NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Colin Tudge

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/17

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/17

Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews

Interviewee’s surname: Tudge Title: Mr

Interviewee’s forename: Colin Sex: Male

Occupation: Science writer Date and place of birth: 22nd April 1943, Camberwell London Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: clarinet housewife player in Grenadier Guards Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 28/1/16 (track 1-3), 9/2/16 (track 4-6), 11/3/16 (track 7-8), 17/5/16 (track 9-10)

Location of interview: Interviewees' home, Oxford

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 10 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 9 hrs. 03 min. 57 sec.

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: OPEN

Interviewer’s comments:

Colin Tudge Page 1 C1672/17 Track 1

[Track 1]

Could you start by telling me, then, when and where you were born?

I was born in King’s College Hospital in Camberwell. [laughs] It's a well known resort for drunks on a Saturday night, but I doubt that it was then. It was the war: 1943. Well that’s it, where and when: April the 22nd 1943.

Thanks. And then, can you tell me about the life of your father, to start with?

Yeah. He was a very nice man, my father. He was probably the nicest man I think I’ve ever met actually. Really super chap. But he was a, he was the son of a coal miner in Bolton, Lancs, and my grandfather, whose picture’s downstairs on the wall incidentally, was down the mine, so was my father, was down the mine for something like fifty years, which is almost unbelievable, because, well I mean why didn’t he die, you know, several times? But he didn’t. And my father, born in Bolton, he had sort of, two… I don’t think mining was ever an option for him, but, his mother, my grandmother, was a, a small, a primary school teacher, and she had sort of, aspirations for her sons, there were two of them. And my father, who was called Cyril, was sort of, trained as they say, or educated, as a bookkeeper, and he absolutely hated this. [laughs] So he thought, you know, I can either stay in the mill, because the other great thing around there was the mill, as a bookkeeper, or I can do something else. And he had an uncle who, for some reason, and nobody, I don’t know how or why, was a very very good clarinet player, who was in the Grenadier Guards band, and this uncle, who was Uncle Peter, my Great- Uncle Peter, said, told my father he could be a musician and could come and… And that’s what my father did, he came to London at the age of seventeen, and he was a self-taught clarinet player, very very good. He joined the Army at the age of seventeen in 1928, and he was in the Army for, well over forty years, as a musician in the Grenadier Guards. And he made a reasonable living. Worked incredibly hard, as you had to, and brought us all up. And so, moved to South London. So I was born in South London. My mother was the daughter of a Guards musician, in a different regiment as it happens but it doesn’t matter. So that’s, there were three of us, and I was born in South London, as I said. And, one of the very fortunate things… I might as well ramble on, mightn’t I?

Yes, that’s…

[02:29] One of the very fortunate things, we had a very very good local primary school called Dulwich Hamlet, and now people, the middle classes queue up for miles around to go to Dulwich Hamlet [laughs], but in those days it was just the local school. But it was very good. And one of the nice things about it, well, first of all the school teachers were mostly, they were either older women, mostly, who had probably lost husbands, sweethearts et cetera in the First World War, some spinsters, they were a bit crotchety, but there were these very nice married women, middle aged. And, blokes back from the war, who were Colin Tudge Page 2 C1672/17 Track 1 kind of, you know, no-nonsense but basically very nice. So it was… And the headmistress, for most of my time there, was a very Christian lady, and it was a very Christian… It was a Church of England school. And my introduction to Christianity was not sort of, hyper-religious, it wasn’t this sort of, you know, nuns with moustaches beating you up that you hear from some people, Catholics for example. It was just all about being kind and cooperative, and all that kind of stuff. Also, I was very fortunate in that the local, the school nearby, not the nearest, yeah, almost the nearest, was Dulwich College, which in those days was a perfectly respectable down-the-line public school, fee-paying et cetera. However, after the Second World War it acquired a headmaster called Horace Gilkes. He wasn’t called Horace, I can’t remember his Christian name, Gilkes, g-i-l-k-e-s, who was a serious socialist. I think he may have been a member of the Communist Party. But anyway, he was a serious socialist, although he was also seriously middle class. And he said the school should be open to scholarship boys. And in those days, you know, with direct grants, governments paid for scholarships, so eighty-five per cent of the pupils were scholarship boys. And I was one of them. Incidentally… No, it’s not… Yeah, no, the rest of it’s the detail, doesn’t matter. That’s the important thing from my point of view. Actually, I’ll tell you the detail, though you needn’t have it on tape.

As many details as you like.

Yeah, but, I, I think I’d probably rather you didn’t use this. But in those days, around Britain and public schools probably in particular, there was terrific anti-Semitism, and Dulwich, like most schools, had subliminally an anti-Semitic policy. One of the troubles of that, besides the fact that it was horrible, I mean this is after the Nazis and all that, but, besides the fact that it was horrible, was that it was, it was economically very damaging, because, you know, the Jews were the people who actually had some money, and they could send their sons to public school. So Gilkes, for reasons that were mostly socialist – well, basically socialist, altruistic, wanted to throw the school open, and he wanted to throw it open to Jews as well as to everybody else. But it was also a financial incentive in that these were the people that could actually pay. So we had, I don’t say we had loads of Jews but we had a decent Jewish population, many of whom were, well, some of my best friends, as they say. [laughs] In fact my very best friend was a Jewish chap. So that was him. But that was the school. And the point is, the ethos of the school in those days, and I was there in the Fifties, left in about ’61, or ’62, ’61 I think, was, under Gilkes, was that, yes, you did well, you worked hard, you became a professional, basically doctor or a lawyer were the main things, not much talk about finance actually, not much talk about industry, but basically doctor or lawyer, and the reason you did that was, for the service of other human beings. It wasn’t about getting rich, it wasn’t about being famous; it was about being a, taking your place in society and, you know. So it was the kind of, it was, it was, oh, in a sense it was seriously socialist, in a sense it was kind of old-fashioned Toryism, in that you got, you know, you got to the top as it were, but, noblesse oblige, you used your… So it was quite paternalistic. But basically very very well-motivated. That was the motiv… When my son went there in the Eighties, I sent him there in the Eighties, foolishly, because we still lived in Dulwich, the ethos had changed completely, which I didn’t really realise, because I wasn’t paying enough attention, and it became very much about, you come to Colin Tudge Page 3 C1672/17 Track 1 this school so that you can get yourself a profession in, banking or whatever, medicine, whatever it is, in order to get to the top, in order to be rich, in order to… A complete change of mindset. Which I think is a mindset that’s overtaken Britain and the world since, really, well since Thatcher really, since the end of the, since the beginning of the Eighties. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s utterly destructive, and will kill us all if we carry on with it. But, anyway, that was a shift that I saw. That was school. [07:41] Nice family. [pause] Sorry. I was the first one, I don’t know whether this is important, I think it is actually, was important to me at the time, I was the first one from my family to go to go to university. No, not quite true. I had a cousin who went to university in Canada. But we didn’t see much of him because he was in Canada. But I was the first one known to go. And I went to, I got a scholarship for Cambridge. So, there was always this dichotomy really in my mind between, you know… The point is that the more you succeeded, I felt this, as a sort of scholar, not that I was ever, not that I ever worked hard enough to be a proper scholar, but you know what I mean, the more you moved away from your own roots, which is of course a problem for huge numbers of people. It’s a strong theme in literature, very strong theme in literature.

[08:33] Thank you. Sticking with your father for a moment. What did he tell you about his, if he did, about his childhood?

Oh quite a lot. I mean it was tremendously hard. Born in Bolton in 19… I’m not sure whether it was 1911 or 1912, but about then. So his first… He was plunged straight into the First World War. Now, the North of England was already sort of on the skids at that time. I mean in Victorian times it was, it was, well, it was never rich but you know, it was the powerhouse of England, and by that time, early twentieth century, the writing was already on the wall. But the mining industry was still very strong, and the milling was still very strong, by virtue of the Empire really, but, anyway. But the actual conditions, you know, described quite well by George Orwell, not from Bolton but from, further… well no, actually, Orwell in Wigan, and then, I was thinking of D H Lawrence, Nottingham, were very very hard. And we used to go… I just digress. I used to go there as a child, four or five years old, after the Second World War, my brother and sister were evacuated there as well, and I spent time as a baby. Anyway. And I loved it, because it was such a warm, cosy, you know, supportive atmosphere, especially if you were a small kid. So I thought it was beautiful, wonderful. But, the physical hardness of it was, was enormous. And, they made a living… So anyway, my father was straight into the First World War, as a child. Following the First World War… Well my grandfather, his father, in the First World War, was allowed to escape from the mines for a few months, to go over to Flanders I think it was, might have been France but I think it was Flanders, to dig tunnels under the German trenches. So he went from one hole to another hole and then back to the first hole again. But it was hard. And he made a living, he made a living, he eked out his living, my grandfather, by playing the flute in the pit, in the local theatre in the evenings. So there was always this, this very strong thing among traditional miners that you, mining seemed to take all your time and energy, but as it were, despite what Lawrence Colin Tudge Page 4 C1672/17 Track 1 says about them all being drunk and so on, which ain’t true, they, they all did things like, you know, gardening was very strong, smallholdings, and fishing was very strong, because, you were never far from a, from some kind of river, and music, and so on, culture in general. So it was very strong, that sort of… Anyway. [11:11] My father. After the First World War… When did the miners’ strike come? Not long after, not long after. They made a living, my father – my grandfather I suppose, probably earned about a pound a week, or thirty bob a week, as a miner. Earned a bit in an evening with the flute. And, his wife, who was also a schoolteacher, but she then opened a little corner shop, tiny little corner shop, in Weston Street, if that’s of any interest. Now destroyed, obviously flattened. But they lived in a two up, two down, privy at the bottom of the garden, all that kind of stuff. There was no, you know… But as a miner, they had free coal, so long as he was mining, and after he retired you had, it used to cost him two bob a bag for coal. So the house was always warm. Everything was done with the house… Everything came from the coal fire in the main room, cooking et cetera. So it was a warm little house, but it was a tiny little house, and, nothing much, you know, no what you would call comforts these days. No hot water or anything silly like that. Electrics were gimcrack to the extreme, you know, with wires running across. All that stuff, you know. You’re familiar no doubt. But it was jolly good, it was a good atmosphere. But, very poor. And then of course, not long, well, a little while after the First World War, in the 1920s in fact, you had the miners’ strike when… They really survived because of my grandmother’s shop. And then the… Which, although the miners had no money either, so it was, you know… And, well that’s basically it. And then as I say, in 1928, when he was only seventeen, he came to London, he had already learnt the clarinet somehow or other, taught himself largely, came to London and joined the Guards.

[13:14] Thank you. Could you now tell me about the life of your mother, as far as you know?

