NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’

John Hedley Brooke

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/8

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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. [10:42] My father, returning to the centrality of your question, my father was a very able sportsman. He was particularly good at cricket, he was a big hitter as a batsman, but he was a very wily spin bowler. And I used to watch him frequently as a lad when he was playing for a team called the Old Retfordians, and many were the occasions when he would bowl a rather gentle off-break which batsmen would hit to the boundary for four and then he would disguise the following ball and it would be a leg-break and spin the other way and the batsman would, with great humiliation, leave the crease. So cricket was very much part of my childhood as a consequence of that interest of my father and I suppose I would have to say that’s the one game at which I had a modicum of talent. I played for my college side in Cambridge. Though it didn’t fit too well with chemistry because lab commitments tended to intrude on the time one needed for cricket in the summer term. [12:04] What else about my father? His attitude on life, I think, had been heavily influenced by his experience in the war. He had virtually no time for religion in a conventional sense. Insofar as he had any kind of creed, apart from being morally exceedingly upright, he would be John Hedley Brooke Page 4 C1672/08 Track 1 described, I think, as a deist, almost a kind of latter day Voltaire. He was critical of established churches, he was anti-clerical in many of his attitudes, but I think he was prepared to go along with those who consider that the universe is not self-explanatory and therefore there must be some kind of power behind it, even though we may not ever have any kind of clue as to what that power may be. So it’s certainly not the case that I inherited from my father a clear set of conventional religious beliefs. His whole demeanour on that topic was that of a dissenter, rather than a subscriber. [13:39] Once I and my brother had gone to Cambridge and assumed our respective roles in life, I didn’t see either him or my mother as regularly as I would have liked, in fact. There was a particular reason for that, they retired, leaving north Nottinghamshire and went to live on the south coast of England where they could be near their grandchildren, born of my younger brother and his wife and because we were living in the north of England, as we still are [until March 2016], it meant that journeys backwards and forwards would always be rather few and far between. However, we always had a point of meeting them for vacations together and that’s where the travel bug came back into play. [14:35] One thing that gratified me particularly was that late in the life of my parents we took them for their first time ever across the pond to the United States and to the National Parks of the Pacific North West. Because my father was a geographer he’d often taught American geography but without the thrill of actually setting foot over there. And we hired a car in Seattle and we drove up to Vancouver, we went along the Icefields Parkway from Jasper down to Banff, then into the Glacier National Park, and eventually into Yellowstone. And you can imagine, for a geographer interested in wildlife, that was just a fabulous trip and I shall always remember that and be very grateful that we had the opportunity to do that with them. [15:42] My father earnt a little pocket money from his photography during his years as a schoolmaster and during my childhood, but it did mean my mother frequently described herself as a photographic widow, in the sense that every Saturday night he’d be in the darkroom printing out the stuff from the wedding photographs he’d taken that afternoon. So that was one of his interests that he kept. [16:14] Should I say something perhaps about my mother? John Hedley Brooke Page 5 C1672/08 Track 1

We’ll come to your mother. I wondered whether you could now tell me to what extent you knew your paternal grandparents, who were the farmers?

I did know my paternal grandparents quite well as a child. In fact, until the time I went to university. My grandfather lived to the age of ninety or ninety-one and that meant that both he and my grandma were alive and available to be seen, but the significant point is that they actually retired to a little bungalow that was very close to where we also lived, and so there was a well-established pattern that after school in the evening I or my brother or both of us would call in to see them. And we would have a game of cards or we would watch the test match on the television, we would meet their friends and other members of their extended and rather extensive family. So I did get to know them and that was an additional source of security and affection in my childhood. I was very grateful for that. I learnt to play various games, for which I could have become addicted to gambling, except that we played with beans as tokens rather than money. And they were alert and interested in what was going on in the world, they would often bring us up to date on what had happened in the day or what the news of the day was. I particularly remember their addiction to The Archers, which I didn’t share and never have, but they sedulously listened to The Archers every evening and so occasionally we had to listen to what had been happening in the world of Ambridge since we were last there. They were a nice old couple. What was interesting was that there were fifteen years between them. My grandmother actually died almost the same time as my grandfather but she was only seventy-five when she died. That difference in age did actually impinge on their life to a certain extent because she would have wished to have gone out and about a bit more. He was happy to sit with his pipe and his newspaper and the cricket on the television for much of his retirement. But he enjoyed playing bowls and one would see him cycling up to the bowling green in Retford, when he must have been in his mid eighties, on this huge sit-up-and-beg bike. He was a very distinctive figure, a very small man on this enormous bike, and I remember waving to him many a time when I was walking home and he was heading off in the other direction.

[19:49] Were you able at any stage to get a sense of your grandparents’ religious position as a way of understanding what your father was perhaps deviating from or following in his own views? John Hedley Brooke Page 6 C1672/08 Track 1

I must say that is an extremely interesting question, but actually a very difficult one for me. I don’t have a sense that there was a religious commitment on their part of a kind that it would be easy to describe in any other way than they would have attended church, the local church in Elkesley, when they were younger. But I think more out of the social convention of the time rather than that they would claim to have had any particular religious experience or in any way deviate from a sort of Anglican orthodoxy, such as it was at the time. I don’t feel, from what I know, that my father deviated from what he saw in them as a strong but unpalatable form of religious observance. I think he was a very rational man whose rationality could quite easily graduate into rationalism if there were stimuli to do so, and as I say, my feeling from what he used to say was that it was observing, observing human beings in a war situation that made him question any sense of human transcendence over a natural world in which men could be violent and in which I suppose ultimately our animal natures were most transparent. That does remind me, actually, that he was very down to earth as a result of growing up on a farm and many characteristics that religious thinkers have sometimes ascribed as unique to human beings, compared with the animals, he would have known and registered as a very keen observer of the livestock on the farm what kind of resemblances there are between humans and the rest of the animal creation. And he had quite radical views on sexuality, not that, to my knowledge, he ever deviated from monogamy and a perfect loyalty to my wife [sic], I never had any indication that it was otherwise. But he could be remarkably tolerant towards a younger generation who were, I suppose, after the sixties rather more experimental in their sexuality. And even, I remember saying on one occasion when my mum, who was much more conservative, was complaining about the behaviour of youngsters, he more or less said well, you know, if they have the urge why shouldn’t they, that kind of attitude. So he was a strange mixture in the sense that he did stand to an ethical code very strenuously. There were things that he could be quite puritanical about. I remember, for example, on one occasion I had gone carol singing with a sixth form party from school, as we did most Christmasses. And we had gone into a pub to sing and hopefully to raise a bit of money for whichever charity it was, and we had succeeded. And I went home and my parents asked me, you know, where had we been, what had we been doing, and in all innocence I just said, well actually, we went into the pub. And my father threw a fit. The idea that sixth formers from the local grammar school should go into a pub, a den of iniquity, even though the motivation was clearly good, I was astonished by how strenuously he reacted to that. And he actually harmed me slightly, because he John Hedley Brooke Page 7 C1672/08 Track 1 complained to the father of the head boy of the school, and that head boy was also a member of the school of course and the father was a member of the teaching staff, it was a very similar situation to my own. And so the head boy’s father, the French teacher, had actually learnt of our visiting the pub and just mentioned it to his son, so word got back to the school that ‘Beaky Brooke’, because that was my, that was my kind of pen name or whatever one says, I had kind of told on the rest of them. Now, if I say I did so in all innocence, because in my mind no sin had been committed, but it was an interesting example of how my father did inherit certain Edwardian values from his parents, I think.

Did he himself drink?

Virtually not at all. I think the one day of the year when there would be alcohol, I won’t say in the house, because there was drink to offer visitors, the one day of the year we would drink en famille was Christmas lunch when we would have cider. And that was quite a regular pattern, but it would be quite wrong to imply that he was a drinker in any sense of a regular imbiber of alcohol.

Thank you. [27:04] Could you, you’ve given us a very clear impression of your father, could you do the same for your mother, tell me as much as you can about her life?

My mother was born into a humble family. She was one of three children and she was the youngest and she was I think her mother, my maternal grandmother, was already in her forties when my mother was born. She had an elder sister and an elder brother. After going through the schools of her childhood, she graduated into teaching at a local primary school and this would have been before the war in a school in a little town called Worksop, which is eight or nine miles to the west of Retford. And she regularly went backwards and forwards to that school. She met my father on several occasions during her adolescence and his adolescence and it’s a rather touching story in a way because they each say that they noticed each other, even from the very first time that they met, but their encounters were spread very thinly. And so sometimes there would be three years or more between a particular sighting and the next meeting. But Retford was a little town where there were regular dances on a Saturday night, my father would come in occasionally from the village where he was living John Hedley Brooke Page 8 C1672/08 Track 1 with his parents. She loved to attend the dances with her female friends. And so there were occasions when they met and danced purely socially. But it was one of those relationships, I think, where my mother had caught my father’s eye but it probably took a little longer for her to detach herself from several other male admirers, who would realise she was a particularly beautiful woman, as a matter of fact. Even in her forties she was raising eyebrows. I can remember when I was in hospital as a teenager and she came to visit me one evening and in an adjacent bed there was another rather virile young man in his late teenage years and after she left he said, ‘Who on earth was that?’ So she had certainly no shortage of male admirers and I think she went through life carrying that particular, I won’t say burden, but that particular feature of her adolescence with her. Her father, just to go back a little further in the story, her father was simply, for the most part of his life, a shop assistant in a local outfitters in Retford and how he had met my grandmother I’m not entirely clear. She always used to say that at a critical point in her life she had had a choice of a particular man of course who meant nothing to me, because I’d never known him, and Fred from Loseby’s, and Fred was my maternal grandfather. She’d elected to marry Fred, and as far as I could tell they were very, very happy. He died, I won’t say young, but he was probably in his early seventies, having had some cardiac problems over several years, as his son, my Uncle Harold, had also at about the same age. My mother, after marriage, continued teaching, particularly for the period when my father was backwards and forwards because of the war. I was born, I think about three years after the marriage. I would actually need to check that. Perhaps it was a little earlier, or perhaps the marriage was earlier and because I was born in 1944 I may have got the chronology a little bit mixed here. What I do know was that she often said how difficult times had been without him to support. She carried me, her first pregnancy, during a period when he was not available to give her any solace. And apparently when I first began to knock on the door to come into the world, her father wouldn’t really believe that she had reached that critical stage and wasn’t the least bit helpful in trying to get her to a midwife and some medical assistance. Her father, I think, was very correct, to the point of being rather prim. So, for example, when my father and mother wished to spend time together, particularly if it involved being away from home together before their marriage, he would always insist on having a chaperone to be with them. And I think that was something my father reacted against. He reacted against a kind of old school prissiness about what was correct and what was socially incorrect. The way this manifested itself in my family life would have been in tensions between my two parents when issues arose like should my brother and I go to the cinema on a Sunday, and my father would be all for it and my mother John Hedley Brooke Page 9 C1672/08 Track 1 would be against, because she was still nurturing sabbatical ideas that she inherited from her father, to whom she was very devoted as a kind of authority figure in her life. So there were a few tensions of that kind arising from their respective backgrounds.

[35:04] Did your mother go to church?

Not regularly. I think it was a not unusual pattern at the time that bringing up two young children and holding down a job during the week meant that Sundays, for example, were very precious days to devote to the family and domestic matters. There were obviously occasions when she did go to church, and not least because at the infant school that she taught at during most of the time I spent at home, she was responsible for music in the school. She was a fair to good pianist. In fact we often used to have our music lessons together with a music, piano teacher in the town. So, for example, it was a Church of England school where she taught and this meant that there would be services in the local parish church and she would play the piano for the children to sing their carols or whatever it might be. So it would be wrong to say that church didn’t feature at all in her life, but I think it was perhaps more through music than through a particular profession of religious commitment or experience.

Do you remember her talking about religion or reading the Bible or doing certain things at home?

I don’t, in truth, remember her ever talking in quite those terms. References to the Bible, I think certainly not. References to what she perceived to be a correct moral code, certainly. And I think she was very much influenced by that sort of late Edwardian attitude, carry over from Victorian prudery or whatever. I think, for example, she would have had very conservative and conventional views on sex before marriage, which she would have considered off limits. She did often talk about how when she was with my father before they got married, how wonderful it would have been had they been able to share a bed together, but it was perfectly clear that her morality precluded that. So I don’t get a very clear sense of what precisely she could have derived from religion at home, other than that sense of utter rectitude about how one should conduct one’s life. And she would no doubt have assumed that that moral rectitude did have some kind of transcendental authentication, it’s just that at John Hedley Brooke Page 10 C1672/08 Track 1 that level, the more metaphysical level, I think it didn’t have a direct bearing upon her. That’s probably as much as I could say about that.

[39:32] Thank you. The home that you lived in, was this the same throughout your childhood or did you move about? I’m going to ask for a description of your childhood home, but perhaps we ought to establish first whether there were several or just one.

The answer is, there were two. The first was a very large terraced house, close to the school, almost adjacent to the school where my father taught and which I would eventually attend. Though not at all immediately, of course. It was a house on three floors. I remember it being rather cold, full of linoleum on the floor, that rather characteristic lino smell. I remember having a bedroom to myself. Sadly one of my most vivid memories of that house was being physically sick one night and unable to sleep as a consequence, and I only learnt afterwards that it was the night my younger brother was born, on the coldest night of the winter, in 1947. So I can remember the bedroom I had and the curtains. I also remember the kindness with which my parents on one, presumably my first fully conscious fifth of November, told me that I was not to be afraid that night if I heard lots of shooting and bangs and whizzers and all the paraphernalia of fireworks outside. They were usually very, very careful about matters of that kind. What I do remember about that house was the garden, because it was adjacent to a canal, not dangerously so, there was a very significant barrier between the canal and ourselves, but it had the wonderful consequence that frog and toad spawn would appear in the garden every year. And one of the great games of my childhood, and we still have family photographs to show this, was the period of several days during a vacation when my brother and I simply went round the garden picking up every baby frog or toad we could find and throwing them into a bucket. And so we collected this amazing mass of wildlife in these huge buckets and it was great sport doing that. I can’t remember very much more about the garden, and neighbours with a dog. Lots of flowers, I think we had lots of lupins in the garden. But it was certainly extensive and when we moved to the second house of my childhood I must by then have been, what, about eight or nine years old, we had a much smaller garden, though it was in a little cul-de-sac called Rose Avenue, and that had a small attractive garden, just big enough for my brother and myself to play football on the lawn if we did it carefully and discreetly. And that’s the home that was very close to my grandparents, to whom I referred earlier. And one common bond between my father and his John Hedley Brooke Page 11 C1672/08 Track 1 father comes back to me because of that name, Rose Avenue. My grandfather loved gardening and was an expert at budding and grafting roses and his annual gift to my father would be another rose for the garden. And to my utter shame there was one occasion when a prize graft that my grandfather had done somehow got smashed in a ballgame on the garden and we were never reproached, my brother and I, for the fact that that had happened. In fact I only learnt about it months, if not years later and had a pang of remorse, have had ever since. It’s one of those things, you know, you do feel very sad about when unwittingly you did something which brought grief to somebody else and somebody you loved very much. It may seem very trivial but the principle I think is there, however the details might vary. So that second house was an attractive detached house, which gave us a little bit more scope for boyhood extravaganzas and what is coming to my mind there is the way, again it goes quite deep back into my childhood, how one Christmas my brother and I were astonished because in the spare room over the garage, which was simply vacant, it was a genuinely large spare room, my father in his spare time over many evenings had assembled an electric trainset and on Christmas morning I can remember the game that he played with us saying he was sure that Father Christmas would have brought some present in addition to what we had already got, which I’m sure were ample presents, and we went all over the house looking for this extra present, where had Santa hidden it. And it had been hidden by my father in the spare room, which was the last of the rooms we opened up, and there was this amazing electric trainset. So I think I would have to say I had a very comfortable, loving and supportive childhood. There were always little things like that. And always a very strong encouragement to take study and learning seriously and I think during my teenage years I remember most clearly gentle persuasion to think in terms that university should be the next move after school. Nothing belligerent about it, but just that assumption. And I never really called it into question, and I don’t think my younger brother did either.

[47:12] When you think of that first house, the tall terraced house, and you perhaps go on a sort of tour of it in your mind, where do you see your mother and father sort of being in that space? Where is your father and what’s he doing and where is your mother and what’s she doing?

Well, I have to say, I think I see them both more in the kitchen than anywhere else from that period. I should perhaps say my father was very, very good, exemplary by the high standards of today, in doing his share of all domestic chores: cooking, ironing, doing the shopping, you John Hedley Brooke Page 12 C1672/08 Track 1 name it, it was something that he shared. One thing I do remember from that house, since we’re talking about spaces now, it had an outside toilet, as many houses did in that period of course, and in the middle of winter that could be a bit of an ordeal, you know, you didn’t particularly relish having to go and spend time out of doors, which is what it seemed like. And certainly when we moved to our second, the second home, we were past that kind of indignity, as it seemed to me as I reflected on it. Not much else I can remember about that house. What I do remember was the journey I took from that house to my infant school, and as I reflect on that, that now seems strange compared with what I think would happen today. The journey from that home to my school was about, well, a good ten minute walk, it might have even been a little bit longer, and the whole journey was by the side of what we called a feeder, a little stream that fed into the river that flowed through Retford. And so every day, and this would be when I was five, six years old, I would walk myself to school and back along this route which involved walking very close to that stream. I don’t ever remember being concerned about that, what I do remember being concerned about was the fact that a little gang of other boys from a higher class in the school would often bully me on the way to school. I don’t think they singled me out specially from anybody else, they just were of that nature. But I was certainly made to feel uncomfortable as a consequence of their behaviour. And I think it did actually once get so bad that my father came with me and gave them a good ticking off. So I don’t know what had happened there. Presumably I had reported back at home that I was uneasy when these guys came along, and my father took that action. And I don’t remember having any further trouble, so I guess they were just trying it on for a while.

What did it involve, when you say that they bullied you on the way to school, what did they do particularly?

I think it was probably mainly verbal, but they would occasionally form a rather menacing ring around one, to the extent that one didn’t know quite what they might be up to. So it did, was probably a threat by implication more than any particularly pernicious deed. It was just rather unpleasant. I can’t think why there would have been any particular reason why they should do it, other than the fact that I was walking by myself and therefore was presumably a sitting target if they were up to that kind of mischief. [52:04] So I do just remember one of my teachers in that infant school, partly because she was well known to my mother, and because years later that was the school my mother went back to John Hedley Brooke Page 13 C1672/08 Track 1 teach at, and that was where she was responsible for music. And I’ve got one or two records where she was playing the piano for little choral concerts in the local church. And that was all stemming from that particular school.

[52:46] Thank you. Do you have memories of time spent with your mother as a younger child? She presumably was eventually at some stage teaching again, whether part-time or fulltime, but in evenings and weekends, things done just with her?

I’m delving back as far as I can. There certainly were such times. Interestingly though, bedtime reading was often done by my father rather than by her. I think he was very careful of her health and probably felt that he should do quite a lot of the things that she might have done and that he wanted to give her a little bit of relaxation. So I do remember being read to by my father, not so much by my mother. Though if we’re talking about very early years I can just remember being with her, of course, much of the time when I was extremely young, thinking about when I would have been three or four years old. [coughs] And I can remember we would look at books together, play games of a childish kind. It’s more in later years that I remember the shared the bond of music, particularly through the piano, that brought us into the situation where we would spend more time together. And that was very close and it lasted a number of years, partly because she took one or two musical examinations, at more or less the time that I was taking O level music at school, so we are jumping forward here to when I’d have been fourteen or fifteen. And I remember that in the exams she had to take, which were essentially dexterity at the piano, and musicality of course, but there were the aural tests recognising what the chord of a perfect fifth sounded like, or a perfect fourth, diminished seventh, all that kind of thing. And I used to test her to bring her aural skills up to the appropriate standard, because her piano teacher didn’t do any of that and I think she felt rather vulnerable on that. Anyway, she passed on her aural, so I always felt I’d done a pretty good job on that. There was always a particular trick of recognising the interval of a major sixth because it sounds as if a Brahms waltz is about to start, and it’s a very distinctive kind of interval. So it was in that context, I think, that we became closer than we had been earlier. But I never sensed any coldness or aloofness from her and there were one or two very, very touching things, the significance of which I only appreciated much, much later. I can remember one when I’d fallen over. This was in our second house and I’d tripped up over the pavement and got a bit of gravel in my knee and John Hedley Brooke Page 14 C1672/08 Track 1 there was blood everywhere and she was mopping me up in the kitchen, perched up on the kitchen sink, and she said something to me which struck me as rather strange at the time, so strange that of course I remembered it. And I think I know what it signified. She looked at me and she said, ‘Remind me of this one day’. And I interpret that to mean that she felt a very special maternal bond in sorting me out and getting me on the road again, as it were, and she felt for her that was a magic moment that she didn’t wish to forget, and so she asked me to remind her of it. Which I did actually, years, years later, and I think she’d completely forgotten about it. [laughs] I don’t know that it achieved anything. But, you know, that’s the sort of rather touching childhood memory that does spring back from time to time.

[58:20] And your father did the bedtime reading. What else would you do with your father alone, with him alone?

Oh, I think a bit of work in the garden, perhaps a little bit of work cleaning the car. Spending a bit of time in the darkroom, because one was interested in the photography. Although I have to say, the smell of the chemicals that photographers used in those days was pretty repulsive, so one felt a bit claustrophobic, and a bit dark, I mean it wasn’t a pleasant environment really. And yet, one enjoyed that precisely because one was with one’s father. So that’s a rather nice example, I think, of where the sense of being bound to him had had real meaning. We would spend time in a sporting context, he would play cricket with my brother and myself. And then later in life there was one occasion when both my brother and I were playing for the same team against a team in which my father was playing, so all three of us were involved in the same game, and I can’t remember now whether this was a jest or whether it was a reality, but there appeared to have been the possibility that the scorecard might have read: Brooke, caught Brooke, bowled Brooke, in one and the same innings. So that was certainly a context where he took an interest in what my brother and I were interested in. And as I say, anything to do with the outside world would tend to fall into that category. And I’ve not said hitherto something that also played into that, which was that my mother’s sister, older than herself, married a farmer, and every summer we as a family would go to the farm to look after it while my aunt and uncle took their annual holiday down in Littlehampton. It was as regular as that because my uncle had an aunt who had a guesthouse in Littlehampton. It enabled him to spend a bit of time on the south coast, and also to indulge a little flutter at Goodwood. So this was a regular annual event and we might be there on the John Hedley Brooke Page 15 C1672/08 Track 1 farm for a week, or sometimes I think it was even two weeks. And that gave all of us as the family to spend time together in a different environment, but nevertheless a particularly stimulating one. I mean the wonderful games my brother and I were able to play on the farm with all the local lads and lasses we got to know every year when we were in the village. We were amazingly resourceful at inventing games; playing cricket in the fields where we suddenly had to beat a retreat because the horses started galloping towards us. And that interaction with the natural world, through the context of a farm, is indelibly stamped on my mind. I was driving my uncle’s tractor by the age of eleven, not on major roads of course, although as a matter of fact, I do remember he allowed me to sit on his knee and steer the tractor when he operated the clutch and the gear and the brakes. So he was kind of developing my driving skills when I was really very young. And at fourteen I was helping them on the farm occasionally when it was harvesting time.

What particular things did you do workwise on the farm as a child?

Well, nothing very strenuous of course, but one thing that comes back to mind is the excitement every evening of the egg collecting, because my aunt had a thriving gaggle of hens and I learnt that there were certain kinds of hens you had to call broody when they didn’t let you reach out for the eggs underneath them. And so that could be a rather painful experience as they pecked you. So collecting eggs, that was an interesting exercise. I remember accompanying my uncle when he was dealing with sheep and foot rot. That was an aspect of the real world I had never encountered before. He bred cattle, Aberdeen Angus cattle, and so that was quite an experience, learning what the routine of the day was. I learnt how to milk a cow before the electronic machines came into play, and that again is a very tangible memory now, because I remember the roughness of the teats that you had to sort of gently stroke in order to tease out the milk. So the sound of the milk in the bucket is a vivid sonar memory from childhood. [Later I even] played cricket for the local team. The village where he had this farm is actually important historically because it was one of the few surviving examples in England of the medieval open field system. So there was this huge expanse of land on the periphery of the village where many of the different farmers in the village had their own strips, but it was all just completely open and that made it interesting. I remember there was an orchard in the grounds of the farmhouse, so collecting fruit was another pastime. It doesn’t sound much like work and it wasn’t really. The serious work both my brother and I did eventually do on the farm when we got a bit older was that we John Hedley Brooke Page 16 C1672/08 Track 1 would help with the spud picking, as we called it. And that was back breaking work and wasn’t a joke. But that was an education in other respects because my uncle used to import from the neighbouring mining town of Ollerton a group of women every day who did this picking of the potatoes, I imagine for a relatively small wage. But it meant I was immersed in the middle of these women picking my potatoes and listening to their conversation was an education, because I was brought face to face with a vulgarity of a kind that I’d never experienced at home. So I suppose one should be grateful to have had that experience, it didn’t seem particularly edifying at the time.

In what sense vulgar was it?

Oh, a lot of sexual innuendo, dirty jokes of one kind or another. Seeing phallic shapes in the very potatoes they were picking, that kind of thing. I mean pretty mundane sort of stuff, I suppose one would have to say.

[1:07:21] Now we know one of the things that you played with indoors, the trainset, but on the occasions when you were playing indoors, what else did you play with, what toys or games?

At my grandparents’ house one evening, we had a visit, my father was there, my mother too, we had a visit from his brother, his elder brother, George, who by then was working in the agricultural civil service in Carlisle, having spent the earlier part of his career, again, in Retford. And for some reason they started to play a game of chess. And neither of them could remember too clearly how the game was played, but I think they had the rudiments. And I watched this and I was absolutely transfixed, and I decided I would rather like to learn how to play. And so my father bought me a chess set and taught me the rudiments of the game, which actually has brought a huge amount of pleasure in my life, and I have said in a short autobiographical essay I wrote recently, I think contributed to my development of certain analytical skills, which have held me in good stay during my academic career. So both at school and at university I played chess quite extensively. At school in the lunch hour with some of my classmates, I played for the school team, I was lucky enough to be on the top board for the school for two or three years. I even played for a local chess team in the Sheffield league, which is where I really developed rather stronger skills than I might. And even, seems rather remarkable in retrospect, I became North Nottinghamshire Chess John Hedley Brooke Page 17 C1672/08 Track 1

Champion one year. So this was quite serious stuff. And I used to spend my Friday evenings at home, regularly, after the school week, Friday evening I would devote to chess theory. And I remember those Friday evenings, listening to classical music on the radio, my parents often in the room relaxing too and I would be playing through the games of the grand masters, learning how to develop the Scotch Gambit, or whichever opening was taking my fancy at the time. I particularly remember that those Friday nights seem to be characterised not merely by classical concerts on the radio, but very often the same piece. Week after week, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto seemed to be what was on offer from the Beeb, a lovely piece, of course, and one that I have always enjoyed and admired, because there are few others in which the piano sings quite as it does, particularly in the last movement of that concerto. So yes, growing out of being with my father and initially with his brother as well, chess has been a very significant part of my life. I still play a little. I played in Cambridge for my college, but then, I have to confess, one evening we were drawn against Girton College, the ladies’ college, and there sat down opposite me the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. And yet, the protocol of the occasion was such that in the middle of a very tense chess game, the last thing you could do was speak, and at the end of the evening when we all went our various ways, I said to myself, John, this is a crazy way of spending an evening when you could have chatted up this young lady and you’re never going to see her again, probably not. I can’t even remember whether I beat her, I was so transfixed by her beauty. So after that, chess began to dwindle a little in my estimation. But I do truly believe the analytical skills you can develop thinking ahead, plotting all the different eventualities and the possible consequences of various moves, does help you to think remarkably clearly in certain contexts, and I think mathematics would be one, and I think possibly in the sciences too. I often used to respond well to the kind of chemical problem you were given, certainly I was as an undergraduate, where you had to work out what substance x was by performing various experiments on it and seeing how it behaved. And the thought processes you go through, it’s a kind of deduction by elimination. You eliminate some of the possibilities till you finally get to where you want to be and you finally know what substance x is and why you were advised not to get it on your sandwiches. That kind of process is quite similar to deduction by elimination in a chess situation, trying to remove the inferior moves from your planning and plotting till you finish up with what you think is the optimal move in that situation.

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[1:14:01] In that case, to what extent has chess helped or not with historical analysis, which would seem to be different?

I think the answer to that is not at all. I really am not conscious that the kind of skills one needs as a historian are strictly comparable. I think it is a different set of craft skills rather than analytical skills in the chess and mathematical sense. I mean I really do see chess, mathematics and music running very parallel courses in this respect. And it’s very striking how many of the great scientists and mathematicians of the past had a deep interest in music. Kepler, the astronomer, even wrote down the music that the planets were singing, writing it down on a stave, you can recognise exactly what the notes were, that he thought they were singing. It’s music to the intellect, not music to the ear, but I think it’s a lovely example of precisely this point. Isaac Newton does something very, very similar. The seven planets, the seven colours of the spectrum, they’re all in his mind woven in to the seven points of the musical scale as you go up to the octave eight, position eight from where you’ve started. There is something about those three interests and they’ve featured prominently in my life and I do trace that interest, well, to multifarious sources, but I would say if I had a genuine aptitude for them it was certainly cultivated by virtue of playing chess.

At what age are you roughly when you’re devoting your Friday evenings to chess theory? Well, if we imagine you sitting listening to that music, how old are you?

I would think at the stage I was seriously applying myself to chess theory, I would have been about sixteen.

[1:16:28] And at this age, or perhaps at any age, are you able to comment on the extent to which you feel you were like or different from your brother in terms of character?

This raises a whole series of very interesting questions, because my brother and I were quite routinely contrasted by my parents, but by my mother in particular. And I have to say in ways that I think were perfectly understandable, but not quite accurate. The reason I say that is that I was presented to the world as the academic member of the family, the studious offspring. My brother was more the outward bound kind of character who would really John Hedley Brooke Page 19 C1672/08 Track 1 throw himself into soccer or some of the more strenuous physical forms of exercise, whose interests seemed a little less cerebral, shall we say, than mine. I actually think I was very difficult for him, because I did have, fortunately, an aptitude for academic work and I think he must have always seen me as a rather difficult act to follow, and I’m not sure that my parents quite saw the problem that they might have been accentuating a little in the way that we were contrasted as a pair. I say that I felt the contrast was not entirely accurate because Mike did incredibly well in his A levels at school, particularly since he was suffering from a terrible infection at the time that he took them. He followed me to the same college in Cambridge, he got a very good upper second class degree in geography, finished up as head of sixth form in a large comprehensive school down in Dorset, which incidentally was why my parents retired to the south coast. So, Mike was, I would say, above, well above average in terms of academic attainment, but I guess for him it was never quite the all-consuming passion that it was for me. Maybe I was the less imaginative of the two and just rather obsessively stuck to my guns when it came to preparing for exams and then eventually moving on to university. But we had an awful lot in common, we learnt our navigation skills as a consequence of these foreign holidays I referred to earlier where he and I would take turns in navigating us through remote parts of France and visiting strange places with strange names. I’m trying to think what else I could say about that. We really shared a lot in common, even mischievously playing games at home that we had been told we were on no account to play. Like a kind of version of basketball from the platform of our respective beds. Of course the consequence of this was we were forever bouncing up and down on the mattresses and whenever my parents were at home they knew we were up to no good when the vibrations came through the ceiling, but when my parents were not at home this was great sport. So we had a, certainly a compatible childhood, but I do think I probably created more of a problem for him than he did for me. And for some time after we both left Cambridge, because we shared three years there, I was doing my doctorate while he was doing his three undergraduate years, and that was very nice for my parents because they would visit us both. And I think my mother used to say those Cambridge years, when we were there simultaneously, were the happiest years of her life, that she knew we were in good company, that she herself could come with my father more or less whenever they wished, but never in a kind of oppressive way, perhaps one trip a term just to come and say hello was what the routine tended to be. But every Sunday night, as a matter of routine, Mike and I would together ring home and my parents, we knew, were waiting for the call, and we very rarely John Hedley Brooke Page 20 C1672/08 Track 1 failed to meet that convention. We were not obliged to do it, but it was a nice way of just keeping in touch and preserving, I suppose, that sense of family, which was important.

[1:22:37] Before I ask you about school, could you just give me a sense of what you read at home before the point that at school you’re being asked to read particular things? So this is what you think you were reading as a younger child.

Yes, this I often think about, partly because I don’t remember too much, which I think tells me that probably until about the age of twelve I was not reading anything very significant. But, thereafter, I can remember one day asking my father what he recommended I should read. I felt I needed a bit of stimulus from my reading, and he made a brilliant suggestion, The Three Adventures of Richard Hannay, [The Four Adventures of Richard Hannay? Four is correct] that was by John Buchan. Of course The Thirty-nine Steps is on in London now as a musical, I think. But adventure stories of that kind with a little bit of guts to them. I was captivated by those. I remember in that same period reading some predictable books: Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Coral Island, all of which sort of conjured up visions of exotic places, whether it was just Scotland in The Thirty-nine Steps or thinking much further afield to exotic Caribbean islands or whatever. So my imagination was fired by books of that kind. But I did also read a lot of things that were of the sort of National Geographic character, if that makes sense. I suppose because my father was a geographer and we had those magazines in the house. But I can remember enjoying reading books on underwater, undersea exploration. Was it Jacques Cousteau [who] was the great exponent of marine biology, certainly in terms of depicting that life in ways that were very accessible and stimulating? And so there was always the question of what books you chose if you were fortunate enough to win a prize at school, and that one I’ve just mentioned, that one on submarine life I can remember specifically choosing from the particular menu that was put before us. Space exploration, certainly, that was part of my reading. Then there were those school stories. Goodness me. Who’s… Billy Bunter of Greyfriars, that’s who I’m fishing for, and I remember various books that featured him. Richmal Crompton [Frank Richards], wasn’t it, the author of those? I certainly didn’t read any books on religion and books I read on science were more this kind, shall we say, at the margins of accessible popular science rather than anything too austere. I do remember choosing as a school prize, when I was in the sixth form, a book which is actually a book on the history of science, it was called The John Hedley Brooke Page 21 C1672/08 Track 1

Drama of the Atom and was an account of all those physicists of the twentieth century who had enriched our understanding of atomic theory. [1:27:11] And an interest in the history of science, which of course has been a prominent motif throughout my life; an interest in the history of science was also sparked by the remarkable fact that we could study it at school, and be examined on it as part of the Cambridge local examinations syndicate. There was a paper that you sat at the end of your first year in the sixth form, and it was called History and Philosophy of Science, and we had a chemistry teacher at school who was also a Methodist minister and he enjoyed teaching that syllabus. So, we probably anticipate it again here, but that was one way I got into the history of science, through the choice of books that were on offer as school prizes. And then through the possibility of actually studying the subject at school level, which I think is virtually impossible, sadly, these days, unless some such syllabus has been brought back. But I think things have become much more humdrum now than they were in those days.

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[Track 2]

Could you give me your memories now of being at Retford Grammar School?

Yes. My time at Retford Grammar School was particularly interesting precisely because my father also taught there, and I think I’ve already referred to the fact that in my gymnastic incompetence I was a bit of a liability as far as he was concerned. But I was fortunate in that he was on the whole a pretty popular teacher, and therefore although I was often teased and I suppose in small ways bullied, I was forgiven a lot by virtue of the fact that he was a good and respected teacher at the school. Of my first couple of years, I don’t remember too much. I was studying most of the subjects one would normally have studied at grammar school: English literature, French, Latin, maths certainly, bit of science, chemistry and physics, geography certainly. By the time I was in my third year at grammar school, I was in the same class of which my father was the sort of master in charge of that group. Now, this led to one or two interesting situations in that our teacher of geography was not him, it was supposed to have been a man, an Irishman, an Irish cleric, but shall we say whose interests were more in the pub than in communicating geographical knowledge. And in the classroom, instead of teaching geography he would tell stories that he made up on the spot about a character called Troddles, who got into all kinds of scrapes. So by the end of that particular year, I think all of us in the class had got about three pages of notes, and that was all, about the angle of the earth’s axis and why it was it went dark at night and light during the day, and various basic things of that kind. The reason I’m telling this story is that at the end of the year when this particular Irish teacher, for some reason, maybe he was ill or had gone off completely, we were to have an examination in geography which my father was given the task of setting as the junior geography teacher. And he asked to look at my notes, because he thought, to be fair, he couldn’t ask questions that we’d not studied during the year, and I shall never forget the look on his face when he saw that about the only question he could ask in this exam was what is the angle of the earth’s axis. Well, somehow, miraculously from my very primitive notes he was able to concoct an examination paper. But that’s one of my kind of humorous recollections where both he, my Irish geography teacher, if you can call him a teacher… I have to say, all the other teaching I had at that school was outstandingly good and it seems to me it was a classic example of a northern grammar school where the teaching standards were high, where many of the masters were idiosyncratic, to be sure, some downright eccentric, and that must be true of most good schools. But when I look back, I just think how John Hedley Brooke Page 23 C1672/08 Track 2 extraordinarily fortunate I was. The headmaster was also quite innovative in that he decided that some of us, perhaps the top twelve in the class, might approach O level a year early and be offered a kind of accelerated route through the school, really from the second year onwards. So I would have taken my O levels earlier than most and, as I say, we were in this class that was force-fed, I think one would have to say, and the headmaster certainly had Oxbridge in view as a possible end product of this force-feeding, but it worked very well as a system. I think many of us who had that accelerated route through probably didn’t score as high grades as we might have done if we had sat it a year later, but it meant that we had O level results under our belts and could go into the sixth form a year earlier too. So that is one feature I would stress from my school experience. I was in a class of about twelve who had been accelerated, and almost all of whom did actually excel in one way or another. A very good friend in that year [Jonathan Connor], with whom I’m still in touch, went to Oxford, read chemistry and finished up as professor of theoretical chemistry in Manchester; others in that group went to universities elsewhere. I can think of at least two, if not three in the group who went to Cambridge. It was not a fixation of the headmaster but I think he was somebody who felt that when it came to the school speech day, if he could brag about the number of boys he’d got to Oxford and Cambridge that year it would go down well with parents, as I’m sure it did. At school I played some of the games one would expect. I had a modest skill playing soccer. Cricket was really my game. I developed a bit of a liking for table tennis, threw myself about playing that a little. And chess I’ve already referred to. [07:44] The great decision was taken in my O level year. And I say a great decision because the question was, whether I should take music at O level or take geography. And the idea was that I would take geography at school where I would be taught by my father, and then that I would do my music via my piano lessons and perhaps have special coaching to do the theory side of music. But then my father had the bright idea, it would save him money if he taught me geography at home and I did the music at school. And I think the consequence was, because we never managed to find quite enough time to do the geography, I didn’t get as high a mark in O level geography as I got in O level music. I can remember answering an exam question on how coral islands, coral atolls are formed, and my father was horrified when I told him I’d answered that question, because he knew there was a trick buried in the question and you couldn’t just regard intuition and common sense as adequate tutors for that. Anyway, the gist of it was that I studied music theory at school and I would say that was one of the foundations on which one of the greatest pleasures of my life was actually based, John Hedley Brooke Page 24 C1672/08 Track 2 because I did learn the rudiments of sonata form, of basic musical harmony techniques. I learnt something of the life of the great composers. We did Schubert, Dvorak, Bach, I remember. And music was a subject that I just loved on every level: playing, performance, even doing a little bit of composition. In fact eventually I would write my own wedding march, which Janice will talk to you about, if pressed. So music to me was very important. I can remember occasionally – this again would be now in the sixth form – visiting Hallé concerts in Sheffield, not regularly, not that often, but they were events that stuck in my mind. And I still remember the first ever symphony concert programme, which was in the City Hall in Sheffield, and the Hallé played a wonderful programme of Schubert’s very youthful 1st Symphony, which is brimming over with melody. And then the Ravel… no, the Mozart Coronation Piano Concerto Number 26. But I mentioned Ravel because after the interval the same soloist played the Ravel G Major Piano Concerto, which is a special favourite. And then, to cap it all, the concert ended with Wagner’s Overture to Tannhäuser, and somehow the composition of that programme, getting Schubert and Mozart, but also Wagner at that tender age, all those were formative experiences that I went on to explore in far greater depth. My parents had bought me a record player at about the time I was doing O level music. And I remember, they couldn’t really afford to do so and we had an arrangement, it’s really quite touching when I think back, we had an arrangement that I would give up two and sixpence, which was more or less the whole of my pocket money, two and sixpence a week until I had paid off the purchase of the record player. And it’s the best money I’ve ever spent, I think. They bought me as my first set of LPs, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique, and – and this is quite revealing – they bought me Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, lovely old recording with Erich Kleiber and the Vienna Philharmonic, but I discovered that it was a rather strange disc that they’d put into my hands, because on one side was the first movement and on the second side was the second movement, but I couldn’t find the third and the great choral final movement. And I reasoned to myself that there must be a companion disc, that it was a two-disc set. So I went down to the local record shop and sure enough, there was a matching record cover, which had exactly the same heading on it, ‘Beethoven: The Choral Symphony, Erich Kleiber’. So I could see why they bought one and not the other, because they thought they were exact replicas, exact duplicates, but in fact this was what I needed for the third and fourth movements. Now, I tell that little story because I think that’s an indication of the wonderful care that my parents took to ensure that I was exposed to the very best of what was available as music, but it also reveals that they were sometimes just a little bit off the focus, you know, that they knew that John Hedley Brooke Page 25 C1672/08 Track 2 would be great, but they didn’t spot that it would have been nice to have had the whole thing. But I tell that story with enormous emotion and gratitude because thereafter the playing of music became very important to me. And while I was at school – this is not so much talking about school, but while I was there, I did for a short while become a member of the local record society. This was in the days when you met at somebody’s house and you would exchange vinyl recordings to listen and talk about particular works. And I noticed in the local paper there was to be a performance of Schubert’s great song cycle, the Winterreise, about which I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, but something impelled me to go and listen. So I got on my bike and went off and spent the whole evening, I guess, listening to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Winterreise. And the host for that evening had very considerately produced a little libretto, as it were, a kind of handout with all the songs, the words of all the songs of the cycle, it’s twenty-three, four, or twenty-five, something like that. And I sat listening to that music absolutely riveted to the spot. It appealed to very much a kind of romantic spirit and a mentality that was of the view that there was more to reality [than just] just than matter in motion. The emotions that that music conveyed of the wanderer reflecting on a lost love and strolling perhaps to some kind of suicidal [end were powerful], incredibly Germanic, you know, Goethe was kind of written all over it, I guess. But it’s an example of how something that started with a decision taken at home, whereby I would not only learn how to play the piano, but study music theory seriously at school, paid dividends in so many ways. And it wasn’t long after that Sheffield concert that I got into Wagner, because it was precisely the time that Sir Georg Solti was producing the first ever full recordings of The Ring Cycle. And I remember ordering the box set of Siegfried, because I’d heard one of the leitmotifs on a radio programme and it got under my skin. I thought gosh, I must find out what’s going on here. And I staggered the record shop in Retford when I went in and ordered a set of records that were going to cost me ten pounds. Now, I think I got the ten pounds because I’d been working for the Post Office during a university vacation. But they couldn’t quite believe that anybody of my age would spend that money on LPs and certainly not on a Wagner opera. And I can still remember some three or four weeks after I’d ordered it, because it wasn’t in the shop, we got a phone call at home saying, can you be serious, do you really mean this? Because they didn’t want to order a set of records that they wouldn’t, presumably, be able to sell, unless there were other nincompoops like myself who were getting into Wagner. But it meant, as I revised for my A levels, I was listening to Siegfried on the record player that I had. And that just took me into a whole world of mythology, of chromaticism in musical composition and all the particularities of a Wagner style of John Hedley Brooke Page 26 C1672/08 Track 2 composition. All this of course while I was studying the sciences at school. But that is interesting, because although I was studying maths, physics and chemistry, and although I took my A levels in maths, physics and chemistry, because everybody told me that’s what you should do, if you want a good job in the world, that was the advice one was given in the early 1960s. Despite all that, I was seriously torn about what subjects I should study at A level and what I wanted to study at university and the choice was between maths, physics and chemistry on the one hand, or music, French and English literature on the other. Because I think I can truly say there was something of the scientist and something of the humanist in me from the very earliest times I can remember. [19:40] There was no history in me, I have to say. That seems paradoxical now, looking back, but history as a school subject was never captivating. It just seemed boring, lots of dates, it was dealing with the past, it was dead and buried. You know, all the reasons youngsters might give for rejecting history. Whereas chemistry was kind of captivating. There was something exciting about blowing yourself up, and fizzing things and smelling things and all the excitement of carrying out experiments oneself, which I doubt one would be able to do now because health and safety would have intervened long ago. Physics I found more difficult and did at university as well. I think because the maths required was that little bit more taxing. But, I enjoyed physics, solving problems, learning about how hovercrafts worked and that kind of thing. [20:43] But all along, I was pulled in the humanities direction as well. And in fact, an examination I took – is this when I took my A levels? Or perhaps this was another, the year prior to A levels. There was a paper called Use of English and I got my highest mark of any on that paper. A loving of language, sadly too much too greatly confined to the English language, though I have examined doctorates at The Sorbonne, my French is good enough to read even quite technical stuff. But manipulation of the English language was something I relished from those very early days, and clearly I was able to score quite highly in that. So I think when it came to university entrance exams, papers like the general paper, the essay paper, were papers in which I probably scored quite highly. So that’s just a digression on the importance of music and the humanities to me, with the exception of history, while my primary school application had to be to maths, physics and chemistry.

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[22:24] Can you say more for the listener with no or limited interest in or enjoyment of music what the pleasure of listening to music for you then consisted of? The extent to which it was intellectual or physical, or what?

It’s quite difficult reconstructing in a clearly articulable way exactly what was so appealing about music. Intellectually in part, yes, because one enjoyed applying what one had learnt about the structures of sonata form, minuets and trios, the way in which composers write variations on themes. You could learn the theory and then see for yourself how this was implemented by the great classical composers. I mean we were not talking here about Stravinsky, Shostakovich and the exciting twentieth century composers who came along later, it was fairly basic classical stuff. The intellectual, then yes, but, it has to be emotional. There is some translation that takes place, or can take place, in the mind between hearing particular combinations of sounds and experiencing particular inner moods. I think everybody recognises this, you can hear something that sounds like a funeral march, whether it’s by Chopin or whether it’s the second movement of the Eroica, or whatever. But you recognise that that music is conveying a mood. There’s something too, I think, in the notion that programmatic music sets a particular kind of challenge. Something like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony would be a good example. I remember our French master at school describing that as Beethoven’s chef-d’oeuvre, this was to introduce us to the French concept of chef-d’oeuvre, this was his masterpiece. Well, I somehow doubt that it is, as a matter of fact, but Beethoven says that the music is not directly programmatic, it’s to conjure up thoughts, emotions that might apply when you’re out in the country, but it doesn’t follow a set programme. But then at the end of the slow movement you get the song of the cuckoo and the nightingale and you feel well, there is something programmatic here, and lots and lots of music is not quite as, shall we say, prosaic in its programmatic character as that. But learning to associate emotion, styles of composition, particular combinations of sounds, with another level of meaning so that you are transported to some other world. And I think musicians themselves often use language rather like that. I was listening to one of the great sopranos of the twentieth century talking about the singing of a Strauss song, and she said, when I sing that particular song, I feel transported to another spiritual realm. Now, the word spiritual of course is immensely complicated and it’s a dangerous word to use, but I do think my enjoyment of music came out of the excitement, I mean the sheer beauty of the melodic line in many cases. I can remember a very early piece I got used to was the 4th Symphony of John Hedley Brooke Page 28 C1672/08 Track 2

Schubert, his so-called Tragic Symphony, scarcely ever played, but for some reason just at the time I was getting into classical music it seemed to be on all the time. And I learnt most of the melodic themes from that symphony. And they began to mean something to me. I think appreciation of classical music does require repetition. When you hear something for the first time, because you don’t know it already, there can be a certain exhilaration in your exploration of where the music’s going, but it’s on repetition where you really get to know the structure, the continuity of the music, that’s when it really begins to mean something to you. But I think it has to be that combination of exploration, intellectual excitement and the emotion that accompanies one’s experience, and it’s a subjective experience of course. You know, I quite understand classical music can leave some people completely cold. But you do require a bit of an education into it before it begins to add up and before it can then take over your life, as it clearly does for many musicians. And in the way science can take over the lives of people who are committed to a particular set of research objectives.

Thank you. [28:30] Could you tell me a little bit more about the teaching and learning of science then at this school, at Retford Grammar School?

Yes. Well, the subject that I eventually specialised in at university was chemistry and that’s no accident, because we had an extraordinarily gifted chemistry teacher at school. He was a Welshman, Taffy Jones, who was great to watch, and listen to. Partly because the experiments he conducted in the classroom, many of which I think now would be vetoed, were just enthralling in their own right. Secondly, he was just so enthusiastic about the subject, which is a pre-condition of any successful teaching. He was just outstanding, he explained everything very clearly, he gave us notes that were applicable when it came to preparation for exams, he would drift off the subject occasionally to throw in anecdotes that were of interest. His whole demeanour as a teacher was exceptional. And I should say, incidentally, one of the reasons why the music which we’ve just been discussing came to mean so much to me was that our music teacher at Retford Grammar School, a man called Alan Taylor, who subsequently went to Haberdashers’ Aske’s School, was an extraordinarily gifted teacher in much the same way. Tremendous enthusiasm. Could involve the whole school in singing and getting us to enjoy it. Terrific charismatic performance. And the Welshman was much the same. So I think my learning of chemistry was certainly stimulated John Hedley Brooke Page 29 C1672/08 Track 2 by the excitement of seeing it in action and seeing the teacher actually doing chemistry, and of course doing some ourselves: I can remember all the titrations between acids and alkalis. I can remember the days when you sucked up benzene in a pipette, the sort of thing that would be frowned upon, and correctly so, today. Maths, that was okay. We had another Welshman teaching us maths. He was committed, he taught very conscientiously, we went through the syllabus, learnt all we were supposed to learn. I can’t say that maths was a subject that thrilled me, but I seemed to be reasonably good at it and didn’t have any particular reason to jettison that. In fact in the end I did both A level… was it A level? Pure maths, that’s right, and A level applied maths. The applied maths was much more difficult, because that was more like physics, which was the one science subject I struggled with a bit. The teacher of physics at the school was not so good. He was the sort of man who would stand up and lecture to you, and his lectures were very difficult to follow and very difficult to take notes from. He was very clever, there was no doubt. He’d also been injured, I think in the war, and he had a sort of injury to his lower lip, which was all kind of twisted, and that meant sometimes he was quite difficult to listen to and the boys occasionally used to caricature him. He was a little bit of a subject of, shall we say, consternation and derision. But when it really came to the crunch, preparing for Oxbridge entrance, then he really pulled out the stops and I think his teaching was at its best when it was delivered at the highest level in the school. I don’t think lower down he was of much help to students, but when it really came to the crunch and we were learning the latest kind of question that was likely to appear in a Cambridge physics entrance exam, then he would be on the ball. And there’s no doubt I was very lucky. He had taught us how the hovercraft works and question one on the paper I had to do was calculate the something or other, you know, if this hovercraft leaves Calais at such- and-such a time and is powered by such-and-such a thrust. The physics that he taught was appropriate to the examinations we had to sit. It’s just that it wasn’t very inspiring. And it probably did leave me with a sense of finding physics that much more demanding than chemistry. And strangely enough, the pattern was repeated in Cambridge. I had a series of brilliant teachers in chemistry. In physics, not so. It’s as if somehow the imagination wasn’t there to bring the subject alive. But anyway, we’ll come to university perhaps a little later.

[34:41] Who was advising that maths, physics and chemistry at A level were the choices that you needed to make for the chance of a successful job?

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Isn’t that an interesting question, and I was just thinking about that. The advice was certainly transmitted to me through my parents, unsurprisingly, I think. But I have the notion that my father took soundings from his colleagues at school. That would be one source of advice. But more than that, I think it was almost part of common culture at that time. If you were listening to programmes on the radio about going to university and what people were studying, you sort of picked up the sense that if you studied maths, physics and chemistry, the world was your oyster, you know, there were all these wonderful opportunities in industry and technology, in commerce, and of course in scientific research itself, which promised all kinds of dividends in those glorious days. And I think there was a sense in which the humanities were thought to be perhaps less adaptable when it came to looking for careers other than in school teaching or librarianship or some of the more obvious kind of subject areas that you could take off into if you studied the humanities. But I do remember that message was loud and clear. It may have come from the headmaster at the school, who may have either taken advice or transmitted that same cultural imperative, and it was almost an imperative. I do remember having that sense that if I didn’t study the sciences, if I went along the music line, I would get some raised eyebrows and some concerns about whether I was limiting my options as a career. And I think one way the argument went, and I often used to repeat this, I haven’t for a very long time, but I think there may still be something in it, that if you studied the humanities, but then decided that your real love really had been for the sciences, it would be exceedingly difficult to change back, because learning in the sciences is progressive in a way that is rather more direct and brutal than the progression you get within a subject like history, or philosophy. And so the advice was, if you do the sciences first and you want to change your mind, it won’t be too difficult to go back to study English or to study music or to study humanities subjects. And I think that is, broadly speaking, correct. So for somebody who was undecided about which way to turn, there was a certain logic to doing the science first, because you kept your options open. And it’s true to say, I think, that relatively few people migrate from the humanities back into a research career in the sciences, or even back to study in the sciences at university level. An interesting exception, actually, was the professor of history of science before the most recent one [now two] in Oxford, Robert Fox, who was my senior colleague in the history of science here at Lancaster. And Robert has been a good friend for many, many, many years. But he studied Latin and the Classics at A level, and then won some kind of scholarship to enable him to convert to physics. And so he actually graduated with a physics degree, having begun life as John Hedley Brooke Page 31 C1672/08 Track 2 a Classics scholar. But I think those cases are rare. So, I think I have now put my finger on what was the rationale for that choice, given its, well my, indecisiveness at the time.

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[Track 3]

At the time that you’re taking A levels in the sciences, to what extent are you interested in science outside of school in terms of the things that you read that you’re not being asked to read for your A levels anyway, things that you listen to, perhaps things that you even watch. I don’t know whether you watch television at this time. So, what I’m trying to get at really is the extent to which you engage with any, what would you call it, popular science type material of whatever form, written or…?

Yes, to a limited degree I certainly did, and I think this just allows a gloss on the point I made earlier, that there were certain books that I remember seizing because they fired my imagination, and they were books about the study of nature in some form or another. But there is quite a difference between, as it were, experiencing, enjoying and studying the phenomena of nature and enjoying the analytical study of that nature as you do in a subject like physics or chemistry. And the aesthetic appeal of the sciences, it seems to me, derives from two sources: one is the aesthetics of theory construction, the way in which an Einstein might talk about the beauty of the mathematics or the elegance of the theory of relativity, or something like that, the way in which Newton could speak about the beauty of the mathematical system that he’d created. But the aesthetic satisfaction also comes just from the direct experience of nature; the experience of a rainbow, you know, the experience of a mountain range, and I think in many ways at the sixth form level my aesthetic satisfaction coming from the sciences was perhaps more from the study of what used to be called natural history, the direct appreciation and taxonomy of nature perhaps rather more than the rather dry, analytical approach that one got through the science syllabus at school. So the popular science I would read was likely to be about things that I just found particularly beautiful or particularly enticing because of the way they were presented. And I mentioned marine biology earlier as something that caught my imagination through the Cousteau books. Programmes on television, those programmes about wildlife in Africa, they fired my imagination. Though sadly, to this day, I’ve never been on safari in Africa, but at that stage in my life that was something that I found exciting. So we’re still at the popular level here I think with, I referred earlier to the National Geographic mentality, and I think that was probably the sort of level I was operating on. If you like, I mean discovering the world vicariously through travel, stories, through documentaries about other parts of the world that I never experienced. John Hedley Brooke Page 33 C1672/08 Track 3

[04:12] But all enhanced and triggered to some degree by the wish to travel that had been cultivated by my parents. I think I did have an exceptional childhood in the way in which we travelled all over Europe towing a caravan, and meeting strangers and talking to them. And my father was very, very gregarious and so would happily embark on a conversation with anybody. And that was, I think, one of his strengths and endearing features, even if at times he would not stop when his conversation partner might have wished to escape. [05:00] But yes, so I think that’s largely what we’re talking about if we’re looking at the ancillary reading in the science. But even at the time I was doing A levels, I was already interested in what one might call the social and cultural implications of science, and I think that was because if not earlier, by the time I was sixteen, I was certainly beginning to think theologically as well as scientifically. And I don’t want that to sound too grandiose, it’s simply that about that age, sixteen or so, I started attending a local Crusader class, which ironically was run by the history master at school with whom I had had virtually no dealings at all as a student. But he ran what was then called a Crusader class, which was basically Bible study, it had a kind of evangelical aspect to it. I’m sure the idea was to get youngsters into the same kind of religious community that conservative evangelicals find themselves at home in. And it was enticing because he had a table tennis table and after our Bible study we could enjoy the games that were on hand. He was also very musical actually and would allow us to listen to Bach Brandenburg Concertos, which he very much favoured as a good choice of music, very wholesome. As a strict Calvinist I don’t think he liked romantic music which gave him the squirms, but a bit of good old Bach was certainly the thing. So I was reading books which purported to discuss the relationship between science and religion and… one by Charles Coulson, Oxford professor of chemistry, Methodist lay preacher. The book was called – I just paused because I was trying to remember the title – but it was Science and Christian Faith. And it’s a book that I think lots of people read who found themselves interested in the relations between scientific claims for authority and religious claims for authority. I would certainly pick that book out as one of the seminal influences at that time in my life, partly because he had a very, very clear thesis, which is that if Christians or members of any religious denomination for that matter, try to capitalise on gaps in our scientific understanding and try to construct arguments for the existence of their God on the basis of those gaps, then they’re heading for trouble. And his was the first explicit critique I came across as [of] the God of the gaps approach to the science-religion discourse. And I John Hedley Brooke Page 34 C1672/08 Track 3 was completely persuaded. And in fact I was so impressed by his argument that I decided that whatever question I answered on the Oxbridge entrance essay paper, I would bring that in somewhere because it sounded like a rather nice thing to be able to argue. And in point of fact, on the Cambridge entrance scholarship exam there was a question about… it was a quotation from Whitehead [something like “Should we not distrust the jaunty assurance with which each new generation believes it has at last got the concepts with which to correctly interpret the world?”] seemed to capture just about what I wanted to say on what I’d read in Coulson. So I was very lucky, again, that the right question came up on the paper. So I was getting into what I suppose you would have to call rudimentary philosophy. And that was partly because we were studying history and philosophy of science at school, as I mentioned earlier. So although some of that syllabus was a bit boring, I remember cavilling a bit at the list of Greek philosophers who’d allegedly made one contribution or other to the sciences, although I protested a bit about that, what I loved about the subject and actually loved about general studies at school anyway, was that you had the opportunity to express your own opinions. Whereas in chemistry or physics or maths, the answer was right or wrong, you didn’t have much room for manoeuvre. And I think a lot of people have found that about a science education, for all its strengths it does have that one defect that if you’re not careful, it’s just a cramming exercise, as you learn, certainly you learn techniques as well as information, but learning how to apply those techniques can also be just a question of re- rehearsing, re-practising something you’ve learnt in repetition anyway. Whereas the wonderful thing about history and philosophy of science was that questions did arise about the religious views of Isaac Newton or whether science disproved religion, and in class discussion you could talk about those things and you could express your own views. And I remember on one occasion blurting out - the context must have been Darwinian biology – and I remember blurting out that I found it very difficult to believe that we were just the result of accident, or an accident, and then some bright spark at the back of the room shouted out, ‘Speak for yourself’, which I thought was a rather nice interjection, though it rather covered me with shame for a moment or two. But I just mention that because one could have interesting discussions at sixth form level involving what today would be called ‘the big questions’, or what the Templeton Foundation would call the big questions, to which of course we cannot have definitive answers, but they are nevertheless engaging and certainly were to me at that time. So a general interest in the relationship between my scientific education on the one hand, my participation in Bible study and the youth club at my local church, which was instrumental, again, in bringing me face to face with theological claims John Hedley Brooke Page 35 C1672/08 Track 3 and the liturgy of the Anglican Church, these all helped me, I think, to begin to think in rather more philosophical and abstract terms about the relationship between claims for authority, whether they’re scientific or religious.

