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Dame Stephanie Shirley Interviewed By IN PARTNERSHIP WITH NATIONAL LIFE STORIES AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE Dame Stephanie Shirley Interviewed by Dr Thomas Lean C1379/28 © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk 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 Board http://sounds.bl.uk The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1379/28 Collection title: An Oral History of British Science Interviewee’s Shirley Title: Dame surname: (formerly Buchthal) Interviewee’s Stephanie “Steve” Sex: Female forename: (formerly Vera) Occupation: Software house founder, Date and place of birth: 16th September 1933 computer programmer, Dortmund, Germany. scientific civil servant, entrepreneur, philanthropist. Mother’s occupation: Tailor's assistant, Father’s occupation: Judge teacher. Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): August 9 2010 (Tracks 1, 2, 3), August 11 2010 (Tracks 4, 5, 6), August 13 2010 (Tracks 7, 8, 9), August 16 2010 (Tracks 10, 11, 12), August 24 2010 (Tracks 13, 14, 15). Location of interview: Interviewee's home, Henley-on-Thames Name of interviewer: Thomas Lean Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661 on secure digital Recording format : WAV 24 bit 48 kHz Total no. of tracks 15 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 14:43:04 (HH:MM:SS) Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: One section in part 4 [recorded as track 5], between timecodes 25:38 and 27:30, is closed for thirty years until January 2042, otherwise no restrictions. © assigned to The British Library. © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley Page 1 C1379/28 Part 1 (recorded as Track 2) [Part 1] This is an interview with Dame Stephanie Shirley, 9th of August 2010. Dame Stephanie, I was wondering if you could start by telling me when you were born, and where. Well I was born with a different name. My name was Vera Buchthal, b-u-c-h-t-h-a-l, and I spell it because, throughout my early life nobody could pronounce this properly, and it was, it was Bootle or Butchthal, all sorts of things. But actually it’s Buchthal [Germanic ch and t] meaning valley of beaches, and I used to delude myself that it was valley of books. I was born in Dortmund, north Germany, on the 16 th of September 1933, and, that makes me a Virgo, and although I don’t believe in a bit of this at all, I am a perfectionist and I realise that that’s one of the characteristics that goes with this stupid characterisation. [01:06] My father was a very young judge, and I’ve seen his courtroom, and, he was only in his early thirties, and, people said, ‘Well he can’t have been a judge at that age,’ but apparently in Germany you can take, qualify as a judge by examination as well as experience, and this is what he had done. And, so I was told he was one of, if not the youngest judges in Germany. He was Jewish. My mother, who had been I think a tailor’s assistant before she had married, but had not worked since marriage, she was not Jewish, and that comes into the story, because, she told me things about occasionally wearing a swastika, and why she did, and all things like that. Shortly after my birth my father was fired by edict of the so-called Third Reich, and, he was not alone in that. Two things of, I suppose, interest. The State, or the city of Dortmund, had a, an event some few years ago where the Justice Department had tried to make restitution, or to record in a proper manner, the injustices that they themselves carried out during that period. And, when that happened, they invited whoever they could there, and, most people of course had either been killed or had died off. There was two members of the family, one of whom that they located, who turned up, and, I was one of them. They had found me from this unusual, rather unusual name, and they knew things about my father’s history that I didn’t know, so, there we are. And certainly I turned up there absolutely waving the Union Jack, © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley Page 2 C1379/28 Part 1 (recorded as Track 2) because, what happened to Jewish families was really rather awful, and although we were terribly terribly lucky, it has formed my own life and culture. When I say Jewish, there hasn’t been anybody religious in the family for two or three generations back as far as I know. My grandmother, paternal grandmother, had been, again one of, or the, first women mayors in London... in Germany, so sorry. And, so that there was this sort of aura of feminism, because, you know, we were very forceful and had learnt to stick up for ourselves. [pause] Again they tried to do some history of her, because they were doing a history of Dortmund, and, and they contacted me for photographs of her as a young person, which I had got, and as an old person. [04:18] So... But you know, there’s a sort of rich background there. And, I never really got to know my father very well, because, that’s the sort of thing that happened in life then. I can tell you a bit about him. [pause] What I did notice, with interest, was that when this retrospective was going on, I contacted my half-sister in Australia, and she had a copy of the notice that had been given to our father in 1933, and this was, probably this century already. So, in all the things that had happened to him, which were also considerable, he had still to carry this notice period, notice letter round, and it was literally two or three lines, quoting some edict that had come out, and, ‘You are hereby fired,’ full stop. And, it told me a lot about him, and, again it characterised I think some of the Germanic efficiency. It was all done properly, no, there were no notice periods, but you know, there were proper letters, and, great big stamp on them and so on. Very, very important. And, there’s a bit of me that I think is still Germanic. I do value efficiency, and have learnt to be more focused on effectiveness. But you know, I do like things right, and, at the Coronation of Her Majesty the Queen, I was stirred for the first time by marching troops. My goodness me. Excuse me, I can hear something going on. [pause] No. OK. How, how strange, you know, the music of marching and sort of by the militaristic music, and jubilant and, and rhythmic and so on. I think it’s interesting that my father was a judge, because I am told that there’s a correlation between the law and music and mathematics. And certainly mathematics was something that I loved and focused on for many years. [06:55] So what happened to me in the Thirties, well as a child, a lot of it is what I’ve been told, and, I was told that we lived in seven countries of Europe, and only one or two of them can I remember, even having been told the names. We’d finished up in Vienna, © The British Library Board http://sounds.bl.uk Stephanie ‘Steve’ Shirley Page 3 C1379/28 Part 1 (recorded as Track 2) and basically we were moving round trying to find a safe place. And, it was the Dortmund people who told me that my father had worked in a coffee house in Vienna in 1939, which I didn’t know, and I thought, how strange, because his parents used to run a coffee importers, and you sort of think, well yes, maybe he did actually know something about coffee. It can’t just be chance, of all the sort of mechanical jobs that he could have done at that time, that he focused on coffee. Because he was not a practical man at all. He was very, very, self-centred... Not... Focused and self- centred, and looking back as my late son was profoundly autistic, I sort of think, did he have autistic qualities? He had enormously high intellect, he spoke seven languages, he played the violin well, I mean not concert level but, he played it in little groups and things. And... [pause] I’ve lost the thread. What was I talking about? [08:39] You were talking about your father. Talking about looking at autism. Yes. Yes. My mother told stories, two stories that I remember. Firstly that when she was boiling some milk and the doorbell went and she said to my father, ‘Watch the milk, I’m going to the door.’ And he actually watched the milk rise in the saucepan and boil over, and he... [laughs] Extraordinary.
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