Yeah. Well, she was born in Colchester, Essex, 1910. I like to say the same year that Tolstoy died, I think that’s, kind of forgive him, because, you know, it spans the eras. And she, she was the daughter, as I said, of a Guards musician. He was the first, one of the… He was… His army number was five, because he, or his regimental number was five, because he was the fifth musician to join the Welsh Guards band, which was newly convened in the First World War. A detail. But, so they came to London, because that’s where the Guards are based. And met my father. An entirely kind of, you know, unremarkable upbringing she had. She had six brothers and sisters, one sister, five brothers. ba- ba-ba They all lived a fairly long time, except for the youngest brother who got killed in the war, or just after the war, in the Fleet Air Arm. And she became a housewife. That’s it really. Almost end of story, that’s what you did in those days. But it was tremendously hard, because, you know, three kids, no hot water at the beginning, nothing like central heating or anything silly like that. No car, obviously. No fridge obviously. So, basically, getting the shopping in was a tremendous job; doing the washing largely by hand was a tremendous job; hanging it out in the garden, et cetera. But we all ate Colin Tudge Page 5 C1672/17 Track 1 very well, because, food after the war was actually rather good, although it was supposed to be short supply, rationing, wonderful what that did. But, so very very hard, and very basic, but, OK.

[15:10] What do you remember of time spent with your father as a, as a child yourself?

Well, less than one would have hoped, because, he was in the Army, so he was always off somewhere. And, and used to get up very very early in the morning to go on guard for example, at Windsor or, or in town. So they had to get up sometimes half-past… If you were on guard in Windsor at half-past eight or something, you had to get up about half-past five, and get into London, and then, bussed out to Windsor. That kind of thing. So he was always out at work. And then in the evening, he did a lot of gigs in order to make money, you know, freelance, playing in dance bands and stuff like that. So… And then, he was abroad a lot, because, the Army at that time was sent away quite a lot, he was off, Germany he went to, Australia before the war, but, after the war, lots of places. He was well travelled actually, in so far as soldiers are well travelled, you know. And, so the only time I really saw him at length was at Christmas, we had several days together – ah well one day anyway. Although even then he would be playing in church, in the Guards chapel. Or, when we went on holiday. Once we went for a, went for a, usually, a good year was a week in Littlehampton, and a week in Bolton with my grandparents, which was some of my formative times, especially the Bolton. So didn’t see that much of him actually, and we, I don’t think we ever… I think, I can remember once we went up to town on a Saturday morning to, just to look at London docks, which were still there, with all the ships, and that kind of thing. But that’s almost, one of the very few times ever we went out as a, him and me. Although there were family outings, but, mm.

Do you remember, on those very rare occasions, do you remember anything about, sort of, anything distinctive about interaction with him, even conversation with him, that is, with him talking to you as a child?

Big interaction. Not really, no [laughs], to be perfectly honest. We talked about stuff. We used to have discussions about whether lions could beat leopards in a fight and stuff like that. [laughs] That’s the sort of thing.

Thanks.

And whether Nat Lofthouse was better than Roy Bentley.

Who are they?

Nat Lofthouse was a centre half – centre forward, sorry, at Bolton, and Roy Bentley was the centre forward of Chelsea. That kind of conversation. Colin Tudge Page 6 C1672/17 Track 1

[17:44] Thanks. And time spent, therefore, with your mother, what do you remember of that, you and her as a, when you were a child?

Not much. It was just day-to-day stuff really. Never had any what you might call deep conversations I don’t remember.

What did you do with her? Leaving aside conversation, what did you, when you were with her, what were you doing, as a child?

Well when I was a kid, until I was about eleven I suppose, I mean when she had shopping and so on, I would go with her, because, what else do you do with a small child? So, I have many, many memories of being seriously bored to death sitting on busses, going up to town and, going down to the greengrocer’s and stuff like that. But not many others. And, so, that’s it basically.

[18:29] What did you play with, as a child?

What did I do?

What did you play with? Toys, games, what did you have?

Oh. I had, at the age of about eight or nine, do you know Britains, the people that make lead soldiers? [laughs] Well, we went to Harrods, and they had this wonderful little box of five lifeguards. They’re beautiful models, lead. And from that time on I built up this wonderful collection of lead soldiers, and lead farm animals, and then some zoo animals. But I used to alternate between farm animals and zoo animals. You don’t need to know – well, whatever, detail. And later, I think at the age of about thirteen, at Dulwich College, the botany teacher – well no, biology teacher, called Brian Jones, known as 'BUM J' [short for Brian M Jones] was very, was very inspirational. He’s still alive. Must be getting on for ninety, he’s still lively. Where was I going with this? Oh, he introduced me to cacti, cactuses. And also… Well you’re asking for details. On the television they did the first, about 1952, they did the first Quatermass Experiment. Do you remember that sci fiction? By Nigel Kneale. And it was absolutely terrifying. Well I was nine, so it was extremely terrifying. [laughs] Kept me awake for months. Anyway, in that, this chap comes back from outer space, seriously infected with some alien organism, and he integrates himself, his own flesh, with living things. And in one scene he, he’s in this lady’s house, and she has a cactus, and he gets hold of the cactus and it grows up his arm. He and the cactus become one. And from that moment on I think I was fascinated by cacti. And then Brian Jones reinforced this, because he had a collection. So, for many years, several years, I had, I built up this collection of cacti. So they were my chief things, were soldiers and the cacti. I also played a lot of, I Colin Tudge Page 7 C1672/17 Track 1 was keen on sport, never any good at it. You’ve got to be coached in sport, unless you’re a natural. So I never knew what I was trying to do, but I was quite sort of nippy. So we used to play lots of football on the park with my brother, cousin, lots of cricket on the park. All that stuff. But, you know, any, any… And loads and loads of time down at the local swimming pool.

[21:05] Could you take us on a tour of your childhood home, as far as you remember it in your mind’s eye?

Oh yeah, I remember it very well. I lived there for a long time. It was a… I’m not quite sure what you call it, but, it was Edwardian, terrace. And it was a kind of big, it was a sort of, in a sense it was this kind of, beginning of the time when people were building houses for the middle classes, or the lower middle classes, that were sort of vaguely sort of, no not classical in style but, it was that, you know that late Victorian style known as ‘dream houses’. This kind of thing. Voysey. Built on, built by people like… I mean nothing much, nothing as grand as that. But…

Yes, I see.

But it’s, it’s the sort of beginning of the, of the suburban house, inspired by Pugin and so on, so on. And it was the scaled-down, Edwardian terraced version of that, built, actually built for the masses. So it had quite a nice imposing front door and so on, so on, but basically, quite small. But it had bells for servants, which was, quaintly. It was meant to have a maid at the top you see. So that was it, you know, it was a, a comfortable house. And my grandfather, my grandparents, my mother’s grandparents, my mother’s parents, shared it with us. So, it was, well occupied as it were. And also, my mother had five brothers, one of whom was killed in the war, and a sister, and they and their families used to come and visit their mother, i.e. my mother’s mother. So, the house was always, often full of uncles and cousins. Not often, but you know, frequently. So I did feel as a child, until the age of about eleven, part of a great sort of clan, which was a very nice feeling. But after that, they, well some of them went to Canada, and, the children grew up, you know how it is, and they moved out, and, et cetera.

[23:18] What do you remember of your bedroom, can you describe that?

[laughs] Well the one I had was right at the top of the house, so it was a garret room effectively. Sloping ceilings. Until my brother moved out at the age of about seventeen, he was seventeen, I mean, eighteen, joined the Army, I – I mean National Service, for him, I used to share it with him, and then I had it to myself. It was about this size, but with a sloping ceiling, the roof. That’s it really.

What did you have in it, apart from your lead soldiers and…?

Colin Tudge Page 8 C1672/17 Track 1

Oh well they were always packed away until you got them out.

Ah.

So they weren’t there. But, basically, you know, bookshelf, bed, that’s it.

What do you remember of childhood reading then?

Childhood reading?

Yes.

Ah. I was quite avid, and as a child I read, I mean you know, I read lots of William books for example. Didn’t get into Winnie the Pooh, don’t know why, never… Oh, Wind in the Willows, but I was never introduced to Winnie the Pooh. And then, at the age of about thirteen I discovered P G Wodehouse. And I had a kind of, I mean I had a good little bookshop at school, and my, from the ages of about thirteen up to, university certainly, I mean I was, my big influences were Wodehouse who I loved, George Orwell, John Steinbeck. Aldous Huxley became my favourite, world favourite. And a few others obviously. But that was the core. And I don’t, I think that’s a very good line-up actually, very good line-up. Later I got into Jane Austen, to some extent into George Eliot. For a time I was a fan, after this, of Anthony Burgess, you know Anthony Burgess? And… But the four I mentioned first were the core. And I return to them actually, not Wodehouse actually, but certainly Huxley, Orwell and, who was the other one?

Steinbeck?

Steinbeck. I quote them quite a lot.

Why did Huxley emerge as your favourite?

Well he was the guy who first introduced me to the idea that intellectuals could be a good thing, if you know what I… I mean, the novel that struck me as being quite extraordinary, and the best, for me was life-changing when I was about eighteen, was Point Counter Point. And there were these, this, these people who moved freely between philosophy and the arts, they could quote Proust and Dante, and, you know, the name of Descartes rattled off their… Who I had never heard of, so I called him [phonetically] descartees until I was… As many children do I should think. And, and at the same time he was a good scientist, and he would have been a scientist apparently, I learnt later, had it not been for his eyes, he couldn’t get… But he was very keen on biology, like his brother, and his half-brother, who won a Nobel Prize, I can’t remember his… Hugh… No it wasn’t Hugh, it was the other one. Anyway. [pause] So it was this tremendous eclecticism. He was also a good painter actually, Huxley, Colin Tudge Page 9 C1672/17 Track 1 till his eyes went. And that’s what appealed to me, I realised there was this great world out there of people who can seriously think. He was also, I discovered later actually, really rather a nice man, who didn’t, didn’t play the part of the intellectual, he just was immensely clever. Julian said of him, ‘He’s the only genius in the family.’ And he was, anyway, great. The other side of that of course was… Well no, that’ll do. [27:22] But later, much later, I got from George Orwell the fact that he was, he used to rail against intellectuals, and there’s one great line, I’ve got it written down somewhere – well I know where I’ve got it written down, that, there is nothing more stupid than an intellectual. And I can see the reason for that, because, intellectuals get so hooked on ideas, they follow the ideas, and never realise that the ideas are just an abstraction of reality. And they build a whole world view on a single idea. And often because they are clever, they will lead others to follow them. Can’t be wrong, because they’re intellectuals. And the result is the most terrible disaster. What’s his name? Huxley… sorry. Orwell was talking about this in the wake of people, British intellectuals, who followed Stalin, and he said, ‘Surely to God they can see that this man is a monster.’ And yet, you know, they were kind of, besotted by the intellectual underpinning. And, I’ve seen the same thing. My interest in agriculture… I’ll go on about this because it’s a line of thought. That, round about 1980, when Thatcher came to the fore, the leading, one of the leading guys in the Cabinet was Keith Joseph, who was seen to be a great intellectual. He was a, he was a Fellow of All Souls, and he was also a senior Cabinet minister. And it was he, more than anybody I believe, who dismantled the Agricultural and Food Research Council, which was this wonderful government-backed organisation, which had twenty or thirty I think, getting on for thirty, dedicated research stations all over the country that were independent of industry, and really looked at problems that were of interest to farmers and to agriculture in general, and passed the information more or less straight to the farmers. And it was Joseph who said, no… It was Joseph more than anybody I think, or as much as anybody, who embraced neo-liberalism, and said, no, everything must be market- led. Because the market, you know, another piece of intellectualism from Milton Friedman et cetera, was supposed to be the ultimate democratic expression and all that stuff. Big idea, sounds good. But he followed it. And he said, no, agricultural research, like everything else, must be geared to the market. And, most of the research stations were closed, or privatised: well, they were either closed or privatised with, one or two just about escaped. And, they now focus on research that is good for industry, GMOs, all that kind of stuff. And, the information doesn’t get passed to the farmers, well, not relevant to them; gets passed to industry to develop in order to make things, products, that can be sold to the farmers. So we now have agriculture which is totally corporate-dependent. Which is a disaster. But that’s the result of following what looked like a good idea, neo-liberalism, Milton Friedman, all that. So Orwell was right. But, the upside of that, of intellectualism, is, Huxley. But that shouldn’t really be called intellectualism. It’s actually scholarship, that’s the point, and there’s this distinction between being scholarly and being, you know, just following bees in your bonnet. [31:03] Can I digress again? That, I came… I mean I’m sure you know this, but you know, in many civilisations, this is another point of Bede Griffiths incidentally, including Chinese, including Jewish… Colin Tudge Page 10 C1672/17 Track 1

