of, natural history? Sometimes parents point birds and that sort of thing, where you, you gain an interest in nature. Did you have any of that?

No I didn’t. No, I didn’t. No, I didn’t. No. No I didn’t.

Thank you. Could you tell me then about the transition from Stamford School to St John’s?

[End of Track 1]

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[Track 2]

Could you tell the story, then, of the transition from Stamford School to St John’s, including decisions made about what to read, why you made those decisions, that sort of thing?

Yes. Well, during my last year at school, I, I wanted to get into Cambridge, and, I went up initially and sat for a scholarship exam at St Catharine’s and Selwyn College, partly because they had some exhibitions that were related to sporting ability. At that stage I was captain of the school hockey team and I was quite a reasonable player. Anyway, I got, I got admission, I got admission to Selwyn College on the basis of, of that, and I was going to go there. And then the following year I went and sat the scholarship exhibition exam at St John’s and I got an exhibition there. And so, I gave up my position at Selwyn and I accepted the exhibition at John’s. The exhibition at John’s was what is called a closed exhibition, all you have to do is reach the standard of a scholar and exhibitioner, but it was one that was linked to Stamford School, because one of the early founders of Stamford School was linked closely with St John’s College. It was called the Exeter Exhibition. So anyway, I got that. [01:50] And then, around the same time, or even before I got that, I had my call-up papers in 1945 and I was waiting to be called up. And then later that year I was called up and I went into the Army in November ’45. Went through the usual basic training in Yorkshire, and then I did my regimental training in Lincoln, because I went into the Lincolnshire Regiment, which was my county regiment. And while I was doing my regimental training I went to the Officer Selection Board which I passed, and then I was just waiting to go to my officer training, and so, I continued in Lincoln, actually, they gave me a job training recruits as well. And then I went to my officer cadet training in, where was it, in Staffordshire, at Trentham Park. I did four months there, passed out in December ’46, was commissioned into the Lincolnshire Regiment. Had a short leave and then I went to a camp at Strensall near York, which was a training camp for soldiers and where we were waiting to go overseas, at that stage we were still going overseas to replace people. And so I was there a brief period, and then, we went overseas. We went from Hull to Hook of Holland, and I took a, a platoon of recruits or soldiers, and we went to this place called Delmenhorst. And after a brief Malcolm Jeeves Page 27 C1672/07 Track 2 period there, we went on up to Hamburg where we became the garrison battalion. At this stage, it was just after the war, and as you remember, Hamburg was virtually bombed out of existence, there were really only about three big buildings standing, and two of them were hotels which we requisitioned as officers’ clubs. So, the population were living in those terribly conditions, really like animals underground, all underground. But we were at barracks called Wansbeck Kaserne, on the outskirts of Hamburg. And there I, yes, then I spent, yes, time there, and it was while I was there that for a brief period I was, ridiculous when you think about it, I was only twenty, I was an acting company commander. Because, the major in command went away for a while, and I was selected to replace him. And then, not long after that I was sent back to Britain to train as a weapon training officer. And then I went back to Germany again, and, we moved down to a place called Hildesheim near Hannover. And I completed my service there, and then, I was demobilised from there. There was one interesting incident there that could have changed my career. I was always a bit keen and energetic in anything I did with enthusiasm, and obviously, for whatever reason, I’d done reasonably well in the Army, and while we were at Hildesheim we did the first Trooping of the Colour of the… Oh by that time, I had moved into your regiment, the Sherwood Foresters, that’s where they needed young officers, so I was sent to join them. And we did the first Trooping of the Colour, and I was selected as what is called Ensign to the Colour, who is the one that carries one of the Colours and commands the parade, I did all that. And afterwards in the mess, the commanding officer, our colonel, got me in a corner with the, General Robertson, who was head of the Rhine Army at that stage, and who had done the, had come to see the Trooping of the Colour. And obviously he’d been primed, and so this General Robertson began to tell me why I should become a regular officer, why I should stay in the Army. And, I, I think I was polite, but I said, ‘Well, thank you very much, sir, for your suggestion, but I’m getting out as soon as I can, because I have a place at Cambridge and I want to go and do that.’ And he turned his back on me and walked away. It may not have been the right thing to say, but, I must say I was tempted, because I, I was, in so far as one can, I was enjoying it, and I seemed to be doing reasonably well career-wise. [07:25] Well anyway, then I came out, and I came out earlier in ’48, and because I was quite rusty I went up to Cambridge and I did what’s called a long vacation term, you can do a six-week term in a long vacation, which was good because it gave me a chance, Malcolm Jeeves Page 28 C1672/07 Track 2 since I had decided to add zoology to maths, physics and chemistry, to do zoology. So I did a crash course on sort of, elementary biology, and also, refresh the memory traces a little bit on the other sciences. And then in October started my, my full course, and did maths, physics, chemistry and zoology. [08:20] And I did those for, well in those days if you had been an ex-serviceman you got a degree in two years, so I, I got my degree in two years. And then, I decided I didn’t want to go on with that, but I wanted to do experimental psychology. Now there’s a story attached to that. When I was in the Army in Hamburg, in the evenings we had a bit of time for reading, and I had been reading around various things, and I came across a book called Psychology in Service of the Soul. I thought, that looks interesting, by somebody called Leslie Weatherhead. So I read this book. I thought it sounded fascinating. And so I read round it a bit more, and I thought, you know, I think I’d quite like to do psychology. So when I got up to Cambridge I said to my tutor, I said, ‘Look, I, I’d rather study psychology.’ And he was a very wise man, he was a zoologist, Colin Bertram, he said, ‘If you want to do psychology seriously, then my advice is, do a degree in Natural Sciences first, so you’ve got a good scientific basis for your work in psychology, and then you can do psychology as Part II of the Tripos.’ So I took his advice. And in those days the Psychology Tripos, you could do it in one year or two years, and, I didn’t want to hang around for two years. So I did it in one year. And, that was a very good year, because in addition to doing my psychology under Sir Frederic Bartlett, who was the doyen of British psychology at the time, and he was the professor, you also did other courses. I went and did a course under Lord, oh dear what’s his…? Names go. He was a Noel laureate in physiology, Master of Trinity. Anyway, he did a course on physiology, linking to brain processes. I did that course, and that I found absolutely fascinating. And they also, at the same time, for the first time ever there was a course in the Zoology Department on animal behaviour, given by a chap called Professor Thorpe, Bill Thorpe. I went to that, and that eventually became a book called Learning and Instinct in Animals, written by W H Thorpe. Now, this is important, because I had the influence of evolutionary biology and behaviour from Thorpe, I had the influence of physiology and brain processes from, a chap whose name eludes me, and then I had the experimental psychology. And it’s these three which seemed to gel, and these became the major strands of my subsequent scientific career. What was interesting is, after I’d finished my degree Bill Malcolm Jeeves Page 29 C1672/07 Track 2

Thorpe asked me if I’d like to have a research job with him at the Madingley animal behaviour place. I went to look at it, but I decided not. But later on when I had done all sorts of other things, been a professor in Australia, I was a professor here, Thorpe came to give the Gifford Lectures here, and he spent six months here, and a lot of the time with me and my department. And interesting about Thorpe, I never knew it at the time, but he was a Quaker, a very quiet Christian person, but, a very devout person, but… And that was interesting. So, these things all came together. [12:36] At that stage I still wasn’t at all sure what I wanted to do. And, because the college system is fairly generous, I was fortunate, they gave me, after finishing my degrees, they gave me a research exhibition, and I decided, just to test the waters, to look into theology. So, I spent a year doing the lectures for Part II of the theological Tripos, which is normally a two-year thing. I did those in one year, and I had an incredible group of lecturers. I had Michael Ramsey, New Testament, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury; I had C F D Mole, the leading Pauline scholar; I had Burnaby; I had, ah, a chap who became Regius Professor at Oxford for patristics. They were an incredible bunch, they really were. And I, I really enjoyed all these lectures, and, and I did supervisions and… It was quite interesting, because for supervisions you, it’s on a one-to-one basis, and my supervisor was a fellow of St John’s who had been Professor of Divinity and was now bursar of the college. And they told me that… His name was Boys Smith. They said, ‘You’ll never get more than a ten-minute supervision.’ It was supposed to be an hour. ‘And you have to write them an essay.’ And he said… We never finished in an hour, because, I was challenging everything he said. And we used to have wonderful discussions and arguments. He had been Professor of Philosophy of Religion, so he, you know, he, he could see the way my mind was working. So that was very good. [14:34] But the end of the year I had to make a decision. I think, I wasn’t allowed to do another Tripos, I’d done too many already. And so, at that time there was a thing in Cambridge called a Cambridge Ordination exam, and so, my… Oh, I think Boys Smith said to me, ‘Well if you want to do something with the, all this theology you’ve learnt, why don’t you go and sit that?’ So I went to Ridley college and sat this exam with all these ordinands, and I passed this, this examination. And that was a, it gave me a further problem. I passed the exam; what do I do now? But by that stage I had Malcolm Jeeves Page 30 C1672/07 Track 2 decided that, I had enjoyed the theology, and I’m glad I did it because, so often scientists talk nonsense about theology; at least I felt I had some understanding of what theologians were saying and where they were coming from. So at that stage, I then, because of the generosity of the university, I had another award, and I started research in experimental psychology. And I did that for, I think I only did that for a year in Cambridge. And then I got… A thing had been introduced just after the war called a Rotary Foundation fellowship, and I applied for one of these, and I got it. And, fortunately, I was able to hold it at Harvard, because there was a professor at Harvard whose work was very similar to what I was trying to do at Cambridge, Professor Jerome Bruner. And so I went to Harvard and worked with him for a year, and, I think that was one of the most stimulating years of my academic career. There was a culture shock, because in Cambridge, we used to get into the labs at about half past ten in the morning; go out to coffee, come back till lunch; work in the afternoon; and then go to college for dinner in the evening. When I got to Harvard I found they had to be in the lab by eight in the morning. So I was in the lab by eight in the morning. And it gave me an opportunity, actually, we’d never had animals in the labs in Cambridge, it gave me an opportunity to work with animals, and I did quite a bit of work on discrimination learning in animals, and published two papers with a colleague there on the basis of that. But at the same time I was working with Bruner on, on experiments on thinking and perception. But, that was really a, a most productive part of my career I think, it was a, it was extremely influential. And then, the year following that, Professor Bruner, who I had been working with, and who I played squash with every week – he beat me every week – he came back to Cambridge. With a different size ball and a different court, I beat him. But anyway, he then came back to Cambridge for six months so we continued, and we wrote two papers together there. And, these, these two are all, they were very influential really, in all my thinking. And then, I forget what that takes us up to. [18:23] Oh that’s right. And then, I had got engaged just before I went to Harvard, and when I came back, I wanted to get married, but of course, research jobs really, you couldn’t exist on that. But I was fortunate, I was offered a job in a research unit in Cambridge called the Nuffield Research Unit on Ageing, and the head of that was Alan Welford, and so that, that was good. And so, I, I did that. And during that time a friend of mine from Cambridge, who became Professor of Psychology at Bristol, called John Malcolm Jeeves Page 31 C1672/07 Track 2

Brown, he was a year ahead of me, but, I noticed he had got a PhD. So I said to Sir Frederic Bartlett, who was my supervisor, ‘I think I should have a PhD.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, Jeeves. You don’t need one of those new-fangled things, they’re not necessary.’ Anyway, I, I insisted, and he said, ‘Well if you want to, you’d better put together some of the papers you’ve published and write a bit of a story around it.’ So I did that, and submitted it, and got my Cambridge PhD, which must be one of the funniest Cambridge PhDs, it’s in the library there, but, it’s a bit of a ragbag. Anyway, I got that. And then of course, at that stage, I think in the year before, I think there were three jobs in psychology advertised in Britain altogether. So I didn’t know what I was going to do. But then there was a job advertised at Leeds, and I applied for that, and I got it. Well that’s probably far enough for now is it?

Yes. That’s great. So that takes us to 1956 where you start at, at Leeds.

That’s right, yah.

[20:20] Could I ask you about, for your first encounter with evolutionary science at Cambridge. Would this be in the…

Zoology.

…the zoology long vacation term, or in the zoology part of the degree actual, or…?

Yes, the two years of the zoology part of the degree, where one does, you know, yup, invertebrate and vertebrate, yes, both, yah. Yup.

And what do you remember, what stands out in your memory about first learning about evolutionary science?

Well I just enjoyed it. Just a remarkable story. Yeah. Absolutely.

Who was lecturing on this then?

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Well, let me think. [pause] Oh my, you’re getting me now. [pause] This is one of the gaps, I’ll have to look the names up for you later. Who was it? I think, Professor Gray was a professor, and he lectured on animal movement I think, that was his specialty. And then, the lecturer in invertebrate was an expert on insects, whose name I can’t remember but Sam will because he had the same person lecture to him. [pause] I can’t remember the others. Interesting, my supervisor, I had two supervisors in the college, one for invertebrate, one vertebrate. For vertebrate was Colin Bertram, who is, who was my tutor, who is an expert on polar bears. Invertebrate was a chap called Hollick, a very shy man, his specialty was insects. Interestingly enough, I noticed that he was, he regularly attended College Chapel. He as obviously a quiet but practising Christian. But that was interesting, that, you had that sort of person, that, again, there was… And Colin Bertram as well went to chapel. And neither of them, you know, in a sense, at any point tried to pretend that there was any conflict between the zoology they were teaching me and the faith they practised. I mean it was all part of all the wonder of knowledge, you know, it was all coming in and you had to make sense of it all.

You say, though, that you, you noticed that the, that the quieter tutor went to chapel. Did he, did he talk about that?

No, not at all. Never, never spoke about it. No, we never did. He was very proper, all he did was talk about his… As one should do. I mean, later I was a supervisor for psychology people, and, I was very proper, never to talk about my faith, unless they asked me. And I remember one student, a very bright student, when I was teaching, called David Watson, he later became one of the leaders in the Anglican Church, he wrote books and he was one of the big leaders. He died very young. But David would ask me questions, but I would say, ‘Now look, let us finish with our proper job, which is, I’m teaching you psychology, and then, outside of that time, now if you want to ask me questions about how I relate it, let’s talk about this. But let’s not usurp my job as a teacher of science with issues of this kind,’ you know? I think one has to do that, you have to respect this always. And this has always been my approach, and, when I went to Australia – and this is jumping ahead a bit – to be professor there, and the first-year class, big classes, and I taught the first-year class, and I, all the basic scientific psychology. Now the professor of philosophy was a very Malcolm Jeeves Page 33 C1672/07 Track 2 distinguished philosopher by the name of Jack Smart, who had, who was a leading person on relating brain and mind and this sort of stuff. And it was interesting, I was told that Jack Smart, who was an atheist, told his first-year students, he said, ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand this new Professor Jeeves who teaches psychology. He’s a Christian. He is, and he’s teaching psychology.’ I would never bring that into it. The interesting thing was, Jack Smart and I were the very best of friends. We played squash together each week, we played hockey together each weekend, and on those contexts we’d have great debates and dingdongs. And long after I came here, whenever he came to Britain he’d come here, he’d sit down, and he’d start to ask me questions about my latest book. And he was extremely open-minded, and a very thoughtful person. Probably wrong to call him an atheist. Perhaps agnostic was better. But I mean he was one of the best, you know, philosophical minds. But anyway, this is going off. But again, I was always punctilious about not using my privileged position as a university teacher to try to bring in my personal faith. That would be usurping my position.

What would have been wrong about it in particular?

Because I don’t think a university teacher of a particular discipline should use his position as a professor to propagate his personal beliefs, whether it’s communism, socialism, you know, Buddhism, or Christianity. That’s not the place for him to do that. It’s the wrong place, he’s usurping his privileged position.

[26:33] As a, as an undergraduate at Cambridge, among the undergraduates working in the same field as you, to what extent was there discussion of the relations between science, and perhaps especially evolutionary science, which you were doing at…?

[26:46] […] [29:25]

Which implies that as a member of CICCU, you were rarely asked to discuss these things as part of that group, science and religion wasn’t a, something that CICCU themselves were concerned about? Malcolm Jeeves Page 34 C1672/07 Track 2

No that’s right. They weren’t, no. No no, it wasn’t a… There were lots of scientists amongst us. And I had one very interesting experience actually during my time there. I went to help an Anglican minister with a mission in Portsmouth in one vacation, and, another member of the team and I, both scientists, were actually, it sounds strange now, doing an open-air outside the docks in Portsmouth as the people came out. And some chap came up to us and said, ‘Ah you can’t believe all that stuff, science has disproved all that.’ Now both of us were studying science at Cambridge. So we just said, ‘What is it about science that is making it difficult? Because we’re both scientists.’ That other person was Michael Griffiths, who subsequently became the head of what’s called the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, which is one of the biggest missions in the world, and he was head of, head of this in Singapore. We still keep in touch, he comes up here. But it’s interesting that already there as this myth amongst some people that you couldn’t be a Christian and a scientist. So it’s been around a long time.

Apart from this… And when you say you were doing an outdoor ministry…

Yes, that’s right.

What is that?

Well this is a group of us who went down there, and we were helping this Anglican minister by the name of Dick Rees having what was called a mission amongst some Anglican churches there, mixing in with the people, mixing in with the young people, encouraging them to think more about the possibility of the Christian faith. And we were involving ourselves in some of their activities in the local churches and this sort of thing, yah.

[31:39] And apart from this person who said to you, ‘You can’t believe in all of that, science has disproved it,’ where else, if at all, were you seeing that feeling? I don’t know whether in newspapers, in radio programmes, in, I don’t know, conversations with people who weren’t scientists, who weren’t undergraduates. Did you get a sense of Malcolm Jeeves Page 35 C1672/07 Track 2 this elsewhere? Or was it just this person on this particular mission who mentioned that and nothing else?

I don’t think at that stage there was a great awareness, I wasn’t aware of it, of the supposed conflict between science and religion. It was beginning to emerge a bit sometimes in the odd radio broadcast. But equally, you got people like Sir Charles Coulson, who was a friend of Donald MacKay, broadcasting, and he was a very committed Christian. So, at that stage you got, you know, in the public domain you get, you get both points of view being put forward in a, in a fairly relaxed way I think, yes. Yah.

[32:47] Thank you. And could you just say a little bit more about how it was that you decided it was that psychology was what you wanted to do, to focus on at the end of…?

Oh I see. Well I’ll tell you. I was so unsure, and one of my lecturers, as I said, was Professor Michael Ramsey who became Archbishop of Canterbury, and I was a bit concerned to know what to do, and I said to him one day, ‘I’m a bit concerned, I don’t know whether to go ahead and consider being ordained in the Anglican Church.’ He said, ‘Yes, well,’ he said, ‘come and have a cup of tea with me and let’s talk about it.’ So I went to his house, and Cambridge was like that in those days, had a cup of tea. He was a very shy man. And we talked about it. And after a while he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘look,’ he said, ‘there are just so many young men who can get ordained and become Anglican ministers, but,’ he said, ‘what we really need for the future is people who are familiar and knowledgeable about both science and faith, and can make a contribution to that whole debate.’ He said, ‘It’s not for me to decide, but,’ he said, ‘I would suggest you go ahead with your science, now that you have such a good foundation in theology that you’ve done.’ And he said, ‘I think you’ll have a much greater contribution to make from a Christian point of view by doing that, than by coming, becoming yet another local rector in a local church.’ And, I thought he was a wise man, and I took his advice, and never regretted it. Yah. So I was fortunate in having such wise men to give me advice at that stage. Yes.

[34:50] Malcolm Jeeves Page 36 C1672/07 Track 2

At Cambridge, were you involved, apart from the Christian Union, were you involved in other, presumably sport…

Yes.

Were you involved in other clubs and societies, perhaps political clubs and so on?

I wasn’t in any of the political clubs. I went to some of the scientific, you know, student scientific meetings, when the lecture looked interesting. But I think apart from that, I had difficulty finding enough time for that really. Yes.

Are you able to comment on what this, I don’t know whether lack is the right word, but, absence of strong interest in politics at Cambridge, in the sort of, political side? And perhaps relate that to your parents’ political outlook, which I forgot to ask you about?

No, I mean he, my father was active, yes, in the local government, very much so. I mean as I say, he was a, he was a, he was a town councillor for decades, and he was eventually mayor and senior alderman. No, they… But, no, I don’t think, I don’t have any particular reason why I didn’t get involved to be honest. I mean the excuse would be, I didn’t have enough time for life anyway, so, I don’t know. Mm.

[36:09] Thank you. Could you, in as much detail as you can, remembering that the listener to the recording may not have experience of experimental science at all, let alone experimental psychology, could you in as much detail as possible describe the research that you did first in Cambridge after your degree?

Right.

And we’ll go to Harvard after that, but, describe the research in psychology that you were doing in Cambridge.

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Yes. Well, Sir Frederic Bartlett was the professor. He had written a famous book called Remembering in the 1930s, and, towards the end of his career he got interested in doing work on thinking. And he did give us lectures on this in my degree lecturers. And, I found this fascinating. Essentially what he said was, one way of describing thinking is the way in which you have to, either look at a set of evidence which is incomplete, see where it’s leading and go beyond it to a conclusion, that’s extrapolation, or you see a set of evidence and then a gap and some more evidence that looks as if it’s relevant, and you’ve got to somehow fit these together. And there you’ve got to engage in what he called interpolation, you’ve got to fill in the, to join it. And, the third one was where all the evidence is there anyway, but you can’t make sense of it to begin with. And the process that you have to engage in there is what he calls integration. You’ve got to somehow make that mess into an integrated whole with a story. And so, extrapolation, interpolation, and integration. Now, I thought this was very interesting. I’m going to go back a step here, because, before I… Let me think. Just get this right. [pause] Yes that’s right. I had, when I was doing my theology there was quite a lot of talk about faith and all this sort of stuff, and it seemed to me that, as a psychologist looking at what they were talking about, the way people came to faith, some people saw bits of evidence which seemed to point in a certain direction, but couldn’t quite get there, and then they had to go beyond that to reach a conclusion, extrapolation. Others had some evidence from one aspect of their life, aspect aligned to another aspect, and there’s a gap between them, and they had to make it fit together before they had a real faith, and that was interpolation. Others had grown up with all this knowledge, they had grown up going to church and they’d heard about it all, it was all there, but it had never made sense. And to make sense, it required integration. So I asked the question, would it be possible to psychologically analyse the process of coming to faith in terms of this thinking model that Bartlett had just put forward in his book? And so I began to devise a set of experiments, and for some of these I actually used people who were at colleges like Ridley college Cambridge, these were ordinands, you know, who were training for the ministry, and I got them to do experiments where I gave them sets of knowledge with a gap, and then asked them to complete it. Others I gave them to… So in other words, I tried to see whether I could get an idea of the way that this model of thinking might be relevant to a new understanding of the way that faith worked. [41:13] Malcolm Jeeves Page 38 C1672/07 Track 2

Now, I started doing that, and I collected experiments. And then I went to Harvard. And I’m saying this to you because, when I went to Harvard, I used to look at a thing called the University Gazette from Cambridge, and I looked at it one day, just after I’d got there, and it, it has the annual announcement of a prize; I didn’t know it existed, I was flicking through the pages. And it said, the essay title for the University Prize in the philosophy of religion is ‘The Nature of Religious Faith’. I thought, well that’s fun. And so, what I did was, before I went into my labs at eight o’clock in the morning, to run my rats, I went to the Widener Library at Harvard quite early and dug around to find out what I could find there, in the literature about this from a theological point of view. Anyway, I thought, just for the fun of it, I’ll write an essay. So I wrote this very long essay. And you have to put a motto so that they don’t know who you are. And I’ve forgotten it exactly now, I used to know it because I, I could read Greek, but, I put a verse from the Book of Hebrews, ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for,’ something I’d not seen in Greek. Anyway, I sent this in, and I forgot about it. But in my essay, I had actually written an essay in which I had tried to apply what I thought were my insights from science and psychology to an understanding of the nature of religious faith. And forgot about it. And then, the following Easter a friend of mine, a very good, brilliant mathematician, close friend of John Polkinghorne’s, an Australian this chap was, a Christian chap, he wrote to me, and we wrote regularly, he said, ‘Malcolm, congratulations. You’ve won the University Prize in the Philosophy of Religion.’ I thought, well he’s pulling my leg. So I looked it up, and lo and behold, I had. I have to confess, it didn’t enhance my view of philosophers, because I’m not a philosopher but I won this prize. And I’ve still got this essay. One publisher asked to see it immediately, Inter-Varsity Press asked, or, no, Tyndale press, but they said it was too academic for their readership. So anyway, this is going back. So, I was already beginning to see how the insights that I was getting from my scientific knowledge might help to illuminate some of the things that were happening in the processes of coming to faith. So that’s how that came in. Anyway, so then I… But… So I did that research, and I included that in my PhD. [44:10] But when I was at Harvard I had got so hooked on my interest in using animals in learning experiments that I published two papers there, and I put those published papers in my PhD. It must have been the funniest PhD in Cambridge. I had to have Malcolm Jeeves Page 39 C1672/07 Track 2 two examiners. One was an experimental psychologist who was an animal behaviourist in Cambridge; the other was R H Thouless, who had written a book on the psychology of religion. So I was, I was drilled by these two people on this one thesis. And, anyway, I got the, I got my PhD. But interesting, later on R H Thouless, who had written what I think is still one of the best books on psychology of religion in 1933 and it’s still being reprinted, I got to know him well, and, when I was a professor in Adelaide he got in touch with me and, said he’d like to come to Australia, and so I said, ‘Well come.’ He had done some brilliant work on visual perception as an experimental psychologist in his youth. And he came, and I gave him a lab in my, in my department, and he did some interesting experiments. But, what I found slightly undermining, that’s not the right word, the local church there, a big city centre Anglican church, was the one that we went to, and I was a trustee of this church, and from time to time I preached there. And on one occasion I was preaching there in the evening, and I suddenly saw Thouless sitting in the front row. I thought, oh, no. But I, I didn’t change what I was going to say. The following morning he came to me in the lab, he said, ‘Oh Malcolm, I really enjoyed what you…’ I forget what, it was something on the Resurrection I think it was. But interesting that Thouless, again, was a quiet but very committed Christian with a very, highly regarded experimental psychologist, but he developed an interest in the psychology of religion. And, so he was influential too. Yes. He was, he was a lovely man.