[13:17] Who was teaching the history and philosophy of science at school?

This is, this is a significant question. The answer is certainly significant, because that subject, as well as religious studies, though I didn’t study that per se, was taught by a Methodist minister, who also taught some chemistry, he was the kind of reserve chemistry teacher in the school. So here’s a Methodist minister, [with] qualifications in chemistry, he was teaching history and philosophy of science and general studies, and he was a slightly eccentric bachelor, but the kind of eccentricity that you could respond quite well to. His name was Kenneth Birch, and he encouraged us to think for ourselves. He would dictate notes, which were sometimes boring. I don’t think that was particularly good pedagogical practice, but [and] sometimes his classes were a bit dry. But they gave us the opportunity to articulate what we thought ourselves, based on reading we had done, whether for school or, as you say, some of these ancillary texts that one would encounter in one’s spare time.

[14:48] What do you remember of particular scientists on television or radio? Actual presenters or discussants who were professional scientists?

Not many spring to mind as scientists whose career was dedicated to scientific research. There were television personalities, I remember, but I’m having difficulty remembering whether I would have… well, actually I wouldn’t have seen these so much during my undergraduate days because I didn’t watch television then. But the three names that suddenly come to mind, but the chronology may be quite wrong, David Attenborough of course, and the nature programmes, which I loved and they of course illustrate again what we were talking about most recently, that the kind of, the kind of exposure to science where you’re actually experiencing, even if vicariously, what one might call the phenomenology of the natural world rather than the analysis of what lies behind the phenomena. So something like the Attenborough wildlife programme, Zoo Quest, I seem to remember from that time. I’ve always fancied going to that Indonesian island where the dragon, is it Komodo, or something John Hedley Brooke Page 36 C1672/08 Track 3 like that, where you can encounter these wonderful dragons, that would be fun. I’m thinking of Jodrell Bank and the astronomer, Bernard Lovell wasn’t it, who would occasionally appear talking about the role of the telescope there. Patrick Moore I watched occasionally The Sky at Night, but I wasn’t a great devotee of that and didn’t find him particularly appealing, though some of my good friends and colleagues have had a very good relationship with him until he died. And one other name just flashed across my mind, but I’m wondering whether I’ve lost it. Oh, I know. If we move as far ahead as [Jacob] Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, there you’ve got an interpretation of the history of science from somebody whose career was certainly in science, though he’s perhaps more a commentator than a practitioner. I did watch that series and found it very interesting, but I think by then I was studying the subject seriously, which would have been in my third year in Cambridge. So perhaps that doesn’t belong to this particular category. Though I have a very vivid memory of one of my tutors at Cambridge, Gerd Buchdahl, the Kant scholar, coming into lecture one day brandishing Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, and his lecture began, ‘How dare this man claim that such- and-such was the case. How dare he say such a thing?’ And the lecture consisted in tearing Bronowski completely to shreds, and I don’t know what the philosophical issue was, but clearly Buchdahl as a Kant scholar thought there had been some very serious mistake made. But interestingly, many other people I meet today who say that that particular series of television lectures were what triggered their real interest in the sciences. I can’t say that because I was into the sciences before that time. But I do remember that series. It was the first experience I think I had of having the history of science represented on screen.

[19:35] When more exactly and why did you join the youth club at your local church, the Crusaders’ group?

Yes, the Crusaders’ group was not the youth club at church, this is a separate entity. I think what happened was… oh, I know how it came about, of course. Although my parents did regularly… sorry, did not go regularly to church, as we mentioned earlier, they did consider that it would be advantageous for me to be confirmed. I mean advantageous I think just by virtue of social custom and what was considered desirable. My mother might have thought that if I wanted to marry a decent girl and she had been confirmed, it could have been an issue if I had not been. Now, I’m reading things into her mind, but I think that may well have been the case. So, both my brother and I attended confirmation classes at our local church John Hedley Brooke Page 37 C1672/08 Track 3 and that led to joining a youth club at the church, where I made some very good friends, some of whom I’m still in touch with today. That was partly because I used to organise a little carol singing group myself and we had some musicians, we had a violinist, I could play the clarinet a little, and I used to arrange Christmas carols for that combination of instruments and we would go around singing in the old folks’ homes around Retford where I was based at the time. So my membership of the church youth club was socially extremely pleasant and one or two of my early lady friends belonged to that group, although the relationships were never developed in any meaningful way. [21:51] There was a difference between my experience of Anglicanism through that church and the Crusader classes and the various events with which they were associated, in that the Crusader classes were much more overtly evangelical in orientation, whereas what I was experiencing in the local church was conventional Anglicanism, but communicating the classic doctrines of Christianity. So I was given a kind of basic elementary foundation in the Christian faith through the confirmation classes and I was experiencing something a little bit, shall we say, potentially more fiery in the Crusader classes. And I mean I recognised, as others did too, that there was a tension between those two theologies. And from the very beginning, though I would say that I fell under the sway of that evangelical movement at the time and for a short time afterwards, I was always very critical of the exclusiveness with which it tended to be associated. So if you didn’t have the correct understanding of the substitutionary theory of the atonement, for example, you were deemed to be unsound and probably on the way to hell. That, I mean that’s putting it very extremely, but that kind of mentality that we are the saved and everybody else are the goats, not the sheep, that kind of mentality I most certainly revolted against at a pretty early stage in my theological development.

Do you remember anything of the particular leaders of the Crusader group? Was this the teacher from school who was involved in…

Yes, the history teacher who was a Calvinist. I do remember about his particular faith and the way he practised it. For example, he would tell us that when he woke in the morning he would just allow the Bible to fall open somewhere, unpredictably, and then he would look for God’s message to him that day in wherever the Bible had fallen open. I’ve thought about this recently because I’ve been involved in academic conferences talking about probability and indeterminacy in a world that used to be considered entirely determinate and whether there John Hedley Brooke Page 38 C1672/08 Track 3 are problems for doctrines of providence if things happen by chance, not by determinate processes, and it occurred to me that the way he lived his Christian life really was a case of both and, because it was a probability question, a chance event that he then allowed to determine his religious focus for that particular day. I remember thinking that I was not going to practise that method, it didn’t seem to me very sound. And I also got a sense from him, and I suppose I reacted against this in succeeding years, there was this notion, illustrated by that anecdote, there was the notion that his life was somehow in God’s hands in a determinate way and therefore there was a heavy responsibility, a heavy burden on discovering what that plan was, because if you deviated from it then you were clearly in some very serious trouble. And carrying that kind of burden, and not just the burden of guilt that the Calvinist theology tends to inculcate, but carrying that burden of constantly trying to find what it is that is God’s will for you for that moment in your life and thinking about what’s going to go wrong if I don’t get it right today. There’s an intensity about that kind of spirituality, which I simply did not wish to experience, I could not see that that was a way to lead a liberated life, and I mean liberated in a religious sense, because I was prepared to believe at that time in my life that liberation did mean some kind of emancipation from one’s own very selfish and egocentric kind of activity. And in many ways I still believe that. It seems to me many of the religions do offer, in theory at least, some means of escaping from the stranglehold of one’s own self-interest and to emancipate oneself somehow from that egotistic tug that we all feel, that seems to me one of the important things that religions can offer. But I certainly did react against the burden of that kind of mentality, while at the same time actually reacting against what seemed like the too comfortable wooliness of Church of England preaching, because in that local church where I attended the youth club, the vicar was a lovely old Welshman – Welshmen seem to have cropped up in my early life – but his sermons were really popular common sense laced with a little bit of biblical reference here and there. And I do remember sharing with others in that group the view that there was more to the study of Christianity than just, as it were, soaking up what seemed pretty close to platitudes. So, it was an interesting tension between those two presentations of Christianity, the more challenging theology of the evangelicals, a more comfortable and comforting theology of a fairly typical rural – because we lived on the edge of town – rural Anglican church. [29:47] But I was so much involved in the church and that youth club that I did get a reputation as somebody who would be willing to speak in public about what I believed. And, this is John Hedley Brooke Page 39 C1672/08 Track 3 extraordinary, I still can hardly believe what I’m saying, but there was an occasion when a church nearby, not the one that I normally attended, was short of somebody to take the service one Sunday and the vicar and his curate at Ordsall Church, which was mine, approached me and asked whether I could possibly contemplate taking the service, which would also involve preaching a sermon. And I think I was seventeen at the time. I agreed to it and then they said, the only thing is, there’ll be no organist available for that particular service, and I remember saying, don’t worry, I can play the organ. [laughs] So you see why I say this with some hesitation. So I found myself in this extraordinary situation at age seventeen, having to take a service. That was of course just going through the liturgy, that wasn’t a particularly challenging… preaching one’s first sermon in public was a little bit more demanding, and playing the organ to keep everything musically sound, that was quite a thrill, because I was kind of contributing something which wouldn’t have been there without. I think, and I’ve said this in print, it’s probably the first time a scientific experiment had been performed in that church, because I remember doing a chemical experiment in the pulpit and then expatiating for a while on the relationship between a scientific account of what was going on in that experiment, and higher levels of interpretation of what it was all about. And I think this was all geared to that familiar old message, that science tells us how things happen and religion tells us why. It is a far too simplistic formula, but I suppose for a seventeen year old speaking in a village church, it said something that might have been helpful to somebody, I don’t know. But that’s just a way of saying that I was recognised as somebody who had my own views on matters of religion and was occasionally asked to speak in public about it. And I suppose that’s one of my earliest exposures to the practice of public speaking, which has never held any terrors for me, despite the fact that as a child I was a terrible stutterer, and I think my parents were deeply concerned about whether I would ever grow out of it. And I’ve spent a lifetime now lecturing in public. But interestingly, whatever it was that was causing the stuttering, has never entirely gone. If I don’t breathe properly, I’m still capable – and you may even have noticed – I’m still capable of stalling momentarily until I get absolutely straight the consonants that I’m trying to spit out. But despite that impediment in my speech, and I was sent to elocution lessons to help correct it, despite that impediment I have been very fortunate and it’s never been a problem speaking in public. I think in a university context where you’re projecting to the back of a lecture theatre, the issue never arises because you’re forced to breathe correctly in order to get the message to the back of the room. It’s in small groups when you’re speaking quietly that you can suddenly find yourself short of breath, and then the stuttering can cut in. So that’s just a little incidental. John Hedley Brooke Page 40 C1672/08 Track 3

[34:41] Do you remember what you, what experiment you performed, what chemistry experiment you performed as part of this sermon?

I can’t remember the exact details but it would have involved a change of colour, so that it was something that was exactly visible from the pews down below. And actually, I mean it may have been just in some way producing copper sulphate or something of that kind so that you got a nice vivid colour to show. But it does remind me that one of the things that lured me into chemistry in the very first instance was seeing chemistry sets in toy shops that looked peculiarly inviting, and it was the colours that caught my eye. Manganese salts, flowers of sulphur, copper sulphate, substances which immediately caught your eye, and I remember thinking to myself, gosh, I wonder what happens if you mix that with that, which is the essence of the appeal of chemistry, I think, even if you go back to the alchemists. You know, it’s what can we get by reacting that with that, what surprises might there be? And that, for me, was the initial appeal of chemistry, I insisted on having a chemistry set for Christmas or for my birthday, and then used to carry out these experiments, producing those lovely kinds of chemical gardens where you could put little tablets of one substance or another into a substance and you got the lovely kind of efflorescence within the tank that you were operating in. So, I’ve got a suspicion that the experiment would have been very basic and it would just have been putting an acid on a salt and producing a different salt to get a colour change.

[36:58] And at this time, if someone had asked you what you believed about God, what would you have said? What you believed about Christianity?

I’m pausing before answering that, because my beliefs, although I think at that stage were quite firm in believing that there was a God who had an interest in my life and that I myself had an interest in learning more about the theology in which that God was embedded, there was – and this has been with me ever since, I guess – a combination of the academic approach to belief and the willingness to say I believe. But the relationship between those two, the more philosophical abstract analysis of what I’m saying when I say I believe, I think I was experiencing that kind of meta-level of analysis even at that stage. In which case you’ll John Hedley Brooke Page 41 C1672/08 Track 3 see that it would be too simple to say, I believed in that particular kind of God. But I would say that all I had learnt about that particular God at that time was through the channels of Christian teaching, whether evangelical or more conformist Anglican. To that extent I would, I think, have said I believe in a Christian God and I think the ethical values that I had probably at that time were those one would find embedded within Christian tradition. But it’s therefore very hard for me to come up with a reconstituted creed or statement that would accurately capture what I believed at that time. I certainly, as I said earlier, had revolted against any kind of exclusiveness which would say that unless one believed in the God that I believed in, one would be in serious trouble. I didn’t believe in a God who would treat people in that way. I do remember even in my Cambridge years, once in a punt on the river when we were talking about contrasts between evangelical and liberal theology, expressing the opinion that without the challenge that an evangelical theology can put before an individual, one might never become religiously oriented at all. And as I said that, a punt went by in the opposite direction with, I imagine, a group of theology students in the punt, because one of them reacted and said, ‘Why?’ [laughs] and of course then they had drifted further down river and so we didn’t engage in any further conversation. And I think what he was wanting to say was that you don’t necessarily have to believe in a notion of some kind of personal commitment to Christ in order to be drawn into a faith which offers a deeper interpretation of the world than you might have on the basis of secular principles alone. So I’m not answering this question very precisely. Once when I spoke to a youth club in another town, to which the curate who had led the confirmation class that I attended had migrated by then as the resident priest, he asked me to go over and preach to his youth club then. And I remember he said to me afterwards, after they’d listened to the sermon, when I was talking about the dangers of following the crowd, and I can still remember that in the research for that sermon I had gone through my concordance in the Bible looking for as many references to a crowd as I could possibly find, and then I argued in the sermon that it’s always dangerous to follow the crowd and I came up with a good few biblical examples to demonstrate that thesis. But what I remember about that was the curate afterwards said, you know, the young people who attended that sermon, they all said there is somebody who knows what he believes. So I was able certainly to get across the idea that I took religion very seriously, that I was prepared to use God talk, and in conventional religious contexts. But I think it was always moderated by what I can only call, and as I did a few moments ago, a genuine academic interest in what all this means. And therefore the possibility that it might mean nothing at all, that one might be, as it were, participating in a language game, but not John Hedley Brooke Page 42 C1672/08 Track 3 correctly interpreting the experiences one might be having. And I think in saying that I’m not retrospectively projecting a more sophisticated theological or philosophical understanding than I had at that time, I do remember thinking about these issues really quite deeply, which is why, as I say, I was reading, I was reading books on science and religion and I think it was precisely because I was thinking about those theological questions on quite an abstract level that I became interested more deeply in the philosophy of science. And in many ways, my original interest in the history of science was because I felt that that was the only way I could really get any leverage on the philosophy of science. And that was a fashionable view in Cambridge when I was eventually studying the subject academically, that the value of history was to create case studies for philosophical scrutiny. And I bought into that for a while, although eventually I purchased my release from that way of looking at things, because I think if you insist on making historical scholarship subservient to philosophical problems, you inevitably miss the richness of the history. And if you miss the richness of the history it then distorts the kind of history that you think you’re uncovering. And that much of the use of history for philosophical case study analysis simply becomes circular, because you look in the history for titbits and examples of particular kinds of reasoning that will illustrate the philosophical thesis you’ve already decided is correct. So this is, I think, is just a way of saying that when I migrated from school to Cambridge I was reading books on science and religion, I was getting into the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of science, for sure in a pretty rudimentary way, but in a way that did genuinely engage my mind and interest.

[46:46] At this age, would you pray?

I think I would say not merely that I would, but that I did. It was certainly part of the culture of my faith that that would be something that I would do. But there were certain kind of prayers I think that I would always have desisted from engaging in, most significantly I think the kind of prayer where you, in effect, ask God to do something that he would not otherwise have done had you not asked. Which does actually seem to me extraordinarily egocentric. So that kind of intercessional prayer I think was never easy for me. Just as much of the liturgy of the Anglican Communion service, for example, eventually became very difficult for me to take, as it were, at face value. And insofar as I drifted away from that kind of religious practice, which certainly had all the appearance of orthodoxy, it would be that I was just finding the language too difficult to give meaning to in the light of what I had come to know John Hedley Brooke Page 43 C1672/08 Track 3 both about the world and experience in the world, the problem of suffering of course being the classic issue, and I was certainly well aware of that. So yes, a certain kind of, I suppose, contemplative, meditative prayer, but not the kind of prayer that asks for a sunny day for the garden fete, that just seemed to me naïve.

[49:14] Could you then tell me now about some of your memories of experiences in the first year at Cambridge?

Yes, I went to Cambridge as still young in the sense that my birthday fell in May, so I was always in a class at school where I was among people who could be as much as eight or nine months older than me, and that had the consequence too, that when I went to Cambridge I was still a callow youth, as one might say. The reason I mention that is that I think there is a sense, and I have said this several times in my life, there is probably a sense in which I would have benefited from a gap year, because during my first year in Cambridge I was pretty obsessive about accomplishing all the academic assignments that I was given. I had, as many northern grammar school products did, a certain sense of inferiority. It didn’t last too long, but I would certainly say I experienced it, I was very conscious, for example, in the chemistry laboratory we were always linked up with two or three other people and we would conduct an experiment together. There was one guy who led our particular group and he was from an independent private school. And he was so much more full of confidence than either I or my other immediate neighbours could exude. Interestingly though, when it came to exam results, he was too full of his own self-confidence and he came a cropper. He was the member of the group who got the third class degree at the end of the show. And I’ve always remembered that because I can see that it is perfectly possible for very good public schools to almost over- educate their students for Oxbridge entry and that people creep into university who probably do not have quite the mental ability of some who have come through more humble routes. So I would stand by that, I think, on the basis of my own experience. So a certain reserve during that first year. Certainly conscientious, almost too conscientious application to work. Always trying to do more work in the vacations than it was possible to do so and taking all my books back again at the beginning of the next term, instead of having a realistic aim of just taking perhaps a couple of books home and making sure I was on top of those. So that constant pressure. There was something of, unsurprisingly really, of the classical puritan ethic at work, having been exposed to Calvinist theology, and that probably meant that in John Hedley Brooke Page 44 C1672/08 Track 3 other respects I might have been a little immature. I had no difficulty making friends and was very happy with my immediate mates, both in the science lectures and science classes. They were civilised people and, again, I’m still in touch with some of them. But there was certainly that sense in which there were people in Cambridge who seemed much more full of self-confidence than I actually had. But, in that same year, I played chess for my college, I played cricket for my college, table tennis for my college. I was pretty well embedded in what Cambridge could offer. And after the end of my first year, which gave me a very good examination result, I think after that I realised that [I] need no longer be over-anxious about whether I could stand my ground academically while I was there. [54:13] There’s much more I guess I could say, I’m thinking again about the enhancement of my musical education further. I remember every Saturday night I went to King’s College Chapel for an organ recital. And hearing the preludes and fugues of Bach in the magnificent acoustic of King’s Chapel, that for a lot of people, and I might I guess have said this myself, that was pretty close to being a religious experience, the sheer magnificence of the sound and what it conjured up. And there are old jokes about how the vibrations of a thirty-two foot organ pipe can resemble the action of the Holy Spirit. You know, there’s something that grabs you and sets you vibrating with it. So musically that first year in Cambridge was great. I was a member of various societies, attended concerts, went to other musical events. I certainly belonged to the college – no, not the college – the university Christian Union, which was evangelical at that time. So Saturday nights were also spent in the university union, listening to visiting speakers who had been invited by the committee that ran CICCU, as it was called. I don’t know whether it still has that same description now. So I was still in my first year in Cambridge immersed in the legacy of that exposure to evangelical theology in my teenage years. But again, I was always somehow at the periphery of it and uneasy with a lot of what was being said. I was actually for a while the chair or the president [more correctly the college representative] of the college Christian Union, but I combined that too with attendance at the college chapel. Fitzwilliam was my college, where I was exposed to an entirely different set of theological precepts. And so once again, I was having this interesting tension between an evangelical theology on the one hand, now becoming more sophisticated because I was reading theologians like Karl Barth and even more radical theologians than him. It was about that time that John Robinson’s book, Honest to God came out, which caused a terrible scandal in the Church, but he alerted me to the fact that there were theologians like Bonhoeffer and Bultmann as well as Barth and others, from which I sensed I John Hedley Brooke Page 45 C1672/08 Track 3 could derive quite a lot, and I did read them. Tillich as well. So I began pretty well from the middle of my first year at university educating myself in theology, very much as an autodidact, of course. But with having injection from the liberal Anglicanism of the college chapel and in tension with the more evangelical Christo-centric theology that was coming from the sermons I was hearing on Saturday nights in the student union building.

[end of track 3]

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[Track 4]

I’d just like to ask one question to follow up on last time and then we’ll continue from where we got to, and that’s whether you could tell me a little bit more about the history master, I think it is, who also ran the local Crusader classes. At one point you say he was an eccentric bachelor and I was interested in how you knew that, in other words, some sense of to what extent you got to know him personally and socially through the Crusader classes.

Yes. I knew of his personal circumstances because he lived with his sister in a large house where we held the Crusader classes and where in an attic he had a table tennis table, which was always a rather attractive thing to migrate to after we’d had a rather intensive discussion below. I would say that I never really got to know him well personally. I think he was perhaps a rather shy, rather aloof figure. I mentioned before that my father taught at the same school that I attended and I rather detected from remarks my father made that he was perceived to be a slightly odd fish by other colleagues at the school. He was eccentric perhaps in that his musical tastes were exceedingly conservative and baroque, so he was very keen to play us records of the Bach Brandenburg Concertos. But he freely confessed, and I do remember this, anything verging on romantic music made him nauseous, and that stuck in my mind because I thought it’s a very particular kind of mind that just warms towards one strand of classical music. What else can I say about him? I really, as I say, did not get to know him well. He wasn’t an easy person to listen to, in fact. I guess what held me in those classes was the conviviality of the group, the fact that he was expressing interesting views which I was certainly taking seriously at that time. But then I recall that before I finally left Retford and went to Cambridge, those classes were taken over by another history master at the school who I think must have succeeded him, or certainly was junior to him for a period of apprenticeship. That was a man called Douglas Grounds, with whom I am still in touch at the Christmas card level. And he was a much more approachable, accessible figure with whom one could have a conversation about anything. [03:39] I think I may even have mentioned last time that the person we’ve just been discussing once said that when he rose in the morning the first thing he ever did was to open his Bible and just see where the page fell open and he would find a message for the day in that text. And I used to worry about that, it seemed to me one was putting one’s life on a kind of razor edge if one felt that there was a message directly from God to you through the chance opening of a page. John Hedley Brooke Page 47 C1672/08 Track 4

But a very interesting, philosophically interesting point, because it’s very often assumed that any causality that operates in nature that admits of chance is somehow a threat to a providential interpretation of the natural world. Somehow if things are not under direct control of the divine you’re actually creating problems, it arises with the Darwinian theory, of course, famously. But it has occurred to me over the years that actually his lifestyle bore witness to the fact that a very conservative Calvinist could quite happily live with chance and providence simultaneously in a very kind of tight-knit combination. So, sorry?

Would he have argued that the book didn’t fall open by chance, that its opening was itself guided?

Somehow or other I think that has to be a presupposition from his point of view. But of course to the external observer it’s a chance process, not necessarily undetermined, because if you knew everything about the air pressure and the temperature and everything else and how the book was dropped, you could in principle, if not in practice, predict how it would land. And that’s true with the toss of a coin as well of course, when we quite happily talk about randomness or chance.

[05:57] Given what your dad hinted about the other masters’ view of this particular master who was running the Crusader classes initially, how did he feel about your attendance, about you going to this person’s house for these meetings?

I think my father was a little anxious about the way both my brother and I found ourselves in that particular evangelical milieu. I can remember my mother also saying that she had heard Herbert Pollitt, which was his name, described as an evangelical. She, I think, didn’t exactly know what that word meant, except it sounded peculiar and odd and I think the implication had been from the person who told her that this was a rather off-beam, not exactly a sect, but a religious position that my mum as a nominal Anglican would simply not have had much to do with locally, if at all. So, just recapitulating now, I think my parents, particularly my father, would have been a little apprehensive, but he was such an open-minded person and intellectually so capacious in his view of the world, even though, as I have said, he had no strong disposition left in favour of religion. But I think he felt that it was important I made my own decision about what I wished or did not wish to believe. And I guess he was a John Hedley Brooke Page 48 C1672/08 Track 4 sufficiently intelligent man to realise that the years we’re talking about here, when I would have been sixteen, seventeen years old, were impressionable years and that it was quite likely that I might grow out of whatever particular movement I had found myself lodged in for a while.

Thank you. [08:21] The person who took over the group, Douglas…?

Grounds.

You said that he’s someone that you could talk to about anything or about lots of things, how would you compare your freedom, your sense of freedom to talk to him about yourself to your sense of freedom about your ability to talk to, say, your father about topics, feelings and so on?

I think I would always put my father at the top of the list. I wouldn’t wish to give the impression that I was somehow taking evasive action out of the home in order to confide in somebody else, that, I never had that sense that something like that was necessary. So I wouldn’t attach any particular importance to it in those terms. I don’t know that I can say much more than that. What I do remember is that this person we’re talking about now, Dougie Grounds, he did once ask me to give a talk to the Crusader group, I guess I was by then a senior member about to go off to university, and he said would I talk about science and religion. And I do remember identifying some problems, but also trying to persuade everybody there that was nothing from science that need shake a Christian faith, which I certainly believed at that time. And what I most remember was that he in his comments afterwards was very appreciative, but if anything, implied that I’d under-estimated the problems. So that I think was quite an interesting little thing to be brought up short, that one’s harmonising mission was seen even by a Crusader leader possibly to have gone a bit over the top. [laughs] I think that is about it in terms of remembering specifics about my relationship with him. He had a much, well my father had a much better relationship with him than he did with the former leader to whom we’ve referred.

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[11:15] Did this Crusader group have any outdoor activities?

Yes, indeed it did and these are some of my most vivid memories of that time, in the sense that there were some peculiar games that flourished within this evangelical milieu. There was something called ‘poddocks’, which was a bit like baseball. It certainly was neither cricket nor anything that one would recognise as a typically English game, though that may just be my ignorance, I’ve never come across it anywhere else. And so yes, we used to meet occasionally on the school playing field and have a game of poddocks. It was a kind of cross between rounders and baseball, I think would be the best way of describing it. But the other context in which there were outdoor activities would have been when I attended summer camps and there were Crusader camps. I went to [them] at least twice and they were held on Anglesey, in fact, a rather attractive part of the island. And these would last a week in the summer and the emphasis there was very much on outdoor activities. There were always the games, there were excursions to climb up Snowdon. It was the old thing, I think, of muscular Christianity with the gospel presented to everybody in the evenings; that was the style. So yes, there were outdoor activities. And I always had a tolerable skill in ball games, but I didn’t have the physical strength to be a successful rugger player or soccer player. In soccer I was always said to have very good ball control but never quite fast enough to make my mark. Cricket, as I may have mentioned last time, was more my game. So yes, I think the outdoor life is one of the keen memories of my childhood, because so often today I read about the fact that parents have to be so much more defensive in terms of ensuring that their kids are not out in the wilds. My brother and I were allowed to wander miles under our own steam. Cycling sometimes, walking. I mentioned last time, times we had on my uncle’s farm. And these gave me a real sense of belonging to the world of nature, I think, which was part of my inspiration for the natural sciences, which was the field I took up when I went to Cambridge.

[14:46] Do you remember how poddocks was played? Given that it might be difficult to find this information out anywhere else?

Oh goodness me. Well, I just have the recollection that somebody threw a white ball at one, that the bat you held was like a rounders bat and the object was to hit it, of course, hit the ball as far as you could to give you time to run round the course. Now, in what respect it differed John Hedley Brooke Page 50 C1672/08 Track 4 from rounders I can’t exactly say, because I was never a connoisseur of rounders, to be truthful. But I do remember enjoying it and once or twice I made spectacular catches in the field, which brought a little glow to one’s self-esteem. But that’s really all, I mean I wouldn’t want to say that playing that game was a dominant part of my athletic activity, it’s really a footnote.

And on the summer camps, were they called house parties, by the way, in your memory, or referred to as camps?

I’m struggling to remember. I don’t think they were called house parties. I think they were more probably called camp, but I can’t be assured of that from my memory.

And was there any attempt to link up the outdoor physical activity and the Christian teaching, or were they separated in the course of these summer days in Anglesey?

That’s a very interesting question. To be truthful, if I have a recollection of that, it would be that I did not myself perceive a direct connection between the two, from which I infer that no direct connection was actually made. It was more, I think, that you were drawn to these camps on the understanding that it would be a good outdoor adventure week, but creating an evangelistic opportunity for the person who was leading the whole thing. So I was very conscious that that was happening and I can remember the little homilies we used to have in the evenings. About which, I have to say, even at that age, I was beginning to be a bit wary and critical, I could see exactly what was going on, and so even though I had some sympathy at that stage in my life, I was also in some kind of tension between thinking very critically about that kind of environment, but also wishing to be helpful and to please those who were organising events of that kind.

[18:24] Who was leading these camps? The same people involved in the local class?

No, I think it was… I can remember the name, it was a man called David Tryon – T-R-Y-O- N – [coughs] and I seem to recall that he had connections with the Reformed Church in South Africa. It was some kind of South African base from which he had come up, so I think we are talking about Dutch Reformed Calvinism mediated through South Africa. He was a very John Hedley Brooke Page 51 C1672/08 Track 4 talented speaker, very impressive man, and he led, I think – I don’t recall now whether I went twice or three times, it could even have been three – but I do remember him very clearly and I also remember the jam tarts on the particular day when the main party had gone up Snowdon and some of us stayed behind because we had a preference to do other games or other little adventures - there was always a menu of things you could do. But I think by my last year there I decided that the jam tart itself was worth staying behind for, [laughs] so that sticks in my mind, that sticks in my mind.

In what way was he an impressive man?

Physically impressive. I mean he was a fine figure of a man. Very commanding voice and presence. His messages were always, to my mind, simplistic, but he was speaking to boys who were a good deal younger than I was at that particular time.

Do you remember one of his messages, to give us a sense of the content of them, or the message or teaching, or I think you said – did you say – soundbite or titbits or something? What was he offering in terms of…

Oh, he would just take an everyday object like a penknife, or something of that kind, and talk about its design and its purpose and its function and then he would graduate from everyday objects to talking in that kind of language about whether there was a purpose for our lives and how we make sure we align ourselves with what that purpose might – I mean it was that sort of thing. Usually with, as you would expect, laced with biblical references. I just remember the penknife, I don’t remember any of the other objects that he wielded on these occasions.

[21:43] Were there any women involved? I know that it’s all boys sort of attending, he’s a male leader, but were there any women on the camp doing anything?

Isn’t it interesting that I can’t tell you, other than I do have the impression that there were ladies behind the scenes helping with the preparation of the food and ensuring that there was perhaps a nurse on the site if there were any problems of a health kind. But I don’t think we’re talking about many, it was a pretty male dominated excursion.

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Thank you. [22:35] Could we then go to where we were at the end last time, and that’s University of Cambridge, and could you, if that’s okay, first talk about the sort of intellectual content of your degree in the first year? We had last time your comments on your general experience of the academic environment, but what were you encountering in terms of your degree, the content of it?

The content of my degree was quite diverse in some respects. It was under the natural sciences umbrella, so I was technically studying the natural science Tripos, and at the end of one’s first year one took an examination called prelims. At the end of the second year you did Part 1 and then if you wished to go on to do research in the sciences then your third year would be a higher degree of concentration in one’s major subject, but we’ll come back to the significance of that later. The subjects I studied for Part 1 of the Tripos would certainly have been physics, I remember that very clearly, mathematics, chemistry, which of course was split between physical chemistry and organic, and organic chemistry. In my second year I added biochemistry to the list of subjects. Interestingly, absent from my choice was the history and philosophy of science, which I could have done, and several of my friends who were doing the natural sciences did elect to do that subject at Part 1. I came to it later. So, very clear recollections of the physics lectures, the chemistry lectures, the mathematics. I suppose one very significant thing that happened during my first year, always with chemistry in mind as my likely major, to use the American language. When I arrived, the chemistry tutor in Fitzwilliam College was a man called Dr Whitworth, I think he was JB Whitworth, who was an organic chemist. I scarcely, if ever, really got to know him, because he was taken ill very, very soon after I arrived, and it turned out to be a very serious illness and so he was never able to resume tuition in chemistry. Now, that was actually, though one hesitates to say it, a blessing in my case, and I think for a number of my contemporaries as well, for this reason that one had a choice in studying organic chemistry between doing classical organic synthesis, more sort of qualitative approach to the analysis of substances and why they reacted as they did and how you could make new things from them, and all those things that make chemistry exciting. But, the alternative was actually much more exciting and much more intellectually demanding, and that was studying organic reaction mechanisms, with a lecturer called Peter Sykes. Now, I don’t think he had a particularly senior position in the chemistry department in Cambridge, but he had written a little book, which was a kind of introduction to reaction mechanisms and understanding how electrons moved about when John Hedley Brooke Page 53 C1672/08 Track 4 you had two chemical substances brought into contact was very much the order of the game, in those days you drew little arrows showing how you got the electro-chemical neutralisation when the one reacted with the other. And he was a good lecturer in the sense that he imparted a lot of knowledge, most of it was in his book, so one could kind of swat that up afterwards. But if one were going on to do chemistry seriously, that choice of lectures by Sykes or lectures by somebody called Saunders, who was the other chemistry lecturer on offer to us in those early days, the choice was, I think, critical, because it was Sykes who was preparing you for the way the subject developed in its more theoretical dimensions. And I can remember after his lecture I always went back to the college, had a cup of coffee, read the appropriate bit out of his book to make sure I’d got everything straight. And although that sounds a little bit obsessive, perhaps, it is the case, I think, that when you have heard somebody speak on a topic you do remember it long afterwards rather more clearly than if you have only read it in a book, because you have a visual image of a human being in action. So that was a significant choice right at the very beginning of my Cambridge undergraduate career, and happily, I made the right one. But Whitworth, had he been my tutor for that year, would have steered me to the lectures by his mate, Dr Saunders. [29:15] So that’s a little bit on my induction into reaction mechanisms in organic chemistry. The maths and the physics I continued as I had done from school, but I always felt that my involvement in those subjects was more by way of necessity than by way of love, whereas I still got a kind of frisson from studying chemistry. It seemed to bring one face-to-face with the real world in a way that the abstractions of maths and physics didn’t always do. So that was good. And there was a nice little group of us used to carry out our experimental work in the Lensfield Road laboratories in Cambridge and I had a good relationship with that particular group. So the practical side of chemistry was also something that I found reasonably congenial and could cope with, though looking ahead from that point, I can also see that there would come a time, and quite soon, I mean by the end of my second year, when the thought of spending the rest of my life in a chemistry laboratory was not appetising and I was thinking about what alternative track might be open to me. [31:02] We had a very gifted lecturer in inorganic chemistry, Evelyn Ebsworth, who I think went to a Chair in Edinburgh after leaving Cambridge. He had a mishap while I was there, in the sense that he was helping a graduate student with some kind of experiment which wasn’t going especially well, and for whatever reason the experiment blew up and he had very, very John Hedley Brooke Page 54 C1672/08 Track 4 serious damage to his hand. I can’t even remember whether he might not even have lost his hand, but I remember there was a period of perhaps two or three weeks when he couldn’t lecture to us because he was basically off site recuperating. And I remember the day he came back, he was so much appreciated by the students that we all burst into applause, you know, it was one of those rather special days that you remember. I didn’t know him personally, it was the relationship of a lecturer who was rather far away from one’s own little world. But he was impressive as a teacher, and no doubt as a researcher as well. [32:25] I’m concentrating mainly on chemistry because my recollections of the physics and the maths, as I say, is that I was just doing routine stuff and coping pretty well. Biochemistry in my second year was challenging. It was exciting because we were still within, well, I suppose within ten years or so of the discovery of the structure of DNA, the Crick and Watson thing. So biochemistry in Cambridge was still buzzing and the reputation they had for that work was of course very high. And biochemistry lectures were at twelve o’clock on Saturday mornings and you jolly well had to get there early, it was one of the largest lecture theatres in the university, but if you were not there a good twenty minutes, fifteen minutes before the lecture began, you probably wouldn’t get a seat. And those lectures were quite various because the biochemists split their responsibilities between quite a number of them. So we would have technical biochemistry from some. We had one lecturer who came, I think, from Churchill College, and his name was Quillan or Quillian – Quillan, I think. And his lectures were interesting because he basically took the view that it wasn’t his job to teach us biochemistry, we could do that ourselves by reading books and making sure we carried out the experiments we were meant to do. He gave lectures on the history of biochemistry, and so he was talking about seventeenth century microscopy and things like that. Now, I suspect that was a bit naughty, I don’t think the idea was that he should have been doing that. But I think his approach was, let’s get these young guys really interested in the subject and teach them a bit about its history so that they can get their own work in perspective. And he made it interesting. I can still remember he lectured on the Dutch microscopist, Antonie von Leeuwenhoek [Antonie van Leeuwenhoek] who’s quite a famous name from late seventeenth century life science. So the biochemistry lectures were quite variegated in the sense that we had a mix of history and the technical stuff that we were doing on the particular cycles going on in the body, [eg] the Krebs cycle. We had a very standard biochemistry textbook from which we worked. I’m trying to remember, I think the author of that was, surname Baldwin, but I can’t remember the first name now. They were happy times, but there was the stress in John Hedley Brooke Page 55 C1672/08 Track 4 the sense that to be studying the natural sciences, particularly compressing your qualifications for an honours degree into two years, which you could do in Cambridge, it had become more or less the norm. But in the natural sciences you could take three years or two years to get your basic honours qualification. [If two, as in my case] in your third year you had a degree of freedom to experiment with other academic subjects if you wished to do so. And I did take advantage of that in my third year. I mentioned last time that at school I had encountered the subject of the history and philosophy of science and that it had pleased me because it was a subject where you could actually express yourself and explore arguments and not merely absorb facts. And I’m afraid for my first two years in Cambridge, the sciences were largely the assimilation of facts and techniques. There was very little opportunity in the context of science tutorials to actually construct an argument. And I realised that what I particularly enjoyed was examining the cogency of arguments. And I began to appreciate that one facet of a scientific education was deeply unsatisfying and it was simply that you were presented with a body of knowledge, body of scientific theory, and you could see how that body of theory was being invoked to explain various features of the empirical world that you were exploring. But I very often felt that I had never really grasped the fundamentals of the science because nobody – and I think there is no exception – none of my tutors, none of my lecturers, even at Cambridge, explained why it was that theory had been devised in the first place. What was it, what were its origins, why had it been accepted by the scientific community, why was it part of what we now call modern science? And the sense of science actually changing with time and the reasons for those changes, this was never explained or explored. And I think that’s one reason among several why by the end of my second year in Cambridge I was just feeling that there was somehow a black hole in my scientific knowledge and training. I can remember we had lectures on physical chemistry, theoretical physical chemistry in my second year from a Welshman, Professor Moelwyn- Hughes, that’s spelt rather difficultly, the ‘Moelwyn’ bit, I remember. And he just used to come in and write up immensely complicated equations for thermodynamics on the blackboard, which we would all dutifully write down. But it was just transmission of mathematical equations. There was no explanation of why we were doing it and when it came to the language of thermodynamics and theoretical concepts like entropy, which is always a puzzle to initiates, again, we were not told why we needed this thing called entropy, whatever it might be. So there was no serious engagement with the philosophy of science in ways that helped one to get a real grasp of what the science was all about. Now, a lot of people would probably disagree with that and say well, all you ever can do is just learn the John Hedley Brooke Page 56 C1672/08 Track 4 theories and make sure they’re sound and make sure in Popperian terms they are testable and in principle falsifiable, and that’s what it’s all about. But I just felt there had been something lacking in my own education. [41:28] And it was something I felt very keenly in the context of the cultural interpretation of science, because I was interested to read articles in the newspapers about new scientific discoveries, what kind of ethical issues they might be raising. And in my natural sciences training, certainly up to the end of my second year, questions of that kind were just nowhere to be seen. And I hope I’m not doing my tutors an injustice when I say that. One thing I’ve not clarified is that I did have two outstandingly good tutors in my college for chemistry, who pressed me and pushed me beyond where I really needed to be in order to qualify for the degree at the end of my second year, or rather qualify for what would eventually be the full qualification after my residence for a third year. Because given that Dr Whitworth disappeared and then died at the end of my first year there, the college had appointed two young, I guess they were research fellows. One was a man called Mike Blackburn and the other was Peter Padley. Padley was the physical chemist. Now, I’m trying to remember, I think Mike Blackburn was the inorganic chemist in the college. And they were brilliant teachers. I mean I would say that I had enormous respect for them in terms of getting me really up to speed on the standards required for a good chemistry degree. And I owe my success, really, at the end of my second year when I got a first class categorisation, I really owe that to them, because as I was hinting, they really took me beyond where I needed to be, which meant that in answering the Tripos questions in the exam papers, I could actually show that I had a kind of virtuosity, learnt from them of course, that I could display in taking some short cuts with some of the questions and using slightly more advanced language in talking about the theoretical chemistry we were discussing. So despite what I was saying about the absence of certain dimensions of analysis when it comes to doing science and talking about it, it is nevertheless the case that I experienced in the chemistry, particularly in the college context, teaching of a very high standard. Peter Padley eventually went to Swansea, I’m still in touch with him. Mike Blackburn I did lose touch with, I think he went to Sheffield and had a career in chemistry there from those Cambridge days. But I do think I was exceptionally fortunate.

[45:24] John Hedley Brooke Page 57 C1672/08 Track 4

Could you say, could you describe the physical work in chemistry and then biochemistry during Part 1, to give us a sense of the experience of the laboratory that you later had had enough of, you know. But can you give us a sense of what it consisted of? For those listeners who didn’t do science, don’t know what laboratory work is, for example.

Yes. It is interesting that as I reflect on that time in Cambridge, it is not the laboratory work that features most prominently in my memory, and I think this may be significant in the sense that much of the lab work was not the pursuit of original knowledge, but was the conducting of well-tried experiments to illustrate particular features of chemical theory or biochemical theory. So one was basically doing chemical techniques for evaluating the strength of particular solutions, exploring the different products from chemical reactions, how you analyse them, how you determine what’s in the mix. Experiments with pipettes where you suck up the liquid and transfer a specified amount into another. A lot of quantifiable work where you’re trying to determine the melting point of some substance, that kind of thing. In the biochemistry, which technically is a very complex subject when you’re dealing with processes actually going on in living systems, one would only be looking at some very small aspect of a particular problem and working through a laboratory manual, always with a demonstrator who would usually be a graduate student who would be coming around just to make sure that you were on the right track and actually obtaining some decent results. It was in the physics practicals that I think I had the most difficulty and I guess that’s because the application of mathematics to real physical problems is always more complicated than doing the mathematics in the abstract. And in some of the experimental work in physics I remember that occasionally I would get the wrong mathematical model to be testing, and somebody would come along and say, actually, you’ve overlooked Kirchhoff’s Laws and you need to look at this electrical circuit in a rather different way from the way… I had used a common sense view and common sense is a very bad guide in science, despite what some of its advocates will say. The world revealed by science is not the world of common sense in general terms. So I had my comeuppance occasionally in the physics practicals. But we would be dealing, as I say, with experiments with electricity, magnetic coils, various physical processes: freezing, boiling, all that kind of thing. And in the chemistry, most interesting was simply experiments designed to determine the structure of a particular compound, or from a reaction to determine what the product was, the product that was dominating the results you got from a reaction. And I could enjoy that because there was a kind of analytical satisfaction from engaging in what was essentially a detective exploit, you were trying to find out what John Hedley Brooke Page 58 C1672/08 Track 4 substance A was, and I could enjoy that kind of intellectual challenge. Very often the experiments in chemistry were such that we would do them as a particular group. You had a particular place in the laboratory and you were always with the same neighbours, as it were, and you would team up to go through a particular experiment. That could have the disadvantage that if you had a particularly, how shall we say, a particularly confident person in that group who might take upon himself to do most of the work and you could easily finish up as an observer if you were not careful. And I think it’s true to say that in the group I found myself in, there was one person rather like myself who was perhaps a little more reserved, he was probably the brightest of the group, and there was somebody else who was all show, but I think actually was not as talented. And if an experiment eventually went wrong, you could usually pin it down on the person who was so confident that he got it right. So that was an intriguing little aspect of the kind of sociology of the teaching laboratory. But, the relationship with, certainly one of the guys in that group, did continue for a while. And I think he eventually became Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University, Clive Booth, and I did meet him once or twice later in life. [52:30] The question which we may eventually come to, but I’ll just anticipate for a moment, because it’s kind of related here, is the question of who my contemporaries were in Cambridge and whose careers have become, in some cases, household names. For example, in my college, in Fitzwilliam, two of my contemporaries were Vince Cable and David Starkey, and they were both very interesting and colourful, even in those days. Starkey perhaps marginally more colourful. And I still remember, he was one year beneath me, and I remember his arrival in October, the beginning of my second year, and he was dining on a table one evening very close to where I happened to be, and I was rather intrigued by this person who was seemingly dominating the discussion, and I just overheard at one point his declaration that he was going to get a first class degree. And I think for some of us that seemed unusually self-confident at that early stage in one’s academic career. But of course he did and we all know and love him since then. So there were very interesting people contemporary with mine and I’ve seen them rise to all kinds of interesting positions, both within academe and within the more political and cultural life of the country. [I add here the name of David Atherton, an exact contemporary at Fitzwilliam, whose musicianship led to his being the youngest ever conductor to perform at the Royal Opera House].

Did you get to know David Starkey more as time went on? John Hedley Brooke Page 59 C1672/08 Track 4

A little more, yes. There was an obvious reason for that. He was reading history, as was another very colourful young man in the college, called Alfie May, from a very different kind of background. And because they were studying history and I knew the history research fellow in the college very well, who became an extremely good and supportive personal friend - perhaps we could say a world about that in a moment – but through the history connection when I then switched to history and philosophy of science, it meant there were contexts in addition just to chance encounters dining in the college when I got know David and this other guy, Alfie May, who was a great Wagnerian. He dragged me off to the Union one afternoon and insisted that I listen to act two of Tristan and Isolde, which I’d never heard before. And he was kind of conducting along with this score for an hour and fifteen minutes while I was soaking up the sound and wondering what it was all about. But yes, I did get to know other historians in the college, partly through that kind of link.

Especially in Part 2 then?

[55:54] Yes, that would be true and by then I had become very friendly with David Thompson, who had come from Queen’s College to take up a research fellowship in Fitzwilliam, and particularly in the context of the college chapel community I got to know David very well. For example, when the college organised a trip to the little monastic community in Taizé in France, which was just becoming quite influential on the religious map of Europe at the time, David was certainly in that party, I remember. And we used to discuss very deep philosophical theological questions, and I think I would say that I owed a lot to him, and to the senior tutor of Fitzwilliam College, who’d actually appointed me of course, originally, a very gracious and interesting man called Norman Walters – W-A-L-T-E-R-S. Huge man, I mean truly huge man. And we had a tragedy in the college because if it was not in my third year it was when I still have very close contacts with the college in the year following my departure, he died from a burst duodenal ulcer, I think, and somehow or other it was just impossible to save him, it was such a serious haemorrhaging. But he had been a tutor in English, particularly. But I remember, he used to attend the discussions on Sunday evenings after chapel when there was a small group of us explored what we thought were some of the leading intellectual issues of the day. And so it was in that kind of context that my friendship with David Thompson blossomed. And I think both he and Norman Walters, having John Hedley Brooke Page 60 C1672/08 Track 4 observed my contributions to those discussions, and I have to assume took kindly to them, I think they may have been instrumental in getting me a research fellowship during the last year of my postgraduate career at Cambridge. So we’re looking still two or three years ahead there. But those friendships were basic and I’m still in touch with David Thompson and his wife today. Sadly we don’t meet very often now because north Lancashire and Cambridge are not easily connected. In fact, that’s putting it mildly. Margaret, David’s wife, had parents who lived in Dalton-in-Furness, so there was a time when they used to come up to the north-west and we maintained friendly relationships. But I can remember when I gave my inaugural lecture in Oxford for the Idreos Chair, I was very anxious that David should be invited to that and he very kindly came. So I had a lot of support from excellent friends and, as I say, from chemistry tutors who were, I think, outstanding.

[1:00:16] Could you then tell me about the decision to study what you did study in Part 2 in your third year?

Yes. I think that I had considered what kind of career moves I might eventually make. During my second year, before I took my Tripos examinations, I guess I was thinking that the probability would be that I would finish up teaching chemistry in schools, and so I began to reflect on the relationship between what I was doing in the laboratory and what I would have to do if I were teaching the subject at school. And there was just something about that prospect that I didn’t feel was resonating with my soul. I mean that’s putting it in grandiose terms. And I remember just thinking that given that there would be the opportunity to launch into something new in my third year, I should consider what some of the options might be. Of the options there is no doubt history and philosophy of science was the one that kept returning to me as a live option, partly because there was a very good HPS department in Cambridge, partly because when I went into that department to discuss the possibility of taking what was actually called the “certificate in history and philosophy of science”,[I was positively encouraged]. It wasn’t yet a fully-fledged Part 2 of the natural sciences Tripos, but you could take this certificate in history and philosophy of science, And that combined with the degree I got, or the qualification from my Part 1 exams would then qualify me for an honours degree. The encouragement I had from Gerd Buchdahl, who’s a well-known Kant scholar; he encouraged me to think that it might be an interesting idea to shift my sights from the laboratory to the library, as it were. And that was helpful. In the event, I was fortunate to John Hedley Brooke Page 61 C1672/08 Track 4 get a first class degree categorisation from the sciences, at which point, I have to say, I was put under a lot of pressure within my college to continue, because I think I was one of very few undergraduates in the college at that time in its recent history who had actually managed to get a first, and so it was felt that I had exhibited an aptitude for future research in the subject. And I think there was some… trying to find the right word, consternation sounds too strong. But there was some disappointment, shall we say, that I was not going to continue taking chemistry at Part 2 when I had proved that I really was up to it. But I did have those very positive reasons for wishing to change, and I had happy memories of the discussions we’d had at school. I’d been continuing in my private reading to be looking at books on science, on religious faith, on philosophy. And the big questions that keep recurring in those domains were of genuine interest to me, I don’t think there is any doubt about that. I had also found my relations with students reading other disciplines in the college, such that I felt the arts and the humanities students were having a quality of life that I was not, in the sense that they seemed to have far more free time, lectures seemed to be voluntary. There was the essay every three days or so, but they seemed to take that in their stride. And they could talk about so many things that I couldn’t, and certainly that many of the other science students couldn’t talk about. And so I did have some concept in my mind of what it would be to be a more cultured person who could talk about science in relation to ethics, science in relation to music, science in relation to philosophy. These were beguiling questions, they kind of beckoned me away from the practice of science into the analysis of its wider cultural ramifications. That’s how I reconstruct it now and I think, I don’t think that does violence to how my mind was working during the end of that second year in Cambridge. I did take advice from the careers office, because I was thinking prospectively, and the careers office were the most sceptical about my switch. They basically said, you know, if you leave Cambridge with a first class degree in chemistry, the world is your oyster. As for this history and philosophy of science business, it doesn’t seem to us that it points in any particularly propitious direction. So I think I flummoxed them, I think they didn’t really know quite how to handle what I was up to. But, as I’ve said many times in my life, that decision, difficult though it was, because I realised I was taking a step that could possibly backfire on me, that step was probably the most liberating decision of any I have ever taken.

What was your parents’ view of that decision? Did you discuss it with them before you made it?

John Hedley Brooke Page 62 C1672/08 Track 4

I would have discussed it with them, for sure. And I think they felt it was most important that if I were to succeed, that I should be doing something that I really enjoyed. They were, as I’ve indicated before, in many ways they were model parents, I could never have wished for more support and very gentle, enthusiastic encouragement all along. They knew I’d studied the subject at school. I think they could see that if teaching might still be the main career prospect, there was no reason why I couldn’t still teach chemistry. And indeed, during my third year as I’m taking this certificate in HPS, I was still exploring the possibility of then going on to do my DipEd, I think it was called in those days, and proceeding to a teaching career. These things do run in families, don’t they? I mean the fact that both my mother and father were teachers, this was a world that I was familiar with. So I don’t think they, I don’t remember any resistance from them at all. They were delighted by my examination results at the end of my second year. My father told me that the day I informed them of the first, he’d gone around telling everybody that he was walking on air that day. And you remember things like that, of course. So I just felt I had been extraordinarily privileged. I’d worked very hard for it, there is no doubt. I can remember one vacation travelling [from] home back to Cambridge, after Christmas it was, and I was reading a chemistry textbook on the train, and it was one of these tin pot trains that stopped at every tree as it went across the land, and I overheard a couple of guys behind me kind of whispering one to the other, and I could see the pointing finger in the tone of his voice, that’s a first. As if the fact that I was working on the train in what was still the Christmas vacation indicated a dedication out of the ordinary. So I will say I did work extremely hard during those two years and continued to do so, of course.

[1:10:17] You talked about how you viewed the arts and humanities undergraduates in your college, their ability to talk about things that you could not and their apparent personal sort of intellectual freedom, but did you get any sense of how scientists were viewed, science undergraduates were viewed by those students?

What an interesting question. I don’t think I can truly say that I got a clear impression, because doubtless they would conceal any adverse views in my presence, because it’s not exactly a kind thing to deprecate a particular class of student in the college. I do just remember discussions over the breakfast table in lodgings in my very first year there. I was with a landlady on the edge of Cambridge, she had rooms for three or four of us and discussions over breakfast in the mornings just seemed so wide ranging. Probably I did get a John Hedley Brooke Page 63 C1672/08 Track 4 sense that they thought there was something a bit slavish about being an actual scientist, you know, you were expected to be there, you had to do this, this, this and that, that you didn’t really have much spare time after that. And they would be talking about the politics of the day. There was one guy in my digs who used to go off to London almost every day, to the theatre, and was discussing what he’d seen [at] Covent Garden. He had a great fondness for Fonteyn and Nureyev and whenever they were dancing he would try to get down there. I was just aware that there was a cultural world that some students seemed able to avail themselves of that I had not yet exposed myself to as fully as I might.

[1:12:45] And when you said that – I know it was just a sort of phrase, moving from the laboratory to the library - but to what extent did the environment of work play into the decision to change?