Are you Jewish incidentally? No you’re not. I just thought you might be, you know. [laughs] Including Chinese, including Jewish, including Greek. There was no doubt that the people who were most respected, apart from the sort of, high priests perhaps, were the scholars. And royalty, you know, were up there somewhere. But scholars And the people who… And then came sort of, craftsmen, artisans, including farmers et cetera, who actually did stuff that was useful. And right at the bottom were the merchants. Because although they were rich, what do they do? They mucked about with other people’s money. So they were rich but they were kind of despised. And in a way, Shylock is, I mean is seen as the great sort of anti-Jewish thing, but it was also the anti-merchant thing, you know, this rich man but, who is he, you know? He’s actually quite a good bloke, as you know, because you’ve read the play, but, that was how he was perceived. Whereas now of course the whole thing has completely reversed, and the merchants are at the top, and they call the shots. And the scholars work for the merchants. But they’re not scholars any more, they’re, they’re tame intellectuals. It’s a different thing. And advocates. Anyway, that’s the point. But the point is, Huxley showed what it means to be a scholar, and, Aldous Huxley – Orwell pointed out the shortcomings of being an intellectual. A mere intellectual.

[32:44] Apart from football…

Excuse me, sorry. [blowing nose] You can cut that. [laughs]

Apart from football on the park, which you’ve mentioned, could you tell me about your experience of the outdoors as a child?

Oh yes. I mean, football on the park et cetera was when I was sort of, younger. And as I got into Dulwich, I spent a huge amount of time playing rugby. And I think I could have been quite good. But I never, I never really knew what I was trying to do, do you know what I mean? And no real idea what the game was about. So I was quite good at picking up the ball and running with it, but, I didn’t know whether that was the right thing to do or not. Anyway, I always liked cricket, I played a lot of cricket, but I was never any good at it, and again I think, coaching. And then later I took up squash, many many many hours playing squash. But also I, this is a bit sad though, I really liked being in the country and nature and all that stuff. Never had a huge amount of stamina, although I liked sports, so, I couldn’t do these thirty-, well, never relished these thirty-, twenty-mile walks that people do. So… And I had terrible hay fever. So… And I wasn’t a very good naturalist. Biology was my sort of, obsession, but, field naturalist, I wasn’t very good at, for various reasons, I don’t know. So, I loved being outdoors and all that, and swimming and stuff, but was never a proper naturalist, which is a regret for me. So that’s it, that’s the answer really.

What did you lack then that you would have needed to have been a better naturalist as a child?

Colin Tudge Page 11 C1672/17 Track 1

Yeah, I’ve sort asked myself that. I could say, I mean, if I wanted to put the blame elsewhere, you know, sort of, guidance, you know. I mean it’s very nice if you’re a budding botanist to have an aunt who will point out what things actually are. And in those days the guide books were not that great. So I could… And the same would be true of birds, say. I mean, as far as I was concerned, for many years there were only three kinds of birds. Well there were pigeons, ducks, sparrows, and what one called ordinary birds, [laughs] which probably were largely crows. But anything small was a sparrow. You know that kind of thing. And, it was only later that I discovered, well I’m still discovering, that, around here, say, there might be thirty, forty species of bird, but you just don’t really know what they are. But you need guidance. But on the other hand, I can’t blame other people for lack of guidance, because, some of the best naturalists, some of the best everything, are self-taught. So, you can almost find out if your enthusiasm is really there. And I think, it’s possible… I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I mean I’m really fascinated by biology, and I, and I write about it, that’s what I do, and I think I’m quite knowledgeable. And I like the details when I’m out with somebody and they’re pointing it out. But I never sort of, related one to the other somehow. And I think my interest in nature, the great outdoors, is largely sort of poetic, it’s a feeling for the greatness of it and all that. But, don’t do what naturalists do, which is to, you know, set traps and, et cetera.

[36:08] Thank you. At primary school, what do you remember of, science, or perhaps if not science, nature study?

Ah. Nature study, as it was called in those days, was a very big part, and we always had a nature table. And in those days of course there was much more stuff around than there is now, so it was considered perfectly reasonable to go and pick a big mushroom and stick it on the nature table, some local wildflower or something. Whereas nowadays there are so few left that, you’re not supposed to do that any more. And looking back, I think this is romancing a bit, but, you know, there was no health and safety in those days, so if you found the skeleton of a rat or something, you’d stick it… Nobody to tell you what leptospirosis was [laughs], bubonic plague or anything like that. So there was much more freedom. And we spent a lot of time mucking about like that, and drawing it. So it was a good basic, you know, basic training. But we didn’t, we didn’t do anything science as such.

Did you add things to the table, did you collect?

Sorry?

Did you add things to the nature table yourself, did you…?

Oh I think so. I can’t remember what now, but I think so.

[37:14] Colin Tudge Page 12 C1672/17 Track 1

Childhood churchgoing. What can you tell me about that?

Went to Sunday school. Not much, it was always very confused and not… And for a time, as a lot of children do, I think for about six weeks, possibly even less, at the age of eleven I used to go regularly up to our local church. But… Well there were several sides to it. Basically, there was the Sunday school version of Jesus, you know, ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’. This tremendously nice bloke, who was answerable to this fellow called God. Frankly, my home was extraordinarily unreligious. So I, when we first got to primary school, at the age of five or so, and people were talking about Jesus and talking about God, I didn’t know who they were talking about. Who is this fellow? [laughs] And, so… And I think a lot of kids might be like that. So, but later I cottoned on to who they were supposed to be. But there was a ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, and that was very appealing. And then there was the kind of feeling, you know, is there a God, and it’s all got purpose, and all that kind of vague stuff, which was also very appealing. But then there were the church services themselves, which on the whole were extremely tedious, and on the whole I still find them extremely tedious. And I just don’t like all those hymns frankly. I don’t like standing up and sitting down. I’m not moved by the prayers. So as far as that… I mean, we go to Evensong now, and, the atmosphere is wonderful, I mean, college chapels and, very very good singing. So of course, that’s, that’s a great experience in its own right as a sensuous experience. I can never hear the lessons, because I’m a bit deaf. I know they’re going on. And… But the church service itself, the standard Sunday morning service, I find extremely tedious, so I can never get into that. That’s basically it, I mean, really. And so that, I mean it was something I found very appealing, but actually when you tried to engage with it, Christianity, in the form of the Church of England, it wasn’t, it was actually boring, and you didn’t know what was going on.

[39:25] What was the bit that you… Can you say more about the aspect of it that was appealing then? The…

Oh. The whole idea that there is this extraordinarily kind fellow out there who is the epitome of everything that’s good, Jesus in other words, was very appealing. And the idea that there is some kind of purpose to the universe, and a mind behind it that’s driving it, is very appealing. And the idea, which I think sort of… Do you know, what’s it, a theologian called Rudolf Otto? Early twentieth century, German. And he coined the term ‘numinous’, and numinous comes from the Latin numen, meaning divine presence. And he talked about nature being numinous, a divine presence in everything. And, that kind of idea is expressed in hundreds of different ways. Basically it’s animism. But… And, Christians often had trouble with it, because they, they think it’s being basically blasphemous, on the one hand animistic, on the other hand if nature itself is divine, why do you need a supreme being, and all that stuff. So, it’s an example of intellectuals making things up. But the general feeling of nature’s divinity, undefined, was always with me, and I think it is with most, many people, you know. And it’s certainly with Rupert Sheldrake, I would say. So that appealed to me, and that seemed to me part of sort of, certainly the spiritual vision of what the world was like. Although I never really talked about it much, but it was, it was always there. And when I did science later, from the age of about thirteen, at Colin Tudge Page 13 C1672/17 Track 1

Dulwich, I always felt that science itself was only sort of, talking about the surfaces of things, and that basically, nature was, you know, this divine presence really, manifestation of.

[41:38] When and where did you, if it had always been with you, when and where did you experience this sense of a divine presence in nature as a child?

Well I never spell it out. But it was always there. I mean I don’t know… Because it’s a feeling. And one doesn’t necessarily explore one’s own feelings. And maybe at the age of, where am I, eight, thirteen, you can’t explore them anyway, and Freud said human beings are very very bad at exploring their own inner selves. So if you had explored it, one wouldn’t have got very far. No, it was just a feeling. It’s just obvious that these... You know, there’s this wonderful line of Robert Burns, well he talks about… Oh I can’t remember the exact line now. Anyway, but it’s a feeling that, the expression ‘fellow creatures’ expresses it, that these, or Saint Francis’s, you know, trees and the animals are my brothers and sisters. And to me it was always self-evident of course, it’s obvious. But that’s very different, of course, from the modern view, or, or a view that’s been around for a long time as well, that, that nature is just a resource, it’s just, stage scenery, it’s there for us to use. And I hate this expression ‘natural resources’, for example.

But was the feeling stronger when you were in nature, in particular places, than when you were not in nature?

I didn’t have these great, on the whole, Wordsworthian experiences. I didn’t. Quite like to have done. Or, you know, the sudden mystical sense. Because, no, but, in a sense it never left me, so, you know…

Is it partly because of where you lived?