[46:50] And so where in Cambridge did you do the experimental work on the…?

I did it at Ridley… I got students at Ridley Hall, which is a theological college there.

And did they come to you?

No I went there, and I gave them paper and pencil tests which they did and had to fill them all in and I analysed them. Yes.

Could you then describe the laboratory set-up in Harvard, the sort of physical place, maybe with a…

Malcolm Jeeves Page 40 C1672/07 Track 2

Well, they were big labs there. There were two labs I was working in, one was where we were actually running animals through mazes, these were rats, we were doing experiments on what’s called discrimination learning, and, trying to work out how animals actually did the processing of stimuli, and learn to go through one door that had vertical stripes rather than another door that has horizontal stripes. Anyway, there’s quite a complicated theory there. And, and this, there was another visiting scholar there from Texas called Al North, and he had I worked together on this. He was older than me, a very bright guy. So I did that. [48:06] But I also was working with Jerome Bruner, whom I mentioned, because, he was interested in the way in which what assumptions you come to in any situation influence what you see and what you report. He had done a very famous experiment judging the size of an American coin, and he had done this with a group of children from very deprived areas, and a group from an opulent area. And he came up with a dramatic result, that the children from the deprived area systematically judge the size of this coin bigger than the others. And it was a very clear result. Well that in a sense is a social thing. Now what I wanted to do was see whether I could do it in a slightly more controlled way. But this goes back to my interest with Donald MacKay of what is called information theory. Now, basically, information theory says that, in a situation where you have two choices, you’re having to process what is called one bit of information. In fact, a log to the base two of two is one. Log to the base two of four is two. Log to the base two of eight is three. So, if you’d got two choices, you were having to process one bit of information; four choices, two bits; eight choices, three bits. And I thought to myself, can I build this into an experiment? Now, the idea came to me, you’ve probably seen, particularly in America, where you have flashing lights at an intersection. And what you see is not two lights, but you see one light seeming to jump from one to the other. It’s what’s called apparent movement. What we do is, we interpret it as one light jumping backwards and forwards. Now, it’s long been known in visual perception that by varying the interval between two lights, you can produce apparent movement. If the interval’s big enough, you don’t see it; if you close the interval, you suddenly see it. Now, the question I wanted to ask was, can you actually control within the individual, in a quantifiable way, the expectations that you bring to seeing these lights? And so what I did was, and this where Bruner was a bit surprised, and he used to tell stories about it, about me, he said Malcolm Jeeves Page 41 C1672/07 Track 2 that he… I had this idea, and he said he thought it was a good idea. Then he, he told my professor in Cambridge, he said, ‘Do you know, he just went off and built his apparatus himself.’ Well I had done physics and all that, I knew what I was doing. So I got a soldering iron, and I built an apparatus. The apparatus was, where the person looks at this board, and on this board there are lights at intervals round about it, and a light in the centre. Now, the set-up was that the light would come on in the centre, and the person in the experiment would be told beforehand that the second light was coming on, either in one of two positions, or in one of four positions, or in one of eight positions. And my question was, by me manipulating their expectations, could I show that this actually modified the likelihood of whether they report one light moving or two lights? And it worked beautifully. And I got a beautiful straight line graph on Bayesian [Shannon] information theory, log to the base two, one bit, two bits, three bits. A beautiful straight line graph. And, so, that I published, and it was, it was a well-received paper. And then, Bruner, who I was working with, got very interested, and he said, ‘Let’s do another experiment,’ so we did another one using a similar apparatus. And we published another, and we, we published another paper. But anyway, this was an example of how, using my knowledge from physics and mathematics, I was able to use it to try to design what I regarded as a slightly more controlled experiment that at that time seemed to be being done in psychology. And so that, that was a sort of… I forget why you asked me, but anyway, that… So that was the other experiment I did when I was there, I did that experiment, I did several of them, and I did the ones on rats, yes. Yes.

[53:42] Where had your interest in information theory come from?

Well, it had come from my physics, because, a man called… two people called Shannon and Weaver had put forward information theory of a model towards the end of the war, and I had got it from there. Later on when I had met Donald MacKay we discovered we had a mutual interest. The difference was, he was an expert on it and I was an amateur. And he and I used to talk a lot about these things. But, it’s interesting that, this is a slight tangent but, those days we used it a lot. When I went to Australia, I had been actually working, as I told you, in the Nuffield unit at Cambridge on human skills for my first job, and, when I went to Australia I was asked Malcolm Jeeves Page 42 C1672/07 Track 2 by the Aeronautical Research Labs in Australia if I would act as a consultant to them, because I had some expertise in human factors and so on. And I agreed. Linked with this information theory is, I then spent quite a lot of time flying round in the second pilot seat in Boeing 707s, the Australian Airlines. Because they had a particular problem. The problem was this. There are two times in any flight when the pilots have what we call information overload, one is during take-off, when they’ve got all sorts of signals coming in from ground control, and they’ve got the plane control, and one is doing what is called letdown. This is when they’re descending, they’ve got all sorts of radio signals telling them what to do, they’ve got their own things. And we were concerned that during these periods, an important signal would be missed because of information overload. The question was, how could we measure this without interfering with what was happening? And together with the full-time researchers there, and I was only the consultant, we designed a task which incorporated this information theory in terms of the bits of information that they had to attend to, and we used this during these periods in order to measure periods of information overload. And we published quite a lot of material there, government material on this. So it’s interesting, information theory was still being used then quite, quite a lot. I’m out of touch with it now, I imagine it’s been long superseded. But then it was quite useful.

[56:37] And could you describe a typical day, as you put it, running the rats?

Well they were only running for a short time. I mean you go in, and you have this maze, and you put the rats in the start box as it’s called. You lift up the door, the rat sits there, it looks at one, and it looks at the other; looks at one, looks at the other. And then, it chooses, it goes through one, and if that door doesn’t open, it runs back and goes to the other. And each day you put him through, say, twenty-four trials. And over a period of days he would learn that, for example, the vertical stripes are the ones that he gets rewarded; the horizontal stripes, the door’s always closed. So you can, you can actually measure his rate of learning. The interesting thing then is, what happens if you suddenly change it? Can he unlearn what he has learnt, and how difficult is it? And so, we were working on what was called reversal learning, which is to unlearn, and this became quite a major part of some of my later work as well. Malcolm Jeeves Page 43 C1672/07 Track 2

But, so this is really what we were doing. And there were various theories of discrimination learning extant at that time. And it turns out that the two papers we published were, ground-breaking is exaggeration. Let me put it this way. The standard textbook on discrimination learning in animals by the professor at Cambridge, written quite a few years ago, starts off by citing our experiments as the one that’s, where, you know, with the key things in this. I used them later on, I’ll describe to you later, in my own research in Australia as well. But, so that, that’s, that’s how you, I mean that would take a few hours each day. And then I’d go off and I’d go to my other lab, and I’d get the soldering iron out and I’d be building apparatus. In between all this I was attending discussions and seminar – not seminar, research group meetings, and learning a lot from Bruner, because Bruner was just brilliant. He’s still alive, over 100. But he was brilliant, yes. So Bruner, yah. So that, that would be a, that would be a typical day there, yah.

[59:04] And, could you now tell the story of something which we’ve missed, and it happens before military service, and that’s your first meeting with Donald MacKay, through your brother-in-law.

Oh yes. Yup. 1944. Go back a step. One of my good friends at school was a chap called Brian Dobbs, we were great friends. He was evacuated from London. And, he became a doctor. On one occasion his brother, Roland Dobbs, came up to visit him. Roland met my sister Dorothy, and from there on out, they became very friendly. Roland Dobbs had done his degree at University College London at the beginning of the war, evacuated to Bangor. He was then in a group doing radar research for the Government in Surrey called the Radar Research Establishment. Donald MacKay was there, I think Robert Boyd was there, and Roland Dobbs. Roland Dobbs was going to be confirmed in the Anglican Church, and I went down in 1944 for his confirmation at a church in Surrey. At that event was Donald MacKay. Donald MacKay and I met, spent time together, and we seemed to sort of, get on extremely well. I mean he had already done his degree here, he was a researcher. But we, somehow we seemed to hit it off really well. And then, I went back, and then I went off into the Army, and then when I came out of the Army, go up to Cambridge, Donald was a lecturer in King’s London, and I invited him to come to college, now in, Malcolm Jeeves Page 44 C1672/07 Track 2

John’s, to talk to a group of my friends on science and faith. Donald came, and, some of the philosophers from the college came. And again, Donald and I picked it up again, and from then on we found our interests and our activities increasingly intertwined, and I saw quite a lot of him from then on, yah. But he was a lecturer and I was, you know…

What did he, at the time of first meeting him at the Royal Radar Establishment, what did he look like, sound like, move like, that sort of thing?

Oh he was just a, just a very straight-backed, tall, friendly man, with a very high forehead. [laughs] Very quietly spoken with a north of Scotland accent. Very gracious. Just a nice, friendly man.

And did you get a sense then of, of what he was doing at, he and others were doing at the -?

No, not really. No I didn’t. If I did, I’ve forgotten. I don’t, I don’t know. No.

[End of Track 2] Malcolm Jeeves Page 45 C1672/07 Track 3

[Track 3]

Could I ask just a few questions before we continue through, and that’s, whether doing scientific research in the early part of your career on the way in which people’s expectations altered their visual perception and on decisions made by rats, whether doing that research had any direct influence on how you thought about faith and how you thought about God and this sort of thing. So in that direction.

No, it didn’t directly, but later on, when I was reflecting on it, once again it, it was pretty obvious to me, and it still is, that different forms of religious belief were reflected in that in the sense that, some people are more prone to let their beliefs be influenced by their expectations than by the facts. And this certainly comes up in some of the things I think that I wrote where I talked about possibility of religious belief being a form of wishful thinking. Which in turn does reflect some of the widely discussed things, certainly in the middle of the last century, at the time when some of Freud’s views and beliefs were taken much more seriously than they are now. Because, one of his more famous books, a small book about religion, I think is the one that’s called The Future of an Illusion, which does talk about the influence of wishful thinking on people’s beliefs. So in that sense, this is always the case that, it doesn’t just apply in the religious context, sadly, it also applies in the scientific context, it’s possible there to be more influenced by what you hope will be the result of your experiment than by what is actually the result of the experiment. So, I think, wishful thinking is a, yeah, I think it’s a pervasive factor in, in human thinking that you always have to be alert to. Yah.

[02:42] Thanks. And, the small group of undergraduates concerned with science-religion relations that you mention, I know you can’t remember the individuals in order to name them, but can you remember whether they were all male or, a mixture of…?

No we didn’t meet in any formal way, they were just people I happened to bump into from time to time. No, it wasn’t anything organised.

And any, any… was it all male though? Malcolm Jeeves Page 46 C1672/07 Track 3

Oh no. Predominantly male, because at that stage Cambridge was predominantly male. I mean, really so. Women were rare species at that time, yes. Yes.

And given that, how did you meet your wife, which I suppose happened…?

Ah, that was interesting. This was on a vacation activity. There was a, an organisation in London which brought together groups of university and college students who were Christians to participate in vacation activities. One of the vacation activities was what were called beach missions. And in these events groups of students lived together in a large house, or large houses, at various beach resorts, and during the day they put on activities on the sands for children on holiday. Remember, these were the days when people still went on holiday at seaside resorts in Britain as families, they weren’t yet going overseas. And so, at places like Frinton-on-Sea, not too far from you, and also around the coast in Wales, and the south of England, these, these activities were put on for a week or two. And we were separately invited to join one of these groups on this occasion, and it was in Wales, at a place called Criccieth. And, my wife, who was at college in London at the time, went with a group of her friends, and I went with a group from Cambridge, and that’s where we met. Yah.

Was this group called the Crusaders?

No.

No.

No, it was called, CSSM, Children’s Special Service Mission. It’s part of a thing called the Scripture Union, which headquarters in London, yah.

And did the activities you put on on the beaches have a sort of, Christian element some way?

Oh they did, they did. They did all sorts of things. But, each day we built a, sort of a sand pulpit and we had a very short service where we sang jolly songs, and put on sort Malcolm Jeeves Page 47 C1672/07 Track 3 of, little pantomime performances portraying biblical stories, and this sort of thing. And for some of the older children, not, you know, early teenagers, we would put on more energetic things like, taking them sailing or something like this. Just an opportunity for them to relax and to get to know us and us them. And it was very much a family thing, and, the parents were around, and in the evenings we’d have events when the parents were invited and the parents could talk to us and, and so on. So, it was, yah, that’s what that was, yes.

On those occasions, did you get any sense of public thinking on science and religion?

No no, it didn’t come into it at all. In those days it just wasn’t, it just wasn’t in the public domain at all, nobody sort of thought about it. It’s interesting. Yah. That was, remember, immediately post-war. Mm.

[07:05] Thank you. Now, to continue through. Having returned to Cambridge as an undergraduate and then a research scientist, how exactly did you become involved in the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship?

Well I, as I told you, I had met Donald MacKay during the war through my brother- in-law Roland Dobbs, and, then, when I got to Cambridge, Oliver Barclay, who you’ve heard of, who had himself been in the Christian Union, in fact he was president on one occasion during the war, he was invited by the leader of Inter-Varsity in London to visit the universities as a sort of travelling secretary. Now he himself had done his PhD in zoology, as I think you know, for a while had been a research student there. He occasionally came up to Cambridge, and on one of those occasions, I can’t remember exactly when, on one of his visits I met Oliver Barclay then. It might have been because of my links with Donald MacKay, because, you know, he… Oliver worked and lived in London, and immediately after the war he had made contact with Donald. Well, what happened was, Oliver met with a small group of research students including Robert… names are going, a physicist, you know. Sir Robert Boyd, a group of, a small group of them were meeting, and, including my brother-in-law, Roland Dobbs. And Roland Dobbs I think had suggested to Oliver that Donald MacKay, whom he’d known at Radar, might be interested, and so, he Malcolm Jeeves Page 48 C1672/07 Track 3 introduced Donald MacKay to the group, and then Donald MacKay became part of the group. So it could have been that either through my brother-in-law or through Donald MacKay, Oliver Barclay sought me out in London. I don’t know. Because my brother-in-law and my sister lived in Highgate, not very far from where Oliver Barclay and his wife lived. Oliver’s wife was a consultant surgeon in London. And they were quite good friends, the two pairs. So, there’s a sort of matrix there that could have been the basis for it, but I don’t know the exact details. Certainly Oliver came up and he met with some of us, and that’s how I got to know Oliver, and through Oliver I got to know about the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship. Yah.

And what, how did you, how in practice did you become involved at that stage, what did you do?

I think what happened was, at that stage they, they had an annual meeting in London, small meeting, and I think I must have gone down to one of those meetings. Either that, or it could have been that we had a small group in Cambridge. That’s right, there was. It’s coming back to me now. There was a group in Cambridge, led by a scientist who had been in Cambridge throughout the war, whose name was Robert Clarke. That’s right. And Robert Clarke invited any of us he got to know to go to meetings at his flat to discuss issues at the interface of science and faith. That was Robert Clarke. He was a, he was a delightful, very bright scientist, delightful, eccentric. But anyway, that would be the link I think, because Oliver Barclay certainly knew Robert Clarke. Because Robert was quite a bit older than Oliver, and had in fact influenced Oliver I think during the war. Mm. But the precise details, more than that, I can’t really remember I don’t think. No. No.

[11:20] Could you tell me about your own experience of the talks given by RSCF members, including yourself, during the annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science?

Oh yes. These were, these were… Well, one was given by Sir Charles Coulson, which I didn’t go to but I read; another was given by the Reader in Biochemistry, Malcolm Jeeves Page 49 C1672/07 Track 3

Malcolm Dixon, on science and religion, which I did go to in Cambridge, which was well-attended. He was a distinguished biochemist. And he also happened to go to the same Anglican church that I went to in Cambridge, the Round Church. He was a very shy, very quiet man, but he gave a, a very scholarly, you know, low-key public lecture tracing out the relation between science and religion. I went to that, yes. And the ones I gave in various places, that were a continuation of them, one I gave in Cambridge, in 1965 I think it was, it may in that little booklet, the meeting of the British Association was held in Cambridge that year. I happened to be back in Britain, because, I went to Australia in 1959, came back in 1969, and in the year 1965 I had a one-year sabbatical leave from Australia, which I spent back in Cambridge. I spent it there in my old department. They had a lot of new work going on on, they then had – I’ll come round to BA again in a minute – a lot of work going on using primates, non-human primates. And, I had already been doing some surgical work in Australia on animals, but I hadn’t done surgical work on non-human primates. But there was a group there led by Lawrie Weiskrantz who became Professor of Psychology at Oxford. And so I went and worked with them for my time there, and, witnessed their surgical operations and so on, to learn further skills. Because I had a colony of monkeys that I was going to work on in Australia. Anyway, I was back for that year, and, the meeting was there, and I was asked if I would give the lecture, and I gave the lecture, I think it was in the Senate House. It was really, slightly embarrassing in a way, because, there I saw sitting in the front row Colin Bertram, who had been my tutor and supervisor in zoology when I was a student there. As I said, he was the one who used to, one of the ones who used to attend College Chapel, so he wasn’t, he was, he wasn’t against religion. He was there sitting… And quite a lot of people I knew were there. And so I gave that one, yes. And I think I gave, I think I gave one in York as well some years later. Yes, I think two or three I gave over the years at the British Association, yah.

[14:50] How were those Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship talks at the BA meetings seen by other scientists, perhaps especially non-religious scientists?

Difficult to say. Depends which ones you talk to. There will be some who would say, ‘Yes, it’s very interesting, interesting that this chap, who is not a bad scientist, seems Malcolm Jeeves Page 50 C1672/07 Track 3 to see how these things all hang together.’ Others, in any developing atheist group, would be annoyed that the British Association for the Advancement of Science was even arranging such a thing. But it would depend on their, on their personal commitments and their personal views. Either way, it didn’t matter. The important thing was, it raised the issues and got people talking, which is really what it was all about, it was to stimulate interest in the possibility of there being interesting issues at the interface of science and Christian belief. Yah.

The… You say in the draft paper that you and Sam have written on the history of these sorts of things that, in the mid-Sixties the secretary of the BA no longer would advertise those talks in the official programme. Do you remember why that…?

No. I, that I got from Sam. Yah. No, I, I hadn’t realised that, no. Of course in the mid-Sixties you see, apart from my year back in Cambridge, I wasn’t in Britain. I was in fact doing a similar, I was promoting a similar set of activities in Australia, but we can talk about that another time.

Mm. Mm.

Yah.

But does that surprise, if that is so, does that surprise you?

Not really. I mean, there are always people who have strong views about these things, and I, I think they’re entitled to express them. I think it’s, I think myself it’s a bit obscurantist, but, if that’s what they wanted to do, well, let them do it, you know, I wasn’t going to lose any, I would lose any sleep over it. No.

[17:03] Thank you. Could you, as someone who knew Donald MacKay very well and in fact worked in a similar field…

Mhm.

Malcolm Jeeves Page 51 C1672/07 Track 3

…could you give us your perspective on how his arguments concerning God’s upholding were, were formed in relation to his science?

Yup. Donald was always concerned, and I think, I think we may have said this in the paper, when he first joined the RSCF group in London, he was quite concerned that it was a backward-looking group. It was re-fighting the battles of old, it was re-fighting battles about evolution and about miracles and this sort of stuff, instead of looking forward with a different set of presuppositions, one of which was that the God who Donald believes a Christian worshipped, is the God who created the whole show, and who, as a matter of a faith assertion, no proof, upholds, having created it, upholds the whole show at all times. In other words, if he goes home and leaves it, the whole thing collapses. And so, this emphasis on God upholding the whole show was for Donald a crucial aspect when you began to think of the relation between science and faith. Because, up to then there was a great emphasis on scientific explanations going so far, say, in the process of evolution of humankind, which we talked briefly about this morning, and then our scientific knowledge at the moment peters out. And then, for some Christians, ah, this is where God comes in. Now, we can’t understand this, so, this is where God did this or this. And Donald, quite rightly in my view, said, ‘No, that’s silly. God upholds the whole show all the time, and what we are doing…’ and this is where your television analogy which you mentioned this morning comes on. This is where he uses analogy. It’s a bit like the creation that we as scientists are studying, or the picture that I see on that screen, and that’s all I’ve got. I mean I’ve got the creation, I can study it with my instruments and so on. And from studying it I can see the way in which one bit relates to another bit, and then I can try to work out causal relationships between A and B, and B and C, and I can, I can form theories of cosmology and, in physics and so on. And when I get stuck in one of my, trying to work it out, I don’t then say, ‘Ah, now, there’s God suddenly come in.’ ‘No,’ said Donald. Back at the transmitting station there is the creator of the whole story of the plot that you’re watching, if it’s a, if it’s one of Colin Dexter’s whodunits, you know? He’s, he’s writing the whole story, and he in that sense is, having written the story, he then is transmitting the story, and then we can have a look at it. Now, in a sense some of this wasn’t new. I think I’m right in saying, Dorothy Sayers had written in these terms before about, because she was a, a thriller writer, Dorothy Sayers, and she wrote about this in a different sort of way, but not of course in those days when she began to Malcolm Jeeves Page 52 C1672/07 Track 3 write the television thing. But that, that was the, that was the basis of the picture. And then Donald would say, well, one day, if there’s going to be an end to the present universe, God will switch it off and the whole show will be wound up. But until then, it’s there for us, and it’s there for us to wonder at the beauty of nature, it’s there for us to wonder at the glory of the universe, it’s there for us to worry about, how come God would create nature red in tooth and claw, these problems. It’s… That’s all we’ve got. And on the basis of that, we proceed with our thinking. And this of course, we then set up hypotheses and there you - so then you move into the hypothetical deductive method of science, which is the way that experimental science mainly works, not, not some theoretical science but… So that, that was the crux of Donald’s thing. And he was always worried when people tried to bring in God as a stopgap when their human thinking had run out, rather than say, gosh, the whole thing is, is God’s work And what is amazing is, this wasn’t Donald but it was some of the great scientists from the past, I’ve forgotten which one it was now, who described it – oh was it Keppler, I think – as thinking God’s thoughts after him. So, that was the, that was the, that was really the, the nub of, I think, Donald’s view. Yah. And it was a very open-mined view. And he, he, one of his colleague’s at Keele published a book of Donald’s collected essays and lectures called The Open and Closed Mind [The Open Mind], and I think that’s a very good one, because, this, Donald really emphasised the open-mindedness of Christianity, which I think is right, I think it’s wonderful, but it can be a bit threatening to some people if they’re not too sure of their faith; they’re always worried that something might happen which will, in inverted commas, ‘disprove’, you know, things that they’ve grown up believing, and now are shown not to be true. So, I think that was what was behind it, yah.

[23:53] And what is the relationship between his work and the things perhaps he had done in the war, the things that he had worked on, and that way of understanding the action of God involving the screen?

Essentially, the core thing of his work, certainly in the early days, was information theory, and he was doing a lot of work on visual perception. And this meant that he spent a lot of his time in his labs, generating images on cathode ray screens, which is what these are, and… And so he was generating these all the time in his work. And Malcolm Jeeves Page 53 C1672/07 Track 3 he was learning things about the way the eyes worked and the way the eye relate to the brain, through generating these pictures, and getting people to report what they saw. The additional thing that Donald used a lot in those days was what are called evoked potentials. These are the things where you put electrodes on the scalp, and you can actually pick up the electrical activity on the surface of the brain under the scalp. And this is a way of actually monitoring what is happening in the brains of the people in your experiment and what they’re seeing out there. Now this isn’t my expertise, but, this is quite an interesting thing, because you were talking about the link between us. Now way back in, now how far back would this go? This would go well over twenty, twenty-five years ago. A young American called Warren Brown came and spent six months I think, or, some months, working with Donald MacKay, because, this young man, Warren Brown, was from California, he had got interested in evoked potentials, he had been and worked in Switzerland with an expert in it there, and he had learnt about it. Then he came to work with Donald. At the end of that Donald suggested he came and worked with me. So Warren Brown then came and worked with me, only for a month or two actually. And at that time – we’ll get on to this tomorrow possibly – I was working in great detail on the differences between the two cerebral hemispheres, and more particularly on a group of patients who, a very abnormal condition, had been born with[??] what is regarded as a major part of the brain [missing] that’s called the corpus callosum. It consists of about 200 million fibres, it’s like a big telephone wire that connects the two cerebral hemispheres. And, some, a decade or so before Warren came to see me, a psychologist in California called Roger Sperry had got the Nobel Prize for his work on what are called split brains. He had done, he had actually cut the brains of animals and looked at what happened, and then he had got access to a very small number of people who had had very major surgery, which has actually cut this part of the brain. I’m going off at a slight tangent but I’ll continue. What happened was, these are people who had epilepsy in one side of the brain. And in those days there was a small range of drugs that you could use with increasing dosages to try and control it. And, if you weren’t able to control the epilepsy, which usually had a focus in one hemisphere, because of this close connection with the other side of the brain, this abnormal brain activity would spread across to the other side through the corpus callosum, so these people suffered major epilepsy seizures. And eventually a neurosurgeon called Joe Bogen, whom I knew quite well, decided to actually, in one particular patient who had tried Malcolm Jeeves Page 54 C1672/07 Track 3 every other form of drug treatment, to cut through this part of the brain to stop the seizures from spreading from one side to the other. He had done this successfully, the patient survived perfectly well. And, afterwards the findings were quite dramatic, and reported that this person had two minds in one brain, one in the left and one in the right. Anyway. So this had been happening. Now I had been working with these patients – we’ll have to get round to this eventually – when I was in Australia, because as well as being Professor of Psychology, I was also what here you call a consultant in the Royal Adelaide Hospital. And so I had a weekly clinic with the neurosurgeons and neurologists. I had come across one of these patients as a small boy. What happened was, the neurosurgeon I worked with rang me one day and said, ‘Malcolm, would you see a small boy in your clinic on Wednesday, because he’s a case of callosal agenesis.’ And I said, ‘He’s a case of what?’ I’d never seen one of those. He said, ‘Oh he’s born without the corpus callosum.’ Born without this massive thing. I said, ‘Well I’ve never seen one of these, but of course I’ll see him.’ I didn’t know what I would see. So I, I went to the hospital, and his mother brought in this nice little five-year-old boy. I’ve got a picture of him, I’ll show you it sometime. And he seemed to all intents and purposes normal. And, so the real question for me was, if this mass of 200 million fibres is so important for me and for you, how on earth does this boy, who hasn’t got this, look so normal? So I began to do a whole battery of psychological tests to try and find out what was happening to information that I had put into one of his hemispheres which normally I would pick up in the other hemisphere, where was it going? So, this was, this led me into the next thirty years of my research, which was on neuroplasticity. Anyway, what happened was, this Warren Brown had been with Donald, he came to me, and I was working on this. I had patients in London, I had patients here and so on. And, Warren got interested in my work, and he had seen my publications. And he became so taken with it, from then on it became his major research interest. He went back to California, adjacent to where Roger Sperry was working, he had never met him, and he managed to locate some of these agenesis, as they’re called, patients, that I had been working and publishing on, and he has done some brilliant work over the last twenty, thirty years. To begin with he published with me, because I was his mentor, but in recent years… But, he was an expert in this evoked potential, we’re back to Donald again. I had never used this technique. So then, instead of having to rely on what our patients were saying they were seeing, we could actually see by looking at what was Malcolm Jeeves Page 55 C1672/07 Track 3 happening in the electrodes on the two sides. And so as well as having their report of what they were seeing, we could see whether the electrical activity was confirming their report. Now Donald was an expert on that. And Donald was a remarkable person because, towards the end of his life he, he died relatively young, he got cancer, and he had chemotherapy, which as you know in some cases, you lose all your hair and you go bald. And there are pictures of Donald when he was recovering from his chemotherapy, he saw this as an excellent opportunity. And there he was, with electrodes fixed all over his head, so that he could do detailed work on himself, you know, without the trouble of his hair. But that was Donald, he was such an enthusiast about his work. Anyway, so Donald influenced Warren Brown, who then came to work with me. And Warren Brown, and I think you may have seen the book which I wrote with Warren Brown, Neuroscience, Psychology and Religion, did you see that?