[pause] I think possibly one respect in which it might just have done, well perhaps two respects, because I’ve already hinted that there was something about a chemical laboratory that made me feel that was not where I wished to spend the rest of my life. Now, what that was precisely, I mean other than foul smells and dangerous chemicals and things of that kind, I’m not quite sure. On the more positive side, during my second year in Cambridge, I was accommodated by Westminster College, which was a Presbyterian Church of England training college, and I was put in there simply out of expediency because the landlady with whom I’d spent my first year suddenly announced that she was not going to take any more undergraduates. We must have been too big a handful for her, I think. And that meant the college placed me in one of the theological colleges, because Fitzwilliam acted as the kind of administrative hub for the theological colleges in Cambridge, they were all affiliated with Fitzwilliam. And Westminster College was a very small college, but I had a very large room there. The library in the college was a very pleasant place in which to work, and I was aware of that. There was a chapel and an organ in the chapel. Now, that’s important, because when I was revising for my Part 1 Tripos exams and my brain was overheating as I was cramming in as much chemistry and physics and biochemistry as I could, my relief came from playing the organ in the college chapel and making, I’m quite sure, a horrendous noise, but thinking that I was sounding impressive. But there was just something about letting off this pent-up energy, which meant that my whole sense of identification with a college where there was a nice library, where there was a chapel, where there was exceptionally good food, that was a very nice perk of living there. And I had two years there in fact before I finished John Hedley Brooke Page 64 C1672/08 Track 4 my undergraduate time and had to go elsewhere. But, I think what it means is that I was aware that one could have a very comfortable existence working on a historical and philosophical subject in a library that was very pleasant, very quiet, very peaceful, in which to study. [1:16:25] And one could have retreated from the world if one had wished to do so. I didn’t, I mean I was enjoying the social life of the HPS department. Very nice group of people with, again, with whom I’ve stayed mainly in touch over the years. Several of them went on to get posts in America and elsewhere. So, there was, I won’t say there was a strong magnetic pull from the library – sorry – to the library from the laboratory, but I was aware that there wasn’t any particular deterrent to making that move. And then I was exceptionally fortunate in that the tutors I had in the history and philosophy of science section were all extremely conscientious, interesting, eccentric in their different ways, and very supportive. And so that, my third year as an undergraduate, turned out to be extremely stimulating.

[1:17:46] Could you tell me then about the lecturers, the lectures, the tutors and the tutorials?

Yes. The person who gave me the most personal encouragement to consider a career in the history and philosophy of science was Michael Hoskin, who is still alive, and he is a historian of astronomy and he taught some general lectures on the history of science, but he also taught a special subject on the science and philosophy of Descartes. And he was just a very good teacher. When I got my report from the first term of taking that HPS course, it was his report that I most remember when my personal tutor in college read it out to me, and I think Michael had said something like, an excellent term’s work, I hope John will consider becoming a professional historian of science. And that was on the strength, basically, of an acquaintance of ten weeks, something like that. But I do remember one of the essays that he set us to write on was on the development of the mechanical philosophy of nature in the seventeenth century, for which Descartes is an absolutely central figure. And I had read in one of the textbooks we were using, insofar as you have textbooks in HPS, I’d seen a footnote reference to a very, very long article, the title of which was The Development of the Mechanical Philosophy, something to that effect. And it turned out to have been a, when I tracked it down in the university library, it turned out to have been a doctoral thesis that was then published as a big long journal article. So I thought, well, if I’m going to write an essay John Hedley Brooke Page 65 C1672/08 Track 4 on this topic I should immerse myself in this. Well, that was probably the best thing I did, because it meant when in my essay for Michael I showed that I had been reading the latest doctoral thesis on the topic, I think he was quite struck by that. But honestly, it shows you how one’s life rests on extraordinary trivial and contingent matters, because if I had not spotted that footnote in what I was reading and followed it up, then that particular way of creating an impression would not have been there, and one just has so many examples of that. I probably mentioned last time how my physics teacher at school had gone through the physics of the hovercraft and there it was as the first question on my Cambridge entrance exam paper. So these coincidences are unnerving in the degree of contingency that they involve. So that was Michael Hoskin, we studied Descartes, he made sure we read some primary sources. Actually, I do remember then, that year, putting my knowledge, such as it was, very limited knowledge, of French to use because one of the standard textbooks on Descartes was by a Frenchman, Paul Mouy, and we had that as one of our set texts. I don’t think we were under obligation to read it, but I decided this would be interesting to look at. The Development of the Cartesian Philosophy was the title when translated into English. So I was all the time stretching myself in directions that were challenging but rewarding in their different ways. Michael Hoskin also taught us the history of astronomy of course, which was his speciality. And so I remember that we did work on William Herschel, John Herschel, nineteenth century nebula theories. And that was all very good solid training in the history of science. [1:22:56] We had lectures from Gerd Buchdahl, who I mentioned earlier as the person who had initially encouraged me to take the course. He was a Kant specialist, as I mentioned, but very, very interesting on issues in the philosophy of science. I won’t say he was the most organised of lecturers, and his teaching operated at a level that not everybody found suitably accommodating in the sense that what really excited him were the nuances in how Kant scholarship had gone. So he taught a special paper on Kant’s philosophy, which I didn’t actually take as one of my chosen papers, but I occasionally went along to hear him talk about Kant. And those sessions were extremely interesting and very, very long. And I may have mentioned this last time, because I’ve spoken to somebody about this, but what I most remember was one session on Kant on a blisteringly hot summer afternoon when the room was getting really stuffy, and we’d been listening to what were essentially Kantian footnotes for three hours. And one guy stood up and dashed across to open a window, because really it was becoming insufferable. And Buchdahl’s reaction was, “stop him somebody, he’s going John Hedley Brooke Page 66 C1672/08 Track 4 to throw himself out!” And I think that impression of the possible implications of teaching Immanuel Kant stayed with me for quite a long time afterwards. Gerd was a bit of an eccentric. We had the science, the History of Science Museum on Free School Lane where the department was based, and occasionally you’d see him come in carrying the most peculiar bits of scientific apparatus from the past. I remember one day he brought in something that looked like a kind of mammoth octopus with tubes and electrical cables and things sprouting in all directions. And all of us in the room just looked at each other in astonishment as he brought this thing in. He gave a lecture once, I remember, on philosophy of science which began with his coming into the room wielding a copy of Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, which had just been shown on television as a series. And something had clearly angered Buchdahl in what Bronowski had said, he’d made some remark that was clearly not to be tolerated. So the lecture began, Buchdahl waving this book, ‘How dare this man, how dare this man…’ and then, you know, he would explain what his crime had been and the lecture then kind of took off from that. But it just gives you an idea of an exposure to a culture of debate which I had found lacking as a science student, but which took many diverse forms during that year of studying the history and philosophy of science. [1:26:44] So we’ve mentioned Michael Buchdahl – sorry – Gerd Buchdahl, and we’ve mentioned Michael Hoskin. The other senior person in the department who was eventually my doctoral supervisor, was Mary Hesse – H-E-double S-E. She was a very bright philosopher of science. She’d recently published a small book called Models and Analogies in Science, but on the topic of the ontological status of scientific concepts and theories, that book was seminal, it was quoted as a little classic by almost anybody who wrote on models, scientific models and what their epistemic pretensions were. Now, in fairness I should say that she was a conscientious lecturer. Again, not a charismatic lecturer and I think some students found her just a little bit distant, but in terms of academic prowess, she was the leading figure in the department at that time. She got a Chair, I think, before others. Buchdahl got a Readership eventually when his big book on Kant and metaphysics was published. Mary was just a very gentle, very gracious understanding person who did her very best to help everybody succeed in what they were doing. There’s a fourth figure in the department at that time whose time in the department was rather chequered. His name was Bob Young, Robert Young, who held a post that the department had at its disposal, which was a five-year junior lectureship, but it was a time restricted post. And Bob must have arrived, I think he must have arrived during my year taking that course, because I went to some of his lectures too. And he was a John Hedley Brooke Page 67 C1672/08 Track 4 specialist on Victorian science and culture, but what was really interesting about Bob and provocative, controversial to the extent that it did, I think, cause difficulties in his personal relations with other members of the faculty, though I’ve never known the inside story, whatever it may have been, but his approach to the history of science was very, very different from what had been, I guess, the cultural norm ever since the subject became significant in the 1920s and thereafter. Because Bob was a quasi-Marxist. I don’t know whether, I mean I don’t know how he would have described himself, but his approach to the history of science was you need to look at the social, the economic, the political context of science, you can’t just treat it as an autonomous activity floating above whatever else is going on in society. And particularly, I think, he found when you studied Victorian scientific culture, it was absolutely critical to look at the social, the religious, the political context. And because Darwin was one of his subjects of study, that of course was a very powerful message to get across. He put on a special subject for historians as well as students taking the HPS course, and I think that must have gone on during my subsequent three years as a postgraduate in the department. But this was a hugely demanding, but extremely exciting course where those who took it were up, I mean we were invited to read colossal numbers of Victorian primary sources. His reading lists were, well, in a sense they were too idealistic because there was no way anybody would have had time to go through them all. I was not, because I was then doing postgraduate work, I was not actually engaged in that course in terms of being assessed on it, but I went to his lectures because I could just see that he was doing something different, and something very difficult, I mean I have to say. But it brought the history of science and, shall we say, real history a little bit closer together, because one had to know what Malthus was talking about in order to know why Darwin read him and why that then became a crucial moment in the development of Darwin’s concept of natural selection. In other words, Bob was making all kinds of links between the political contexts of the day. He had very interesting research papers on a subject which had been of interest to me for some time, which was what we call natural theology, the attempt to construct some kind of knowledge of the existence and attributes of the deity from the use of natural reason alone. And that natural theology was still very prominent as a part of, certainly for the first half of the nineteenth century, but well into the second half of the nineteenth century too, famously represented by William Paley in his text Natural Theology of 1802. And Bob gave some very, very interesting lectures on what he saw as continuity between that natural theology, which had been part of the culture of Anglophonic science for a long time, from the mid seventeenth century. And the relationship between that natural theology and the continuity with what John Hedley Brooke Page 68 C1672/08 Track 4

Darwin, Huxley and others were doing in the post-Darwinian debates. And Bob really went out on a bit of a limb there, and whereas the standard view was and still is, in many ways, that Darwin’s science delivers a death blow to that kind of argumentation from nature to nature’s God, Bob was able to argue that not only had natural theology supplied a common context for much of the scientific work that was done in the nineteenth century, but that much of its political and ethical significance carried over to later intellectual discourse, despite Darwin, or even because of Darwin and Huxley. [1:35:27] And it still remains a controversial thesis. It went against one of the other giants of nineteenth century cultural history, Frank Turner of Yale, who sadly died three or four years ago. But Frank had argued for the more or less traditional view, but gave it a lot of new supporting evidence that natural theology had been part of the culture of amateur science, but when science became fully professional, at least in the second half of the nineteenth century, natural theology really was eclipsed and the Darwin theory was an instrument of that eclipse. So, the gist of what I’m saying is that my own interest in Darwin, the theological significance of the Darwinian revolution, my, what had in many ways been an independent interest in that, was succoured, it was nurtured by virtue of suddenly confronting a huge conspectus of literature that I would need to study if I really wished to be an expert on these things. In other words, I saw that there were amazingly interesting points of contact between scientific innovation and religious belief. But that from what I was reading in the kind of standard popular stuff there was a depth to what was required if you were going to do significant academic work in that science-religion area. It’s not something you could just do off the top of your head, which sadly many people still think you can. [1:37:46] So, those were the four people with whom I had the closest contact in Cambridge. Gerd Buchdahl, Michael Hoskin, Mary Hesse, Bob Young. A friend, well, who became a friend, joined the department during my postgraduate career there, Martin Rudwick, who’s probably the most illustrious historian of geology in the world, in fact I would say that he is. I mean he’s just an outstanding figure, who’d had a background in geology, and I’ve always been an admirer of him, and he went out eventually to help set up a new department in the history of science at University of California, San Diego. But Martin and I, we don’t meet very often these days, but he’s still very productive and still writing books that win prizes. That did actually, his appointment did create a diplomatic problem within the department because Bob Young’s five years in that limited post that I referred to earlier were coming to an end and it’s John Hedley Brooke Page 69 C1672/08 Track 4 an open secret that he had also applied for the job, thinking that he’d done enough, which assuredly he had, but then Oxbridge posts are hyper-competitive and out of the blue Martin decided to leave the practice of geology to become a professional historian of geology, and he was preferred over Bob I think simply because he had the distinguished background of a geologist, which meant that he brought to the history of science impeccable scientific credentials. And of course, these appointments are not just made by the inner circle of colleagues within a group like the history and philosophy of science, they involve other senior figures in the university and I can just imagine, had I been a fly on the wall, what I might have witnessed in that discussion. But I’m happy to report that Bob and Martin became very good friends and I don’t know whether they’re still in touch, but that was just a little hiccup in the smooth diplomatic relations within the faculty while I was there.

[1:40:50] How was the experience sociologically different? You spoke a little bit about the sociology of the laboratory earlier and the small group of peers who tended to work together, a dominant individual. I sensed that there was a predominance of male undergraduates in chemistry, and I don’t know if this is going to be different when you move to history and philosophy of science, but how was the group of people studying the history and philosophy of science different from those you had worked with in science?

Strangely, I’m remembering only men, still, in that HPS group. There were female students taking the history and philosophy of science, I just don’t remember them being part of that little group of probably no more than seven or eight of us that year. Certainly the ones I kept in touch with afterwards and who’ve had careers in the subject were all male. I think we were all undergraduates who had been taking the natural science Tripos, so to that extent we were still part of a common local culture. The teaching, because it was Cambridge, was usually still tutorials, perhaps two of us at a time. And that’s all it ever was in the context of college tuition for our time as first and second year undergraduates. So in terms of the sociology, the construction, the architecture of the teaching was still very similar. One prepared a piece of work, that work was discussed in a tutorial. I would say in retrospect that there was a mode of teaching there which I know is the sort of classic Oxbridge mode, where the student would read the essay out in the tutorial. Now, we did do that in that HPS course. I don’t remember reading out written work for the chemistry or the physics or the maths. We submitted our work for assessment and critical feedback. I can remember in my very first John Hedley Brooke Page 70 C1672/08 Track 4 year we had had a Hungarian mathematician who, gosh, I can even remember his name – Zamadits was his surname. And so there was that kind of feedback arrangement and that’s what was dominating the third year in history and philosophy of science. What I was going to say was, thinking back over that style of teaching, I think it was very, very easy for the tutors in the sense that you didn’t have to plan a one-hour session scrupulously mapping out all the issues that you felt should be discussed. I mean you sat back and you listened to somebody read the lecture and – sorry – the essay that they’d done and if you made a few intelligent comments at the end, that was, you know, more or less the end of the afternoon, if there were two of you who had to do that. When challenged about that, I once heard the response that it’s very good to get people to read their essays out in a tutorial because it helps them to see what lousy English they’ve written. And there is some truth in that, I wouldn’t deny that can be useful. So, I think all I’m saying here is that I was obviously no longer meeting people in a laboratory context, but I was still meeting natural scientists in small groups for the discussion of essays and the discussion of problems. It was a more seminar oriented situation than I think we’d had in the sciences. One other feature was that there were visiting speakers. Every week there was a seminar in the HPS in the Whipple Science Museum where we met. I’ve occasionally referred to it as the HPS department, I shouldn’t really, because it was not technically an independent department in the university, it was very much a sub-section of the philosophy, the moral sciences faculty. But there were visiting speakers, Thursday afternoons, regularly. And one was encouraged to go to those. So you were exposed to visiting speakers, many of whom were very distinguished in their field. [1:46:38] I think that’s probably the gist of that. I have failed to refer to the tutor I had in that year who could very well have become my doctoral supervisor, had it not been for another highly contingent circumstance. The tutor I’m referring to was an Indian gentleman called Satish Kapoor, who was a historian of chemistry and therefore in a sense with whom I had the closest dealings through my science background. Kapoor was also, I have to say, a very brilliant teacher. He would lecture for an hour without a note. It was all bright, lively, sparky stuff. It was a special subject we did with him on nineteenth century organic chemistry, particularly French chemists, who did then become the main subject for my doctoral thesis. But there was a big discussion, of which I was privy to only a part, within the department about what was going to be in my best interests, because Kapoor was there in the department, I think possibly deputising for somebody or brought in on an ad hoc basis, and towards the end of that year it became known that he was moving to a post at the University of Sussex. John Hedley Brooke Page 71 C1672/08 Track 4

And so the big question was, given that my doctoral topic was likely to be in the history of chemistry, should I not go with him to Sussex and remain with the person who had the real expertise. I was not averse to that, but Mary Hesse, Bob Young, possibly Michael Hoskin as well, gave the matter some thought more than I had known, I think, and pointed out that Kapoor was going to Sussex, but to another temporary position and therefore there was no telling where he would be in three years’ time. Secondly, and this was the point that was really stressed to me, that it would be in my best long term interests to have a Cambridge doctorate than a doctorate from the University of Sussex. Now, that was a local view, of course, and I don’t know to this day whether that would necessarily have been the case, but certainly a Cambridge doctorate has never been a handicap to me. And so even though there was nobody in my first year of graduate study who was a real expert on the history of chemistry, Mary Hesse freely acknowledged that as my supervisor she would be fulfilling a sort of Socratic role rather than putting me on to the latest chemistry or history of chemistry literature. So even though I would have that disadvantage I was told in no uncertain terms that I should remain in Cambridge. Now, one of my colleagues doing that course in that year, and also a man from Fitzwilliam College, John Perkins, he went with Kapoor to Sussex, because he thought very highly of him, and quite rightly, I mean he was an exceptional figure. But what had been predicted of him turned out to be the case and within a couple of years at most, he went off to the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and John, I think, followed him there. So it would have been a very different experience as a doctoral student from the one I was privileged to have in Cambridge. The fact that Mary Hesse, for all her many, many strengths, had not got a real expertise in the history of chemistry, turned out to be of very little importance. That was partly because she was excellent as a Socratic supervisor, but she was also supervising a historian of chemistry at Churchill College, called Arnold Thackray. And Arnold was doing a doctoral thesis on John Dalton, the atomic theory man. Arnold was also beginning to realise that serious history of science was taking a new turn. He had a very keen sense that the kind of work that Bob Young was doing on the social context of science was going to be a way in which the subject could really develop in the future, instead of just being, which it very often was, a very internalist account of how one theory had succeeded another, had succeeded another till oh boy, we’ve got the truth at last. You know, that kind of Whiggish, triumphalist, linear understanding of how science has developed, which sadly is still extant in the world. But for Bob Young and for Arnold Thackray they were extinct and should be made extinct, because this notion that science has a complete autonomy of its own without being shaped by social and cultural priorities of one John Hedley Brooke Page 72 C1672/08 Track 4 kind or another is actually a serious misrepresentation of how science actually operates. So, Arnold Thackray was getting really interested in the social history of science and not simply the internal development of atomic theories. And I think there was a rather interesting dialectic between Mary Hesse and Arnold Thackray, in that Mary as primarily a philosopher of science probably belonged more to the older school than Arnold who was breaking out of that, and I think they had some very, very interesting discussions. And as a matter of fact, the big book that Mary Hesse eventually wrote on the philosophy of science, called The Structure of Scientific Inference, became a very powerful instrument in the work of the most radical social historians of science, the famous Edinburgh ‘strong programme’ school, those who were analysing the social interests that fed into particular scientific projects and priorities. So there’s that very interesting aspect of Mary Hesse’s work that from having a more conservative background her own work in the philosophy of science eventually gave succour, gave support to that very radical strong programme, David Bloor particularly – who was actually one of my tutors in that HPS year. He gave us a course on philosophy, we did Hume with him, I remember. And he was very good, very careful scholar. And then he went to Edinburgh, became part of that Edinburgh school in the sociology of scientific knowledge. So, where were we?

[1:55:55] Before we… well obviously we’ll be moving on to your PhD, but before we do, could I ask you to talk about the development of your Christian belief at the University of Cambridge and particularly your explorations of different kinds of theology? Because we left you last time, you’d just arrived at Cambridge and you’d joined the Christian Union and you had mentioned, but not said anything much more than that you were reading both liberal kinds of Christian theology and more evangelical accounts, and we left you considering these. But it would be nice to have some sense of where your thinking on this led throughout your degree, so by the time you start your PhD we have some sense of where you’ve got to personally in your understanding of, thoughts about Christianity.

Yes. I mean it is true that I did experience what I think many who come to theology from an evangelical background experience, which is some tension between the certainties, shall we say, of a simple biblical faith, probably underwritten by some knowledge of reformation theology, Calvinism in most cases, I guess. I think it’s not uncommon to experience a tension between that and more liberal theologies, which, for example are more critical of John Hedley Brooke Page 73 C1672/08 Track 4 substitutionary theories of the atonement, more critical of the whole style of relating to other people, because I certainly did feel within the evangelical culture of which I had been part that there was this pressure, sometimes felt quite urgently, to be presenting an image to the world which would help people to think that Christians do have a happier, more satisfied, more fulfilled life, and that there is a very particular reason for that, which is a sense of some kind of personal relationship with the transcendent, whether one says in the person of Christ or whether it’s in the context of prayer to a supreme deity. And what was happening, I think, during my time living in Westminster College, in my second and third years as an undergraduate, I was participating in theological discussion all the time with, as I mentioned, people studying for the Presbyterian Church of England ministry, but who were at the same time very earnest in their scholarship and they were reading books and we were talking about them. I don’t know whether I mentioned last time that one friendship I made when living in Westminster College was with a Yugoslav reformed Calvinist minister and he and I became very friendly, although he was twenty years older than me, and he invited me back to his own country and I had two visits actually, very interesting time spent there and was asked to preach to his congregation while I was there. But with him I used to have very earnest discussions about Calvinist theology in particular, and it was probably, it was probably in that time or shortly afterwards that I started studying Calvinism in a little bit more seriously academic format. One book that I enjoyed very much, and I think really did influence the topics I eventually became involved with, was a book by John Dillenberger, called Protestant Thought and Natural Science. And I think after I’d read that book I worked through some of the footnote references and there was a book by Edward Dowey called The Knowledge of God in Calvin’s Theology, which is a hugely impressive, very systematic discussion of all the different levels that you have to invoke when trying to understand and expound what Calvin was teaching. So, in that period prior to moving into postgraduate work, I was still doing quite serious theological reading, exploring both the roots of the evangelical tradition in which I had found myself, but at the same time reading books that were definitely of a more liberal persuasion. So, for example, it would have been, I’m pretty sure, during my undergraduate years that John Robinson’s book, Honest to God was published and caused a furore within the Church. And he was giving a kind of popular version of Bonhoeffer, Bultmann and Tillich, arguing that a modern scientific world view just meant that one could no longer accept, certainly accept literally the traditional metaphors for discussing God’s relationship to the world. I actually found that book interesting and challenging and it reinforced a growing sense I had that one could be a very upright, honest Christian scholar John Hedley Brooke Page 74 C1672/08 Track 4 even after abandoning the more stringent evangelical position. Now, some people in that situation just eject everything and I know many who have done that, I mean they just take the view that they have been subject to a kind of brainwashing, some kind of delusion and never again do they become involved in religious activity or belief. Sometimes they do come back to it, I guess. In my case it was never such a dramatic renunciation, it was a very gradual liberalisation of my theology through reading books that I felt I could respect because of their academic integrity. And in that transition I was actually helped by reading some of the theologian, Karl Barth, who belongs to that same reformed tradition that I had belonged to, was famous for being deeply critical of a natural theology, deeply critical of trying to argue on the basis of reason alone to God’s attributes. Barth places tremendous emphasis on the grace of God as the ultimate cause of everything in terms of redemption in the world. And because Barth had a more interesting take on the authority of scripture than just a straightforward literalism, which is what I’d been exposed to, I found his writing very energising and interesting. I read some of Tillich, not much of Bultmann. I certainly read some of Bonhoeffer, some of Gerhard Ebeling. So I had my own little library of theological books that I picked up from conference bookstalls, church bookstalls, that kind of thing. But it was a constant process of determining what I could in good conscience still believe as proto-intellectual thinking about these very big questions, about whether it makes sense at all to talk about God interacting with the natural world. And that was the big question that I think because of my science background and theological interest it was a question I kept coming back to and it’s a question about does the natural world have complete autonomy or is it in some sense sustained by and/or open to external divine influence of some kind. And if so, how does that work, where is the causal joint, to use, I think, Austin Farrer’s famous phrase. I do remember thinking very seriously, I won’t say with the depth that is necessary, but thinking very seriously about how to articulate that problem and how it might be answered. [2:07:50] And it was very interesting to me, because thirty years later I was kindly invited to participate in an annual consultation in Princeton at the Center for Theological Inquiry there, which involved some very interesting and famous names. John Polkinghorne was part of that, Ernan McMullin, the Catholic philosopher of science was there, Wentzel van Huyssteen who became Professor of Science and Religion at the Center for Theological Inquiry there [more correctly: at the Princeton Theological Seminary]. It was a very, very lively and academically interesting experience. But the questions that I had been wrestling with as an John Hedley Brooke Page 75 C1672/08 Track 4 undergraduate were still the very ones that were animating that particular discussion group. How does it makes sense, if at all, to speak of a divine being interacting with the world? And it’s continued to vex a lot of people, I think that topic is one of the recurrent ones on any science and religion agenda. [pause] I think, Paul, I need two or three minutes just to recover. [end of track 4] John Hedley Brooke Page 76 C1672/08 Track 5

[Track 5]

What was the effect on what we’ll refer to as your Christian faith of these changes in your outlook on Christian theology of different kinds?

Most of the liberal theology that I was reading was still very Christo-centric in its construction and orientation. I think what I found, reading the more liberal theological texts, was a much greater degree of theological imagination and inventiveness than I was reading in the evangelical materials that I had on my bookshelves. I began to see that one could use scripture, for example, much more creatively if one really thought about allegorical meanings, symbolic meanings, typological meanings, than just trying to get a straight message from a literal text. The question of how deep was my Christian faith at about the time I finished my undergraduate studies is quite difficult to recapture. Certainly I would have said at that time that I felt in close but critical contact with an evangelical Christian community. And indeed, in my first two years, or perhaps, no, perhaps it was my second and third year as a graduate student [actually it was first and second], I lived in Tyndale House in Cambridge where other residents, certainly for the most part, had evangelical convictions and where I could use the library for my own private theological explorations. But at the same time I was aware, as I say, of a kind of literature which still seemed to me deeply Christian, but without sharing the same rather straightjacketed views about where religious authority was actually grounded. And I’ve sometimes said that articulating what one actually means by faith is quite difficult. I mean there’s the old joke that it’s believing something that you know is not true, and certainly I would not have said that about my faith at that time. But I do think there is a kind of subtle position where there are times in life where you look for guiding principles and you accept such principles, shall we say, on trust as if they might be ultimately true, but without being able to verify definitively that they are. And I think I would say about that time in Cambridge, there was something of that ‘as if’ beginning to play a part in my life, because I was becoming increasingly critical of what seemed to me sometimes a rather facile self-confidence among some of my evangelical friends about what they believed or did not believe. One or two of them had crises of faith and simply ejected everything. Because my movement towards a more liberal theology was so gradual, I didn’t experience that kind of sudden hiatus between having been utterly convinced in my Christian faith and then believing nothing, that was not how it was with me. I think I did believe, and I remember having discussions about this, that if you based your life on the faith that John Hedley Brooke Page 77 C1672/08 Track 5 something might be true even though you could not absolutely validate it, that there was a sense in which that belief became, or could become true for oneself if one found that leading one’s life according to those precepts were very fulfilling and very satisfying, so that one could say to oneself, I aspire to be a better Christian in my life, even knowing that my faith might be resting on a series of beliefs which may not be true. And I think I would say that at that time in my life I was experiencing something of that feedback. It seemed to me that living a life aspiring to lead a better life as a Christian, trying to be courteous and responsible in every way, was actually proving personally very, very rewarding. And I think in the sense that I had a feeling that my contemporaries, male or female, were responding to something in me which I couldn’t claim for myself, but which seemed to them, I guess, to indicate that I was deeply affected by the beliefs that I had. But as I say, I was also deeply conscious that these were beliefs that I could not in all honesty say that I espoused with a hundred per cent conviction that those beliefs were sound or should necessarily be transmitted to other people. And as I say, or hinted at before, it did worry me about some of the kind of self-consciously evangelising techniques that I saw at work among Christian evangelicals. And there’s a sense in which I thought that it could be, I suppose, a case of taking great liberties with other people’s lives to try to impose one’s own particular beliefs on somebody else, especially when those beliefs were held in faith in the sense in which I’ve articulated it. So I don’t know whether that helps at all. It may be the raving, the retrospective ravings of somebody who now feels uncomfortable at having once been so closely identified with an evangelical group. But I think it’s an honest statement of how I remained part of an evangelical community when I was living in Tyndale House and how my worshipping life, if one could use that phrase, that certainly belonged more to my college chapel, which was socially rewarding, not least, and I’ll be a hundred per cent honest, we shared the chapel in Fitzwilliam College with the ladies of New Hall next door and I had some very good lady friends. No lady friend in the strong sense of what that might mean, but I had some very good friendships with women next door in New Hall. I used to actually organise quite a lot of social events which drew on that chapel community in the college. Every year I used to organise a trip to Ely on the river by hiring a big boat from Banham’s Boatyard, and you could hire it for the day and if you got enough people to go to Ely, which was the destination, you could cover the cost and it made for a very jolly time. Unless you left somebody behind, as we once did.

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[10:21] So I had a real core of good friends in the college, and that became, in the Christian community in the college, I did see the warmth and a degree of appreciation in that context when I was quite seriously ill for a while during my postgraduate years. I had a vicious attack of something called pericarditis which cows get when they swallow umbrellas. It’s a piercing of the pericardium around the heart and inflammation and I had these violent chest pains and of course I was mystified as to what it was, I didn’t think it was a heart attack, I seemed to be a bit too young for that. Anyway, it turned out to be pericarditis and I was whisked off into hospital at high speed and told to rest for, well, probably best part of two weeks, which is all you can really do. The danger is that the heart gets stuck to the pericardium and it restricts its beat. The purpose of telling this story is not to mourn my misfortune, but rather the contrary. But that college Christian community was wonderful during the time I was ill. All my lady friends came to see me [laughs] in bed. I think my parents were actually astonished, they showed up one day, coming to find out what great misfortune had befallen me, and there they found me surrounded by women [laughs] and in very good spirits, unsurprisingly. So there were social contacts, particularly also friends with some of the women perhaps more than the men, with my common interest in music that I had with some of them. That’s a topic we’ve not discussed at all today, but I indicated last time was a very important part of my life, and I became the local organiser of a youth and music group which enabled me to secure highly subsidised tickets for both English National Opera and for Covent Garden, ballet and opera, and I used to organise group trips to London from Cambridge where we would go with a party of seven or eight of us and sit in some very good seats in the amphitheatre at Covent Garden, sometimes in the stalls at ENO. So I had a very, very rich social life, very full and very satisfying. [13:30] And I at the time certainly regarded it as not unrelated to the particular outlook I had on the world, which was still seriously informed by a Christian background. But as I say, articulating what one means by a personal faith isn’t a straightforward matter. And if I had been pressed very hard at the time, I think I would have found it quite difficult to articulate a string of propositions to which I assented, or indeed, could have articulated very clearly how I saw any relationship I might have thought I had had with some transcendent power. I did think very deeply during those years about what kind of sense it made to talk about an interaction between a deity and the world we inhabit, what kind of paradoxes and dilemmas even raising that question actually generates, and it’s a topic which still energises a lot of the John Hedley Brooke Page 79 C1672/08 Track 5 discussion in science and religion territory. So I think this is presenting a view where I would certainly still have said very clearly that I identified myself with a Christian understanding of the world, but that it was not an understanding that any longer was exclusively based on the evangelical theology to which I had been exposed. It had been enriched both socially and intellectually from the more liberal theology that I had been reading, but in ways that I found stimulating rather than destructive of faith. Stimulating because I was seeing the very clever way in which the best serious theologians could give an exegesis of a biblical text and for it to mean something much deeper existentially than just its surface meaning. And I think that’s what still intrigued me about reading theology books, it was looking for that more sophisticated insight, that nuance, that openness to reinterpreting the faith, which I didn’t find in conservative evangelical circles.

[16:52] How did behaving as if there was a Christian God affect what you did do and what you didn’t do in terms of your own conduct?

Well, I think that insofar as I had a moral code that was informed or reinforced by the faith that I had held, I would say that living the as if – and I wouldn’t wish to say that I lived exclusively on an as if ticket, because that can make it sound as if [laughs] – there we go [laughs] – it can make it sound as if this is some kind of game you’re playing and it wasn’t like that at all. I think there was still a very keen sense that I had an obligation to demonstrate to others, insofar as I could, the value of believing that there was a deity who did take an interest in human lives and that it mattered, therefore, how we behaved and what kind of ethical stance one would take in real life situations. And I hope that some of the things I did would count as altruistic, even though one’s motivation, as in everything, was undoubtedly mixed. For example, it was during the years that we’re discussing that one of my summer vacations was spent in London doing some voluntary work for the British Council, which involved showing new students arriving into London, showing them to their accommodation, helping them to find their way around, introducing them to some very quaint British customs, introducing them to first division football matches if that’s what they wanted. That was one summer vacation I spent. That was interesting too, because I stayed with an evangelical family in the East End of London where the father was a lawyer, who as far as I could tell, self-sacrificially remained living among very poor people with very difficult lives, and he was their local counsellor and legal adviser, and a very keen John Hedley Brooke Page 80 C1672/08 Track 5

Wagnerian. I still remember we had Siegfried’s Funeral March one night when I was talking to him after his wife and daughter had gone to bed, and somehow we got into opera and the next thing I knew was that we were having part of Götterdämmerung to listen to and it was blasting out. I mean it’s a fantastic piece, as you probably know, and… So it’s very interesting, looking back how many of my experiences that I remember most vividly were associated with both my Christian allegiance, because perhaps that’s a word that is helpful in this context, a sense of allegiance to a faith, the simultaneous combination of that with some vivid musical experience as well. And I do actually think, and this would have been true of my interest in music even before I went to Cambridge, I do think music can generate a sense of the transcendent more powerfully than almost anything else. For some people a glorious sunset can do it. But if I can watch a glorious sunset listening to Wagner, then I feel I’m actually in touch with something beyond the material world, even though of course you can give an account of it in material terms, but there is that sense of it transcending that. So maybe what we’re saying here is that though my faith sometimes took on that ‘as if’ aspect, there was still an underlying sense of allegiance to Christian tradition. And in a little autobiography I had to write recently, for the journal Theology and Science, I can remember… sorry Paul, this is I think…[The reference is to John Hedley Brooke, “Living with Theology and Science: From Past to Present”, Theology and Science 12 (2014), 307- 323]

[end of track 5]

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[Track 6]

Today I’m going to just ask a few questions that arise from thinking about last time, and then we’ll continue from where we got to chronologically, which is about the beginning of your PhD. But just on those few issues, I notice that you’d mentioned that the Crusader camps that you went on, you were old in relation to what you saw as the average age of the boys on them, and I wondered whether you could give us a sense of your perception of the average age of the boys on those camps.

Right. I would think the average age would have been probably fifteen. It could have been sixteen. But that’s roughly where we’re talking about. And I would have been eighteen, I guess, perhaps seventeen. And one was simply perceived as the person in charge of the particular tent where a group of the other lads would be based. So it wasn’t a position of any great significance, it just meant that one had a notional responsibility for the welfare of that group. And of course to help if they had specific questions that they wanted to raise about what they had been hearing.

Perhaps judged from that position of being somewhat senior to a group of boys that you were looking after, and in that sense I suppose sort of overhearing, do you have any speculations on the extent to which David Tryon’s sort of impressive physical presence was a feature of the inspiration that he gave to the boys that were on these trips, whether that was a feature in the extent to which they were attentive to him?

I would think in that respect, the respect in which they would have been attentive to him, his physical presence would have counted for something. He was a reasonably charismatic figure and spoke very clearly and very well, with an attractive deep voice. So he cut the mustard in terms of a leader who could speak forcibly and clearly. I don’t know the degree to which he ever formed any close relationship to any of the guys who were at the camp, but he didn’t strike me as an unapproachable or distant person, but you were aware that he was the boss.

Thank you. [03:02] John Hedley Brooke Page 82 C1672/08 Track 6

And given that your brother also went on Crusader camps and to that extent had a similar experience of Christianity as a child, similar sort of upbringing, in other words, parents who weren’t active churchgoers but both involved in, for example, the Crusader movement, could you tell me about his experience of any change to his outlook from going up to Cambridge and its experience in different forms of Christianity… the kind of thing that you talked about of yourself last time, how did he fare when he went up to university, how did his outlook change or not change?

The question of how my brother fared in Cambridge and the degree to which his attitude to religious matters was changed, he would be the best person to answer that. There is a sense in which of course we’re talking here about intimate beliefs, which none of us really has a direct access to. He, rather like me, took a significant role in the college chapel. I don’t know that he to the same extent went along to the Christian Union meetings in college, I don’t have a very clear recollection of that and I didn’t particularly interrogate him on that. He retained a Christian faith, of that I’m sure, and to this day is a churchgoer, and he and his wife have, for a whole range of reasons, remained loyal to a particular church in Broadstone in Dorset where they live now. So I have no reason to suspect that he underwent the kind of crisis that would be described as a loss of faith altogether. But I do notice now, in conversation with him, that he can be quite vindictive when talking about evangelical Christianity and evangelical theology. So at whatever stage in his life this happened, there was a degree of emancipation which of course I have detected in myself and have spoken about. But in his case it is very clear, and I think what has brought it home to him, and to his wife, Annette, who has been a Lib Dem MP, is that the experience they have had in the political life of the community in which they live as members of the Lib Dem Party, the experience they have had has been that whenever there is a matter where certain kinds of conservative beliefs are being defended, you normally find that the most vociferous complainants about Lib Dem policies or the policies that Mike or Annette fought for at a more local level, the most vociferous complainants and who are most rude have been the evangelicals. And that has certainly meant that my brother and his wife’s perception of Christianity have been affected by that. But they still go to a pretty, what would be described as a Low Church. They go to the local Methodist church in Broadstone where they’ve got a very good relationship with the minister in charge. So that isn’t an easy question to answer, and it’s why I said that Mike would be the person to answer that question, I think. As I said just a few moments ago, though we overlapped for three years while I was doing a doctorate, John Hedley Brooke Page 83 C1672/08 Track 6 we didn’t have that many heart to heart conversations. We would meet in different contexts, sometimes sporting, occasionally in the college chapel, every week when we rang my parents, which I have referred to earlier. I think that’s all I would wish to say about that.

[07:55] I wasn’t sure to what extent you were involved in the Union of the Christian Unions, I think it’s called the CICCU, is it, at Cambridge?

Well, it is called the CICCU and I was a member of that, and it was in that context that I was the college representative. As I’ve hinted elsewhere, my feelings at the time about that were such that I had no compunction about joining that particular fellowship but I was certainly critical of a kind of exclusivist mentality that I found among other members. I think I was rather fortunate in that the Fitzwilliam College Christian Union had members who for the most part were quite liberal in their theology and I, along with them, would resist some of the more obscurantist attitudes one sometimes encountered. But it could also be stimulating and we had visiting scholars come to talk, people like Donald MacKay [Professor of Communications at Keele University], for example, would come and talk to the Christian Union on Saturday evenings, and there would be a very large audience. And certainly I would have to say that contributed further to my own interest in the relations between science and religion.

Do you remember other scientist Christians who came to give talks on the extent to which science and religion are compatible, in an individual and in a society?

There were other scientists of some note who came and spoke in that context. One name that comes to mind was Robert Boyd. I can’t remember very much about him, actually, but I know he was a scientist of some stature. After that, I’m not sure. The majority of speakers did not fall into that category, they were mainly theologians or biblical scholars or pastors whose message was often primarily exegetical. They would turn to the Bible as the main source of what they wanted to talk about. The more philosophical questions about compatibility with science or with other philosophical positions, those talks were relatively few, but they were not insignificant.

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Do you remember there being a freshers’ sermon at the beginning of the degree that was the way in which to sign up for CICCU or to join it?

I think during the Freshers’ Week there were stalls for joining pretty well everything you could think of. I don’t remember there being specifically a freshers’ sermon designed specifically for that, though my memory may be failing me. I think in quite a number of cases people were introduced to the Christian Union, or indeed to a specific church in Cambridge. The Round Church was one of the more evangelical churches in Cambridge. And one would be introduced by somebody one had known at home saying, you know, why don’t you go to that church if that’s how you want to continue your devotional life. So there were ways in which one could be drawn into the evangelical community through personal recommendation of that kind. The Christian Union would certainly have had a stall and would certainly have been mounting events in each college, usually with a speaker and usually a person of some note within the university who could come and give a little talk. I still remember, actually, that in Fitzwilliam the speaker who came to introduce the Christian Union to the freshers was somebody who became a good friend and one of the finest scholars in the history of science, namely Martin Rudwick, who I think I have mentioned in previous interviews, who had a distinguished career in the history of geology and is still winning prizes for new books today. And he certainly had Christian sympathies at that time and I think they have been retained over the years. So yes, there were mechanisms to ensure that anybody who might be interested, or who might just have a hankering to find an extra degree of meaning in their lives would come and things would be taken from there.

Thank you. [13:51] And just before I now ask about your PhD, reading the autobiographical article that you shared with me, there was a section that applies to this point in your life and I wondered whether you could expand on it, and that’s that you say that reading Tillich you were able to preserve your belief in the therapeutic power of forgiveness of which I was convinced by the case studies of the Swiss psychologist, Paul Thornier – is that right?

Paul Tournier.

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Tournier, okay. Could you expand on that a little bit, just to give us a sense of what that means, because you say that this sense, this thought occurs at just this sort of point in your life. This reading of Tillich and this belief in…

Yes. The reading of Tillich followed the reading of John Robinson’s Honest to God, because Tillich was one of John Robinson’s references in that controversial book. And I remember what was striking about Tillich was that he would take themes from a conservative Christianity like the fall, like a personal sense of guilt or inadequacy, themes like redemption from such sense of sin, which if you’d come through an evangelical route you were very conscious of, it had a high profile in one’s thinking as a young man. Tillich had ways of talking about the same kind of thing, the same kind of experiences, but in ways which just seemed so much more rational and sophisticated. So instead of talking about our complete inadequacy and its seeming impossibility without the substitution of Christ on the cross as the source of forgiveness of sins, without using that kind of language Tillich would talk about human beings being acceptable in the sight of God in ways which I actually found very helpful and very constructive. It’s not easy to articulate this, but I think that that’s where the sense of forgiveness that came from the dialectic within evangelical theology was expressed in more existential terms by Tillich. So, instead of there being, as it were, a historical fall which then raised all kinds of questions about whether Adam and Eve were historic individuals, the sort of questions that very conservative Christianity still spends its time debating, one had a much clearer sense that what was being referred to in the genesis myth about the fall was a sense of human inadequacy (that one would forever fall short of the highest standards that one might aspire to) and yet there was this notion of acceptability, which seemed to me a very powerful kind of motif in Tillich’s writing. So what he’s doing is helping somebody like me, as I was then, retain a lot of, as it were, the structure of a traditional Christianity but reinterpret it in existential terms which were intellectually more satisfying than regarding the Genesis story as somehow a work of history, or even more, a work of science, which of course sadly is how it’s sometimes interpreted by the creationists today. So that meant that I could find stimulus from reading theologians who it seemed to me were very clever in making the Christian message relevant to a more modern age.

Thank you. [19:27] John Hedley Brooke Page 86 C1672/08 Track 6

Now, last time you told us about, a little bit about the department of history – well, it wasn’t a department, as you explained – but the centre for the history and philosophy of science, but we don’t know how it is you decided to study what you did study what you did for your PhD, how did that happen?

During my third year as an undergraduate when I was reading for what was called the certificate in the history and philosophy of science, which was the equivalent of the Part 2 of the natural science Tripos, during that year one of the special papers I took was on the development of organic chemistry in the nineteenth century, and that is the course for which I was taught by Satish Kapoor, a name to whom I have referred before. And I decided when the prospect of postgraduate work became a reality, I had decided that it would be good to do research in that particular domain. Now he was an expert on the French chemists of the nineteenth century and so it seemed perfectly natural for me to think in terms of looking for a topic in the history of chemistry, to capitalise on my chemical background, but which would also be built on work that I had done in my third year, so that there would be some continuity of study. I mentioned earlier that Satish Kapoor left for the University of Sussex and then eventually finished up teaching in Canada. So I had been advised that I should remain in Cambridge and I studied with Mary Hesse who was my doctoral supervisor. For the first year of my research in Cambridge I did what most research students do, perhaps more in the humanities than in the sciences, I read as much as I could around the topic going back to the scientific journals of the period, shall we say 1810 to 1870, that sort of timeframe, just looking for ideas as to what might make an interesting and specific topic, because as you know, for postgraduate work you’ve got to have a very clearly defined goal. And it was at the end of my first year when I was shaving one morning, and this is often the case I think, the ideas come to you at unexpected moments, suddenly I hit on a topic that would bring together much of the work I had done during that first year, and also be a promising line of enquiry for my second and third year and which would constitute the main theme of my thesis. And that idea was that it would be good to look at the way in which new concepts in the emerging science of organic chemistry were dependent upon concepts and theories that had already been articulated for inorganic chemistry. And the reason that’s an interesting topic, though it may not sound like it to an outsider, but the reason it’s interesting is that there was a supposition, certainly at the time, that the science of organic chemistry might have to differ in some crucial ways from the science of inorganic chemistry, because of course it deals with material compounds, molecules that one finds within living systems or produced John Hedley Brooke Page 87 C1672/08 Track 6 by living systems, that seemingly may not have an analogy with inorganic elements and compounds. And what actually happened was that as a result of the work of the Swedish chemist, Berzelius - that’s B-E-R-Z-E-L-I-U-S – Berzelius developed a very specific methodology, which was to see how far one could get in organic chemistry by deliberately modelling one’s formula for organic compounds on the dualistic structures of inorganic chemistry. By that I mean the way in which inorganic compounds were often understood as, if they were neutral, as the product of the reaction of a salt with a base. So you had an electro positive, an electro negative part to the molecule and the idea was, could you apply that electrochemical dualism into organic chemistry and how far would it take you. And it had implications for whether there was something distinctive about organic compounds and whether that would mean that there was some perhaps vital force or vital principle, some vital ingredient in life itself which the chemist could never capture, something beyond the realm of chemistry as it was being practised. So that gave my topic a wider philosophical significance. And indeed, during the course of my doctoral research I looked carefully at the reaction to a very famous chemical reaction, which was Wöhler’s, Friedrich Wöhler’s synthesis of urea in 1828. The myth was, the story still is in many chemical textbooks, that when Wöhler succeeded in synthesising urea, which is an organic compound, from inorganic material, he in effect dealt a death blow to vitalism. So it’s proclaimed as, you know, a part of the triumphalist story in which a reductive chemistry would drive out mysterious forces from the organic world. What I discovered, it made it much more interesting for me, was that Wöhler’s synthesis did not in fact have that consequence if you studied the reactions of other chemists at the time, they marvelled at the fact that he had been able to produce urea from ammonium cyanate, in effect, but they saw that as one of the first really striking examples of what chemists call isomerism, where you have two compounds that have the same basic number of elements but which have very different properties. And so the chemists of the time did refer to it as a remarkable experiment, but it was largely because of the isomerism. And far from dealing a death blow to vitalism, it turned out, as far as I could see, that because Wöhler did not synthesise urea from its elements directly, it was not a complete synthesis that he’d achieved. In fact he started with some organic material to get the ingredients that he wanted. And also his experiment was conducted under rather extreme conditions, which would never obtain in a living organism. So the notion that his experiment somehow mimicked or simulated what was happening in a living organism, that was a rather extravagant kind of claim. So that was an interesting example to me of a rather striking myth in the history of science, of which there are many. And I felt rather pleased with myself that I John Hedley Brooke Page 88 C1672/08 Track 6 might be credited with having exploded that particular myth. It was in fact the first academic paper I ever published, that was in 1968 during my third year as a postgraduate student, so it preceded the completion of my thesis. And in effect, created a bit of a problem, because when I wrote up the thesis in the end, I wanted to include that piece of work and I made it the first chapter of the thesis, but it led to a situation where the external examiner I had of my PhD, Marie Boas Hall, very fine historian of science and of chemistry herself, she worried when she examined my thesis that I had published that chapter on Wöhler and the urea synthesis without integrating it fully with the rest of the thesis. And I’m perfectly prepared to believe that because she believed that quite strenuously, there was a lot of discussion before I was finally granted my doctorate. So I do remember my viva particularly clearly, because that was one of the questions that I had to answer: what was the relationship between that opening chapter and the rest of the thesis? There was a very close relationship in fact, because it dealt with precisely the issue of whether you could simulate an organic compound through the methods of inorganic synthesis, but I think I just hadn’t spelt it out clearly enough. Anyway, I did not have to resubmit my thesis, which for all graduate students is a great relief, of course. [31:21] Thinking of those three years when I was working as a postgraduate, it was in some ways quite a lonely time, as doctoral work can often be, in the sense that one is spending so much time in the libraries and having to think very deeply about the problems you are examining that it doesn’t seem to leave a great deal of time for more leisurely activities. It was a period during which I took on some responsibility in the History and Philosophy of Science Centre there because I was asked by Mary Hesse if I would basically act as a kind of secretary for the seminar series that was put on every term. So I would write to prospective speakers, invite them to come and then thank them afterwards. The speakers to be invited were, I think in every case, suggested by the senior members of the department, it was not my job to conjure up names we might approach. But it did have one consequence actually, which meant that I was put in touch with scholars at that very, very early stage in my career, with whom I then subsequently had a good relationship. One name that springs to mind in that context was Charles Webster, very distinguished Oxford historian at All Souls, whose book on puritanism and science in the seventeenth century is still a landmark classic of its kind. [The Great Instauration, London 1975]. And Charles, I remember, was one of the speakers I had to invite and thank afterwards, and I remember he told me afterwards that he had not found it a particularly pleasant experience, coming to Cambridge to give a seminar, because John Hedley Brooke Page 89 C1672/08 Track 6 he had found the audience, well, rather acerbic might be an adjective that captures what he was saying. It didn’t seem a particularly friendly or welcoming group, it was the kind of group in which the people there seemed to want to demonstrate their own virtuosity, rather than appreciate the wisdom of the visiting speaker. But I shouldn’t place too much emphasis on that, it was not everybody’s perception that that happened. So that was one little thing I did, and of course as a graduate student in Cambridge, one did act as a tutor to undergraduates, and I certainly did that in my last two years as a graduate student. I can’t remember whether I did in my first year. In my last year [1967-8] I was actually invited to give lectures on the history of chemistry, and so that was quite a challenge. And really my first experience of giving undergraduate lectures would have been when I was twenty-three years old in the last year of my graduate work. And I enjoyed that very much and even managed to do one or two things which I think perhaps even today would be regarded as a touch imaginative, if not eccentric or weird. I remember giving a lecture on Lavoisier and chemistry during the French Revolutionary period, and indeed, the period known very often as the Chemical Revolution. And it had seemed to me from all the reading I’d done that you could give certainly a very plausible narrative account of how Lavoisier’s refutation of the famous phlogiston theory really did advance chemistry with a whole new nomenclature and a whole new understanding. But at the same time, there were features of Lavoisier’s chemistry that were quite conservative and also features that were very controversial, which meant you could actually set up a critique of his chemistry and thereby a critique of the view that he had single-handedly delivered chemistry from its alchemical past. That’s rather an exaggerated claim, but you sometimes find that. And so what I actually did was during my lecture I played the role of two characters: one speaking for Lavoisier, but another speaking as a critic of his work, drawing not only on immediately contemporary views, but on one or two retrospective constructions as well. So when I was speaking for Lavoisier I would stand on one side of the room and wear a particular hat, and when I took over the role of the critic I would walk to the other side of the room and put on a different hat. Now the students, I have to say, found this quite jolly and I enjoyed doing it, and probably it gave me a bit of a reputation as an extrovert in Cambridge as a lecturer, because there was certainly some feedback to the hierarchy about what I’d been up to. [37:17] I also remember the very first lecture I gave and it was one when for twenty-four hours I was deeply distressed because after half an hour a most beautiful girl in the audience actually walked out, and that was pretty distressing for a young lecturer, who kind of had an eye for John Hedley Brooke Page 90 C1672/08 Track 6 the girls. And I was deeply concerned about this and found it more difficult to concentrate for the rest of my lecture, wondering what I’d done wrong. Anyway, all was forgiven because the next day I received a little note from her saying “so sorry I had to walk out of your lecture, but I had a dental appointment that I had to keep and I didn’t want to miss the first half of your lecture”, which is a nice message to receive. [38:15] But I do also remember one other thing that I learnt from that lecture, and I do still remember it to this day. It was a lecture that I hadn’t timed down to the last immaculate detail and when it got to ten to the hour and I had to finish within five minutes, I became aware that I had a whole section that I really hadn’t dealt with and somehow or other the pressure was on compressing what I wanted to say into that last five minutes, with the consequence that I started to speak more quickly and perhaps less coherently. And Gerd Buchdahl, as head of the department then, came in to attend that lecture, I think he thought it was probably a wise thing to do when a graduate student gives a first lecture in case the whole thing is a complete shambles and disaster. But he did take me to one side afterwards and he said, why did you rush at the end? And I said, well, I’d got all this stuff I hadn’t had time to squeeze in. And he looked at me and he said, they don’t know that. And he was just suggesting that you can always round a lecture off in a coherent way without necessarily having to say everything that you had planned to say in the lecture. That was good advice, actually, and I try to heed it even now when I have a sense that I’m overrunning or in danger of so doing. So I did get the kind of support from the staff which nowadays I think would be regarded as de rigueur in the training of any postgraduate student for an academic career.

You said that of that first lecture you hadn’t timed it down to the last minute, does that imply that that is how you tended to prepare?

For many years, particularly if I were giving a public lecture, not, shall we say, just an undergraduate lecture where one could often speak in an impromptu fashion, but for a public lecture I would usually make a point of reading the lecture through if it wasn’t all written out, at least rehearsing a paragraph, if it wasn’t written, to get a fairly clear idea of how long it was going to take and whether I had seriously miscalculated. I don’t do that now, partly because I’ve become more used to improvising at the end of a lecture if I feel that I need to wrap it up, but secondly, I now know how long a pre-scripted text has to be if it’s going to take me a certain length of time to read. Now when I say read, when I prepare lectures or John Hedley Brooke Page 91 C1672/08 Track 6 conference papers now, I often do prepare a full script in advance, but I then have a version which contains, insofar as I can control it, only very short and uncomplicated sentences. So what I actually do is have notes which are a detailed summary of the paper in note form on a lectern or whatever. I speak to that text, following it fairly assiduously, but because everything is in very short and uncomplicated sentences, I can read it as if I am not reading it. And I do find, and from what people tell me, that that actually works very well, because it means that you do know what you’re going to say, you do know that it’s not going to be too complex, but you can have eye contact with the audience the whole time, which I think is crucial. I mean there is nothing more deadly than listening to a read lecture where the lecturer has not edited the text for oral delivery, where it’s just as was written. So that would be my normal strategy now. I like to have a detailed set of notes from which to work.

[43:55] Apart from perhaps the rather obvious fact that having studied chemistry you were more likely to be able to quickly understand the work of the historical figures you were looking at, apart from that point, what was the effect on your historical work of your immediately previous scientific training?

It is interesting to reflect on how the kind of historical work I did in my thesis reflected my scientific background. I had of course had in my third year some proper academic induction into the history and philosophy of science. So, for example, I was deeply aware that it’s not good history just to tell a triumphalist story of who got the right answer first, which is what a lot of amateur history of science still looks like today. And in that same third year as an undergraduate I had been reading books like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which did have a big impact on me, because that was a very powerful critique of the kind of triumphalist, linear narratives that one so often finds at the beginning of scientific textbooks. So I was well removed from doing a kind of history of chemistry in which I was just trying to celebrate the work of Berzelius or Pasteur, to mention another name, whose work I was discussing. But, there was one critical respect in which I would say in retrospect that my work as a historian of chemistry during my doctoral years was still very scientifically informed and it was simply this, that I was not feeling under any compulsion during my doctoral thesis to talk about anything in the biography of the scientists I was studying, that really lay outside the purview of their own science. So I was not asking the ulterior questions that a social historian might ask about the career structures, the profile of these figures, their John Hedley Brooke Page 92 C1672/08 Track 6 philosophical persuasion, their religious beliefs. I did focus more or less one hundred per cent on their chemistry and talk about that, as if the science really did have a kind of autonomy. And one of the other reasons I did that was that I think it reflected very much the genre of work that was done in the Cambridge department. I keep calling it the Cambridge department, because that’s the easiest word, and I think we all knew it as that, even if it was not formalised at that stage, though later it was. I think that most of the work done in the department still was of that character, that one looked at the science of past scientists to see if you could make or draw conclusions about scientific methodology that could then be of value when discussing current philosophical issues in science. So the emphasis was on science and philosophy rather than science and history, as a historian trained in social and political history might think of history. Now I mentioned earlier that there was one member of the Cambridge department, Robert Young, who did exciting work introducing his students to the value of examining the social, political, generally the cultural context in which science was done, and during the course of my doctoral work the supervision of what I was doing began to be shared between Mary Hesse and Arnold Thackray, who was just completing a doctorate on John Dalton, the early nineteenth century English chemist associated with the atomic theory. And Arnold was somebody who independently I think was also developing that feeling that the history of science needed to be more properly historical, rather than a handmaiden to the philosophers, or subservient to philosophical issues. And so he became very interested in the wider culture of the Industrial Revolution and Manchester science in particular and the literary and philosophical societies in which science was discussed in the early years of the nineteenth century. So the influence of Arnold Thackray on my work was probably to shift me a little bit into taking the social and political dimensions of the history more seriously than I had done. [50:22] So I would say my thesis reflected what would now be a dated approach to the history and philosophy of science, it very much reflected a scientific background in which one felt most comfortable examining just the technical details of the science. And although informed by books like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions there was in my own thesis I think probably a much weightier emphasis on philosophical distinctions and fine grained analysis of distinctions than you would find in a typical history of chemistry thesis today.

