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Sam Berry Interviewed by Paul Merchant: Full Transcript of The NATIONAL LIFE STORIES Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum. Life Story Interviews Sam Berry Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1672/02 IMPORTANT This interview and transcript is accessible via http://sounds.bl.uk. © The British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB United Kingdom +44 (0)20 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators. The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1672/02 Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews Interviewee’s surname: Berry Title: Professor Interviewee’s Robert James (Sam) Sex: Male forename: Occupation: Professor of Genetics Date and place of birth: 26th October 1934, Preston, UK Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: dentist Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 13/01/2015 (track 1-2), 03/02/2015 (track 3-5), 17/02/2015 (track 6-7), 16/03/2015 (track 8) 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 8 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 10 hrs. 20 min. 40 sec. Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: OPEN Interviewer’s comments: Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 1 C1672/02 Track 1 [Track 1] Could you start then by telling me when and where you were born? I was born in Lancashire, at Preston in 1934. And can you tell me as much as you can about the life of your father? This can be combined things that you’ve found out and things that you actually experienced. My father was a dentist. He was in the first tranche of National Health Service accumulation so he… he’d always had an honorary appointment with the local infirmary one day a week and he became fulltime in the National Health Service, drove him round the bend and – how many years – six or eight years later he committed suicide from the stress of it all. [00:47] Now, my mother had MS and as a result my father and I were thrown together really rather a lot, purely as friends, as it were, and we used to go, well, before my mother got bad, we all used to go on holiday, then my father and I used to go, we used to go up to the Lake District and walk. So he and I were really quite good pals. [01:18] What do you know of his parents? His father was a schoolmaster. He ended up as Director of Education for Preston. He died before I was born, I never knew him. He was a local historian; he wrote quite a number of books about the history of Preston, the history of Lancashire. He ran the Preston Guild in 1922 and there’s quite a lot of literature archives on that. I never met him, his widow lived on for many years, I knew her. Nothing very much to say, she was a lady of that generation. [02:02] Did you, I mean what do you remember of time actually spent with her, did you do things just with her? No. Much more with my mother’s parents. My mother’s father was a plumber, one of his achievements was that Tom Finney was apprenticed to him as a young lad. He could never understand why, like him, I didn’t leave school at twelve and start earning my living, and I Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 2 C1672/02 Track 1 think he was quite tickled with the fact that I actually went on for some time after that. He married somebody of his ilk, as it were. He came from Barrow, he married somebody from Lancaster – I may have it the wrong way round – they moved to Preston, they always lived in Preston in my days. What then do you remember of time spent with that set of grandparents? My grandfather smoking a cigar after lunch put it into a tin so I could then take it home and smell the lovely smell for the next few hours, days, whatever. I don’t think we spent… we used to go there every Sunday, I don’t know that we spent time with them as such more than that. What were Sundays like, as a child? [03:31] Sundays was lunch with one grandparents, tea with the other grandparents. When I joined the Scouts I was told I had to honour God and the King, so I used to take my father to church in the evening; we sat on the back row and had an awfully dull service in the local parish church. You used to take your father to church, rather than the other way round? Yeah. His father had been a church organist and so there was certainly no antipathy, but again no sort of keenness to involve in matters religious. [04:14] Did you live in the same house throughout your childhood? We moved when I was the age of about three. I don’t remember the old house, it was literally just across the road. And then we lived in the same house until, well, I went to university. During that time, right at the end of that time my mother died, I moved in very briefly with my grandfather and then as a graduate student moved into a flat in London. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 3 C1672/02 Track 1 In that case, could you take us on a tour of the house that you moved to when you were three, describing it sort of physically, but also if you, as you go round in your mind’s eye, if you see someone in a particular room can you tell me. So if your mother tended to be in a particular space doing a certain thing, and so on. Well, it was a bungalow, with an upstairs, just effectively a room and a lobby upstairs. We used to have a maid, an Irish girl, and she lived upstairs. Downstairs you went in the front door, the dining room on your right, my room was to the left, beyond that there was a drawing room, which is the place I also associate with my mother. There was a garage, beyond the garage there was a lawn, which originally I think had been a tennis court, but in my time became a football pitch, a cricket pitch, a croquet lawn and a few other things. Next door was a builders’ yard, beyond that was a garage. It was on a corner, the house opened on to the main road to Liverpool. Great excitements on Grand National day because you used to have all the buses going past with the drunks going to the Grand National. Round the front of the house, as you turned left, as it were, before the door, there was effectively a rose garden, not very well maintained but sort of looked after, so it was quite a reasonable garden. But the lawn was the place I used to play, as it were, as a small boy, and beyond small boy, I suppose. As a smaller boy, what were you playing on the lawn? Whatever small boys do. I don’t know. Do you remember what you did in particular? No, frankly! [laughs] You said that you particularly associate your mother with the drawing room. What do you see her doing in there? Well, because she couldn’t really walk she used to sit there quite a lot, and I mean latterly the food had to be brought in to her, as it were. So she was just – reigning is the wrong word – residing there. And her bedroom, my parents’ bedroom was next door to that, as I say, it was a bungalow so all these things were close together. Robert (Sam) Berry FINAL Page 4 C1672/02 Track 1 And where do you see your father? Do you associate your father with a particular part of the house? No, there was a surgery at the far end beyond the garage, so he in his pre-National Health Service days used to perform there certainly in the evenings. He had another surgery in a rather downtown part of Preston where he used to go in the morning, he used to come back at lunchtime. Whether he was always at home after lunch, I can’t remember, but certainly there was a surgery there. And in the days of the power cuts just after the war, I used to occasionally, used to go and help him. Being a dentist with a drill he had one with a foot pump and you had to sort of use a foot pump to make the drill work, so I used to go and help him on that a bit. Do you remember conversation between your father and patients on those occasions? No, no. Thank you. I remember that it was five bob to take out a tooth, twelve and six for a filling. But I can’t remember how much it was to take out the whole lot, but some of the older people used to have all their teeth out.
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