Mhm.

Which has now been published into, Chinese, Spanish, Greek. It’s a very widely used book. But, that, that was the link between Donald and his work, yah. We’ve gone off track a bit there, but I’m just following it through.

[33:52] No that’s great, thank you. And, do you have similar views on the formation of what I see as two of his other key ideas that influence Christians in Sscience, Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship, that’s ‘nothing-buttery’ and complementary, those two things?

Yes I do. Nothing-buttery is related to his divine upholding thing. Because, what he was trying to point out is that, you can say that an event that you are watching is, well you could say that our conversation now, this would be a very accurate description, is nothing but me emitting sound waves of a certain length, your auditory system picking up these sound waves of a certain length, and I have a processor that emits them, you have one that receives them. And that’s all that’s happening. It’s nothing but, acoustics. In a sense that’s true, it isn’t. But if we said that, we’d be missing the main point, which, hopefully I am communicating something to you, and you are asking me questions. And that’s the important part of it for our purposes, not the, not Malcolm Jeeves Page 56 C1672/07 Track 3 the physical neurological substrate on which it depends, but the message that this physical substrate is, is embodying backwards and forwards. And he was always concerned when people said ‘it’s nothing but’, because, he would say, it is nonsense. Of course it’s that. But the important thing is, you’re missing the whole point if you don’t recognise there’s another account of the same set of events. And that links in with his emphasis on complementarity. Because, this, as you know, he, the first person to emphasise this really was Sir Charles Coulson, when he was Professor of Physics at King’s London and Donald was one of his lecturers. I have the impression that Donald was considerably influenced by Charles Coulson’s views on this. And, complementarity is just, it’s sort of, part of, of what was then modern physics. You can give a wave account and you can give a corpuscular account of light. And both are necessary to do full justice to what’s happening. And in a sense the two accounts we were talking about, the principle of complementarity applies there. When you get on to issues of science and faith, you don’t set up one as a competitor with the other any more than you set up an acoustic account of our conversation as a competitor with the messages that they’re… These are complementary accounts of one set of events. And so what Donald wanted to say is that, in addition to the physical interpretation of all that’s happening, there’s another interpretation, which is in a sense the religious language, the faith one, you don’t have to believe it, but it’s a legitimate account of that same set of events. So for him the principle of complementary, you’ve done your homework very well, I mean, you picked it up perfectly, nothing-buttery and complementarity, and divine upholding, very nicely characterise three of Donald’s key emphases, which did permeate a lot of the thinking of the groups at that time, certainly. Yah.

[37:55] They clearly permeated RSCF. How widely known was his thinking beyond the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship?

He was, he was, he was a regular contributor to science programmes on the BBC. In the Fifties there was a popular programme, a friend of mine’s a psychologist, Donald Broadbent, at Cambridge, he was on it as well. And they were asked, a panel, they were asked science questions each week, and he was very good at that. But he also was often asked to give talks on science and religion. And certainly on one occasion, Malcolm Jeeves Page 57 C1672/07 Track 3

I mean you may have read about this in, in our chapter, in our paper, in the 19… yes, it would be the, I think, in the early 1950s, I must just have graduated I think, Donald MacKay, because of his connections with the BBC, with a director of the broadcasting there whose name was Robertson, I’ve forgotten his first name, was asked if Donald would organise a group of five broadcasts on science and faith, to go out in the Overseas Service of the BBC. And so Donald got in touch with Oliver Barclay, and Oliver did the secretarial work. And Oliver got together, I think there were, eight, ten of us. It included Donald, Sir Robert Boyd, Oliver Barclay, a professor of botany at London, Douglas Spanner, my brother-in-law, Roland Dobbs. I think two or three others. And they had a theologian, James Torrance, and I was there as a psychologist. And we met in London on a series of occasions and we planned a series of five talks for the BBC. And having planned them, it was then decided that, I think Donald gave the first. Anyway, I gave one. This takes us back to a, this takes us back to earlier. Mine was called Wishful Unthinkng, instead of wishful thinking. And so, we met and discussed a lot. And these broadcasts went out into the international service of the BBC. And then, they were subsequently published, you’ve probably seen this, have you, a little booklet, Where Science and Faith Meet? And so, that, that was another activity. And then, various other members would then be invited to participate in various talks and things like this. And then when I went over to Australia I did a certain amount of television and broadcast work over there, we’ll get back to it later. But, that was it. But, I think one has to say that it was partly because… [41:19] Oh. Robert Boyd was on this panel as well, this BBC panel on science. Because I remember he had, he had rather a nice sense of humour, and, as you know he was a cosmologist. At that time there was great interest in flying saucers, and I can still remember him being asked a very serious question, you know, he was asked, ‘What is the significance of flying saucers?’ was the question. And the chairman put this to Robert. And he thought for a bit, and he said, ‘Well, I suspect it’s a symptom of marital unhappiness.’ I mean, you know, in other words, this is a ridiculous question about a ridiculous thing. So Robert was on that. So there were several of them who were, you know, involved with the BBC as well, and they from time to time were also invited to, you know, participate in these sort of things.

Was this a television programme, this panel? Malcolm Jeeves Page 58 C1672/07 Track 3

No, this, this was…

Radio.

…radio. Yes, yes. Television was very new, yah.

[42:33] What I’m trying to work out is whether the, the ideas of MacKay and of the RSCF in general, to what extent they have an effect at this time, in the Fifties and then into the Sixties, on the sort of general, what you might call public sphere, understanding of the relations between science and faith?

There was not much on it apart from that, and I would say that, at that time Donald’s views and the views of a few of us who associated with him were probably more evident than any other views. Because there weren’t many other views really. There was the odd theologian who talked about it, who didn’t talk an awful lot of sense. But, I think in that domain they were the ones, if any of it caught the public attention, they were the ones. Yes, I think that was a fair thing to say, yes.

And yet if you looked at a sort of, a newspaper article on science and faith at the time, or, or the sort of, the comments of a broadcaster, would these sorts of ideas of complementarity and upholding have appeared, or would it have been the sort of, the conflict, the oppositional sort of…?

Well that’s an empirical question. You’d have to go and have a look. I suspect, I suspect, the likelihood is that, in order to get headlines you would probably need to be promoting the conflict warfare model. That’s, that’ll, that’ll get the headlines much more than the other one. So, that’s a testable hypothesis, but that’s my guess, that if you did the homework, you would find that, I suspect so anyway. Yes.

[44:35] Malcolm Jeeves Page 59 C1672/07 Track 3

Did you have any sense of who was reading the, the large number of publications that arise from the existence really of the RSCF through particular publishers? You have some early ones, I know they start off as, as small sort of booklets…

Yah.

…and go up. Did you have any sense of the readership of those? In other words, where were they sold, how were they marketed?

I think it was relatively limited to the religious community. And I think it was certainly promoted by things like Inter-Varsity Press, which was linked with Oliver Barclay and London. And I think it was people… I think the Christian Unions would have been familiar with these things. And at that time there was also an organisation called the Graduates Fellowship, which was a sort of, a, a group of people who had been undergraduates, had become graduates, and continued on, and it had a magazine. And certainly they would have been promoted there. They would have been promoted in some of the religious press, which I’m not familiar with, like the Church of England Newspaper and these sorts of things. They’d have been promoted in those places. But I suspect that the readership was relatively small, and I’d be surprised if there were many outside of that sort of Christian group who were reading it at all seriously. There were a few philosophers, certainly a few philosophers who took Donald MacKay very seriously, and Donald was very good at participating with them in meetings at Oxbridge, and where he was highly respected as a philosopher as well. But outside of that, I… Well certainly they had a much wider impact, strangely, in America, I think, because in America, amongst religious circles, many of them were much more conservative and old-fashioned than we were, and so some of the views that they would put forward… Donald did quite a lot of talking tours in America, speaking tours, and he was quite well-known over there, and he, he broadcast quite a lot over there as well, and he had debates on the radio there which were, which were very well publicised and, and well-known. So, I think, they had quite an influence over there, but as I say, I may be wrong, but I suspect, in terms of numbers, it could be more than it was here, because there weren’t many people thinking like that over there. As, as you will have read in that paper I did with Sam, I mean, the conference we had in 1965 in Oxford, the, the Americans there were really quite surprised at Malcolm Jeeves Page 60 C1672/07 Track 3 some of our views, they thought they were a little bit advanced and risqué, you know. A lot of them changed their views as a result of that, you know, they hadn’t really… They had been a bit afraid to think outside the box, because of the cohesion of some of those churches in America, and they hadn’t really felt the freedom to think as, as we always felt. One of our things was that… [48:37] Well, the group was very largely influenced also by a man called Hooykaas. Now he’s important in the Donald story, because, Donald had been at some meeting in Holland, and Douglas Johnson, who is Oliver’s boss, had suggested, I think, that Donald should go and meet Professor Hooykaas, who was a professor, he had been a professor of geology, he had become a professor of the history of science at the Free University in Amsterdam. And he had written a lot of books, but he had written a little booklet called Philosophia Libera: Christian Faith and the Freedom of Science. Now this is important in my story as well, because, when I was, as a researcher at Cambridge, he came and gave a talk at a place called Tyndale House, under the title ‘Philosophia Libera’. I went to that talk. I heard this lecture for the first time, before he published it. I got to know him quite well, we remained very good friends, he gave the Gifford Lectures here and he spent six months here and so on. But that, I think his influence on Donald MacKay was quite profound, because quite a lot of Professor Hooykaas’s views had influenced Donald, because Hooykaas had researched the history of science and shown what a myth it was to suggest that there was always conflict between science and faith. Because he had documented the faith of many of the leading scientists over quite a number of centuries. He and Donald were very good friends, very close friends, and I think, I always felt that a lot of Donald’s thinking was permeated with the historical scholarship of Professor Hooykaas. They came from a slightly similar background, I mean, Hooykaas was a Dutch Calvinist; Donald came from the very north of Scotland, he came from Wick, where as a member of the Free Church, and the Free Church in Scotland is very Calvinist. And I sort of feel that there was a, almost a natural empathy between them, which enabled them to move forward in other aspects of their own thing. I may be wrong, I never asked Donald this, but, I, I did mention this in that paper I did with Sam. It’ll be interesting to see what reactions we get from that. Valerie might have something… I think I may have mentioned this in the lecture I gave in Oxford when Valerie was there, and I don’t remember her commenting on it. Anyway. Malcolm Jeeves Page 61 C1672/07 Track 3

[51:51] And can you expand on the extent to which, for the ’65 conference which is one you were just talking about, there was an effort to close down any sort of attempt to focus on evolutionary biology and faith, as opposed to science and faith more generally? This was the 1965 one funded by the Canadian Harvard engineer with the ASA members involved in…

Yes. No no no, there was no attempt to close down on that. Only to the extent that, since we were meeting for eight days, and we had a week of discussions, Oliver, who was on the… Well, as you’ve seen, there was a little committee of six of us who organised it. Both Oliver and Donald realised that with the Americans the really hot chestnut was creationism and evolution, and they were determined not to, as they would have put it privately, waste the whole week talking about this, which is a non- issue for us, and therefore, in planning the programme, we made sure that it was there as an issue to be discussed, but it had the same amount of time as everything else. It was just seen as an issue we should deal with. And even then, I mean some of our American colleagues found it quite challenging I think, because, during the week they really did undergo a conversion experience in their views, they changed their views, because, here were a bunch of relatively well-regarded scientists who found, who were totally at ease about evolution. And indeed, one of their people who was on our little organising committee, Walter Hearn, who was a professor of biochemistry, he was totally at ease about it as well. But, he was in a minority, and some of the others… So, it was a bit of a, a radical departure for them, yes.

[54:03] Thank you. Could you talk now about the development of your research, first as lecturer in psychology at Leeds, and then, obviously as founding Professor of Psychology at the University of Adelaide. So…

Yah. I’m just looking at… OK, we’re back to Leeds. Yup. Well as I said, there weren’t many jobs going in Britain at the time. When I got to Leeds, they were very nice people. It was a small department. And I have to say that I became aware after a little while that, how shall I put it? It didn’t hold out great prospects. Fortunately I Malcolm Jeeves Page 62 C1672/07 Track 3 managed to, I had, fortunately I had two very good research students I was asked to look after, talk about them in a minute, and also, I was contacted by a member of the medical staff in the medical school who wanted to do some work with me. And, as a result of that I was able to continue some of my work on visual perception, and to continue some of my work linking with some of the medical aspects of it. But it, it was a bit disappointing. On the visual perception side, I had a very bright girl called Mary Pickersgill. She had done her first degree at Oxford in psychology, and she was a lecturer in psychology in the psychiatry department, a junior lecturer, and she wanted to do a PhD, and I agreed to supervise it. And we continued this interest in the visual system. We did things which I think you wouldn’t do these days. For example, she was interested to find out whether… You will know that if you stand in front of a waterfall for long enough, then you look away, you get what’s called an afterimage, instead of the water coming down, the wall seems to go up. It’s a visual afterimage. And you get a visual afterimage of movement as well. Now, we didn’t know whether that was something happening in the retina or happening in the brain. And, the usual way of testing this, and this links with Donald MacKay again, he was working on this too, he had a circle of radiating black and white lines, and you rotate this fast in one direction, and then you look away and you see it rotating backwards in the opposite direction, the afterimage. So what Mary did, and I as a supervisor was helping her, she wanted to see if she could find out what was happening. Now, if you – I don’t recommend this – if you press on your eyeball hard enough, you can restrict the blood supply, and you can make the eye anoxic, that is to say, you can make it temporarily blind, so that the retina no longer is responding. So what we did to begin with was to get them to look at one of these rotating things, just in the normal, see it rotating; close that eye and then look with the other eye. We wanted to see whether what had gone in here was also seen by this eye to give us a clue of whether it had come to the back of the brain or not. But we also wanted to find out whether, if we could actually put the eye that was getting the stimulation temporarily out of action, so you, although it was being stimulated, you weren’t aware of it, would it still get to the back of the brain, and so on. So what we in fact did was, both Mary and I were the subjects, we made our, each eye temporarily blind, and then we did this experiment. And we discovered that in fact the afterimage is in the brain, not the eye. And we published a very nice little paper in Nature, which was very nice. So, and then we, I did various other things with her. This became part of her PhD thesis, and Malcolm Jeeves Page 63 C1672/07 Track 3 she subsequently became a lecturer then senior lecturer in London, in, at Bedford College, in psychology, and she took study leave and came up, worked with me in Adelaide. And we’re still in touch a bit. She is very bright. Mary Pickersgill. So, I went on with that sort of work. With the chap in the medical school, we were doing slightly different things, we were doing various conditioning experiments using a thing called a plethysmograph. Otherwise, I was just really continuing on my own work on thinking. [59:53] Oh, that’s right. I continued on my work on thinking. And, during that time, a lecturer in mathematics at Leicester University had heard about my work on thinking, and he came to see me, because he was very interested, although he was a lecturer in mathematics, he was fascinated to know a bit about how mathematicians think, mathematical thinking. And so he came to see me, and we had some long discussions together, and we decided that it was possible to do actual experiments on this. And so we began to do some experiments on mathematical thinking. His main interest was on the way that young children learn mathematics, and he was doing some quite pioneering work in teaching mathematics to young children using games, objects and so on. And he was a brilliant fellow. So we began to do work there, and it was progressing, and I left and went to Australia, and we’ll come on to this another day. Once I got to Australia, and I was head of the department, I had the opportunity to make a number of appointments, I in fact invited him, he was still a lecturer in Leicester, to come and join me as a reader in my department. And he did, and he worked there with me for quite a while, and we published quite a lot of books on mathematical thinking, which you may have seen references to. He’s brilliant. He died just recently. Anyway, so that’s how I spent my time in Leeds really. And it was really, it was a, it was a stepping-off point for going somewhere else, and in the event I went to Adelaide, to the chair of psychology there, to set up the thing there. Yah. But that’s a full story, we can get round to that another day, which is an exciting story.

[End of Track 3] Malcolm Jeeves Page 64 C1672/07 Track 4

[Track 4]

Could you tell me the story of the development of your academic career in Australia? We’ll then consider your work in science and religion in Australia as well.

Yah. As I said, I went to the University of Adelaide. They had… I was the first professor of psychology, but, there had been a number of lecturers, so I inherited, I think four lecturers. Oh no, three lecturers and a reader. Very nice people. The reader, I only discovered afterwards, had really rather hoped he’d get the chair, but of course I knew nothing about this. And so, I suppose wisely, he and I got on very well, he decided to move on and he went and worked in industry and did very well. So he, he moved on. But the others, all but one were older than me, but they were most cooperative. But they wanted to develop it, so, I was able with a year or two to make a whole series of appointments. And I made appointments in areas that I wanted it to develop in. So I got an Australian who had just done his PhD in University College London on various aspects of brain chemistry and behaviour, got him, recruited him. I recruited another one from University College London who was good on learning theory, and he came and worked with me on the rat stuff. I recruited Dr Dienes, I mentioned, to come as a reader in that. I recruited a human factors person from the anatomy department in Oxford, Kenneth Provins, who had done a lot of work on the effect of heat stress on human performance. And he was a wonderful guy. He was slightly older than me, he had been in the Air Force during the War, he was a Hurricane pilot. They were a lovely family. They came out. And, I managed to set him up, at great expense, with a climate-controlled room in my laboratories there, and, he went on to do quite outstanding work. He went to be professor in Canberra, and then, after I had left he went, came back to Adelaide as Deputy Vice-Chancellor. So that, that was, he was a great guy. And, yes, I went on appointing people of my own choice, and, fortunately it was a time when the Australian universities were expanding, and that meant that it made it easier for me to expand the department. Towards the end of the time, one of the big coups that I got was, the person who had been head of the research unit in Cambridge that I had worked for, Alan Welford, came out to visit for six months. His wife didn’t want to come at all, they had no children, she thought Australia and Australians were terrible, on no evidence. Anyway, they came out, and absolutely loved it. At the end of six months there he Malcolm Jeeves Page 65 C1672/07 Track 4 said to me, ‘You know Malcolm, if there was ever a second chair here, I’d love to come and join you.’ So I said, ‘OK. Leave it to me.’ He went back to Cambridge and he told the professor there what he had in mind, and the professor there immediately said, ‘No you can’t go, I’ll give you a readership immediately if you’ll stay.’ Anyway, he decided… And I, and I spoke to the vice-chancellor in Adelaide, and, managed to get another chair available, and we appointed this man, Welford, to the second chair. That was in the last year I was there. And then, to his great disappointment, and I think slight annoyance, later that year I decided that I was coming back to Britain. And he wasn’t too well pleased, because the one thing he didn’t want was administration, because I was doing it all. Anyway, he got a young lecturer to do the administration. And he remained there, and made a big contribution. But it was good, but… And at that time when I left, and I, I think others would say this, although, I shouldn’t, it was widely regarded as, without a doubt, the best psychology department in Australia, because of all the international people I had brought in, and also all our research strengths. [05:11] So, now, this is interesting, because it was during this period that I was doing two things. One, I was extending the work with Zoltán Dienes to produce these books…

On mathematical thinking.

Yah. And, what was new about some of this was, these were the days when computers were the old IBM punch card things, and I decided that, to do this sort of work the way I wanted to do it, where I thought the timing of the events was crucial, I wanted to get online control of the experiments I was doing. And so, we actually set up online control of the experiment and on the recording the results. And I think that was important. And so that work developed well.

What does that… Excuse me. What does that work mean, to say that you had online control?

Well what happens is, a part of the experiment was, part of the aspect of the mathematical thinking was getting them to look at displays which required them to relate, for example, one shape to another, or, to relate one mathematical concept to Malcolm Jeeves Page 66 C1672/07 Track 4 another. But they did it by pressing keys when they thought they had the solution. And so everything they did was through key pressing, and the pressing of the arrival of the information on the screen and the pressing of the key was all done by the computer, online. So the IBM computer presented the thing, and then recorded it. And so this meant that we had a much finer control of exactly what was happening than the old, watching them with paper and pencil. So that was that. [07:13] But while I was doing that, as I said, my appointment as Professor carried with it also what was called an honorary, what we call here a consultant, in a hospital. I was a bit reluctant to take it on, but, it meant I had three assistants, and, they all three were lecturers in my department. And so, I said I’d take it on, on the condition I only saw the neurological patients, and they would see the other patients that needed other forms of psychological assessment and testing and so on. Now that’s when I, as I told you earlier, when this, I saw this small boy who had been born without the corpus callosum. And, that really in a way became the major focus, that and the work that flowed from it, became the major focus of my research for the next thirty years, mainly by looking at the small group of children born without this. I was also looking at adults who were discovered not to have it. Now that was unusual at that time, because, remember at this time you didn’t have all these brain imaging things. You had two procedures, one was called ventriculography, and the other was called pneumoencephalography, which were very unpleasant procedures, and occasionally the procedure proved fatal. So they were only very rarely done. But sometimes when the neurologists simply, or neurosurgeons, simply couldn’t understand what was happening, they would do these procedures. And these would then give you a picture of the brain inside. And this is how some of the adults came to their notice, and thus came to my notice. One of them was a very very prosperous grazier, a well-known figure around Adelaide. And, interesting man, he had been all through army service, nobody had noticed anything different about him at all. But he developed some very unpleasant, persistent headaches that they could do nothing about, developed epilepsy as well. Did this procedure, and they found he hadn’t got a corpus callosum. So immediately, he came to me, came into my labs, and I was able to compare him with my little boy without the corpus callosum, and begin to see, to some extent, whether the brain had adapted at all in the course of forty-five years. That was one strand, and I, and I gave my first international report on that. In about 1964 the CIBA Foundation Malcolm Jeeves Page 67 C1672/07 Track 4 in London held an international conference on the functions of the corpus callosum, and I was invited to give a presentation on my work, which I did. And this was published in a book called Functions of the Corpus Callosum, it’s a little book, reporting on this CIBA Foundation conference. That was important because I met quite a number of people there who became subsequent close colleagues. But that, that really, you know, put the story that I had been developing onto the, onto the international scene. [11:19] Another aspect of this, this goes back to the original work by this man, Roger Sperry, in California at Caltech. As I mentioned, his original work had been done with animals, he had been bisectioning this part of the brain in monkeys. One of his researchers had, as his experimental subject, used cats, and he had sectioned this part of the brain in adult cats. And he had explored the way in which cats will learn to discriminate with their paws between, for example, a rough surface and a smooth surface. And very quickly they will learn that if they press the lever that’s rough they get a squirt of cream, and if they press the lever that’s smooth they don’t get anything. And so very quickly, one of their paws, you can teach it to correctly do this task. And then, you can ask the question, what if I get them to do it with the other paw? And a normal cat, with this part of the brain intact, whatever it’s learnt with this paw, it will do with this paw, because the information that went from this paw is going to this side of the brain, and although this paw is connected to this side, they can talk to each other through the corpus callosum. Now what this researcher found was, if he sectioned this part of the brain in cats, then what the cats had learnt with one paw was no longer available to the other paw. Again, you had two separate seats of learning. Now what was unusual in my work was… Remember I was working with people born without the corpus callosum. Now one of my good friends and colleagues there, in the Children’s Hospital, was a professor of paediatric neurosurgery, a very good neurosurgeon who had trained at Oxford, and I used to help a bit, I used to see his patients and test them and so on, and evaluate them. On this occasion I, I decided that I was going to try and see whether, in newborn kittens… Now remember, kittens don’t open their eyes for the first week of their life, so there’s no selective input going in, on the visual task. And so I decided I would try and see whether I could, in these newborn kittens, do this same experiment of sectioning this part of the brain, then let them grow up normally, and then see whether the task that these grown animals in Malcolm Jeeves Page 68 C1672/07 Track 4