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What sorts, could you, it may be difficult to recover, but what sorts of fine philosophical distinctions would you have been concerned with in that thesis because of the particular environment in which you were doing it, the department?

One thing that I was very struck by, doing my work on the representation of chemical substances by their formula in the nineteenth century European context, is that there was a surprisingly large number of different meanings you could give to the formulas that you wrote. And those very different meanings were clearly visible to anybody who studied the texts of the period because different adjectives would be used to describe what the provenance and the meaning of the formula was. So, for example, formulae would sometimes be described as empirical formulae, which just give you the number of the atoms in the molecule or the ratio of different atoms in the molecule. Then there was something called the rational formula that did purport to get you close to the real structure of the molecule. Then there were formulae called type formulae, which tried to assign various chemical compounds to the same basic type. So, for example, ammonia which would be represented as a nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms, if you start to talk about amines in organic chemistry you would link them to the same basic type where one of the hydrogen atoms is replaced by a group of other atoms which would include some carbon. So type formulae had an important role to play. They were associated with two French chemists: Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Charles Gerhardt. And they gave different interpretations and different meanings to their respective types. You then get structural formulae, which were developed by chemists including August Kekulé who’s famous for having produced the hexagonal closed formula for benzene, among many other things. And so you go on. And the point I want to make is that behind each of these different understandings of what a chemical formula was, there was a particular understanding of the scope that a scientist could achieve in attempting to describe the structure of things you could not see with your naked eye, because here we’re talking about atoms and molecules that nobody had ever seen, directly, and yet we’re coming up with all kinds of ways of describing them, different kinds of chemical formulae with different philosophical meanings. Now, I actually found that rather exciting, because most people don’t stop to think, I mean they see a representation of a chemical compound in a chemistry textbook and we think we know what that means, but actually in the middle years of the nineteenth century there were fierce debates about whether a chemist could really know the interior structure of the compounds he was talking about. So that would be an example, I think, where my thesis did take very seriously those John Hedley Brooke Page 94 C1672/08 Track 6 philosophical distinctions and to try to analyse them out in ways that I thought would be interesting to other readers.

[56:06] What training had you had either in the third year, third undergraduate year or as part of the, I suppose, first part of the PhD in what might be called theories in the writing of history, or historical methods, or historiography? So sort of arguments about right and wrong ways to engage with historical material, that sort of thing. I should perhaps explain that it’s inspired by your book Science and Religion, I mean much of the first chapter is about ways of avoiding historical writing which gets stuck on essentialist definitions of the things you’re looking at. Now that would seem to come from a certain kind of historical training, but I wondered when that historical training in your case happened?

I think it would be fair to say that in the preparation for my doctoral work, which again was in my third year as an undergraduate, I did not find myself exposed to sophisticated historiographical debates, where by historiographical we are talking about the kind of history that a political or a social historian would have been au fait with. I was exposed to controversial issues in the historiography of science. It really was as focussed as that. And so books like Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions did convince me that there were certain traps one had to avoid in historical writing. I read some of the classics of the history of science during that period and Herbert Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science immediately springs to mind. There was another classic by Edwin Arthur Burtt called The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern [Physical] Science. But again, most of these books were dealing with historiographical issues in the writing of very specifically, the history of technical science. And I think even Kuhn’s book falls into that category, actually. There are analogies here and there and then his last chapter too, where you do get a sense that there is a wider prospect that he has in view, and certainly many, many colleagues from other disciplines latched on to that, though he retracted rather and I think felt that he probably said more than he really intended to at that point. [59:26] But comparing my doctoral thesis in 1968/9 with my book to which you’ve referred, 1991, there are several really big differences. The book is bound to take in a much wider cultural compass by virtue of talking about religion as well as science. In the thesis, although I was conscious that two of the French chemists I was examining, one in particular, but I think at John Hedley Brooke Page 95 C1672/08 Track 6 least two, were what we call positivists. These are scholars who did not actually believe you could really get to the ulterior structure of atoms and molecules and regarded their chemical formulae simply as summaries of the reactions that a compound could do, rather than saying anything about the ulterior arrangement of atoms in the compound. I was conscious that if you were a positivist in mid nineteenth century France and following the philosophy of Auguste Comte in particular, you would be pretty hostile to conventional religion, certainly to the mainstream Catholicism in France at the time. So there were issues of [a] science and religion kind that I could have brought into the thesis if I had felt at that time it was appropriate to do so, but I didn’t. And that really was a kind of awakening, perhaps, in the early seventies or, yes, it would be the early seventies when I went first to Sussex University [1968-69] and then to Lancaster, when I began teaching courses on science and religion. I had to read texts of a greater historiographical sophistication in order to feel competent to handle the very complex issues that arise when you try to relate two very different cultural, two different cultural forces.

Thank you. [1:02:19] And could you tell us about the more straightforward practical methods involved in doing the research for the PhD? I don’t know where you were doing your reading, what sorts of things you were reading, whether you were going to archives, whether you were reading books in French or a translation. So what did the actual what would now be called primary research consist of for that PhD?

My primary research was to read the published texts of nineteenth century chemists in technical chemical journals. That sounds relatively straightforward and in one sense it was, it meant that I spent many long afternoons, and mornings too, in the university library at Cambridge, which had the wonderful facility in those days that you could just browse along open shelves, which meant I found books that I would never have known existed, had it not been for that facility, and scholars often to this day lament the closure of that kind of option in our great libraries. You always have to know in advance what it is you want. Many of the French texts that I read, I’m sure nobody before me had ever read, so they were covered in dust. And so for three years the most prevalent smell in my life was the smell of dust from Cambridge University books, and since I often took them back to my room so that I could study them in greater depth and at greater length, it meant that my rooms, or my room in John Hedley Brooke Page 96 C1672/08 Track 6

Tyndale House, for example, would often have this very scholarly smell of deep dust associated with it. So I did read many things in French and one of the reasons for that – well, there were two reasons – the most interesting chemists in organic chemistry at that time were largely French, not exclusively, Berzelius was Swedish, Justus von Liebig, the great German organic chemist of course was not French. But I read the French too because my German was not as good as my French and I would gain access to the content of the German chemical journals through reading them in French translation. And anything really significant from Germany was translated into French, because Paris round about 1840 would have been the chemical centre of the world. Liebig in Germany made the small town and university of Giessen a challenging centre, in fact the centre really of chemical education and the production of future chemists, I think that one would associate with Liebig and Germany. But I did read the French, and actually, it’s not that daunting, because when you’re reading chemistry, the language of chemistry is very similar, whether it’s French or in English. And of course on the rare occasions when I was reading the work of English chemists, because on the whole they were not particularly significant until one reaches Edward Frankland, perhaps, in the eighteen, late forties and early fifties. There were a few English chemists who were significant, but not as significant as the Continental chemists. So yes, my doctorate was quite heavily French oriented. And it has meant that I have retained a good reading knowledge of French; that has never been my problem. My problem, as for so many Englishmen, has been in speaking French and participating in French discussion. So, to my shame, I have to say that I do not consider that I have any real claims to linguistic facility, even though I have examined French doctoral theses and from The Sorbonne, because I can read them very easily and formulate questions, play a full role in the examination process. So your question about my reading French or German or whatever is quite a salient one. But in the work I’ve done on the history of, if one can call it the relations between science and religion, reading things in French has not been such a dominant pastime. Much of my work has been in the Anglophonic world where natural theology and the attempt to bring scientific and religious discourse together, I think that natural theology has been a, not a distinctive feature of the Anglophonic world, but it is where it has had noticeable effects on scientific practice and understanding as well as on theological understanding. And of course, if one is looking at the great Continental thinkers, if one’s looking at Leibniz or Kant, Descartes even, much of their work, if not all of it now, of significance, is available in English translation. So unless I have had a very particular reason to go back to an original French text, for example, that has not featured as heavily in my subsequent work as it did in my doctoral research. John Hedley Brooke Page 97 C1672/08 Track 6

Thank you. [1:09:33] You said that, in relation to the degree anyway, that the PhD tended to be a lonelier time, which was also incredibly busy, but when you weren’t conducting research or in the third year of your PhD sort of preparing lectures, etc, etc, acting as the secretary for the seminar series, what were you doing when you weren’t working?

Well, because I was living in Tyndale House, I was sometimes playing croquet because there was a croquet lawn there, small croquet lawn, and it was very interesting to observe. I mean as you probably know, croquet is an extremely aggressive game, or can be, and it can bring out the worst in human beings. And because Tyndale House was a residential library for theologians doing research, it was very interesting to observe how vindictive the theologians could be when playing that game. That’s a joke, of course. But that was something on the doorstep that gave one a little bit of light relief. I was still pursuing my great interest in music and that provided heaps of leisure opportunities, not only in Cambridge, which of course is wonderful for access to music, but I think I mentioned before that I had acted as the liaison person in Cambridge for an organisation called Youth and Music, which enabled one to put a small party of friends together to go to opera or ballet in London at a subsidised rate. I mean as a student one would never have had the resources to pay Covent Garden prices. But you could get both to English National Opera and to Covent Garden with these subsidised tickets that were made available to groups if one actually took the trouble to organise them and apply for the money. And so that I continued to do and I remember we had very jolly evenings in London going to the opera or the ballet. It meant that if ever I wanted to treat the latest girlfriend to a night at something rather special, that was something that I could insert into one of those little trips. As far as the music in Cambridge was concerned, I remember attending one, it was probably during my postgraduate years, though actually perhaps it was still as an undergraduate, but the university orchestra often gave symphony concerts during the course of the year and on one occasion there was a performance of one of Mahler’s symphonies. I’ve got a feeling that it would have been number five, which of course became very famous when the slow movement was used for the film of Death in Venice with Dirk Bogarde and others, the slow movement, the adagietto from that symphony. But I remember it was the first time I’d ever heard Mahler live and I was on something like the third row of the audience, so the full blast of the brass opening that John Hedley Brooke Page 98 C1672/08 Track 6 symphony was something else and really set the spine tingling. So many new musical experiences and I continued to explore pretty well the whole gamut of classical music, with the possible exception of chamber music. At that time I was far more into orchestral music and opera than I was to chamber music; that developed, that interest developed much later. What else did I do? I still played a bit of cricket, I still played other things for the college. I once played football, I think, when I was in that postgraduate period. I just happened to be in college one day when they were looking for somebody to make up eleven men for the college soccer team and foolishly, when I was asked if I had ever played, I had to confess the truth, which was that I had, and the next thing I knew was I was playing on the left wing for the college side. I remember it because a quite extraordinary thing happened, which – now this is a story that may be embellished over the years, but I’ve told it so often that there must be a bit of truth in it. I was stuck quite close to the penalty area of the opponent’s goal and I noticed that our right half, as he would have been called then, was about to kick the ball over in my direction, and I was a bit worried because I wore glasses, otherwise I couldn’t see anything very much, and I thought if that thing lands on my head, I could smash my glasses. It was almost as if I could read that he’d picked me out as the person who was going to head the ball into the goal. So without a moment’s thought I decided that the only evasive strategy that would make sense would be for me to pretend to leap for the ball when it got close to me, but to be very careful to miss it. However, I misjudged my leap into the air and the ball hit me on the forehead in the perfect position and flew into the goal. And so I was hailed as this new star. And some of my other passes that afternoon were much applauded by actually the person who was coaching the opposing side. So it was a rather memorable day and I never played again, I certainly never headed a ball into the goal again. So there [were] odd things like that. When I said it was a lonely life, I was thinking primarily in terms of the solitude of the thought that goes into writing something that is over, in many cases, over a hundred thousand words long and represents a huge amount of one’s time. I think that’s about it on the leisure. Always in the long summer holidays there would be the prospect of a vacation spent at least in part with my parents, who were still going places with their caravan and often to very interesting places. So I had a very full life in Cambridge and I look back on those years with a sense of enormous gratitude and satisfaction for the support that I had.

[1:17:31] Before we then go to Sussex, could I ask you just one other question which takes in the time up to this point, and that’s last time you spoke of the extent to which music can create John Hedley Brooke Page 99 C1672/08 Track 6 experiences that make the idea of there being more than just material reality seem plausible, let’s put it like that, and then I read the article that you sent and you had the story of the walk in the snow, which makes me want to ask, particularly as I know that you travelled quite a lot because of your father’s interest in it, could you comment on the extent to which landscape produces similar opportunities to think beyond the material?

I’ve often asked myself why it is that I respond so fully and in many ways excitedly to particular kinds of landscape and I think this does go back to holidays travelling in Europe with my parents. In particular I remember the first time I was in Switzerland, this was a family holiday, and we went to Interlaken and some of the resorts around that lake. It meant we could, when we were disconnected from the caravan, drive up into the mountains that sort of dominate that particular scene, and I did get a thrill of excitement from walking on beautiful Alpine pastures with snow-capped mountains around, the grandeur of Mont Blanc. I remember going up the little, it’s not a funicular train, but it’s a train that takes you right up to the glacier, towards the summit of Mont Blanc and seeing the very sharp pointed pinnacles, that great mountain. And I did get a real sense of excitement, appreciating both the grandeur and the beauty of the scene, but also the sublimity, the fact that there is something there that goes beyond human capability to create, it’s as if nature itself has produced these astonishing forms which evoke the sense that nature itself is not all there is, that there is something, if you like, that transcends nature, even though what that is precisely is very elusive. But I think it probably did evoke that sense which Robert Boyle had in the seventeenth century when looking at the more awesome features of nature, that there is something there that it would be a mistaken use of language to say that nature acts as if personified. It’s interesting that Darwin later often personified nature and kept on being ticked off for doing so, because when you talk about natural selection, I mean is nature selecting as deliberately as a breeder might breed pigs or pigeons in a deliberate manner. Darwin of course did not mean that it was, but the way he wrote about nature implied to many people that that perhaps is what he was trying to say. So, there is something in the appreciation of landscape which I do find extremely evocative and very suggestive of forces at work in the world, the meaning of which we would exhaust if we spoke simply in terms of the interaction of natural forces. It is that of course, but to be reductive about that is what for me becomes difficult when I look at a really evocative landscape. This summer my wife and I were in the Andes on the way to the Galapagos Islands, and just seeing again the grandeur of those volcanoes along the main Andes ridge from Ecuador, and through Chile a couple of John Hedley Brooke Page 100 C1672/08 Track 6 years ago, you can explain them of course, because we’ve got our plate tectonics that explain that, but the effect still strikes a chord in me and maybe that word chord, of course, is the link with music again. Not everybody reacts the same way of course and I fully recognise that, but in my particular case I do find it very moving.

Is it more likely to be upland landscapes than lowland landscapes?

I think upland landscapes do it for me more than lowland ones. And yet, having said that, there can be a different kind of beauty with lowlands, and you may see in terms of wildlife, for example, you may see things on a lowland scape that you wouldn’t on a high one. But I think to see a large bird of prey wheeling over a high mountain is exciting in a way that seeing a duck on a pond is not quite the same. But that’s a frivolous remark. I’ve never spent a holiday on the Norfolk Broads, maybe it should be on my bucket list, but it hasn’t risen yet to the top.

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[Track 7]

Could you then now tell the story of the move from Cambridge to Sussex?

During my third year as a postgraduate student I was by then living in Fitzwilliam College in its new buildings on the Huntingdon Road. I’d been fortunate enough to be given a research fellowship at the end of my second year and so I had all the privileges of a residential Fellow during my third year. It was, however, rather a stressful year, despite those privileges, because my fellowship was non-stipendiary and therefore at the end of that academic year, unless the college changed its policy and made its research fellowships stipendiary, there was no way I could actually remain in Cambridge. The reason it was stressful, in particular, was that it was precisely during that year that the college was reconsidering whether it would make research fellowships stipendiary and it was relatively late in the year that I learnt it had decided that it still could not afford to do so. It was not a wealthy college, and there may have been other reasons, I don’t know. But the consequence was, relatively late in the year during which I was writing up my thesis, I learnt that there was really no prospect of my remaining in Cambridge unless I was prepared to live, very much as some people do, very much on the margins and eking out an existence by doing extra teaching and various administrative jobs and that sort of thing, and promises of various kinds were made to me, to the effect that I wouldn’t be out on the streets. [02:15] But, at that late point in the year, and it was possibly as late as May, or even early June, probably May, I was told by Bob Young - this is the Robert Young I’ve referred to before, the American scholar in the Cambridge department of HPS who had brought a very fresh but controversial perspective into the department. He was extraordinarily kind to me because he had a friend who actually had the Chair in Philosophy at Sussex, Peter Nidditch, a Locke scholar. How Bob and Peter knew each other, I don’t know, but Peter had written to Bob to say that one of his colleagues, Jonathan Dorling, was due study leave and they were looking, rather late in the year, for a young scholar who could step into the breach and do Jonathan’s teaching for the year. Could Bob recommend anybody from Cambridge? At that stage Bob informed me of this and said would I be interested, he thought it would be a very good move to go there, and of course I without any other prospect at that moment agreed. And so I went for an interview, but that largely turned into a chat about exactly what I could do and would do. And so that was the point at which it became clear to me that I should begin to think in John Hedley Brooke Page 102 C1672/08 Track 7 terms of a year’s teaching in Sussex. I think Bob, to try to be fair to myself on this, he had heard me give a seminar paper earlier that year which was based on my work on the Wöhler urea synthesis, to which I referred at an earlier point, and I have to say that I still think to this day that that particular paper was one of the very best I’ve ever written and certainly of which I am still quite proud, because it did do some serious linguistic analysis on the meaning of terms like vital force and synthesis, and all that kind of thing. Bob I know had been impressed by that paper because he asked me afterwards, was that paper based on my doctoral work or was it something that I had just worked up as a hobby? And I said well, a little bit of both, I mean it was based on my doctoral work, but not the extent that it was solely grounded in that; it was something I’d been working on independently. So I think he was confident that he could say to Peter Nidditch that there is somebody here who should be able to fit the bill. [05:42] It turned out, when I migrated to Sussex, that it was an extremely demanding year because I was asked to do not only the kind of teaching that Jon Dorling had done, but various requests had come to Peter for courses on other things and I was asked if I could perhaps take those on as well. In addition to which, back in Cambridge, I was invited back to give, in the second term this would have been, lectures on the history of chemistry. So not only was I committed to a whole raft of new teaching in Brighton, but also had obligations in Cambridge still. And it was a year during which I did actually develop an incipient duodenal ulcer which I ascribe simply to the stresses of overwork, and possibly the stress of uncertainty during that last year in Cambridge. [06:55] So I found myself very nice accommodation in Brighton and commuted up to the university every day. I was in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, so moving among largely physicists and one or two philosophers. Peter Nidditch himself, as I mentioned, was a philosopher, so I didn’t actually encounter many colleagues in the history of science during that year, but I was invited from time to time to give talks based on my history of science research, very often at the Science Museum in London or places like that. So I was very, very active. But it was a bad year for my health because I also had some severe dental problems which took a long time to resolve, so I was suffering from those and my little ulcer, and commuting between Sussex and Cambridge, and finding actually that Sussex was not quite the welcoming place that I had hoped it would be, and I don’t blame anybody for that. The university, unlike Cambridge, is non-collegiate, so I got a sense that students didn’t John Hedley Brooke Page 103 C1672/08 Track 7 derive a strong sense of identity from where they were living, and actually that was the second problem. Whereas in Cambridge colleges everybody lives in for some of their time usually, and there is residential accommodation on site, in Sussex in 1969 there was very little accommodation on the campus. So people were commuting in from Brighton and Hove and places all around, you didn’t really get much of a sense of community there. And whereas in Cambridge one had an identity by virtue of the subject you were studying, in Sussex, because you belonged to these rather amorphous schools, you didn’t get quite the same sense of identity from your academic discipline that you might have done in Cambridge. So I just got a sense that Sussex was an exciting place to be, I loved Brighton. I didn’t have serious problems fulfilling my teaching obligations but I was kept very, very busy and worked extraordinarily hard that year. [10:01] That part of the world of course is very beautiful and I did make friends there who sometimes invited me to dinner and then drove me off to Sheffield Park Gardens or some of the delightful places there are around. It was also the year in which I went to Glyndebourne for the first time, allowing me to maintain my operatic interests in that respect. [10:29] So, it was a very important bridging year, but what it bridged to turned out to be much more consequential for my life. Actually, relatively early in that Sussex year, and this would have been, would have been, I guess, in December, January time, I learnt of a vacancy advertised at Lancaster University which was, potentially at least, for a permanent post in the history of science. The problem with my Sussex one was that because I was stepping in for somebody who was on study leave, the prospects of what we call tenure were not good. Now when it was learnt in Sussex that I was possibly going to apply for Lancaster, and certainly when it was learnt that I had applied, there were – and this is very flattering, I think – there were serious attempts to keep me there. But those attempts revolved basically around paying me more money, not giving me any sense of permanent security and so when this more permanent position was advertised at Lancaster I did apply and was invited to interview. Which was not uninteresting in that there were clearly two other shortlisted candidates, whom I eyed over the breakfast table in the hotel to which we’d all been allocated overnight. I guess we all eyed each other up wondering about the opposition. And the story was told, and I’ve rehearsed it since, I don’t know how true this is, that one of the three candidates rang the department during the morning of the interviews making some reference to his desire to climb Clougha, which is one of the Bowland Fells that you can see from the university site. John Hedley Brooke Page 104 C1672/08 Track 7

And the way the story was sometimes told was that he declared that it was his wish to do this and was basically asking permission to whether the time of the interview might be changed to give him this lifetime’s wish. And I don’t know what truth there was in the story, but it was said that he went up his mountain and was never seen again. But at least he didn’t get the job so the competition was between me and actually one very good scholar from Manchester University who did some excellent work on the history of technology. But as it happened, I acquitted myself pretty well at the interview, I think, and so I was granted the position. It was still in the winter because I remember that that night spent at the hotel was very, very cold. It was very dark and we were looking out on Lancaster Castle, which had a gloomy Dickensian look to it on that cold winter night. And I remember bringing my parents up to Lancaster in the Easter vacation prior to my coming in to Lancashire, to show them around and to explore some of the neighbouring countryside. And we drove one day into the Trough of Bowland, which is right in the heart of the Bowland Fells, [a] beautiful part of England, not widely known. I still remember the frisson I got from seeing that landscape for the first time, because one was talking about the moors and the birdlife that one associates with that, and just very attractive wild scenery with no habitation for miles and miles. And from the Lancaster campus one could see the Lake District set out in the distance, certainly on a clear day. And I do remember saying to my mother, as we looked around the campus, if I had to spend the rest of my life here, it wouldn’t be so bad, would it, because they had also seen just how attractive the landscape is around here. And she, I remember, said no, it would be fine. Little did I know that for the next thirty years I would actually be teaching on that site, and still in retirement living, albeit provisionally, in the north-west. So that gets me to Lancaster from Sussex. [16:24] And I have to say, there’s a very – or there was – a very real contrast between the feel of those two universities, as I experienced it. What I experienced in Lancaster was being given a truly warm welcome in a rapidly expanding history department, being made to feel welcome wherever I went on campus. I even remember on the day of the interview I was looking rather lost in the main university square, and clearly a university employee, I don’t know what she did, came up to me and said, can I help, you look as if you’re not quite sure where to go, would you like a cup of tea? And I didn’t demur, of course, and that was very pleasant. I cannot imagine any occasion when I was on the Sussex campus that anybody would have come up to me and said, would you like a cup of tea? There’s something about the friendliness of the north Lancastrians that spills over, I think, on to the university, or it John Hedley Brooke Page 105 C1672/08 Track 7 certainly did in those opening days when everybody was full of ideas and excitement about what it was to be a new university. And actually Lancaster and Sussex were founded at more or less the same time, the mid 1960s. [18:00] To that extent, of course I was very fortunate in securing a relatively permanent – there was a period of probation of course – but a relatively permanent job so early in my career, but it does reflect the fact that Britain had just gone through a period of university expansion following the Robbins Report. So there were new universities like Sussex and Lancaster, East Anglia would be another, Warwick of course. These were universities that were looking to fill vacancies as their respective departments were on the increase and for increased size. So to that extent I was exceedingly fortunate. There was an awkward moment at the end of my first year in Lancaster when I was asked by one of my former tutors in Cambridge to consider applying for a job which had just become available in Cambridge. And I thought about that hard and long and of course it was a very tempting suggestion. It wasn’t a promise that I would get it, but it was certainly a little bit more than a hint. And in the end I decided not to, because I had had a year in Sussex, to have just one year in Lancaster and then move yet again, I just felt was destabilising in various ways. And I never regretted that decision, because I had a wonderful thirty years with Lancaster University in a department where colleagues were extremely civilised and tolerant of each other and mature in their approach to scholarship, which meant that there was nothing of the backbiting and the wretchedness that you sometimes find in academic departments. And I think to a large extent the first professor of history, Austin Woolrych, takes a lot of the credit for setting up a department in which there was almost a military sense of rectitude and loyalty and persona presented to the outside world of a department that could behave in a fully civilised way. Oxford had featured very prominently in Austin’s formation and I think he liked to think that he ran the history department at Lancaster in a kind of exemplary Oxbridge style. [21:07] Lancaster is of course a collegiate university and my own college, Bowland College, played a role in my early years in town. That’s because I became both the senior tutor and then the principal of my college, in both cases involving quite extensive administration. I was also initially the resident dean, which meant I was responsible for the general discipline in the college and could have been hauled out of bed at any time of the night to investigate problems of student obstreperousness or obnoxious behaviour of one kind or another. I had a charmed life. There was one occasion when a man with a hatchet was seen at the top of the John Hedley Brooke Page 106 C1672/08 Track 7 big tower that was part of my college, but by the time I was dragged out of bed to deal with it, the problem had been resolved and the guy had been reprimanded or was okay. But you never quite knew what was coming next, but I tell that story only because it gave me the opportunity as resident dean to have a room in college during my first couple of years in Lancaster, and that was a great help while I was settling in. And it also meant that my college identity was quite strongly forged and so in later years, when I became senior tutor and then principal of the college, I did feel it important to take those roles very seriously and very responsibly, and they were rewarding in many ways. [23:13] One thing that the college system did do in Lancaster was to ensure that when students on their graduation day received their degrees, they would all be done college by college. So there was quite a strong sense of identity right up to the point where you took your degree. And I was interested to discover that at Durham, which of course has a much older and in many ways stronger collegiate system, in Durham I learnt that was not the case, that you did not go college by college to receive your degree. Whether that’s changed, I don’t know. So Lancaster had a few peculiarities, some of which I think were very good. One of the great things about Lancaster in the early seventies, as I gradually got accustomed to the place, was that John Manduell, later Sir John Manduell and Principal of the Royal Northern College of Music, John Manduell had been appointed to a directorship of music in the university which gave him the responsibility of organising regular concerts in the Great Hall, and in those days, perhaps rather less so now, but in those days those concerts were a highlight in this whole region around the city of Lancaster, because musicians of international calibre were brought to the university. And I really do mean international opera singers of the calibre of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Victoria de los Angeles, there were great pianists played at the university. So that interest of my life in serious music found that it could express itself here, and I was enormously appreciative of that. [25:34] So, when I began my teaching at Lancaster, I was exceedingly fortunate in that what seemed to many a rather curious desire, was given full rein. And that rather curious desire was to put on a historical course on the relations between science and religion. And I felt confident to propose that that’s what I might do, because while at Sussex I had actually taught a course that was not specifically historical in orientation, but there had been two religious [studies] students who had specifically asked for a course on science and religion, and they I think had approached Peter Nidditch, or through one of their other tutors had done so, and so one of the John Hedley Brooke Page 107 C1672/08 Track 7 extra things I’d been asked to do during the Sussex year was to teach something on science and religion. And I remember using Ian Barbour’s book, which came out in 1966, his Issues in Science and Religion, as a textbook for that Sussex course. So, moving back to Lancaster, I had a foundation both in literature that dealt with contemporary discussion of science and religion, but from my other training and my other interests and all my work in Cambridge I’d got the historical foundation for putting on a course of that kind.

[27:26] At Sussex, why do you think it was you who was asked to put on this course that a couple of students had requested, rather than anyone else?

It is interesting to reflect on why I was asked, because it couldn’t have been that by that time I had a reputation that went ahead of me. But I think it was probably because the invitation to put on a course of that kind had gone first to Peter Nidditch, who presumably didn’t want to do it himself, and then he realised that he had got somebody whose work perhaps lent itself rather more than any of the other members of his department to providing that particular task, and to fulfilling that task. I found it quite rewarding. The only problem, I remember, was that one of the two candidates answered an examination question based entirely on Ian Barbour’s book, and I remember the other examiner was unhappy about that, because it made it look as if the student had never really thought for themselves about that particular issue that was being examined. I can’t think of any other reason than that it was convenient for Peter Nidditch to assign that responsibility to me and that he must have thought from what had been said in references that I did have some competence in that area. But of course I was very much feeling my way, as I was in some of the other courses I taught. I did one on the philosophy of biology in Sussex which involved quite a lot of new reading, and one on the scientific revolution, which was interesting because Peter Nidditch had given the students some reading to do in preparation, not knowing exactly who would be doing the teaching. Obviously that information had gone out prior to my appointment. And gratifyingly to me, the students who attended that seminar said to me afterwards that they had not been inspired by the reading that had been allocated, but that they had greatly enjoyed the seminar, so that was nice to have that kind of approbation. I think Peter Nidditch himself, again, just backtracking a second, I think he must have been very happy with the feedback that he had had about my work in Sussex, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so keen to try to keep me, and I imagine it meant that his reference to Lancaster on my behalf would have been really John Hedley Brooke Page 108 C1672/08 Track 7 very strong, making particular reference to the teaching that I had been doing. It did lead to one slightly curious thing, because I’d been promised more money if I stayed in Sussex, it meant that in a sense by moving to Lancaster I took a salary cut, because Lancaster as a new history department with many young members of staff, who like myself had only recently completed doctorates, the department, certainly the head of department, Austin Woolrych, had a very clear sense of how impolitic it would be to bring in somebody else, arguably a little younger, because I was kind of young for my year, having been born in May, somebody younger and yet being paid significantly more than they themselves. So I sacrificed filthy lucre for stability and the prospect of tenure. And it was exactly the right thing to do of course.

[32:00] Is there something in your personality, in your sense of self at the time that was likely to have valued that stability and sort of job security? It seems to have been something very attractive to you at that age, if we extrapolate from (a) a stressful experience when employment was insecure, and then the positive things you’ve said about getting a permanent job. Was it something that you think at that age you… that concerned you?

It concerned me, but I think at the level of what would I do if I had no employment at all. That’s why that last year in Cambridge had been stressful, because there was the real prospect that I would perhaps have to consider a very different future, one in which perhaps I would have to contemplate teaching chemistry in school. The notion that the rest of my life would be spent in higher education as a university teacher, that was certainly not self-evident at the time, or that it would be fulfilled, that particular ambition. So I don’t know that there was anything deeply specifiable about a personality that was intrinsically insecure and was looking for that kind of stability. There was, I think perhaps there was one respect in which there was instability, but it wasn’t directly to do with employment, though how it might have manifested itself I don’t exactly know. This introduces an entirely different theme and one that we shall probably talk about at a later stage. I, as I’ve hinted just occasionally, was not short of girl friends when I was in Cambridge, or even during my Sussex year, but I was short of a girlfriend, you know, in the rather stronger sense. And I remember there was a particular context in which I discussed this with the college chaplain in Fitzwilliam. I guess this would have been some time during 1969, when I was flitting backwards and forwards between Cambridge and Sussex, and by that time my younger brother had actually become John Hedley Brooke Page 109 C1672/08 Track 7 engaged to be married He’d clearly got a very permanent relationship anyway. And I remember the college chaplain saying to me, I’ve really been thinking about you recently, he said to me, knowing what has happened to Mike, and you must have reflected on this issue about having some more permanent relationship with a prospective partner. And I remember I was a little bit surprised by the discussion, but I remember him saying, you will find that this will all come right, if that’s the right word, it’ll all come right naturally when you are yourself in a stable position. But he was very conscious of how, at that time in my life, having had the uncertainty in Cambridge and then the commuting backwards and forwards when I was at Sussex and the stresses of my life there. I think he was actually very perceptive, because as it happened, that is exactly what happened and at the end of my first year in Lancaster I met Janice, whom I eventually married. But, I do recognise, I guess, that any young male would recognise, that I was not in the fundamental sense yet in a deeply satisfying relationship at that particular time. So stability in that sense and the fact that getting a secure job here and with the prospect of remaining at Lancaster for some time and therefore developing a different kind of social life where one could build relationships that were not ephemeral, that was significant.

Thank you. [37:40] Could you describe the, is it the Department of History at Lancaster?

Yes. It was the History Department [in] which I found myself. Of course a very different academic culture from the maths and physics and philosophy I was ensconced in in Sussex and very different from the history and philosophy of science I’d been surrounded by in Cambridge. So it was a very different academic ethos. It was a department which eventually expanded to contain twenty-five, twenty-six, possibly even one or two more members of staff. It was striking in one respect, which was for a while a source of embarrassment to the department in that despite that number we had only one female lecturer in the department, though she [Ruth Henig] has eventually found herself in the House of Lords, so she had a distinguished career outside the department in the long run. It was, as I hinted before, a warmly welcoming department. I found common interests with a number of colleagues, with whom I am still in very, very close contact, even though we live in different parts of the country now. There was an openness to new course proposals, though as I mentioned earlier, my suggestion of a course on science and religion was certainly looked at as peculiar. It John Hedley Brooke Page 110 C1672/08 Track 7 obviously lay outside the normal parameters of what would be taught in a history department. But I had great encouragement from my senior colleague in the history of science and that was Robert Fox, who’d been appointed two or three years prior to my arrival and he really set up the history of science show. He was very keen I should be allowed to teach what I wanted to teach, and I got encouragement too from Ninian Smart in the religious studies department, religious studies being one of the really strong departments in the university at that time. So, that meant that after relatively short time in post I was able to devise my own really quite substantial and extensive course on the history of science and religion. I’m trying to think how many lectures it had when it was first launched. It went on for a whole, all of two terms, and then examination after that. I think forty to fifty lectures I would give on that topic during the year, and it wasn’t the only teaching I did because I contributed to other courses that were already in place. And what was striking and what was actually probably unique to Lancaster was that we had the opportunity to teach the history of science to both arts students and science students, and for a very particular reason. In defining the degree structure, the founding fathers of the university had decreed that in their first year all arts students should do at least one course that would introduce them to the culture of science, and conversely, all science students should do at least one course that brought them into contact with a more humanist kind of culture. And of course the history of science was absolutely perfect for that. So we had a lot of students, the numbers expanded and it wasn’t long before we had a third colleague, and then not longer after that, a fourth. And to have four historians of science in a history department was truly exceptional, and I think has probably remained so. Historians of a more conventional kind can tolerate one, usually, if it has to be, but to have a core group as large as that! But we were so fortunate, because academically I can truthfully say, I think, academically it was very strong and it also meant we were in the position not only to teach arts and science students, but we could teach the courses to the historians that revolved round the history of ideas. So any course that was on the history of thought rather than the history of events, we would on the whole take responsibility for. So we had a pretty high profile in the department which worked pretty much to our favour. But, reciprocally, we were genuinely grateful to be in such a supportive environment. And it’s one reason why I never felt any sense of compulsion to leave Lancaster at all. So that says a little bit about what I found when I came here. I remember the collegiality with which the historians would sometimes organise walking trips to the Lake District, and in general, introducing newcomers to some of the delights of the Lancs/Cumbria countryside.

John Hedley Brooke Page 111 C1672/08 Track 7

[44:21] What did you take from working now with historians as opposed to briefly a sort of different group of people at Sussex, but before that working in a department of the history and philosophy of science, what was different about a department of history as opposed to a department of history and philosophy of science?

It’s a fascinating point to reflect on how one’s location in a university and in which department one might find oneself, how that can have a bearing on the kind of work that one does. I’m convinced that the effects can be very considerable. But it happens, I think, often in subtle, inconspicuous, almost in ways almost like osmosis; something passes into your own understanding by virtue just of listening to the conversation of one’s colleagues, of attending staff seminars, doing perhaps rather more historical reading than philosophical, because that was certainly a switch in emphasis from both Cambridge and Sussex to the history department at Lancaster. One wasn’t for the whole time constructing philosophical arguments and trying them out on colleagues who would try to tear them to pieces; that was not the academic game. And I think I still do believe that the set of skills you need to write as a historian, it is a different set of skills from those you need as a philosopher and as an analyst of scientific methodology. I think those craft skills involve improving one’s sensitivity to the use of language, ways of constructing narratives which can be attractive, perhaps by starting with a particular theme and then developing it on a whole track and returning to where you started from at the end with a little rhetorical flourish. It’s the kind of thing historians in their writing are often very clever at doing. So I would guess hearing some of my senior colleagues in the history department at that time often taught me not only to think in more genuinely historical ways, in other words, to think more contextually about the ideas I was analysing, but also to be more sensitive to creating narratives that have [a] kind of special appeal by virtue of being crafted to develop the theme in an engaging sort of way. That sounds terribly vague and…

No. So is the point that listening to colleagues in a history department, part of the result of that was for you to value actually the kind of almost literary quality of the writing of the work in a way that you wouldn’t have done if you’d remained in a department of the history of science and philosophy of science?

John Hedley Brooke Page 112 C1672/08 Track 7

I think that is the point. I do remember, however, in some of my reading, even as an undergraduate in Cambridge, being struck by the different writing styles of the historians of science I was reading then. I remember, for example, Herbert Butterfield’s book, The Origins of Modern Science, which was one of the great classics of that time, he had a particular way of dealing with additions he wanted to make to a sentence, which didn’t involve the start of a new sentence, but he would insert a dash and then continue the sentence in a particular way. And I was very struck by that because I thought it was actually rather effective. These days, in a novel for example, you’d never do that, I mean you’d remove the dash and the extra information would just be a separate sentence without a verb. The style in those days, even some of the most exemplary writing was, I think, more complex than would be regarded today as ideal style for communicating to a general audience, certainly. So I was conscious of different ways of writing history, even before I began my doctoral work. But I think it was during my time at Lancaster with increased knowledge of historical scholarship, listening to my colleagues talk, listening to the way they argued and constructed different interpretations of the same events. It was all edifying in ways about which it’s rather difficult to be precise, but the effect, as I say, over time, was like a kind of osmosis in which one began to think of oneself, well, if I say as a historian it would be presumptuous, because I have never actually made the claim to be a historian in a conventional sense. And I have a very particular reason for saying that. But I think certainly a sympathy for high quality historical writing grew in me during those early Lancaster years. And in some of my more exposed publications – I’m thinking ahead now two or three years to when I wrote teaching materials for the Open University – I think that I was conscious that I could write in, shall we say, rather more direct and less flowery ways to attract attention than I had done in my earlier publications. So in writing and in thinking, the importance of context when constructing a historical argument seemed to me very important, and I do remember stressing that in the Open University stuff that I wrote. You know, that to extract these scientific and philosophical debates out of the cultural context in which they took place you risk missing the point, but there was something going on either in the politics or in the religion, maybe in the economics. But there was something going on that you miss if you strip those controversies of their immediate cultural reference.

[52:51] Were the historians there talking about particular theories of the writing of history? I suppose I’ve heard of Hayden White’s Content of the Form and I know that about this time John Hedley Brooke Page 113 C1672/08 Track 7

Foucault’s writing things on what he calls genealogy, which has got nothing to do with what we commonly think we mean by that, but were the historians enthused by particular models for the writing of history at that time, do you remember?

I think individuals in the department probably were, but I don’t remember, say, having a staff seminar devoted to an appraisal of Hayden White or… there would be references to them in work that was done in the department, but I don’t get the impression that was an all- consuming interest. Whereas I do remember, for example, when Foucault came into fashion, in Cambridge there were seminars devoted to Foucault. I remember Roy Porter once chastising me at one academic event in Cambridge when I simply confessed that a particular book by Foucault I had not yet read, and I think there were colleagues in the history and philosophy of science who were very clued in on the absolutely latest historiographical vogue. And actually I could sometimes feel that I was not quite as close to that avant-garde work as I should have been. And yet, in my own way I was forging a new historiographical approach to controversies in science and religion and I felt that that actually was where my own particular contribution and talents might be. So it didn’t worry me too much that I was not directly involved in the kind of progressive discussion of historical theory. But it was of course part of the milieu in a history department and journals like History and Theory were certainly in circulation and people were talking about them. But I wouldn’t say that it was as dominant a motif as one might have found in other departments.

Thank you. [55:54] Now in the autobiographical article you say that your course on relations between science and religion that you start here, I think you say something like it very quickly led on to the invitation to write for the Open University. Could you expand on how the one thing led to the other?

My course on science and religion at Lancaster did actually lead quite quickly to an invitation to contribute teaching material for a new course that was being devised at the Open University. The connection is through a colleague, Colin Russell, who taught in Preston at what was then Harris College. He was a chemist but deeply interested in the history of chemistry because he had completed a thesis on Edward Frankland, a Lancastrian actually, Edward Frankland who’s known in the chemical world for the concept of valency and also John Hedley Brooke Page 114 C1672/08 Track 7 for his work on organometallic compounds. So Colin from having been a chemist had, rather like me, become a historian of chemistry. He was deeply interested in the relations between science and religion. I knew that because we had had conversations when we’d met at history of science conferences. And I’d met him – actually, when would this have been? Early in my doctoral work, so it could have been about 1967 when there was a conference in Manchester appraising the work of John Dalton, which led to a book called John Dalton and the Progress of Science, and Colin contributed an essay on Berzelius and electrochemical dualism. And I remember at the first night of that conference happening to sit opposite Colin at dinner and we got into conversation and he asked me what I was doing, so I told him I was working on the history of chemistry. The conversation led on to the point where I probed him a little bit on what he was going to talk about as his contribution to the conference. I was just there as a student observer rather than a contributor. And he happened to mention that it was going to be on Berzelius and Dalton, and I’d just been reading myself the crucial primary sources for what I needed for my thesis on that. So I immediately started asking him quite serious academic questions about the very texts that he was going to speak on. And I think that took him rather by surprise, that somebody else had been reading the same things. But it led to a close friendship which ended, sadly, only a couple of years ago when Colin passed away. But, this is the point, Colin applied for the vacancy that was advertised at the Open University to set up a department of the history of science there and he was successful. Now, we had spoken before he went, we had been speaking about putting on a course on science and religion that could be taken both by Lancaster students and by his students at Harris College in Preston. It was going to be a collaboration between the two institutions and he knew that I had done a terrific amount of work already in producing the course that existed at Lancaster. Now, we never got round to doing that because he got the call to the OU. But it meant when he had to put on a new course for students at the OU and set up his stall there, he went back to the idea of a course, which became known as ‘Science and Belief’, rather than science and religion. It was a course called ‘Science and Belief from Copernicus to Darwin’. In the preparation and authentication of new courses at the Open University, you had to have a course team, no one person or even two could legislate, as it were, for a new course, it had to pass through all kinds of hurdles. But having a course team with two external consultants, seemed to be the pattern, certainly it was the pattern that Colin adhered to when he set up this science and belief course. Knowing that I had such a course on my books and in my head, he suggested that I should be one of the external consultants and the other was Reijer Hooykaas, the Dutch Calvinist historian of science, [a] very fine scholar, who had quite recently John Hedley Brooke Page 115 C1672/08 Track 7 published a book called Religion and the Rise of Modern Science. And so that book, which when I look at it now is rather fragmentary, but that book was adopted as the course text, but since we are talking here about the Open University in the early 1970s, we’re talking about in addition to a course book, a whole series of written course units containing important materials for the students and containing proscribed reading and containing self-assessment exercises and referring to television programmes that the OU made in conjunction with the BBC, and also radio programmes. So to put on a new course at the Open University was a pretty tough assignment; you had to have a team of scholars who contributed the writing, you needed the external consultants, you needed to prepare television and radio programmes and you had to get it all approved by the educational technologists, who were this breed of newcomers, as I perceived, who gave very helpful criticism on things that one wrote, particularly examined from a prospective student’s point of view, bearing in mind that OU students were often mature people who had been separated from their original education by many years. So it was demanding for them and it was demanding for those of us who devised the programmes and devised the material. So that’s how I got into acting as a consultant for the Open University, which I did for many years, because there were subsequent courses. There was one called ‘Science and Belief from Darwin to Einstein’ which succeeded the original one, for which I was brought in as an examiner. And I would occasionally do radio and television programmes to supplement that work. [1:04:46] But what I did for that very first course that went out in 1974 but was devised during ‘72/73, that very first course I was responsible for writing four of the sixteen course units, which is quite an assignment. Fortunately, the year in which I wrote them I had my first bit of sabbatical leave, not a whole year, but I had a couple of terms in which I could devote myself to that. And so I wrote on the mechanisation of nature in the seventeenth century, I wrote on natural theology from Robert Boyle to William Paley, I wrote on precursors of Darwin, looking at early theories of evolution, and I wrote a unit on Darwin himself. This was all wonderful experience for me and not least because I got helpful feedback from those who read the material as it was prepared. And I did a television programme on Isaac Newton, and I think I’m right in remembering a radio programme on vitalism and different theories of the nature of life in the early nineteenth century. So this was all historical in orientation, but picking out various themes that have a modern resonance still. What is staggering about that when I look back to it now, and I picked this up when I attended the memorial service for Colin Russell a couple of years ago, was just how many students took those courses and read John Hedley Brooke Page 116 C1672/08 Track 7 the stuff that I along with others had written. And one was talking about several hundreds each year over a period for each course of at least five years, because that was the timespan of a given course, after which OU policy was basically to dispose of the units on the grounds that they would be obsolete by then. For a historian that’s a bit of a tough policy and a lot of people regretted that some of those materials, not merely the ones I had written, were no longer available after about 1980 or so, because they had travelled the world and they were being used in a lot of places. So I mean that was very nice to know. But it means that globally one is talking about that teaching material having reached thousands and thousands of students, and that’s what I find electrifying when I think about it, because most of us in a conventional academic career will be teaching, I don’t know, fifty to a hundred students, sometimes not as many as that, in any one year and in a lifetime on that sort of basis one would get nowhere near the kind of numbers that the Open University was serving at that particular time, I don’t know how it fares now in terms of student numbers. But I do find that very humbling and I think back and am actually rather glad that I put the effort into that that I did. [1:09:09] It was also a significant course, that very first one, because Colin Russell himself published a unit, [the] very first one, which was called ‘The Conflict Thesis and Cosmology’ and I think I can say that it was the first publication associated with a teaching document that specifically critiqued the thesis that science and religion are essentially in a conflictual relationship. It’s difficult to articulate what one means by the conflict thesis, it can mean many different things of course, but it usually has meant that there is some kind of essential conflict between science and religion, which means that when you come to analyse a particular historical controversy involving both, you bring to your historical investigation the presupposition that there must have been a conflict, and then you explain things on the basis of that. And I think we can truly say now that that isn’t the best presupposition to bring to a historical conflict, certainly if one is going back more than 150 years or so. So that course was interesting in that it did lay some foundations for other teaching courses in which one would try to get the students to think more deeply about some of the issues they took for granted, and of course that they heard on the radio and saw on the TV in the way popular journalism likes to have conflicts because it’s more interesting and makes a better story.

Where do you think that Colin Russell would have got that language choice from, why The Conflict Thesis and Cosmology in that unit rather than any way of expressing the same? John Hedley Brooke Page 117 C1672/08 Track 7

I don’t know when the two words, ‘conflict thesis’ were first put side by side. I think Colin has been credited with that through the choice of words in that particular unit. The idea that there has been a perennial, or shall we say, a very common conflict between science and religion, is language that goes back to the nineteenth century, particularly John Draper’s book, The Conflict Between Religion and Science, so the word ‘conflict’ is certainly not a 1970s invention, it was part of popular historiography of science and religion from, shall we say, 1870 onwards. The metaphor was strengthened in the 1890s when Andrew Dickson White, who was the first president of Cornell University, published a book called The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. So conflict becomes warfare. Although in other respects White’s book was a little bit more sensitive than Draper’s, in that Draper’s is just a blatant diatribe against the Roman Catholic Church. White always said that he didn’t think there was a conflict between science and what he understood by religion, but that there was a conflict between science and [dogmatic] theology. And that’s a very interesting distinction, because it does actually reflect what was often said in that post-Darwinian Victorian period, when figures like Huxley, John Tyndall and others would make precisely that point, that they were not attacking religion understood in its most noble, personal and intimate senses, but they really had it in for theology, which they saw as dogmatic, ultra- conservative, obstructive of science. And in some ways they were right, but it’s the distinction’s quite interesting there. So the word ‘conflict’ is, you know, has a long history, and I think Colin, who would have accepted the designation of being an evangelical Christian, knew enough history of science to know that the kind of thesis that Draper and White had produced in the nineteenth century and slightly watered down versions from historians of science in the early twentieth century, he would have known enough to know that their representation of the past was flawed. And he felt, and we discussed this I remember, that there could be real value in having an academic course which corrected what had become a popular perception based on those writings, which were a throwback to the nineteenth century. And of course in popular culture the views of Draper and White still reign okay. It’s the kind of standard view that you would encounter. So I think that’s where Colin got the idea of having the opening unit described as something on a thesis of conflict between science and religion that could be shown to be defective.

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[1:16:03] Were your motivations for taking part in this course the same as Colin’s for being involved in this course at the OU?

I think to the extent that I had felt during the preparation for my teaching, for my teaching on science and religion at Sussex, for my exposure to Victorian literature on science and religion which I had during my Cambridge days, I did have a very strong sense of mission and a very strong sense – and I don’t actually mean to use that word mission directly in a religious sense, I’m using it metaphorically – I did have a mission to want to get over the fact that history can teach you something different, it can widen your horizons, it widened mine to the point where I saw that the clichés that I was reading every day in newspapers and hearing on the radio, that those clichés were only part of a much bigger story one needed to tell about how religion had sometimes been supportive of science, sometimes had provided presuppositions for the rationality and intelligibility, the unity of nature. I could see in the scientists of the past I’d now discussed in some detail – figures like Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton – these were great scientists who would have been appalled at the thought that science and religion were in conflict. So I did have a sense of mission in that metaphorical sense of thinking that history really has got something to tell us about how these particular popular historiographical beliefs have come about and what is wrong with them, and what kind of self-serving agendas they promote, without being insensitive to the fact that one might have a self-serving agenda myself. [1:18:30] I was asked once by a colleague whether I thought that the motivation for that first course, the ‘Science and Belief from Copernicus to Darwin’, could have been deep down a kind of religious motivation, that it was a course that was somehow founded on an attempt, well, to do some kind of pre-evangelism. Knowing Colin’s evangelical background, knowing that I had religious interests myself, I can see why that question might have been asked, but actually, I don’t think that my sense of mission for putting on a course of that kind was drawn, not consciously anyway, from that religious objective. I just had that sense of excitement and having something to demonstrate which I was in a position to do, having studied some of the controversies from the past. But like so many events in history, because we are talking now about a historical event in the early 1970s, like any historical event, you can place different interpretations on what was happening. All I would say was, that if that course had been designed as a form of pre-evangelism, I don’t think that the course as it was John Hedley Brooke Page 119 C1672/08 Track 7 produced could fit that description, simply because it would never have been approved. The fact that there was so much authentication done at an academic level meant that each of the units that was written was scrutinised to a very high degree of sophistication by those who read it. I mean I remember my piece on natural theology, which has been one of the things I’ve specialised in, was very heavily criticised by one of the ecclesiastical historians at the OU. There was… it was a very serious academic course and I would hesitate, I think, now certainly in myself, to speak of ulterior motivation. But why one takes an interest in a particular academic problem or a particular historical complex of ideas, why one takes an interest in one complex rather than another may of course reflect one’s formation, and I wouldn’t dispute that for a moment.

And what about your perception of Colin’s aims for this course, given that you could argue that there was more at stake for him personally in resolving conflict between science and religion because he was, I think you said, himself a chemist, so you have that tendency which you write about in Science and Religion for individuals to be interested in resolving a conflict in their own biography and then that gets sort of beamed out on to more general things. So did you, through being his friend and through working with him, get any sense of his aims for the course?

Well, one thing one has to remember is that if one is interested in religion as a scientist and becomes at the same time then interested in how one might resolve difficulties or conflicts between them, I think it’s very often the case that the scientists who have an interest in religion don’t themselves always experience a conflict. We are in danger of actually somehow projecting a conflict on them precisely because of the prevalence of the notion that there must be one. I mean I’ve often been asked when I’ve spoken about seventeenth century science and the scientific revolution, I’ve often been asked, how did Isaac Newton reconcile his science with his religion. I don’t think he would have recognised the use of the word ‘reconcile’ in that question, because for him there are not these two separate territories or two separate disciplines pulling in different directions that you’ve somehow got to haul back into a rapprochement. I think for him there was a degree of, considerable degree of overlap in the way his discourse about science also impinged on his religious interests and vice versa. I mean just as he says himself, you know, discussing God’s relationship to nature is part of the business of natural philosophy, it’s not a separate kind of thing that you have to bring into some kind of coalition. So in asking whether I thought Colin was in some way resolving a John Hedley Brooke Page 120 C1672/08 Track 7 personal conflict, I mean only he would be able to answer that, for reasons I’ve mentioned before, these are often very intimate and personal questions. What I think what he did think was that a knowledge of the history of science really did have something valuable to contribute, to correcting an image which did damage religion. And I think I probably felt the same about that, that so long as people were using this notion of inherent conflict between science and religion as a way of disparaging religion, then one way to attack that kind of agenda would be to show that a premise, the premise was wrong, that there hadn’t always been a conflict between the two. And I find myself still following that strategy today. I very recently reviewed Peter Harrison’s book, The Territories of Science and Religion for the TLS and I remember making that point in that review, that the history can correct views which I think are damaging to religion. I do incidentally have a spare copy of that if it would be of any interest to you, because it does of course bear directly on this, that Peter is talking about the origins of the conflict thesis and how it all came about and how it’s all wrong…

Yes please.

…in various ways. I mean it’s a very deep book, very, very scholarly, which I greatly enjoyed. So, that was answering your question about Colin.

[1:26:52] When you were answering the question about your own aims for the course, you said that you were concerned about the kinds of clichés that you were reading in newspapers and hearing on the radio, can you be a bit more specific about where you would have read those things and where you would have heard them at this time in the early seventies, I suppose we’re talking about. I mean what were you reading and what were you listening to that would have contained these clichés that would have been annoying to you as someone who’d looked at these things in a scholarly way?

Yes, I can’t remember very specific examples where I read something that stung me so much that it stayed with me afterwards where exactly I saw it. In the early seventies, if we go back to that time, of course it’s a time only just after a time when positivism tend[ed] to reign supreme in a philosophy that purported to discuss the culture and methodology of science. So by that I mean that one frequently encountered the notion, I suppose made famous by the Vienna School, but popularised by Freddie Ayer in Oxford and others, that if you can’t verify John Hedley Brooke Page 121 C1672/08 Track 7 or falsify a statement then it’s meaningless, or at best, nonsensical. And that kind of attitude I think was quite prevalent at the time, so I would have read that in the kind of books on science that I was absorbing at that time. Certainly in kind of review sections of newspapers that were talking about texts in the philosophy of science or elsewhere. That kind of reigning positivism did define quite a common outlook at that time. And I think that’s one reason why some of my colleagues at Lancaster were a bit surprised that one might even think about teaching a course on science and religion, because there could have been that ulterior suspicion, well it’s alright to talk about science, but if you bring religion in, you’re bringing in something which is such a totally different kind of animal, you’re bringing in something that doesn’t bear serious examination. So you’re hitching two things together that ought to be kept apart. It’s a view Richard Dawkins still articulates. You know, if you place science and religion in the same sentence you’re automatically dignifying religion by virtue of doing so, it really doesn’t deserve serious consideration. The sort of attitude you still find in many academic institutions in France today, for example. It’s a strong kind of secularist position and I think one certainly found that in the early seventies, late sixties and early seventies. [1:30:31] I remember actually giving a seminar as a graduate student in Cambridge to a small group of the faculty. This was a kind of private discussion group that involved the research students and some of the staff and involved some of the philosophy staff too, and I rather blotted my copybook – this was relatively early in my postgraduate career, it was before I read the paper on Wöhler’s urea, which I mentioned earlier and which I think was probably a leg up to my move to Sussex. But I remember reading a paper which was talking about natural theology and figures like Adam Sedgwick, a Cambridge geologist who was one of Darwin’s friends in Cambridge, one of his rather severe critics later. And I set up that particular seminar as one in which I was trying, as it were, to think aloud about how somebody then, but even now, might try to talk about God’s relationship to nature in such a way that you could produce some coherent account of divine activity that didn’t violate the naturalism of science, [a] perennial issue in [the] science and religion field. And I remember being rather stunned afterwards because I had said, you know, this is a problem as I see it, how might one make any progress with this? And I think my setting up a problem like that, which took a theological problem seriously and putting it centre stage, I think it was a source of embarrassment. As I remember, the very fine philosopher, Hugh Mellor, simply answering my question, what do we do with this problem, he said, why have the problem? And of course I could see immediately what he was driving at. If you eliminate theological discourse John Hedley Brooke Page 122 C1672/08 Track 7 altogether you don’t have that problem. And it did lead, I know, from what Mary Hesse told me afterwards, to some discussion among the group as to whether I had gone beyond bounds of etiquette in introducing a theological problem in a history of science seminar. But I remember Mary Hesse saying we all came to the conclusion in the end that perhaps we should talk more freely about our issues, you know, our own beliefs outside our academic work. So I don’t think I killed my reputation in that talk, but I remember it and I mention it now because I think it’s just a measure of how one did get a sense at that time that if you took a theological issue seriously you were violating the cardinal issues of contemporary philosophy. Now, there are many, many philosophers today who I’m sure would take still exactly that view, but it meant that it was a time when you would read things quite regularly that carried that implication that religious discourse was not worth the candle and you shouldn’t trouble yourself with it at all. And I think I just felt, having moved in religious circles, albeit rather circumspectly, I just felt that there were riches and resources in the historical record which should be brought to bear on that same question. And I do think it has happened and in part due to the work of historians of science, not to them entirely, it has come about that that rather rigid positivism has failed and people talking about the culture of science these days would not constrain it in the way that those philosophers did. In other words, there can be a much greater openness as to what counts as a valid scientific methodology, even if it goes against the grain of well-defined norms.