Some places are more moving than others. I was very aware that South London, which, where I lived, I mean it wasn’t, wasn’t a depressed or rough part of South London, it was nicely appointed as they say, but it was fundamentally barren. Actually there were lots of creatures of the garden in those days, which aren’t there any more, worms and stuff like that. But it was, it was a barren landscape, soulless. I can’t say much more than that, can I? I mean… And sometimes when we went in the country, not that we did very often, places like, for example, we went to Dorking once, I mean it’s a, nothing now, but, sixty years ago, yeah, there was a tremendous feeling that this… Oh, or in Bolton sometimes, when you went out onto the moors, terrific feeling of, of wildness and, yeah.

I think you said that it was, earlier in this interview you said that it was Bolton in particular that was formative.

Yes. Colin Tudge Page 14 C1672/17 Track 1

Why that? The times you spent there with your, you know, visits to grandparents.

Yeah. Well we were with the family for a start, which we weren’t often, because, as I say, my father was often away, and, kids were at school, all that stuff. It was a tremendously warm atmosphere, which South London wasn’t. South London was cold, I don’t mean physically cold, but you know, it was a, socially cold, and snobbish. And we were sort of, I suppose, we would have been lower middle class, and, in my road, which was called Holmdene Avenue, there were tremendous, they were all basically lower middle class; some of them veered towards the genuine middle class. And there were just tremendous social stratas which everybody was aware of. I mean you know, my father was a musician, was sort of, superior to the plumber; and the bloke who was the sort of, in a sense almost the local aristocrat, was the pharmacist. And so it went on, you know what I mean? And minute differences, which people like Orwell noticed incidentally. It’s a very, again it’s a strong theme in a certain, of English literature, is, this, very fine social distinctions, which thank God have largely disappeared. But in Bolton, we didn’t feel that. They were all, they were all part of a mining community. And there was the mill as well, but I mean, I was… The mill was important to me, because, if you, if as a kid, you, you lie in bed, we often went up late in the year, because of my father working during the summer, so it would be dark when you woke up in the morning, six o’clock. And actually, it’s only sixty years ago, it’s post-war, where you could hear the women going to work in the mill, and they all wore clogs. I mean you know, thinking it’s a, you know, it’s a joke and all that stuff, which belongs to the nineteenth century; no no, this is post-Second World War, and you could hear all the women in their clogs going to work in the morning there. But the point is, it was a classless thing. It was, as they say, everyone left their front doors open, so you could, you know, people would just walk from house to house, as if you’re all one big family. I spent a lot of time actually, not a lot of time but a certain amount of time, just playing in the street, which we never did in South London, because, it was too dangerous with the cars, and you didn’t do that, you know. And, as I say, it was like a great big family, is the point. Very dirty, very hard life for the people who actually lived there, including the schoolkids, which I, I didn’t… but, but very, well very warm. And I found it very picturesque. I mean, you know, the dark satanic mills. But they really are impressive. And the air was, was pure acid and soot. All the buildings were black. I never realised until I was, basically sort of, eleven or twelve, that buildings didn’t have to be black, and that the stone walls out on the moors weren’t naturally black. Because it wasn’t until the Clean Air Act of the Fifties that that blackness disappeared, and suddenly there were all greys and greens and pale… The trees were black. I just grew up thinking that, you know, the bark of a tree was black. And I’m still surprised actually now, when you drive along in the winter sunshine, and you see that the trunks of the trees are pink, and, pale green and yellow. Beautifully painted by, David, David Hockney, in his recent book on trees. Which mentions my book on trees, which is rather nice of him. But the point is that, when I was a kid, there was no conception that that was the colour of things. Everything was black. But, I found it very, what’s the word, dramatic, and striking, and combined with this sort of human warmth, sense of, the whole thing being a family. You sit on a bus and people, in the North in those days, and people would Colin Tudge Page 15 C1672/17 Track 1 just talk to each other, as a matter of course. Of course you did. What else would you do? Not in London obviously. And of course they also had these wonderful accents, where a bus was booz, and all that stuff. [laughs] Anyway, but that’s by the way.

[End of Track 1] Colin Tudge Page 16 C1672/17 Track 2

[Track 2]

Could we then talk some more about your, about Dulwich College?

Ah.

And, perhaps we could start with whatever sense you’ve developed by the time you are this sort of age of your, sense of your own similarities to and differences from your peers if you like, the other, boys, is it only, at Dulwich College?

It was all boys, yeah. Yeah. Well looking back, I suppose we were, there was a group of us there, we were all much of a muchness. I mean, my natural group were sort of, they were clever. [laughs] They wanted to go to university and things. Most of them became medics; I was a biologist. The sensible thing to do if you wanted to be a biologist was to be a medic, and only a very few didn’t. And, they were all a nice lot. I’ve lost touch with all of them, with possible, one or two exceptions. But, that’s it really. [laughs] But they were the biological friends. I also had a friend who was local, called Paul Sidey, who you may conceivably have heard of, who’s a publisher, who died very recently, and he, for one reason or another, remained a lifelong friend, until he died last year. But all the others I’m afraid I lost touch with. Although I tried to keep up with them later. Later I tried to get in touch, I couldn’t find any of them really. That’s it. I mean they were medics, and nice chaps. I suppose the difference was that I didn’t really want to be a medic; that would have been the sensible thing. Because then there’s a career structure and all that. And I had this vague, I had this idea… For a long time I wanted to be a vet, and then when I got within sort of shouting distance of going to veterinary college, or Cambridge, I decided I really wanted to be an intellectual, and I wanted to be a zoologist, I wanted to be a proper scientist. And I was a reasonably good rugby player, I played for the school once, a few times. And, a boxer. I used to do athletics. No, I was fairly ordinary, looking back.

What about in terms of things like, confidence, or…?

No, very lacking in confidence. In the beginning I could be quite amusing, but as they say, Hamlet said of himself, ‘I have of late lost all my mirth.’ I suffered from adolescence, frankly, and at the age of about sixteen a huge gloom descended upon me, which never really dissipated until I was about sixty. [laughs] It’s- and it’s a, it’s compounded of a lack of confidence and a sense of pessimism and all that kind of thing. I don’t know what the origins are. I mean, I think to be kind of, one would have to go to very deep analysis, and a) I’m not sure that I believe deep analyses, because I’m not sure that what they tell you in the end is true, probably not, and only half the truth; and secondly, it would take too long, and be too boring. So, I just say, well that was then, and this is now. I was for a time really quite gloomy, between the, after the age of about sixteen, and I’d been quite a cheery lad up to then mostly, up to about the age of about sixteen, and I lost any sense of what life was supposed to be about and all that kind of stuff. Which stayed with me through university, which is, I never really settled in to Colin Tudge Page 17 C1672/17 Track 2 university, and looking back, I see what fantastic, well I knew at the time, the tremendous opportunity. But, I just wasted the time there really. I went to some good things, but… For example, at university - I know you don’t want to talk about that [yet] - but at university, I spent the first two years doing zoology. I’ll go back a bit. Sorry. I don’t normally talk about this stuff. But I did A Level at the age of about seventeen, A Levels, which many other kids did. However, before… Then, then we go on to do scholarships in those days. However, between… For Cambridge and Oxford. Between A Level and scholarships, I had hepatitis, so I spent the time, most of that, a lot of that term in bed actually, and really quite unwell. And, and it takes you a long time to recover. So, I didn’t… In the scholarship, I got one of these letters which said, ‘Don’t want you this year, but you can try again next year.’ So I stayed on at school for another year. And, second time round I… I did A Level… Did I do A Level again? I don’t think I did. Because I’d already got my A Levels. But I did four terms before doing the scholarship again. And by that time, frankly I could have got a degree in zoology pretty easily, and a degree in botany pretty easily. I mean I was, I was really quite, quite good at it frankly. So by the time I did get to university, and actually went up, I had a scholarship by then, and a good scholarship, in 1962, I was already, the course that we then did was mostly familiar And that’s a bad thing. It means you’re, most of the time you’re not learning anything new. And when you do learn something new, or something new comes up, you sort of think, well I can’t be bothered with that, you know, because I’m, you’ve already got into a lazy mode. And what I wanted to do at university, having, particularly having read Aldous Huxley, was a combination of science, which for me would have been biology, and philosophy. And if I had my time over again, I would say science, philosophy and theology. But at my university, Cambridge, you couldn’t do that, actually. You could do two years of science and then one year of an arts subject if you wanted to, you know, the Tripos system, which in fact is what I did, but you couldn’t read them together. So, I spent my time, two years, being basically an apprentice scientist, and, almost on day one I realised I didn’t really want to be a scientist. So, and there must be loads and loads of people in the world, in fact there are, who are very very interested in science, or in a particular science, in my case biology, other people physics, who don’t really want to be scientists. Of course being very interested in science and being a scientist are not necessarily the same things at all. So, I sort of felt I was wasting my time. And I was obliged to read things like physiology, which was basically for the medics, and I didn’t want to be a medic, or wasn’t a medic. So I thought, that’s a waste of time. So the whole first two years were really quite depressing, and basically a waste, as I said, and I never really got into it. And the last year I read English, which was quite enlightening, and, and I’m very glad I did. Very good. Philosophy in those days at Cambridge, I think would have been a mistake, because it was mainly kind of, Russell, Wittgenstein type science, you know, logic and, language and all that kind of stuff. Which ain’t my thing. Moral philosophy I was interested in.

[07:41] Could we then, could you, before we get to that point then, go back to the beginning of Dulwich College, and tell us how you came to, through that time at Dulwich College, to see yourself as someone who was a scientist who wanted, who was a biologist, I think you said, I think you said, I am a biologist, and who wanted to either be a vet or read zoology at university. Colin Tudge Page 18 C1672/17 Track 2

Mm.

But how did you get to that point from being an eleven-year-old arriving at Dulwich College?

Well that was, those were the ambitions I went up with.

Right.

I mean it was, you know, as I said, a child’s naivety really. Well not naivety really. I mean I had a great love of animals. I thought animals were, you know, I certainly thought animals were the, were equal to human beings, and we should treat them as such. And had this great, you know, hated the, I had lots of pets, hated the idea that animals should suffer, and all that kind of stuff. So it was, it was basically the kind of feeling that many people apply to medicine, but applied to animals. And I just liked them as things, and I liked plants, as I say, got into cacti. So, I was amazed that other people didn’t share this really. I remember the doctor once telling me that, it was a she in fact, that she, she felt sorry for anybody who wasn’t a doctor. [laughs] And I sort of felt bemused by anybody that wasn’t a biologist, and didn’t want to be a vet, and was, you know, cruel to animals and things like that, just seemed outlandish really. But that’s how most people were.

[09:20] We don’t know anything about your pets so far.