California couldn’t do, could now be done by my kittens who had grown up without this; had the brain managed to reorganise itself? Well, we did the surgery, and I have to say, these kittens had surgery which, if you had been a private patient, it would have cost you at least £1,000. He and I operated together. One of the problems in operating with newborn animals is that it’s very difficult to get the level of anaesthesia right so that the anaesthetic is doing its job, but you’re not giving them too much so that it kills them. The actual cats or kittens I had, it’s worth telling this story, where was I going to get them from? This is back to church again. Holy Trinity Church in Adelaide was the church we attended, and the rector there, I had known him briefly when he was in Cambridge, and we picked up when I went over there, and we were very good friends, and I, my wife and I were intimately involved in that church. But they had a cat that was constantly getting pregnant. So I said to him, ‘Look, next time the cat gets pregnant, you know, don’t destroy the kittens. May I have ’em?’ So he said yes. And then one day he said, ‘Oh the cat’s pregnant again.’ So I said, ‘Well I’ll take the cat.’ And I took them into my laboratory, which was a very humane place, it’s a friendly place, they can run about. It wasn’t like a lot of the laboratories. And so we waited for these kittens to be born. And then I rang my neurosurgeon friend and I said, ‘Donald, can you spare time to operate with me this week?’ And he said yes. So on… we did it. And, it was a, I’m glad I had his help, it was a very tricky procedure. Anyway, we operated on the four kittens. Unfortunately one of them died under the anaesthetic, and the other danger with newborn animals is, if you get a bleed, it… We lost two of them. But four of them were fine. And they grew up, and they were healthy animals. And then, I had a medical research student who took a year off from his training, and he worked with me. And we did with these animals what the people in California had done with the adult animals. And my question was, would they be able to do this? The interesting thing was, that some of them could and some of them couldn’t. And that was a real puzzle. But it wasn’t a puzzle once we, at the end of it all, sacrificed them and put them down, and did the histology. In other words, we looked exactly at what had happened. In one of them we had succeeded in completely cutting the corpus callosum, and that cat couldn’t transfer. The other three, a bit at the back had been spared. Another one, a bit in the middle had been spared. Another one, a bit at the front had been spared. This meant that there was plasticity within it, and as long as a bit of it was left, the pathways that crossed over in other parts would cross over there so they could transfer. And we Malcolm Jeeves Page 69 C1672/07 Track 4 published this paper in the journals. And so in fact what we did, we produced, if you like, evidence from an animal model that there was this sort of plasticity. And then, we then began to wonder, because there is one other little pathway in the human brain called the anterior commissure, through which a small number of fibres, now remember, there’s 200 million going across there, but the large… This little part, these go across. And, I had speculated that some of the information that normally goes across, with you and me across the corpus callosum, as, as the brain developed it reorganised itself, and some of the pathways that would have gone through that moved themselves in the brain and managed to, if you like, transfer over to this other one. And we were able to show that that is probably the case. And, it was soon after this that Warren Brown came and worked with me, and he followed that up with a lot, lot more patients. But it did show again there was plasticity in the brain, and even with a major thing like this, it’s remarkably able to reorganise itself if the damage happens early enough. Now we had known that, for a long time, that early brain damage, you know, in a human, enables much more reorganisation than late brain damage. So if you get, you know, cerebral damage in a child, it can often develop things like speech and language to an extent that if you’d got the same thing in an adult, it would be a much more radical loss. So it all began to fit together. And I was working on that, and, when I came back here, I insisted that the university here ship all my apparatus back here, which they did, and I was going to continue it here, but unfortunately, I had so many other things to do, and in fact we set up a primate colony here of… and, an operating theatre we had built. Because if you’re operating on non- human primates, monkeys, doing the fairly radical things that were being done, you had to have the full aseptic procedures you have in a, you know, in a big hospital. Because the operation can take up to six hours. So we had this. And I recruited – we’ll get back to this later I’m sure – I recruited a young researcher who was just doing his PhD with a friend of mine in London who had worked on the corpus callosum, as a young lecturer, and he came here and he worked here, and he stayed with me for twenty years, then he went to be head of psychology at Durham. A very bright man, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London last year, David Milner. And he continued this sort of work with me here. So, so that, anyway, that’s Adelaide, there, though my main two things were the mathematical thinking and what is usually called neuropsychology, and this was developmental neuropsychology really. And it was those two things which really occupied me. Malcolm Jeeves Page 70 C1672/07 Track 4

[22:04] But, the other thing I was interested in, and this takes me back to my zoology, I was always fascinated in the animals in Australia who are marsupials. Now the distinctive thing about marsupials is, they don’t have a corpus callosum. Eutherian mammals, which is what we are, we have one; they don’t. And so I was fascinated, I was wondering, could I do some experiments on them and see what they use. Now, I didn’t get far on this. To begin with you have to find out whether you can do behavioural experiments, and there again, we had, in my big labs we had some small marsupials, they’re called quokkas, nice little things, and they lived very happily, they… And to begin with what I used to do was, I used to get them to learn to press these buttons. And it was quite interesting, you would let them out of their compound, and they’d actually hop along the path into my laboratory and they’d stand in front of it, waiting for you to let them start pressing it to get reward. So they’d learn how to do a task with one hand, one paw, then the other. And we did a lot of work on that. But, I didn’t stay long enough to get into the surgical part, because there’s a part of the brain there called the massa intermedia, which we think does for the marsupial brain what the corpus callosum does for our brains. But the other side effect of this, and this is interesting, because of my interest in this, another one of my lecturers who, an Aberdeen graduate, he was interested in animal learning, so he decided to work with another, smaller, marsupial; another one decided to work with possums, another marsupial; and I had the quokkas. And this meant that, during my time there we had the first ever small conference in Canberra, during the annual conference of the Australian Psychological Society we had a conference devoted to marsupial behaviour. And this was… So we had a series of papers presented by members of my staff. But the most interesting one of all was this. And this is going to all join up. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, we had two textbooks of psychology recommended, one was by three people, Boring, Langfeld and Weld, and the other was by Norman Munn. These were the standard textbooks, and the widest used in America. Now I also knew about Norman Munn because I worked on rats in Harvard, I discovered that he had written a book called Handbook of Psychological Research on the Rat, which is a bit tome, describing all the methods that you can use for investigating learning in rats. So I, I knew about him. And then, about halfway through my time in Australia I had a letter from this Professor Munn to say that he was visiting Australia; could he come and visit me and my department in Adelaide? Malcolm Jeeves Page 71 C1672/07 Track 4

And I was just delighted, I mean he was a big name. So I said yes. And he came. And he told me his story. He had grown up in south Australia, as a boy. He was a champion weightlifter as a boy in south Australia. And then he, there was no psychology here then, and then he had gone to America, and he’s made his name, and he had written these textbooks. And his first wife had died recently. And it was at the time of the Vietnam War, and because of the large amount of royalties he made on his books he was paying enormous amounts of US tax, and he regretted and wanted to stop paying tax to support the Vietnam War. So, he said to me when he was there, he said, ‘Malcolm, I just wonder, I’d like to leave America. Would you be able to find a spot for me here?’ I said, ‘I’d love to have you. I can’t offer you any money. I’ll give you an honorary professorship.’ So, we agreed. Went back to the States, he wound his affairs up, came back, and we made him honorary professor. But, he said to me, ‘Ever since I was a boy I’ve always wanted to study the behaviour of marsupials..’ He said, ‘I’d like to study discrimination learning,’ this is back to Harvard, you remember, ‘vertical, horizontal stripes in kangaroos.’ And I said, ‘Well you’re going to need a lot of space for that.’ I said, ‘I think I can arrange it for you.’ Now a part of the university was the Waite agricultural Research Institute, which had large fields. And I said, ‘I think I can get a bit of one of those fields for you.’ And indeed, we set up a, a run, with these two big doors, about four feet high, vertical and horizontal bars. And he got three kangaroos, and he trained them to do discrimination learning. And he was just thrilled to bits. So he presented these results at the conference in Canberra, the first ever study of discrimination learning in, in kangaroos. And there were all sorts of jokes at that stage, because, one of the, the leading behavioural researcher in America was a man called Skinner, B F Skinner, Skinner box conditioning, and he used to put his rats on a, on a jump stand, they’d jump from one place to where they made the response. That was one of his techniques. He was, he was at Harvard when I was there. But… So the crack was, about the kangaroos, have you got kangaroos on a jumping stand? Knowing how they leap, you know. All sorts of jokes were made. Anyway, so he, he came back, and, he stayed there, and remained there for the rest of his career. And we kept in touch, and he wrote a story about his life, I have it in there, in which he very kindly said some very nice things about me there in it, about the way I helped him and, helped him settle back and so on. But, yes, so, I was very fortunate in that I had all these different streams coming together which meant that my department was developing quite a Malcolm Jeeves Page 72 C1672/07 Track 4 name for itself, not because of me but because of the people I was able to gather round me. So, that’s why, back to why it was quite a difficult decision to leave Australia. As I said earlier on, also while I was there, I was consultant to the Aeronautical Research Labs in Australia, and used to do work on pilot problems in long-distance flights and so on. So, I had quite a busy life one way and another. But I was young, I mean I… You see, I was appointed to my chair there when I was thirty, what was it, thirty, thirty-one or something like this. So, it meant that I was still fairly full and vigorous at that time, so, and the climate and food are very good, so you can work hard. Mm.

[30:41] Why, why cats rather than any other animal?

Why cats? The reason for that was, split brain things hadn’t been done on rats; they had been done on monkeys, but I didn’t have a monkey colony, and I wasn’t, at that stage, ready to set up a monkey colony. I knew this had been done on cats, and I knew that I had the facilities. I knew that there was an experiment that had been well done and well reported, and therefore I had results, reliable results with which I could compare mine when I did those. Yah, that, that was, that was the reason for using those. Yah.

And what does the, what does the surgical procedure involve? The, the cutting of the…

Well, you have to open the, the skin, and then you have to open the skull. And then there you see the brain, and you just slightly retract the two hemispheres. And, you then cut through. You can see this little band of fibres. You cut those through with a surgical knife. And, and then, you close it up, you sew it up, do it all up, and… The other thing I was doing there, and this goes back to the discrimination learning again, there was a lot of interest at that time in the role of the frontal lobes, and there had been some, quite a lot of work done on that. And since I knew quite a lot about discrimination learning, and what’s called reversal learning, when you unlearn something, I was interested to see whether I could find out a little bit more about the roles of the frontal lobes. And so I, that was another surgical type thing I did, I Malcolm Jeeves Page 73 C1672/07 Track 4 actually made lesions in the frontal lobes of rats and, and looked at the way in which selective lesions in the frontal part of the brain affected the ability of these rats, first of all to learn a task, and then to unlearn it. And so I did publish some work on reversal learning, which was a big topic at that stage. Reversal learning and the frontal lobe function were big things. And so I did that. But this was, I did all that surgery myself. But, yes, that, that worked well too, yes. Yes.

[33:15] How did you feel at this time about the use of animals in these experiments?

I felt that, it was only warranted if it was done entirely humanely, with no suffering, and if it was, had the possibility of adding significantly to our knowledge of the human brain in a way that we couldn’t do because you can’t do these experiments on human beings. So you use a minimal number of animals, with the best technique possible. This why, for the kittens, I didn’t… I could have relied on my own skills, but I got a professor of paediatric neurosurgery, and you couldn’t have better than that. So that I knew that they had the very best skills. And, so, that, that was always the guiding principle. There’s no excuse at all for using a single animal more than was necessary. And it had to have the possibility of an important pay-off for the understanding of the human condition where it’s, well as you know, the problems associated with aspects of brain disease and brain damage are so life-distressing, that if one can relieve that in a little way. This is why, one of the people I appointed, the one from University College London, he was working with rats on a particular biochemical in the brain called acetylcholine, which has an important role in transmitting messages in the brain. And so he was actually working on this to discover more about how this particular biochemical agent affected the ability of the brain to learn and so on. So there again, it had a clear related clinical implication. So again, it was a, it was important to have that in mind. So, that, that was, that was the rationale for that, yah. Mm.

[35:43] Here in Adelaide at the, at the church…

Yah. Malcolm Jeeves Page 74 C1672/07 Track 4

…and, also in Cambridge at the Round Church, as a, as just what you might call an ordinary churchgoer to those churches…

Yah.

…to what extent were members of the congregation interested in your professional life as a scientist?

The Round Church was a small church, and, it was of no great interest there. [pause] Adelaide was some years later, and there it was of some interest, because, at that stage, rightly or wrongly, professors in Australia were very highly regarded, in my judgement too highly regarded, so much so that a previous vice-chancellor of the University of Adelaide had written about what he called a ‘professor god myth’. The professor was a second god. What he said went. And when I first went there, professors at the local university, there was only one university at the time, Adelaide, were held in very high esteem. And so when you get a science professor who is a member of the congregation, this does produce quite a bit of interest. And since I was already thinking and writing about the relation of science to faith I was invited on occasions by the rector to, to preach at student services, and because I was Professor of Psychology, this did tend to be quite a draw. Wouldn’t be now, but it did then. And so, yes, it was like that. So that it was different. And because of that, and there were a few other scientists, they weren’t professors in the university, whom I met who were also Christians, it was at that stage that I decided to see whether I could perhaps initiate some activities which might enable thoughtful senior students at school to have a constructive approach to science and faith. And so I discussed this with my other science colleagues, and, it… for the, for the high schools there, there was great competition, that, they wanted their students to do extremely well in the state school examinations. And so what we did was, we set up a long weekend which was called a Science for Schools weekend, in which we gave state-of-the-art science lectures by people who were leaders in their field, in biochemistry, geology, these things. And we also gave one talk on the relation of science and faith. And on the Sunday morning we had a, a church service which they could come to if they wanted to, and that was taken by the chaplain from one of these schools. And when we started on Malcolm Jeeves Page 75 C1672/07 Track 4 this, we sort of advertised it, and the take-up was overwhelming. We just had to get, well you just had to take the best. And we took as many as we could; we couldn’t take many, it was residential, we took about sixty I think. And so from then on we did this each year, and it was really sought-after, and you… So, it meant that you had the opportunity of sharing your science, but also sharing why you didn’t see science as an enemy to faith in a constructive way with these very bright young people. And that went on throughout my time there. It’s stopped now, but, these things always start and then stop. But some of the people I got involved in that made a real mark later on. I mean there was a senior lecturer in physiology there called Allan Day, he was one of the first people to work on the effects of cholesterol, which is a big topic, he became Professor of Physiology at Melbourne, and he wrote lots of things on science and Christianity, which were very influential in Australia, and he was one of the people who was instrumental in setting up, really, a similar sort of thing to the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship but in Australia. They called it the Institute for the Study of Christianity in an Age of Science and Technology. And he was a leading figure in that, together with a distinguished chemist, Lawrie Lyons. And that still continues, and is still holding annual conferences and so on. So in a way, it, it was part of, would sow the seeds. And held some of the first conferences in a rather primitive way during the time I was there, just to get the thing going. But Australia’s such a big country that to arrange things between states is, is much more of a thing, because, you know, it’s further to go to, you know, probably, from Sydney to Perth is much further than from Perth to Singapore, this sort of thing. It’s a big country. But, so that, that started there, and it’s gone on ever since. Yes.

[41:53] How did the amount and content of the prevailing public debate about relations between science and Christianity differ in Australia compared to Britain where you had experienced it previously?

Well it was beginning there. I was asked to, I was asked to go and have a debate/discussion with the leader of the Roman Catholic seminary in Adelaide on the topic of asceticism. Because, committed Roman Catholic priests by definition are ascetic, they give up the possibility… And, we both had to fly to Melbourne, and then Malcolm Jeeves Page 76 C1672/07 Track 4 we, in the studio in Melbourne, and for, I don’t know, half an hour or an hour we had a very friendly debate about this. And, that was very constructive. [43:02] […] [44:02] But certainly when I went back in later years, I went back to give some things called the New College Lectures. I gave the first series of those. John Polkinghorne gave some later on. But anyway, these were New College Lectures at the University of New South Wales. And, it was all on my mind and brain and, you know, the stuff, and what implications this has for Christian belief. But it was interesting that, I was asked to go on various television programmes, and one of them was an ABC programme run by a very well-known chap called Robertson, and I went on, and he interrogated me at length about what I was going to be lecturing on, and, he got quite personal about what I believed in. And it was all very friendly, and we had a good… This was all being televised. Then, it finished, and, and we, we left the studio. And as we walked back he said to me, ‘Could you spare a few minutes?’ And I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘There are some things I’d like to talk to you about.’ ‘Sure. My next engagement isn’t till lunchtime.’ So, we went into his office, and he said, ‘I just want to ask you a few things.’ He said, ‘From what you’ve been telling me, it’s really making me rethink things.’ He said, ‘I was brought up in a Christian home,’ and, you know, he had the family Bible and so on. But he said.....

[pause in recording – telephone]

.....said?

Well, he said, ‘I stopped, I gave, I gave all that up when I grew up. But,’ he said, ‘you know, from what you’ve been saying, and these things, I can see that some of my things were excuses now, and this business about science all disproving it, just wasn’t true.’ So, we, we talked at length about this, as long as I could spare. And that was it. And we parted, and that was it, and he thanked me very much. A year or two later we were back there, and some friends said, ‘Have you heard about Robertson?’ I said, ‘What about him?’ ‘Oh well, he’s publicly said he’s become a Christian.’ Well that was interesting to me, because, I had been willing, with an open mind, to talk about the problems, but to do so in a way that he felt I was accessible to him, and that helped him then on a path which enabled him to come to a real faith. And so these, Malcolm Jeeves Page 77 C1672/07 Track 4 you never know what these things will lead to. I’ve always said, never attempt to argue anybody into the Kingdom of God. That’s not the way it works. I think people have to think the thing through for themselves, you know, examine the evidence, discuss it with other people, and make up their own minds. And all that I can do is, if people ask me, ‘Well how do you manage to believe what you believe about the brain and the mind, and also believe,’ whatever it is, then, I can give them the answer. And that’s what this last book, Minds, Brains, Souls and Gods is all about, because the students are asking me these questions. So that’s, that’s a, that’s a footnote to the time in Australia really, mm, yah.

[47:55] Thank you. When you write your, well at least the first books that I’m sort of aware of in the 1970s on relations between Christianity and psychology, you seem to be writing against, to some extent, a kind of, a version of popular psychology, or certain kinds of popularisation of…

I do, yes.

…of psychology.

Yes I do.

And, I was wanting you to sort of expand on your view of popular understanding of psychology at the time, and when and where you saw it if you like. So, is it particular books, like the ones that you mention, Battle for the Mind…

Battle for the Mind, William Sargant yah.

Yes. So, if you could talk about the, the context of popular understanding of psychology that you are to some extent writing against…

Yah.

Malcolm Jeeves Page 78 C1672/07 Track 4

…in those early books, Contemporary Psychology and Belief and Christian Experience, Scientific… Science, Psychology and Christian Belief, and then The View Both Ways, the longer account.

Yah. Well, for a long time the views that were put forward by, for example, Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Freud was an incredible person, I mean he is an amazing intellect, and had some quite profound theories. He began life as a neurologist, but he, he left that and he moved into his own psychoanalytic theory. But it seems that very quickly his building up of psychoanalytic theories slipped away from its moorings in scientific fact. And this was why, for example, Professor Eysenck, who was one of the big figures in psychology in Britain, not a Christian, and at the Maudsley Hospital, he was one of the great leaders in the application of conditioning of this sort of stuff to help people with psychological problems. And he wrote book after book in which he exposed the fallacy of Freud’s theories, you know. Well if Freud’s theories are true, then this and this. But that’s not the case. And so, in a sense, long after professional psychologists were taking it too seriously. But there are still those who accept aspects of psychoanalytic theory, no doubt about that, just as there are people who are very committed to homeopathy. I mean, I can understand their views. But long after that, psychology as it’s taught in most university science departments wouldn’t really spend much time at all on psychoanalytic theory, because it’s not taken seriously from a scientific point of view. And so my concern in some early writing was, it’s interesting that it is still taken very seriously in the psychology and religion domain as the major critique of religion. And, this is regrettable because in a sense it doesn’t do justice to psychology, because that’s not what psychology’s all about. And so my purpose was in exposing the lack of the scientific foundations of psychoanalytic theory and so on, and saying, well, if the foundations are that insecure, I don’t think one should be spending too much time with their critique of religion. And Battle for the Mind was again different. That was a brilliant psychiatrist, again, William Sargant, who incidentally, he was very much of a behaviourist, but he again was interested in what I would call extreme expressions of religion. So for example, he went round the world studying religious sects, and the ones he was most interested in, for example, the snake-handling sects of America. I’m sure that’s fascinating stuff, but, you know, there are still one or two weird sects who still do that. But, it would be very difficult to argue that has much relation to mainstream Christianity. So, it Malcolm Jeeves Page 79 C1672/07 Track 4 wasn’t difficult for him to dismiss that, but in dismissing that, I didn’t feel he always… I mean he was describing conversion as a, a form of brainwashing, but the theory of brainwashing that he espoused had very little basis in physiological fact, that’s not the way the brain works. So that’s why I was keen to expose that I think, yes. But that, that was a, that was the flavour of the month. And also, I suppose my other motivation is, this is what was worrying some Christian believers, they were worried about Freud, they were worried about Sargant, and so, what I was trying to say was, well, in so far as they make you think about your faith, I think they’ve done a good job, but in so far as what they’ve said is concerned, I want to show you that it’s not itself very firmly grounded in science. So, that was really what I was trying to get at, mm.

[54:26] When you say Christians were worried about Sargant and, and Freud, who, in your experience, were these Christians who were worried?

Well you saw some of them in the press, and some, some religious leaders would write about the, the threat to faith of Freudian theories, or the threat to religious belief of brainwashing and conversion. It wasn’t a threat from my point of view, but they saw it like that. And therefore it seemed to me that if that was something that was concerning them, if I could offer a different point of view, it could be helpful. Well that’s really what it was.

[55:06] In those same sort of press treatments which alerted you to possible Christian concern about these two kind of forms of popular psychology, was there also concern about the other kind of behavioural science that you talk about in these earlier publications, and that’s ethology and The Naked Ape and that, that side…?

No, I hadn’t got into… That, that’s evolutionary psychology. That hadn’t really come yet. That was beginning to appear. But that was the other major aspect of some of my later writing where, again, I mean one of the things I did when I came here, and I knew I was going to build a new department, I didn’t inherit people here, well one old gentleman, but, I had to decide which way was the department going to go, and I Malcolm Jeeves Page 80 C1672/07 Track 4 decided I wanted two major research groups, one in neuropsychology, and one in evolutionary psychology. Because this goes back to what I told you, in my undergraduate days when I was influenced by Adrian, that’s the name I was trying to think of, Lord Adrian at Trinity who was a physiologist, and to William Thorpe who wrote the first book on learning and instinct in animals, the beginnings of evolutionary psychology. These were very influential with me in the way they impacted on psychology. These seemed to me to be two areas which had great potential for increasing our understanding. And therefore these I developed. And so evolutionary psychology is a major theme here, we have some of the world’s – I can say it, I’m not one of them – world leaders, and, Dick Byrne and Andy Whiten and people. And that’s a major theme now, and major funding. And so, when people began to write in a rather silly way about The Naked Ape and so on, I was sad, because I felt that a potentially very important area of developing science was being misrepresented in a way which wouldn’t do any good for science, and I was concerned that the science shouldn’t get a bad name because of that. So I think that was, as, as would Professor Thorpe, who wrote, who was, you know, wrote his book on learning and instinct in animals, as I said, he gave the Gifford Lectures here on that sort of thing. So, yes, that was the sort of background to that, yah.

[57:42] And how does that, how does that sort of, affect your views about the public understanding of science more generally? Since, since this period, and really only from the sort of, late Eighties, there’s been the development of a sort of movement for the public understanding of science, but at this time, there was, there was little of it. And I wonder to what extent, when you were working in Adelaide and then in St Andrews, you were telephoned by journalists who were asking you about your work, or, or whether these departments had a press office who might respond to public interest.

No. No, there was very little of that, very little of that really. I mean you did get to speak at the British Association, and when I was President of what’s called Section J of the British Association, which is psychology, I gave a public lecture in Oxford when the meeting of the British Association was there, and there I talked about, well I really talked about neuropsychology, brain and behaviour, because that’s what I was Malcolm Jeeves Page 81 C1672/07 Track 4 talking about. I don’t think I probably made any reference at all to religion there. I mean that wasn’t what I was called upon to do. I can’t even remember whether any questions were asked afterwards, but, I’ve forgotten now exactly what I said, yah.

I suppose the question is, how would the public in the Sixties and Seventies have known what professional psychologists did, how could they, what was their, how could they have been more, better informed about what psychology really consisted of?

Well, that’s a good question. I mean the British Psychological Society is, is concerned to do that, but it’s not easy, because of all the sciences, the one that is easiest to misrepresent, because it’s, it’s great fun, is psychology. And so you can always make up lots of lovely mouthwatering stories about the latest ‘psychological discovery’ in inverted commas, in a way that links with a person’s sex life or family life or something like this. And so people will read it. It’s that sort of subject. And so in that sense I think it’s, it’s more vulnerable to misrepresentation than a lot of others, and that’s a constant concern I think. Mercifully these days, in the national press I find that the reporting is much better, much more accurate, and, much less likely to be exaggerated in a way… The only way the exaggeration comes is in the headlines, but when you read the small print, of course the small print isn’t saying what the headlines say. That’s what headlines are for, to make you read the small print. I think there’s still a long way to go, but I think the British Psychological Society does a, a good job, but, I’m not… I mean I’m a Fellow of it, but I’m not actively involved in it. I mean I read it, I read the monthly journal and that sort of stuff, but I’m not actively involved in it any more obviously. Yah.

[1:01:04] And your undergraduate students that you taught, what, if they did, and I, I think that they did from what I’ve read, when they were concerned about certain kinds of psychology and its relationship with faith, what would they be concerned about, what did they ask you? What… In those times when you said that students might ask you a question but you’d say, ‘I can talk to you about that afterwards; let’s do the psychology now,’ what would they be interested…?