[end of track 7]

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[Track 8]

As I look back on to the years round about 1970 I am reminded actually of one rather humorous episode. I would travel regularly between the University of Sussex and the University of Cambridge where I was still lecturing and still actually attended college events to which I was invited. And on one occasion there was a very formal dinner which meant that as I left Brighton I had to remember to take my DJ and my dress shirt and bowtie just to make sure that I would not be out of place at the dinner. When I arrived in college I was at that time permitted by the Master to reside in his own suite of rooms, which was an exceedingly generous offer, and that was fine and I greatly appreciated that. But on this particular occasion, as I unpacked my case, I observed that my dress shirt had somehow become extraordinarily crumpled during the journey and so I really needed an iron and an ironing board, and despite my best attempts I could not find an iron or an ironing board in the Master’s suite of rooms, perhaps not altogether surprising. But I hit on a brilliant solution, which was to visit my lady friends in New Hall, the college next door, and I thought if I could gain access to their inner sanctum, namely their ironing room, I might be able to achieve what I needed to do there. So this I duly did and I knew one or two of the girls there and they very kindly obliged, as I anticipated they would. And so I duly ironed my shirt and walked back to Fitzwilliam College, but when I got back I realised I’d made a dreadful mistake, which was to leave the coat hanger behind in this inner sanctum in New Hall, and it was significant because it had the Master of Fitzwilliam’s name on it, Walter Grave. And I thought oh dear!, things could be read into this if I don’t retrieve the coat hanger. But when I went back almost immediately, the coat hanger had already been found and a ransom demand had been placed upon it, and so it required some pretty deft diplomacy in order to retrieve this object, and I smuggled it back to where it belonged in college without anybody ever discovering, or certainly without the Master of Fitzwilliam discovering what had happened. And then I remembered, months later when I thought it was safe to acknowledge this faux pas, we had a really good laugh about it and he saw the funny side of it, happily. But I tell that story because I did have that privilege of residing not merely back in college when I returned from Brighton, but enjoying his rather palatial suite of rooms. And I was exceedingly fortunate in so many respects like that, I experienced the kindness of many colleagues and very senior colleagues too.

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[03:53] Thank you. And sticking with this time, last time you mentioned that at the time you were commuting back and forth, you were also speaking at other, or lecturing in other places, including a talk at the Science Museum I think that you mentioned, which was at this time. And I was just interested in questions like why you were doing that and how it came about, how the opportunity or how the invitation came about?

Yes, during this period when I was teaching at the University of Sussex, I do recall speaking at various society meetings, and by society in this case, it was very often a history of chemistry society. I think like any young academic working in the field, one very much valued membership of the professional history of science societies, and the one with which I had the closest affinity was the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, affectionately known as SHAC, -S-H-A-C. And their journal, Ambix, had published my first ever paper in the history of chemistry back in 1968, so during the year 69/70, I was invited by that society to give a talk at one of their regular meetings, often held at the Science Museum in London, so I do recall this particular meeting, because something very strange had happened. I was having dental problems at the time, to which I might [already] have referred, and something smashed with the temporary denture that I was wearing. So my appearance on that occasion, not exactly toothless, but partially toothless, must have been quite disconcerting to some members of the audience. But because my thesis, my doctoral thesis, had been on several aspects of nineteenth century chemistry and philosophy of chemistry, I did have a good number of talks I could mine from the thesis. And indeed, over the next four or five years, including my early years at Lancaster, I would often speak at meetings organised either by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, or the British Society for the History of Science, with which I had a long and close association, eventually becoming editor, treasurer and eventually president. [07:10] And the other organisation where I would occasionally give talks would be locally in Lancaster where the local history society would put on events and gradually as one became known in that vicinity one had the opportunity to speak there. So I was never actually short of teaching and speaking engagements in that respect.

Thank you.

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[07:43] The other thing that I was interested in, is in asking you whether you could say more about the way in which the request from two students at Sussex for a course on science and religion, how that became sort of amplified into… so it seems quite a small signal, two students asking for a course for that to become amplified into an actual course. How did that…

I think in many universities it would not have happened, because the request of two students for a course on something they wanted to do would probably have cut relatively little ice. But one has to remember that Sussex was a very young university in the 1960s, that students were often seen in relatively small groups, courses were devised that did not last the whole academic year but would be a feature perhaps for just one term’s study, in which case the demand was not as great as it would have been if they were asking for somebody to lay on a massive lecture course involving forty or fifty lectures during the year. I think what was envisaged and how we played it was a series of nine or ten seminars on critical issues in the historical relationship between science and religion and they would, as in an Oxbridge tutorial, they would do a certain amount of reading, they would write essays, and we would discuss that work and other themes I wanted to introduce in our weekly sessions. I suppose it would have been open to the head of my department, Peter Nidditch, who was Professor of Philosophy, would have been open to him to decline the invitation that came from those students. But I was actually very grateful for it because it forced me to think about the textual resources then available for a course on science and religion. And fortunately, just a few years prior to that, Ian Barbour had published his Issues in Science and Religion, it was published by the SCM Press and came out in 1966, I think it was. And that was a very comprehensive setting out of the field of science and religion, and therefore worked very well as an introductory textbook.

Thank you. [10:56] And last time you also said that you’ve never claimed to be a historian in a conventional sense and mentioned that you had a particular reason for saying that, but I don’t think you then went on to say it, if you see what I mean. So could you expand on that description of yourself?

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Yeah. I suppose it has been a feature of my academic career that I have worked consistently on the interface between different disciplines. And that has meant - and I’m perfectly open to censure in this - it has meant of course that one has never become, as it were, totally proficient and totally assimilated into the culture of any one discipline more than the others that one has been studying. And of course it’s for that reason that there are critics of interdisciplinary studies, because to become a master rather than a jack of all trades is a very demanding thing and I wouldn’t pretend that I would ever have really mastered the refinements that a person who’s spent all their life working in historical archives would have developed. History is a craft skill, as I mentioned earlier. So when I say that I have never regarded myself as a conventional historian, it’s partly because I did not have the professional training in the single discipline, history, that many of my colleagues at Lancaster, for example, would have had. But there is a second reason why I think the kind of history that, for example, you would find in my Cambridge book that was published in 1991, the Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, the kind of history you find in that is a history that I felt I wanted to write in such a way that lessons could be learnt from it for contemporary perspectives and contemporary debates in this very contentious field of science and religion. In other words I wanted historical studies to have a contemporary relevance and not merely be a serious academic attempt to recover the truth about the past, which of course one is always trying to do, but the emphasis was on how history might be used to illuminate philosophical problems, problems in the sociology of science, the cultural implications of science, and the lessons that might be applied today on the basis of what one discovered as a historian, working on the interface between history, philosophy, science and theology. And when one is working in all those spheres, as it were, simultaneously, then there are bound to be some debits as well as some gains. So I didn’t mean to censure myself too severely, but I did say that I think others might not see me as a conventional historian simply retrieving as accurately as I could the particular studies, the particular developments that I was looking at. That’s not to say that I ever knowingly indulged in any travesty of the history that I was investigating.

Thank you. [15:32] And a final discussion before we go on from where we’d got to chronologically. Last time you said that the sort of Draper and White conflict story is still – I don’t know whether you did say still – but you did say that it was the standard view that you encounter even now, I John Hedley Brooke Page 127 C1672/08 Track 8 suppose, in spite of your scholarship and other people’s scholarship. So I was just wondering whether you had thoughts on why it persists, you know, how two nineteenth century books can determine popular views now. Is the reason for a lack of change because change is slow or is it because academic work sort of floats above popular views of these things and can’t get to them, that sort of question. So it’s on the persistence of one of the arguments about the relationship between science and religion that you tackle in the book which we’ll talk about later today.

Yes. The seeming everlasting influence of those nineteenth century figures, AD White and John Draper, is to some scholars, I think, something of a mystery. And it’s interesting how books on the historical relations between science and religion very often still feel the need to refer to those nineteenth century books as if they themselves do have a lasting influence. Well, they do to a certain degree, because each of them has never, I think, been out of print and people do read them and twentieth century figures have been influenced by them. But I don’t think that’s the real reason why this seemingly perennial idea of conflict between science and religion has been so durable. There is, I think, a growing recognition among, particularly among sociologists of religion, but among historians too, that belief in a perpetual conflict between science and religion is actually something that particular categories of the populace, particular constituencies, want to believe is the case, and therefore the history is often interpreted in ways that reinforce those particular wishes. I mean just to expand on that a little. It is quite clear that contemporary atheists who wish to argue for a completely secular and irreligious culture find it very convenient to invoke the authority of modern science on all kinds of levels to justify that secularity, and therefore for them it almost is a kind of platitude that science and religion have always been in some state of conflict. So that’s one category of person, the very, very, I won’t say dogmatic, but the very convinced scientific atheist who sees science constantly eroding whatever religious beliefs have been held in the past. But there are other constituencies too, obviously religious fundamentalists themselves see, and are often very suspicious of this, they see scientific authority being wielded against them and they therefore wish to defend their understanding of the religious tradition in which they’re held in a way that brings a historical perspective to bear and one in which they’re perfectly happy to accept that there is conflict between science and religion. And I think at that more popular level there is a sense in which current events can reinforce the notion of conflict and continues to do so. An obvious example would be in the sphere of bioethics and conservative religious apprehension and resistance to some of the John Hedley Brooke Page 128 C1672/08 Track 8 biotechnology that we see developing in all kinds of exciting ways around us. So if you believe there has always been a conflict between science and religion you can certainly look at contemporary events and find some kind of support for that. But you were also, I think, right in suggesting that there is a gap between the academic discussion of particular historiographical positions and popular understandings, both of science and of religion. And the public understanding of science has of course been a major topic of research in itself, because scientists themselves, many of them will acknowledge that in their technical scientific work they don’t really engage a public understanding at all. Indeed, it’s a very remarkable skill to be able to convey something of the culture and the methodologies of science to an audience that is largely illiterate in those topics. So I hope that gives some kind of sense of why the conflict thesis still has cogency for a lot of people and why historians still feel inclined to talk about it as such because they recognise that the views articulated by White and Draper in the nineteenth century are still held by many. And I think one could perhaps summarise all this by saying that the warfare or the conflict thesis does represent a certain kind of mythology. Now, the word myth is difficult because it sometimes simply means a falsehood, but I’m using the word in this context in its rather deeper meaning about signifying, symbolising something that actually existentially can go quite deep and what I think I’m referring to here is that…

[break in recording]

And the mythology I’m thinking of here is what one might call the foundation mythology of science itself, because science, at the end of the nineteenth century, when Draper and White were writing, was almost defining itself in opposition to religion. You had to compare science somehow with something if you were going to express what was distinctive about science, and it became very convenient to use a contrast between science and religion as a way of expressing all the virtues of science and correspondingly all the defects of religion. So there’s a kind of founding myth about these issues and that myth is, it’s typified by the way in which scientists will talk about the Wilberforce-Huxley confrontation in Oxford in 1860. The alleged triumph of Huxley over Wilberforce is often presented as if it were a kind of foundation myth of professional science.

Thank you.

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[25:19] Now, last time we left you in the early years of your post at Lancaster and we spoke for most of the time about your work in preparing teaching materials for the Open University. Could you give us a sense of your own research in the 1970s, which I understand this could overlap with research for the OU and research that you see as your own research, but your research through the seventies, leading up to the point where, in the early eighties I think it must be, you are contacting Cambridge University Press and I think suggesting a book and it doesn’t sort of go as you thought it might.

That’s right. Yes, as I reflect on the decade from 1970 to 1980, there are one or two things that immediately stand out in my mind. One I would want to mention, and this was my marriage in 1972, which falls into that decade, because my wife did herself play a part in my work on the Open University materials. After graduating in French at Lancaster University she took a kind of advanced personal assistant course at what was then Harris College in Preston, and so she became qualified as a PA and very well accomplished secretary. This meant that she had secretarial skills which were of great help to me when I was preparing the Open University units and I remember this very, very clearly because in total I wrote certainly the equivalent of one quite large book for the OU. And she basically did all the typing for me, because word processors were not yet on the scene, and I could type but I was not nearly as proficient as she was. And so in the very early years of our marriage she was involved in my work to that extent, certainly. [28:11] In terms of the topics of my research, I continued, certainly during the early 1970s, to work on topics and problems in the history of organic chemistry, which had been the topic of my doctoral thesis, and in particular turning the themes of the respective chapters of that thesis into a series of articles. And some of these were quite long and substantial, and they appeared in various journals: in Ambix, the journal of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry; The British Journal for the History of Science; Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences which was edited in America by Russell McCormmach; and various other history of science journals that were interested in the development of chemistry. So that was a whole series of projects, mainly undertaken during the long summer vacations that one enjoyed at that time. So my work in the history of chemistry gradually saw the light of day through a series of articles. The Open University work required me to do quite extensive John Hedley Brooke Page 130 C1672/08 Track 8 reading in the four areas that I was deputed to write on and this meant familiarising myself with more primary sources on the seventeenth century mechanisation of nature. It required me to think much more deeply than I had before about the history of natural theology and a book by John Dillenberger called Protestant Theology and Natural Science pointed me towards some of the primary sources I should pay close attention to in writing that particular unit. Then pre-Darwinian concepts of evolution and then Darwin himself and particularly the material I wrote on Darwin himself was completely grounded in the primary sources. In other words, I read the books and I read as much of his correspondence as I could easily access. And the material I produced was grounded in those primary sources. So that eventuating in the Open University course in 1974 meant that my publications were going into rather different directions. Occasionally there were links between them. The work in the history of chemistry did raise big questions about mechanism, about materialism, about more spiritual understandings of the natural world, which I was exploring through the Open University course material. [32:08] The big change, I think, came the year after the Open University course was established, because I had my first sabbatical term from Lancaster in 1975, it must have been. And my Cambridge college, Fitzwilliam College, very kindly awarded me a visiting fellowship to spend that time back in Cambridge. And I had a very specific project to work on and it came about through a historical accident, which was that I had visited the Yorkshire town of Hawes and knew nothing about a second-hand bookshop which I went into there, and I found two books, one of which was anonymous, on the topic of extraterrestrial life. And these were books published in the 1850s. The first one, it turned out, had been written by William Whewell, who was by then Master of Trinity College in Cambridge, and the other book was by David Brewster, Scottish physicist, very critical of Oxbridge in many, many ways and of the English educational set-up. And Brewster was an evangelical Christian, but he was a very accomplished physicist; he invented the kaleidoscope, he did a lot of significant work in optics. But these two were daggers drawn on the question of whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And that’s what these two books were about. It was Whewell’s very large book setting out the grounds for his scepticism and why he thought people were too glibly referring to the possibility of ETs. And it was the popular dogma of the day on the topic: if you spoke about intelligent life elsewhere in the 1850s, the chances are you would be a very… very committed apologist for the view that there was life elsewhere. And Brewster wanted to defend that view against the criticism of Whewell. And I found this such an John Hedley Brooke Page 131 C1672/08 Track 8 interesting debate, it had so many ramifications for an understanding of the state of astronomy at that time, for the state of science in Cambridge, for the philosophy of William Whewell, who is an extraordinarily interesting commentator on scientific methodology, as has finally been realised, I think, today. And I therefore decided that I could use my sabbatical term in Cambridge to study the Whewell papers, which were held in the Wren Library in Trinity College. And so I found myself working then more on a science and religion topic than on a history of chemistry topic. And I think that is significant because it must indicate that the centre of gravity of my research was beginning to shift towards the science and religion domain. Because one thing I learnt from that particular debate is something that I’ve tried to incorporate, not always directly, but certainly indirectly in much of what I’ve written, and that is the realisation that when you look at the relationships forged between science and religion they are often very surprising and not what you expect, because you might expect that it would be the conservative evangelical Christian, Brewster, who would be much more apprehensive and resistant to a radical idea like extraterrestrials, and Whewell, who is the broad-minded Anglican cleric in Cambridge, very sophisticated in his scientific understanding and his work in philosophy, mathematics, and he was a very proficient student of the tides, and yet it’s Whewell, the liberal Anglican, who is the sceptic about extraterrestrials. And the paper that I eventually published, having studied the Whewell papers, was published in 1977 in the journal, Annals of Science [vol. 34, pp. 221- 86]. It was such a long and substantial paper that one of the commentators subsequently said I really ought to have made that a book rather than a very, very long… I mean in effect it was a short monograph itself, but published in a well-known history of science journal. But in that essay I particularly stressed that when looking at conflicts or attempts to demarcate the realms of science and religion, or attempts to study how they were related by historical figures, the positions that individuals take are generally influenced by much more than just whether you can say the ideas they had were correct or not. And in that particular debate, as I’ve already hinted, there was (all kinds of) grievance on Brewster’s part. There’s a kind of loathing of the privileges that Oxbridge dons would have, he was deeply suspicious of the way science itself was not taught in Cambridge, whereas in the Scottish universities it could be. So you find that there are many, many levels and interests that somehow influence positions in this. So that particular insight that you cannot necessarily predict the positions that people will take on issues in science and religion, I found that very liberating because it opened my mind to many other possibilities when examining historical controversies.

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Does it imply the need to think biographically about these things? Does it imply a need to look very carefully at the individuals in question, and does it relate to, I think comments that you made in the short autobiography that you sent me, that through the seventies you became more and more aware of the need to consider the factors that predispose individuals to take up particular positions?

Yes, I think it points to the need for as deep a biographical study of the personalities one is examining as one has time and energy to be able to do. Because it’s often biographical information that provides clues as to why the participants in these controversies are disposed or predisposed, one might say, to take the positions they do. And I think that is one respect in which my own work was influenced by discussions with fellow historians who pointed out their reasons for being dissatisfied with conventional work in the history of ideas which didn’t seem to see the need for a biographical study to complement the analysis of the ideas themselves. And I can remember I myself, when I was in Cambridge, saying to one of my friends there, what really interested me were the ideas then, as if who had them was of very little consequence. I was looking for ideas that were exciting and interesting and might have a relevance to current issues. But I remember one journey I spent with an Oxford historian [John Walsh] and we were talking about various historiographical approaches and he put it like that, that a history of ideas which did not investigate the predispositions of those who held those ideas and where those predispositions had come from would to him never be particularly satisfying. And I really thought about that for a long time afterwards, and it was a point that I made, I remember, in one or two book reviews that I was writing at that time where I felt that the historian of science who had been looking at the development of a particular scientific idea was not really looking at those dispositions or predispositions, for which one simply had to study context and biography. And I hope that from then onwards my work has really illustrated the value of that particular approach. Commentators on my work have often said that it is characterised by a concern to do justice to the individuality of individuals and that my work is interesting because it doesn’t simply buy the generalities and the master narratives that tend to be deployed in the polemics of the science and religion debates. And it means, I think, that if one has to distinguish between those who are the lumpers in their historiography and those who are the splitters, I’m definitely among the splitters rather than the lumpers. But there are dangers of course, if one focusses only on individuals and loses complete sight of other larger trends that may be taking place in society that you can miss if you are just highly focussed on particular individuals. John Hedley Brooke Page 133 C1672/08 Track 8

Who was the Oxford historian with whom you were having the discussion at dinner that led you to think quite a lot about this idea of predisposition?

Yes, it was actually a discussion in a car, because he was driving me from one place to another, and I can’t remember the reason. Maybe he had been attending a conference in Lancaster, was heading back to Oxford and I needed to be there. I need, Paul, to check that out and I need to make a note to myself. I can remember his first name was John, but it’s a long time since I had any particular dealings with him. So I need to make a note. [The name John Walsh is inserted above].

[46:15] And perhaps it’s worth saying now that I’d be interested in knowing who were the historians that you were rubbing shoulders with and they were expressing their dissatisfaction with the kind of absence of the individual and of personality from historical work? These were historians at Lancaster, perhaps?

Yes, I think that this was one of those examples of osmosis, to which I have referred in the past, where simply drinking coffee every morning with one’s colleagues in the SCR would generate discussions which made me more self-conscious about the need for examining context and biography. Of course not all my Lancaster colleagues were writing biographies, but I think some of the more distinguished of my colleagues, like Geoffrey Holmes, for example, who wrote a definitive biography of politics in the reign of Queen Anne, he would be an example of somebody whose work I admired and came to see on certain respects was on a very different level and plane from my own at that particular stage in my own development.

Thank you. [47:48] And to what extent did a concern to investigate individual predispositions lead you into questions about sort of psychological predisposition, or the relative importance of conscious and unconscious, however defined, predispositions for certain positions. So that when you’re thinking why is this particular historical actor likely to say this, do you need to think about John Hedley Brooke Page 134 C1672/08 Track 8 the extent to which it’s a kind of conscious strategy in that individual or a kind of, more of a kind of unconscious response to situation or background?

This is a deeply interesting question about the extent to which in examining predispositions one can identify the conscious and perhaps at the same time, unconscious motives. If one is exploring the world of the unconscious, of course that can be a bit of an insult to the historical figure you’re examining who may have had perfectly explicit and conscious reasons for adopting the positions he did. Though I suspect in many cases it’s a combination of conscious thought about the particular issue they’re discussing. In the Whewell/Brewster case it was the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. It’s quite difficult I think to penetrate the unconscious motives, even though they may very well have been playing a part. For example, one of the issues was whether the nebulae that were being examined by astronomers were simply unresolved star clusters, so you’ve just got a huge area of space in which there are many, many, many stars and when you look at them through the telescope you may perhaps not be able to see those stars as individual items, but are just part of this nebulous, luminous cloud. And that’s the position that Whewell took, thinking that the nebulae were just basically gaseous material and which could not support life of any kind, let alone intelligent life. Whereas Brewster was convinced that the nebulae were simply star clusters, so there are a lot more stars up there, they’ll have planets of their own, and therefore there’s a very good chance one or other of them will be occupied by intelligent life. And I’ve just reverted to that because I can imagine images of the heavens featuring in the unconscious reveries of both Whewell and Brewster, because these seem very kind of visual, very visual prompts of one kind or another, which do feature in their writing. But I could imagine that featuring very prominently in some kind of unconscious dreamlike reflections of how the heavens are constituted. To be honest in answering your question, how far did I get involved in psychological theory in exploring the more biographical approaches to these debates, I have to say that I don’t remember spending a great deal of time looking at Jung and Freud and Adler and the German psychoanalysts. I probably should have done, but somehow or other, there seemed to be levels at which one could write intelligently about these debates without having to use the techniques of psychoanalysis. But that may be a defect in my work of that period. But I would never claim to have been an expert in the study of the history of psychology in particular and the particular psychoanalytical techniques that could have been useful. I’m always intrigued when I read psychoanalytical investigations of Isaac Newton or Darwin or whoever one might be talking about. The difficulty I find with that is a difficulty John Hedley Brooke Page 135 C1672/08 Track 8 that I think Karl Popper found with some of the psychoanalytical work that it can generate ingenious and attractive theories about why an individual was predisposed to a particular line of thought, but you can’t really verify that that was the issue at hand. I mean it’s often been suggested that Isaac Newton’s very strong belief in what is in… effectively a non-Trinitarian God. Newton sees one transcendental force or power that he associates with God and it’s been suggested that that God of Newton is very much a surrogate figure, a projection, because he never had a father [with whom to relate]. He was born after his father died. Or as one of my students once wrote, ‘Isaac Newton was born posthumously’, and of course what he meant was, or she meant was, he was a posthumous child. And I can see there are ways in which you can say that Newton’s very distinctive non-Trinitarian God might be precisely that kind of surrogate figure, but it is very difficult to verify that. And I don’t think it’s ever going to be quite the whole story, because that particular understanding of God was in Newton’s case reinforced by a huge amount of biblical study [and] of historical scholarship [on the] chronology on [of] ancient kingdoms. So I can see the value of often highly suggestive psychoanalytical work on the personalities who feature very prominently in literature on science and religion, but I’ve never been completely convinced that if one focussed on a psychoanalytical examination, I’ve never been convinced that that would give one the whole story. It might be ancillary in a very valuable way, but never definite, I think.

Thank you. [56:29] Can you then take us on, we’ve got to the mid-seventies and your sabbatical year. I mean we’ll come back to points, but could you then take us to this point when you’re offering the book to the CUP, so if you could take us through the later seventies in your research.

The later seventies in my research grew in many ways still out of the work I had done for the Open University and it grew out of what I had been studying in Cambridge with my work on extraterrestrial life, because that took me into a realm where my new familiarity with the Whewell papers gave me a further project that I particularly wished to work on. And I laid the foundations by focussing on a particular genre of Whewell’s writings, which were held by the Wren Library in Cambridge. And this was to look at Whewell’s sermons, where I thought one would get some insight into his attitudes towards what we call natural theology. Now the main flowering of my work on Whewell as a natural theologian came rather later when I did further research for a paper on Whewell as a Christian apologist and it was an John Hedley Brooke Page 136 C1672/08 Track 8 essay for a book that was edited by Simon Schaffer in Cambridge and Menachem Fisch who has worked in Israel, but Menachem did his own doctorate in Cambridge on the philosophy of science. They collaborated on a book [William Whewell: A Composite Portrait] devoted to many aspects of Whewell’s philosophy, his life, his work as Master of Trinity, and in particular his work in epistemology. But that book, I forget exactly when it came out, but I think we must be talking there about the mid-nineties [actually 1991], but some of the spadework for that, or for my essay in that book was done in the seventies. And I was particularly interested in what one might call Whewell’s perceptions of the limitations of natural theology. The reason that’s an interesting question is that Whewell was one of the contributors to a series of books published in the 1830s known as the Bridgewater Treatises, because they were funded by the will of the [eighth] Earl of Bridgewater. Whewell was one of the contributors and he worked on the physics and astronomy in relation to natural theology. And you can read his book and you can read some of the others in that series as just a very straightforward re-exemplification of the natural theology of William Paley who was looking for examples of design right across the natural world, and to some degree they do illustrate Paley’s approach. But in other respects they don’t and I already knew from reading Whewell’s published work that, when talking in the Bridgewater Treatise, he would often suggest that the existence of a designer was not so much an inference at the end of an argument rooted in inductivist knowledge of the natural world, but was actually something you presupposed at the beginning, which could then make sense of what you found in the natural world. The realisation that Whewell was hinting at least, even in his early work, the Bridgewater Treatise, that design and a designer was more a presupposition of his philosophy of nature than the conclusion to it [was important]. That I found very interesting because it drew attention to other respects in which perhaps some [apologists] and historians had exaggerated the claims that could be made within a natural theology framework on the basis of a scientific understanding of nature. And to find that Whewell in the early 1830s was already, I think, sceptical about simply inferring from nature to God, that I found interesting, and it was one reason why I wanted to look at his sermons, to find out if there were theological reasons for those limitations of natural theology as he had already perceived them, but subsequently I think perceived them more clearly. And the sermons, I discovered, were actually quite illuminating in that respect, because it showed, for example, that he never expected anybody to be converted to Christianity on the basis of a natural theology. And there were other issues too that the sermons made clear. So one piece of work I was doing in the late seventies was looking perhaps a little bit more deeply into the presuppositions of John Hedley Brooke Page 137 C1672/08 Track 8 those who did try to relate their science to their theology, as Whewell certainly did try to do. I’m also thinking that in the late seventies, I must have been looking at other issues in the history of natural theology, because that topic became one of my main research interests over really quite an extended period. So I would have been doing work on crucial figures like Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, probably more reading on Darwin and the challenge of Darwinism to Paley’s work. But I don’t find it easy just to pinpoint exactly what I was doing in say, 1978. I would need to go back, I think, and look at my expanding list of publications in that period, which would remind me of what I was exactly working on then. I think that’s probably what I should say about that.

[1:05:14] Yes. Where were you living in Lancaster?

When Janice and I married in 1972 we were very fortunate in that we had just enough money between us, I having lived a very frugal life up to that point, to put down a deposit on a semi- detached house on the outskirts of Lancaster, which was on a road called Exeter Avenue, and for three years we had a very happy existence in that semi-detached house. There were two reasons why I look back with pleasure on that as a first house purchase. One was we were very close to Lancaster’s Williamson Park, which made a very nice place to walk to on a Sunday morning or whenever, and indeed where the local theatre, local dramatic company would sometimes give open air performances. I remember a wonderful performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream there, where we all had to follow the actors through the woods and strange creatures kind of burst out from behind the bushes. It was lovely and that was a feature of living where we did. The second feature I look back on with pleasure is that our first house had an unusually large garden. I don’t know how that had originally come about because a previous owner, but not the immediate pre… not the immediate occupants who preceded us, an earlier occupant had managed to buy bits of land that if you looked at the layout geographically, he really had no right to, but the owners of other properties had obviously been willing to part with bits of their land. So we had a very curiously shaped, but interesting garden that had been set out by this man who was obviously an extraordinarily keen gardener. And this forced me to learn rather more about plants and the kind of conditions they liked. And there was a very nice herbaceous border which had a whole series of plants that we could enjoy as they came out in their due season. Because it was already very mature, I didn’t feel the need to plant very much that was new, but it was part of my John Hedley Brooke Page 138 C1672/08 Track 8 botanical education to feel that I had some relationship with that bit of land. That actually was the period from 1972 to 1975. In 1975 we moved to a rather more interesting house in a little village between Preston and Lancaster called Scorton and we had an old stone cottage in the middle of the village with wooden beams, very large lounge and a very large bedroom. A rather beautiful staircase, which the person who converted the cottage originally had a builder who took that staircase from an old Lancashire country house that was being demolished. So very nice [wrought] iron railings and a copper balustrade on top of the railings, and a rather nice chandelier in the main entrance to the cottage. Now, I don’t want to exaggerate, this was still a relatively humble dwelling, but it does mean that my wife, seeing it for the first time when we’d gone for a walk in February 1975, she instantly fell in love with this cottage, called Pear Tree Cottage because it had an old pear tree that had once been trained as an espalier up the front of the cottage. There were limitations to that house. It didn’t have very good parking, had parking for only one car, whereas we did eventually feel the need for two. It was right in the middle of a village which on Sundays attracted a large influx of tourists, so it was never exactly a tranquil location. But because my wife’s work would eventually be in Preston and mine at the University of Lancaster, it was actually very convenient to live, not quite halfway between, but certainly in the middle, in ways that enabled us both to commute very easily to our respective places of work. But I would sometimes get a lift with other colleagues who were coming from further south, from Blackpool even, and also from Garstang, and I would get my lift to the university that way; Janice would have the car and drive into Preston. But we actually lived in that Scorton house for twenty-five years. We did convert a kind of attic space into a very small third bedroom and also a study area, which certainly played a role when I was able to work upstairs in that space rather than, rather unconventionally, in the lounge where I was just typing on a little desk. So I have very happy memories actually of both the houses that we lived in, the Scorton house until 2002, when we finally moved into a house that my parents [in law] were [had been, until their recent deaths] living in in a village to the north of Lancaster, which is Yealand Conyers. I mean you’ve seen that particular house, Paul. But it does mean, my wife and I in our married life have not lived in many houses, unlike her parents whose great interest in life was moving from one home to another.

[1:13:19] The fact that you mentioned yourself working there in the lounge raises the question of when you tended to work. So for the time we’ve been talking about, when you’re either writing John Hedley Brooke Page 139 C1672/08 Track 8 materials for the OU or you’re having this sabbatical year looking at papers and then researching in natural theology, where are you tending to prefer to work?

All my constructive writing was done at home, not in my office at the university. When I went up to the university it was largely because I had quite a, well, it was a normal teaching load for those of us teaching in a large history department. But [in] my office I used to deal with the ephemera of the day, the daily mails that came in. And then eventually of course the emails that started to bombard me, but that was not until, I think, the 1990s. Earlier, there was a constant correspondence to keep up; liaising with colleagues in different parts of the world, organising trips when I was invited to speak abroad, and I was very fortunate that there were many of those, and so I was able to see other countries in Europe and eventually a large part of the United States. But I don’t remember finding that when I was in my office I had a great deal of time spare to be writing up the research that I’d been doing. And I would do that in the long vacations, over the summer period, in vacations at other times during the year. But it’s that image I have of myself writing on the desk at the far end of the lounge adjacent to the piano in Pear Tree Cottage which rather dominates my reflections on when I found time to write up the research I was doing.

Did you work at weekends and in the evenings?

Yes, certainly. [1:16:11] But I wouldn’t say, and I don’t think my wife would say, that I have been a workaholic in a very strong sense of that word. I mean I know there are some scholars who if they don’t write their thousand words a day or however much it is, actually have withdrawal symptoms and feel very uncomfortable. And I wouldn’t say that my commitment to my scholarship really placed me in that category. I worked very hard; any suggestion to the contrary would make me feel extremely uncomfortable, because I always tried to work conscientiously in my teaching and in my commitment to research. But I didn’t feel that I was a workaholic and if a beautiful day came at a weekend, then Janice and I would go walking in the Lakes or find some other destination that gave us an opportunity to take advantage of clement weather. Though it has to be said, the number of beautiful sunny days when you’re living in north Lancashire are relatively few and therefore when such days came one would try to get out. But weekends certainly were devoted to work and evening work too, as it most certainly John Hedley Brooke Page 140 C1672/08 Track 8 became the case when I was eventually in Oxford. There was just no way I could cope with the responsibilities I had if I didn’t spend time in the evenings catching up on the day, or the week, or the month in some cases, certainly.

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[Track 9]

I’m imagining you looking through the Whewell papers, for example, in the Wren Library and I’m thinking that different people might well have different ways of engaging with archive material. I’m assuming that this was before the time when people took laptops into archives, so could you describe how you do archive work, or at least how you did archive work?

When I was working on the Whewell papers there was certainly no technology that facilitated that, not of any great consequence. As I recall, it was a question simply of taking my own notes from whatever manuscript I was currently examining. When I was working on the topic of extraterrestrial life there were helpful guides in the sense that some of the materials that pertained to that interest of Whewell had been classified together among his papers. Though having said that, the state of the Whewell papers when I first encountered them was not really what it should be and I know that quite a lot of effort subsequently went into tidying them up. So I don’t think there was any special technique that I adopted, other than looking, I knew the kind of things I was looking for and I would just simply take notes from the manuscripts as I dealt with each one in turn. Nothing very exciting, I think, on that. No.

But potential quotations presumably would have to be copied out, would they?

Oh yes. And it was, the way I did it was certainly very laborious and in ways that happily have now been transcended, that one can now operate in a very different way. But there was no obvious photographic solution that was acceptable to the library. It was a slightly peculiar experience. I don’t know whether I have mentioned this before, but one thing that really struck me when I first looked at the Whewell papers and the letters in particular, was that there would be many, many penny red and penny black stamps, which I knew as a stamp collector from my childhood, must have had enormous value. And I can remember thinking to myself, the library is trusting me not to snaffle these for my eventual pension. I subsequently, when I was working much later, ten years later or so, by then all the stamps had gone and I trust it was not that they’d all been stolen, but that somebody had realised that it just didn’t make any sense to have that valuable material just open. Because whereas I would like to think I would not have been seriously tempted, you can’t always know how people are going to behave. And also, the public were allowed into the library, about two o’clock every John Hedley Brooke Page 142 C1672/08 Track 9 afternoon I would be sat looking at my papers and a little flood of tourists would come in to examine the Wren Library and to see a typical Cambridge don poring over his work. So yes, that was one little memory I have of that archive. It was pretty disorganised when I first encountered it. My own methods were, I think, probably rather amateurish, although I don’t exactly know what else I could have done, other than identify through a kind of index. There was a pretty big comprehensive guide to what the library held, and so I knew, for example, where Whewell’s sermons were, I knew where his first draft of his book on the plurality of worlds could be found. And the librarians were marvellously helpful, as they usually are.

[05:51] How then did you come to be writing the book on science and religion for Cambridge University Press? Could you tell that story?

It must have been round about 1980 or 81, when having published by then six or seven articles on the history of chemistry, which had in their research really dated from an earlier period than my science and religion work, it did occur to me that probably I had a book in me that would be able to present some of that chemical material and its very interesting history in an accessible form to a larger public. And I was conscious that Cambridge University Press had a series which they called The Cambridge History of Science. And there were books by Richard Westfall or Sam Westfall, as he was known, on the mechanisation of nature in the seventeenth century. There was a book in the same series by Allen Debus on alchemy and early chemistry. My colleague at Lancaster, Peter Harman, wrote in that series a book called Energy, Force and Matter, which looked at the history of matter theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But there wasn’t anything in that series on the history of chemistry. And so the thought crossed my mind, why not write to the editor and just say would he be interested. Maybe the idea had been sown in my mind by one or two other friends and colleagues in the history of science, it’s difficult to remember the exact sequence. But I wrote to William Coleman who worked at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and he was the general editor of that series. And I said would you be interested in a book on the history of chemistry for your series. And it was a while before I got a reply, but when it came it was utterly surprising. I mean it was very gratifying in some ways, but he said we really do want you to be an author for our series, but we want you to write a different book, and the different book was on a historical survey of the relations between science and religion. Of course I had to think rather deeply about whether I did feel I was equipped to tackle that, but John Hedley Brooke Page 143 C1672/08 Track 9 then I thought having written so much for the Open University and done serious archival research on – by 1980 – several kinds of topic areas: natural theology, plurality of worlds, Darwinian material, I thought well, perhaps this is what I should do. And so the contract I had was to write a book that would help to orientate a first year graduate student into a field of study with which they might not yet be familiar. So the idea of that particular series was not that it should be a series of textbooks, but that it should be a guide, as it were, for a young scholar and written very much from the point of view of the author. In other words, not to try to write a rather bland textbook, but to write something that had something of oneself in it. And I suppose I did manage to do that. But I have to say, it took a very long time. I found it a demanding project, the historiography of science went through something of a revolution during the 1980s in particular, so I could write one way and by the time I got to the end of the chapter then it was time to read something else and go back to the beginning again. But actually, it took a long time for other more pressing practical reasons, the prominent one must have been that it was during the 1980s that I took on several responsibilities for my college at Lancaster. And this was an important part of my life in that university, because having had the privilege of an education in Cambridge and then teaching at Sussex, which was not collegiate, I did feel that Lancaster’s collegiate system, although not one that can really be compared with Oxford or Cambridge, really did offer the undergraduate something very important in terms of identity. And so I took on the task of senior tutor and then subsequently, principal of my college and that of course was a very significant administrative distraction from my research time. But, in all the spare time that I did have between 1980 and 1990 I did work on that book. I was very fortunate in that probably round about 1987 or 88, the university advertised to all members of staff, anybody could apply, the opportunity of an extra year’s study leave to enable them to finish a project. That’s how it was presented to us. If you’ve got a project, you know, that’s kind of nearing completion but really needs that extra bit of space or time, and I just fell perfectly into that category and was very lucky that I was given the award of an extra year’s study leave, which enabled me to complete the writing and revise the various chapters in the light of the comments that I had. I had very helpful comments from the editor, Bill Coleman, and then the book was sent, in its final draft form, to external referees, one of whom, Michael Crowe – C-R-O-W-E – from the University of Wisconsin [actually Notre Dame], was particularly helpful and conscientious in his comments. And so eventually in 1991 the book came out. There was a lot of work involved, I guess more than many members of the public would realise, even on such things as ensuring one got the illustrations from the appropriate libraries and in such quality that they could be John Hedley Brooke Page 144 C1672/08 Track 9 incorporated into the book, and also at not too great an expense. And I do remember, that was quite an issue, because I had a few illustrations from the Science Photo Library and they charged highly for anything you took from there, whereas from books in the Cambridge University library, you just got the photograph and had to pay very little for it. But all the admin over copyright and that kind of thing was certainly significant and I should think the book was probably finally written by about 1988/9, but all the extra time that went into getting permissions and the illustrations and that kind of thing certainly added extra months to the task.

[15:49] When you said that historiography of science was changing rapidly in the eighties so that it affected the extent to which you had to rewrite part of the book, could you go into a bit more detail about what those changes were?

When I referred to changes in the historiography of science during the 1980s, primarily I had in mind the way the subject was becoming more like conventional history in the sense that one was aware that there were people coming into the discipline, history of science, who had very little in the way of a science background and they were not so much interested in the technical development of particular sciences, but were interested in some of the social variables and parameters that had influenced the way science had developed in particular locations. So this is a reference back again to a kind of gradual sea change whereby the history of science, in the main, not exclusively because many fine scholars continued to work in the way the subject had been developed in the past, but there was a much greater openness, I think, to placing the science one was talking about in a wider social and cultural context. You know, why did this particular scientific theory appear in the particular context where it did? It was a turning away from the idea that a history of science can be a history of scientific geniuses who happened to get the right answer. It was a breaking away most definitively from the old Whiggish historiography which just told a linear story. And with the recognition that even the content of science could be influenced by, and by the historian related to, the particular agendas and interests of the scientists concerned. All that really led to a situation in which historians of science like myself, who’d been brought up on an old internalist model were much happier to look at external influences on the development of science. Where did the money come from? What kind of audience was there for the science? And so I found when looking at the relations between science and religion that this John Hedley Brooke Page 145 C1672/08 Track 9 development in the historiography of science was actually enormously helpful and actually gave a real justification for what I was doing, in the sense that one could show that religious movements, religious institutions had an effect on the way science had developed, sometimes in oppositional ways, in obstructive ways, but in other cases in much more propitious and catalytic ways. So I think I was encouraged by these developments in the historiography of science to emphasise more than perhaps I had done when I initially started writing, the sheer diversity and variety of ways in which religion had been relevant to science and in some cases still could be. And it also raised questions about whether some religious movements had been more conducive to scientific developments than others, some work had been done on that, certainly. I mean there was Robert Merton’s work on Puritanism and science in seventeenth century England. But I just felt that with these developments in the historiography of science my own horizons were extended, but also in ways that made the writing of the book in that particular way more intellectually acceptable than might have been the case, say, in fifteen years prior to that.

[21:16] Did you write it in the order that it appears?

Yes. I certainly wrote it chapter by chapter, though I doubtless all the time was having prospective ideas in the sense that I would have been making notes for what I would do in later chapters. Such thoughts as invade one’s mind from time to time are usually too precious to discard, so if there was something I thought might be interesting I would usually make a note of it. Most of the chapters in their first draft were too long and in fact Bill Coleman, the editor of the series, did insist to me at a relatively early stage that I should compress what was basically a two-chapter quite elaborate prelude to the rest of the book. I wrote a two-chapter theoretical introduction, talking about the nature of science, the nature of religion, the nature of history, the nature… you know. And I quite see that those two chapters were too abstract and too theoretical and would have the effect of deterring certainly a student from reading the rest of the book if they got bogged down in those. So I was very grateful for that advice and the first two chapters were condensed into one and a lot of material was simply discarded, or in some cases incorporated into later chapters. But I’m glad that there is that first chapter still, because it seems to me there is quite a lot of preliminary spadework one has to do and that a reader should be aware of, on things like: has the word “science” always meant what it means to us, has the word “religion” always meant what it means to us? And those are very John Hedley Brooke Page 146 C1672/08 Track 9 deep questions and Peter Harrison’s recent Gifford Lectures on The Territories of Science and Religion [2015] is a wonderful example of just how fruitful it can be to trace the meanings of the two words that have featured in the title of so many books.

[24:17] What else, do you remember what else Bill Coleman was interested in seeing in this book, or was keen not to see, if you like? In other words, what was… did he have a sort of agenda for this book that was clear to you through either anything explicit in the way that he set it up with you or just implicitly through the kinds of comments that he made?

I don’t recall that I was given any sort of template for how the book might look. It was left very much up to me in the spirit of the series to give my own reading of the history of the relations between science and religion. Now, Bill Coleman gave detailed comments on each chapter. Each chapter went to him before I revised it. What was very gratifying to me was that in almost every case he was clearly pleased with the content of the chapter. There was a certain point where he became aware that it was going to be a big book and most of the others in that series are, I won’t say slighter, because that gives the wrong impression, but most of the other books, if not all, in that series, were probably only about half the length. So he was aware that it was going to be unusual and distinctive in occupying as much space. I think the only chapter where I got the impression that he really held a different view from me, but where he didn’t insist that I made any changes, I think this was in the penultimate chapter where I was talking about the response to Darwin’s theory, and one of the things I tried to do, as I have done in other things I’ve written on the religious response to Darwinism, what I tried to do was to take seriously the diversity of the responses to Darwin and give as many examples as seemed appropriate of the way those responses did differ and vary from person to person. And that meant that I decided that when I was referring to the theologians responding to Darwin I would not be as critical of their positions as I think some writers might have been, and I don’t regret that, because I think part of the task of a historian is to indicate what people did say and think and I felt I was being fair to those who actually were often quite persuaded by Darwin’s argument, not always on the details of natural selection, but certainly on the fact that evolution had occurred, or by whatever mechanism it had occurred. I think Bill felt I should have been a little stronger in saying look, some of these theological responses, though they were honestly and sincerely made, intellectually are not always very prepossessing and therefore I guess I could have been criticised and was so, in John Hedley Brooke Page 147 C1672/08 Track 9 his own mind at least, for not doing quite enough to indicate how Darwin’s universe really did represent a kind of cataclysmic shift from what had gone before. I still think about that from time to time, because many very good historians of science would, I think, want to say that the emphasis given to Darwin as a single figure effecting this great revolution in our understanding of the history of the earth and our place in it, I think they would say that you can give too much weight to Darwin, who was obviously networking with many, many contemporaries. And there’s the Wallace business too of course, that Darwin is not the only one even to develop the idea of natural selection. But I think the way Bill expressed it to me was in one letter that I do still just remember, when he said I think maybe you have fallen victim to your cast, which was a slightly strange way of putting it, but I worked out that what he meant was that somehow I had been too soft on the people I was writing about. I’d allowed myself somehow to be persuaded instead of being the critical observer that I had been in the earlier chapters. So that’s one respect in which he made an interesting criticism and I remembered that phrase because it was just a little bit odd, you know, that I’d somehow been too persuaded by my cast. I interpret it the way I have explained, he may have meant something rather different. The other thing he did, particularly for the end of the book, he did say that I ought to include something on creationism, which I hadn’t particularly wished to do, and I was at the time I wrote that book, and I guess it’s still true today, really pretty intolerant of creationist rhetoric and creationist politics. But I remember him saying, you don’t need to say anything very much, but these are people who like to be noticed and mentioned, and I think he felt that if there was no reference to the kind of deep religious resistance that comes from American Protestant Evangelicalism then it would be an omission in the book. So I do remember then ensuring that I wrote two or three paragraphs to indicate that I was aware of the existence of this creationist movement, as it had become. But Young Earth Creationism, which is now the form of creationism that has the most followers, was still pretty recent on the world stage in the 1980s when I was writing the book; it was probably no more than ten or fifteen years old. So I had no notion at that point that it was going to become such a popular and threatening to many evolutionary scientists, that it was going to become a threatening cultural phenomenon on the scale in which it has become. I might have had some sympathy at that time for a much older form of creationism, which was sometimes called progressive creationism. I would never have subscribed to it, but I could understand how one might interpret the fossil record in ways that implied that there had been periods of relative stability and then new species had been suddenly introduced by a creator. And looking through the fossil record you could track that kind of progressive appearance of John Hedley Brooke Page 148 C1672/08 Track 9 new forms. And if one were looking at creationism in the United States in the 1920s, shall we say, at the time of the Scopes Trial, it would I think have been more that Old Earth Creationism that was being defended. There are many ramifications to the Scopes Trial that I don’t think we need discuss, but I’m trying to explain why it was that originally I had not thought of including much on creationism, but following Bill Coleman’s advice it certainly was necessary to say something. But even in what I said in that 1991 book, I was certainly not aware of how serious a threat Young Earth Creationism might become. [35:20] I do, however, remember writing a section in which I was talking about how on scientific issues there seemed to be an assumption, certainly within journalistic accounts of the debates, that scientific truth could be somehow determined by popular vote and how the realisation that that might in itself become a form of culture, how that really was and should be deeply disquieting to the scientific community, who I think probably have never really seriously thought that that was something that might happen, but it was possible you could have a movement in society that by scientific standards and any normal intellectual standards was easily dismissible, but which represented a political threat because it behaved as if scientific truth could be determined by popular vote.

Thank you. [36:53] And the comments of the external referee that you said…

I mentioned Michael Crowe, who had been a friend for some time, not least because he wrote a very large book, wonderful reference book but it’s far more than that, on a history of the extraterrestrial life debates, and he wrote it for the period from Kant through to the early years of the twentieth century. Actually, another scholar, Steven Dick, had written a history of the plurality of worlds debate from ancient times right up to Kant. So Michael Crowe’s book took the story right up to the early years of the twentieth century and the debate about whether the canals on Mars were indicative of engineering and water and all the other things that one thinks of. So I was familiar with Michael and we’d met on various occasions, but I don’t know whether Bill Coleman, as it were, for the Press employed Michael as an external referee or whether at some point he might have asked me could I suggest somebody who would be good as somebody to read the book. So I do actually forget how that came about. Michael was very, very supportive and made a series of comments, largely on relatively John Hedley Brooke Page 149 C1672/08 Track 9 minor things where one could make a little adjustment to the text to gain greater clarity or whatever. Strangely enough, what I most remember from his comments turned out to be a significant part of my education as a writer and this is the tricky business about when you use ‘that’ and when you use ‘which’. Now, I had many, many examples in the first draft of my book where I had used the word ‘which’: ‘the book which I had written’ or ‘the experiment which Priestley had done’, and it was Michael who pointed out to me that there was a convention that in that kind of case you would use the word ‘that’ – ‘experiment that Priestley had conducted’, whatever – and that you reserve ‘which’ to be used after a comma when you are adding extra information. So in other words, you could say something like, ‘not many people read the book that Priestly wrote’, comma, ‘which was about the gases’. And it meant I went right through the book on Michael’s advice, adopting that convention. I don’t know how well entrenched it was at that time in 1990, shall we say, but I had never before been confronted with that particular use of language. I notice many of my colleagues and I myself sometimes still adopt the older convention, that it’s perfectly acceptable to use ‘which’ where one might now prefer to use ‘that’. It’s one of those things you accustom yourself to and then that sounds better when you’re used to it. But I was grateful for that, because I think sometimes sentences do sound better, the poetry of the sentence, even though both words are monosyllabic, can sometimes be better.

[41:35] Do you have a view on why you think it is that the book, as you say in the little autobiographical article, is much more regularly cited for its criticism of the conflict thesis than it is for really it’s the equal weight given in that first chapter anyway to a criticism of harmonisers, but I think in particular of interest is the separatist position, you know, the argument that in fact science and religion are compatible if only the two activities are presented in a clear enough way, the idea of complementarity, two different levels of explanation of the same thing, or that sort of thing. Do you have a view on why it is you think that the book is cited more for its criticism of just one of those three?

It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? And it’s one that I did address recently at a conference in Madison in May of this year, 2015, when a group of historians of science were gathered to discuss the resilience of the conflict thesis and why it has attracted so much attention. And I, when talking about my own book – this was in the context of a fifty year survey of how historians have treated the conflict thesis – so I had to include a few words on my own book, John Hedley Brooke Page 150 C1672/08 Track 9 otherwise it probably would have looked like a false modesty to have left it out. But I did decide to address that question, and yet I think the correct answer is probably this, that if you are a convinced secularist, atheist, I don’t know, certainly somebody who finds religion in most of its forms unacceptable, you probably have a frame of mind in which you have your own very strong reasons for adopting that position, in which case you don’t necessarily feel the need for what an academic historian might tell you about how science and religion are not necessarily always in harmony, because the section of the book you’re referring to is pointing out that sometimes the image of harmony is illusory for all kinds of reasons. But you may not feel the need for a kind of historical reinforcement of your very strong atheistic or secular position. Whereas those with religious, I mean the constituency of those reading that book perhaps as Christians or as religiously sympathetic, they might find in the section that exposes the inadequacy of the conflict view as an exclusive account of science and religion, they might actually find that section quite liberating, because they have been used to being on the defence. And so I can see why the book might appeal more for its critique of the conflict motif, because that’s still the one that tends to shape the discussion, whereas the section that I was actually in some ways more pleased with in which I point out that some of the apologetic uses of the non-conflict model, that section I thought was in some ways the more interesting, because I could see that it would be possible for people to grab hold of the first section and to think that it was simply a complete corrective to the conflict thesis and that was the end of the matter, and I wanted to show that no, it really is more complicated than that and that some of the harmonising strategies are just as deficient for one reason or another as the conflict models. But the only reason I could really come up with was that many of the readers of that book coming to it with religious beliefs of various kinds would I think find that section, the critique of the conflict thesis, the most interesting and the most apposite for their own particular interest. And they might, if that is their position, they might rather regret that second or third section which looks at the inadequacies of the harmonisation strategies. But it’s an interesting question you’ve asked because it draws attention to something that I really was conscious of in writing that book and something I tried to transcend insofar as I could and that was the apologetic uses of history in a very simplistic way. In other words, I felt I was attacking the standard atheistic, materialistic, secularist view where science was wheeled out very often as the supreme justification for their position and I was unhappy with that precisely because the history showed that the science can be interpreted in so many different ways, and that has always been the case, I think. But I did also feel a need to quell what I sometimes experienced at meetings and conferences where I felt the apologetic use in John Hedley Brooke Page 151 C1672/08 Track 9 defence of Christianity or whichever religion was being discussed, that that was being overstated and that the history showed something more complicated than simply a harmony that one could say captured the essence of the relationship between science and religion. So the calling into question of the harmonisation thesis, for me, was if not quite as important, certainly almost as important as calling into question the conflict interpretation. Because I just felt that neither view really understood much about the other. One almost felt that as a historian you were trying – it sounds very presumptuous – trying to educate both parties, if one can use that language, out of their simplistic presuppositions. And I then hoped that the rest of the book, which explored particular historical developments, events, incidents, positions, all those things, that the rest of the book would illustrate what I had wanted to set out in that first chapter.

[50:48] And what do you remember of the immediate reaction to it, taking in published reviews but also what people said to you about it?

