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John Hedley Brooke Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1672/8

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John Hedley Brooke Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1672/8 NATIONAL LIFE STORIES ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ John Hedley Brooke Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1672/8 This transcript is copyright of the British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] IMPORTANT Access to this interview and transcript is for private research only. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators ([email protected]) The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1672/08 Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews Interviewee’s surname: Hedley Brooke Title: Professor Interviewee’s John Sex: Male forename: Occupation: Historian of science Date and place of birth: 20th May 1944, and religion Retford, Nottinghamshire, UK Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: teacher teacher Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 21/5/15 (track 1-3), 26/06/2015 (track 4-5), 22/09/2015 (track 6-7), 20/10/2015 (track 8-9), 08/12/15 (track 10-11), 02/02/16 (12-14), 26/04/16 (track 15) Location of interview: Interviewees' home, Yealand Conyers near Lancaster and the British Library 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 15 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 16 hrs. 33 min. 04 sec. Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: OPEN Interviewer’s comments: John Hedley Brooke Page 1 C1672/08 Track 1 [Track 1] Could you start then by telling me when and where you were born? I was born in May 1944 in a small market town in north Nottinghamshire, and that town is called Retford and it was famous for being a wonderful railway junction where, for young trainspotters, one could catch almost every kind of locomotive that passed through. So, part of my childhood was spent trainspotting, as you might surmise from that. It’s also famous for a rather nasty gasworks explosion that took place, I guess, around about 1950/1952. And in my family there was concern because I had a grandmother who lived very close to the gasometer that blew its top, but she was okay, as it happened. I’m just giving a hint that Retford is not the most salubrious of places. [laughs] Thank you. [1:13] Can you tell me as much as you can about the life of your father, including the things you know because you witnessed them, but also the things that he told you about or you’ve discovered since. My father had a particularly interesting life, I think. He was brought up on a farm, again in north Nottinghamshire, from farming stock. And he was the first member of his family ever to go to university and he went to Nottingham where he studied geography. I have learnt anecdotal bits and pieces of information about his boyhood rambles in the area where he lived. I think like all young men of that period he was very adventurous, always out playing the outdoor life as much as he could. After graduating from Nottingham, he had it in mind to become a schoolteacher and was possibly put under a little bit of pressure at a certain point by his former teachers where he had gone to school to consider that. What actually happened was that he went to King’s College, London for his year of special training. I don’t recall how much teaching he actually did before the war came along and I do remember stories he told of his experience in the war. He was in the RAF, one of his special interests was photography, which remained with him throughout his life, and so his task was to fly and record what was on the ground insofar as one could. He was in Aden for a significant part of the war where he developed an allergy to bananas, because bananas were about the only thing there was to eat and I think he simply ate too many of them. So this was always a bit of a John Hedley Brooke Page 2 C1672/08 Track 1 joke in the family. But the consequence of his serving during the war was that for the first two to three years of my life, I scarcely saw him. And of course he was separated from my mum as a consequence of that. So when he came home finally, and this would have been, I guess, 19… late ’45, ’46, apparently I behaved very strangely towards this peculiar person who suddenly weighed in on the home scene. [04:53] After that, his teaching post, throughout his life, was at the local grammar school, at Retford Grammar School, and that was the secondary school that I attended. That actually created a few interesting problems, as you might imagine, having your father as a teacher in the school meant I think one was particularly vulnerable to bullying and being teased and all kinds of sly remarks of one kind or another. It was particularly difficult for him, because I could cope pretty well with most of the academic things thrown at me, and I wasn’t bad at games, but physical education in the technical old sense of PT where you jumped over horses and climbed the bars and swung on ropes and generally had to behave like Tarzan, I was no good at that at all, and so he had the pitiful experience of seeing me make a fool of myself in those gymnastic classes, which he took, along with the teaching of geography, those were his two specialities. [06:17] One other thing I should say about him is that he had the love of travel. Because both he and my mother, when she resumed a career, because they were both schoolteachers, they had long-ish summer vacations and because they were pretty impoverished, certainly by today’s standards, enjoying an expensive holiday was never an option. So they decided to invest in a caravan and throughout my teenage years, I and my younger brother would travel with them and travelling with them over the summer meant travelling all over Europe. In fact on one remarkable occasion my father drove all the way from north Nottinghamshire to Zagreb in Yugoslavia, having gone through France, Switzerland, bits of Germany, into Italy. It was an incredible journey and exceedingly foolhardy, I think. We had no ends of problems; hoses in the car kept bursting, tyres got punctured, and my father almost despaired in the end of our ever reaching our destination. But there was an objective and a reason for the trip which was that in my first year, or perhaps it was my second year, as an undergraduate in Cambridge, I met a very nice man who was a Calvinist pastor in the Reformed Church in Croatia, very close to the Hungarian border, and he was very anxious that I and indeed my brother should spend time with him out in this tiny little village called Tordinci, which was populated largely by pigs and geese, although there were a few people as well. You could only get to this John Hedley Brooke Page 3 C1672/08 Track 1 village on the back of a motorbike, there was no paved road leading to it. So it was a very colourful experience visiting there. But that particular journey sticks in my memory as one that my father was prepared to drive. And even having left the caravan in Zagreb, it was another hundred miles to get to the place where this fellow lived. [09:04] There’s an aspect of that actually which takes us away a little from your question, but perhaps it’s of interest. In one of the letters I had from Andrew, my friend who lived out there, prior to my going, he happened to say that they had just been spraying the trees locally in order to get rid of some rather malicious insects, and I had just been reading Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, which had made a great impression on me, so in my reply to his letter I said something like: I was very sorry to hear that there’d been this spraying of DDT in the woods, I rather fear you may notice a reduction in the birdsong in the coming months. Well, that is in fact what happened, but the consequence was, I arrived in his village with a glowing scientific reputation, having made this prediction as if I was the most knowledgeable scientist on the globe, which he turned to his advantage because he wanted me to give a little sermon in his village church to his congregation, and of course if I could be introduced as this world famous [laughing] scientist, then no doubt it gave my sermon a little more credibility too. I’m sorry, that’s a real digression, but it always comes back to me when I think of that story.
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