Malcolm Jeeves Page 82 C1672/07 Track 4

Well way back in those days when I was teaching at Cambridge, when I was supervising, this was, particularly this chap David Watson who became a Christian leader in Britain till he died, he, he had only recently become a Christian, and he was asking all sorts of questions about, how does all this stuff about conditioning relate to the way a person becomes a Christian? Is he conditioned by his parents, if he grows up in a Christian home, so he has no choice, he automatically…? So, he was making a jump from, from the psychology to the Christian domain, and seeing the sort of questions that a thoughtful critic might say, ‘Yah, but I mean, you only believe what you believe…’ I mean this is a standard thing, I’ve said this in my book quite often. Archbishop Temple, of great fame, many years ago in an Oxford debate, a very bright student listened to him and, in a typical arrogant way students did in those days, said to the Archbishop, ‘Well of course, Archbishop, you only believe what you believe because of the way you were brought up.’ And the Archbishop said, ‘Yeah, but you only believe that I believe what I believe because of the way I was brought up, because of the way you were brought up.’ It’s an infinite logical regress you see. So, I mean, some of these things need exposing, because they’re still used, simplistic, you know, copy-outs, you only believe because, you know, you were dropped on your head as a baby, or something like this. [1:03:22] So, this, this, you go on hearing about this, because I think there are some very, very bright people, like Richard Dawkins, brilliant writers and very persuasive, I’m not as well acquainted with him as Sam is, Sam will have talked to you all about this, but I think those are the sort of people who, you know, who should be taken seriously, and are making people think, you know, about their, about their faith, in a way in which think is, at times he’s a, he’s a bit aggressive, but, in so far as it makes people think, I think he’s doing a good job. Yah.

[1:04:04] And how did these… A sort of, a practical question. How did these books get published? So, these, these two I’m thinking of. Who was involved in encouraging their publication and…?

Oh, I think, I think, people like Oliver Barclay, I suspect he would have been at the, at the lectures of the British Association. And, afterwards he’d have asked me whether I Malcolm Jeeves Page 83 C1672/07 Track 4 was willing to have my lecture published. And I would say, ‘Well if you want to publish it, that’s fine.’ So they published it, yes. The book, is that, Psychology and Christian…?

This is, Psychology and Christianity: The View Both Ways. You men…

Well, I tell you how that arose. I mean, during the years before that, I was frequently being asked to go to speak to student groups around the country in the universities on psychology and Christianity. And in so far as I could make the time, I would do this. And, Ronald Inchley, who was the editor-in-chief of Inter-Varsity Press in Britain, obviously had heard from all these groups, all these talks I was giving. So he wrote to me and he said, ‘Look, we’d like to have a book on this; would you be willing to write a book?’ And I said, ‘Well not really, I’m too busy,’ you know, I was very busy as a scientist, I was setting up my… And he said, ‘Well look, if you will just write a rough draft of the whole book,’ he said, ‘I’ll do the editing work for you.’ And so I did that, I wrote a whole book very quickly. And he was marvellous, because I, I don’t write very good English, and he was marvellous. So he went through it, and he chopped my over-long sentences up to short sentences, and he got the English right, and this. And they sent it back to me and said, ‘Would you be willing to look at this?’ And I looked at it, and said, ‘Oh well that’s fine, you can go ahead, publish it.’ And that’s how it got published. Well then of course it was published in America as well. But that will lead on, I think, to another story tomorrow, about this chap David Myers I mentioned, because, we later wrote a book called Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith, which is still selling well, I’ve just got the latest royalties. And we’ve sold 40,000 copies I think. But, yah. But, that arose out of this, but I’ll explain that tomorrow I think possibly. Yah. I think we’ve had a good innings, don’t you?

[end of session]

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[Track 5]

First of all today, could you talk about the experience of being an academic psychologist and being a husband and a father? So, how those things ran together, in Australia and then back in Britain.

I think you could ask the same question about being an academic physicist or metallurgist or whatever. I don’t think it’s a particularly special question because you’re a psychologist. I mean I know what’s behind your question. In a sense, if you are a psychologist, it would be quite easy, as some people think you do, to be analysing other people all the time. I mean the, the usual thing, if you go to a cocktail party or something and you’re introduced and somebody says you’re a professor of psychology, they say, ‘Oh, you must be reading my thoughts.’ There’s this sort of image, you know, that you’re all the time analysing people. Well, there may be some psychologists who do, but, in my experience, very few of the ones I know do that, and certainly not the academic ones whose psychology is scientifically based. So, in general I think that there’s nothing special about it. On the other hand of course, I suppose having some awareness of normal development in psychological terms, you may be a little more alert to how your children are progressing at school, and, in social situations and this sort of thing, but, that never became an issue at all with me or my thinking, and, so it, it was really, I’m sorry, it was a non-issue.

[02:17] What about more the sort of prosaic things like, who took the children to school, to what extent did the children understand what you were doing at work?

Oh I see.

Yes.

Yes. Well of course, there you do get some amusing things. One example, you know that schools have, well they get, they get the little children to, when they’re quite young, to write stories about themselves and their family. And, we had one amusing occasion when our older daughter had written an essay, invited to do this. I think Malcolm Jeeves Page 85 C1672/07 Track 5 sometimes teachers are a bit naughty because they, they’re obviously finding out perhaps they shouldn’t. Anyway, she wrote an essay which said, ‘My father is,’ I forget how old he was, ‘and my mother is…’ very, made us extremely young, which we were. ‘My father is a rat doctor,’ because she knew that I ran rats and made these… ‘None of my family are married.’ I mean, it’s just amusing. And so, not long after that we went to a parent-teachers day, and so, Ruth, my wife, said, ‘What on earth will they think about these people?’ you know, you know, the father’s a rat doctor and neither of us are married. And of course, it’s a good laugh, you can laugh about these things. But apart from that, they, they didn’t really take any, you know, great interest. They knew that, things like looking after them, taking them to school, these things, were things that we, that we did together, we shared always in the home, and… So there was nothing unusual about it really.

Did your wife work while you were in Australia and…?

Well occasionally she did a little bit of what you call supply teaching, she helped out if she was asked to do a bit of teaching, but normally, she didn’t do that, no, she, she devoted herself full-time to the children and to the home. Yah. Yah. And that continued here, when we came here. She did a little bit of, they asked her from time to time to go and teach in some of the local schools, and she did a little bit, but normally, she didn’t, no.

[04:55] Thanks. Am I correct in detecting in things you’ve written, and something you said yesterday, that, psychology is especially prone to simplified popularisation, and successful popularisation, in other words, things that a public audience will take interest in, partly because psychology can include sexuality, and that’s the sort of, a sort of good selling point for a sort of popular…?

Oh yes, I mean there was a whole plethora of books, you know, twenty years ago. This is partly, interestingly enough, I’ve forgotten the name of the chap who, you will remember it, who wrote it, but he drew upon evolutionary psychology, it was a book called The Joy of Sex. And he drew upon evolutionary psychology as a way of spinning the yarns he wanted to spin. And of course, it sold millions because, people Malcolm Jeeves Page 86 C1672/07 Track 5 were, you know, wanted something like this to read. So yes, there’s always a ready market for that sort of thing. And, I think it’s probably, I don’t know but I think it’s probably more in America, where you can, you can go into a bookshop and look at the psychology section, and that’s, that sort of thing’s about all you’ll find under psychology, because, they know that’s what sells. You won’t find anything about hard-core psychology, you know, with a firm scientific basis, that, that’s not newsworthy. So, yes.

[06:31] And could you comment on the, the clipping that you got from the Times and how that relates to your view of the way that psychology and neurosciences sort of reaches a public audient now?

Yah. Well this, this clipping from the Times is, yah, was just last week, and, it’s interesting in the sense that, where you get explanations being given of some aspect of behaviour, nowadays it seems that, if you can make an appeal in your explanation to some research which points to a particular part of the brain that is involved in this kind of behaviour, this immediately seems to flag up that this is more important than other research because it looks as, it sounds more scientific because it’s, it’s neuroscience, and it looks as if you’ve specifically found something very definite. And this is what gave rise to this headline, which is, ‘How to win an argument: talk “neuro-gibberish”’. And this relates to other comments that have been made in the past, that if you want to grab somebody’s attention, instead of saying that, well so- and-so is growing a bit old, and so you are finding he’s, you know, his memory’s not quite what it used to be, if instead of saying that, you catch that in the language of some pop psychology that you’ve read somewhere, that is often described as psychobabble. And so, what is happening is, it’s being suggested that if you don’t really understand something, you’re much more likely to accept as an explanation something which is either psychobabble or neuro-gibberish. And this I think, I suspect this is probably true, but, perhaps not surprising, I don’t know, but, I think that’s what’s behind it, yes. Yes.

[08:51] Malcolm Jeeves Page 87 C1672/07 Track 5

Thanks. Could you talk about differences of opinion and belief within the organisation that we were talking about yesterday, Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship, later Christians in Science? Because, I think it’s quite easy, reading the sorts of things that I have read, to get the impression that there’s a sort of common view of science and faith in the organisation that presumably there isn’t. So I wondered if you could now talk about the sort of differences within the organisation.

I, I… I think, because it’s an organisation that’s been going for a long time, and since its main focus is understanding the relation between science and religion, I think the differences tend to be outside of the membership rather than within it. So that, the difference is in the sense that there are those outside who look at science and religion and say that there’s a constant warfare theme or conflict. And those who are members and who have, perhaps read fairly widely about the history of science, and been influenced by some of the people we mentioned yesterday, such as the historian of science Professor Hooykaas, who made some well-documented arguments based on historical evidence, that whilst of course there were those early scientists who saw this conflict, the majority of those did not, and in fact as it happened many of them were leaders of science in their day. But, so, I think that there tends to be within the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship, as a result of long argument, debate and discussion amongst ourselves, a sort of, a view that, there’s a proper view of the relation of science and religion which, rightly understood and taking all the evidence into account, should be seen as a constructive account, and one which is often described in terms of a number of different ways of looking at it, but the pervasive theme often is a complementarity, and the other is levels of explanation, in the sense that you can look at any phenomenon and you can, you can study that phenomenon at a series of different levels depending on which particular science you’re in. So if you’re looking at some aspect of behaviour, you may look at the growth structure, shall we say, of the brain, or you may be looking at particular parts of the brain, or you may be looking at particular pathways and systems in the brain, or you may be looking simply at the biochemistry of the brain. So, each, each of these levels attempts to give, in its own language and with its own scientific tools, a full account. You know, if you’re giving an account at one level, you don’t have to leave a gap in your account. And this applies, you don’t have to leave a gap in the neurological account so that the poor old psychologist can feel wanted and have something to put Malcolm Jeeves Page 88 C1672/07 Track 5 in. And I think this idea of levels of explanation is important. And so… That also applies to the social context as well, there’s a whole level of explanation there which is extremely important in understanding religious behaviour. And then there is the, the level in terms of ethics and morals, and a level in terms of religious explanation. So, each of these should be respected as important within its own domain, and the problems seem to occur when, and it happens easily, you forget this and you start mixing your languages, then you get into a mess. That’s when you, I think you get into psychobabble and neuro-gibberish. So I think… So I think, I, I can’t think of any big differences that I can identify. No.

[14:03] One of the features of, of those prominent members of Christians in Science is a kind of, analytical way of reading Scripture which is alert to the fact that, it’s a text of different kinds and it’s lots of books and so on and so on. Are there not within Christians in Science those with a more or less literal reading of the Bible, those that are more fixed on, sort of fixed on the words that are there, rather than the need to analyse the words, would you say?

Well it depends which particular time you are talking about. I suspect that if you went back seventy years, there could have been those who, not because they were ignorant, but because this was a widely-held view amongst many people, not just scientists but others at that stage, a view of Scripture which they sort of, accepted as being an authoritative view because of biblical scholars and so on. And… But I, I don’t think you’ll find that these days, for the reasons you have given. My impression is that, in recent years and in recent decades, there’s this widespread awareness that, just as within science careful research produces fresh knowledge, so over the last 100 years, or more than that, careful scholarly and detailed research of the texts of Scripture, and, more importantly, of the historical periods in which they were written, and the influences that bore upon their writing, which meant therefore the assumptions that the writers brought with them, there’s a much greater awareness these days of the need to do that, and therefore the temptation to just try and close an argument by throwing out a verse of Scripture is simply, not acceptable, because it just shows that you’re not giving due recognition to the detailed linguistic and scholarly research, the archaeological research, that many of these scholars are immersed in. And so… But, Malcolm Jeeves Page 89 C1672/07 Track 5 having said that, I do think that it may be the case that in other parts of the world, and certainly a few decades ago it would have been the case I think in our fellow organisation in America, that what you are saying may have been more likely to be true because there may have been groups there who did hang on to what you describe as a much more literalist view. And, so yes, it’s a… But even there, like everywhere else, I think it’s changing. But these things don’t change overnight; it’s a, it’s a process that goes on over the years. But I think a scientist these days, we are extremely alert to the need to say, well look, hold on, this isn’t our area of expertise, just as we would not be terribly impressed if a biblical scholar began to tell us what’s right and wrong about our science. So we should be very careful not to be telling biblical scholars the proper way to interpret the Bible, because, that is… what is important is that they and we get together and share our joint scholarship and see how we can take things forward. I think that’s a constructive way of doing it.

[18:47] Thank you. And, you talked a little bit earlier about the, the ‘discussions amongst ourselves’ in Christians in Science about complementarity and levels of explanation, which is there.

Yes.

How successful has the organisation Christians in Science been in influencing the debate outside of it along those lines? So influencing the debate outside of Christians in Science, about relations between science and religion.

Yes.

How successful has it been in taking that, that view, the complementarity, the levels of description, the nothing-buttery and so on, outside?

Yah. Well I mean, in a sense I could ask you the question, how would you, how would you research that, how would you know? And, in one sense you could do a detailed study using a questionnaire. To my knowledge, I don’t know that it’s been don, but that would be an obvious way to do it. And then you could actually pose a Malcolm Jeeves Page 90 C1672/07 Track 5 series of question and, you know, hand out your questionnaires and collect your data. That may have been done, I’m not aware of it. But my impression is that, those thoughtful scientists who are not Christians, many of them accept the recognition that there are different levels of explanation, because that’s the way their science works. And also, they recognise, because it comes actually from within science initially, the notion of complementarity, that it is a potentially useful way of thinking about situations where you have to try to relate explanations, each of which within its domain is a legitimate one, but you’re not quite sure how to relate them. And so I think, most of them would have a respectful view of it and say, well yes, I think that’s probably right. But if they’re not Christians they’d say, well, that’s interesting, but as far as we are concerned, we accept all that, but at least for the moment, having looked at the claims of Christianity, to us at least at the moment they’re not convincing for the following reasons. So then they have to produce their reasons. So, in other words, there are no knock-down arguments on either side, that’s not the way things work. I think, the most that one can do in sharing one’s views with a very thoughtful scientist who is not a Christian, it’s a bit like suggesting that there’s a, that there is a different pattern detectable in the available evidence which they may not at the moment be seeing. Now, the illustration of this is, in the olden days in psychology textbooks, in the chapter on visual perception there would frequently be a chapter on what’s called selective perception. And on one of the pages there would be a photograph of a country scene with trees in it, and in the text you would be told, if you look at this picture carefully you will see a face. And what you do is, you stare at this picture for ages and you, you can’t see this face anywhere, and then it tells you, if you go to the appendix of the book it will explain where it is. So they go to the appendix, and you see that in the branches of one of the trees, if you look at that, there is what looks like a face staring out at you. When you then go back to the original, this wretched face is the first thing you see. However hard you try, you can’t see it and not see this face. Now, nothing has changed in terms of the visual input, but your ability to see a particular pattern within the visual evidence has changed in a radical way which means that you see a face now you didn’t before. And in a way, this is what is happening with, with fellow scientists, you know, you’re looking with all the evidence together. [23:48] Malcolm Jeeves Page 91 C1672/07 Track 5

And this indeed is something that I’ve been involved in quite a lot. I’ve done three very big books now which have been published by Eerdmans in which we brought together leading scientists, some of whom are Christians and some of whom are certainly not, and we spent a long time sharing our views and pointing out to one another why the evidence for us points in a certain direction. And then, in each of these books in the final chapter, as editor it’s been my job to try to pull these things together. But in pulling them together, there’s never any knock-down argument; all you can do is say that, well, from the perspective of that science, you see this, from that you see this, and certain features begin to emerge which will be salient in the final putting together of the composite picture. But, this is work in progress.

Well now that you’ve mentioned that, could you, could you talk more about those two, I think there are two… In, for example, From Cells to Souls and Beyond…

Yah.

…you write the last chapter, which is 'Towards a Composite picture of the human.

That’s right, yah.

And the two properties of personhood that you see as running across all of these different scientific accounts of the self are, the centrality of personal agency…

Yah.

…or what might be, what philosophers might call the ontological primacy of consciousness - the conscious mind.

Yah.

And the other one is the sort of, long phrase, ‘irreducible intrinsic interdependence of the physical and mental, manifesting itself as duality without dualism.

Yah. Malcolm Jeeves Page 92 C1672/07 Track 5

Could you expand on both of those things? And, this is what you’ve just described as being a work in progress, based on the published…?

That’s right. Yah. Yah. Well, the first one, I, I can’t comment so much on, I’m not a philosopher. But, it seems to me that, whether you’re a Christian or not a Christian, there seems to be a common consent that there’s something that is very important about what is called personal agency. Each of us in some quite profound sense, and we can’t prove it, is aware that we have our own personal thoughts, we have our own personal consciousness, we make our own personal decisions. We have a personal agency and responsibility. And I think that’s the first thing. You can’t prove it, but it seems to be a pretty commonly shared thing. Occasionally it’s not there, and when it’s not there, normally we think this is because of this pathology, and the pathology is usually to do with something that’s wrong with the brain. And so, in some of the work with psychopaths, they don’t have this responsibility. But there we now know which parts of the brain are abnormal, and, you can actually see this by looking at pictures. So, that’s that. Now the other thing is, all the evidence seems to point to the intimate relationship between what is happening at the level of, inverted commas, ‘psychological processes’ and what is happening at the level of physical processes, whether it’s the biochemistry of the brain or whether it’s a neural transmission, things, and so on, this is happening. And these, these always seem to be running there in parallel. And, if something goes wrong with one of them, it looks as if something goes wrong with the other. So if something goes wrong with the biochemistry, in some forms of depression, or, if something goes wrong with the interconnections in terms of there being some lesions in some part of the brain, if something goes wrong with the physical substrate, this usually shows up in a change in the person’s behaviour, his, the way he perceives the world, the way he thinks, the way he remembers, the way he responds to other people. And there seems to be this intrinsic interrelationship. This is the way the system is built, this intrinsic interdependency. And that seems to be part of, well the way the world is, that’s the way we’re built. So what is the third word there?

Irreducible intrinsic interdependence, I…

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Yes. Irreducible is there because, once you’ve described those levels, you can’t go beyond that, there’s nothing further to do. I mean it, you, you’ve fully described it, but it’s, you’ve described this necessity that both accounts are necessary to do full justice to the phenomenon you are studying. Now this leads on to what I prefer to call a duality of aspect without dualism. Now, there are those who still want to hold to a dualistic account that they’re, somehow within us there’s a little thing called a soul or a mind, and that’s separate from the brain. And they think this means that within us there is a duality, two separate things. I don’t find the evidence persuasive that that is the case, for the reasons I’ve already given. It seems to me more realistic to say that we’re looking at one set of events, but to do scientific justice we’ve got to look at two aspects of it, both of which are crucially important. So dual aspect is a two-aspect… So this is why, it’s a dual aspect, but without dualism. So, this seems to me to be, for me it’s the most helpful way. Others such as the philosopher Nancy Murphy and my colleague Warren Brown, who I worked with many years and still do, they call it non- reductive physicalism. That’s fine, but the reason I don’t like that is, it seems to single out the physical aspect for special mention. Why call it non-reductive physicalism? Why not call it, upper layer mentalism? Because, you’ve selected out the physical aspect. Whereas the whole thing we know is that, if you give an account purely in terms of the physical aspect, you have left out what for the individual, the personal agent, is the most important thing. They are aware of the mental aspect. For them that’s the primary thing. And indeed it’s so primary that we couldn’t talk about non-reductive physicalism without language and speech, and that’s not physical; that’s part of the mental thing. So that’s why I personally prefer dual aspect… Yah.

Why wouldn’t it be possible just to expand the definition of what the physical is to include all of those things that are at the moment thought of as being mental and therefore separate from physical? Why aren’t thoughts and outlooks and perceptions just as physical as an ache or a, or a…?

Well, because you’re then, without giving reasons, changing the, you know, the normal dictionary definition of physical. And, you know, it’s a bit Alice in Wonderland, you make words mean what you want them to mean. But that, if you go down that road, then, it’s very difficult to converse, because, you’re changing the meaning of words all the time. So, I think, purely in terms of the way the world is and Malcolm Jeeves Page 94 C1672/07 Track 5 logic, you can’t… It would be a strange thing to do, to change the meaning of the word physical.

But, but I think, I think what you’re saying is that, that the, the sort of, the physical brain and then the experience of thought and that sort of thing, they are, they are interrelated, but aren’t they both, when it comes down to it, physical? I mean…

They depend on the physical substrate, but they themselves are not physical. Language isn’t physical. We are talking about things, the concepts you and I are discussing now, they’re not physical things.

OK, yes. What about just thoughts then, that aren’t communicated?

They’re not physical.

Mm.

But they’re crucial to the way we’re talking now.

I see.

The basis on which we’re being able to have an interesting discussion.

Yes.

But they are utterly dependent upon the normal functioning of the physical substrate, because if that goes wrong, then, we shall find that we can’t have the conversations we’ve had. If it affects my speech I can’t share my thoughts with you; if it affects your thinking it’s because you can no longer think and relate your thoughts because some bits of the brain aren’t talking to another. So, they’re all important, but you’ve got to do full justice to both of them. I think that’s the take-home story.

[34:28] Malcolm Jeeves Page 95 C1672/07 Track 5

And on the first one, on agency, what was, what was your work and the work of the people in your department at St Andrews showing about the likely differences between animal and human agency, especially the, the differences in animal and human consciousness? I know that you set up a, a key department in St Andrews involving more research.

Yes.

I don’t know whether this was feeding into…

You don’t… There are no claims to studying consciousness. The nearest you can get in making these comparisons between animals and humans, and particularly between primates, human and non-human primates, is one aspect of their behaviour which is widely agreed totally differentiates us, which is our capacity for language. Now what is important is, because this capacity for language is so clear and important for us as humans, that does not mean we therefore deny the possibility of some form of language in animals. And some of my colleagues here, particularly Professor Richard Byrne, has done very detailed studies showing the emergence of what looks like linguistic behaviour in non-human primates. Now I’ll give you just a, a rather superficial example. I’m always amused when I’m watching the television and watching Italian reporters. You see them reporting, and their arms are going, they’re doing all this, all the time. Now, what Dick Byrne has suggested, and with some evidence, is that, he has identified a lot of distinguishable gestures in animals which are communicating quite specific things to other animals. In other words, gestures are the beginnings of language for communicating and differentiating what you want to say. It’s of interest to me that it could well be that it is this which in due course, in the process of evolution, this gesturing became more and more advanced if you like within the nervous system, and the parts of the brain where it was linked to became the language parts. So, there’s a, there’s no evidence for suggesting that there’s no link between the humans and the animals. On the other hand, as Dick Byrne himself would say, and has done many times, and he’s not a Christian, the gap between human language and animal language is so vast, you know, it’s going to be a problem to keep us going for several decades if not centuries to begin to get it. So, there are no grounds for denying the continuity; what remains are some extremely interesting Malcolm Jeeves Page 96 C1672/07 Track 5 scientific questions and puzzles which we’ve got to continue to work on. That is, that is the important message I think.

[38:10] And how was that book From Cells to Souls and Beyond, how was that put together and published and organised? Things like, how were the authors chosen.

Oh, well, I was asked if I would organise a group of people to contribute to a book on this sort of topic, or a topic of my choosing. And so, what I did was, I tried taking advice from various people. I mean I got together, I’ve forgotten the details now but, I got together a consultant psychiatrist, I got together the recently retired professor of neurology from King’s College London, and I got a range of people dealing with the physical and medical aspects, and then I got the experimental people, like myself and others, the psychological, and I also got the, which was important, I got – this goes back to our earlier conversation – I got the best biblical scholars working on this issue at the moment. And in this case it was, it was a professor of the New Testament in America called Joel Green, who had written extensively on this. I particularly drew on him because, he was very aware of the relevance of the science as well. And in fact he, he on one occasion wrote to me and said, look, he wanted to take a year off, doing an advanced crash course in neuroscience; would I be willing to write to the professor of neuroscience at a particular university in support of his application to do this? Which I did. And so he took a year off, and he did nothing but neuroscience. So, he immersed himself in that as well. And so, I thought he would be a good person, because whilst he was first and foremost a biblical scholar, and was emphasising that, the idea that the soul was some sort of separate thing was in fact not a Christian thing, it was a Greek pagan thing which came from Plato and so on, the biblical picture was always of the whole person, and the soul just means the person, it doesn’t mean a bit of the person. Although, many of the early translations of the Bible, heavily influenced by dominant Greek platonic thought, contain phrase after phrase which makes the soul sound as if it’s a separate thing. So in those early versions, if you take the authorised version, you see, a psalm says ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord.’ Go to a modern version, that’s gone, it says, ‘I praise the Lord.’ And so, he was drawing out the way in which biblical scholarship has made us rethink the meaning of these. And then, that seemed to be showing, nothing proving, but it Malcolm Jeeves Page 97 C1672/07 Track 5 showed an interesting convergence between the direction that the scientific evidence was moving, which is the unity of the person, and the direction that the biblical scholarship was moving, recapturing the unity of the person. And so, my job was to say, well these are interesting things, they’re worth looking at, and then I forgot what I said in the final chapter but I tried to pull it all together. So that, that was the purpose of that, and it was really… That’s why I chose the title From Cells to Souls and Beyond, yah. Yah.

When you say that you were asked to do it, who asked you to do it?

I think it was the senior research fellow organising these sort of books for the Templeton Foundation. Because it was funded by the Templeton Foundation. But the good thing about it is, once they invite you to do it, there’s no constraints. They, they don’t attempt to exercise any influence on… You know, they provide the money, and it’s over to you, you select the contributors, you select what you’re going to publish, you decide what to write, and you, you know, agree the publisher. So yes, all they do is, they obviously identify people. Another book that, one of the first in this sort of series, they did this, in fact it was the first, Sir John Polkinghorne was asked if he would organise a group, and he published a book called The Work of Love, and I was one of that group, he invited me to take part in that. But that, I mean once they invited him to do it, it was hands off; it was left to John to decide who he wanted to come, what he wanted to do. And that has been the pattern from, since then on, mm.