Well, reviews of academic books take some time before they start appearing. I don’t know how many reviews of it I ever saw or read. I certainly read some and was very struck by some. There was, for example, an outstanding review of it in the journal Annals of Science by Scott Mandelbrote, who now teaches history at one of the Cambridge colleges, Peterhouse, having also had a research fellowship at All Souls in Oxford. Scott wrote the most detailed review of the book, I mean analysing the arguments in every chapter, and there were points he made where I felt that the criticism was certainly just and that I should take note of it, in particular, I think, the chapter where I discussed the influence of the Reformation on the scientific movement, where I was looking at the question whether radicalism in religion might have encouraged radicalism in science, that sort of question. And he did give the impression in his comments that that particular chapter was, I won’t say out of date, but that the way I had set it up was not as adventurous as perhaps other chapters in the book. But he did very graciously go on to say that the chapter on natural theology really set new standards for the discussion of that topic. So it was an excellent review in every sense, because it was highly supportive and in comments he and others who’d read his review did often fall back on a form of words suggesting that the book had set new standards for the discussion of science and religion. That of course I was very pleased with. I don’t actually remember any reviews that were hostile. Some were much shorter reviews than John Hedley Brooke Page 152 C1672/08 Track 9

Scott’s. I remember reading a review from a theologian, [in] one of the theological journals, where he underlined the fact that he thought this really was a good book and he just expressed the disappointment that the very last chapter was not written with the same depth and detail as the preceding ones. There were actually interesting reasons for that, but he finished his review by saying that it would have been nice to know how somebody who had written with such a tolerant, empathetic and liberal spirit, how the author would have regarded some of the immediately contemporary debates that were being played out in the 1990s. The reason the last chapter was rather shorter and lacking in the same depth was that it was never envisaged initially that it would be there at all. The original draft of the book that had been agreed by Bill Coleman and CUP simply finished more or less at the end of the nineteenth century. But I think it was the Press itself who, after I’d completed those chapters, said wouldn’t it be good to have a concluding chapter in which you draw some of the threads together and perhaps discuss one or two issues that would be kind of illustrative of one thing or another, but not go into the same depth. Of course, it’s difficult writing on the twentieth century because the science becomes much more complicated. You can write about Einstein’s religious beliefs, but if you don’t really understand what he’s talking about in his relativity theory or his work in quantum mechanics, you just feel a bit exposed doing that. Not that he actually claimed there was any relationship between relativity theory and theology. In fact he emphatically denied it. But the consequence was that I bowed to Cambridge’s wish that there should be something on the twentieth century and I decided to take as the theme that would bind some of the discussion together, the theme of reductionism and whether the scientific method as Descartes had originally envisaged it of breaking everything down to its components in a kind of top down way, whether that reductionist approach to so many problems, and principally the nature of living systems of course, whether that approach really was exhaustive or whether there shouldn’t be complementary methods also brought in when discussing such matters. So there was a section on quantum mechanics. And there were other issues where I just felt that it was possible to say something about twentieth century developments, to have a general discussion of scientific reductionism, but not pretending that that chapter was an account of science and religion in the twentieth century in the way that some of the earlier chapters had been rather more comprehensive at least in their conception. In terms of the reception, the British Society for the History of Science did me a favour, which I greatly appreciated, and they organised a day conference in which various speakers would give their reaction to the book. As far as I remember, I didn’t have to do anything on that occasion. I might have made some little John Hedley Brooke Page 153 C1672/08 Track 9 speech at the end. But the people who were drafted in were John Polkinghorne as a theologian, Colin Russell, whose name we have had before, from the Open University, Piyo Rattansi, who was a historian of seventeenth century science, had worked on science and religion in seventeenth century England, so he was also there. I’m trying to remember whether there was a fourth. Maybe it was just, maybe it was just those three. Anyway, they each gave a little speech on the book to really quite a reasonably sized audience who’d turned up for the occasion. So that was very nice to have that degree of attention. I seem to remember, yes, this must be true, the Australian journal, Metanexus [sorry, Metascience] privileged the book with a kind of review symposium where several people wrote reviews of the book. And the format there was that I as the author did write a very short piece at the end commenting on the various reviews that had been written. [1:00:33] But other than those relatively few reflections, Paul, I can’t really say that I was deeply affected or concerned by how the book was initially perceived. It’s assuming the role that it seems to have assumed in the eyes of quite a few commentators of having become something like a classic in the subject. That all came about rather gradually, I think, as people gradually discovered it, found they could use it in their teaching. It has been used quite extensively as an undergraduate textbook, even though it was not written for undergraduates. The consequence, of course, is that I am sometimes told by friendly colleagues that the book has worked very well for their brightest students but that it is rather demanding for those who’ve had no background in the subject at all. But it does seem very gradually the book acquired a particular status, I think because people started talking about it having a complexity thesis, that the book has not just a way of talking about science and religion in ways that perhaps hadn’t been widely adopted before, but that by drawing attention to the complexity of the historical relations and therefore its tacit critique or even explicit critique of the master narratives that have dominated the subject, that complexity means that it has a kind of distinctive thesis to offer. I’ve been rather reluctant to accept that it should be said to carry a complexity thesis. I see history as complicated and the complexity isn’t really a thesis, it’s the reality of historical situations. But, I think it was Ronald Numbers who claims that he was the first to describe the book as conveying a complexity thesis. And that rather caught on and in various secondary sources on science and religion I am now associated with the complexity thesis. I’ve written little essays from time to time on why I would prefer not to be the author of the complexity thesis, because it can give the impression that all that I did in that book was to say it’s complicated and throw up my hands in horror, and that’s not what I John Hedley Brooke Page 154 C1672/08 Track 9 envisaged I was doing. And in other things I’ve said that the historian does have the responsibility to find patterns and commonalities, it’s just that those patterns are not always quite as self-evident as much of the literature makes out.

[end of track 9]

John Hedley Brooke Page 155 C1672/08 Track 10

[Track 10]

First of all today, could I ask you to expand on comments you made in the introduction to the classic edition, the more recent, classic edition of Science and Religion, and that’s that if you were writing it now you would include more references to women, concepts of secularisation and impact of new technologies. Well, the third one is, I suppose, fairly obvious why you made that point, but why the first two, why did you list women and concepts of secularisation as two things that you would change if writing now?

I think the main reason why I would want to include something on women is simply that there was virtually no reference to women in science in that 1991 edition and I think there was such an interest in women and science developing around that time that it did strike me afterwards as an omission. I don’t recall critics pointing out that it was very male dominated, they may have done, it was perhaps a little later that on reflection it occurred to me that there was a dimension missing there. Whether, had I included women in science it would have affected anything that I wrote on the relationship between science and religion, I rather doubt, actually. I mean I’ve no reason to think that it would. But when one is covering a large area of time from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries right down to the twentieth and towards the present, I think not to have had some discussion of the women who are notable contributors to science did, I think, affect the overall balance of the book. So that was, broadly speaking, the reason. It was more, as it were, a sin of omission than that I felt that the contours of the book would have been dramatically changed, had I included Caroline Herschel or some of those who have been, certainly in the Victorian period, often crucial to the success of their husbands or partners or whatever. It’s a point often made that figures like Darwin could be as productive as they were because so much of the weight within the work of the family was conducted by their wives or other helpers of various kinds. So, there are many interesting issues there. Now, the second issue on secularisation raises some very interesting questions. I did refer last time to what I thought was the best review of Science and Religion. That was by Scott Mandelbrote and he’s in Cambridge now, as I think I said then, at Peterhouse. He did say in his wrapping up of a very fine essay review that he thought the book was a little bit light on secularisation. Now, he didn’t amplify that and you can be light on secularisation in more than one way. I suspect what he had in mind was that because I was looking at specific developments within the sciences and specific responses to them, usually by people with some kind of religious preconception or other, it would be possible John Hedley Brooke Page 156 C1672/08 Track 10 doing that to miss the, as it were, the larger story, and the larger story might be that for all that the old conflict theses about the relationship between science and religion can be exploded - and I would like to think I helped to do that - for all that, there may be, taking a longer view, a thesis to the effect that one of the primary agents of secularisation has been science, and not to have addressed that question directly in the book was perhaps a shortcoming. And I recognise the issues there, because I did argue that in the nineteenth century, for example, each new development in the earth sciences was harmonised with scripture and with the exegesis of the Genesis texts in particular. But the point I made was that you can have a whole succession of successful harmonisations but that you can reach a point when the cumulative effect of all that work attempting to reconcile the science and the religion, all those efforts might lead, perhaps for some people quite suddenly, to the thought that maybe all that effort had been misguided, even though it was successful on its own account in each of the decades of the nineteenth century. But, for example, that by the time you get to 1860, just after Darwin published and when the volume Essays and Reviews was published and caused, if anything, a larger stir in the Church than Darwin did, you do get a sense in one of the contributors to that book [C. W. Goodwin] that attempts to harmonise Genesis with geology represented almost a misguided attempt, because it was trying to make scripture still pronounce in some way on science, albeit in a kind of summary way or a symbolic way, or whatever. And you find the argument coming to the fore there, that professional scientists – and they were just beginning to emerge as a class at that time – professional scientists should not have to waste their time worrying about how what they were saying was going to be reconciled with the Genesis text. So that would be one example, and I certainly included words to that effect in the book, and I specifically discussed the essay that I’m thinking of in Essays and Reviews where you really do get that sense that the way forward was not to continue the attempt at harmonisation with each new successive discovery. So I could have blown that up into a more significant historical thesis than I did at that time. But the other reason why, had I been writing it now, I would have had more on science and secularisation is because I have made a study of that since writing the book, and that hasn’t actually shaken my fundamental belief that science is not on the whole the primary cause of secularisation. I think as Francis Bacon recognised in the seventeenth century, the most dangerous threat to religion comes not from science but from religion and divisive opinions within one and the same religion, or culture wars between rival religions, rival faiths, have done much more damage to religion than developments in the sciences, which are usually interpretable in either theistic or atheistic ways. There’s not a great deal John Hedley Brooke Page 157 C1672/08 Track 10 that’s intrinsic, it seems to me, to science that, as it were, automatically disqualifies religious claims. Atheistic scientists often do say that, that the whole ethos of [the] sciences is against religion. But you have to build in quite a lot of metaphysical assumptions to make that argument really fly philosophically, I think. I perfectly understand why those claims are made. But through the last 300 years, which would be the period during which you might appeal to science as the source of secularisation, I think other factors really have been more significant. And some of the finest modern treatments of secular societies I think have actually made the point that what provokes secular and anti-religious thinking is often not science, but the science can be very handy when you’re trying to justify that atheistic position, or to defend it. And I think you can point to many examples in the history where that has happened, that people have become disillusioned with religion, with religious authority, with religious institutions. They’ve become disillusioned for all kinds of reasons. I mean in the current age one thinks of the way in which one has got now so much evidence of bad behaviour on the part of the priests and the clergy, and there’s no doubt that has been an issue in the past as well. And I think from many members of the general populace it’s things like that that create a kind of gut feeling against religion, not some rather elevated set of scientific theories that render religious claims implausible. So, I’ve written now a fair bit on science and secularisation, some of which it would have been good to have had it in the original book, I think. But you can’t do everything and you can only write at the stage you have reached in your own reflections at that particular time.

Thank you. [12:04] And can you tell me about your Christian interests, maybe even worship during the period that we talked about last time, which was the seventies and eighties. So you’re in Lancaster, I don’t know whether you go to church or what?

I think in the early seventies, which is the period when I got married, when I began to take administrative as well as academic roles within my college, I think my friends at that time would have recognised in me still a fairly strong Christian outlook. I was not a regular attender of church, I would gladly go to events in the university chapel, for example. But it must have been round about that time as my reading in theology and philosophy was extended further, I gradually became uncomfortable with the liturgy, I think I would have to say, that I could attend a church service on a Sunday, and did occasionally do so, but I was John Hedley Brooke Page 158 C1672/08 Track 10 not finding the language easy to sympathise with. It seemed to me to be expressing certain facets of the Christian tradition in a language that I just found very difficult to square with the modern age. So, to be scrupulously honest, I have not since that time been a regular worshipper in church, but I have maintained very close contacts with friends and colleagues who do and I’m very sympathetic to the reasons which do impel them to do that. But I must, I think, truthfully say that some of the language in which worship and the conduct of worship is framed I have not been particularly drawn to. And that is for quite some time now.

What is it about the language that deterred you then and continues to?

I think it’s, it’s probably nothing that I would wish to blame the language for, I think that it expresses Christian doctrine to my mind in a rather literalistic way and I think I mentioned earlier that even during my days in Cambridge as a postgraduate student I was reading existentialist philosophy and existentialist theology and I was finding, I was finding the theological literature more exciting when it was offering what I thought were innovative and original interpretations of those doctrines and applying them in existential and ethical ways, rather than, as it were, implying certain things as straightforward historical facts. So, for example, when you recite the Apostles’ Creed in the context of worship you would be reciting things about the life and death of Christ in language which implied a kind of historicity that I was not finding it easy any longer to adhere to. That didn’t affect my view that Jesus Christ, for example, and we’ve just mentioned that Christ was such a truly exceptional person that one could claim that in him one saw something of the nature of God, something very special, and the fact that he had the impact that he did on his disciples and those who followed, it seemed to me a very strong indication that there was something truly exceptional about him. But when one is reciting the creeds, one is adopting a kind of Trinitarian theology that Christ is of one substance with the Father. And I think that I have found very difficult to come to terms with. So I do see in Christ a way of talking about the nature and character of God. I think there are major problems even with that, but that’s not the same as saying that Jesus Christ was in some rather special and almost physiological sense the son of God. And certainly the notion of one substance with the Father seems to presuppose a kind of Platonist notion of substance which I think is quite difficult to reconcile with modern ontologies. So, I don’t know whether that’s helpful Paul, but it just gives you an indication, I think, because obviously I do wish to be scrupulously honest in acknowledging that. But, I still do, to this day, retain the profoundest sympathy with Christian tradition, the John Hedley Brooke Page 159 C1672/08 Track 10 ethical values that it has sustained, the attempt to reconfigure one’s theological enterprise, the attempt to understand more clearly what one is talking about in language about God, and I suppose I would have to say that when people ask me if I believe in God, I have to first of all ask them what do they mean by God, because there are many gods I most certainly do not believe in. But the notion that there could still be some kind of intelligent power behind the universe is something that I believed in the 1970s and eighties and would still, I think, persuade me to this day that the truth of that proposition that there is some intelligent power behind the universe is a notion I prefer, for various reasons, to the notion that there is nothing and that the world has absolutely no meaning other than what we may impose on it.

Thank you. [19:54] Now last time we had reached the publication of Science and Religion in 1991 and I was wondering whether you could tell me the sorts of things that you think happened to you in the early nineties and beyond that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t have published that book, if you see what I mean. So what was the, another way of saying it is, what was the effect on the kinds of people you met, the kinds of invitations that you got of having been the author of that book?

I was affected by the publication of that book in ways that for my academic career were highly beneficial, and if you’ll forgive a kind of self-centred recollection, what actually happened after the publication of the book – although actually no, this must have been just prior to it coming out – I was being considered for promotion at Lancaster in the late eighties and very, very early nineties, this would have been 1990, before the book came out, and I had been a senior lecturer for many years and I was being considered for a Readership on the strength of many research publications. While I was being considered for a Readership, and indeed awarded one, which made me very happy, some of the external referees who were being consulted made the point that the book that I had just published in 1991 was of a calibre and quality which raised the question whether I should not be given a personal Chair rather than a Readership. So that was obviously even more gratifying when I learnt that was the case. So the consequence of that was that I was only a Reader in the History of Science at Lancaster for a very brief period, just a few months, while the process then took on another gear and all the procedures for assessing a candidate for a personal Chair came into force. And happily for me, I was successful with that. I mean I didn’t apply, but it simply grew out John Hedley Brooke Page 160 C1672/08 Track 10 of the consideration for the Readership. As a consequence of that, I think I did enjoy more speaking engagements over the next few years. I believe we did mention last time that the British Society for the History of Science held a special one-day meeting where there were three or four speakers, each in turn evaluating what I’d done. So to that extent the book had quite a high profile. I was also fortunate that there were two colleagues in the United States, Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg, both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who had made supportive comments, I think we say they had endorsed the book in such a way that Cambridge University Press could put on the cover that my book was the most important contribution to the history of science and religion for a hundred years, looking back to when AD White in the 1890s had published his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology. And I think I’m right in saying that David Lindberg said that this book will permanently change the way we look at the relations between science and religion. And to have accolades like that as part of an endorsement that one hadn’t asked for oneself, [was] obviously extremely pleasing and gratifying. So, the consequence I think was that whereas up to that point my reputation as a historian of science was grounded pretty solidly in my work on the history of chemistry – and I was still publishing short monographs on nineteenth century organic chemistry in 1993, so I hadn’t given up on that – but I think after that book came out, the Science and Religion book, my reputation in many people’s eyes was significantly enhanced because it showed that I’d been working within a very different historiography from the rather more technical internalist philosophical work that had gone into my scholarship on the history of chemistry. I do remember one of my colleagues – this was actually David Knight at the University of Durham – seemed a little surprised when the Science and Religion book came out, that it was so large. I mean he sent a very nice letter of congratulations and I remember the size of it I think had rather taken him aback, because he was probably expecting the book that Cambridge might have published had I had my way early in the eighties when I had approached them. So I think that’s a rather interesting little glimpse of how perceptions of my work were undoubtedly changed by that book, although of course people knew I had written a fair bit on Victorian science and religion, Darwinian material; in 1985 I published quite a detailed analytical essay on the relationship between Darwin’s religious ideas and those of William Paley, whose natural theology he kind of corrects with his theory of evolution. But the fullest answer to your question I think would have to refer to the fact that in 1991, the year the book was published, I received an invitation to give the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow University in 1995. And I have to say, at the same time, my very good friend and colleague, Geoffrey Cantor, who was Professor of the History John Hedley Brooke Page 161 C1672/08 Track 10 of Science at Leeds University, he was asked simultaneously because Neil Spurway, who was the chairman of the nominating committee, had proposed that we jointly collaborate on the ten Gifford Lectures for Glasgow. And the reason Geoffrey and I were asked simultaneously is that in that same year, 1991, he had published a very creative, interesting, original biography of Faraday. It was an important book, which hasn’t pleased everybody, but it was a book which I think to my mind showed that a very popular conception about Faraday is inadequate. The popular conception is that Faraday is the classic example of an excellent scientist who kept the spheres of his science and his private religious ideas completely separate. And Geoffrey was able to show that although you can argue that, there’s much, when you look more closely at Faraday’s style of work in science, how he envisaged the scientific enterprise, there’s much in that that resonates with his very unusual religious beliefs. Very unusual because he was a member of a very small biblically orientated evangelical Christian sect, the Sandemanians. Actually, I used the word evangelical then, probably shouldn’t have, because they didn’t go out and do a lot of preaching but they were very biblically based, very conservative in their religion. And Faraday became an elder in that church and belonged to it till the end of his days. And Geoffrey in that book made some very interesting connections, for example, the notion that Faraday’s belief in the unity of the universe, which had its endorsement from a theology in which there is one God whose will is expressed in the natural world, Faraday’s belief in the unity of the universe found expression in the scientific belief that the various forces of nature should be interconvertible. And much of Faraday’s research was based on that principle, showing connections between electricity, chemistry, magnetism. And he hoped, though this was where he fell short, as have many subsequently, he hoped that gravitation might be a force also brought into this very nice umbrella of the unity of nature. So that was a more kind of abstract level, but Geoffrey also argued that Faraday’s commitment to a highly disciplined life in science, with very little interest, so it seemed, in the more glamorous aspects of earning lots of money or whatever one might think of in the context of a scientific career, that that very organised disciplined life in science reflected the disciplined life within the Sandemanian church. So that’s just a little bit about that very fine biography of Faraday. And so Neil Spurway had hit on the bright idea, since our two books had come out more or less simultaneously and since we were both professors of the history of science, then it would be nice to have us collaborating. [31:38] So we duly gave lectures in Glasgow in 1995, in the autumn, which we had jointly prepared, though we each separately took responsibility for five of the chapters, but we each John Hedley Brooke Page 162 C1672/08 Track 10 commented on each other’s drafts. And if I haven’t mentioned this before, it was a particularly joyful collaboration because, well, for many reasons, but we used to meet in a very nice old pub in Settle on the Yorkshire borders with Lancashire and we used to plan the book, what we wanted to do and what our aims were, and we had some really very, very good conversations in that planning. And I have to say, I always regard that collaboration with Geoffrey as one of the most pleasant and actually one of the most highlights of my academic life, and we’ve maintained a very close friendship ever since. So I suppose the invitation to give the Giffords was the most tangible academic recognition of the value of that ’91 book.

In those meetings in the pub with Geoffrey were there differences in your historiographical outlook or differences of opinion on the kinds of, you know, simple things like what to include and what to not include, that sort of thing?

We explored many, many options of course, as we reflected on what the book might do. And one of the things we agreed on, I think at a relatively early stage, was that an interesting line of attack might be to try to show in each of our lectures separately, or in each of the chapters of the book that would eventually be produced, we would try to show that different styles of history could illuminate the relations between science and religion in different ways and that these ways were all valuable and that there was no one way of writing about science and religion in history that somehow trumped all the others. And so I think I could say, each of our ten chapters in the book that eventually came out of those lectures did fulfil that aim. In terms of historiographical principles, I don’t think we did have major disputes about what should go in and what should not. I think we had both lived through a period of twenty, twenty-five years, during which professional history of science had become increasingly open to the methods of the historian, the political historian, the social historian, economic historians, a recognition that history of science should be, if anything, more like conventional history. And so we could draw on our own experience of how the historiography had changed over the years. Where we did differ was more in our cultural background, though it’s difficult to say how that, if at all, actually altered the character of the book. Geoffrey comes from a Jewish background and is still an observant Jew. I from my Protestant Anglican background [held] obviously [a] very, very different set of religious beliefs. But I think at the level we were working at in that book, the obvious differences in outlook that that is bound to generate were not such as to significantly alter the shape of the book. Because we were trying to reinforce the critique which each of us separately had written before, the John Hedley Brooke Page 163 C1672/08 Track 10 critique which said that too much literature on science and religion adopts a very general thesis and tries to squeeze everything into it. And that meta-level thesis, that master narrative, can be one of conflict or harmony or separation. It can be… it can take many, many forms. And what I think both Geoffrey and I had independently reacted against was the notion that one of those views must somehow be right, that there is a best way to relate science and religion and it should be done like this. And we were trying to show that the whole subject is much richer, much more fascinating, open to much more diversity and flexibility of interpretation than trying to defend one particular historiographical position. So because we were both in the business of critiquing the meta-narratives, we actually had our interests focussed on many commonalities rather than contrasts between us. Which is not to say that our different contributions to the specific chapters we were allocated didn’t take on a form that did reflect our own particular interests. So, for example, Geoffrey’s chapter on the Quakers in the Royal Society, that was very much, I think, informed by a closer understanding of the methods of social historians at that time than any of the chapters that I wrote. But then I wrote a chapter on science and aesthetics and the particular element in natural theology which tries to make claims about the beauty or the power or the unity, the wisdom of God on the basis of beauty in nature, and one says beauty in nature, but that very often meant beauty in science, because scientific theories are often said to be particularly beautiful, particularly by mathematicians who understand the mathematics, it’s not so easy for the general populace to grasp that, I think. So I did my chapter on aesthetics and science, I did a chapter on natural theology and its inter-relations with the history of science, how it was affected by the changing fortunes of scientific theories themselves. Geoffrey did a very good chapter on the importance of biography as a historical genre, which can illuminate the discussion of science and religion. Because if you’re writing the biographies of scientists, you do try to get to their inner state of mind, what’s motivating them, how are they coping with any perceived difficulties in reconciling their scientific work with their religion, or are there no problems at all, do they just see their science as a straightforward expression of their conviction that nature is the creation of an all-powerful God? And that varies, of course, from scientist to scientist. But our chapter on that, I think, was quite nice because Geoffrey in particular had suggested we discussed three or four particular cases and they were all men of science but from a different religious background. So one was the geologist Adam Sedgwick, who was liberal Anglican, but with perfectly orthodox views in theology. One was St George Mivart, who was a convert to Roman Catholicism and a convert to evolution. That was a particularly interesting case. Another was John Tyndall, who was much more of John Hedley Brooke Page 164 C1672/08 Track 10 an agnostic than a committed religious believer. He’d dabbled in various things and been influenced by the German idealist philosophers and scriptural critics. So we had a nice miscellany of nineteenth century scientists, all with different religious allegiances and tried to show how you could learn a lot about them and about the scientific controversies of the time if you brought their biographies into the arena. So this is just by way of saying that each of the chapters in that book did adopt a different style, that I can see in the chapters I wrote preconceptions about the writing of history which did in some ways differ from where Geoffrey was at at that particular time. But there was no incompatibility and I think the different chapters enriched each other, really. And people had a kind of guessing game around the world of trying to guess which one of us was responsible for which chapter. And they usually, I think with one exception, got it right. But our styles of writing were often said to be very similar, so you can read the book without actually having to ask the question, which bits did John do and which bits did Geoffrey do.

Which bit do people commonly get wrong then? You said with one exception.

D’you know, I cannot now remember which the two chapters were that got misplaced. It’s a nice question. It was at the University of Notre Dame where I was told by Ernan McMullin, I think it must have been, that they had used the book, Reconstructing Nature, as a kind of term seminar text and that this question had been asked, you know, who was responsible for which, and Ernan told me which ones they had all said, and they had got them right except for two, but d’you know, I cannot now remember which of the two had caught them out.

[44:01] So the Gifford Lectures certainly follows on from the publication of the book. What other kinds of attention did the book attract, if you like? So, we can see the conference that was organised to discuss it, the invitation to give the Gifford Lectures, did anything else arise that you think arose because that book had been published and the topic that it was about?

Well, within a strictly academic sphere there were many other things. I would pick out a review symposium that was conducted in the journal Metascience and they have had a policy over the years of selecting a book that has had some impact and recognition, usually at a fairly early stage after its publication, and they invite three or four commentators to write short essays on the book and its impact as far as they’re concerned, and then I as the author John Hedley Brooke Page 165 C1672/08 Track 10 was invited to comment on the comments. And that’s, I think, a very successful way of treating a new book, it draws attention to it in ways that might otherwise have been missed, but I think that was one that I particularly appreciated, [along with] invitations to speak around the world. The book won two prizes, both of which actually came right out of the blue because I had no idea that it was being considered for either. The American historians of science have a – well, I shouldn’t talk about the American historians of science because I’m sometimes accused of speaking of an American history of science society – it’s the History of Science Society, but it has a series of prizes, one of which is the Watson Davis Prize for a book which in the preceding year has made a notable contribution towards presenting issues in the history of science to a larger audience, something that goes beyond just the limited world of the professional academics. And my book was placed by obviously the prize committee into that sort of category and I was delighted to learn that I had been awarded that prize. So I duly went over to Washington and received the envelope. Actually, I’m pausing because what really happened was that when I went to Washington to receive the prize and was presented with the envelope, there was nothing inside it and there had been an administrative mistake, which placed me in a very difficult position, because I didn’t want to embarrass people afterwards, but I thought equally they wouldn’t wish to know that my envelope was empty, the cheque had not been stolen, it was all explained to me afterwards how this rather curious event had come about, particularly since I’d paid my own airfare to go across [laughs] to the States for it. Anyway, that was acknowledgement from the Watson Davis Prize committee. The other prize, and this also came out of the blue, because I didn’t know that the John Templeton Foundation was at that point in the business of looking for books to which they could award a Templeton Prize. Now, I have to make it absolutely clear that we’re not talking, when we use the language of a Templeton Prize, we’re not talking about the really big annual award to people who have made some major contribution to what became eventually classified as progress in religion, but interestingly, one of my colleagues at Lancaster when he learnt that I had been awarded a Templeton Prize, thought that I had actually been awarded [laughing] the big one and I was acutely embarrassed on one occasion when he introduced me to one of his colleagues from elsewhere as the Templeton Prize winner. Anyway, the point is, the Templeton Foundation in the early 1990s was just beginning to advertise its interest in promoting scholarship in the field of science and religion and one of the ways they did that was to award prizes for books in the field. And I suddenly got a letter through the post which said that mine had been selected for that year, and it was very gratifying. And the envelope did actually contain the cheque, unlike the one that I’d John Hedley Brooke Page 166 C1672/08 Track 10 found in Washington. So that was extremely pleasing to have that degree of acknowledgement. But that was my first acquaintance really with the Templeton Foundation, which went on, and still does of course, sponsor a lot of research projects on fields connected with human growth and flourishing with scientific work that can illuminate or enhance one’s spiritual understanding, which Sir John Templeton himself was very keen on promoting. There are now three separate wings of the John Templeton Foundation and they have an enormous amount of money every year to disburse. But one thing I would say since the Foundation is often criticised, is that in my experience whenever I have been involved in a project that they have funded, and I should perhaps say I have never actually had in any of my own research projects direct funding from the foundation, but I’ve been involved in many projects that they’ve supported. I’ve actually been quite impressed by the way in which they have not interfered in any way with the research once they have agreed to fund it. There may be exceptions that I don’t know, but I think it would be an unfair criticism to suggest that they will only support work that they themselves feel will almost guarantee that their own agenda is approved or ratified. It’s not quite as circular or incestuous as that. Anyway, that was a couple of prizes in the 1990s. So, as you can see, there was genuine recognition of that book, and happily there still is. I was at a conference this last year back in Madison when the conflict thesis was being discussed and somebody came up to me afterwards and said, you know, listening to all these speakers, all of whom refer to your book in their talk, this is almost like a Festschrift conference for you. I mean it had no structure at all that would suggest that that’s what it was and I didn’t interpret it as that, but it was interesting that people were noting that the book was seen, I think, as a kind of landmark contribution, if only because it managed to synthesise what was a hugely expanding amount of research, historical research in the subject, some of which I had done myself, so my book wasn’t just a synthesis of other people’s views, it drew very heavily on my own research. But I think there was a feeling afterwards whenever I did speak at conferences or elsewhere, a feeling afterwards that it had made a decisive contribution to the assessment of the conflict narratives and shown their inadequacies; not that they were always wrong, not that there haven’t been pretty violent controversies involving scientists and religious folk, but simply that the presupposition that if you want to understand one of these controversies in the past it’s best to assume the conflict to start with [is too constrictive]. Trying to show that just isn’t the way the history should be done. I don’t know that I would immediately think of anything else [54:11] to add to that, Paul. A significant thing that did happen to me during the mid-nineties and which in some ways was more of a distraction than any success I was having with the book was that on my John Hedley Brooke Page 167 C1672/08 Track 10 fiftieth birthday I was diagnosed with diabetes, and that of course has affected my life ever since. And for a while it meant in the kind of initial state of shock that you experience when something like that happens, for a while I was perhaps not quite as active in my research and ongoing work as in retrospect I could have been, but for three years we were trying to control the diabetes just with tablets and that never quite worked and I continued to lose weight, which is one of the symptoms of diabetes, and in the end I had to switch to insulin injections. [55:22] But round about 1995 when this was diagnosed – actually, it would have been 1994 – there was another recognition of where I now stood in the field, because the previous year – this would have been 1993, I guess – an annual consultation had been established at the Princeton Theological Seminary [actually the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton] where a group of scholars interested in science and religion came together to discuss major theological and philosophical issues, including the big one of the day, which was how you can talk meaningfully about divine activity in a world as described by science. And there were impressive people round the table, and they included John Polkinghorne, they included Ernan McMullin, they included William Stoeger, who worked at the Vatican Observatory. That first year I had not been invited, but I did receive an invitation to say would I join the group for the two subsequent years, and I think that would only have happened because I was now known for that book. But I remember the meeting I went to, which must have been 1995, the second one of the three, that was almost immediately after I had had the diabetic diagnosis, and so I could remember being very, very careful about what I was eating and counting my carbohydrates and all the things one does. So those two things are linked in my mind; the diagnosis of the diabetes and also beginning to play a more active role in major international consultancies. So that’s probably about it for the mid-1990s, I think.

[57:52] Were there invitations, maybe letters, contacts made that you were uncomfortable with as a result of the book? So to what extent did you receive unwanted attention immediately after it or soon afterwards?

Actually, I don’t remember receiving letters that made me feel uneasy. I do remember receiving letters to talk to religious groups, to other historians, to meetings in the history of science. I would very often talk about the history of natural theology, the way in which science between the time of Robert Boyle and Darwin, and for some time afterwards in fact, John Hedley Brooke Page 168 C1672/08 Track 10 how during that period many attempts were made to ground arguments for belief in God in what the sciences were telling us about the natural world. And that process still goes on today, of course. But I think the fact that that was a topic on which I had become something of a specialist meant that I could talk to many different audiences about that and I don’t recall ever feeling that an audience who had invited me to speak to them would not have welcomed a discussion of that particular theme. So if it was a straight history of science conference you could still talk about natural theology because it had been part of the culture of science and certainly part of the culture of disseminating science in the early nineteenth century. Similarly, if I was speaking to a religious group they would be interested to know what kind of arguments there had been coming from the sciences and into theology and what the status of those arguments might be today. And I think I can truthfully say that even if my own Christian convictions became more agnostic in tone over the years, I have always made a point of trying to help those within Christian communities who are struggling with the questions that I have certainly struggled with over the years. Just a couple of weeks ago I was asked if I would speak at a Roman Catholic hospice up in the Lake District in September of next year, and I really expressed no hesitation about doing that. They wanted a talk on Darwin and creation and why should I not accept an invitation to do that and explore the issues? So I don’t recall any invitations where I felt it would either be improper to speak or whether I would feel it necessary to somehow slant what I wanted to say too much because of the character of the audience. In a good talk you have to slant it to the audience, obviously, to a significant effect, but not to be kind of manipulating the message just for the sake of the audience you’re speaking to. So sometimes I think I’ve been quite daring when giving public lectures and saying things, I won’t say to antagonise my audience, but certainly to provoke them into the thinking that the issues are not quite as straightforward as they may wish to think.

[1:02:10] Yes, because I wondered, we talked last time about the extent to which you have sometimes felt that the book is more often cited by those taking a position against the conflict thesis than those taking a position against some kind of other harmonising type thesis, both of which you are questioning in the book, and so I wondered whether you were uncomfortable with the way in which the book might have been used by people who were, for their own reasons, very happy with the idea of the conflict thesis being questioned?

John Hedley Brooke Page 169 C1672/08 Track 10

That is an interesting question and I have rarely, I think, been troubled by that, but I have occasionally read historical articles which have cited my work, and that of other historians of science and religion, like Ronald Numbers, David Lindberg, Peter Harrison and others, who have cited that work in a way that suggests it is improper to talk about conflicts between science and religion. Essays with titles like The Conflict that Never Was, and when I see that, I worry because that seems to be just lifting the one message from the books of those of us who’ve been qualifying and correcting the conflict narratives, because I think the professional historians of science who’ve done the best work in this field have always acknowledged that there have been significant conflicts, it’s how you describe it and whether you shouldn’t be looking to some of the other roots of the controversies that you’re analysing and not just reduce everything to science versus religion. But the idea that we’re talking about a conflict that never was, that seems to me language which is getting a bit precarious. I think even Peter Harrison’s most recent book, The Territories of Science and Religion, I can imagine people reading that book and perhaps drawing the conclusion that we are not entitled to speak about controversies between science and religion in the past, and Peter has a very sophisticated argument as to why you’ve got to be very careful if you use that kind of language. But I don’t think he would deny that there have been major conflicts in which there have been scientific interests and also religious interests. How you describe those conflicts is in many ways the issue. But I think that’s probably the closest I could get to saying where I feel uncomfortable that the historical work I have done has taken on a kind of one-sided aspect and I would not wish to be remembered only as a critic of the conflict thesis. I’ve tried to show that there is enormous diversity in the relations that scientists and religious folk have constructed when connecting science with religion in various ways. And one has to acknowledge that there can often be significant conflict even in the mind of one individual. But it’s largely a question of perspective and not wanting to do the reductionist thing of constructing an apologetic argument that stresses just one aspect of these relationships.

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[Track 11]

Could you talk now about the way in which your awareness of perhaps relations with the Templeton Trust developed from the point of winning the prize for the book to the present, if you like, but at least until we get to Oxford?

I don’t have a particularly clear recollection of how much I was involved with Templeton initiatives during the 1990s. The award of the prize came in the mid-nineties. I was of course delighted that they were promoting work in the science and religion area. It’s raised a very interesting question subsequently, that because their impact on the field eventually became quite considerable in that they were obviously in a position to finance many different projects, not all of which I think in the early days were necessarily that good from an academic point of view and they had to live that down subsequently. I was conscious of work that they were funding, I was occasionally asked if I would referee project applications for them, [and] was very happy to do that. That was particularly if there were historical elements in a project. The Foundation has never actually supported historical projects that have been historical per se, they’ve been persuadable that history should have a role to play in modern discussions of science and religion, they have recognised that but they wouldn’t fund a project that was geared to discovering things about the past for its own sake, and I think that’s in their constitution. Sir John himself was not a great fan of history, I think, and he looked simply to science as the way forward for enhancing human growth and spirituality. We could talk a lot about that, because I was conscious, even during the 1990s, that the Templeton Foundation seemed to be committed to a kind of natural theology which I certainly regarded as obsolete in its attempts to construct a religious apologia out of science, however that might be done. But in terms of actual involvement, it was not until I went to Oxford in the late 1990s and the early years of the new century that I was, for example, invited to serve on the Templeton advisory board, [and] played a more significant role in refereeing projects. By the time I went to Oxford in 1999, they had become so well known as offering philanthropy in my sort of area that quite a lot of people thought that the new Chair in Oxford that I was privileged to occupy, had been funded by the Templeton Foundation. And that is not correct, it was a misunderstanding and a misperception. Templeton has not actually funded permanent academic posts because it’s part of their constitution only to support initiatives for a limited period of time. And so although there were those of us in the field who in the early years of the new century felt it would be very nice if Templeton were John Hedley Brooke Page 171 C1672/08 Track 11 willing to fund university posts in science and religion as probably the best way of achieving what they wanted to achieve, they were never able, because of their charter or because of their interpretation of their charter, they were never able to bring themselves to do that. And so most of their philanthropy has been geared over the years to specific research projects for a limited period of time. Some of those have impinged on my particular areas of interest and where they have I have played a consultancy role and I’ve been involved in many conferences that they had sponsored and financed and have been immensely grateful for that. [05:38] But certainly, it would be a mistake to imagine, and I would make this point quite strenuously, I think, it would be a mistake to imagine that research in the domain of science and religion began when Templeton started to fund research in this field. From my own record it will be clear that I was teaching courses on the historical relations between science and religion during the 1970s. There was a huge amount of scholarly literature on science and religion by 1991 when my science and religion book was published. The bibliographic essay in that book in its latest edition occupies a hundred pages. So I was drawing on a vast resource of work in science and religion and Templeton had had nothing to do with that particular movement in scholarship, or indeed with some of the trends one can identify in scholarship on science and religion. But that’s not to underestimate the immense impact they did have once they started funding work specifically in that area.

[07:07] Have you developed some ideas about why it was around the early nineties that they indeed did start to fund this sort of work?

I should have asked that question and I should have put it to some of the Templeton folk, whom I of course have got to know quite well over the years. I don’t know what the answer is. Whether the need to disburse large sums of money simply became more oppressive at that time, that Sir John’s financial acumen and his resources may have created a situation where the tax liability was such in America that they simply had to find something that they could encourage and promote as a way of relieving themselves of that tax burden. But that makes it sound very calculating and very mechanical, very mathematical and I doubt that that’s the whole story. I think Sir John himself was genuinely interested and wrote himself a number of books and encouraged other people to write on his particular entrepreneurial world view and on his particular style of investment and on this notion he had that we were likely to gain John Hedley Brooke Page 172 C1672/08 Track 11 more of spiritual value from scientific progress than from the study of ancient traditions which tended to encourage their own preservation rather than innovation. So I don’t know the exact cluster of events which suddenly led to their taking on a higher profile in this field, but I think the two suggestions I’ve made probably would take us some way towards understanding why.

[09:28] And its impact on the field, is its impact just more research or has it had an impact in terms of the kind of, say, historical research on questions of relations between science and religion that has been conducted?

The impact that the Templeton Foundation has had has been immensely diverse, because science and religion as a field of course is hugely eclectic. And so they have funded many, many different things. But I think the best answer I could give to your question is to stress the fact that they want to support projects which enhance the education in the area of science and religion. So, for example, in the years prior to my going to Oxford and also for the first two or three years I was there, they had been supporting what was called the Course Programme in science and religion. They were offering funds to scholars who were teaching courses on science and religion in colleges and universities around the world – this had a global aspect to it, although I guess the majority of those who received the awards were from the United States – and the idea was that you submitted the details of your course to the Foundation and its panel of adjudicators and if this looked like a creditable academic course and was well supported with bibliographic resources that would be necessary, then you would receive a prize. One of the conditions of receiving the prize was that as a young scholar, and most were still relatively young, was that you spent time in Oxford, in fact. But there were a couple of other places, I think Berkeley [the Center for Theology and Natural Science] would have been one, and Chicago [the Lutheran Theological Seminary] possibly another. You could choose between two or three places where you went to a kind of summer conference. These were always held in the summer in Oxford. And the conference would be constructed in such a way that questions of pedagogy would also be on the agenda, but that there was also a very strong kind of academic profile to them as well. So I took those over when I went to Oxford. They’d been organised by Arthur Peacocke, the biochemist turned Anglican priest, who had done important work actually on the early stages of the structure of DNA and he’d been Dean of Clare College in Cambridge. In Oxford he established the Ian Ramsey Centre John Hedley Brooke Page 173 C1672/08 Track 11 and was able to promote it to the Templeton Foundation as an ideal place for where these requisite summer conferences might be held. In fact I think it’s true to say that in my first year in Oxford it was still a time when we were having two conferences each year to support that particular programme. I may be recollecting that incorrectly, but certainly in the first two or three years of the iteration of that programme there would be two conferences each year in Oxford. That was very helpful to the funding of the Ian Ramsey Centre. It did mean there was a close connection between Oxford and the Templeton Foundation through that particular route. [14:09] When I eventually arrived in Oxford in 1999, the Foundation was very keen to promote other things in Oxford. That led to a rather interesting dilemma for me, because I did not seize every opportunity to appropriate funds from the Foundation and that’s partly because I did feel, as the first holder of the Andreas Idreos Chair, I should do everything I could to ensure that the Chair did not, as it were, appear to be in the pay of some external organisation, that I wanted to give the Chair, I suppose it’s rather strong language to use, but I wanted the Chair to have impeccable credentials and not to be open to critical remarks about capitulating to the agendas of outside organisations. So I would have to say, I think, that when I arrived in Oxford, there was obvious pressure on me, and the Foundation approached other people in Oxford too to make sure their message got across. But I was less convinced at that very early stage that I should be taking funds from the Templeton Foundation in case it was misconstrued and that the Chair became identified with some particular religious mantra. [16:11] So, that says a little about my early relations with the Templeton Foundation. I can remember meeting the main protagonists within the Foundation very early in my Oxford years. There was a kind of deputation came and we had a meeting with Fraser Watts in Cambridge at the same time and it was just an attempt to explore what more could be done to promote science and religion in the way that the Foundation hoped that it might go. As I say, my recollection is that they never interfered in research projects once they were launched. But they certainly did, I think, have a clear notion that science and its spiritual dimensions, if one can use that kind of language, could not and should not be kept in absolutely separate compartments. I think the Foundation felt then and does now, in keeping with Sir John’s own views, that science does have major cultural implications and you can’t just reduce those to one simple kind of formula.

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Thank you. [17:57] Could you now take us from Lancaster to Oxford firmly by telling us about the sort of the years before you move to Oxford and then telling us about the move itself?

Yes. The 1990s were of course an exciting decade for me following the appearance of the book. I think I didn’t mention earlier that in 1993 I was elected a member of the International Academy for the History of Science, which was quite an honour, and I still am a member of course to this day. So there was recognition all along the line. But in 1999 I felt that I had been extraordinarily busy in Lancaster and had done many administrative jobs over the years, as well as tried to promote scholarship, and a scheme was advertised for an early retirement and it was not financially marvellous, but it was tempting. And so the sequence of events prior to my move to Oxford were a little curious in more ways than one. They were curious in the first instance because knowing of that early retirement scheme I applied to retire early from Lancaster when I would have been, I would have been, in 1999, I would have been fifty-five, which is about as early as one could take advantage of the scheme. I had been struggling earlier in the nineties with the diabetes, to which I referred earlier, and I felt that a less stressful life would actually be more attractive. This was in the months prior to my taking the decision to apply for this particular scheme. And so I envisaged an early retirement in which I would be able to work at my own pace, continue to do research and write and occasionally give conference papers and invited lectures, all the kind of things I had been doing, but shall we say under less pressure than hitherto. And I was awarded that early retirement and in the July of 1999 I had basically retired from Lancaster and was looking forward to a more peaceful existence. Earlier in that year, and I suppose this takes us back to the winter of ‘98/99, I was made aware of the fact that a Chair in Science and Religion was going to be advertised, and indeed was advertised in Oxford. And I thought to myself, that’s great news, because Cambridge already had the lectureship in science and religion there, and I thought for Oxford to be having a Chair in the subject was really very exciting. But I can truthfully say that because I had taken the early retirement or was planning to, I didn’t seriously consider applying for it and I never did apply for it. But, to my delight, I was asked if I would serve on the appointing committee for that Chair, and I remember thinking to myself, that’s really very nice, in the year in which I retire from a university post, I am being asked to help Oxford University find somebody to fill this new Chair. And over the course of John Hedley Brooke Page 175 C1672/08 Track 11 the succeeding months as I was involved, as the other members of the appointment committee were, in looking at the applicants and reading their work and attending interviews in Oxford, I of course became increasingly interested to see how this was going to play out. Again, I have to say, there was no notion in my mind while I was fulfilling this role that I would be the person who would take that Chair. There was only one hint I had on one occasion which made me think that perhaps one other member of the committee was wondering why I hadn’t applied for it. What actually happened was that though there were candidates we saw whom I would have been happy to vote for, and on one occasion in fact did vote for, there was no consensus among other members of the committee on any of the candidates who were interviewed. I have to say that it seemed to me at the time was very largely a consequence of the fact that the appointing committee was made up of very senior scholars in a wide range of subject areas: philosophy, philosophy of science, theology, religious studies, history of science in my own case, and I just think it would have been very difficult for any candidate at interview to have pacified everybody on the committee. So it’s no reflection on the quality of the interviewees for that post that the committee appeared able not to make a decision. My last meeting on that committee ended when the chair, who was Ernest Nicholson, the Warden of Wadham – no, not Wadham [actually Oriel College] … why am I not remembering? Can we leave that, and we’ll come back to that? Ernest Nicholson said to other members of the committee that he felt that we were having a problem finding the right person and he wished to talk to each of the members of the committee separately in a kind of heart-to-heart conversation to give him further guidance as to what the committee should do next. And I was, perhaps along with one or two of the other members of the committee, interested by that remark; I simply had no previous experience of how decisions at chair level were taken. I then heard nothing, but I remembered that he had said that he wanted to talk to members of the committee individually. And there came a point where I was due to spend a couple of weeks in Canada, because I’d been invited to give a lecture at the University of Calgary, and I thought it was responsible if I alerted his secretary to the fact that I would not be on the end of a telephone, or not easily, if the chair of the committee wished to talk to me about this. And the person at the other end just said, well I’m sure he will, she said, and I thought okay, right. When I arrived in Canada, my hostess there said she’d had a phone call from Oxford earlier that day, which had come in at a very strange time, because it was as if the person who rang didn’t realise there was a time difference between the two places. But anyway, was it true that I was staying there and could I receive a call later in the day. And so she of course said yes, he’s due in sometime during today. John Hedley Brooke Page 176 C1672/08 Track 11

And the gist of it was that the committee had decided that whatever I had done on the committee in the way of showing my own expertise had satisfied them that I was the one person they were willing to form a consensus over. But, that was still not the same as offering me the post, because the legality of the situation was such that I had to stand down from the committee, the committee had to be reconstituted, because it was now a different search, and I of course at that stage had to submit my own CV and examples of my own publications and that kind of thing. Now, I was just utterly staggered by this, because it was not what I was expecting, I was still looking forward to my peaceful existence in early retirement. But of course, it was remarkably tantalising because an opportunity to occupy that first Chair in Oxford, if I thought that I was capable of doing so, was not something one would turn down lightly. And so once I had the understanding that unless there were things that were not yet known, I would be an acceptable candidate to the rest of the committee, it meant I really had to think very, very hard about whether I should accept or not, because I could still have said no, I’m sorry. So there was a period of three or four weeks during which I thought long and hard about what this would involve. I spoke to colleagues and friends I knew in Oxford. The gist of it in the end was that when a final offer did come, and I still spent another three weeks, I think, or four weeks thinking about it, I did eventually accept. I understand it is not that unusual for a situation like that to develop, where an external assessor becomes the preferred candidate of the committee. It’s not something of course I had ever experienced and never expected to experience. But it was deeply flattering, deeply encouraging, and it meant that I of course felt a huge obligation to fulfil the expectations of those who had set up that Chair. That’s the story in a nutshell and how it happened. I was in a difficult position afterwards, because of course having been on the committee, much of the discussion, if not all of it, was confidential and I guess so is strictly confidential even now, because the work of such a committee would be so. It did mean one or two people thought it a little odd that somebody who had originally been on the committee was appointed to the Chair. Fortunately I don’t think that was ever taken seriously by my friends and colleagues who knew that simply was not the case, and also knew that I had never wished to apply for the job. But anyway, that was quickly water under the bridge and I faced the rather daunting task of beginning my tenure of that Chair just a matter of a couple of months after I’d retired from Lancaster. But there was that period of two or three months when I was actually unemployed and that’s how I had wished it to be. So, it, I’m sure, does make it an interesting story. But as I say, my understanding is, it’s not at all uncommon for that kind of pattern to ensue. John Hedley Brooke Page 177 C1672/08 Track 11

[33:00] From where were the questions being raised about the appointment? You know, you said there were a few voices who regarded it as unusual and problematic. From what sort of direction are these criticisms coming?

I can think of only one, actually, Paul. I can think of only one and there was a whistle-blower column in the Times Higher at the time and somebody, I never knew for certain who it was, but somebody did suggest that I had somehow manipulated the committee in my favour, that I somehow managed to get rid of the other candidates and then occupied the hot seat myself. Which was, I mean it was a deeply insulting thing to say to other members of the committee, as if they could have been fooled by anything I might have been up to. And of course it was deeply saddening to me that somebody should take that line. But it was very quickly water under the bridge. The Vice-Chancellor actually wrote a letter to the Times Higher the following week or a couple of weeks later, making it absolutely clear that I had never applied for the post and had not played the game that was being imputed to me. But things like that can be hurtful, of course, when you encounter them. But that was the only real case and it very quickly faded from view. And friends, including other members of the appointing committee, tried to console me because they thought whatever view would I take of Oxford if that was the place I was going to and people were behaving in that kind of way. So, one of those ephemeral things.

[35:30] Could you then describe the – I’m assuming you take over the running of the Ian Ramsey Centre at the same time that you take up the Chair?

Yes. Hitherto the Ian Ramsey Centre and the Idreos Chair have been linked together and that the theology faculty has consistently taken the view that the director of the Ian Ramsey Centre should be the holder of the science and religion Chair. It does mean whoever occupies the Chair has an extra line of responsibility. I was fortunate when I went to Oxford in that Arthur Peacocke had succeeded in persuading the theology faculty to make the Ian Ramsey Centre an element of the theology faculty and that meant that Arthur had had some resources, some of them independently because of the programme he was running for that John Hedley Brooke Page 178 C1672/08 Track 11

Templeton course programme I mentioned. Arthur had been able to employ a couple of people part-time to do some of the administrative tasks associated with the Ramsey Centre, including the summer conferences that were held annually and a scientist who was also a clergyman, Michael Parsons, was responsible largely for the administrative side of those conferences that the Centre put on. We ran seminars fortnightly throughout the year, open to members of the public, on topics in science and religion. And the administration of that programme was in the hands of Margaret Yee – that’s Y-double E – and Margaret had been a doctoral student of Basil Mitchell, philosopher of religion, she had worked on a theology of Austin Farrer, and she was a real asset in actually organising those seminars. It meant that I was spared doing absolutely everything when it came to the running of that Centre, but I did have an assistant in the shape of a secretary specifically for the Ian Ramsey Centre, and she would also help in the day-to-day running of the Centre, which often involved of course answering queries and letters from people wanting to know what the Centre might be able to do for them if they came and spent a bit of time in Oxford, that kind of question. I think that during the tenure of the Chair by my successor, Peter Harrison, he was able very helpfully and constructively to acquire a kind of senior research associate figure who took on rather more of the running of the Centre. He was, I think, as sensitive as I had been to the fact that rather a lot was asked of the Idreos Professor in terms of teaching, launching new courses, launching, in effect, a Masters degree programme, in my case, and to try to combine the two roles did actually inflict an imposition which perhaps very few people realised the magnitude of. So in retrospect I could probably have done more myself to gain some kind of assistance during the time I was in Oxford in order to fulfil that dual role as well as it has been subsequently. But I did feel my main priority was to establish the quality of research, academic research in the field of science and religion. And I felt my other significant priority was to devise and instigate a Masters programme in science and religion, which I did and which was accepted without any problems really rather rapidly, I understand, by Oxford standards. So that was very gratifying. And I had a series of very talented graduate students who came to work on projects and work through the various teaching programmes that I had implemented. It was a very exciting time, but it was also very challenging.

[41:18] Can you just talk in a little bit more detail about how you designed the Masters programme, what you were drawing on in order to structure it as you did?

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I felt that the Masters programme in science and religion could not be simply a historical course. I wanted elements that would introduce students to contemporary issues. I would often insist that to understand the contemporary issues properly you needed a knowledge of the history. But the structure of the course that I wanted to see implemented was that the students should advance their knowledge of theology or religious studies, so one unit was either in theology or with the alternative option of religious studies. I wanted another element in the Masters programme to be the philosophy of science, because I felt that was of crucial importance. I wanted there to be a unit on the history of science and I wanted students to write a dissertation on some issue in science and religion, which could be historical or it could be contemporary, in which there had been both scientific and religious interests. So in the dissertation, the students, whichever way they went through the programme, would finish up writing a dissertation of 15,000 words, which showed that they could handle a topic involving literacy in both the science and the religion. I was very pleased with the structure actually, and I have to say, it did work quite well. Well, very well, I would want to say. The wonder of Oxford is that you can get help from colleagues with other areas of expertise who can help in the teaching, particularly if you can do it on a kind of quid pro quo basis. So, for example, I did not teach the philosophy of science course myself, I had help from philosophers of science in dealing with that part of the course. The quid pro quo of getting help from historians to teach the history of science, and we perhaps ought to come back to that in a moment because the Professor of the History of Science, Robert Fox at the time, Robert had been one of my colleagues in Lancaster and so we were very good friends from long back and he was happy to help teaching the Masters course. I of course did a lot of the historical work too. But as the quid pro quo, I was asked if I might contribute teaching to the economic and social history graduate programme for the history faculty. So I actually became a member of the history faculty in Oxford as well as the theology faculty, and taught a special programme on the history of natural theology, which was open to graduate students in economic and social history. That was very exciting and I think the students doing the Masters programme in science and religion valued that too, because there was interplay between different disciplinary approaches. And of course it also meant that the graduate group was significantly enlarged for that particular course. And I also insisted that the Masters programme should involve everybody doing a unit specifically on Darwinism and theology, because I felt that is such a central issue that not to include that in some depth would be a deficiency. That adds up to a lot of work for a year, for the students. Of course a lot of work for me, because I was involved in teaching many of those courses. In fact I met John Hedley Brooke Page 180 C1672/08 Track 11 the graduate students as a group for two hours every week just to discuss how the course was going, what general problems they might have, choosing topics for their dissertation, just, as it were, acting as a general tutor for their studies as well as being an academic tutor on the more specific issues in the course. So a significant number of them went on to do DPhils, having written dissertations on topics that they then wished to advance further.

[end of track 11]

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[Track 12]

You took over the running of the Ian Ramsey, or the directorship of the Ian Ramsey Centre in 1999, and it had been going since 1982. And so that raises the question of whether there was anything about the sort of already existing-ness of the Ian Ramsey Centre that you weren’t comfortable with or wanted to slightly tweak or perhaps change entirely. So because the professorship was something that was itself new, that was something that you could develop from scratch, if you like, but did you come to the Ian Ramsey Centre and feel that you and it didn’t match in some way or that you wanted to change it, that sort of question?

I think it would be an exaggeration, actually, to suggest that I came to the Ian Ramsey Centre with many ideas for reform of the institution as it then was. It was functioning actually in several quite successful ways at the time, not least because Arthur Peacocke who had preceded me as director of the Centre had quite close ties with the Templeton Foundation and because of the involvement of the Ian Ramsey Centre in providing instruction for those who had been awarded prizes on the Templeton course programme, to which I think we have referred before. This actually meant that there was funding in place to continue that work for another two or three years, and I saw no reason at all to change that. It seemed to me it was good for the Ian Ramsey Centre, it was good for the theology faculty to be seen to be actively involved in promoting the subject that I had come to espouse and in which to take the Chair. So in terms of regular meetings and conferences, the Ian Ramsey Centre was quite successful. One of its other functions locally also seemed to me, when I first arrived, to be running quite smoothly. This was largely because Margaret Yee, who had done a doctorate [under the supervision of the eminent philosopher of religion Basil Mitchell], and she had been invoked by Arthur to help organise the fortnightly seminars that ran throughout the year on topics involving scientific and religious ideas, authorities, institutions, and Margaret actually had quite a good grasp of where the interesting people were and who could be invited to lead those seminars. So I was quite happy to leave the organisation of that to her; of course we met regularly to discuss the programme and how we should proceed with that. One aspect of the Centre I actually feel less comfortable with now than I did at the time, but when I say less comfortable, it’s I who feel slightly uncomfortable, because I think I could have done more if I’d had the time and the resources and the energy to boost its research profile. There were some, no doubt, in Oxford who felt – and indeed, abroad – who felt that the Centre should be a kind of Centre where visiting scholars from overseas could come and spend some time in John Hedley Brooke Page 182 C1672/08 Track 12

Oxford studying science and religion, and I had several letters that were kind of overtures from international figures, asking what I could do to make that possible for them. And I have to say that to organise that and to arrange the funding for that would have been quite a tall order on top of the many other things I had to face in establishing the Chair. So in retrospect I feel a little uncomfortable about that, because the Centre subsequently, particularly with the additional resources that Peter Harrison secured for it and again now during Alister McGrath’s tenure of the Chair, I think with additional resources it would have been possible to give a little bit more impetus to the research aspect. But of course I was extremely involved in trying to maintain my own research profile, which seemed very important in a new Chair. So to that extent if I’d had my time over again, maybe I would have tried to be a little bit more progressive in that particular aspect of it. But I don’t ever recall thinking that the Centre was failing in its duties both to scholars who came for the annual conference year after year, and that itself is a tradition which is being maintained now and I think is leading to publications as a consequence. [06:51] I think that’s probably sufficient on that, Paul.

Could you say more though about the meeting that you mentioned having soon after starting with a sort of series of representatives from the Templeton Foundation and Fraser Watts, I think you said was there. What you said last time is that the Templeton were keen to fund new things associated with the Ian Ramsey Centre, but that you were to some extent cautious about taking everything that might have been on offer. So I wanted to get a sense of, in detail, what might have been on offer and the sort of thing that you might not have taken up for those sorts of reasons that you talked about last time of wanting to remain independent, the Chair to be.