Oh no, no. Well, I mean I acquired my first, rabbit I think was the first, at the age of eight. And then I got two more rabbits as time went on. And we always had a cat, we had a series of cats. In South London, a few of them lived to a ripe old age, some of the wily ones, but most of them died fairly early on, for one reason or another. And, we had our cat. I always had fish, and then we had budgies, and then I had hamsters, and… This went on till I was about fifteen I suppose, sixteen, when you sort of grow out of them. And you go to school – you go to university later, you know. But they were a big part of my life at that time, as a, between the ages of about eight and fifteen I suppose, or fourteen.

How did you acquire them?

You buy them from the pet shop. In those days a rabbit, I think the first rabbit I had, which was called Simon, I think it cost three and six, which is approximately eighteen new pence. And you make a hutch out of an orange box, which, there were lots of orange boxes around in those days. And, that’s it. And I used to get food from the greengrocer. Because the greengrocers used to trim their own vegetables, so there were always big piles of cabbages and stuff. And then you got oats from the pet shop. And basically that’s what you fed them on. And then you let them run round the garden. Wasn’t much of a life for a rabbit, but… Oh, we also had tortoises, sorry, I shouldn’t forget the tortoises. And Colin Tudge Page 19 C1672/17 Track 2

I was keen on tortoises until quite late. I would have them now, except that we moved into a place with no garden, so, not suitable. Tortoises are quite fascinating creatures.

Were either of your parents, did they share this?

Animal oriented? Not really, no. I mean, inevitably with children, they become neglectful, because they just are children, and so, my father would finish up lumbered with the job of cleaning the rabbit hutch and things like that, and my mother would finish up with the job of feeding them and things like that. But they, they had no enthusiasm for it. They liked the cats, which in the days after the war were fed on fish heads and things like that. It’s probably the reason why they didn’t live very long.

[11:54] So, in that case, could you tell me about the development of this pre-existing interest in biology at Dulwich College, through the teaching or, or through the, or through clubs, or through things that you did out of school at that time?

Well it was always there. I mean I just remember, we had a small garden, you know, South London suburban garden, bigger than this room obviously, but you know, small, and, but it was full of stuff. And in those days, there was so much wildlife And the garden in the summer, late summer, was full of spiders, which I was quite afraid of, but, they’re lovely things, in their webs. There were hundreds, literally. And underneath the arris rails of the fence, wooden fence, there were thousands, literally thousands, certainly hundreds, many hundreds, of harvestmen. And, if you dug in the garden, which I used to do, because kids do, and plant things, one dig, you’d probably cut a worm in half, and then there were centipedes and millipedes and, red ants, and, all sorts. I mean, just loads. Beetles. And a little game that my brother and I used to play, he’s six years older than me, was to get some fish heads, because we had a lot of, the local fish shop, or some old scrap of stuff like that, stick it in the garden, and sit there with thin sticks. [laughs] It was a gruesome game. And then when the flies landed, the idea was to swat the flies with the stick. Not with anything, you know… So, you had to be a good shot. And one thing I remember… There were swarms, you know, you put it down, I mean in seconds, there they were. And several species, didn’t know what the species were in those days, but, you know, you were aware that there were bluebottles, green bottles, house flies, hag flies, and smaller flies, I can’t remember what they’re called, but there’s a, there are probably at least half a dozen species. And then, didn’t have much of a, didn’t, weren’t keen gardeners, but you know, there would be Michaelmas daisies and stuff. And loads of things. Obviously bees, solitary bees, didn’t know they were solitary bees then. Hoverflies. Loads of butterflies, had a lilac bush. The garden swarmed with stuff. And, it was, you could spend hours out there as a kid, just looking, you know, being a naturalist in fact, without wandering two yards from your front, back garden, back door. And you can’t do that now, it’s gone, it’s gone. People don’t realise the extent to which the whole thing’s been zapped. You can dig, dig half a day sometimes now and you wouldn’t find a worm. They’re just gone. And God knows… It was a combination of things, this. I mean in those days for example there were still loads Colin Tudge Page 20 C1672/17 Track 2 of horses around, in London. The milkman had a horse, the bread van had a horse, coalmen had horses when I was a kid. So there was loads of manure around. Now it’s a huge difference. That meant there were loads of sparrows for a start. Because they go for the seeds. But also, it meant that people used to stick it on their garden, so, you know, the soils were organically rich. And also, there were no, there were no, there were virtually no pesticides. I mean, they came later really. DTD already existed, but it wasn’t sort of, you know, thrown on by the ton as it was later. So, there was, ten times as much stuff as now. And that’s in my lifetime. And in eras before that there was more. [15:28] I’ll digress if you like. Philip Gosse, do you know Philip Gosse, great zoologist, and very religious man, of the mid-nineteenth century, was a great marine biologist, and he did terrific stuff on rock pools, and a great painter of rock pools. And his son, Edmund Gosse, used to go out with him in the 1850s and ’60s. Edmund wrote a biography of his father and his childhood reminiscences, round about the beginning, well the beginning of the twentieth century, round about 1906, and he said in 1906, ‘If my father could see the rock pools now, he would be appalled,’ compared to what it was in the mid- nineteenth century. Well now… I mean I remember when rock pools still had things in them; you almost, you didn’t expect to see starfish but you did expect to see crabs and a great deal of other things. Nowadays, you go to any ordinary beach around England, look in a rock pool, you’ll be lucky to see anything. And I was in, we were in Sardinia a few years ago, and there was nothing. You know, snorkelling, there was nothing. I saw one octopus and a few fish. And I remember in my lifetime, fifty years ago, even thirty years ago, every time you went out you saw something new, something different, in England. So the loss has been fantastic. But I grew up, although I was in South London, and it was a barren place, I grew up surrounded by, if you cared to look, loads and loads of strange, fascinating creatures. And it just always was with me, from the very earliest, I remember. I remember at the age, it didn’t strike me that I was different, but I remember at the age of seven, at school, primary school, and one of my teachers… and I put something on the nature table or something, or, referred to something, she said, ‘Ah yes, here’s our nature boy.’ It never occurred to me that was the case, I thought everyone was the same. [laughs] But it was there. So, I can’t really say when it grew. But when, at Dulwich, I wanted from the outset to do biology, that was what I, and you specialised very young, so you did it from the age of thirteen, as a sort of major thing. And they were very inspiring teachers at Dulwich. I’ve mentioned Brian Jones. I don’t know whether you’ve got others, but Doug Hillier, Colin Stoneman, who was a very good theorist on evolutionary stuff, I think he’s still around, and a chap called Stanley Cole, who did sort of physiological type things. But it was a very very good team, very inspiring. Two of them actually were really quite religious, as a matter of interest, Brian Jones, who was a sort of conventional Christian, and Doug Hiller, who was a sort of Welsh Nonconformist.

[18:18] How was that, how was the fact that they were Christians apparent, how did that, how-?

Colin Tudge Page 21 C1672/17 Track 2

Oh well, Doug used to talk about it all the time. He took, he took, on Friday afternoons he would have… He wasn’t the official RI teacher, but he would focus on, he would actually give specific lessons. Brian I think sang in the choir, but he was always at chapel and that kind of stuff: not always at chapel, but you know, he was a Christian gentleman.

Did they ever talk about faith within science?

Within science specifically. I don’t remember them doing that, no, funnily enough. They talked about it being, you know, self-evident – well, Brian didn’t talk about it at all much, but Doug used to talk about, you know, it’s just obvious to him that the place had a bind behind it and all that kind of stuff.

What… Do you have sort of, striking memories within that sort of mass of biology teaching of practical work, or of particular concepts learnt? I realise this is a bit of a longshot, it’s quite a long time, and you’ve learnt a lot since, but, are there particular things you remember doing and learning there?

Well, I mean, I was fairly, I mean looking back, I should have probably been a botanist rather than a zoologist, because I was very struck by the beauty and the variety of plants, I mean, subliminally as it were. I remember actually a boy that we, a boy I was at school with, slightly older, just pointing out for example, in a daisy, you know, it’s a composite flower. Used to be called Compositae, now called Asteraceae. But anyway, he just pointed out that each of the bits in the middle was an individual flower. So the flower is actually made up of maybe hundreds of individual flowers. And I never knew that before. And that struck me as being a sort of, what an incredible insight. And then, we were very well taught, I mean sort of, at O Level and after O Level we, we majored as they say, or homed in pretty firmly, on Mendel. And, also on Darwin, you know. One very striking thing, yeah, very striking thing, is that I was in the lower sixth form in 1959; 1959 was the anniversary of Origin of Species, the centenary. And the natural History Museum, from which we weren’t far, in London, oh it was a short train ride, had that brilliant exhibition, centenary exhibition, of that. And it was a kind of old-fashioned exhibition. You know, like, instead of sort of doing fancy diagrams and all that stuff, there were just loads of good stuff, real butterflies and real things. And it was done by a chap, oh what was his name? I think it was Le Gros Clark, a director at the time. It may… No, Gavin de Beer, Gavin de Beer. And he organised this exhibition, and it was brilliant. It just looked at evolutionary theory, from all angles, as then known. And, Doug Hillier said, ‘Look, go to this exhibition, and just write down what it says on the labels. Don’t do any… You will look at it and write it down.’ And I very conscientiously copied out all the labels, and there were hundreds of them – no, not hundreds, but lots. And that exhibition, that single exhibition, kind of, stood me in good stead ever since. I don’t know if you know that bloke, I don’t like him at all, but, David what’s his name, who does the Tudors on the television.

Starkey?

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Starkey. I really don’t like the man. Nothing to do with this interview. But anyway, he said he wrote an essay on the Tudors at the age of eighteen, at university, and he said he’s been living on it ever since. One honest thing that he did say. And I know the feeling, if you know what I mean. [laughs] Peter Cook incidentally wrote the Tarzan sketch, you know the one-legged Tarzan, at the age of eighteen. And he said, [laughs] he never said anything better. So that was a pivotal moment, doing that exhibition. And then, in my very last year at university, 19… at school, I think 1960, Scientific American did a, a brilliant issue, September 1960, devoted… Scientific American in those days was a very substantial magazine. And this was a brilliant explanation of everything that was then known about DNA. So it had all the sort of, Crick and Watson stuff, but then it had the later stuff about switching on and switching off of genes. Who was that? Monod. And, yeah, that was about it, that was about as far as I’ve got. It then struck me round about my, well 1960, struck me that, and it’s clear, everyone knows it now, but, you know, you could put Darwinian natural selection together with Mandelian genetics, together with the modern biology, and you’ve got the whole of, basically the modern, the modern synthesis. It’s there, that’s it. And, I wrote a couple of books along these lines later. But, that was, that was, that had the force of revelation. That, however, although at the time I was reading sort of, stuff of a kind of metaphysical, spiritual type nature, including Arthur Koestler’s Lotus and the Robot, about Buddhism and modern life and things like that, and also tried to read Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, which is actually a very difficult read, didn’t get very far with it. My one failure with, with Huxley. But although I was reading that, nevertheless, the Darwinian-Mendelian, Crick and Watson DNA, sort of, what do you call it, synthesis, well the modern synthesis in fact, was such a powerful, complete, persuasive exposition, that there didn’t seem to me any room for anything else. That was it. And it’s the classic thing, that, you know, scientific descriptions can be so good and sharp, and you say, well, why bother with anything else? And it’s not a sense in a sense of rejecting anything else; it’s a sense, sense that the story is already complete, without adding anything to it. And so, for a time, when I was at university, although I was still interested, you know, still reading people like, so on, so on, there wasn’t much around that you really wanted to read, that I knew of, I nevertheless considered myself to be an atheist at university. And, I shared, several of the guys who were the medics at university, who I associated with because our courses overlapped, and were in my college, were also quite strong Christians. Medicine, doctors are often quite strong Christians, as you know. But I sort of, treated them with great disdain, idiots basically. But, so I, it was another serious oversight. Although I think, to be fair to me, they were kind of, old-fashioned Christians as opposed to, they weren’t theologians if you know what I mean. Oh they might have been, I didn’t probe deeply enough. Anyway, sorry, so, yes, there were then at university, at school, these revelatory moments. Definitely.