[43:35] As we’re now mentioning it, could you… I was going to ask you about this today anyway. Could you tell me about the sort of, the origins and history of your relations with the Templeton Foundation, however limited or strongly they might be, I don’t know.

I think they probably arose… Let me think. [pause] I think I was probably invited to a meeting with other scientists and theologians, I can’t remember in detail, in London, and, which was organised by the Templeton Foundation. And I think, it must have gone on from there. Certainly from then onwards, occasionally I would, I met Sir John Templeton when he was alive, he came up once to Edinburgh and we had Malcolm Jeeves Page 98 C1672/07 Track 5 breakfast together there. And he was a, he liked to talk to scientists, and get suggestions from them about areas of work at the interface of science and religion which they thought were important and potentially productive of some new thinking. So I think that’s really how it began. And then, from then on they, they sort of, knew about you, and then, as in the case of From Cells to Souls, the book, knowing about me, they wrote and asked whether I would organise something, as they did with John Polkinghorne on the first one. I think it, in a sort of, that sort of, rather informal way, is the way it developed, yah. Mm.

What would have happened at the London meeting of scientists and theologians convened by the…?

I can’t remember, that one, I can’t remember which particular meeting it was. It must have been some event, possibly funded by Templeton, when we were asked to gather to discuss something, but I, I couldn’t remember that actually. There have been so many events, I can’t remember it.

And do you remember, as Sam does in his interview, which is open, which is why I can mention it, do you remember your own thoughts about the theology of the Templeton, the approach of it, and also, anything you can remember about relations between Christians in Science and the Templeton?

I thought that the Templeton Foundation had the potential to initiate and open out wider discussions of the relationship between science and religion. And, in so far as they used their funding wisely, this seemed to me to be a good thing. And in that sense, I thought it was good. And also in the sense that, in my experience, as I have already told you, if there’s a particular project, once they had agreed the funding, they didn’t interfere at all, there was no attempt to impose any sort of a Templeton party line. No there wasn’t.

And did you have a view on certain kinds of psychological research or neuroscientific research that was funded by the Templeton?

Malcolm Jeeves Page 99 C1672/07 Track 5

[pause] Well some of the things that they funded, I think they funded them, were, research which I didn’t personally feel was going to be terribly productive. I thought, I thought the discoveries that the scientists made would be interesting, but I thought the interpretation was not really terribly productive. There was some work I think, I think they supported some work by an individual, I forget who it was, looking at the brain mechanisms when I think Christian nuns and Buddhist monks were meditating. And, this was interesting. And they found that, as I, if I remember correctly, they found that in fact, there was no difference, the same part of the brain was unusually active. And so, again, if you like, the physical substrate was the same, but what it was used for depended upon, you know, where you came from, your presuppositions obviously. And that was fine. I think where it got a bit out of hand were, not these particular people, and certainly not people funded by Templeton, but, there were then those who thought that they had managed to, in inverted commas, ‘prove’ the existence of God, because there was a, it seemed there was a particular part of the brain which is active when Buddhists were praying and Christian nuns were praying, and this led to talk about the ‘God spot’ in the brain. And there was a book that was published, one of the authors was Carol somebody, it’s in my books, I refer to it, which was, had the title, Where God Lives in the Human Brain. Now I spoke to Carol whatever her name was, shortly after it was published I met her, and she was rather appalled at the title, but, for some reason, I think the publishers wanted the title because they thought it would sell more copies. But it’s this sort of thing which, which is slightly worrying. Although one has to say, this is nothing to do with Templeton, I mean, one of the leading neuroscientists a neurologist, Ramachandran, brilliant man, he actually, in one of his scientific papers, talked about discovering the ‘God spot’ in the brain. I mean, it’s documented in my book here. And so, yah, I mean that’s nothing to do with Templeton. It’s just that, this again is how you interpret the data. The data’s one thing; how you interpret it is something else. And how you interpret it will depend on your presuppositions.

[50:41] Did you have a view on the, I think it was Alister Hardy had set up a research unit much earlier on, religious experiences, did you?

Malcolm Jeeves Page 100 C1672/07 Track 5

Yes. I, I know about it. I don’t know… I think when his book came out many years ago, I reviewed it for the Guardian. And I’ve forgotten what I said. I think I probably said that I thought the work that he had done was really excellent, but some of his interpretations of the data were open to debate. I think this is often the case with these things. The data’s one thing, and then, the slant that you put on the data’s another, and I, I think that’s probably what I said. But, yah. Yes, I don’t, I don’t really know much about Alister Hardy’s work. Sam might have known more about that, he probably would, perhaps nearer to his stuff, yes.

[51:40] Thank you. Now we started talking about From Cells to Souls, we were actually talking Christians in Science, and, you had spoken about the extent to which Christians in Science might have influenced the thinking of scientists outside of Christians in Science, whether they’re Christians or not. But what about influencing, what you might call public/media discourse, do you remember times in Christians in Science where groups of you thought or spoke about the fact that in newspapers, on the radio, when science and religion are talked about, often, in spite of historical scholarship to the contrary, often conflict, and opposition is what’s being talked about? Did you at any point, as Christians in Science, think, how can we influence the general popular media debate on science and religion?

No, not in any organised way. I think, there were one or two occasions, and Sam would have been able remind you of this, where one or two of us wrote letters to the Times which were published simply pointing out that some of, I think in this case it was, it could have been the Dawkins thing, some of the views that he was expressing as a scientist were not the only conclusions you could draw from the data. But apart from the occasional foray into letters to the Times, I don’t remember any organised, organised attempt of that kind. But of course, I wasn’t, for years I wasn’t, although I was one of the initiators, seventy years ago, I wasn’t, I wasn’t involved in the, over many many years, the committees, the hard-working committees who ran Christians in Science. And even when I was President of Christians in Science, it was a purely honorary thing, all the work was done by these hard-working people on the committee. And I was, I mean I wasn’t, I wasn’t involved in that, that was, that was their activity. So, you would have to ask them whether they at any time thought that Malcolm Jeeves Page 101 C1672/07 Track 5 they had a, a crusade involving… I mean people like Denis Alexander would know this better than, than other people I think, yes.

And just looking at, from the outside, the group seems quite male, especially the members who were contributing to the sort of intellectual content of the group.

Yah.

Is that correct, or am I missing some sort of, key females?

No, I just - it's a good point. In a sense, if you had said this a few years ago about science in general you would have been saying that. I mean, it’s interesting that, for the first time ever the president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh is a distinguished astronomer, dame somebody-or-other. I’ve forgotten her name. I mean, the first ever female president of that. I don’t there’s been a female president of the Royal Society of London. So, it’s, it, at the moment I think it’s quite often the case that females don’t seem to be represented in these echelons in the way perhaps they should be, but, I can’t think of any good reason for it, no. There’s certainly no policy behind it that I know of. I mean people have been heavily involved in it. I mean, Sam’s wife was terribly involved and instrumental and worked terribly hard. So, in that sense she was perhaps more influential than any of the men for many years when she was secretary of it. And the present secretary of the committee, Diana Briggs, I means she, she’s extremely hard-working. But, no, I don’t know of any feminist bias there, you know, that I’m aware of.

And Valerie MacKay, was she involved?

Valerie was a member of it, yes, but I don’t think Valerie… In those days, you know, you never thought about these things, you just went to the meetings and you never counted how many men and women were there, it just sort of… But at that stage there weren’t all that many, there weren’t so many women in science, I think that’s the case, but, we could check that, I’m fairly sure about that. Mm.

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How have you tended to pray throughout your life? Different people pray in different ways, I assume. So, how has it, how have you experienced prayer?

Well there’s no sort of, monolithic answer to that. Obviously over a lifetime your ways of prayer change, and certainly in the early part of my life, in the Anglican tradition, one’s prayers were helped a lot by the Anglican liturgy, parts of which I still remember well. And that, that I think is always extremely helpful. I’ve always thought that the model that Christ himself gave us, because when his disciples said to him, ‘How shall we pray?’ and, He said to them, ‘When you pray, say so-and-so.’ And it seems to me that, that prayer, not just the specific words but the pattern of, first of all being concerned to recognise the greatness of God, the wonder of His creation, to give thanks for these things; and then the importance of concern for other people, praying for other people; and then finally, any prayers to do with yourself. So that, that sort of pattern seems to me to be one which Our Lord taught us, and, I find extremely important to follow. It’s important, then, that prayer is, you know, recognising the greatness of God, being thankful to God, worshipping God, and so on. It’s not, it’s not, as sometimes it has been portrayed, particularly I think on some of the American television programmes I’ve seen, a sort of, a, well, something that sort of sounds more like, what’s in it for me, what can I get out of this? So that, that seems to be not the, the way that prayer is taught in Scripture. So that would be my general pattern, yah.

[59:21] And, I think this differs between people, but, do you feel any sort of response when you pray, or do you, in the sort of personal relationship with God, does something happen when you pray, do you feel differently while praying? Is there, is there some kind of answer, however, however you perceive it, whether it’s retrospectively or at the time or, that, that sort of…?

I certainly don’t feel anything at the time. And again, I don’t know of any biblical warrant for expecting to feel anything different at all. I think in Scripture, prayer is more seen as an opportunity to praise and thank God, and as a discipline of praying for other people. In terms of whether retrospectively, this is an interesting, very interesting question, and I’m tempted to psychologise slightly here. We go back to Malcolm Jeeves Page 103 C1672/07 Track 5 this business, the pattern that you see. Now, there is no proof at all, but I think I can say at times that the pattern of subsequent events, for me is interpreted as the providential kindness of God manifesting itself in my daily life. You could show all, you could, you could say the same pattern to somebody not a Christian and they’d say, ‘Well I don’t see that at all.’ So I think it’s, it’s, you know, it’s a, it’s a personal thing and the way you see this pattern in it. You never know what might have been, but, you know, in the event of what did actually happen, you can look back and say, well, in retrospect I think that was providential. That’s all you can say.

Looking back on, then, the pattern of your life, apart from the, the graze fuse not going off…

Mm.

What else do you see in that pattern that you might be tempted to, or actually perceive as providential, as…?

[pause] Well, looking back, I think I would say I was, it was providential that I had the sort of parents I had, who, you know, brought me up to understand Christian faith. It was providential that I met the wife I married. All the good things in life I think I would say… Yah. I mean, it… I, I don’t think I can say more than that, because there’s no proof. Because it could all, all have been otherwise, you know? Yah.

Meaning it could all have been…

You can always give an alternative explanation, of the same set of events. So there’s no knock-down proof to say, this proves that God did this. And, I think there has been a temptation in some circles to want to try to prove the power of prayer, and certainly there have been attempts in America in terms of healing situations and things like this, which I think are just, well they’re, they’re pointless, they don’t succeed. In any case, one of the things that we’re told to do as Christians is not to put God to the test. So, no.

[1:03:47] Malcolm Jeeves Page 104 C1672/07 Track 5

Would you , when it came to the sort of, third phase of a prayer, where you’d, where it was appropriate to think about yourself, and, so you’ve done God, you’ve done people around you, and now it’s…

Yes.

Did you ever pray about your scientific work, about aspects of that?

[hesitates] Not specifically, no. No, I would, I would simply pray that I would do each day’s work, which included my scientific research, to the best of my ability and to the glory of God. Yah. And then get up and get on with it.

[1:04:28] Was there anything significant in the renaming of Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship, Christians in Science, apart from the fact that it no longer contained mainly research fellows, and its sort of independence from UCCF and…?

No, I wasn’t involved in that so I couldn’t tell you. It all happened… Yah, I don’t know.

And do you remember any relations with the other professional groups, things like Christian Medical Fellowship, Agricultural Christian Fellowship, the Christian engineers association, were there any…?

Only at the, only at the, only at the personal level, on quite a lot of occasions, because of my work straying into the medical area. I spoke at meetings of the Christian Medical Fellowship, I spoke at their international meeting in Korea on one occasion. And I’ve spoken at groups in different parts of the world. But that’s because of my neurological sort of, going into those sort of areas. And of course I, various members of that I’ve brought into my books, like Gaius Davies, who was a psychiatrist, in From Cells to Souls and so on. So I had very good relations with them, but I’ve not, no formal relations, no.

[1:05:44] Malcolm Jeeves Page 105 C1672/07 Track 5

And in the more recent past, I’m talking about Eighties, Nineties and up to the present, have you perceived any sort of increase in public interest in science and religion, debates of popular, in newspapers, on TV, that sort of thing? And if so, have you any thoughts about the reasons for this?

Well I guess, that’s again an empirical question. And I would suggest that my impression, and I’ve never attempted to do it, if you go back fifty years and you look at the number of books published on science and religion, I would suggest that it not only increased steadily to begin with, but I think almost increased exponentially in the last two decades. Now for whatever reason, this could have been partly because of the funding of the Templeton Foundation, I don’t know, but it seems to me that the general increase in the number of books on science and religion is, is fairly well documented. So I think there has been this big increase. Why, I don’t know. It, it certainly seems to be the case, and… And, also, to take an example, I mean, the journals like Science and Christian Belief, Theology and Science, which is the American journal, Zygon, I mean all of these have really arisen in the last fifty years or so, and Theology and Science relatively recently, I mean I’m on the editorial board and I remember when it started. And, you know, it… And the publisher’s a secular publisher, I think, Routledge. But, so yah, I mean, this is sort of evidence that, publishers don’t publish things to make a loss, and so I suspect that is, in so far as there is evidence, that’s the sort of evidence that there is a, there is a hunger for this I think. Where it comes from, I don’t know. Because I still think that many, many of these books are, whilst they’re very interesting, probably remain inaccessible to, in understanding, to quite a large proportion of the population. I mean they’re not easy reading. They’re fairly high-powered. And therefore I think the, the readership must be relatively limited, I don’t know. Perhaps not so much amongst the students, I mean students tend to, and some of the books written for students have certainly, you know, been widely read. And also, I don’t know whether it’s any evidence, but, the way in which they get translated. I mean, my recent books have been, you know, translated, as I was saying, into Spanish and Greek and French and German. So, publishers don’t do that for the fun of it, they must be making money. So, maybe that’s evidence that there is an increased appetite, but, I’m sure that there are several PhD theses in that for somebody who wants to study it.

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Thanks. Now can we go back to St Andrews. This is 1969 to 1993 as Professor.

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[Track 6]

I’d like to talk a little bit more, if possible, about your career at St Andrews as Professor, 1969 to ’93. You’ve already talked about establishing and expanding the department including the to key research groups that you set up.

Mm.

What I’m particularly interested in is the, the practical detail of the experimental work that was either being done by yourself or being done by academics that you had appointed and research students. So, I suppose, in general the question is, what experimental work was going on in the department at St Andrews while you were in charge?

Right. Well, let me talk about the people I appointed and what they did, in so far as I can remember it. I think the first appointment I made was, David Milner. I had talked to you earlier about my interest in the functions of the corpus callosum…

Mhm.

…and how I came back to Britain to a conference organised by the CIBA Foundation, and there I met a very active researcher in this area in London, whose name eludes me, I can give you it later. And when I was looking for young staff to appoint… George Ettlinger was his name. I wrote to him and said, ‘Look I, I’d love to get somebody in this area,’ and he had a very bright young man, David Milner, who had done his first degree at Oxford and was going a PhD actually on primates, non- human primates, doing surgical things, in London. And so, before he finished his PhD I interviewed him and offered him a job. And he came, and he worked with me quite closely for many years, our shared interest in the visual system in humans, in differences in the two cerebral hemispheres. And, he did early work following up his work on the effect of lesions to various parts of the visual system in non-human primates in the labs. And then, not long after that, it was a few years, Professor Larry Weiskrantz, whom I mentioned I had worked with when he was still at Cambridge on my study leave and had become Professor at Oxford, wrote to me and said he had a Malcolm Jeeves Page 108 C1672/07 Track 6 very bright Canadian working with him as a research fellow, and his period had finished, and he’d like to stay in Britain. And so, I offered him a research fellowship, and he came and had a research fellowship for two or three years, and then I gave him a lectureship. Now I’m mentioning him along with David Milner because they met, and they worked together very closely in later years, and together they developed a new theory of the different visual pathways in the visual system. And on the basis of this, about three years ago David was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Mel Goodale, who had only stayed with me a few years, then he went to Canada, where he came from, and he also was elected to the Royal Society. Very very bright people, but they had done their early work on this visual system in my visual group. So, and David Milner remained with me and continued this work, and we did work on the differences between the two visual fields, and similar things, for many years. [04:38] Around that time I had a student called David Perrett, a very very bright student, and he got a First. And I sent him off to California, and then to Oxford to do a DPhil, and then appointed him back to my department, but not to a lectureship, to a research job, and he got a Royal Society research fellowship, which are very prestigious. And, he held that for quite a number of years, and each time I had new jobs advertised, I didn’t appoint him because, I talked to him and decided he’d do better to go on researching. He did that for about ten years. Anyway, he then became a lecturer and very quickly a professor. He’s still here, and his great contribution was that he was interested in the study of face perception, and his work started, again with animals, he was looking at a part of the brain called the superior temporal sulcus, where an American had shown that there seemed to be cells which responded selectively just to faces and not to other things. So David pursued this, and again, you know, with the monkeys in our primate colony he did his experiments where the monkeys sit there very happily in a monkey chair, and they look at different pictures that are flashed in front of them. Some of them are faces and some of them are other things. But in this case they have a microelectrode which is lowered down into the brain, no pain of any kind in the animals, and he was recording from these cells in the superior temporal sulcus. And he managed to show that these cells were very very selective in how they responded. To begin with they responded only to faces, some of them. But then he was very clever, he had the same face turned slightly away, and a bit more away, and a bit more Malcolm Jeeves Page 109 C1672/07 Track 6 away, until it was a side view, and then going the other way. And he showed beautifully on the graph how, as you got less and less of the face looking at the cells, the response diminished. So, this very tight relationship between what’s happening out there and what’s happening in here. And this again, we’ll pursue some of the things we were talking about earlier, the intimate relationship between mind and brain. He’s still here, but after quite a lot of years he finally stopped doing the work on the monkeys and has done a lot of work now on humans, and has looked at all sorts of social aspects, sex differences, age differences, race differences, social class: all these things, showing the way in which quite minor modifications to the face produce significant changes to the response that the individual made. And he’s written a number of books on this. So that’s David Perrett. And he’s still with us, and he’s, he’s a Fellow of the British Academy and so on. He’s a very bright chap. So he was another one in that group. [08:29] The other one in this group to do with brain and behaviour was Richard Morris. Richard had done his first degrees, first degree at Cambridge, a very bright chap, and then I think at Sussex. For a while he had worked for the Science Museum in London. Anyway, I appointed him to a lectureship, and he wanted to study the aspects of memory, particularly things like short-term memory. But he wanted to study the, not only localisation in the brain, but also the role that was played by specific neural transmitters in laying down memories, and how this laying down was sustained. And, he, when he came, he wanted to have a, a rat maze. And since I had worked with rats quite a lot, I thought that was no problem. When I asked him to design it and then tell me what it would cost, what I hadn’t realised was that the rat maze he wanted was totally different from the little plywood ones that we had used. It was, it was a very large circular tank about three feet deep. And, what he did was, he had these rats swimming about in the maze – in this, in this bath, but he made the water opaque by putting milk in it, and in this water maze there’d be a little island, and, which could be submerged or otherwise. And what the rats had to do was to learn where this island was, taking into account other cues around. And above the maze he had a whole battery of sensors. And, it actually was a very very expensive bit of apparatus, but anyway, I, I managed to find the funds. So we set him up. Now what is known as the Morris water maze is now internationally used. He did some brilliant work on this, here, he was here about ten years, and then he went to Malcolm Jeeves Page 110 C1672/07 Track 6 neuroscience in Edinburgh. He is still there, a very senior person, he got a CBE, he got an FRS. He’s a very distinguished scientist. And he has done all this work on what is called long-term potentiation, and he’s looked at the, the way the chemicals work in the brain to lay down memories. But he was one of the group. [11:52] During that time, there were a sufficient number of us that the MRC agreed to set up the first, in Britain, Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group, with me as Director. And so we were a nice little group then. It was Richard Morris, David Milner, Mel Goodale, David Perrett, myself. We were a sort of, coherent group, all interested in cognitive neuroscience. So that, that was the way that all developed, and has continued since, although it’s changed obviously a little bit since I retired. [12:32] Now the other side, evolutionary psychology. Again I managed to make appointments, really through personal contacts. I told you that I had worked with Professor Jerome Bruner at Harvard. Bruner later gave up his chair at Harvard and came to be Professor at Oxford, and while he was there he took on a zoologist who had done his first degree and his PhD at Bristol in zoology called Andrew Whiten, and he went to work with Bruner as a research fellow. And when I was looking for somebody to work in this area, Jerry Bruner in fact was in touch with me and he used to come up here with his research group. But anyway, he suggested that Andrew Whiten would be extremely good, and so, I appointed him to a lectureship. He came, and he has developed this whole area of evolutionary psychology enormously and with great success. He’s a, he’s a very distinguished figure. Around the same time Dick Byrne came, Richard Byrne. He was interesting in that he was very much in the mould of an experimental psychologist. He worked and had done his PhD in the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge with Alan Baddeley. And he came. But he got very interested in collaborating with Andy Whiten, and he got very much into evolutionary biology, and in fact he wrote the first book on it called, I think he called it The Human Ape, which was a summary of things at that stage. And from then on he and Andy Whiten worked together very closely for many years, and they wrote – they edited two large volumes called Machiavellian Intelligence, which are widely regarded as reference works. And he brought together, they brought together a whole lot of authors’ works on the ability of non-human primates to show very high-level behaviour, and the one they were studying was Malcolm Jeeves Page 111 C1672/07 Track 6 deceptive behaviour, Machiavellian behaviour. So those two volumes were quite influential. And then, they went on and they continued to do their work. Andy Whiten worked, and they both worked part of the year, in Africa where we had colonies there of animals that we worked with, and, also colonies of animals in St Andrews. But mainly now, all this work is done in Edinburgh Zoo, and there is a public display there now, been on for several years, I forget what it’s called, which is directed by Andy Whiten, all about human, all about human evolution based on the understanding of animal evolution. So that thread has developed and developed and developed. I wasn’t involved in it, apart from encouraging them because of, I had been interested in, as I told you, way back, in marsupial behaviour and animal behaviour in that sense when I was in Australia. [16:15] But, the research group, those were the two research groups that, that developed. And that was really… So there was one other appointment, a chap called Robert Prescott, he came from Cambridge, and, he, he was working on animal behaviour, and, I mentioned yesterday I think, a research station on the Isle of May, and he was doing research on puffins and bird behaviour there. So, you can see the two themes, you see the theme of, if you like, mind, brain, vision and all that stuff, and then you’ve got human ethology, human evolutionary biology. But I should have said that Andrew Whiten had a great interest in developmental psychology, children. So he was relating this to development in human primates, and development in non-human primates and looking at similarities and differences. So those are the, that’s the sort of story, and that really continued on until I retired. Except that, one by one they went off, as they should do, and David Milner went to become head of the research labs at Durham University; Richard Morris went to neuroscience in Edinburgh; Mel Goodale went to be what is called, quite distinguished, Canada Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario. And so on. And so they’ve each made their marks. But Andy Whiten and Dick Byrne have both stayed on here as professors and they’ve continued here for many years, and, and David Perrett is professor as well.

[18:04] How did you go about seeking funding for this research over the period, and how did that change, perhaps come more difficult or easier, over the period 1970 to your retirement in the Nineties? Malcolm Jeeves Page 112 C1672/07 Track 6

Well over the years, the position kept changing, and, they simply had to put in their grant applications. In some instances it was made easier because, for whatever reason I was offered funding by the Medical Research Council, and in fact they not only offered me funding, they offered me a very highly trained postdoctoral person from the University of Sussex who was working in an MRC unit there which was closing down, a physiology one. And she came and worked with me, sadly she’s dead now, but she became my full-time research assistant, so I had this very highly qualified person working with me. Which was a great help for somebody who is a very busy head of department. And it was during that period that I was heavily engaged, as you probably saw from the CV, in the Social Science Research Council, the Medical Research Council, and I was the first ever psychologist to be a member of the Science and Engineering Research Council. That took a lot of my time, but if you are involved right at the top in these things, it can benefit your colleagues because you can often give them good advice about how to apply for funds, and the best way to do it in a way that you’re more likely to be successful. I mean I was never on, I was never on any committee that was giving funds to my colleagues here, that is not allowed, but I was, I was able to be there. And in fact I was quite involved at a national level in, well, the Medical Research Council set up the first-ever advisory committee on the development of brain and behaviour research in Britain, and I chaired that committee. And so, these contacts, you know, were helpful in me being able to guide my colleagues to the places where they might get research funding, and to suggest sorts of topics which were perhaps more likely to get funding than others. And, they were very successful. But now, Andrew Whiten has a big grant at the moment with Kevin Laland in Biology from the Templeton Foundation, funding work on monkeys and children. It’s interesting, you know, it’s, it’s nothing to do with religion at all. And they’re… And, Kevin Laland had had a Templeton grant as well. So Templeton are funding straight scientific research now, which is interesting. So there again I was able to perhaps help them a little bit by suggesting how to go about getting, applying for money. So that, that’s the sort of background story to, to the, to the funding, which is changing all the time. I think it’s much harder now than it was when I was doing it, I mean, it’s much more competitive, but I don’t, I don’t know because obviously I’ve not been involved for many years now, except, except, you Malcolm Jeeves Page 113 C1672/07 Track 6 know, I go in regularly and I give them advice if I can, if they want to ask the old man, I advise them, but, that’s all.

[22:13] Was there any perceptible change in the 1980s in funding for this kind of science?

[hesitation] 1980s. Yes, that’s when there was quite a big expansion. I think that was a time… You had that CV of mine. I printed one off, just to refresh my own memory.

I’ve got one here.

I can probably find it in this one somewhere. But, it would be around the time that I was chairing that national committee, that might have been the time.

’87, ‘Medical Research Council advisory committee to formulate a national research policy on brain and behaviour.’