Yes, I was concerned about the image of the Chair, both internationally and within Oxford itself, and it did seem to me particularly important not to be seen to be taking any kind of party line and I guess there is an independent streak in my personality which means that I do relish independence from organisations that I think could be misconstrued if I was seen to have a particularly intimate connection with them. The whole field of science and religion of course is deeply infected by biases of one kind or another and hidden agendas, whether those of scientific materialists or of religious supernaturalists. In terms of what might have been on offer, I think that’s slightly difficult to answer, because what would have been on offer, I John Hedley Brooke Page 183 C1672/08 Track 12 think, was receptivity to proposals for particular research grants, which for the Templeton Foundation even in those days were limited to perhaps three years and that was the maximum that you would have in order to accomplish the particular objective that you had set out in a grant application. I think I did also feel that my time, which was already under a great deal of pressure, was not best spent filling in complicated application forms for grants of the kind that Templeton might have awarded had I done so. I had a sense too in which the Templeton Foundation at that particular time – I don’t think they would need this now – but at that particular time were trying to seize the opportunity of cashing in on the fact that a subject close to their own interests was now represented in both Oxford and Cambridge. There was a kind of indirect sense in which it conferred some kind of kudos on their own interests, and Sir John’s, in that subject. That also made me just a little bit wary at that time of not wishing to push too hard. Moreover, I had already got quite a big research grant from the European Science Foundation to organise symposia and publish monographs on the theme of religious values and the rise of science. I guess I’ve made reference to that earlier, it led to a book called Religious Values and the Rise of Science in Europe, [on which I collaborated with Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, an international authority on science in the Ottoman Empire, who kindly arranged publication by the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA) in Istanbul]. So I wasn’t wishing to go out of my way to take on more research projects, certainly not in the early days when Fraser and I had that meeting with the Templeton senior administrators. So I don’t think that gives you an exciting picture, but that’s a kind of honest recollection of how I felt the pressures on my own time, particularly as I say, having already acquired heavy obligations across Europe. It was exciting [to be Cordinator of] the ESF project, the European Science Foundation project [which] I found in many ways more to my taste because it put me in touch with a number of European universities and colleagues from those. I’m not sure that applying for funding from Templeton at that particular stage in its grant giving and at that particular stage in my own intellectual development, I’m not sure that it would have been the best priority. But others might take a very different view and the Foundation is now helping the Idreos Chair in Oxford. It can’t endow it in perpetuity, but I think during Alister McGrath’s tenure they have provided funding over a three-year period to help reinforce the endowment of the Chair. Because that was also a concern of mine: during the seven years I held it, the Chair was under-endowed, not by a great deal initially, but with stock market performance and other things, rates of inflation, over the period while I was there, the gap widened rather than narrowed and I think under Peter Harrison’s tenure of the Chair it probably widened even John Hedley Brooke Page 184 C1672/08 Track 12 more, but I can’t be sure of that. So it’s very good for the subject, certainly in Oxford, that the Templeton Foundation has for a limited period of time offered to fund the Chair now so that the endowment can actually increase. And that makes me much more optimistic about the future of the Chair.

[14:20] You mentioned somewhere that you had, you experienced the occasional raised eyebrow within the University of Oxford when introduced as the Professor of Science and Religion. I wondered whether the establishment of the post attracted the attention of the sort of small number of very public atheists in Oxford, people like Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins, whether the very fact that this Chair had been created was something that they commented on, perhaps just within the sort of world of Oxford University.

I think I shall never know that, because I was never made aware of any such representation from Peter or from Richard. I was half expecting it and I think other colleagues in Oxford might have been expecting it, because Richard had lambasted Cambridge when it introduced the Starbridge Lectureship, and of course he would do so along fairly predictable lines to those who are well-versed in his writings. In my own case, it happened rather differently, I think. I never experienced any animosity from either of them. They both attended my inaugural lecture, I can remember talking to Peter Atkins afterwards and he congratulated me on an excellent lecture, even though I’d been showing how from Copernicus down to Einstein scientists had often had very strong religious convictions, and indeed how science could become a kind of surrogate religion in certain circumstances. Richard I know didn’t like that comment. But I was not aware of any animosity and I still meet Peter Atkins from time to time at conferences and he’s always extremely amiable. It’s possible, and I have said this once or twice, that a historian of science might be perceived by them as harmless to their cause in the sense that they of course are interested in what we know now and Richard is famous for saying that any kind of metaphysics or theology prior to Darwin simply has no value and shouldn’t be of interest to anybody because it’s all been rendered obsolete through the Darwinian revolution. I don’t of course share such a view of history. I’m not sure Peter does actually, although he’s the more vitriolic of the two when he’s disparaging religion. I think he is aware that for a long time the Christian faith was in various manifestations supportive of the scientific enterprise. I, as I say, was never made aware of any objections to there being such a Chair in Oxford. And I think one thing that could be significant in that John Hedley Brooke Page 185 C1672/08 Track 12 respect is that it was one of the more striking examples of the way in which Oxford was beginning to look more kindly, certainly in some quarters, on interdisciplinary work. I never claimed that ‘science and religion’ was a new discipline – there have been people who have claimed that, but it never seemed to me that stood up to serious investigation. It is interdisciplinary and it’s multi[disciplinary]. And so I think that one was very conscious of that. I think it was in the year 2002 when the university published a feature in its Annual Review on initiatives involving interdisciplinary activity and I was featured and the Idreos Chair was featured in the university Annual Review in that year, precisely as one of the more interesting examples of that kind of interdisciplinary work in Cambridge [This should say Oxford, which was intended]. So there was quite a strong riposte, I think, to any kind of criticism that might have come from the hyper-atheists in that one could show that there was serious historical work to be done on the relations between science and religion, and scope for closer work in the relations between theology and perhaps the philosophy of science, which is another interesting area where there are points of contact, certainly have been in the past, still are, I think, in interesting ways. In fact, a doctoral thesis was done on that very topic in Paris a few years ago by Lydia Jaeger, in which she argued that some of the most dominant positions in the philosophy of science at the time were underlaid for the individuals concerned, who, as it were, perpetrated those positions, for those individuals were underlaid by their quasi-religious or sometimes not quasi-religious [but seriously religious or anti- religious] preferences. So it was possible, I think, for me as a historian of science to demonstrate that serious scholarship could be pursued in this without it necessarily having any overt apologetic intent. I think that if I had used the Chair as a platform for some kind of religious evangelism, that would have been seized upon and it would have been very possible for Richard, Peter and others to protest that in a modern, secular university you should not be, as it were, rewarding people who were pushing a specific theological line. I never did push a specific theological line, though I obviously illustrated a certain kind of sympathy for the theology enterprise, and within the theology faculty I was allowed to lecture on the first year doctrine of creation course. And one of the things I did do there [within the faculty] was introduce into the final honours school syllabus in the theology faculty a paper specifically on science and religion. But there was never anything directly apologetic about it and I think knowing myself as I do, I don’t think there was anything indirectly of that kind, though I have always relished torpedoing some of the common misunderstandings about the relationships as people have commonly reconstructed them.

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Was, in that case, were people like Richard and Peter in your mind when you were having thoughts about the reluctance to seize everything that the Templeton might offer? Was that part of that reluctance, how the Chair was seen from within Oxford by New Atheists, for example?

Thinking about that now in retrospect, I don’t think I actually accorded so much weight to either the views of Peter Atkins or the views of Richard Dawkins to make me feel that that was an appropriate line to take. I think I was feeling it in rather more general academic terms. I think that’s all I would want to say about that, Paul. I mean obviously I was conscious that they were the two ‘terrible twins’ as they were once described by one of my colleagues. But I don’t think that I specifically held back from the Templeton initiatives because I thought, oh dear, you know, I would get into trouble with Richard or Peter. I never actually found myself in that kind of relationship with them. I once spoke at the Royal Institution in London and somebody asked a question, which I answered in a particular way. It was about the relationship between divine causality and the action of natural causes that scientists of course explore, and I do remember that Peter Atkins was in the audience on that occasion and certainly reacted adversely to what I was saying. What in fact I was saying was that to set up the antithesis between divine activity on the one hand and natural causation on the other was itself misguided, given the long history within the Christian traditions, certainly, and primarily as exemplified by Thomas Aquinas, who is still often cited in this context, that there is a distinction between primary causality and secondary causality, and the scientists investigate the natural causes, the secondary causes of things, but underpinning the very possibility of regular causality is that metaphysical belief in some kind of intelligent mind behind the process. So I have had occasional meetings, or that experience in the Royal Institution when I have known that what I am saying is very different from what either Richard or Peter would want to say. Just an anecdote on that, my wife is a tour manager for two tour agencies, one of which is Martin Randall Travel, on one of whose tours Peter Atkins was one of her clients. And apparently he asked her, when she explained who she was, he asked her what my views were, had I been converted to atheism, whereupon she apparently replied that I would describe myself as an agnostic, but a kind of agnosticism deeply informed by the Christian tradition. And he apparently, partly in jest I think in that social context, said it was time I made my mind up [laughs] and that to be an agnostic was not a satisfactory position. So there have been little ripples of that kind. But I do hope, actually, and looking back I’ve reason to believe this may be the case, that because I have treated John Hedley Brooke Page 187 C1672/08 Track 12 people and their ideas with a degree of tolerance and diplomacy, that has also been reciprocated to some degree. And I would like to think that the kind of work I have done has enjoyed at least the respect of other scholars who may have very different views from myself. What’s particularly gratifying is that the theses that I put forward in my Cambridge book on science and religion are still being debated and this very week I’ve had an invitation to participate in a symposium in Brazil, in Rio, in 2017 where the theme of a whole day symposium is to be the complexity thesis, when one looks at the history of the relations between science and religion. And since, unfortunately, that label is permanently attached to me, it means that my book will once again be at the centre of a quite significant international conference. That’s deeply gratifying and it would be for any scholar, I think.

[end of track 12]

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[Track 13]

Could you now tell me, because last time you talked about the Masters programme but not about research students, could you tell me about your research students in that Oxford job until, say 1999 until 2006? So you had a number of PhD students?

Certainly. I think the maximum number of graduate students I taught in any one year [in the sense of closely supervising their research] was probably eleven, which was made up of seven Masters students, two MPhil students from the history faculty and two doctoral students. That’s quite a lot, I mean there are people who do far more than that, but it was an interesting part of my work. The backgrounds of the Masters students varied quite a lot. [A young lady from Greece, Angeliki Kerasidou, came to Harris Manchester College through the award of an Idreos scholarship, generously funded by Susan Idreos, widow of Andreas Idreos without whose beneficence the Chair would not have become possible. Angeliki came with an interest in Greek Orthodoxy and how its teachings might bear on major issues in bioethics. She subsequently worked with Julian Savulescu and continues to work on problems in bioethics]. We had some [graduate students] who had already done significant work in the science and religion area. One I remember particularly [Patrick Woolley] had studied in some depth with the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences in Berkeley, but he wanted to do more advanced work, particularly on Einstein and Spinoza, which became the theme of his doctoral thesis. Others were looking to the Masters programme to prepare them perhaps from a less exotic background. Sometimes people with very good scientific qualifications, eager to become literate in theology, and sometimes the other way round. So I have very happy memories of students who in their specialist topics found a very interesting range to investigate. I mentioned informally before this afternoon one of them who came from Germany [Sven Wagner] became very interested in the ‘playing God’ motif and how that had manifested itself in literature, as well as in science and technology. That was an extremely interesting thesis. Another graduate student I remember also did some work on Einstein on quantum indeterminacy. So twentieth century scientific topics were often involved. One of my doctoral students [Michael Marsh] was particularly interested in the question of what it means to be human. He had a medical background and did very interesting work on the experience, or perhaps we should say near-death experiences and how they are both related and rationalised by people who have had them. And that was turned into a book. Another was working on the concept of kenosis, the notion that God has divested himself, in inverted John Hedley Brooke Page 189 C1672/08 Track 13 commas, of certain powers to give a degree of autonomy both to humans and to the natural world. It’s an idea that John Polkinghorne, for example, has developed in his theology. And that particular graduate student, Peter Colyer, went on to write a book on that topic. So it was very exciting for me because I was teaching and helping people from a range of disparate backgrounds to embark upon projects that have been intellectually very interesting and exciting. [My first doctoral student in Oxford, Shaun Henson, worked on the theology of Wolfhardt Pannenberg, particularly in relation to the radical philosophy of science of Nancy Cartwright; yet another [Jonathan Edelmann] studied the Indian sacred text the Bhagavata Purana looking for resonances with contemporary biological theory. During 2006, my last year in Oxford, one of the Master’s candidates in science & religion, Ignacio Silva, a native of Argentina, wrote a fine dissertation on concepts of divine activity in nature, favourably comparing the approach and theology of Aquinas with that of scholars today, such as Robert J. Russell, who give the deity a more manipulative role within a framework indebted to quantum mechanics. Following his doctorate, Ignacio has worked for the Ian Ramsey Centre, successfully leading a Templeton-funded project on the development of a science-theology dialogue in Latin America].

[04:38] Could I ask whether through the Ian Ramsey Centre and towards the end of that period, experience of the science and religion forum, whether through these inter-disciplinary environments you found yourself in contact more often than before with scientists who were religious?

I wouldn’t say that I found myself more in contact with scientists who were also religious. I have been very conscious of how scientists who are also religious do make up one of the largest constituencies of people who are generally interested in books which have science and religion in the title. By and large, theologians and indeed philosophers don’t tend to get drawn into books which have that kind of title. It is scientists with an interest in religion or some kind of religious commitment who do, I think, feel a very strong kind of motivation to try to understand how they would relate their two great passions to each other. And there are many examples of that from history too. One thing though that I did find rewarding in that context was that I was approached by Ian Walmsley in the physics department in Oxford saying that he had colleagues who would be very interested if we could set up a forum in which scientists and theologians, or people like myself wearing many different badges, could John Hedley Brooke Page 190 C1672/08 Track 13 meet and just very informally discuss issues that were topical and of importance to them. And that’s how we did come to set up the forum within Oxford. There are two forums that I talk about. One is the one specifically in Oxford. There is the National Forum for Science and Religion that Arthur Peacocke established years before I went to Oxford. In fact, that forum, the National one, celebrated its fortieth anniversary in Durham just last year. But within Oxford there is the forum that is run usually by somebody from within the physics department, but involving philosophers, theologians and just all who are particularly interested. And that is really flourishing and the Ian Ramsey Centre, I think, is making a good contribution to that, just as I tried to do from the Ian Ramsey Centre when I was there. So I was very conscious in Oxford that there were clusters of scientists, often actually with evangelical interests and commitments, who found themselves in a situation where they would relish the opportunity to explore these issues a little more fully. Curiously, just this week I have received a copy of a fine book, written by two people who came to see me very early on in my Oxford years: Andrew Briggs, who subsequently became Professor of Nano- technology, I think (That’s right, yes, because he was in materials science), and an artist friend of his, Roger Wagner. They’ve published a book called The Penultimate Curiosity and that interests me because it’s seventeen years since they came to seek my advice on whether there was scope for a book that was accessible, well interested [and informed], that explored some of the highways and byways of the development of science. They’ve, I think probably wisely, avoided putting the two words ‘science’ and ‘religion’ in the title. The book’s called The Penultimate Curiosity; the title refers to scientific curiosity, the ultimate curiosity refers to the big questions about the meaning of life, the origins of the universe, things like that. And their thesis is that science, the penultimate curiosity, has flourished and been satisfied in the slipstream of the big questions. And I think that is actually rather a nice way of expressing it. So they’re not necessarily claiming that there has always been some kind of direct relationship between religion and science, but they see that behind the scientific enterprise there have pretty well always been the big questions exercising some kind of pull through a spiritual mediation of one kind or another. So I was delighted to find that book on my desk, remembering as I did that I had encouraged them to write it. But in their acknowledgement they very tactfully also point out that I warned them of the difficulties, and I’m quite sure I did. But anyway, they have done a very nice job, and interestingly, in that epilogue at the back of the book, there is a reference to my inaugural lecture in Oxford [published under the title Of Scientists and their gods] and [to] the presence of Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins in the audience. And they’ve even remembered one of the jokes I John Hedley Brooke Page 191 C1672/08 Track 13 told in that lecture, which was that the university had decided to place its first Professor of Science and Religion for his accommodation in a vicarage, a disused vicarage, but one due to be demolished in order to make room for a chemistry laboratory! Forgive me if I’ve told that anecdote before. But clearly it was remembered by Andrew, who must have been present in the audience that night. So that’s just completing a little circle from our discussion earlier about the inaugural, and the range of people who were actually there from many different disciplines. But scientists certainly among them.

The inaugural lecture, when you were speaking about it earlier, you said that you’d suggested in some cases that science can become a kind of religion and that you know that Richard didn’t like that. But I forgot to ask, how do you know that he didn’t, what was the… how was that manifest?

I think I know that because I have seen him turn his nose up at that kind of suggestion when he’s been interviewed on television or on the radio. I can’t be sure that on the evening I gave that lecture I detected a facial response from him, though something tells me I might have done. And I was certainly conscious that he was in the audience. Of course, what he doesn’t like about that is that it has the effect of putting science on a very similar kind of plane to religion and he prefers to keep the word religion for things that are much easier to critique. And I have some sympathy with that. I don’t think science ever becomes a religion in quite the way that, say, Christianity and Islam in their historic manifestations are understood to be religions. But I think that there were members of the, you know, the church fathers you could identify, going way, way back in time, who expressed the view that your god is very closely associated with that which you are [most] passionate about. And insofar as scientists can be very passionate about their science, it can take on a certain kind of religious aura.

[15:09] To the extent then that you did interact with scientists who were themselves religious and interested in science and religion through that kind of personal biographical sort of interest, this might be a sort of difficult question, but I wondered whether interaction with living scientists who were say, Christian, had any effect on work that you then go on to do, or the continuation of your work on sort of historical individuals who are thinking about those two things together?

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It is rather a difficult question, whether I could say that I took away from a conversation, shall we say, with a scientist who had strong religious convictions, a particular idea that I decided I needed to examine more closely historically. I can’t immediately recall a specific example of that where I went away and said gosh, you know, I really must look into that from a historical point of view. Though I have given before examples of topics like the existence of extraterrestrial life where conversations with others or simply reading the newspaper did prompt a wish to go back and examine the particular kind of inter-relations between the science, the metaphysics and the theology that had underpinned speculation about life on other worlds. It’s possible that that would be an example where conversations with scientists who were interested in that topic might have added weight to the impetus to do that kind of research. And I think if I had longer to reflect on this I probably could reconstruct examples. I think one area where this would obtain might be in the context of Darwinism and evolutionary biology, because one does of course encounter many biologists who think their science really leaves no room for religious discourse of any moment at all. But it’s not always the biologists who are interested in these issues. Physicists too are obviously interested in evolution because of all its cosmological aspects. So I think that when I have taken an interest in the history of astronomy, for example, it has been with the realisation that scientists whom I have spoken to have particular perspectives on the evolution of the universe and whether it can be characterised exclusively in terms of lucky chance events, or whether there is some kind of order behind it. Perhaps an example of what I’m thinking of here is that Simon Conway Morris as a palaeontologist in Cambridge with, I think, very strong well- developed Christian views, has emphasised in our own day the importance of convergence in evolution towards similar kind[s] of structures, like the eye that humans have being developed independently in other lineages. And I do remember seeing a resonance between what he was proposing and what I found in St George Mivart, one of Darwin’s contemporaries, who became a convert to Roman Catholicism and also a convert to Darwinian evolution, though in respect of the latter he was very soon an apostate and became one of Darwin’s severest critics, not attacking the idea of evolution per se, but attacking the mechanism of natural selection and claiming that it was insufficient to do the work that Darwin needed it to do. And what’s interesting about Mivart is he has a very similar notion of convergent patterns in evolution leading to similar structures, which I think he felt was more sympathetic towards a theistic understanding of the world than it was to a lucky chance construction with the kind of randomness that’s built into the way natural selection works for Darwin. John Hedley Brooke Page 193 C1672/08 Track 13

Thank you. [21:12] You were co-director of a Templeton project on science and religion in schools during the period in Oxford, is that right?

Yes, I was approached quite early on in my time in Oxford by Martin Rogers, who had been a headmaster of a distinguished school [Malvern College] before becoming Director of the Farmington Institute in Oxford. Now, the Farmington Institute exists to improve the quality of teaching in schools, I think it has an interest particularly in improving the teaching of subjects which bear on religion or might be conceived to be derivatives of it. Martin was very keen to build up some kind of resource material for science teachers and for religious studies teachers in schools, which would introduce pupils to rather more, shall we say, sophisticated and circumspect perspectives than they traditionally got from teachers who may have had a rather narrow or ill-informed view on the subject. And Martin applied, I guess because the application was known to have my imprimatur with it. It did lead to a project which I then helped him with over a three or four-year period, during which the teaching materials were actually written by teachers themselves. And that was the gist of the programme, because it was felt that if we were producing material that could be used in the classroom, it really should be seen to be prepared, not by educational technologists, but those who were really at the chalk face, as it was in those days. So I enjoyed working on that. It involved a lot of work actually, because I took upon myself to vet all the material that had been written. It was interesting material because it was self-consciously full of suggestions for class exercises and projects and things like that, for students. And it was also associated with video materials, a lot of ancillary stuff. And I think I’m right in saying – my memory may be deceiving me – but I think we worked out that these materials actually constituted in sum the equivalent of about 3,500 pages of a book. Actually, I think there was too much and in some ways it was an over-ambitious project. But I must say, some of the material was excellent and we certainly know that a good portion of it was used in some schools. But of course because it [‘science and religion’] wasn’t a subject specified in the curriculum, or if it was it would disappear and then resurface as it has done again more recently in various ways, we felt that perhaps the material didn’t get as much exposure as it might have done because teachers were under so much pressure to focus only on issues that were of direct relevance to examinations. And both Martin and I of course fully understood that. When the project came John Hedley Brooke Page 194 C1672/08 Track 13 to an end and Martin retired from the Farmington Institute and I retired from the Idreos Chair, the material was taken over to complement work being done at the Faraday Institute in Cambridge on science and religion in schools, and I think that work has been successful and has had quite a high profile. [The ‘Science and Religion in Schools Project’ (SRSP) on which I collaborated with Martin was incorporated into the LASAR (‘Learning about Science and Religion’) project led by Berry Billingsley who was then based at the University of Reading and subsequently became Professor of Education at Christ Church University, Canterbury]. So what we did has a certain legacy through the take-up of that same topic in schools.

[26:39] Could you tell me about your work on scientific and religious dissent at the time that you’re working here in Oxford? I think this is to some extent the focus of your own research.

My college in Oxford, Harris Manchester College, was very much associated with religious dissent. Its foundation was in the late eighteenth century, it was a spin-off from the Warrington Academy where figures like Joseph Priestley had a strong presence for a while. It’s primarily the college which historically had prepared [trainee] ministers for the Unitarian life and work. By the time I went to Oxford that had become very much a minority aspect of the life of the college, but it did still exist. And one consequence of its dissenting tradition was that the library was very, very well stocked with primary sources on the… those who were the perpetrators, the protagonists of what’s sometimes called rational dissent in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I had worked on Joseph Priestley before I went to Harris Manchester, but invitations [were now received] to speak on science and dissent at various conferences around the world. I remember one on Vancouver Island which was particularly attractive, and also one in the Canary Islands. It seems that religious dissent was a topic of interest in these Elysian [laughs] environments. It just meant that I had to polish up my knowledge of Priestley, who then also featured in a book that I co-edited with Ian Maclean of All Souls College, a book called Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Theology [actually Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion]. It was a topic which featured in the European Science Foundation network that I coordinated for three years. The volume which was published in Istanbul as a consequence of that programme certainly gave prominence to those forms of reformed theology which were perceived as most radical in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. So, that theme of the way in which science had John Hedley Brooke Page 195 C1672/08 Track 13 been cultivated in dissenting milieus, that theme is one that I did devote quite a lot of my research time in Oxford. It led to various essays published in books edited by other scholars, but I’ve always been very happy to contribute in that way. So the role of dissenting religion in the promulgation and stimulus of and to science has actually been very marked and I have been particularly interested in correlations between what one might call scientific innovation and religious radicalism or unorthodoxy in its many different manifestations. That’s not to say that science hasn’t also flourished in contexts where it’s been very much the offspring of perfectly orthodox religion. But I do find it quite striking how many of the leading figures, shall we say, in the history of British science, have been pious with a very genuine piety as far as one can tell, but in theological terms, often heterodox. And Isaac Newton is the absolute classic case of that, of course, with his denial of the doctrine of the Trinity he would have been perceived as a heretic, had it been public knowledge at the time. He managed very skilfully to keep that in the private domain. It’s difficult to know exactly why there should be that correlation but I think one can suggest reasons, that if you’re going to excel in science you do have to have a certain kind of independence of mind, a willingness to entertain new ideas, to look at things in a slightly different way perhaps from the way others have done. And that kind of independent rationalism can then manifest or express itself in a theological context as well.

[32:59] Thank you. You retired from Oxford in 2006, why then, what’s the story of retirement, I suppose?

The story of retirement, my goodness. When I was appointed to the Idreos Chair, I did say that I would undertake to stay and do my best to establish the Chair for five years. At the end of that time I would know whether I felt it had been successful, whether I had done all I could do and whether perhaps it should be passed over to a younger scholar. When the five years were up – this would be 2004 – there were various reasons why I decided it would be premature to retire at that point in 2004. This was because on most of the fronts with which I had been innovative in pursuing science and religion in Oxford, things were really blossoming and it seemed to me it was just the wrong moment to leave, because I could see that there were still things I could do to steer the development of the subject. For example, it was relatively late in my time in Oxford, I think it must have been 1994, when the science John Hedley Brooke Page 196 C1672/08 Track 13 and religion paper was finally inserted [as an option] into the theology finals [honours] programme.

2004?

Did I say 2004?

No, I think you said 1994, but you clearly mean 2004, yes.

I mean 2004, Paul, yes. And there were other developments too. It was in 2004 that I think I had the maximum number of graduate students. I was anticipating those numbers continuing to rise. But, I think what also weighed with me was the fact that the faculty was at that time losing one or two, perhaps even two or three, senior professors, either to retirement or to their being translated to other universities. And it did occur to me, and in conversation with colleagues, that for another senior professor to join what could almost look like, you know, a kind of exodus, was not an appropriate thing to do. So in 2004 I pledged that I would remain for another two years, but I did make it clear that really I would not wish to continue until I was sixty-five. I retired at what must have been sixty-three, I think, sixty-two going on sixty- three. Of course, it’s important to remember that my wife was still living in Lancaster the whole time I was working in Oxford, seven years of commuting down the M6 were enough, I think, to grind down most people. I survived that remarkably well and she did too and we both agreed afterwards that it had actually enhanced our marriage, that I had taken that Chair, it created various opportunities for her as well. But in 2006 she had been retired for a year herself. It just seemed the right time to go and I felt because I’d done two years beyond what I’d originally promised, I really could do so in good conscience. The thing that I was unhappy about, though this didn’t affect my decision to retire because it only transpired afterwards, was that the university would, for whatever reason, delay the appointment of a successor. And I think it was something like eighteen months after I left before Peter Harrison was appointed as my successor. And I have got various suppositions about why there was such a delay, given that I had made my intentions absolutely clear two years earlier. No doubt, one factor could have been a wish on the part of the senior administration in the university to save a bit of money, given the rather delicate state of the endowment that I referred to earlier. But it did mean actually that one or two initiatives that I was setting up at the time I was leaving rather fell apart because there was not the immediate continuity to John Hedley Brooke Page 197 C1672/08 Track 13 develop them further. And I think in particular the Masters programme the year after I left, and possibly even thereafter, was something of a casualty as a consequence of that delay. I think by the time Peter Harrison arrived, the number of applications had dropped because applicants were being told that there was no Idreos Professor who could supervise their work during that interregnum period. So that was a disappointment after I left, but that could not have been a consideration that persuaded me to retire. One of the questions my wife and I did have to consider was where would we retire, and of course Oxford was a very attractive possibility, though we had not bought a house there. And I remember we discussed the Cotswolds, we discussed the Sussex Downs, and then we concluded that actually, living on the border between Lancashire and Cumbria and being so close to the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales, and the sea, we really had the best of all possible worlds where we had been living over the previous thirty-five or forty years.

Thank you. [40:37] Earlier in the interview you said that in popular culture the views of Draper and White still reign okay and that it’s the standard view you encounter. Off the recording earlier you were talking about the reading of newspapers and the attention that you give to science and religion stories and I suppose the question that a listener might want to know is where in popular culture do you, John Hedley Brooke, encounter the standard view, if you see what I mean. So how do you gauge what is in public or lay or standard or ordinary discourse the standard view on science and religion, where do you sort of dip the litmus paper to sort of gauge that at any one time?

Well, one clue that you so often find is where the Galileo affair is invoked as the supreme and iconic example of the way in which a religious predisposition, a religious authority, a religious institution stands in the way of the truth, which is how it’s often presented, of course, since the earth really does move as we know Galileo propounded. So there are certain things I look for. The litmus paper might be reference to, or looking for references to some of the standard anecdotes like the Wilberforce/Huxley debate, which is often there, often described, particularly in America, [as] the Great Debate, as if it really were a great debate. It was certainly a public debate, but not I think of such consequences as are so often purveyed these days. So one looks for anecdotal evidence of that kind. But I think you can kind of read between the lines to judge where the reporter is actually coming from and where John Hedley Brooke Page 198 C1672/08 Track 13 their sympathies lie. I’ve always said that historical investigation of public controversies over science and religion make an extremely interesting and challenging topic for students to investigate, precisely because there are usually hidden agendas of one kind or another and there are hidden presuppositions which are often taken for granted, but which are often suspect when one goes into them more closely. And I think I would stand by that if one’s wishing to develop critical skills in a young historian it makes very, very interesting material for precisely that [reason]. And I don’t wish to disparage journalists in any very general way; they have a very, very difficult task and I have come to respect the writings of many of them, simply because of the flair with which they can write. I mean journalistic prose can sometimes be despised but it’s often deeply impressive and has a strong kind of emotive impact. But, more often than not when issues involve new forms of science, new forms of technology, there will be a tendency, I think, to perhaps exaggerate the implications of the scientific innovation and a tendency to be indiscriminate when talking about a religious appraisal of those innovations. So you get more generalisations about the likely repercussions for a religious constituency than you do in terms of the promise of the science. And I guess I have also realised increasingly over the years how it’s just part of the culture of science now, and the practical necessity if you’re a scientist, to be wanting to claim very strong implications for your work. And this is eminently true in the medical sphere where biotechnological research inevitably comes with the promise of some kind of therapeutic breakthrough. And one sees that in so many contexts. Whereas of course very often lauded innovations in science and technology actually kind of evaporate and you never hear anything much more about them because they’re superseded by some new flavour of the month and the promise that they may hold for the future. It’s a very important feature, I think, of the culture of science and the way it’s presented to the public, but perhaps often in ways that are a little bit unself-critical in terms of the image of science that’s being purveyed.

Thank you, and just in terms of sort of practical details, where do you follow these stories? We might imagine you watching TV, listening to the radio, flicking through the Radio Times, we don’t know, the listener doesn’t know where you access popular culture, if you like, or where you access this standard popular view of relations between science and religion of the public understanding of science and so on.

Yes, I mean the sources that I would come across are varied and in many ways haphazard. I don’t systematically devote time each week to scouting through all the daily papers looking John Hedley Brooke Page 199 C1672/08 Track 13 for sensationalist accounts of science and religion, that would be entirely false. I pick up interesting perspectives from some of the more sophisticated radio programmes: In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg would be a classic example. Of course, some would say that’s not popular culture, that’s a very rarefied academic culture when you’re looking at that programme, and thank God that it can be, that’s impressive. I read The Times and The Sunday Times every day, where I pick up the particular tendencies of their regular reporters, whether they’re reporting on science or other political events. During my time in Oxford I regularly subscribed to Nature, to Science, to the New Scientist, to those broadsheets which particularly want to portray a very positive image of scientific achievement, and do so of course very successfully and in many ways perfectly correctly. On the religious side, well, it’s very hard not to come across the kind of deeply fundamentalist forms of suspicion of scientists when you are acquainted with the debates that have taken place in America, particularly since the 1970s with the development of Young Earth creationism and subsequently intelligent design, and seeing the way in which journalists respond to those two movements can be interesting too. I have read books on the development of creationism as a popular movement, not only in the States but recently there’s been a very interesting volume on creationism in Europe, looking at a whole range of European countries and the way in which creationism has been fought in those countries.[Stefaan Blancke et al, eds., Creationism in Europe ]. And that can of course give you further insight into popular attitudes and how they are deflected, or in some cases taken very seriously. So it’s a range of sources, Paul. I don’t go out of my way to find these, but I’m just very conscious when I do find reference that there’s usually something interesting in them. It’s been a common assumption, for example, in press coverage of debates about extraterrestrial life that if life were discovered on some other world, that would be a deep embarrassment to the monotheistic religions. Actually, there are many representatives of those traditions who would completely deny any such adverse consequences and there have been long and very deep debates about that over centuries and still today. Ted Peters at the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences in Berkeley has published one or two papers in the last three or four years consequent upon the conducting of a survey he devised to try to establish what different religious communities do think about extraterrestrial life. And he’s found rather interesting things, [one of] which is that most representatives of a particular religion will say that they don’t see any particular problem for them, but that they suspect it might be a problem for members of other faiths. And I think that’s quite an interesting perspective too. But it’s just when one comes across in the press an unwillingness to consider that there might be other John Hedley Brooke Page 200 C1672/08 Track 13 perspectives on these issues. That’s when I do become a little bit more animated and I feel I want to say, if only you’d read such-and-such a book, or such-and-such an essay on that topic, you’d realise what a simplification it is that you are propounding, or simply just taking for granted.

Have you ever written letters in to The Times, having read articles, to point that sort of thing out?

I have not written many, but I have written some. For example, and this is a rather interesting case, largely before I went to Oxford, but I did do work on him while I was there, the Scottish geologist, Hugh Miller, who was probably the most successful populariser of geology in the whole of the nineteenth century, but a geologist who came to the science as an amateur from relatively humble background, was converted from a kind of atheist position to an evangelical theology at a certain point in his life, [and] subsequently became editor of a newspaper, The Witness, which was the organ of the Free Church of Scotland following the disruption of that Church, or rather of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland in 1843. Hugh Miller tragically died in what appears to have been, what I think was, a suicide, because he basically blew his brains out. I remember reading one article, I think it was The Times, it could have been another newspaper, but I think it was in The Times, when a commentator suggested – it was a psychologist actually, though I don’t remember the name of the author – suggested that Miller committed suicide because he had been unable to reconcile his science with his faith. And I became angry because Miller wrote a stream of books and essays and articles in all of which he was able to demonstrate, and I’m sure to himself as well as to others, that there was not a problem, that geology, for example, furnished evidence that could be cited contrary to the evolutionary theories that were in vogue in the early 1840s. Miller committed suicide before Darwin published his theory. It’s very likely Miller would have taken exception to Darwin’s theory, from what we know of his general world view. But the notion that he committed suicide because he was living with this terrible conflict in his own mind between the geology and his evangelical faith to me just didn’t wash. So I did write, but it wasn’t published. Perhaps I was too angry or too animated. And I guess, looking back now, I can see perhaps why an argument could be constructed to say that even somebody who writes so much, showing the harmony of their science and faith, could deep down be doing that because there was some kind of ulterior thing that was nagging away in the background. Just as it has been said that some of the English scientists of the seventeenth century, or we should John Hedley Brooke Page 201 C1672/08 Track 13 call them natural philosophers of course, when they wrote on the harmony of their faith and their scientific work, it’s been suggested they were trying to convince themselves rather than, or in addition to, their audience. So I would be willing to concede, I think now, that there are perhaps perspectives from which that argument on Miller’s suicide might have had a little bit more in it than I was willing to give it at the time. But I still think to say quite baldly that the cause of Miller’s suicide was his inability to reconcile science with theology, I still think that is misguided. In the 1830s, forties and fifties, before Darwin published, there was still a very strong linkage between the historical sciences and a natural theology which still saw in the way nature was ordered and organised, evidence of an intelligent creator and designer. And of course Darwin also uses some of that language himself and derived quite a lot from it, even though his thesis of natural selection did subvert it in some respects, but not all respects. So it’s a complicated situation.

Thank you.

[end of track 13]

John Hedley Brooke Page 202 C1672/08 Track 14

[Track 14]

Thinking again about the question of letters to The Times when one has been aggravated by something, I did in my capacity as President of the International Society for Science and Religion, have to write a letter to Nature on one occasion. I’m not sure that I would have written had it not been for the fact that various people drew my attention to it and suggested that I ought to object. Nature had published what was really a very silly satire which certainly held the Christian faith up to ridicule. It was the kind of ridicule that makes you think well, it’s best to let this pass and people will forget. I don’t, unfortunately, remember now who the author of it was. But other members of the International Society for Science and Religion got in touch with me and said, don’t you think this was, you know, just going too far. And so I wrote a letter to the editor and I did say that I felt that Nature had rather demeaned itself by publishing something that was as flippant and actually uncritical as it was. My letter was not published but I did get a reply from the editor, not however one which I felt really met the case, because he just wrote back and said “I was very sorry to hear that you didn’t like the letter that we [published]”… so I mean he didn’t take on board the fact that I was writing as a representative of an international society. But, as I say, I’m not sure that if it had been left to me alone I would have felt it judicious to reply; it seemed almost too silly to merit that kind of response. But it does raise in my mind questions that have a contemporary political significance, and I’m thinking of the tragic case in Paris earlier this last year when the offices of Charlie Hebdo were attacked by the Islamic extremists because they have deliberately satirised aspects of Muslim belief, Islamic belief. And they still continue to do so. And I do find myself asking whether an initiative which, or an organisation, which exists simply to satirise and pillory certain forms of belief could be said to go over the top if it does it so deliberately as to provoke. And I don’t know really what the correct response to that is, I think one can react in many different ways, but I can certainly understand how religious people do feel they are entitled to take offence when their faith is not, as it were, being attacked, but subject to a particular form of attack which seems cheap and lacking in understanding. So, I wouldn’t draw a direct parallel between Nature’s performance on that occasion when I was asked if I would protest and the way in which Charlie Hebdo conducts its affairs. But it does raise in my mind that very, very difficult question of how far you should go deliberately to provoke what you know is likely to be a very angry response.

[05:12] John Hedley Brooke Page 203 C1672/08 Track 14

Do you remember anything of the substance of the satire that you were asked by the Society to respond to? Who it was by, roughly when it was, so that the listener might be able to find the Nature article that you’re referring to?

I can’t off the top of my head, Paul. I do not remember the name of the author or whether he had any particular position of distinction which entitled him to sound off in the way he did. And it was in a series of articles which I know were conceived as a bit of fun, as it were, a kind of digression from Nature’s more serious business, and of course it’s a journal I deeply respect for the way it keeps us all abreast of scientific work. Exactly when it was, well because it coincided with my presidency of the ISSR, that would pin it down to a period, well I suppose could have been about 2009/10/11, somewhere around that period, but I don’t exactly recall. And I don’t even, precisely because it was so lightweight and silly, I don’t even remember exactly what the content was. I think if I tried to remember I would probably come up with the wrong recollection.

Do you – and again, it’s a bit of a long shot – but individuals within the International Society, do you remember the members who were concerned that you ought to respond on their behalf?

Well, if I’m remembering correctly it was three or four people who were themselves scientists who had obviously been offended by the tone – I think it was the tone of the piece rather than the rather silly content that just made people’s, the hairs on the back of their neck bristle a bit. And I could perfectly understand why that was. Somehow you feel that a successful satire has to know something about what it is it’s satirising, and if what you get is not a satire of that kind but a satire based on a caricature, then the double whammy, as it were, can show very poor taste. And I think this was a question of a matter of taste. The issue on Hugh Miller that we were discussing a few moments ago, that was on a genuine academic issue and how to interpret a very sad event at the end of the life of somebody who was one of the great littérateurs as well as one of the great amateur geologists of his age.

Thank you. [09:12] Now, what might be thought of as your autobiographical output is quite slight, I think you would say, consisting of a short interview for Chemistry World in 2013, a paper in Theology John Hedley Brooke Page 204 C1672/08 Track 14 and Science in 2014, and now this, but you’ll perhaps point out other little bits if I’ve missed them. But what I want to ask is whether you were asked to be interviewed in a biographical way or to write autobiographically before 2013, and the reason I’m asking is because you hint at a possible tension in the introduction to the Theology and Science paper that ‘In my historical scholarship I’ve not felt impelled to advertise where my theological sympathies may lie, partly because of their complexity’ - which we’ve definitely captured in this interview - ‘and partly because I’ve not wanted prospective readers to discount my work from a suspicion of bias’. So I’m asking you about whether you’ve been approached to do autobiographical things before these quite recent things, with that comment of yours in mind.

I think the truthful and short answer is no. I have often been interviewed about aspects of my historical work and that’s been a rather interesting facet of conferences I’ve attended when there have been reporters present, and I’ve always enjoyed that. But, the autobiographical comment that went into the Theology and Science article [vol. 12 (2014) 307-23] I’ve not been challenged on. I think I did mention when we were in the context of reactions to my Cambridge book in 1991, John Greene, who had written on The Death of Adam and was a fine historian of ideas and of the Darwinian revolution, John Greene wrote to me and in his review that he enclosed, I was reading this again quite recently, he considered it a significant weakness of the book that I had not stated exactly how my beliefs had been formed and how they had been composed. And I wrote a very detailed letter back to him explaining why I had not wished to do that, which certainly included the two points to which you have just referred, that I felt that to go through all the philosophical and theological literature which had influenced my thinking, the fact that I couldn’t identify with any one specific tradition any more, even if I might once have done so, would have meant that wearing my heart on my sleeve, would have, it seemed to me, have been pretty tough for the reader, even before they’d started on the book. And John still felt, I mean he then replied to my letter, he still felt that I should have said more about my own religious sympathies, where they lay or may not have lay, just so that the reader would be prepared for what they found in the book. I’ve often thought about that, I’ve never been interviewed about it. I still think because the subject of science and its bearings on religion and religion and its bearings on science is such a delicate and sensitive topic on which people can be extraordinarily opinionated, I just didn’t want to construct an argument in that book that could be lightly dismissed by somebody saying, well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? I was reminded that Robert Boyle, back in the seventeenth century, declined to become a priest in the Anglican Church because he had very John Hedley Brooke Page 205 C1672/08 Track 14 interesting, very deep views on how science and his Anglican faith related to each other at that time, but when asked to explain why he had not become a priest, he said that it would lead to a devaluation of the work that he had done in writing about, well the title of one of his books was The Christian Virtuoso, and other books on the utility of science, the usefulness of natural philosophy. I think he felt there was a danger that the message would become too lightly dismissible if one went out of one’s way to advertise some kind of predisposition. Now, I may have gone too far, you know, one does. And you can never, of course, be utterly impartial and disinterested in the way in which you write. What people said about that book was that they found it incredibly well balanced, that I was trying to be fair to a tradition of deep religious faith, but also trying to be fair to rationalist positions that went in antithetical ways to that. And I still think, looking at it now, that it does have that balance. And that’s how I tried to convey something of me in the book, rather than by saying look, I have had a strong Christian Protestant formation, I’m agnostic about various aspects of that now that my philosophy’s been influenced by existentialist writers and Kant and… Doing all that it seemed to me was a bit self-indulgent. I think I’ve said that before in these interviews, but the straight answer to your question is I have not been challenged in interviews about that. And actually, John Greene’s complaint in his review and in his follow-up has not actually been made by many other people, if any others that I can think of. Other reviewers said that it was the balance of the book that they particularly valued.

[17:56] Has the lack of what John Greene was asking for led to sort of… have you detected the sort of interest in trying to get to the bottom of that question from other people, you know, sort of privately? In the way that you said that Peter Atkins had asked your wife about you in that sort of way, do you sense that interest among sort of colleagues and friends and not quite colleagues, but people who read your work and that sort of thing? Have you noticed, have you sort of spotted that in others?

I’ve not noticed it in others to the extent that it has been of great concern to me. Interestingly, that autobiographical essay for Theology and Science did elicit responses from people who know me very well, and what was interesting about those responses was that they were saying how similar the story I had to tell in that essay was to their own theological adventure or pilgrimage or whatever word one might use. So I have had kind of sympathetic, corroborative responses of that kind. There may be people out there who think that they can John Hedley Brooke Page 206 C1672/08 Track 14 guess what I might believe. I simply don’t know, Paul. I like to believe that my position is not such that they ought to be so interested, but there can be many different perceptions of course.

[end of track 14]

[Track 15]

Just some questions then on last time, then we’ll carry on. You said in the last session that at Oxford, during your time at Oxford you established a small, what you called a forum, distinct from the national Science and Religion Forum, which involved a number of scientists. And you mentioned that these scientists who were interested in forming this group tended to have evangelical interests and I wondered whether there is a tendency in the science and religion community in Britain more generally for the scientists who are interested to come from one sort of Christian tradition or another and I wondered whether the evangelical interests are a sort of common feature across that field. And I have in mind Christians in Science, which seems to include a number of scientists that might have sympathies in that direction. So I don’t know if there’s anything to say about that.

Yes, my perception when I was in Oxford was that a significant number of the scientists who came to the forum - we had a meeting every term with a theme and pre-circulated papers for discussion and we used to have a dinner at the same time, so one got to know colleagues from other faculties and other departments - I think the perception was that there was a particular group of physicists whose sympathies you would describe as evangelical and I suspect that most of them, if not members of Christians in Science, would have been generally sympathetic to the outlook of that organisation. Whether one can generalise and say that in the field of science and religion there is a preponderance among the scientists of evangelicals, that’s actually quite a hard question to answer. It is true that the history of organisations that has led to a body like Christians in Science, and I’m thinking back to the inter-varsity fellowship which certainly sponsored work of an evangelical kind, organisations that have led historically to Christians in Science have been pretty well organised bodies. And so to belong to a group like that would give one a strong sense of identity and bring one into contact with other Christians with whom you would have theological sympathies. So I can understand why one tends to get a kind of core group of scientists who would have that kind of affiliation, because it is a community of a kind and their own interests reinforce each other in that respect through annual conferences and that sort of thing. Christians in Science now has a thriving collection of centres around the country and they have talks and conferences pretty well all the time. It’s actually rather impressive, I think. But I imagine that there are quite a lot of other scientists with interests in religion or theology whose sympathies do not square with a conservative evangelical position, but who probably aren’t part of an

organisation in the way that CIS allows people to be. So I would, for example, imagine that there are scientists with Catholic interests or background, and I don’t know that there is such a similar society for High Church or Catholic scientists. So perhaps we’re more conscious of the evangelical presence in science and religion literature than we would be of those from alternative persuasions. But I would hesitate to over-generalise and say that the evangelicals really dominate the discussion. I think in lots of ways they don’t, because their own theological position is of course, if judged from certain theological perspectives, not always that sophisticated. It can be, but one also does tend to find rather rudimentary theological views in those circles.

Thank you. [05:54] Something which you refer to in the autobiographical paper, and that’s, ‘though describing myself as a thoroughgoing naturalist’, your ‘wariness of facile reductionist claims has threaded its way through most of my work. This is why books such as Ian Gilchrist’s [McGilchrist] The Master and his Emissary and Raymond Tallis’s Aping Mankind are particularly important to me’. Those two books, could you tell me something about those two books?

It’s a little while since I was reading those and I was referring to them in that article at the time I was preparing that, so we’re now going two or three years back. But what I did find in those two books was what seemed to me a very healthy scepticism about what one might call neuroscientific reductionism. Very helpful critiques of the kind of facile inferences some researchers were drawing from brain imaging experiments, and I think what I liked about those books, they were attacking the notion that we could be said to be nothing but our brains. And I think that has been a certain reductionist tendency in the neurosciences, that instead of being human beings, we’re now brains. And to my mind that loses something very crucial. Even our cognitive abilities and skills relate to us as embodied people, not just as brains. And so I think it’s very helpful to have considered critiques of those reductionist tendencies. I also think it’s crucial to have those kind of critiques because it’s certainly a tendency one sees in some places for certain kinds of activity to be excused on the grounds that, well, if I’m speaking autobiographically “it’s my brain that made me do it”. So you can imagine a kind of criminal in a court of law saying I’m not responsible for this because it was my brain that made me do it. And that kind of language just sounds phony and just seems

something deeply wrong with using that kind of language. And yet, some neurochemical literature probably does lend itself to that kind of statement. And there have been cases, I remember reading of one in Italy a couple of years or so back where somebody who had committed quite a serious offence was exonerated largely, if not completely, on the ground that he was really not responsible for what he did. And it wasn’t entirely clear to me that the grounds of, I won’t say absolution, but the grounds on which that conclusion was drawn were entirely sound. So I think there are very serious social and legal ramifications if one has a view of the neurosciences that make them so reductionist that we just become brains. And the two books to which you’ve referred I found very, very healthy critiques of those reductionist positions.

Thank you. [10:25] Can you tell me about the origins and development of your relations, working and otherwise, working with Ron Numbers, including the work that led to one book that we haven’t talked about, which was Science and Religion Around the World.

Right, yes. Now I first encountered the name, Ronald Numbers, back in, now would this be the late 1970s? Because he published his doctoral thesis as a small book, which was on the history of the nebula hypothesis of Laplace in American thought during the nineteenth century, and I was asked to review it for the British Journal for the History of Science. I think that must have been because the editor of BJHS was Robert Fox, who was my senior colleague at Lancaster at the time and Robert knew I’d been teaching material on science and religion. So I encountered Ron’s thesis, the gist of which was that the way for the American intellectual elite to respond positively to Darwin had been prepared by virtue of the fact that in the decades preceding 1859 when Darwin published his Origin of Species, during those decades the American people had to come to terms with an evolutionary theory in the physical and cosmological realm. Laplace’s hypothesis famously suggesting how the solar system had developed from having been a swirling, rotating mass of gas, which gradually cooled and condensed and formed rings and these rings contained large bodies of matter which eventually coalesced, and so with each ring you eventually get a planet that occupies that orbit. It was a naturalistic account of how a solar system had developed in which certainly the majority, if not all, the planets orbited the sun in the same, roughly the same plane, certainly in the same direction. So it was a kind of evolutionary theory, it was also a

naturalistic theory because Laplace had famously said he didn’t wish to import God into his scientific explanations, which I think one respects as actually a pretty sensible position to take. Anyway, Ron’s thesis was all about how American intellectuals responded to Laplace’s nebular hypothesis. I wrote a review of the book which was favourable, though I remember having one general line of criticism, which Ron very generously said afterwards had been helpful to him, because it meant that my review had been one of the more, I won’t say critical necessarily, but certainly suggestive of an alternative approach which might have reaped more rewards. The point I remember making was that Ron’s thesis was an excellent study in the history of scientific ideas and the reception of scientific ideas, but it basically stated what the ideas were and what the ideas were of those who received them, either favourably or unfavourably. What he didn’t do in that book, which I had come to recognise as important – and we have discussed this actually in earlier interviews – was that if one’s going to look at the reception of particular ideas, you need to look at the predispositions that scholars have for why they react one way rather than another. And when the idea is controversial, like the nebular hypothesis, that I think becomes very important. So I do remember developing quite a detailed critique, very sympathetic, I mean I was not at all hostile, just suggesting that the analysis could perhaps be expanded to include rather more about the pre-history of those who reacted in various ways to Laplace’s theory. That was how I first encountered the name of Ron Numbers. We didn’t meet, I think, for a considerable length of time after that. In fact I don’t actually remember when precisely we first met. We corresponded occasionally. I think because of our respective editorial roles, he was editor of Isis, I think, at more or less the same time I was editor of The British Journal for the History of Science. Or it might have been that I was President of the British Society for the History of Science when he was President of History of Science Society. But certainly we had a rather similar career development and we assumed these positions in the major history of science societies in our respective countries. I’m trying to think now when we would have gone beyond that. He and Dave Lindberg published their book, God and Nature, in 1986 and I was not invited to contribute to that, so I was not featuring so prominently in their perception at the time that they wanted me to make a contribution to that book. So I think it was probably when my Science and Religion came out in 1991 and both Dave and Ron wrote some lovely comments on the back that Cambridge were able to use in promoting the book. I think it was then that I began to feel that there was a closeness of interest and point of view in terms of the historiography that we could share and on which we might be able to do various joint projects. I subsequently met Dave Lindberg at History of Science conferences, Ron too,

during the 1990s. And we were often liaising about small matters which seemed important at the time in the development of our respective research interests. So that’s not a good answer to that question, because I am not remembering the precise occasion when I met Ron for the first time. But since the 1990s our paths have frequently crossed and interwoven. When in 2007 there was a conference at Lancaster University to mark my retirement, it was Ron who gave the banquet speech, talking about my work then. [That conference, incidentally, resulted in a Festschrift for me, published with a title echoing that of my 1991 book. It was edited by my good friends Thomas Dixon, Geoffrey Cantor and Stephen Pumfrey with the title Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (Cambridge 2009)]. I think what possibly also happened is in the academic world, as you know, there are certain key moments when you’re up for promotion and you are able to nominate referees who will, one hopes, say sufficiently nice things about one to justify that promotion. I can certainly remember writing references for Ron and I think he probably did one or two for me back in the 1990s. But it’s just been a very gradual growing closer together through warmth of friendship, and a shared sense of humour because he is tremendous fun and I think everybody responds extremely well to him because you are forever being teased. I remember a road journey all the way from Madison in Wisconsin to, was it Calvin College, I think, where both he and I were speaking at a science and religion conference, and he and his good friend, Jon Roberts, with whom I’m also very friendly – he has written on Freud and he’s written on Protestant responses to Darwin in the United States – Ron in particular was teasing me for the whole of that car journey, trying to get me to wear my heart on my sleeve and declare precisely from which theological position I was coming, and I was very reluctant to do so and I think, we’ve discussed this before, but I think there is a kind of English state of mind which is less open to wishing to declare one’s precise theological credentials of one kind or another. The most recent collaborations I’ve had with Ron, there have been several, but I guess the one that resulted in the book, Science and Religion Around the World, was the one that brought us into closer academic contact and we each took responsibility for editing half the essays that went into that book. And it was a pioneering book because we tried to do something within a relatively brief compass, but which looked historically at the way the sciences had been evaluated in the different world religions. So it was very rewarding and we were working with some wonderful people in the preparation of that particular book. And it’s led to further collaboration. We’ve spoken at conferences in the Middle East, drawing on some of the insights that went into that book. And the introduction that we prepared has been in slightly modified form published in one or two places as well since its original inception. So I value

my friendship with Ron enormously and, as I was saying informally before this session, we’re actually this very week working together on a commentary on recent work on the Orthodox Church and science. Have you learnt anything about what we might think of as Ron’s sort of predisposition to have done the work that he’s done? So in the same way that in a teasing, joking way he was attempting to find out about you, do you get any insight into his sort of background reasons for alighting on the interests that he has?

Oh, well I won’t say I’m deeply familiar with that background, but he grew up as a Seventh Day Adventist. His father, I think, was involved as a missionary or certainly somebody very deeply involved with the Adventist Church. And Ron certainly went through a phase later where he basically rejected that more or less completely, but it left him with a very great interest in how the religion of that movement and how his own interests in science were best examined from a more academic scholarly point of view. A lot of people do get into science and religion through, as it were, emancipating themselves from a very conservative theological background, but still retaining a desire to think through the whole question of how their own faith is affected both by that rejection of the past, but also by what they know of the sciences and how it has impacted on a more secular culture in general. So I think Ron is actually deeply interested in those predispositions we’ve been talking about, having had a pretty unusual one himself through that background. Dave Lindberg too, I think his father was a missionary or there was something both Ron and Dave shared, which was a very conservative religious upbringing, which they rejected, but something of which stayed with them. Ron, I don’t think retains anything that he would wish to call a religious belief now. I think he has come to the view that really the various positions that he writes so well about as a historian are indefensible philosophically or theologically. But because he has looked at those issues, as it were, from the inside and not only from the outside, he’s able to write about American creationism in such a sympathetic way. By sympathetic I simply mean a way in which he does genuinely try to understand and get inside the mindset of those who just are resistant to evolutionary science. So yes, I think Ron is deeply interested in that very question himself, and indeed, he is a good friend, as I am too, of Nicolaas Rupke, a Dutch historian of science, who publishes on science and religion. Nicolaas for a while moved in creationist circles, he was the bright young geologist at one stage who was going to defend creationism. But he grew out of that, I think realising that, you know, he was really on a hiding to nothing, intellectually. But he has therefore similarly retained a very deep interest

in what it is that makes people adopt conservative religious positions when they do. He edited a valuable book just a few years ago called Eminent Lives in [Twentieth Century] Science and Religion, and it was focussed specifically on the twentieth century. A lot of historical books never quite reach the twentieth century in this field, but this is one that had eight chapters looking at scientists of the calibre of Theodosius Dobzhansky, the geneticist, Pavlov of Pavlov’s dogs fame, the geneticist Ronald Fisher was another in the hall of fame. There were eight, anyway, detailed case studies written by scholars. And that was a valuable – still is – valuable reference work, I think, for people who want to gain some understanding of how scientists in the twentieth century could still be profoundly religious and distinguished scientists at the same time. Not all were, I think Pavlov who was brought up in a family of Russian Orthodox Christianity, I think maybe his father was even a priest, Pavlov is certainly one who reacted against that background. Dobzhansky on the other hand, also a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, he writes on evolutionary philosophy and theology in ways that suggest he retained his faith throughout his life. A very interesting example of a twentieth century evolutionary biologist who didn’t just capitulate to the materialism that has tended to dominate the metaphysics. So, yes.