[26:11] Was there anything else that contributed to your atheism by the time you go up to university, other than this evolutionary biological revelation?

Colin Tudge Page 23 C1672/17 Track 2

Well, there was a general sense. I mean the point is, I think the mood of the early 1960s was, it was basically atheistic. It was materialist. I think it was part of the post-war, you know, Harold Wilson, white heat of technology. It was all part of it. So there was a sense, a very strong sense, which of course is still around, and always has been around with some people, that religion belongs to the past, and it’s old-fashioned and all that. And so… And, I had some arty friends, including my friend Paul Sidey, who I mentioned him, you know, some literary chaps, and that was basically, they basically had the same attitude. So that the kind of religiosity of, I don’t know, seventeenth century poets, or, nineteen, was considered to be, you know, just a kind of quaint aspect of their lives which no doubt they would have grown out of had they lived a bit later. So there was this, yeah, there was this feeling that it was done, anachronistic. Which of course many people are still writing about and still dining out on. And I think Dawkins is probably not writing as much about it as he did, but, and that was basically his thesis. And, and Lewis Wolpert sort of, done and dusted. I don’t have a lot of respect for Lewis Wolpert as an intellectual, I think he’s overrated by some people. Actually, I do happen to know that Jonathan Miller said he was the stupidest man he had ever met. [laughs] But I don’t want to go into that. Miller was also of course an atheist. But Miller, Miller got it seriously wrong. I mean, for example, he did a wholes series of programmes, Jonathan Miller. I hope you’re not a great fan of Lewis Wolpert incidentally.

It doesn’t matter, either way.

[laughs] I don’t dislike the man, I’ve met him quite a few times, but I think he just gets things seriously wrong. But… Where was I up to? Jonathan Miller, for example, did this big series on television about being an atheist, and I remember him once looking at a, I can’t remember who the painter was, but it was a sort of fifteenth-century painting. And, it was a late mediaeval rather than sort of, Renaissance painting. And it was a picture of the cosmos, you know, with, human beings in the middle and all that stuff, and… And he turned to the camera and he said, ‘I think this shows just how closed the mediaeval mind was.’ And I thought that was a profoundly ignorant statement. I mean anybody who knows anything mediaeval philosophy, thinking, they were the most incredibly sort of, outward-looking people. They were always asking, what is true? They were all asking, how do we know what’s true? So, you know, these are the profound questions that everybody should be asking. So they were not, it was the opposite. And then actually it was the scientists who later came along and said, we understand that, we understand that, who are in fact the people with, I would say with the closed minds if anybody. And he also turned to the camera, he also said at one point, with a chortle, Jonathan Miller type chortle, you know, ‘We’re told that in order to become religious you have to make a leap of faith.’ And he said, ‘Nobody ever ways what, what athletic training you should undertake in order to make this leap. [chortles]’ And I thought, that’s not wright, you know. And of course, one way, one of several ways in which it’s not right is that if you actually look at people who did become seriously religious, including C S Lewis, and Bede Griffiths, and Saint Augustine, it took them years, you know, they went for years, all of them, of saying, you know, being serious atheists, and over about a decade it began to creep up on them that actually they’d probably missed something. And then in the Colin Tudge Page 24 C1672/17 Track 2 end they said, well, sort of, in a sense they said to hell with it, I mean, let’s go with them. But nothing like a leap. And anyway, faith, you know, a very strange word. But we could, we’ll probably come on to that I guess. But that was a little diversion. But that was the answer to your question, I think.

[30:42] It was, thank you. Can you tell me more, then, about your experience of and perhaps insight into the reasons for the, the depression that you say hit at around this time, or slightly earlier, when you were sixteen I think?

Ah, yes. I think there are things I don’t really want to talk about much. And I think it was a whole mixture of things, like growing up, you know, adolescence, it’s very difficult for, it strikes some people harder than others, but it strikes most people as being quite hard. And the transition from being a child to being, not exactly an adult, I don’t know when you become an adult, I mean, I don’t feel I’m adult yet, but, you know, to… but you know what I mean, is actually quite difficult, and a whole new perspective on life. And that was compounded by… Actually, social issues played a big part, because I became aware that our lower middle class status was actually an inferior status, and I’m ashamed of this, but in a sense I’m not, because that’s the way it was. Other people say the same thing, you know, Steve Coogan the other day gave a lecture in which he, in Oxford, in which he said exactly the same thing. And I think James Lovelock as well. People who were born in that social class, working class, lower middle class, become aware at a certain stage of their life that there are other people who are kind of, you know, materially and, in terms of what one might call sophistication, some leaves ahead of them, and, and they have a much better time. You know, we had a week in Littlehampton, which I thoroughly enjoyed as a child, but you know, you realise that your friends who were the sons and daughters of, mainly the sons of Dulwich, obviously, of, you know, professors and people like that, would actually spend three weeks in France for example, which in my day was a fantastically exotic thing to do. And, it’s that type of thing. And, so you become aware that you belong to this inferior stratum. And the same thing happens to, I think there’s a parallel here with, with, you know, indigenous tribes, who have their gods, and they have, everything’s sewn up, they know where they are, they know who they are in society, and then along come de white men with their guns and their axes and their music and, and suddenly they realise they belong to some primitive, what they’ve been doing, and the people they thought were gods and chiefs are actually sort of, feet of clay, all that kind of stuff, or indeed non-existent. And they completely lose their sense of, you know, identity or whatever. It’s not the right way to put it. They feel they use a sense that they are serious human beings. I mean it’s what happened to Australian Aborigines for example, they completely lost heart basically. So I think it was that, compounded with the business of transition from childhood to adulthood and all that goes with that, combined with a sense of not… You know, there’s a vague sense, well not vague sense, but a sense of wanting to be a, I wanted to be a scholar really, but also, a very strong feeling of, so what? I remember having a very good conversation with a friend of mine called Peter Challen, who became a doctor, must be a doctor now, he’s probably retired by now, but he was a good chap, and saying, I just, you know, ‘I just don’t see the point of doing anything,’ you know. Colin Tudge Page 25 C1672/17 Track 2

So what? And he quoted Thomas Gray, you know, that line, ‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave.’ And it’s this kind of, I suppose, you might call it an existential crisis, but you know, the whole thing seems to be utterly pointless, so why bother to do anything? And that came over me very very very strongly. [34:35] On the more positive side, I’ll say, there was a John Steinbeck fan. I had two great heroes, three great heroes. One was Steinbeck, one was Darwin, who I just thought was a sort of, wonderful chap, and one was Aldous Huxley, as I said. Well the thing about Darwin, he was the complete opposite of, say, me. I mean he was upper middle class, very very rich, as you probably know, and, a gentleman, and a profound intellectual, a deep thinker throughout his life, and, but I admired him, I thought, and how wonderful to be, you know, a person of independent means. Incidentally, as a kid, you know, I used to read, for example, a small kid, used to read, for example, Rupert Bear. This is important for me. There was a scientist in Rupert Bear known as the Professor, and he lived in a castle, and he did experiments. And it was very interesting, he was a friend of Pong Ping, who was a, who was a Pekingese. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. [laughs] But the real point about him was that, he lived in a castle, he did experiments, and I never asked the question, how on earth did he make a living? Because the assumption was, if you’re a small kid, that you do something like being a scientist, and you just get paid, I mean, you know, or, there’s money. And it wasn’t until I got to university, really, that I began to realise that, nobody, unless you’re born rich like Darwin, money isn’t there, you have to earn it, you have to do something, be a professional. And a scientist didn’t mean sitting around thinking and inventing stuff; it actually meant plugging yourself into a system. And that I found very chastening and shocking, rather awful. Anyway, Darwin was my great hero as the scholar, and as the independent scholar, the independent one. Sorry, just to divert too. If you read boys’ literature from the 1920s and ’30s, which we inherited sort of, in the ’50s, was still going, people would, like detectives, you know, and they would somehow have independent means, somehow they were just able to do what they wanted to do. And nobody questioned, you know, how they earned a living or anything like that, they just… And, that’s how I felt life was. And then you find it isn’t, and it’s very annoying. So he was that. Another great hero was, as I say, Huxley, done him, was, Steinbeck. Well one of the great characters in… Now I don’t know if you a book called Cannery Row, and another book, followed that, called Sweet Thursday. Anyway, it contains a whole number of characters called Mack and the boys. And Mack is basically a bum, he’s a wastrel. The whole thing is set, I think, in the Thirties. It was one side of the war or the other, I think, but I think Thirties. Depression. So these guys live on nothing. They live in Monterey, California, and weather’s not a problem. But they live in a disused warehouse, and they just hang out, and they drink whisky of a kind known as Old Tennis Shoes. And their great mate is a guy called Doc Holliday, who’s a marine biologist. Anyway, the point about Mack and the boys is that they have a good life, but they do absolutely nothing. They just sit around and drink whisky, and they go to the Flophouse every now and again, and they go and mess up their mate Doc Holliday’s life and so on. And he was a sort of hero, because he was a kind of guy who just lived for the sake of being alive, you know, very much a hippy existence. So, I admired him as well, as being a guy who just lived on nothing basically. So there was this dichotomy between Darwin on the one hand Colin Tudge Page 26 C1672/17 Track 2 and him on the other. Plus this, well this Huxley aspiration to be a scholar. Plus I think the kind of Orwell awareness of social injustice and all those kind of things. Strange mixture, which has stayed with me really.

[38:38] Who could you, who did you talk to about these feelings?

Well I had a few mates. Peter Challen who I’ve mentioned. Another guy called David Lieberman, who was a, he also became a doctor. Not many people, not many people. Just a few friends really. Almost nobody.

Parents and siblings, could you talk…?

No no no, not about any of that stuff. Not at all.