Oh that’s right. So it was in, that was in the Eighties, that, yah, money was coming on then. Yes, it certainly was coming on then. And then also in the Eighties we had the joint research councils, all together, on cognitive science, and I was chairman of that as well. And around that time we had, National Research Initiative on Natural and Artificial Mechanism in Image Interpretation. And I was chairman and director of that. So, you could say I was fortunate to be at the centre of the three things where some of the big funding was coming. Mind you, I was fighting for funding nationally to get that money, because I felt strongly about those, about those areas of research. Yah.

We’ll talk about the way in which you fought for funding in a second, but, why do you think it is that at that time these kinds of science seem to have been supported?

I think it’s partly because of the way that research that was being published was developing. You could already begin to see the potential for this sort of research. And, it was happening all over the place. I mean one of the, I remember vividly in Malcolm Jeeves Page 114 C1672/07 Track 6 the, in fact it was the early Eighties, there was a very bright physiologist at University College called Semir Zeki, and he asked for a very large amount of money for his research, and I was asked to go and look at what he was doing and advise on whether he should get it. And he was in fact using monkeys, single-cell recording, but he was studying colour perception in the brain. And it was just brilliant work, and, I recommended they should fund him exactly as he had asked for. So, this was happening all round the place, these separate people, and you could see, not only here but also of course in America where things tended to be much faster and… I mean they had brilliant researchers there. I knew what was happening there. And so, there was an awareness that this was an area, not only of basic science, but which potentially could have spin-offs for medical applications in terms of aspects of neurological illness. And so there was this applied aspect to it which was very important. Yah.

[25:36] What aspects of the science did you stress or emphasise when, as you say, you were fighting for funding?

Fighting is a wrong word.

OK.

I think what one did was, you, like everybody else involved, you were asked to give a case for why you thought this particular kind of research at this particular stage with the limited funding you had, warranted support rather than another kind. And all you could do was prepare your case as carefully as possible, present it, you know, with all the others being presented, and it was a committee decision where different sorts of funds would then be allocated. But there was a, there was a very good neuroscience committee in the Medical Research Council, I wasn’t ever chairman, I was a member of it, and, and that I thought was, had some very very bright neuroscientists on it, and they were good at making their cases strongly. And if you do that, then, and the research is good, the science is good, then, you have a good chance of getting the funding.

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[26:54] At any point during your time at St Andrews, was there a kind of, a university or departmental press office, perhaps in the later part of the period where you would connect with media on discoveries and…?

No. No I never, I never bothered with any of that, no.

When you say you never bothered, was it…

Oh no, it would have been fine, but… It happens a lot now, I mean, the university now has a weekly report that comes, you know, I get every week, where they list all the things the university is doing, and all the discoveries. I mean, that just didn’t exist then, well of course none of this existed then. So, no, we didn’t really, we didn’t really look for publicity. I suppose we got it occasionally, but, no, I, I don’t really remember paying any attention to that.

[27:49] And when you mentioned the primate colony that you had…

Mm.

Given that, who knows what the listener to the recording is imagining when you say that, could you describe what it consisted of?

Oh yes. It consisted of an area with very large cages, extremely, in inverted commas, ‘comfortable conditions’, where the monkeys could roam around, swing from toys, swing from the roof. Live as rich a life as you can, not living in Africa. And, they would simply be in there, well fed, well looked after, well housed, regularly looked after, inspected by external vets who came in to make sure that they were being well looked after, and the Home Office came in to check. And then, each day when they were in an experiment, they would… they were very well trained, and they would, they would be put into a carry cage which they usually would get in very happily because they knew they were going to get some goodies. And they’d go and sit in this, and they, they’d press a few buttons, or they’d have the electrodes in, and they’d Malcolm Jeeves Page 116 C1672/07 Track 6 do all these things. Then they’d go back to their colony again. And that was what it was like. But, it no longer is there, partly because, for a while there were only two, really, colonies like that, there was one in Oxford and ours. And, they are so expensive to maintain, because you have to maintain them at a very top level of quality, and they’re extremely expensive. And, it was decided, this was after I retired, that, partly because David Perrett had moved away from using monkeys for his face perception and was now doing it on humans, and so his, he was the main researcher still, and David Milner, that there wasn’t a case for keeping this group. And since there’s a large colony still in Oxford, this one was closed down. But yes, it was, yah, a very humane sort of, in so far as it can be, not in the wild, it was a pleasant atmosphere, yah. Mm.

In spite of that, did you ever have sort of, public concern over it, or…?

Oh indeed, from time to time. But, we were fortunate in that, since St Andrews is, as you have discovered, rather off the beaten track for getting to, where there were animals being held, used in research in England, as in Oxford, that is where the people would go and demonstrate. Or in London at that time as well. We were so much off the beaten track. There was one occasion when there was some anti people demonstrating in Glasgow, and I was alerted by the local police that it’s possible that some of these might come across to St Andrews to do some demonstrations and so on. And so the local police offered to put a couple of policemen in my department overnight throughout the time this was happening. So, nobody ever came, nothing happened. But, this was sort of, about the nearest that one got to really I think, yah. No, so there was… But we didn’t advertise it, and so, most people would be unaware that, what was going on, so, there we are.

Was it not in some way visible, then, to the public, the colony?

No no, the animal laboratories and the operating theatre and everything was on the top of a very big stone building. On the roof. A very big additional building we put up there. And everything was up there, and there were lots of staircases and secure doors which you had to go through before you could get up there. And people were totally unaware. Although there were outside play areas up there as well, because, for a time, Malcolm Jeeves Page 117 C1672/07 Track 6 one of my colleagues was working with cats, and he had this outside area, and, you know, there were cats running around and so on, but no, you, from down here, you couldn’t see anything. I mean you were totally unaware that there was this set-up up there, it was, not seen.

Where were the big cages, for the monkeys?

Oh they, they were in the building. Yes, in the building. Yes.

Oh that upper floor?

Yah, that’s right, yah. Yah. It’s a very big building, and it’s… Yah, yah.

But, and they didn’t make noise that could be detected from…?

No. No, because they were in the building, I mean the cage…

Mm.

Yah. You probably won’t have time but, I’m sure you won’t, but in South Street there’s, as you go up South Street on the right-hand side, beyond the banks, there’s a thing called St Mary’s Quadrangle, and there’s a stone entrance which says ‘in principio erat verbum’, and on the right in there is the Faculty of Divinity. On the left there, when I came it was the university library. The university has got a new one, and I was given that building to modify, and that became the psychology department. It’s been slightly added on now, there’s a, there’s another stone building adjacent to it, quite a long stone building, with about, fourteen small laboratories for human research, and if you go down West Burn Lane it’s actually called… The university buildings have plaques on. This one is called the Malcolm Jeeves Psychological Laboratory. I, I had nothing to do with this, I was surprised when they did it, but, they normally do that when you’re dead, but, anyway, that’s where it is. And so, that’s there as well now. But the medical school used to be in that quadrangle as well, but that has now moved down to what’s called the North Haugh, so, the medical building is partly biology but part of it has also been taken over by psychology and… Well, Malcolm Jeeves Page 118 C1672/07 Track 6 my psychology department, about four or five years ago, I think it was realised that there was more neuroscience going on in psychology than there was in neuroscience. And so it is now combined, it’s the department of psychology and neuroscience. Which is very good, because they’re all together. And it means that the total mass of scientists with cognate interests are all there together. And that’s what it’s become now, and so, that’s good. Yah.

And while in St Andrews, what did you, what were your arrangements for just sort of, ordinary churchgoing?

I just went to the local… I, quite often I went… [bell ringing] Oh.

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[Track 7]

I just asked you to talk about your sort of church life while in St Andrews. You talked about the Round Church in Cambridge, you talked about the church you went to when you were in Adelaide.

Trinity in Adelaide, yah.

Yes. But not here.

Well, as I say, we were going to the Anglican churches in Cambridge and Australia, and we tried the Anglican church here when we came, but our, our children were quite young then, you know, they were, let me think, how old were they? Oh gosh. They could have been ten and eight or something like that. And, we felt that there was nothing really at that stage that would interest them, and it could actually put them off. I used to go to College Chapel, because they had, some very, very good preachers came, and you know, there was the university sermon, and I’d go there occasionally. But it wasn’t suitable for the family. Anyway, so, we soldiered on, but to cut a long story short, we found that several of our colleagues, who were good friends of ours, were going to one of the local churches which had a very sort of, interesting and lively ministry for young people, this was the Baptist church. And so, we decided to try that. And although, as I’ve often said, you rarely see a Baptist there, they’re mainly sort of, Anglicans like us who are looking for a church which is friendly and stimulating to children and young people. So we’ve rather stuck there, and, we’ve stuck there ever since. It’s expanded and expanded now. We moved out of the church buildings in South Street, but, we have to meet in a school on a Sunday, and there are 300 people come and so on. But it’s a, again it’s a very, it’s what would be called an interdenominational church, because, the people who go there, like us, don’t regard denominational labels of any great importance whatever. So, yah. Quite a lot of academic staff go, quite a lot of professors go with their families, scientists and so on. But anyway, it’s, it’s a lively church, although of course our family, our girls have long since gone, but we, because we have so many friends there, we still go there.

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What was it that the first one you tried lacked, what was it that might have put your children…?

Well the church we had been in Adelaide, the Anglican church there, it seemed to be a lively and accessible ministry, they understood the children, they had activities for the children, but they just didn’t seem to engage them in that way here, you know, people just went to church on the Sunday and that was it. There wasn’t much else. Whereas, the churches we had been used to in Australia were much more of a social group as well, you met interesting people and you were delighted to socialise with them during the week as well. Something like that anyway.

Mm. Thank you. And was there any overlap between your, your churchgoing at the Baptist church and your work in Christians in Science?

No, no formal link at all, no, no link at all. I can’t think why there would be, no.

Any of the congregation interested in science and religion?

Oh yes. Oh yes, some of them would… Oh certainly some of them. And in fact, there was a little group of scientists who went there, and, we used to meet sometimes as a small group to discuss issues on science and religion. And, yes, this does link in to the research scientists, because, at that time the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship had an annual conference at which papers were presented which were prepared by groups who met in the different universities. And so we had a little group who met here. Now we mentioned Mike Hulme. His father was a member of this group with me. And we had chemists, physicists, biologists, and we had a few of the people, biblical scholars, as well. And each year we would prepare a paper – well not every year, sometimes we’d prepare a paper, and then someone would go and, and read it at the annual conference. What I used to do was, not do it myself, I used to lead the group, but I used to make sure that one of the young people went down and led it, because I wanted to get them involved in it. And that worked well for quite a long time. But like all these things, as people began to move away it, it wound up. But, yes, so that’s right, there was a little group here, which would have been really a small RSCF group, yah. Yes, thanks for reminding me, mm. Malcolm Jeeves Page 121 C1672/07 Track 7

And how did that… You’ve said how it ended, with people moving away and that sort of thing. How did it begin?

I think it began that I met these people at the church, and I realised that there was a nucleus of a group who had the range of scientific interests to make a group that could offer a paper. And so I just invited them to come to my office. And they used to come to my office once a week at lunchtime, I would provide the coffee, they brought their own sandwiches. We were very strict, we didn’t start till five past one, and I insisted on finishing at five minute to two so that everybody could be back at their desks by two. But, so that went on for quite a while, yah.

And, who, sorry, who… one of the members was Mike Hulme’s father.

Yes. And then, there was Dr David Weeks, who’s still around, good friends of ours, he was a senior lecturer in biology. There was a lecturer in physics, Michael Wray. There was a senior lecturer in geography, John Paterson. Let me think, who else? And there were a few research students, whose names I can’t remember. But that lot were the nucleus of the group. It was a small group. Yes, so that, that would be it I think. I can’t remember any others. Yah.

And if they hadn’t have been, this is sort of a, a what if, but if they hadn’t have gone to the Baptist church, and you’d got to know that they were scientists, how else could that group have formed at St Andrews?

I think it’s… St Andrews is a small enough university that you tend to get to know other people very easily. You did in those days. It’s twice the size now. But the ones at the Baptist church would know somebody who knew somebody, and they’d say, ‘Well I’ll tell them that we’re meeting and discussing this topic,’ and ask them if they want to join us. It’s easily done.

[07:46] Mm. And, I noticed in one of your earlier books, when you’re writing about yourself, you say that, ‘Some of my Christian friends have difficulty understanding how I can Malcolm Jeeves Page 122 C1672/07 Track 7 continue to believe in the basic teachings of the Christian faith and be a professional psychologist. And on the other hand, I suspect that some of my professional colleagues wonder how I square some of my activities as a psychologist with Christian profession.’ Now the fact that you say that Christian friends have difficulties, when you’re talking about colleagues, ‘I suspect’ some of them do, suggests… Well can you talk about that difference? Because, I wonder whether it indicates that, you were more likely to talk to your Christian friends about your science than you were to talk to your scientific colleagues about your Christianity.

Quite often Christian friends would ask me, they had read something in the paper, and they would know I was a scientist and a Christian, and they’d say, ‘Look, I read this in the paper. It sounds to me as if this calls into question, then, some aspect of my Christian belief. What do you make of this?’ So I’d ask them, if I hadn’t read it myself, to give me exact details of what… And then I’d try and share with them my reactions to that. So, yah. On the flip side of it, I never ever saw it was my right to seek to propagate or proselytise my personal beliefs onto my professional colleagues. If they asked me, then I would be delighted to share with them, but, particularly being a professor and head of department, I wanted to fall over backwards to avoid any impression that I was using my position of authority to try to impose my personal views on others. Now, they knew my views, because, soon after I arrived here, a year or two after I arrived, I was asked to preach in College Chapel, and so, having done that, they would know that, you know, this is, this is, this is his view. So, they knew where I stood, and if they wanted to talk to me, they could, but that was it.

[10:29] Thank you. What do you remember of time spent with your children, who you say might have been around ten and eight when you arrived at St Andrews?

Yah.

What do you remember of, in the same way I asked you for memories of time spent with your mother and father as a child, what do you remember of time spent with them, you know, when you were not at work?

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Oh, well, we were like any other family really. They loved going out with us into the country, exploring, walking, playing games, and, when they were able, playing a bit of tennis together, they liked playing tennis, and… You know, this, this went on for a while. But, as children grow up, they’re not quite so interested in doing things with their parents as they are with their fellow children. And so we encouraged that, and we’d have, we had open house, they could always bring their friends in, and do things in the house here, or, providing we knew where they were going, very happy for them to go out and, you know, do things with other children. And that’s really it. I mean, we used to take them on holiday, on the Continent, and introduce… in the summer, and introduce them to, you know, a sort of, wider culture. And, of course, like all these things, you get amusing stories. I mean one occasion we were in Italy and we were going to Venice, and we had been talking about, we’d been describing Venice and the canals and all this sort of stuff, and they were getting very excited as we were driving and we got nearer. And sitting in the front we heard this conversation between the two of them in the back, and one said to the other… Because, we had also been on holiday prior to that time at a beach place called Laigueglia. But anyway, we could hear this conversation, and one said, ‘Well look, we’ve got our inflatable lilo. Now I think what we can do is, we can blow that up when we get to Venice and we can paddle round the canals.’ And we were in, in fits, because I mean, as you k now if you’ve been to Venice, the canals are absolutely filthy to begin with, and the thought of inflating your lilo and paddling round was just… But that’s a child’s interpretation, all they knew was this. So you get these funny, you get these funny, you get these funny incidents, yes. Yah. Yah. But anyway, they, they grew up. They went to a local school here, and, yes, I hope had a fairly normal childhood.

What did they go on to do educationally?

The eldest one went and did nursing at Edinburgh, and then, she’s the one in that picture there, she married the chap who is now the head of the forestry research thing. And the younger one is unmarried. She read law, and she has been a solicitor. She read English law so she had been a solicitor in England where she was a solicitor in Oxford for quite a while. And, for many years now she’s been in a firm in Carlisle, and she lives there and, comes home regularly with her two big dogs. Mm.

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Did they, did both of them grow up believing in God?

They grew up, and, they, they went to various camps and activities which they enjoyed. And, yes, and they went to their local churches in different places. [pause] That’s right, and they did, and then, I think, I think, well I’m fairly convinced they’re still believers, but they, like a lot of their generation, they don’t regard going to church as part of the normal way of life these days. But they’re not unusual in that respect. Yah. Mm.

[14:57] And what did you do at St Andrews when you weren’t working and you weren’t doing sort of family things? In other words, what were your hobbies, what did you read when you weren’t reading the literature, what did you do, in whatever spare time you had?

Well my, my spare time I, I still did quite a lot. I played squash a lot, in fact my department, for better or worse, for a while got known as the squash department. Most of my colleagues played. And students. So I played a lot of squash. I, I think I told you I am very keen on, when I get the chance, fly-fishing, and I used to do quite a lot of fishing here and further north in Scotland, I used to fish. And, we’re very keen on walking, we were then, we’re not so much now, so we did a lot of walking at weekends, we’d go out on long walks. Reading, I tended to, sort of, read the odd novel, the odd bit of history, but I have to confess that outside of that, I would read a bit of -find something, a bit of philosophy I’d read. But, I tended to read journals and newspapers and that was about it really. I didn’t do a lot of other extensive reading. Yah. Mm.

[16:32] Thank you. Could you then – we’ll continue after the break, but could you start to tell me about your experience of the Royal Society of Edinburgh as first a fellow and then its president, in the Nineties?

Mm. Well…

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But a fellow from 1980.

That’s right, yes. Well, it calls itself Scotland’s national academy. As I said to you, it’s different from the Royal Society in London in that, London Royal Society is for scientists, and its, its fellow academy there is the British Academy, with arts, humanities and so on. But the difference in the one here is that, although I think it’s probably true to say that the majority would be scientists, there’s a very good representation of the arts and humanities, and of course of engineers and a few leading figures in the commercial and business life of Scotland. And so in that sense it, it’s a fairly wide representation, which makes it possible to bring a wider range of perspectives on some contemporary issues than you could if you just had scientists. So we have ethicists and philosophers, and so, there are issues in, in science, we talked, just mentioned earlier, the use of animals in research and so on, which are philosophical and ethical issues. And so, what I liked about it was, it’s possible you can go to meetings which are exclusively with scientists, or you can go to meetings which try to bring together people from other disciplines. And I, I found these particularly enriching. But, yah, I think it, I think it does a good job. It has, it has, it has increased in its status quite a lot since Scotland had its own parliament, and during the time that I was President, it just on the eve of the Scottish Parliament being formed, and so, as President I was asked by the leaders of various parties if I would talk to them about the role of the Royal Society, you know, in a Scottish setting and so on. Which I happily did. And it has formed good relations with the Scottish Government. And so just as the British Government has a Chief Scientist, we now have a Chief Scientist here who is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. So, we’ve modelled it on, on that. And it still makes important contributions to the social life of Scotland I think, in that it will take on, you know, a wider range of issues than you would typically get in a society which was purely science. I think that would be the thing. I think it does a good job, mm.

And so, as a fellow from 1980 you attended meetings of…?

I used to go, if it was a topic that was of interest, I would go, yes, if it was a conference of interest, I would go, yes. And I got a bit involved in the sense that I was asked, already, I became a vice-president I think about, in about ’80-something, Malcolm Jeeves Page 126 C1672/07 Track 7 and I was a vice-president for a while, and then, you do that, then I demitted office, and then, later on I was elected as President. So, yah. Yah. Mm.

[20:51] And could you give me some stories which you mentioned yesterday but which we didn’t follow up on, which is, stories of meeting scientists in your role as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. You said that scientists would come to give talks and then you would entertain them afterwards at dinner, and…

Well after… We have a, I forget how regularly it was, we had these formal public lectures, they were public in the sense, if there were any seats left after the fellows had filled them, by eminent scientists from all over the world, Nobel laureates and so on. And on those occasions we would have a formal dinner in the Scott Room as it was called, and there would be about, we’d invite about, up to thirty or forty people. And, these would follow, well, there’d be the lecture, then there’d be drinks when the general public can mix with them. And then we’d have this formal dinner when, you know, you sat beside these people and had interesting conversations. I mean, I remember, I remember Mark Walport [means Lewis Wolpert], but I can’t remember the conversation, but, I remember finding him engaging and interesting to talk to. Once a year we had a lecture of a very distinguished medical scientist, usually from America, and I remember on one occasion this annual lecture, which I chaired, I can’t remember who it was, it was somebody from Seattle I think, and… Oh one of the, one of the features of these dinners, which you can say is a leftover from the past, was that, you had grace. We had a Latin one so it didn’t embarrass anybody. And sometimes somebody would say, ‘Oh that was interesting, you had grace at this thing,’ and, that could lead to a conversation. On this occasion I remember the wife of this distinguished medical scientist, a very nice lady, was sitting on my left, he was on my right, and she said, ‘Oh what do you do when you’re not sort of, presiding over this, and doing all sorts of things?’ And, she was really inquisitive, and she probed and probed. I said, ‘Well actually, sometimes I write books.’ ‘And what do you write on?’ I said, ‘Well, I, I’ve written a few books on science and religion.’ ‘Oh really?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Oh.’ Then she pours out her life story, about how she grew up in a very rigid fundamentalist home in America, and because of this, when she became a teenager she reacted against it all. And, so this got into quite a deep conversation about what Malcolm Jeeves Page 127 C1672/07 Track 7 she reacted against, and, she asked me what I thought, and I told her and so on. And, and so, and then she said, ‘Well, have you written anything recently?’ I said, ‘Well, I, I did write a book called Human Nature at the Millennium.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘could I read it?’ I said, ‘Yes, you know, you can buy it in America.’ Anyway, she went back and bought this book, obviously read every word and every dot and comma, and had analysed it. And wrote back and said what a tremendous help it was, because she realised that you could be a Christian without having to believe some of the obscurantist things she had been told she had to believe in a fundamentalist upbringing. ‘I’ve read it,’ she said, ‘it’s wonderful. Now my husband’s started reading it.’ So this leads to conversations like that sometimes. And when that happens, it’s just interesting, you know, I’d say, well I… Another occasion when Sir Roger Penrose gave a lecture, we had a small dinner party then, and he was sitting next to me and we talked about everything else, and at the end I said, ‘You know Roger, I’ve been reading one of your books,’ I forget which one it was, ‘and you mention God in it. You know, what do you mean by that?’ And then he said, ‘Oh of course, do you know I had Quaker background?’ I said, ‘Well I did actually, because, you know, we used your father’s book on genetics as a student at Cambridge,’ and, somehow I knew from that. And so that led to an interesting conversation with him. So, these are things that just naturally arise really, and, it’s stimulating, because it opens your own mind and it makes you rethink some of your ideas, and, sometimes, it seems, it makes them rethink some of theirs as well.

Do you know whether or not these kind of conversations, taking in religion, are more or less likely at the Royal Society of Edinburgh than they would be at the Royal Society in London?

I couldn’t tell you. You’d have to ask somebody who’s a regular attender there. I couldn’t tell you. If you ask somebody like Sir Brian Heap, he might tell you, because he was, he was Foreign Secretary to the Royal Society in London. He came up… When I was President he came up, because, we have meetings with the officers, so, at that time it was, Sir Aaron Klug was the president and Brian Heap was the foreign secretary, and one other. So they came up and had meetings with me and my, so on, foreign secretary. And so, I knew Brian actually, well, of course he’s a very active Christian. And so Brian came up and… So that, that, you meet some of the Malcolm Jeeves Page 128 C1672/07 Track 7 friends, you know, in that sort of context as well, but, Brian could tell you that certainly, yah. Aaron Klug was an interesting man. I think he’s probably a devout, I don’t know, a practising Jew, I think so. I believe he is. And his son was very ill at that time in, in Israel. I think, I think he is, yes. Yes. Yah.

Why do you mention Aaron Klug, because…?

Well because he happened to come, he happened to be President of the Royal Society of London when I was President of the Royal Society here, and we met, and, you know, we talked quite a lot over dinner about various things, and, I forget how it came up, but, I got that impression. And I think it was Sir Brian Heap who told me afterwards, because he knew him very well because he spent so much time with him flying round the world as Foreign Secretary, that, they, they had talked about religion, and I think Brian said that Aaron was a very quiet practising Jew in Cambridge. Yah. Mm.

[End of Track 7] Malcolm Jeeves Page 129 C1672/07 Track 8

[Track 8]

OK, we’ve got nearly an hour for this last session. Could I start by filling some gaps as I perceive them, and then we’ll do the things we need to do to finish. The first thing that I forgot to ask was, how you went about worshiping during military service.

I went, where it was accessible, to a local church. Frequently that wasn’t accessible. But, each battalion has its own chaplain, so the chaplain had Sunday service, and I went to that.

And, how, as a sort of, a proportion of the, the servicemen in your bit of the Army, what proportion were going to the Sunday service?

Oh I couldn’t answer that. [pause] I couldn’t answer that because, on occasion, it was what’s called a church parade, and so everybody had to go. So then you get 100 per cent. But, leaving that aside, it would be a much smaller number. And certainly, to give a slightly different answer, when we were garrisoning Hamburg, turned out that the second-in-command of the battalion, whose name I’ve forgotten, he was a major, was a Christian. And we had a chaplain, and occasionally he organised discussion groups in one of the rooms in the barracks for anybody who wanted to come. And then, there wouldn’t be many there, might have been twenty or thirty, but when an infantry battalion has 1,000 people, it gives you an idea, it’s relatively small.

And did you have any sense of how it was viewed by the, you know, the 970 who, who didn’t?

Not really, no. No.

[02:46] Thank you. And also, before we broke you mentioned that you were, I think you said you were an exact contemporary of John Polkinghorne at Cambridge?

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Yes, we went up to, we went up at the same time. I’m older than him because, I was away in the services a bit longer than him as well. But I’m pretty sure we both went up in 1948, yes.

Do you remember the Freshers’ Sermon of the Christian Union?

That first year? No. Did John?

Yes. Yes.

Who gave it?

Oh. Don’t know.

John Stott?

No I don’t think it was John Stott. I’d have to look that up I’m afraid at this stage, yah. No, I mean he talked about this in his autobiography, which is on public, record that this was the, the moment that he felt he sort of, really committed himself at this…

Yah.

