Mike Baillie Interviewed by Paul Merchant

NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Mike Baillie Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1379/85 IMPORTANT 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. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] British Library Sound Archive National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1379/85 Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s surname: Title: Professor Baillie Interviewee’s forename: Sex: M Mike Occupation: Date and place of birth: dendrochronologist November 1944, Belfast, Northern Ireland UK Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Housewife Director of linen company Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 20/10/11 (track 1-2), 15/12/11 (track 3-4), 29/12/11 (track 5-8), 02/02/12 (track 9-10), 15/03/12 (track 11-12). Location of interview: Queen’s University of Belfast and interviewee’s home, Belfast Name of interviewer: Dr Paul Merchant Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 Recording format : 661: WAV 24 bit 48kHz Total no. of tracks: 8 Stereo Total Duration: 9:13:53 Additional material: photographs and video taken by interviewer Copyright/Clearance: OPEN Interviewer’s comments: Mike Baillie Page 1 C1379/85 Track 1 [Track 1] Could I start by asking you when and where you were born? I was born in Belfast in November 1944. And, could you tell me about the life of your father, either things that you know because he told you about them, or you witnessed them, or, perhaps things you’ve found out since? Father came from a middle-class background. His father had been a draper, and his grandfather had been both a teacher and then someone who had run a commercial college. So Father had expectations by the 1930s, he was born in 1916, he had expectations of possibly going on to become a doctor, but unfortunately his father, my grandfather, died rather prematurely and quite suddenly, and the result was that he had to leave school in order to get a job to support his mother. And, he was an only child, which was another, I suppose, aspect of that, there was no shared responsibility basically, he was the responsible adult. So, he went through a variety of jobs; interesting, on his marriage certificate he puts himself down as a warehouseman. I reconstruct that to mean that, he was working in Short’s, the aircraft factory, during the war, and, presumably he was in charge of stores or some such thing. It’s a, I was quite surprised to see it on his wedding certificate. He subsequently went into the linen industry, and spent the rest of his life up until his death in 1976 rising up to being a director of a linen firm. And the thing about that of course was that this was during the demise of the linen industry, which had been huge in Ireland, but had gone into decline really after the war. So, keeping it going, keeping the business going, was a matter of considerable stress. [02:24] Apart from that, he was well-educated up to the age of sixteen, he was keen that I would be educated as well as possible. He had interesting political views. Although he was allegedly Protestant, he wasn’t really a churchgoer. He was not fond of royalty, for reasons I never fully understood. He didn’t like Conservatives because of what he had seen during the Depression, people sleeping in doorways and poverty. I think he was a sort of a natural socialist. For whatever reason his politics/religion or Mike Baillie Page 2 C1379/85 Track 1 lack of them ultimately led to me having very little interest in either of those fields. So that’s how he would fit into things. He was a golfer [His grandfather George Lockhart Baillie was a scratch golfer when he came to Belfast from Scotland, and he laid out several major golf courses as well as featuring in golfing history]. He in many ways later in his life wasn’t a very social person, he was very...[introverted] I think the pressure of work told on him increasingly. And, that’s pretty much a synopsis of...[father] [03:38] What did you see, in terms of the pressure of the work, of keeping this going, what did you see from a sort of child’s point of view of that? The manifestations of that were, quite a bit of alcohol consumption, and also smoking around about forty cigarettes a day for forty years. So, I think those, in retrospect you would, you would see that it was a reaction to stress, I mean these, these things weren’t, weren’t done simply out of the love of tobacco and alcohol, but it was sort of part of the job. [04:18] Thank you. And, when you say that he was extremely keen for you to be educated well, again, how, how did that come across to you, by things that he said, by things that he did, how do you know that? He was very keen when I was a small child on practising mental arithmetic, you know, sort of, you couldn’t get a bus ticket that you didn’t have to add up the numbers in your head, and, things like that. He was also very keen on spelling, and he would have been a stickler for grammar and the like. So, there was a, a tone of, of that. But also he went out of his way to make sure that when the time came I was put into a good grammar school. I don’t know quite what order you want to take things in, but, the post-war era, of course I mean I was one of these people who benefited enormously from the way the system had been set up for free education, the 11-plus as a major telling point of course, and he went out of his way to make sure I was well tutored, not by an outside tutor but by him, and also to make sure that I was, my nose was to the grindstone at primary school. Because he recognised the importance of, of Mike Baillie Page 3 C1379/85 Track 1 getting the 11-plus, and, and getting into a good school. I think, his attitude I think was that once you were onto that track, you were on your own after that, but that getting you there was the, was the key significant factor. So, as luck would have it, mental arithmetic and, and spelling were two very key issues when it came to performance in the 11-plus. And when I heard that you were wanting to interview about some of my earlier life, I went and dug out some school reports which my mother had kept from primary school, and I was, I have to say, I was shocked to discover that I was in classes variously of forty-six or fifty pupils. This was in a perfectly reasonable primary school, I mean there was nothing deprived about it, but the class sizes were frankly enormous, and between form one where I was roughly twenty-third to twenty-sixth in the class of forty-six to fifty, I managed by the fifth year, the 11-plus year, to have moved up to third in the class. At that stage the class was forty, so third out of forty. But interesting, on the report it says in brackets, ‘(first in boys)’. So obviously two girls had out-performed me. Now that, I’m not sure how much you know about it, but in, certainly in Northern Ireland, the dice was stacked against girls. It didn’t matter what they actually scored, there was a, a tendency to give better grades to boys in the 11-plus, so as to pack the grammar schools with boys rather than girls. That’s maybe slightly over-stating it, but there was a definite bias built into the system. But, irrespective of that, yes I did, I did rather well in the 11- plus. In fact, I think it’s fair to say I peaked at eleven. [laughs] And, I remember coming home from the 11-plus maths exam, which had taken place in a school I’d never been to before down in North Belfast, and, when I arrived back home, my mother said, ‘How did you do?’ And I said, ‘I answered all the questions.’ And, that meant that I not only answered them but I’d checked the answers and that they were all right. Because that was one of the things that Father had been very keen on, that simply answering a question wasn’t enough, you had to make sure that it was right by effectively doing it again. And that was, obviously, [laughs] if he left a legacy, that was one particularly good legacy that he did leave. So, yes, my performance in the 11-plus was probably as near as optimum, near to optimum as you could reasonably get. And the result of that was that, I had been put [forward] for about three different grammar schools in Belfast, and in those days you were interviewed, so I was taken along by my father to be interviewed by Belfast Royal Academy, which is probably one of the, it’s one of the top three grammar schools.

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