Your siblings, what did they… You say you were the first in your family to go to university. What did they, what were they, what were their, in what direction were their lives going, very different?

Well, my brother was six years older than me. Life was very different. So he left school in 1954, and in those days going to university was quite a rare thing, I mean it’s common as, everyone does it now, but, not then. And so the idea was, he passed his, some O Levels, as they were, and he went on to be apprenticed to a heating, engineering company, and became… That was, that was a good career move, you know, you became professional at something and then you went into a company. Good. Very traditional. And then you went into the Army for National Service, and, that was it. And he stayed in that for the rest of his life. Good career. Richer than me. And, you know, good things. And my sister, who left school about 1951 I suppose, ’50, well she, she was just very unfortunate. She’s actually very intelligent, but, the war messed her up. So she went to a very ordinary, what would now be called a sink school actually, a second mod. And then came out at the age of, I don’t know, sixteen, and learnt how to type, and, you know, became a, went into an office. Got married very young, nineteen or something like that, which was standard. If you got to twenty or so, you were possibly on the shelf. And, that was it, three children. She’s still alive, eighty-something now. But it was a, it was a, there were no careers there, well not for her. But that’s the way life was, that’s what happened to women.

And what did your parents say about your decision to go to university, and what you were doing? What was your father’s view of that, and what was your mother’s view of that?

Well they were always very supportive. Because they always wanted, the boys in particular… It was always considered in those days that the girls get a job as a secretary or as a, possibly as a nurse, possibly as a schoolteacher, and then got married, and that was, that was the end of it. And it wasn’t considered a good thing for housewives to work, because the husband should be able to support them. Colin Tudge Page 27 C1672/17 Track 2

All that kind of stuff. This was Fifties. Different age. Victorian rather than modern. And… But my brother and I they wanted to get on. Getting on really meant, having a secure job and a nice house and, you know, raising children and things like that. My parents, well my father was a musician, my grandfather a musician, there were lots of musicians knocking around the family. I remember my grandfather, my grandfather advising me to learn how to play the piano better. So, of course he said, musicians, you’re never short of a pint if you’re a musician, was his expression. [laughs] You can go into a pub and you play a tune and somebody will buy you a pint, and that was… That was my grandfather rather than my father. Anyway, but the point is… But, I remember when I got my scholarship to Cambridge, which was, which was no mean thing, but, in a sense, nobody, nobody cared, I mean it was just another… I mean they were very glad, you know, nice. But it wasn’t kind of, there was no putting out of buntings and stuff. I was quite disappointed, I thought somebody ought to be more impressed than they seemed to be. One or two of my uncles were reasonably impressed. That was the generation, all very bright, my uncles, my mother’s brothers. But, university wasn’t something you went to, you know, it was expensive. And then the war came. So they all had, with one exception, had commissions in the war, and they all did well. One of them became a naval adjutant. But then after that, all back into, well, basically rather mundane jobs, except for one who became a publisher. But you see what I mean, it was a, it was a generation that didn’t aspire, because it was, the possibilities weren’t there. And I just happened to be the one who came along at a time when there were opportunities, for the kind of reasons I’ve said.

[43:40] In the Part I of the degree, so for the first two years, leaving aside what you said about the fact that you now think you didn’t make the most of the time for various reasons, what did you do outside of zoology at university over this period?

Well I did read a few books, but in a random sort of a way. There were whole things I should… I mean, I think I probably went to the wrong university, because I, and Cambridge is wonderful, so I’m very pleased in one sense that I went to Cambridge. On the other hand, there were universities I think where one could have combined subjects in the way that I wanted to do, and still think it’s necessary. For example, Brighton – Sussex, not Brighton, Sussex, was starting up then, I think I could have done a broader course there. Warwick was then new, I think I could have done stuff there. And I didn’t even look at the others, but maybe Edinburgh, I don’t know. So I think it was wrong because it was this very very traditional tramline type. You know, philosophy and natural sciences were different schools. Philosophy was called moral sciences and that was that school, and theology was another school. So no possibility at all of combination. So, what I should have done… Well there were other people there who were passing through. For example, at the time F R Leavis was still around, he was getting old but he was still around. If I had known then what I know now, I’d have spent, I’d have gone to see Leavis, even though I wasn’t in his faculty, you can go where you like. Raymond Williams was still there, I should have spent time sussing him out. For a time when I was there, C S Lewis came up from Oxford; should have spent time with him. And, Great St Mary’s, the big university church, there were Colin Tudge Page 28 C1672/17 Track 2 some serious clerics there, including I think Hugh, I think Hugh Montefiore was there. And if I’d sort of had any awareness, I would have spent much more time in that kind of thing. As it was, I just knocked around with some friends, including Paul Sidey who I mentioned, and, sat in pubs, and went to the cinema, and, all sort of stuff like that. Wasted time. And I was very bored with the course. I still liked zoology but I was, I was incredibly bored by the biochemistry and the physiology. And never really got into the experimental psychology, it wasn’t, it wasn’t what I meant by psychology, you know what I mean? Because it was behaviourism, all that stuff. Rats. You weren’t allowed to say that animals think. Certainly weren’t allowed to say that they feel, that got in the way of the purity of the thing. So you started with the premise that the animal was a machine and then you tried to find out how much you could find out about it on that premise. Very tedious. But it needn’t have… I think it was always bound to be not my kind of university, but it needn’t have been. I could have done other things there, lots of other things.

[46:49] What do you remember of direct discussion of relations between science and religion, for example in science classes, tutorials, and so on, and also, of sort of, the more general interest or discussion of it?

Yes. Well apart from Doug Hillier at school, who, as I say, was the biologist who did this stuff, but he was very much Welsh chapel. So he had a very particular view of Christianity. Which in a sense ran parallel with his biology, so there wasn’t a great feeling of one to the other. [pause] Nothing at all really. And, the first person who, who really for me began to reopen, or, awaken the dialogue that I should have been having, if you see what I mean, was John Hedley Brooke, who I don’t think I read until about, the early Nineties I think, late as that. Well, Arthur Koestler to an extent, but you know. Koestler, like, when I say like me… I mention Koestler in particular because my wife actually worked for Koestler for several years. But one point about him is that, he was very very interested in religion, because, but with… and he had respect for it, but without ever really getting to grips with it. [laughs] Never really knew what it was. Always quite bemused I think. Which is an interesting position. And of course enormous intelligence, and, great litterateur, said intelligent things about it, but never really got to grips. And the first one I think, for me, who did was, John Hedley Brooke. So never really had proper discussions about it. And then, I don’t remember. I got to know Rupert Sheldrake in the early Eighties, because he was a scientist, and, basically it’s been Hedley Brooke and then Rupert Sheldrake, this guy… well Goswami, and things like that, we’ll mention them. And there are some chaps at Oxford. For example, when we first moved up to Oxford, this was about fifteen years ago, my wife already knew a chap called John Lennox, who is Professor of Maths, an Irishman, and he was also a serious evangelical Christian, and a chap called Paul and his wife Chris Wordsworth, who was a professor of rheumatology, who was also a serious Christian. So I had some very nice conversations with those. But that’s recent.

[49:38] Who were your tutors and lecturers in zoology in the first two years? Colin Tudge Page 29 C1672/17 Track 2

In my first two years. Well the only one I – no, two. The one who was in my college was Richard Skaer, spelt s-k-a-e-r, who is basically a cell biologist. And I think, he’s probably still around. I met him, I met him a few times, a few years ago. He’s a very nice guy, is all I can say about him. He’s a good zoologist, nice guy. And, a chap, another one that I sort of dug out of the woodwork really was, I mean, was Hugh Cott, c-o-t-t, who was an old classical zoologist who, who talked about camouflage. And he, he claimed to have lost an entire tank regiment in the Second World War because the camouflage was so well done he couldn’t find them. But that may have been a joke. [laughs]

[50:38] Thank you. And now could you tell me about the third, English, the third year, the English?

Well I, frankly, I knew I didn’t want to be a scientist. I had one year to go. What am I going to do? You’ve got to do a Part II. And frankly, it was a combination, several of my friends, who I knew well, who were my best friends really, that year, were reading English, and they seemed to have a terrific time. And the scientists at university, at Cambridge, were supposed to work all the hours that God made, with practicals every day and all that stuff. Excuse me. [blowing nose] So it was, I don’t know, might be, certainly more than thirty hours a week, I mean really hard, from lecture to lecture to practical and so on. And if you don’t particular want to do it, it’s, it’s, well it’s soul-destroying. Whereas, as far as I can see, the people who did English simply lay around and went punting and stuff like that. That was a huge attraction. But also, there was a feeling that, at university, frankly, apart… And I suppose I polished up my knowledge of biology a bit. But I didn’t really learn anything. I felt. You know, I felt seriously uneducated, and that I didn’t know… I wanted to be an Aldous Huxley, and I was, didn’t know anything, you know, really. So I thought English would be a kind of, easy way of getting an introduction to lots of different things. Which in fact it was. I mean there’s a book lying there, John Clare, which I’ve just got hold of. Well I was introduced to John Clare at Cambridge by a supervisor at the time who was a great fan, when Clare was very much out of fashion. He’s becoming quite well known again now. So I was introduced to a whole lot of people I wouldn’t otherwise have got to know. And also, there was something called, I think… What was it called? I think, there was a course in English, it was something, something to do with morality, the moralists, I think it was, who introduced you to people like Hobbes and, and so on, who you, you ought to know about, but I hadn’t spent any time with. So that was a, a mini-introduction to, to philosophy. And it also included, you know, they were quite keen on the Greeks, so, Sophocles, Aeschylus, et cetera.

Did you get a sense in that third year of how scientists were viewed by the people you were joining? You’ve told us about your view of the, of the English students from the point of view of a scientist.

Mm.

You saw them having a good time. Did you get a sense of how they viewed the scientists? Colin Tudge Page 30 C1672/17 Track 2

Yeah. Basically with disdain. Scientists, well certainly among my friends, Paul and his, you know, other people, Robert Raison, Tony Gooch, seemed on the whole to regard science with a certain amount of bemusement, or, well basically with contempt. They weren’t themselves religious in any way, but they sort of had a sense that life was about aesthetics and, whereas the scientists were supposed to be the buttoned-down, you know, materialist. Which I might say in those days they were. I mean it was this terrible kind of, as I say, psychology of animals meant behaviourism. And, it was, it was assumed that if you did enough physiology you’d have an exhaustive knowledge of how the human body works, and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, physics seemed to be largely sewn up as well, up to a point. So it did seem as if there was this huge dichotomy. And, they regarded each other I think with a certain amount of mutual disdain. And this of course accounts for the fact that C P Snow, who as far as I can see was, well frankly entirely mediocre, achieved such fame. Because he actually aspired to have a foot, as they say, in both camps. And another guy I’m reading, he’s not on there at the moment, but, I’m now reading Leavis again, and Leavis of course had this deep disdain for Snow, and said, for example, about Snow’s aspirations as a novelist, not only does he write bad novels, he doesn’t know what a novel is. [laughs] So it was… Anyway so, it was, mutual misunderstanding, and mutual distrust and mutual disdain basically. Except for a few people, and one of whom spanned the, whatever you call it, you know, the Two Cultures, was, was a great hero of mine, I can add him to my list of heroes if you like, but not, probably not quite, Peter Medawar, Sir Peter Medawar, you’ve heard of him?