…at this Freshers’ Sermon where undergraduates were asked to come forward if they made that commitment.

Yes.

And he also in his autobiography talks about the extent to which he, on reflection he, and perhaps at the time to some extent, he saw the Christian Union as slightly, now I think you might say narrow or overly cautious of the influence of lack of belief, you know, people who didn’t believe around.

Yes.

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And I wonder what you, what was your experience of that, of the concern to mix only with sound people, and to do or not do certain things, and all of that sort of thing.

I think… Yes I know, I know John’s views on this because we’ve talked about it. I know exactly what John means, but I, I think, I would want to point out that the Christian Union never claimed to be an organisation which was a substitute for a church providing the opportunities for widespread discussion of every issue you can think of. It was a group of Christians who felt that one of their commitments as a Christian, since they took their faith so seriously, was, where possible, to share it with other people. And that, that was the centre of their focus. So, given the multiplicity of things that happen in university student things, I don’t know what the latest count is but there used to be, what, nearly 300 different student societies, you can only be involved in terms of time available in a limited number, and therefore, it may have seemed to some people that the Christian Union people were not engaging in the way that others did in a range of other societies. But I think that’s because of, that was their purpose. But because that was their purpose, it didn’t mean that individually they didn’t engage. So that some of them, for example, would, as a different sort of society, would be very actively engaged in various sporting societies, and that took a lot of time. My roommate in one of my years was one of those people, he was a, a well-known Christian, but, he, he played cricket for England before he came to Cambridge, but, he… So during the cricketing season he would be up at six in the morning, have his breakfast, study like anything until, ten o’clock, then he’d be off to Fenner’s to play cricket. Back early evening, evening meal, study till he went to bed. So, you know, if you’re doing that sort of thing, you haven’t got much time for other things. So I think, I think that has to be borne in mind when you, you make comments like John does, and I, I appreciate them and he knows my views on it, and in some ways I do feel that John’s views are ones formulated looking back over the years. Like him, now, I suppose one would have appreciated the opportunity for wider discussions on some things in those undergraduate years, but I think, it just wasn’t possible. That’s my view. I don’t think it was that they didn’t want to involve themselves; they had a list of priorities, this was their priority, and they didn’t have time for anything else. So, I think that’s, that’s the other way of looking at it. Yah.

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Did you, though, not do certain things individually because of the sorts of things the Christian Union were saying about right and wrong ways to conduct yourself?

Such as?

Drinking, watching films, certain kinds of films, all of that.

No. No. That was entirely individual differences. Some people did things, some people did other things. Some Christian Union members would go to the May Ball, some wouldn’t. Some would go to the local pubs, some wouldn’t. They were, variable, because, that’s the way the world is. Yah.

And what were the relations between it and, I think there’s at least one other Christian society in Cambridge at the time, student society.

I don’t know much about that I’m afraid.

OK.

No.

And, with the sort of, the Christianity represented by the college chaplains, what was the relationship between the chaplains and the Union? How did it…

That would depend entirely on the particular college. In some colleges there was a very close relationship. I used to go to College Chapel every Sunday morning to the early communion service, and I frequently went to the evening service in chapel. In others, they wouldn’t go. It depends, again, on the individual, and, to some extent it depends on the chaplain. If a chaplain was felt to be not as sympathetic as he might be to the Christian Union, he, he didn’t have to be surprised if they didn’t turn up at all his services. You know, it’s a, it’s a two-way street. But in general I, I found that the relationship with the chaplains, at the college I was in, was very good, we had excellent chaplains, and, yes, they were good. And, and with the dean, they were good, yes. Malcolm Jeeves Page 133 C1672/07 Track 8

[10:16] Thank you. In one of your books you mention something called pastoral psychology, and I wondered what that was, what you were referring to.

Well pastoral psychology, I believe that in theological colleges now they have courses in which there’s an attempt to relate those aspects of psychology which are thought to be relevant to issues that the average parish parson might face in his ministry. Now in a sense, this is an attempt to see if there’s any relevance, for example, in what psychologists know about human development, to the issues that the local rector would be dealing with. And this is important, because, you could still go to a church where there is a, a specific, during the service, a children’s talk. And I sometimes go to these, and I squirm when I hear an excellent talk which would be fully understood by the adults, but a high percentage would be totally incomprehensible to children because of the length and choice of the words being used. And I feel, if they understood a little bit of what we know about the way that children think, and a child’s vocabulary at different ages, they would be much more effective in telling the stories they want to tell if they’re Bible stories, than they are if they totally ignored this knowledge which is available. I think that sort of, fairly basic understanding of the human person. And, if they understood the difficulties that some older people find with remembering, then they would be careful in their pastoral visiting to remember that this person doesn’t have the same memories as you think he has, because, no fault of his, it’s just not there. And a variety of things like this. And to give another instance. A well-known minister in London used to tell the story of how, when he was in a very small rural church, in another part of Britain, one of his parishioners was terribly concerned because, this person’s father, who was a pillar of this local church, very small church, had grown old, and from time to time he would sit in the corner of the room and just, swear nonstop for five minutes. And this lady was terribly concerned, what had happened to this wonderfully devout Christian man. And this minister, who before he became a church minister had been a consultant physician, and knew quite a lot about human condition, he had to point out to the lady that, you know, ‘Your father is a lovely man, but he has for some years now been suffering quite severe senile dementia. This has been affecting his brain, and, these are, this is, this is just his brain freewheeling.’ I mean her question then was, ‘Where Malcolm Jeeves Page 134 C1672/07 Track 8 did he learn these words?’ of course. But the answer was, he had learnt these words before he became a Christian. So you see, the point is, in a simple pastoral situation like that, if you understand a little more of the human condition from a psychological and neurological point of view, you are much less likely to be judgemental, and are much more likely to be sympathetic to that condition, and therefore have a better understanding of how, if you wish to minister that person and to help them, you can do it. This is the sort of thing that a good course in pastoral psychology deals with, it takes, not what we earlier called psychobabble and neuro-gibberish, it takes a well- established knowledge from psychology and neurology, and asks, to what extent can we learn from this, in our better understanding of interactions with other people, and particularly in the context of the pastoral situation? That’s, I think, what is meant by these courses, yes.

[15:43] Thank you. You were President of the Psychological Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science…

Yes.

…in the late Eighties. This may have just been a, I don’t know how, I mean how involved you therefore became in the BAAS as it was then, but, did you, did it give you any window on the way in which psychology was being popularised by that position?

Not really. Not really. I was just invited, you know, to be president, and if you do accept that, then you are, you are expected to give a lecture at the annual meeting, and this happened to be in Oxford, and that’s what I did. It was really like muggins’s turn really. Yah.

Thank you. And, one of the common ways in which, recently anyway, the sort of public media sphere has engaged with science and religion debates is by actually having debates between two people who are seen to hold different positions. And I wondered whether at any time you have been invited to debate publically in a recorded way maybe with someone who was going to come on and say, human beings Malcolm Jeeves Page 135 C1672/07 Track 8 have souls given by God, and you would be the psychologist saying… whether you’ve been invited to take part in that kind of debate which you see a lot of.

Gosh. I think, discussions of that kind, I think, I can’t remember the occasions, but I certainly, I, on occasions in Australia, and, I think I mentioned the other day, in radio and television programmes, I did accept invitations to enter into those sort of discussions, or debates, whatever you like to call them. But I can’t remember the details. You know, if I was free and could do it, I happily did it. I can’t think of doing it much in this country. No, I can’t.

[17:53] OK. Thank you. What are your thoughts on relations between science and other faiths? We’ve only talked about science and Christianity, for obvious reasons, so far.

Relation… What’s your question, between…?

Between science and faiths other than Christianity.

I think it’s an important area of investigation that is really at the moment only just opening up. And certainly for me, I have a book at the moment I’m working through called Paths to Spirituality, which goes through all the great religions of the world. Because, although one has a vague idea of what Buddhists and others believe, and particularly I know more about what Jews believe, it’s a, unless you have an accurate understanding of what they believe, you can’t begin to see how they relate that to their science. And I think this is, this is an area of potentially great importance, because, since in a sense science today is a shared human concern, it has the potential to bring together disparate religious groups. So you have scientists who come from different faith backgrounds who are all enthusiastic about their science, so they have a common ground to begin with, and then, in a, not in an antagonistic way, they can begin to discuss how the science they all share is for them related to, to particular faith commitments that they, each of them has. So, I think potentially it has a lot for the future, but I have to confess that in the past, I just haven’t had time to, to pursue those things in the way it would be nice to do.

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[20:11] Could you tell the story, then, now of the ‘Human Nature at the Millennium’ conference?

Oh yes. Well now, as I said this morning, I had forgotten about this book, and we picked it up. I think a good place to start, just, before you came I was looking at the back of it, and the blurb on the back is written by Professor Sir Michael Atiyah, who, as you know, is President of the Royal Society of London, Master of Trinity College Cambridge, the leading mathematician in Britain. And then he became President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. And on the back of this, he followed me actually, on the back of this, he wrote… This goes back to our earlier conversation. He wrote, ‘The Royal Society of Edinburgh, by encompassing both science and the humanities, is uniquely, amongst all the learned societies in the UK, well placed to ensure that the barriers that so often get erected between disciplines are dismantled, and that interdisciplinary thinking takes place.’ Now, given that, I took my position at the Royal Society of Edinburgh as the President as an opportunity to bring together a diverse worldwide spread of people who could share the present understanding of this. And I was looking at my introduction to this thing, which I wrote at the beginning, it said, ‘With the sometimes breath-taking advances in the biological, medical and psychological sciences, we’ve come to expect fresh media reports about discoveries on topics ranging from stem cells to serotonin uptake inhibitors on a daily basis. Each reveals something new about our unbelievably complex human nature. It’s not always easy to match up the careful reporting in scientific journals with the coverage of the same discoveries in the media. Never before have the mass media shaped thinking in the marketplace so powerfully.’ Now, so the, the point behind this was, to try to give an accurate, well-informed account of what we know when we bring together, not the media reports, but the researchers at the cutting edge. And then I went on – I think this is relevant to our discussion – ‘The days when it was left solely to theologians and philosophers to pontificate about human nature are long past. A millennium ago St Augustin, somewhat plaintively, reminded his generation that, quote, “Men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of rivers, the ocean that encircles the world, or the stars in their courses, [doorbell] but they pay no attention to themselves.”’ Close quote. Front doorbell. I’ll have to go. Malcolm Jeeves Page 137 C1672/07 Track 8

[End of Track 8] Malcolm Jeeves Page 138 C1672/07 Track 8

[Track 9]

.....It’s a worthwhile quote, don’t you?

Yes. Yes.

Now, well that’s that quote, ‘but they pay no attention to themselves.’ Then I’ve written, ‘He had no doubt that the focus should be elsewhere, exclaiming,’ and this is Augustin again, ‘”Oh Lord, I am working hard in this field, and the field of my labours is my own self. I am not now investigating the tracts of the heavens, or measuring the distance of the stars, or trying to discover how the earth hangs in space. I am investigating my self, my memory, my mind.”’ Close quote. And then he goes on and asks, ‘What is my nature?’ That is Augustin, more than 1,000 years ago. And then I go on, ‘Now, it is not only the theologians and philosophers who are asking questions about human nature; today scientists share their reflections on some of the likely, wider implications of their latest discoveries, and it is the biological and psychological sciences which are setting the pace.’ And so on and so on. And so, the idea of this was to, given that agenda, to see if I could collect together leaders first of all in the medical field, I got Sir David Weatherall, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, Michael Steel, who’s Professor of Medicine here, Gareth Jones. And then I got a group of the biological scientists and evolutionary scientists, a group of those interested in neuroscience and psychology, a group of those interested in sociality and morality, developmental evolutionary aspects. And, and then finally, looking forward to the future. So, I got these different groups, and it included philosophers like Keith Ward from Oxford, and what they did was, in order to share this with the wider public, I arranged this week conference to be in the middle of the Edinburgh Festival. And, for five days there were five of the speakers in five plenary sessions gave public lectures that the general public were invited to. So for example, on day one, Sir David Weatherall from Oxford spoke on DNA and its implications. Professor Francisco Ayala, who is a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he gave a lecture on biological evolution and human nature. Richard Morris, whom we mentioned, on the third day, brain, mind, behaviour and personality. The fourth day, Timothy Ingold, human nature, culture and history. And on the fifth day, on society, and this was an anthropologist from Princeton. So they were the five key lectures, and then each day, in closed session, all the other people who participated presented their papers. And then after the conference was over I mobilised an Malcolm Jeeves Page 139 C1672/07 Track 8 editorial committee. Obviously I, I did it having in mind people who were easily, closely to hand. And so I got Michael Steel, who was Professor of Medicine here, Dick Byrne, Alan Torrance and Andrew Whiten, and one other, a man from America, David Myers. And they helped me as sub-editors, and we, each of us wrote an introduction to each section, then at the end I wrote a short final chapter sort of pulling it together, So the idea was to produce what you might call multiple perspectives on a common issue, and the common issue was, what do we now know about human nature that Augustin would love to have known 1,000 years ago, but they had no clues then? He said then, ‘I’d love to know about memory.’ Well do know a bit about memory now. Well that was the idea. And, so, it wasn’t on science and religion, but it was on science, if you like, and society, including religion in the sense that, Keith Ward, who was Professor of, Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford and a philosopher, he obviously brought in the philosophical issues. So, that’s what it was all about. So that, that was the idea of this. And that I felt was the sort of event that the Royal Society of Edinburgh could quite legitimately put on, because that was the reason why it was formed; whereas, as I said earlier, if you wanted to do that in London, you would have to say, well now, we’ll have to have a joint committee to talk to the British Academy, see if we can set something up. So we were able to do it in-house, as Sir Michael Atiyah said at the back here. So that, that’s really what it was all about.

[05:42] How did you go about choosing, from the very large number of people you could have chosen, the particular participants, including those that are listed as participants in the back but don’t have chapters themselves in the book?

Oh…

People like Mary Midgley and…

Yes. Well, what I did was… The then principal and vice-chancellor of Edinburgh University was Sir Stewart Sutherland, now Lord Sutherland. This goes back to the Oxford conference of 1965, on which I wrote that book. And when we were organising that conference, Oliver Barclay said to me, ‘I recently came across a very bright research student in philosophy.’ He said, ‘I think he’s about to get a lectureship in a college in Wales.’ And he said, ‘I think he’d be somebody that would be good to include.’ So, he told me a bit more about this chap, told Malcolm Jeeves Page 140 C1672/07 Track 8 us on the committee. So we said, OK, let’s invite him. This was young Stewart Sutherland. He had just finished his PhD. And, he was at that conference. I got to know him quite well, and, our paths crossed from time to time afterwards in various ways. And, so, he being the vice-chancellor of Edinburgh, I went and chatted with Stewart and said, ‘Look, I’m a scientist, you’re a philosopher. I don’t know who the right people to invite in the wider fields.’ So we agreed to set up a little committee of six of us who met in Edinburgh, and the six of us, first of all sort of, plotted out the sort of areas we’d like to see covered, which is in this, and then, each of us made suggestions about people we knew of, and if possible knew personally, who could cover this. And in that way we managed to select these people who we were told would be the sort of people who would be able to talk across disciplines. There are some people who are so focused, they don’t seem to be able to talk outside their own discipline. So that’s how we selected them. And then we sent out invitations, and, I think without exception, those who were invited, you know, accepted. That, that was the way we selected them. And in the event, you never know how it’s going to work, in the event, they gelled very well. I mean we had very lively discussions, which either I or Stewart Sutherland chaired, and out of that, this is what we produced. So that’s, that’s the story.

And from the beginning of the introduction that you read, it seems as if it was partly in response to, again, concerns about media misrepresentation of the various scientific fields that might lead into a book about studies of nature as a whole.

That’s right.

I think the, the second or third sentence is about media…

That’s right. That’s right.

…accounts of the same being unreliable.

You’re absolutely right. And, I think some of the, I think this is a theme that was taken up by some of the participants. I’ve got an idea that… [pause] Yah. Sir David Weatherall for example, who did the, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, on his, his was entitled ‘The Role of the Human Genome Project in Human Biology and Medicine’. And he begins this chapter, ‘Current thinking in human biology and medicine is dominated by the prospect of Malcolm Jeeves Page 141 C1672/07 Track 8 what may be learnt from the outcome of the Human Genome Project. It is argued that once we have completed… once we have a complete sequence of all human genes, or “the book of life”, it is being called, we will start to understand why we are, what we are, and how we got that way. Furthermore, this information will revolutionise medical practice, and prolong the human lifespan, Granted, all this will leave some new ethical problems in its wake, but overall the acquisition of this new knowledge will be immensely beneficial.’ And he goes on, ‘However, views on the likely impact of the Human Genome Project on the health and betterment of humanity vary widely. At the one end of the spectrum there are those who believe that within a few years every baby will have its own genetic make-up examined at birth, and its faults identified, after which they will all be corrected. The child will be ensured a long and healthy life. An alternative view is that the concept of molecular medicine is no more than a confidence trick on the part of basic science. In the twenty years that this concept has been around, none of the promises in the field have been fulfilled, and so far it has had absolutely no impact on the betterment of human health.’ So you have the popular image, which is what I was getting at, and the evaluation by the experts working at the cutting edge. And what I was suggesting, in almost every discipline, this takes us back to our old psychobabble and neuro-gibberish again, you have those who extrapolate, through lack of detailed knowledge, but only on the basis of media reports and wishful thinking, on what it’s going to do for us. So that, and that was a good example you see. And that was the first public lecture, and David Weatherall I think set the, set the theme very well in doing that. So, yes, we love our science, we’re very keen on our science, we’re enthusiastic about it, we hope and see great possibilities, but don’t get over-excited, don’t think it’s all going to be OK tomorrow.

Did this, was this written up in the, in the local media during the Edinburgh Festival, the, the occurrence of these public lectures?

It was in the media, yes, but I honestly can’t, I don’t know how it treated it, to be honest. I didn’t have time to look at that.

[12:53] Thank you. There were… There’s just a couple of people that I’d like you to give your memories of, partly because you’ve mentioned that you knew them well, and partly because Malcolm Jeeves Page 142 C1672/07 Track 8 they’re sort of linked up with the project. One is Robert Boyd, who said you could tell me something about, through knowing him personally.

Well, I mean he was, he was a, one of the leading cosmological scientists of his generation. He was a very hard-working, very enthusiastic space physicist, but he was also extremely hard-headed about its relevance and its irrelevance. The little story I gave you about the significance of flying saucers. He was down-to-earth, and when you got that sort of gibberish again, he would, very graciously but, point out that that’s just, there’s no evidence for that at all. In his personal life, he was a very modest person, a devout Christian, both he and his wife, who worshipped at their local church, and, was always an easily accessible and friendly person to work with. You know, as I say, we knew them personally, we stayed with them, they stayed with us. When I was out in Australia, it was the time that the European project, the Ariane Project was trying to get things into space, and they had this three-stage rocket which they were launching from Woomera in Australia. And, Robert and his wife came out, Robert, because of the science, because he had built some of the stuff that they were sending up. And he was a leader of the project. And they were staying with us, and he said, ‘Look, would you like to come up to Woomera?’ because he had a private plane. And so I went up with him, and, spent some time there. And we waited and waited for this thing to be sent off, and of course, something kept going wrong and something kept going wrong. You’re probably too young to remember it, but, what happened was, they eventually got, it was, there were three sections to the rocket, built by different nations, and eventually, I think the furthest they got it, because the sections kept going wrong, they got the, they finally got the top section as far as falling into the sea off north Australia, and that was about it. [15:37] But, there’s an interesting side gloss to this. I could perhaps… It’s not irrelevant to some earlier discussions. Some of my work when I was in Australia was working with aborigines, and, it’s interesting that, aborigines, who live way out in the middle of Australia, have no contact virtually with the rest of the world, but they have their own, I forget what they call it, they have the stories that they tell in their culture. And it turned out that… Now, the practice range for Woomera was over this totally, in inverted commas, ‘uninhabited part of the Australian outback’. And these people had begun to see these objects from time to time flying over where they were. And anthropologists investigated and found that they had wonderfully incorporated these new flying objects into their mystical thought world in a perfectly satisfactory way. It’s an example of the way in which all, we all, all the time we’re Malcolm Jeeves Page 143 C1672/07 Track 8 trying to make sense of the world around us, and when something unusual happens, we don’t like it to be unusual, we like to get control of it and make it fit with our preconceived ideas. I thought that was a rather nice, interesting thing. Mm.

What work were you doing with the aborigines?

Well, aborigines, the aborigines in the centre near Alice Springs, they had some serious health problems with the very very young children, the neonates, and the very small babies were dying sooner than they should do. And our professor of paediatric health at Adelaide, who is a friend of mine, he went and spent some time up there trying to get to the bottom of it. He couldn’t find any straightforward medical reason why this happened. But he wondered whether it could be something to do with their behaviour. So then, I was asked whether I would go and have a look at the situation, and see whether we could do some serious research to see whether it was aspects of their behaviour which might be part of the reason for this abnormally high incidence of serious illness and fatalities amongst very young babies. And in fact, the Australian Government decided it was an important project, and together with a professor in Canberra we set up a project, and we recruited a researcher who had just done her PhD in Cambridge. This is really ethological research, but studying human behaviour. And so we were doing this. And we did find that, what happens, you probably heard, the aborigines from time to time will decide, as a group, to go walkabout as they call it. And what was happening was, a decision would be made to go walkabout, totally ignoring the physical condition of some of the babies that had been born very recently. And it turned out that it was these who, when you went walkabout, and you didn’t have the normal ready supply of fluids and nutrients of various kinds, these are the ones that, because of their changed behaviour, were not getting the nutrition they would normally get if they were in a static situation. And it was amongst these that you were finding you were getting fatalities and abnormal number of serious illnesses. So it’s an interesting example of the way that, again, behaviour modifies health. And medical problems aren’t just medical problems, they’re behavioural problems as well. So that’s how I got involved in that, yah. Mm.

[20:11] Thank you. And what are your memories of Sam Berry as a, as a young man who you met, must have been through Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship?

Malcolm Jeeves Page 144 C1672/07 Track 8

I remember Sam as a, a very enthusiastic, energetic, enterprising researcher who had a very real and lively Christian faith, a very nice person to spend time with, and who also was quite ready to, as they say, think outside the box when necessary. And to be quite bold, because, as you know from having spoken to him, there was a time when acceptance of evolutionary biology and all its implications was quite a, a lively debating issue in some Christian circles. But Sam did his homework very thoroughly and he, he was very gracious, but very definite, in not being ready to qualify his science just in the interests of a little bit of contemp… a little bit of short-term peace. He wanted to see these things thought through. I think that has been an enormous contribution, as you know from interviewing him, he has written extremely widely on this, at all different levels, and I think has been very influential and, and made important contributions. And he is still very energetic. He will go and talk, here, there and everywhere, in a way I won’t these days. I’m not prepared to go. I mean I, I turn down all international invitations now. But mind you, he’s a lot younger than me. I pull his leg always, he’s always a youngster. But, he’s stayed here frequently as you know, because, when he was doing his mice work up here, he would come and stay with us each time. And during that period also we were writing that book. And, I found him an extremely congenial person to, to work with and to write the book with. So yes, I have a great admiration for both him and Caroline, they’ve done a wonderful job I think. Yah.

[22:40] Two final things. One is, where should the person listening to this interview look in the future to find any archive material on you? That’s part A. And part B is, if you could describe how you found the experience of recording this interview.

Tell me a bit more what you mean by archive material.

Is it… Will there… I mean, perhaps you haven’t thought about where you might put an archive, or whether you’ve got archive material in a university department already, but, for example, would St Andrews have any of your sort of correspondence and scientific notes or anything like that, or, would the Royal Society of Edinburgh have material on you, so that someone listening to this in the future can think, ah, I think Malcolm Jeeves’ archives are probably here, or here, or here.

Malcolm Jeeves Page 145 C1672/07 Track 8

Well I, I don’t know how the Royal Society of Edinburgh deals with its archives. I suspect, like a lot of organisations, an awful lot of stuff just gets filed away. So I suspect that quite a lot of my correspondence as president is probably filed away there somewhere in their archives, I would imagine so. And the archives at St Andrews, it’s possible that some of my correspondence during the time I was vice-principal of the university, in those days there was just one vice-principal, now there are six, but, and some of the roles I played there in the university, that could well be in the university archives, I suspect it is, because, at times, obviously, I was standing in for the principal. The only other archive material, which I haven’t got round to yet, because I’ve never recommended any of my books to the library here, I plan, in due course, to put together as many of my books and scientific papers as I can into, you know, into a set of boxes, and give these to the university library here. I might also deposit a similar set with my college in Cambridge, I think, because, they would, I think, be pleased to have that in the St John’s College library. But, beyond that, I’ve, I haven’t got around to thinking about that sort of thing, because I’m too busy answering questions like you ask me.

And how have you found the experience of thinking about beforehand and then actually being interviewed for National Life Stories?

Well, you didn’t tell me to think about it beforehand, so I didn’t.

No. OK, good.

You said I didn’t need to.

True.

[pause] Well I, I don’t want to be, you know, on record trying to throw compliments at you, but I must say, I didn’t quite know what to expect, and what has impressed me enormously is the amount of reading, I know some of it’s skim-reading, but some of it’s more detailed, that you have managed to do, which has managed to generate some really very good questions. I think without what I would call the priming of your questions, my hidden memories, which as an older person are more difficult to retrieve, would not have been so easily retrieved. So I think you should take a lot of credit for formulating questions which were very efficient Malcolm Jeeves Page 146 C1672/07 Track 8 probes for getting down to material which somewhere is buried between my ears. But, I shouldn’t have… I’m a bit surprised actually how much I managed to remember, given your questions. I think, it’s a very interesting, you know, psychological exercise that you’ve been doing, which is, I mean it’s interesting, I mean you know, as a, as you know, in theories of memory, in psychology, you’ve got short-term memory, long-term memory, working memory, and one of the great problems is, the retrieval mechanism. So it’s possible that, in some people the memories are there, but the retrieval mechanism is no longer working properly. But from what I can make out, and I’m quite encouraged, I think my retrieval mechanism seems to be working reasonably well. [laughs]

[End of Track 9]

[End of Interview]