[31:07] Are those, the people that you’ve just mentioned, are they the ones you had in mind when you said that a number of people come into the science and religion field, or the history of science and religion field through an abandonment of an earlier conservative Christianity, are they, Ron Numbers and David Lindberg are two examples, are there others that you have in mind?

I can think of one more, an outstanding example, and I don’t think he would mind my mentioning this. This is the very fine Darwin scholar, James Moore, whose career was based at the Open University, who wrote with Adrian Desmond a very fine biography of Darwin, published in 1991. Jim has also published with Adrian a book called Darwin’s Sacred Cause, which looks at the way in which Darwin’s ideas about race were related to his ideas about human evolution. Jim wrote some very fine Open University teaching units as a scholar at the OU. Apparently he was brought up in a very fundamentalist Christian home in the USA. That his father wished him not to go to university because places of higher education were satanic in their ethos and consequences, and I think Jim had a pretty tough time eventually emancipating himself from that. But, if you look at his first major contribution to scholarship, his big book, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, published by

CUP in 1976, I think, might have been ’79, think it was ’76 [actually 1979], that book is all about how the Darwinian theory not only could be reconciled with Christian theology, but could be particularly well accommodated within Calvinist theology. The argument is complex and I don’t think I should go into it, but it’s a very interesting example of a big controversial thesis on a big controversial topic that Jim was working his own way through as he wrote it as a doctoral dissertation and then published just a few years later. It contains in the first hundred pages or so one of the most sustained critiques of the warfare thesis, the thesis that science and religion have always been essentially at war, probably the most sustained critique of that idea that we have in print. We’ve got many, many critiques of that, but that one by Jim you can feel it has got some personal animation in the writing of it. So he regards popular views about the conflict between science and religion as views which are often written by people he calls prisoners of war, those who are simply drawn into that historiographical framework, where to understand any controversy in the field of science and religion you simply have to begin by assuming that there is conflict. Nobody doubts, as we’ve said before, that there have been many, many conflicts, but understanding them doesn’t require you to begin with the presupposition that you’re going to find your best explanation by assuming that there is an inexorable conflict.

Thank you. [36:06] Now last time we’d just got to the point of your retirement from Oxford and I wonder whether you could take us on – which is 2006 – I wonder whether you could take us through the next ten years professionally and personally and however way you want to do that.

Yes. Well, the first bit is quite easy, because during my last year in Oxford I was invited to spend part of the following year, 2007, at the University of Durham to help during its inaugural year, the inaugural year of a new Institute for Advanced Study which they were setting up. And they had as their theme, the life and work of Darwin and they wanted scholars from various academic backgrounds who could bring the insights of different disciplines to bear on, I won’t say a communal research project, in the sense that we were all collaborating on one and the same project, that wasn’t the case. But we all had projects of our own that benefitted from the multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives that were available to us there. So I went for what must have been the, was it the summer term, or perhaps the second term, that year and found it extremely valuable. I was attached to St

John’s College. As a Fellow at the Institute one has a college membership while one is there. So I had a nice room in St John’s College. I enjoyed it particularly because the Principal, David Wilkinson, who is an astronomer and physicist as well as an ordained priest, he had been a friend from some years back, so I was very happy to contribute insofar as I could to little seminars and things in the college. It was required of one actually as a Fellow there during the year that one had to give at least one public lecture, seminars in other faculties, and also to give a presentation to one’s group of resident Fellows at the Institute for Advanced Studies. So we each took our turn in that respect. It was valuable to me because I was completing an article for a volume called The Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species, that’s right, and I was looking at Darwin’s understanding of the concept of natural law and the various theological ramifications that had for him, and I found that quite a valuable exercise. So I remember 2007 particularly for that time spent in Durham working with other colleagues, preparing principally for what I knew was going to be a very demanding year in 2009. 2009 was a celebration of the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species and the 200th anniversary of his birth, so it was a big double celebration. And five years prior to that, this would have been in about 2004, those of us who were invited to give plenary lectures at the festival that Cambridge was planning to mark the Darwin anniversaries, five years before we were receiving our invitations, and I think that’s probably the most operatic kind of invitation I’ve had, in the sense that to be booked up five years in advance was something rather flattering and something new. So I knew when I was in Durham of course that I had that obligation looming for 2009. But 2009 was a year where there were Darwin conferences everywhere. There was another big one in – where am I thinking of here – Chicago, of course. And interestingly enough, both in Cambridge and in Chicago I found myself in the same session as Dan Dennett, the Harvard philosopher who writes on Darwinism and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, and Consciousness Explained, and who generally has it in for religion. He and I were actually speakers who had to speak in the same session, in effect in opposition to each other, though it was not a specific requirement that we critique each other’s positions. But that was quite an honour and a responsibility during the Cambridge Festival. And I decided to speak for that meeting on why it was that religious belief survived critiques coming from evolutionary science, and indeed why it still does, and I found that quite an interesting little challenge that I set myself and I could draw on historical examples to find a whole range of reasons why religious belief was not actually killed off by Darwin. So, 2007 and 2009 are heavy Darwin years for me and I spoke, I should think, at ten or a dozen different conferences during 2009. Chicago and Cambridge were the two really

big ones from an academic point of view. Though interestingly, neither actually led to an obvious big publication, whereas the 100th anniversary of The Origin of Species in 1959 led to an enormous, I think it was a two or three-volume product from Chicago University Press. But nevertheless, of course, these events did create a large public interest. In the Cambridge meeting, it was so hugely enjoyable because they had artistic and musical events all associated with Darwin in some way or another. So, for example, a brand new string quartet which purported to describe in musical terms the history of the universe with its rather fearsome ending, such as we contemplate it to be, or be it not, we hope, just round the corner. Very, very interesting piece of music, I remember some of us attended in the Fitzwilliam Museum. There was also for that Cambridge meeting and to which I contributed in a small way [in a podcast], an exhibition held at the Fitzwilliam Museum. It was called “Endless Forms”, which is a phrase taken from the last and very famous paragraph of Darwin’s Origin of Species where he says [to paraphrase], ‘Is there not grandeur in this view’, namely his view of an evolutionary process in which ‘endless forms most wonderful’ have evolved from a small number of lower forms. And they produced t-shirts with ‘Endless Forms’ written on. I have a very nice example in my wardrobe. And I was asked if I would do just a little talk based on my experience of the exhibition. I think you can still find all these things, even the lecture I gave, on the CUP, or rather Cambridge University website. These things have a kind of immortality now, which is very nice in some ways. [46:12] So, I have to try and convey, I think, a sense in which for the first three years of my retirement, certainly in 2009, I probably gave more talks and was more actively involved as an academic historian of science than I had been even in the years when I was at Oxford, and that’s saying something, because they were very intense years. So insofar as there has been any genuine retirement, I guess we would be looking only at the last five years, from about 2010 onwards, when I have gradually wound down in terms of the number of academic engagements that I have accepted. But I have continued to write and publish, particularly on topics that I have felt there was perhaps more to be said about than I had published on before. So, for example, further work on science and secularisation, including an essay for Peter Harrison’s book, The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. There was a book that Ron Numbers published called Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. And I did an essay on science and secularisation for that volume too. So that’s one theme that I’ve published further on and given quite a lot of talks on around the place. [48:11]

I’ve continued to be interested in the sphere of science and aesthetics, the question about how and why we value scientific theories that themselves have a degree of beauty or elegance. And I’ve tried to take that a little bit further by switching the emphasis actually a bit away from science and towards technology. And I’ve done that because there’s quite a big interest internationally now in the whole subject of what is it that makes human beings unique and artistic creativity is one of the themes that you often find developed by scholars who are wanting to say that we share almost everything with the animals, but artistic creativity is something which we are particularly good at as human beings, even if it doesn’t make us absolutely unique. And I have been struck by the fact that people who have written about that have focussed on the aesthetics of art and painterly art especially as a source of human creativity, but technology doesn’t often get discussed in that particular context. So if we say that one of the things that makes human beings distinctive is an interest in beauty and aesthetics, it would be interesting to illustrate that from technology and not just art. So I’ve done a bit of work in that area in recent years. More recently still I find myself drawn into almost any conference that looks at the historiography of science and religion, how should we write about it, is the conflict thesis absolutely dead, for example, how has it been affected by other historiographical developments? Looking at the role of women in science, for example, looking at science and religion from a more literary perspective. But wherever there’s a conference on the historiography of science and religion I, like Ron Numbers, tend to be thrown into the deep end and [we are] asked to sing for our supper, and it’s very rewarding. It’s also very interesting looking back over one’s life to realise how interviews one has done over the years, even some of the smaller articles one has published, have perhaps had slightly more impact than we imagine at the time. We write these and then we move on to the next project. But occasionally you meet people or have letters from people who say they’ve just seen the interview one gave in particular places at particular times. And they may, sometimes they don’t, but they may say nice things about how what one has said has been helpful to them. Curiously enough, just this week I have had such a letter which has taken me aback, because it turns out to be a letter from a woman who introduces herself to me as my second cousin, a second cousin I never knew I had. But she, on a visit with her husband to Cambridge, to his old Cambridge college, apparently, last summer noticed a book by John Hedley Brooke, knowing that Hedley Brooke was the name of somebody who was an offspring from the family with which she was connected, obviously bought the book on an impulse and says she’s been looking and attending events on science and religion since, including a recent church meeting at which the clergyman in charge showed a film of an

interview and it turned out to be an interview with me. So she’s written to me to tell me that she could declare to her local vicar that the person he had introduced as the interviewee was actually her second cousin. But this is trivial, of course Paul, but it’s just a rather nice example of the way you do never know the degree to which work one has done may be relevant to, sometimes even perhaps positively helpful to other people. And that’s ultimately the most rewarding aspect of an academic career, I think. [54:00] If you ask me to say more about this particular period in my life, I would say that an important feature after my retirement was returning to the home I had left during my Oxford years. I’d returned there at weekends, of course, many, many times, but I continued to live in the north-west of England with my wife, to whom I have remained every bit, if not more, grateful for all her help and support over the years. And she hasn’t had as much emphasis in these interviews as I think she might have done, because we don’t any of us function as well as we do, I think, without that kind of support. And throughout my years back in the Lake District Janice has provided wonderful moral and intellectual support, and that’s such an important part of my life that I would wish to include it in any summary of the last ten years or so and we remain deeply attached to each other now, and that’s an enormous privilege. I’ve tried, I guess, in recent years to be helpful to younger scholars, wherever that’s been possible. That’s sometimes meant in the examination of doctoral students, which I’ve continued to do not only at Oxford but other universities as well. That’s increasingly demanding as a task that one has, because there are now so many administrative features of that which in days gone by were simply not there. Apparently when I go in the near future to examine a dissertation at the University of Durham I have to take my passport with me to prove I am who I say I am, even though I’ve been appointed by the university as an examiner. And I think all the concerns we have these days about identity and identity theft have their larger ramifications when it just comes to trying to lead an ordinary academic life. But certainly that’s one feature of my life. Also helping at summer schools, either for students or for members of the general public, or for young academics. And last summer, for example, I was fortunate in contributing to a summer school held in Oxford for academic members of staff from Christian colleges in the United States, and the idea was, with the help of other people as well, I was only one contributor, but we were trying to beef up their expertise in the academic study of science and religion to help them with the difficulties they encounter on campus when they are meeting of course some students from creationist backgrounds who were deeply unsympathetic to evolution. Or people who may have an animus of one kind or

another against theological discourse. So that was one in Oxford last summer and I think I mentioned before, I was lucky enough to go to one in the Galapagos Islands for young South American academics [organised by Ignacio Silva mentioned above] who were developing an interest in the field of science and religion, and the idea was to give them some, well, instruction sounds rather too pedantic and pedestrian, but it was to comment on their work and generally be a mentor, to see them developing, flexing their muscles a bit. So I would like to think that that work has been valuable and paid some dividends, not necessarily for everybody I’ve been in contact with, but for some I think perhaps so. Otherwise, much of my academic work has been of the fairly predictable kind, namely still reviewing books, still writing referee’s reports on papers submitted to academic journals, book manuscripts occasionally. Although I have to say that’s one area where I have grown rather sceptical about the way in which publishers like to get some choice words to put on the back cover of a book to try to persuade the potential purchaser to buy it. And I think it’s very difficult in a few words to capture the essence of a book in such a way that you are scrupulously honest to what you think about the book and which you know either will or will not help the promotion of that book. And I don’t think I’m alone among university academics in feeling that tension. If it’s a friend who has written the book, it’s even more difficult because you do, understandably, feel an obligation to write something that will at least attract the attention of a possible purchaser. But there is a risk in doing that. If you do too many and you do too many uncritically, then I think the value of what you may or may not say suffers. And I’ve just had one or two examples over the last couple of years where I have said things that I’ve meant honestly, but which I recognise are perhaps not perhaps as full with the truth as one ideally should be if one is trying to give a truly accurate portrayal of the book. In other words, you find yourself caught up with the whole business of promoting somebody’s work. I’m more than happy to do that and I’ve done it many, many times, but it does sometimes leave a slightly uncomfortable feeling that if you were reviewing the book and the author were somebody not known to oneself, one might have been a little less effusive with the language. But I think the whole of the publication industry is tarred with that particular problem. And I think these days with so much emphasis on social media and people saying whether they like things or they don’t like them at a rather trivial level, it can lead to an undervaluation of a genuinely critical appraisal. [1:02:48] That captures something of my life over the last ten years. It’s been richly rewarding in so many ways, not only because many of the meetings and conferences I’ve attended have

continued to be in really interesting parts of the world and I have had opportunities to travel, for which I’ve been enormously grateful. I think that, all being well, I might continue to do something of that in the future, but one never knows of course how much time one has left. [Speaking of the last ten years, I should also include reference to my rewarding role as President of ISSR, the International Society for Science & Religion, which provided opportunities for other initiatives, one of the most rewarding and challenging of which was the so-called Library Project. Generous funding from the Templeton Foundation and a lot of hard work by members of the Society, notably Pranab Das II, Philip Clayton, V.V. Raman, Wesley Wildman, Ronald Cole-Turner, Christopher Knight, and myself, led to the identification and collation of over two hundred books that we considered foundational for serious research in the field of science & religion. Institutions around the world were invited to compete for something like a hundred and fifty collections of this library, which have proved invaluable especially in countries and locations, as in Africa, with minimal bibliographic resources. Another recent source of pleasure has been my membership of the Board of Advisers for the new series of Boyle Lectures, delivered annually since 2004 in London in the Church of St. Mary le Bow where the original series, endowed by the will of Robert Boyle, began in 1692. Initiated by Michael Byrne, the new series has provided an opportunity for leading figures in the science-religion field to address a public audience on contemporary themes]. So I think my main priority that I see now is to try to be constructive, helpful, academically critical to younger people who recognise that the academic study of science in its cultural context and particularly in relation to religious belief is a field of study that is still worth pursuing and can have very deep implications for the way people perceive their own place in the world.

[1:04:25] When you spoke earlier about discovering from people that your work has been helpful, perhaps because they’ve written to you to say so, do you mean that they’re writing to say that your work has been helpful to them as historians, helpful in suggesting ways in which they might look at their own material, or are these people – it might be both of course – or are these people saying that your work has been helpful to them in the way that they think about themselves?

I think it can certainly be both, not just the one, not just the other. I think it can certainly be in some cases simply an academic point that they have valued the breadth and the

contextualist approach that I’ve brought to looking at science in the past, and indeed the religion in the past that interacted with it in various ways. It can be a purely academic point, that people have realised that the methodological assumptions they were bringing to work in science and religion were just too simple to cope with the complexity of the task. In some cases I think it would be true to say people have written to me when they think that the particular line I have taken when discussing science and religion has actually been helpful to them in a more personal way. That can mean in a spiritual way, I think in some cases, or it can just simply mean that it brings them face to face with the fact that there are more things in heaven and earth than they have dreamt of. There was an interesting example this last week when I was giving a talk up in Blackburn at the cathedral there, and this was on extraterrestrial life and the history of the theological engagement with the possibility of extraterrestrials. And I did sense after the lecture that I had pitched it at probably a bit too high a level for some of the people in the audience who may well have had very little historical background, but I did also get a genuine sense, and this was said to me, that they really felt challenged and stretched by what I’d said and that that for them had been a very rewarding and perhaps slightly disconcerting experience. And that kind of response I have often had when talking to a more general audience. So in my mind’s eye I think there is a distinction between an audience made up of people who may have very little knowledge of the history of science or even the history of religious thought, but are just genuinely interested in the big questions, you know, who am I, what’s it all about, what’s the purpose of it all? At the other end of that spectrum are fellow academics, serious historians of science who are writing books of different kinds which touch on themes I have also discussed. What I do find is quite interesting and rewarding is that people with whom I’ve had some encounter in the past will usually send me copies of their work asking for my reaction to them. And there was a rather touching example of that just recently. I gave a lecture in Oregon, quite a few years ago now, probably ten, twelve years ago, and I had a letter a matter of three or four months ago from somebody who had attended that lecture, and she said that she was currently writing a novel about evolution and religion and she wanted to weave into the novel an account of the different theological responses there had been to Darwin, particularly in United States. And I was touched, because she had said how much the lecture I gave had stimulated her to think of that particular project. Well, just three or four weeks ago I received the novel, not yet in hardback form, it was just as a PDF attachment, and I read it, or most of it, and it’s brilliant and it was just so gratifying to read something that in some very small way might have been indebted to me. I’m sure she was being exceedingly and excessively

polite in suggesting that I had contributed to it, but it’s that kind of thing, again, that does happen and which brings one enormous gratification. What you don’t always discover, of course, is how many people you might have deeply offended [laughs] as the basis of something you’ve said. Or people whose perception of one’s own standing as a scholar may have been in some sense diminished by what one may have said on occasions. One tends to hear the good news, and I suppose it’s perhaps nice that it works that way.

[1:11:26] You said in one of the sessions that you’d long been aware that scientists who are Christians form a large part of the contingent of people who are interested in books on science and religion, is letters from scientists one way in which you’ve become aware of that fact? In other words, do you get letters from scientists commenting on them having read your book?

Occasionally. But I wouldn’t say that has been the main source of that particular perception. It’s more that so many of the books I am asked to comment on in the field of science and religion are actually written by scientists, perhaps a significant number of them by scientists who, if not retired, are thinking of retirement and are looking for something interesting to write about in their later years. Now those aren’t always the best books, I mean I have to say that. Very often they’re the worst, if one’s truthful. But I do think that there is a constituency out there. You are, I think, more likely to find – some might find this surprising – you’re more likely to find scientists with a religious faith and with an interest in religion than you are to find theologians with an interest in science. There are some who’ve written with great distinction about science from a theological point of view. But by and large, theology still, if anything, tends to protect its own autonomy as an academic discipline and is suspicious of claims that theologians ought to take science more seriously. So that’s one reason, I think, why I have a sense that literature on science and religion will have a larger constituency among scientists who have some personal faith than it will have among theologians. And I can understand it, because to comment on science at all, whether theologically or historically or philosophically, it helps a great deal to know some science, or certainly to have had a scientific formation. And I think understandably people who might comment on the subject just feel rather reticent about so doing if they feel very exposed. Some of the people who’ve done distinguished work in the area, people well known like John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke, they of course did have a background as scientists, practising scientists, distinguished practising scientists. Others I think perhaps rather less so. But another

constituency where I do feel, because I do see evidence of this, where I do feel my own work has had some impact, is the academic history of science where the science that I have discussed I have discussed in relation to some of the more normative religious and theological ideas at the time that science was conceived and developed. And so I am conscious that among fellow historians of science I am perceived as somebody whose work in the area has had genuine impact and whose work is by and large, I think, respected for the historiographical impact it has had.

[1:16:26] Have you, since the early nineties anyway, detected a change in what you might call the status of the study of the history of science and religion within the history of science more generally, both in America and – you mentioned at one time that you were involved in BSHS and Ron Numbers was editing Isis and I wondered whether over a period of your career, whether the study of science and religion has sort of gone up or down in terms of, you know, the status of fields within the history of science?

It’s a very difficult question to answer, whether the status of work in science and religion has been elevated or downgraded from the perspective of the academic history of science. The reason it’s difficult to assess that is that there has been a much greater sophistication in recognising that simply to try to relate science to theology and to refer to those two variables alone in looking at issues from the past, there’s certainly a widespread recognition that that is an inadequate way of approaching the topic. In other words, one has to look at the social, the political, even the economic context in which particular forms of science have blossomed, developed, contexts in which different religious movements have had their formation. And therefore simply to relate science to religion can be to construct something that is completely artificial, because you’re actually missing the key variables for the historical analysis that you’re trying to develop. And what I would say is that the academic history of science has become much more sophisticated in identifying the kind of variables and the parameters you do need to look at when examining the success of any scientific theory and when examining how it was received and how it was utilised. So I think I would say that the status of work in science and religion has been depressed, if by work in science and religion you mean a kind of work that just asks questions like, what is the implication of this science for religious belief, or how does that theological doctrine bear on a particular piece of scientific research. If, however, by new ways of doing the study of science and religion you could include

expanding those other parameters and variables so that the religious complexion of the particular people or particular institution, the particular scientific research project, if you’re looking at the religion in the context of a much broader spectrum of parameters, then I would say work of that kind has been elevated rather than depressed. [1:20:49] And actually, one scholar who drew attention to the need for that switch, and he did so very forcefully some years ago, was James Moore, Jim Moore who I mentioned earlier as an example of somebody who had emancipated himself from a creationist background in the States. And he wrote a number of very forceful kinds of essay reviews during the 1990s saying don’t just look at issues in science and religion by looking only at science and religion, you need to expand the variables to understand what’s going on within those perhaps rather more narrowly then defined subjects and topics. So I don’t know whether that makes any kind of sense, but it’s saying that certain kinds of work in science and religion would not now be held in high esteem by fellow academic historians of science. Other work in science and religion, work which shows sensitivity to a much broader range of variables, that work I think if it’s done well is very highly respected.

Thank you.

[1:22:25] A couple of questions on the reviewing of books, picking up on two things that you have said. The first was, I was interested in from where the requests to write the sorts of things that you were talking about appearing on the back covers of books as a way of promoting them, as a way to help the publisher promote books, do requests for those sorts of comments, do they come from publishers or from friends who are writers directly, you know, authors that you know. How does that happen?

I think there’s a fairly well defined route, Paul, which is that the publisher will ask the author if the author has suggestions for knowledgeable and authoritative people who the publishers can approach to ask for an endorsement. And so whenever you get a request from a publisher, there is a fair bet – it’s not necessarily always the case – but there’s a fair bet that the author, him or herself, may have suggested who they would ideally like. Now, sometimes the invitation comes directly from the author, particularly if it’s somebody you know quite well, and I’ve certainly had that. Former graduate students publishing a book, you know, will

write and say it would be jolly nice if you could give me an endorsement, or it would be jolly nice if you could review this book for some particular journal. But I think there is that fairly well trodden path. Publishers seem now just to assume that any book that is going to be selling needs a push. It would look strange for a new book, a new academic book to have no comments of any kind on the back page or on the inside front cover. Sometimes those comments really are pretty bizarre and inane. Other times they can be extremely helpful, if it’s done well. But it’s the publisher really who wants the book to sell, is trying every trick to get good promotion. And this now can involve asking you to do blogs and asking you to do this, that and the other, to put the book before the general public. So one could spend, one could spend one’s whole time on Facebook and Twitter and these organisations promoting things, saying whether you like them or dislike them. But there is also an unsatisfactory degree of inanity in some of that.

Have you declined to endorse certain things because you think that the work was a sort of a step backwards or wrong or misleading?

The honest answer is that I don’t recall writing to a publisher and saying definitively that I could not say something that would support the book, and I’ve worded that reply carefully because there has been perhaps an example or two where initially I was having serious reservations and then perhaps the more I thought about it, after perhaps sending a kind of holding reply to the publisher, thinking about it more deeply and deciding that the honourable thing, if I could do it without violating my academic conscience, the honourable thing was to say something supportive about the book. So I don’t think there has been a case where I definitively declined. There have been one or two where I changed my mind, where initially I had reservations and then when I thought about it more deeply I tried to think of some generous and empathetic way out. Sometimes this has been true, certainly one case I can think of, where I was being asked to do so many of these endorsements that I was beginning to think, my wife too, that the value of anything I might say was being debased because I just seemed to be cited on the back cover of almost every new book on science and religion. And when I became more sensitive about that I decided that one strategy for coping with the problem – and it merely reflects the fact that when I was Andreas Idreos Professor in Oxford, there were not that many senior professorial figures in the field of science and religion who could be asked to write references, write reviews, endorse books. I felt I was receiving invitations because, frankly, I was one of so very few people who was actually known to be

working in the area. But what I’m working up to saying is that one strategy I thought of was that I would decline to endorse books of a general kind on science and religion and only comment on those which were conveying some genuine research in my own areas of research expertise. So in the history of chemistry or in the history of natural theology in Britain, or in other facets of the history of science and religion, if they impinged on my own research interests, then I would comment as an expert on those particular areas. And so I do recall one case during the course – actually, this is fairly recently – where I decided that because the book seemed to me to be more like a textbook than a research monograph, I would if I implemented that strategy, I could reasonably say that I wished not to endorse it because it didn’t conform to the type of book that I was now thinking I should endorse where I could. But that was an interesting case too, because again, the more I thought about that, and the more of the book I read, and particularly the more I looked at the references, the bibliographic documentation and support, I realised that though it was probably more in the line of a textbook than a research monograph, it was at least drawing on all the best work in my field and was not just somebody launching out and thinking that he could write a book having read a few others. And so I did actually in the end provide an appropriate endorsement, I think, for that book, stressing that it had actually drawn on high quality historical research. But you can see how it is a delicate area. You don’t want, of course, to offend the publisher, you don’t want to offend the author, particularly if it is a friend, and yet at the same time the whole system does risk the denuding of a sharp critical acuity.

Thank you. [1:32:50] And is there a particular reason why scientists reaching retirement and writing about science and religion, why sometimes those, I think you suggested that sometimes those books fall into the category of sort of the least successful interventions into the field, if you like. Is there an obvious reason why that is the case? So is it, for instance, the absence of training in historical analysis?

Well, it seems a bit intellectually snobbish to say you shouldn’t write books on science and religion unless you’ve actually looked closely at the way both scientific and religious ideas have developed historically and philosophically. It can sound snobbish, but at the same time, I do think to write well on science and religion you do need a foundation in ideally philosophy of science and philosophy of religion and that that foundation should inform the

way you also look at the history of science. And also vice versa, that what one picks up from the way scientific theories are enunciated, how they’re evaluated, how they impact on wider culture, those kind of studies should inform the way we analyse problems in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of religion. So I’m all for quite a rich panoply of academic approaches to the field. The danger, I think, is that you sometimes find people with what strikes one as perhaps a slightly arrogant notion that having had a career in science, they are the ones who are in the best position to pronounce on the relevance of science to religion, or indeed the irrelevance of religion to science or whatever particular party line they want to take. Often, one has to say this and not unkindly, often with very little knowledge of just how extensive the literature now is and for scientists to pronounce on some of the anecdotes and the myths from the history of science when they’re simply not aware that what they think are truths are well exploded myths. It just has the effect, I think, that what they write sometimes seems below par. One would rather they did a bit more work before they started laying the law down as to what implications for religion you should draw from science, or indeed vice versa. It may be of course that scientists have developed during their lives a much more sophisticated idea of religion but have not had the opportunity to write about it, because to be a successful scientist you’ve jolly well got to keep your head down and focus on your immediate research projects and your immediate research grant applications. So on retirement or on nearing retirement when some of those heavy constraints are removed, there suddenly becomes perhaps the opportunity to write up what they had always wanted to write about. And in those cases the work can sometimes be enlightening. Very often it has a kind of anecdotal quality because it refers to their own experience and that can at times be valuable. So I don’t know that I could say very much more about that, Paul. There’s an enormous range of variety. There just are too many books of a general kind on science and religion, books that pretend to tell you something about the quintessence, the nature of science, and the quintessence, the nature of religion and how we construct some kind of model for relating the one to the other. There are far too many books of that kind, because they tend just to fade into rather vague generalities about scientific methodology or the nature of religious faith, or whatever, without appreciating the enormous variety of the discourse that there has been on science and its relation to religion. So some of the people who write books on the topic would be better advised to read some first and then perhaps write something drawing on their own experience. And there are plenty of examples of that. But it is an area where you are liable to get rather maverick views, both from the scientific and the theological side. It’s why it’s a wonderful topic to teach at university level because you can

really encourage students to recognise what assumptions are being made by scholars who develop one particular mode of rapprochement rather than another. And I think those critical skills are transferrable to so many walks of life.

[1:40:02] I know that you’ve recently moved house, or moved from one house into another, and I wondered whether the process of sort of moving and looking through things has led on to any thoughts about where you might in the future perhaps leave an archive. I don’t know whether you’ve thought about what this might contain, if anything at all. I mean in one sense your published work is an archive, but perhaps you have correspondence and photographs, that sort of thing. Have you thought about where someone listening to this recording in a hundred years’ time perhaps ought to look to find your archive, where are the likely spots?

Well, I’m touched, Paul, and gratified by the fact that you think people might be interested in my particular archive. One thing I would say is that I am trying to keep a record of all my publications. I don’t, I think, still have a complete collection of absolutely all of them. There were journal articles I published years ago where I ran out of all my offprints and didn’t actually have a copy of the original journal in which they appeared. No doubt, now electronically I could resuscitate some of those. There is one simple answer to the question insofar as it relates to my library, because books that I own I have had to prune substantially in moving house, to which you’ve just referred, and I now live in a much smaller apartment than the large four-bedroomed detached house I had up in Lancashire. And one consequence is I have actually discarded quite a lot of that library. Some has gone to second-hand bookshops where I’ve thought the books were perhaps only marginal to my own particular work. I have promised my Oxford college, Harris Manchester, that they will have first refusal on all my books, and by that I mean all the books in my private library, on which I do rely and have relied very heavily. So that’s one thing, but of course that is not the same as one’s own papers, one’s own correspondence. There have been jobs I have done as a historian of science, for example, as President of the British Society for the History of Science, perhaps even more significantly, as editor of the British Journal for the History of Science. The papers from those years, certainly the BJHS, are already in the British Society for the History of Science archive, I remember delivering those when I went to Oxford in 1999. In terms of general academic correspondence and issues pertaining to projects I’ve done in the past, I have to say I have not been especially fastidious in preserving them. I

have destroyed a fair number which just seemed to me inconsequential. There are papers of a more personal kind which relate to my academic story and I do have a folder of those and maybe that collection should go somewhere. I’ve not thought about where that should be. It has been pointed out to me that as the first Andreas Idreos Professor in Oxford there will in future, perhaps at least, be a certain amount of interest in where I came from and where I went to in my own academic work, and so for that reason I must actually give more attention to the question that you’ve asked. But I wouldn’t say that in my possession at the moment is a large archive dealing with a kind of blow by blow account of all the issues I have corresponded about during my career at Lancaster or in Oxford, or indeed since then. Maybe for a historian to concede that is not a particularly impressive concession. But that is the current state of play. So there would be an archive of a personal kind which has strong connections with much of my life’s work, but it would not be the kind of archive that would enable somebody to write a detailed biography on the basis of that extant correspondence.

[end of track 15 – end of recording]

[APPENDIX: John Hedley Brooke’s Main Publications, as at 1 January 2017

I BOOKS

Science and Religion: some historical perspectives, Canto Classics edtn. Cambridge University Press, 2014, 566pp. ISBN 978-1-107-66446-3

Science & Religion around the World (ed. with Ronald L. Numbers), New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 316pp. ISBN 978-0-19-532819-6

Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion (ed. with Ian Maclean), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 373pp. ISBN 0-19-926897-5

Religious Values and the Rise of Science in Europe (ed. with E. Ihsanoğlu), Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture, 2005, 258pp. ISBN 92-9063-140-6

Science in Theistic Contexts: cognitive dimensions (ed. with M. Osler and J. Van der Meer), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 376pp. ISBN 0-226-07564-8

Reconstructing Nature: the engagement of science and religion. The Gifford Lectures, Glasgow 1995/6, jointly authored with Geoffrey Cantor. Edinburgh: T&T Clark 1998; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, 367 pp. ISBN 0-567-08725-5

Thinking About Matter: studies in the history of chemical philosophy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995, 300 pp. ISBN 0-86078-464-9

Science and Religion: some historical perspectives. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991, 422 pp. Chinese edition, Beijing, 2000. Portuguese edition, Porto, 2003, 402pp. ISBN 0-521-28374-4 Russian language edition, Moscow: St. Andrew’s College, 2004, 347pp. ISBN 5- 89647-093-2 Spanish edition, Madrid: Universidad Pontificia Comillas, 2016, 563pp. ISBN 978- 84-8468-653-8 Also Greek, Japanese, Korean, and Romanian editions.

OPEN UNIVERSITY TEXTS:

The Crisis of Evolution Milton Keynes: Open University, 1974, 126 pp., including an essay by Sir Alan Richardson.

New Interactions Between Theology and Natural Science Milton Keynes: Open University, 1974, 88 pp., including an essay by Professor R. Hooykaas.

Towards a Mechanistic Philosophy Milton Keynes: Open University, 1974, 96 pp. including an essay by Professor D. Goodman.

The above texts for the Course Science and Belief from Copernicus to Darwin were translated into Japanese (Tokyo, 1985), 338pp. [ISBN 4 422 40013-4]

II SHORT MONOGRAPHS

Physical & Organic Chemistry from Dalton to Mendeleev, in P. Corsi (ed.), Storia delle scienze, vol. 4, Turin: Guilio Einaudi, 1993, 48-97.

New Perspectives on the History of Organic Chemistry, in C.A. Russell (ed.), Recent Developments in the History of Chemistry, London: Royal Society of Chemistry, 1985, 97-152.

Davy’s Chemical Outlook: the Acid Test, in S. Forgan (ed.), Science and the Sons of Genius: Studies on Humphry Davy, London: Science Reviews Ltd., 1980, 121-75.

Natural Theology and the Plurality of Worlds: Observations on the Brewster- Whewell debate, Annals of Science, 34 (1977), 221-86.

Chlorine Substitution and the Future of Organic Chemistry, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 4 (1973), 47-94.

III CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

“Historians”, in “The Idea that Wouldn’t Die” – The Warfare between Science and Religion: Historical and Sociological Perspectives, (ed. Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley), Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017

‘Divine Providence in the Clockwork Universe’, in Abraham’s Dice: Chance and Providence in the Monotheistic Traditions (ed. Karl W. Giberson), New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, 215-39.

‘Order in the Relations between Religion and Science? Reflections on the NOMA Principle of Stephen J. Gould’, in Re-Thinking Order. After the Laws of Nature (ed. Nancy Cartwright and Keith Ward), London: Bloomsbury, 2016, 187-203.

‘Charles Darwin über die Religion’, in Wissenschaft und die Frage nach Gott (ed. Andreas Losch and Frank Vogelsang), Bonn: Evangelische Akademie im Rheinland, 2015, 38-41.

‘Evolution and Religion’, in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (ed. W. J. Mander), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 211- 32.

‘The Legacy of Robert Boyle’, in Science and Religion in the Twenty-First Century (eds. Russell Re Manning and Michael Byrne), London: SCM, 2013, 114-28.

‘Newton, Science and Religion’, in The Isaac Newton Guidebook (ed. Denis Alexander), Cambridge: Faraday Institute, 2013, 75-82.

‘“Ready to Aid One Another”: Darwin on Nature, God, and Cooperation’, in Evolution, Games and God (eds. Sarah Coakley and Martin Nowak), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, 37-59.

‘El Inicio de la Ciencia en el Mundo Occidental’, in Ciencia y Religión en el Siglo XXI: Recuperar el Diálogo (eds. Emilio Chuvieco and Denis Alexander), Madrid: Fundación Ramón Areces, S.A., 2012, 13-32.

‘Science and the Christian Tradition: A Brief Overview’, in Science and Religion: Christian and Muslim Perspectives (ed. David Marshall), Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2012, 7-21.

‘Inspiration in Science and Religion: Historical Perspectives’, in Inspiration in Science and Religion (ed. Michael Fuller), Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012, 1-20.

‘Christian Darwinians’, in Darwinism and Natural Theology: Evolving Perspectives (ed. Andrew Robinson), Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012, 47- 67.

‘Termes et Implications de la Controverse Historique sur l’Origine de L’Homme (Thomas H. Huxley vs. Samuel Wilberforce, Oxford, 30 Juin 1860), transl. Fabien

Revol, in Evolution et Creation: Des Sciences a la Metaphysique (ed. Jean-Marie Exbrayat, Emmanuel d’Hombres et Fabien Revol), Paris: J. Vrin, 2011, 131-56.

‘Wilberforce, Huxley and Genesis’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (eds. Michael Lieb, Emma Mason and Jonathan Roberts), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 397-412.

‘Learning from the Past’, in God, Humanity and the Cosmos (ed. Christopher Southgate), 3rd edition, London: T & T Clark, 2011, 68-88.

‘Modern Christianity’, in Science & Religion around the World (ed. John Hedley Brooke and Ronald L. Numbers), New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 92-119.

‘Science and Secularization’, in The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (ed. Peter Harrison), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 103-23.

‘Historical Perspectives on Religion and Science’, in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, 2nd edition (ed. Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn), Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2010, 529-38.

‘The Myth that Modern Science has secularised Western Culture’, in Galileo goes to Jail and other Myths about Science and Religion (ed. Ronald L. Numbers), Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, 224-32.

‘Science, Religion, and Historical Complexity’, in Recent Themes in the History of Science and Religion (ed. Donald A. Yerxa), Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009, 37-46 and 56-9.

‘Genesis and the Scientists: Dissonance among the Harmonizers’, in Reading Genesis after Darwin (ed. Stephen C. Barton and David Wilkinson), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 93-109.

‘Should the Word Nature be eliminated?’, in Envisioning Nature, Science, and Religion (ed. James D. Proctor), West Conshohocken: Templeton Press, 2009, 312- 36.

‘“Laws impressed on matter by the Creator”? The Origin and the Question of Religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to the “Origin of Species”, (eds. Michael Ruse and Robert J. Richards), Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 256-74.

‘Can Scientific Discovery be a Religious Experience?’, in The Edge of Reason (ed. Alex Bentley), London: Continuum, 2008, 155-64.

‘Cosmologies Ancient and Modern’, in Creation and the Abrahamic Faiths, ed. Neil Spurway (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008, 113-18. ISBN (10): 1-84718- 809-5.

‘La Ciencia en los Unitarios’, in Ciencia y Religion en la Edad Moderna (ed. José Montesinos and Sergio Toledo), La Orotava: Fundación Canaria Orotava de Historia de la Ciencia, 2007, 253-71. ISBN 978-84-611-7981-7.

‘Overtaking Nature? The Changing Scope of Organic Chemistry in the Nineteenth century’, in The Artificial and the Natural: An Evolving Polarity (ed. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and William R. Newman), Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007, 275-92. ISBN 978-0-262-02620-8.

‘Science and the Self: What Difference Did Darwin Make?’, in The Evolution of Rationality: Interdisciplinary Essays in Honor of J Wentzel Van Huyssteen (ed. F.Leron Shults), Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006, 253-73. ISBN 10: 0- 8028-2789-6.

‘Contributions from the History of Science and Religion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (ed. Philip Clayton), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 293-310. ISBN 13: 978-0-19-927927-2

‘Joining Natural Philosophy to Christianity: The Case of Joseph Priestley’, in Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion (eds. John Brooke and Ian Maclean), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, 319-36. ISBN 0-19-926897-5

‘Learning from the Past’, in God, Humanity and the Cosmos (ed. Christopher Southgate), London: T & T Clark, 2005, 63-81. ISBN 0567041441

‘Concluding Reflections’, in Science and Beliefs: From Natural Philosophy to Natural Science, 1700-1900 (eds. David Knight and Matthew Eddy), Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005, 251-60. ISBN 0-7546-3996-7

‘Darwin, Design, and the Unification of Nature’, in Science, Religion, and the Human Experience (ed. James D. Proctor), New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, 165- 83. ISBN 0-19-517532-8

‘The Search for Extra-terrestrial Life: Historical and Theological Perspectives’, in Actas do Forum Internacional: Ciencia, Religiao e Consciencia (ed. Joaquim Fernandes), Porto: Universidad Fernando Pessoa, 2004/5, 271-86.

‘Science and Dissent: Some Historiographical Issues’, in Science and Dissent in England 1688-1945 (ed. Paul Wood), Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2004, 19-37. ISBN 0-7546-3718-2

‘Can Science Dispense with Religion?’ in Can Science Dispense with Religion? (ed. Mehdi Golshani), Tehran, Iran: Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, 2004, 43-53.

‘Natural Theology’, in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (ed. John Heilbron), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 563-5.

‘Science and Religion’, in The Cambridge History of Science Vol.4 Eighteenth- Century Science (ed. Roy Porter), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 741-61. ISBN 0-521-572243-6

‘Darwin and Victorian Christianity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (ed. Gregory Radick and Jonathan Hodge), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 192-213. ISBN 0-521-77197-8

‘Improvable Nature?’, in Is Nature Ever Evil?: Religion, Science and Value (ed. Willem Drees), London: Routledge, 2003, 149-69. ISBN 0-415-29060-0

‘Detracting from Divine Power? Religious Belief and the Appraisal of New Technologies’, in Reordering Nature: Theology, Society and the New Genetics (ed. Celia Deane-Drummond and Bronislaw Szerszynski), London: T & T Clark, 2003, 43-64. ISBN 0-567-08896-0

‘Scienza, Segni e Premonizioni’, in Measure and the Infinite: Science, Faith, Experience (ed. Vincenzo Augelli and Vito Angiuli), Bari: Edizioni Giuseppe Laterza, 2003, 169-76.

‘The Changing Relations between Science & Religion’, in H. Reagan and M. Worthing (eds.), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cosmology and Biological Evolution, Adelaide: Australian Theological Forum, 2002, 3-18.

‘Religious Belief and the Content of the Sciences’, in Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions (ed. John H Brooke, M. Osler and J. Van der Meer), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 376pp., 3-28. ISBN 0-226-07564-8

‘Science and Secularization’, in L. Woodhead (ed.), Reinventing Christianity, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001, 229-38. ISBN 0-7546-1650-9

‘Science’, in Adrian Hastings (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 646-52.

‘The Study of Chemical Textbooks’, in B. Bensaude-Vincent and A. Lundgren (eds.), Communicating Chemistry: textbooks and their audiences, London: Science History Publications, 2000, 1-18.

‘Chemistry’, in G. Ferngren (ed.), The History of Science and Religion in Western Tradition, New York: Garland, 2000, 378-83.

‘Natural Theology’, in G. Ferngren (ed.), The History of Science and Religion in Western Tradition, New York: Garland, 2000, 58-64.

‘The History of Science and Religion: some evangelical dimensions’, in D. Hart and D. Livingstone (eds.), Evangelicals and Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 17-40.

‘Foreword’, with M. Hunter, in R. Hooykaas, Robert Boyle: a study in science and Christian belief, New York: University Press of America, 1997, vii – xix.

‘L’Essor d’une Culture Scientifique’, in H. McLeod, S. Mews and C. d’Haussy (eds.), Histoire Réligieuse de la Grande-Bretagne, Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1997, 261- 85.

‘Religious Apologetics and the Transmutation of Knowledge: Was a Chemico- Theology Possible in 18th and Early-19th Century Britain?’, in J. Van der Meer (ed.) Facets of Faith and Science, vol. 4, New York: University Press of America, 1996, 215-29.

‘Religious Belief and the Natural Sciences: mapping the historical landscape’, in J. van der Meer (ed.) Facets of Faith and Science, vol. 1, New York: University of Press of America, 1996, 1-26.

‘Like Minds: the God of Hugh Miller’, in Michael Shortland (ed.), Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 171- 86.

‘Science and Theology in the Enlightenment’, in M. Richardson and W. J. Wildman (eds.), Religion and Science: history method dialogue, New York and London: Routledge, 1996, 7-27.

‘The Earth Sciences and their Cultural Implications: the question of religious belief’, in D. Branagan and G.H. McNally (eds.), Useful and Curious Geological Enquiries Beyond the World: Pacific-Asia-Historical Themes, Sydney 1994, 308-17.

‘Doing Down the Frenchies: how much credit should Kekulé have given?’ in John H. Wotiz (ed.), The Kekulé Riddle, Vienna, IL, 1993, 59-76.

‘Berzelius, the Dualistic Hypothesis and the Rise of Organic Chemistry’, in T. Frangsmyr and E. Melhado (eds.), Enlightenment Science in the Romantic Era: the chemistry of Berzelius and its cultural setting, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 180-221.

‘Chemists in their contexts: some recent trends in historiography’, in F. Abbri (ed.), Proceedings of the 3rd Convegno Nazionale di Storia e Fondamenti della Chimica, Cosenza, 1991, 9-27. A synopsis of this chapter was also published in Bulletin of the Société Francaise d’histoire des sciences et des techniques, 27 (1990) 11-13.

‘Indications of a Creator: Whewell as apologist and priest’, in M. Fisch and S. Schaffer (eds.), William Whewell: a composite portrait, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, 149-73.

‘ “A Sower Went Forth”: Joseph Priestley and the ministry of reform’, in A. Truman Schwarz and J.G. McEvoy (eds.), Motion Toward Perfection: the achievement of Joseph Priestley, Boston: Skinner House, 1990, 21-56. This essay was first published in Oxygen and the Conversion of Future Feedstocks, Proceedings of the 3rd BOC Priestley Conference, London: Royal Society of Chemistry, 1984, 432-60.

‘Science and religion’, in G. Cantor, J. Christie, J. Hodge and R. Olby (eds.), A Companion to the History of Modern Science, London: Routledge, 1990, 763-82.

‘The Superiority of Nature’s Art? Vitalism, natural theology and the rise of organic chemistry’, in Anne Baumer and M. Buttner (eds.), Wissenschaft und Religion, Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr N. Brockmeyer, 1989, 38-48.

‘The God of Isaac Newton’, in J. Fauvel, R. Flood, M. Shortland, and R. Wilson (eds.), Let Newton Be!, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, 169-83.

‘Why Did the English Mix their Science and their Religion?’, in S. Rossi (ed.), Science and Imagination in 18th-century British Culture, Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 1987, 57-78.

‘Joseph Priestley and William Whewell, Apologists and Historians of Science: a tale of two stereotypes’, in R. Anderson and C. Lawrence (eds.), Science, Medicine and Dissent: Joseph Priestley, London: Wellcome Foundation & Science Museum, 1987, 11-27.

‘The Relations between Darwin’s Science and his Religion’, in J.R. Durant (ed.), Darwinism and Divinity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985, 40-75.

‘The Natural Theology of the Geologists: some theological strata’, in L. Jordanova and R. Porter (eds.), Images of the Earth, Chalfont St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science monograph no. 1, 1979, 39-64. Second revised edition, 1997, 53- 74.

IV PAPERS

(With Ronald L. Numbers) ‘Science, Eastern Orthodoxy, and World Religions’, Isis 107 (2016), 592-96.

An autobiography: ‘Living with Theology and Science: From Past to Present’, Theology and Science 12 (2014), 307-23

‘Interpreting the Word and the World’, Introduction to Responses to Darwin in the Religious Traditions, Zygon, 46 (2011), 281-90.

‘Darwin and Religion: Correcting the Caricatures’, Science and Education, 19, Issue 4 (2010), 391-405.

‘Darwin’s Religious Journey’. The Conway Memorial Lecture. Ethical Record: The Proceedings of the South Place Ethical Society, 115 no.9 (2010), 3-13.

‘Christianity and Darwinism: Can There be No Common Ground?’ Global Spiral (www.metanexus.net) vol.8, issue 12. March 2008.

‘Science, Religion, and Historical Complexity’ and ‘Response to William Shea and David Livingstone’ in ‘Complexity and the History of Science and Religion: A

Forum’, Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society, 8 (May/June 2007), 10-17.

‘The Distinctive Agnosticism of Charles Darwin’, Second Spring: International Journal of Faith and Culture 8 (2007), 49-54

‘“If I were God”: Einstein and Religion’, Zygon, 41 (2006), 941-54.

‘Darwin and God: Then and Now’, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Autumn 2006, 76-85.

‘Friends and Enemies: Breaking Down the Dichotomies’, Modern Believing 47 (no.4), 2006, 5-16.

‘The Search for Extra-terrestrial Life: Historical and Theological Perspectives’, Omega: Indian Journal of Science & Religion 5 (no.1), 2006, 6-22.

‘Darwinism and Christian Belief’, Dialogue , 24 April 2005, 13-17

‘Ciencia, Religion y Unificacion de la Naturaleza’, Pensamiento, 61 (2005), 147-56

‘Creating the Space for Science: Strategies for Alleviating Religious Suspicion in the Scientific Revolution’, Faith and Freedom, 57 (2004), 110-114.

‘Commentary on John Polkinghorne’s “The person, the soul and genetic engineering”’, Journal of Medical Ethics [on line] vol.30, issue no.6 (2004).

‘Les Detours de Darwin’, La Recherche, Hors Serie no.14 (2004), 26-30.

‘Science and Religion: Some Historical Myths’, Impact of Science on Society No.4, 2002, 40-45 [Published by the Institute for Science and Technology Policy and Management Science, Chinese Academy of Science].

‘The Wilberforce-Huxley Debate: Why did it happen?’, Science & Christian Belief, 13 (2001), 127-141.

‘Religious Belief and the Content of the Sciences’, in J. Brooke, M. Osler and J. Van der Meer (eds.), Osiris, 16 (2001), 3-28.

‘“Wise Men Nowadays Think Otherwise”: John Ray, natural theology and the meanings of anthropocentrism’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 54 (2000), 199-213.

‘Science and Religion: Lessons from History?’, Science, 11 Dec. 1998, 1985-86.

‘Small Beginnings in a Disturbed World’. Editorial: British Journal for the History of Science, 30 (1997), 1-4.

‘Author’s response’, Review Symposium dedicated to my book Science and Religion, Metascience, 1 (1992), 46-52.

‘Natural law in the Natural Sciences: the Origins of Modern Atheism?’, Science and Christian Belief, 4 (1992), 83-103.

‘Between Science and Theology: the defence of teleology in the interpretation of nature, 1820-1876’, Proceedings of the 19th-century working group of the American Academy of Religion, 16 (1990), 80-94. Republished in the first issue of the Journal for the History of Modern Theology, 1994, 47-65.

‘The Galileo Affair: teaching AT 17’, Physics Education, 25 (1990), 197-201.

‘Science and the Secularisation of Knowledge: Perspectives on some 18th-century Transformations’. Guest Lecture delivered at the inaugural International Summer School in History of Science, Bologna 1989, and published in Nuncius: Annali di Storia della Scienza, 4 (1989), 43-65.

‘Scientific Thought and its Meaning for Religion: the Impact of French Science on British Natural Theology, 1827-1859’, Revue de Synthèse, 4 (1989), 33-59.

‘Science and the Fortunes of Natural Theology: Some Historical Perspectives’, Zygon, 24 (1989), 3-22.

‘Science & Secularization: some Historiographical Issues’, Proceedings of the Anglo- American Conference on History of Science, Manchester, 1988, 401-8.

‘Methods and Methodology in the Development of Organic Chemistry’, Ambix , 34 (1987), 147-55.

‘The Chemistry of the Organic and the Inorganic’, Kagakushi (Journal of the Japanese Society for the History of Chemistry), 7 (1980), 37-60.

‘Avogadro’s Hypothesis and its Fate: a Case-study in the Failure of Case-studies’, History of Science, 19 (1981), 235-73.

‘The Meaning of Evolution for the Christian Tradition’, BBC Open University radio programme for A 381: ‘Science & Belief from Darwin to Einstein’, 1980.

‘Nebular Contraction and the Expansion of Naturalism’, British Journal for the History of Science, 12 (1979), 200-11.

‘Richard Owen, William Whewell and the Vestiges’, British Journal for the History of Science, 10 (1977), 132-45.

‘Laurent, Gerhardt and the Philosophy of Chemistry’, in R. McCormmach (ed.), Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 6 (1975), 405-29.

‘Charles Gerhardt’ and ‘Charles Adolphe Wurtz’, biographical entries in C.C. Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography, New York: Scribner, 5 (1972) 369- 75 and 14 (1976) 529-32, the former in collaboration with Professor M. P. Crosland.

‘Organic Synthesis and the Unification of Chemistry’, British Journal for the History of Science, 5 (1971), 363-92.

‘Wohler’s Urea and its Vital Force? – A Verdict from the Chemists’, Ambix 15 (1968), 84-114.

V ESSAY REVIEWS

Essay Review of Curtis Johnson, Darwin’s Dice: The Idea of Chance in the Thought of Charles Darwin, Reviews in Science and Religion, Science and Religion Forum, no. 66 (November 2015), 21-28.

‘A Theoretical Judgement’. Review of Peter Harrison’s The Territories of Science and Religion, Times Literary Supplement, 4 September 2015, 25.

‘Reconciling Religious Tradition and Modern Science’, Essay Review of Nidhal Guessoum, Islam’s Quantum Question. Zygon, 47 (June 2012), 322-36.

Essay Review of Alister McGrath’s Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology, Science and Education, vol.46 published on line, November 2011.

‘A Secular Religion’, Nature, 43 (6 October 2005), 815-16.

‘Beyond Everything’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 May 2005, 24.

‘His Bright Designs?, Times Literary Supplement, 7 February 1997, 27.

‘Matters of Fact and Faith: The Galileo Affair’, Journal of the History of Astronomy, 27 (1996), 68-74.

‘Among the Sandemanians’, London Review of Books, vol. 13 no. 14, 1991, 10-11.

‘Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 9 (1990), 125- 29.

‘Radical Overhaul of Evolutionary Science’, Times Higher Education Supplement, March 23 (1990), 19-21.

‘Victorian Science & Religion’, Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography, new series, 1 (1987), 20-23.

‘Secular Theology’, Times Higher Education Supplement, July 17 (1987), 22.

‘Photo-finish’, London Review of Books, vol. 7 no. 9 (1985), 11-13.

‘Small Items with Big Implications’, London Review of Books, vol. 5 no. 22/3 (1983), 22-24.

‘Middle Positions’, London Review of Books, vol. 5 no. 13 (1983), 11-12.

VI ADDITIONAL PUBLICATIONS AS EDITOR

The British Journal for the History of Science, 22 (1989), 512 pp. The British Journal for the History of Science, 23 (1990), 512 pp. The British Journal for the History of Science, 24 (1991), 512 pp. The British Journal for the History of Science, 25 (1992), 512 pp. The British Journal for the History of Science, 26 (1993), 512 pp.

Consultant Editor (with Fraser Watts): The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, ed. Russell Re Manning, OUP 2013.

Consultant Editor: History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition, Garland, 2000.

Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Scientists, Thoemmes, 2004.

Guest Editor: Responses to Darwin in the Religious Traditions, Zygon, 46 (2011).

VII BOOK REVIEWS

More than 100 book reviews and short articles in:

Ambix American Historical Review Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography Annals of Science British Journal for the History of Science British Journal for the Philosophy of Science British Book News Bulletin of the History of Medicine Cambridge Research Cambridge Review Centaurus Chemistry in Britain Christian Graduate Christian History Dictionary of the History of Science Education in Chemistry Encyclopedia of Science and Religion Endeavour Enlightenment and Dissent European History Quarterly Expository Times French History History Isis Journal of the History of Astronomy La Recherche

Liber Amicorum London Review of Books Metascience Nature New Christian New Scientist Notes and Records of the Royal Society Nouveau Journal de Chimie Nuncius Palaeontological Association Circular People and Science Religion Today Research News and Opportunities Science Science and Christian Belief Social History of Medicine The Bible in Tranmission Times Higher Educational Supplement Times Literary Supplement ]

VIII NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS

Universities and other academic venues where John Hedley Brooke has spoken as guest lecturer or keynote lecturer:

Adelaide (Flinders) Akron (Ohio) American University of Sharjah,UAE Amsterdam (Free University) Arkansas (Fayetteville) Athens (Historical Research Institute, National Hellenic Research Foundation) Barcelona (Autonoma University) Bari Belfast (Queen’s University) Bologna Boston (B.U.) Brisbane (Griffith) British Columbia (Vancouver and Victoria) California (Berkeley), California (San Diego) California (Santa Barbara) Calgary Cambridge Cardiff Chicago Cleveland (John Carroll) Cosenza Cracow (Pontifical Academy) Dublin (Trinity College and University College)

Durham Edinburgh (New College) Florida State Univ (Gainesville and Tallahassee) Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania (as ‘Presidential Distinguished Fellow’) Gőteborg Hamburg Harvard Helsinki Jerusalem (Van Leer Foundation) Kent (Canterbury) Lancaster Leeds Liège Limerick Lyon (Catholic University) London (Imperial College and London School of Economics) – also The Royal Institution, Linnaean Society; Science Museum and Natural History Museum Madrid (Comillas University) Madrid (Ramon Areces Foundation & Univ. of Alcala) Malaysia (Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur) Manchester Melbourne Mercyhurst College, Eerie Milan MIT (Dibner Centre) Moscow (St Andrews Theological Institute) Nanterre (Paris) Newman University, Birmingham New South Wales (Brisbane) New York University (NYU) New York (City University) Notre Dame University, Indiana Ohio State (Columbus) Oregon State (Corvallis) Oxford Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes) Peking University, Beijing Porto (Fernando Pessoa) Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) Quito (San Francisco University) Rome (La Sapienza) Southern Illinois, Carbondale Strasbourg (Louis Pasteur) Sydney Tel-Aviv Toronto (York University) Union University Uppsala

Vancouver (UBC and Simon Fraser) Wisconsin (Madison) York UK