Mhm.

I’m sure you have. Yes. But he, he’s another… I did actually speak to him once, but he’s another guy I regret not spending time with. But he is dead, otherwise he’d have been jolly good for your series. But he, for example, was one of the first people who, of the modern kind, who got seriously into the philosophy of Karl Popper, and he wrote this wonderful book called The Art of the Soluble, I don’t know if you know that book. And that, this expression, the art of the soluble, actually is brilliant, and it summarises what science is. Because the point about scientists is that they deal with problems that they think, or they know, they’ve got a reasonable chance of answering within the time available with the resources available. It’s a very pragmatic approach. And so they confine themselves, well they confine themselves basically to, mostly to materialist problems, because, you can deal with that, you can measure, et cetera. The mistake that people like Dawkins make, and Atkins, very much, is to say that, because I choose to discuss this, and I can give such a beautifully complete looking, seamless account of how the world is, therefore there is nothing else. And some people, I’ve met lots of scientists who say, ‘Well I don’t necessarily say there is nothing else. I’m just saying, there’s nothing else worth looking at.’ And some say, ‘Well, there might be something else worth looking at, but I haven’t got time, so I’m not going to bother with it.’ But others, including Atkins, just say, ‘Well, there isn’t anything else, that’s it,’ that’s dogmatic. But of course, that’s, that is just a piece of dogmatism. And it’s an entire non sequitur. You can’t say because I choose to study the art of the, Colin Tudge Page 31 C1672/17 Track 2 study what is soluble, that therefore what is insoluble is a meaningless, stuff. So… What was the question?

[57:13] We were… This is all in regard to the third year English degree.

Oh third year English. Yeah.

And, the view that, the view that scientists had of the arts and arts had of science. Oh yeah. Yeah, exactly, yeah yeah. Yeah, yeah. But at the same time, I find it very very interesting that all these characters, arty characters, that I knew, including the people who were very interested in Romantic literature, because Romantics, the Romantics were sort of, the groups of people we did, so I was introduced to, Coleridge in particular, and John Clare, was, so none of them were religious. None of the students were religious, or the tutors. Whereas of course if you look at the Romantic poets, well, they have an enormous dichotomy as well. I mean, I think Byron was pretty atheistic. Shelley was thrown out for being an atheist, although he later said, ‘I think I could be a cleric.’ And then, Thomas Love Peacock said, ‘No you couldn’t, you’re entirely unsuited, and you don’t believe in any of that metaphysical stuff.’ And he said, ‘No I don’t believe in any of that, but, clerics do a hell of a lot of good, they’re just nice people, and it would be nice to run a…’ Anyway. The point is, he had an ambivalent attitude. But Coleridge wrestled all his life, and he at one point almost became a cleric, with the relationship between what one might call the sort of, romantic view of nature, in an emotional sense, and a sort of metaphysical view of nature, that actually, that is generated by an embedded mind and consciousness and so on. So… And it is very interesting, I think, that a lot of Romantic literature reads like religious literature, even though the writer is himself, professes to be, an atheist. And vice versa really, but, particularly that. So, yah, so I got the beginning of that idea through university.

[59:15] Could you take us on from the end of the degree then, or, or rather, getting towards the end of that third year.

Mm.

What decisions were you making about what to do next?

Well. I knew I’d given up on being a professional scientist. I still harboured some thoughts about being an academic. And at one point after university I felt, I should do an MSc, and get back into science. And I did, I’m actually very ashamed to say at this stage, I did get a place on a course at Southampton University to read for an MSc in marine biology. And I, I failed to get… I didn’t… I didn’t apply for a grant. Probably could have got a grant in those days, but, it never occurred to me that I needed to do it, because, previously, they’d just come through the post basically. And, so I, although I got onto the Colin Tudge Page 32 C1672/17 Track 2 course, I didn’t do the course. So that basically was the end of my aspirations to be any kind of a research scientist, more or less the end anyway. I still later used to look in ads in New Scientist and say, you know, should I become a research assistant or so on, but never, never really serious. And I’d sort of, blown medicine, because I never really got into it. So there were two kind of obvious options. One was to be a schoolteacher, which I did seriously toy with. In those days, you didn’t have to have all these sort of, great degrees and so on, that what’s his name insisted on, that little bloke, what’s his name? The last Secretary of State…

Oh Gove.

Yeah. [laughs] Anyway. The point is, I could have, that was an option. And at one point, a bit later, I thought of going to York to do a one-year teaching diploma, but, it wasn’t financially possible by then. Anyway, so, I toyed with being a schoolteacher, and did actually spend a little time doing it. But, the other option was publishing. Because my uncle had been a publisher. And I also thought at the back of my mind, wouldn’t it be great to be a journalist, because, you know, or a writer. But I always thought, well that’s more or less impossible. I mean, actually having your name in print, I mean it doesn’t, you know, it wasn’t something that I’d ever thought about really. You got your name in print in the local paper when I was a kid if you won the 100 yards at primary school, but that was, that was as high as the aspiration went. One point about being lower middle class, or in my particular family, was, your aspirations are very very low. So when I first thought about science… I mean I’ve mentioned the Rupert Bear fantasy scientist, but the other feeling was that if you’re a scientist, that you would in effect only be a lab technician, and you would be assisting the greats but you wouldn’t be among the greats yourself. And you deferred to the people who were actually the research scientists, and all that kind of stuff. So the aspirations were always, always quite low. So the idea that one could in fact be a sort of, a journalist, or a writer, and get your name in print, was, really quite, you know, off the agenda, off, off the radar, if you see what I mean, at first. But anyway, I thought, wouldn’t it fun. So I tried to get a job in publishing. [phone ringing] No, Ruth will get that. Anyway. So I thought, publishing would be good. So I did write to one or two academic publishers, like Heinemann and so on. But, then, in the paper that I was reading, you know, they used to have job columns in the paper, in the Times I think probably was, there was a new magazine starting up called World Medicine, which was, in those days there were lots of publications around that were freebies, paid for by pharmacological advertising, pharmaceutical advertising. And, yeah, so, and it said, editorial assistant needed, editorial assistant being absolutely the bottom rung. And I thought… For this new magazine called World Medicine. And I thought, well I haven’t got a hope, you know, but I do know a bit about physiology and, you know, I… Writing was always one of my things. I didn’t say that but, at primary school I used to write jolly good essays. And I used to come top in English at Dulwich, that was the other thing. I used to come, quite regularly I came top in biology and top in English, all the way through. Not all the way through but certainly, lots of years. Definitely my thing. So I thought, well I like, I do like writing, as a hobby. So, I thought, I applied, anyway, I got the job. [1:04:01] Colin Tudge Page 33 C1672/17 Track 2

The editor was a man called Donald Gould, who was again a hugely important figure in my life, and again, one of the nicest people I’ve met. And, and he sort of took me under his wing, even though I was pretty useless frankly. [laughs] And we remained friends until he died a few years ago at eighty- something. I’m still in touch, roughly, with his daughter, called Polly. And he gave me this job, so I got the job in World Medicine, and I started writing articles. I did that for a few years. And then… Until about 1970. I wrote an article on brucellosis. I don’t know if you know brucellosis. It’s a disease that, the actual bacterium is a microbacterium, which means it’s related to TB and leprosy, and it’s a sort of chronic disease. It was very important among cattle, because it causes abortion in cattle. It’s got other effects, but that was the main thing. But, it got into humans. It didn’t like being in humans, I mean it didn’t flourish in humans, but it made them very ill. So it was very very common among vets, in fact it was almost ubiquitous among vets. And, it was a, it was a serious human disease. Well it didn’t cause abortion, but it caused arthritis and things like that. So, when I was at World Medicine I wrote a feature about brucellosis, and in order to do this I got in touch with Farmers’ Weekly. World Medicine was based in London, in Leicester Square, and Farmers’ Weekly was based in Fleet Street in those days. So it was just down the road. And I knew that they had, well I didn’t know that, but, there had recently been a big outbreak of brucellosis among cattle in Britain, late Sixties, and, so they knew something about brucellosis. So I went there to see what they had written about brucellosis. You didn’t have Google in those days, all that stuff. And I thought, I really would like to work for this place. Because it just seemed very nice. And I was very interested in agriculture. So I wrote to the editor and said, ‘Are there any jobs?’ And he said, ‘No, not at the moment, but we’ll keep you in mind.’ And about two weeks later he said, ‘Yes, well we have got a job actually, just come up.’ So, I went along and I got the job at Farmers’ Weekly I was there for about three years, two and a half years. And it was, I was a fool to leave. I don’t know why I left. But it was one of the best periods of my life as a journalist. Just travelling the country and looking at farms, and it was a real eye-opener. And it was then when I was first introduced to the Agricultural and Food Research Council, and got to know, I got to know some of the scientists very well as well as looking at the research. One of whom was a chap called Bob Orskov, o-r-s-k-o-v, E R Orskov, who first introduced me to the subtleties of ruminant nutrition. And he’s still a good friend. And, yeah, that’s when I got seriously interested and involved. [1:07:14] Then, I don’t know, I left Farmers’ Weekly for no particular reason. Stupidity. And I mucked about for a bit, and I worked for New Scientist part-time for a bit. And then I went back to World Medicine for another, five or six years, because I didn’t know what else to do frankly. Anyway, that’s, that’s some… I’m running ahead. That takes us to about 1980. No, to, that takes us to about 1985. No it doesn’t. Takes us to about 1980, something like that, yeah.

[End of Track 2] Colin Tudge Page 34 C1672/17 Track 3

[Track 3] Could you describe the offices of World Medicine, as a sort of physical place?

Yes. I think the buildings were, sort of… I think they were, they were sort of 1960-ish, but I don’t think, but I think they were earlier. I think they were pre-war. In a road called Oxendon Street in Leicester Square. Very near Leicester Square. And it was, I think it was, by memory, the third floor of a, basically an office block. That was it. I mean, a corridor with a few rooms off it. I mean, a space. I had my own office, that was one good thing. It wasn’t open-plan. We all had our own offices.

And who else was there?

Well, when I first joined it was Donald Gould, his wife Jennifer. She became his wife. I met my first wife there actually, Rosemary Shewan as she was called then. But that’s, by the way. Bernard Dixon was the deputy editor. Christine Doyle was there, who became the Observer’s medical person. And then, a few other characters who were sort of, well a few other characters, but those were the main honchos. And when I came back to it the second time, in 1974 or 5, 1975, yeah, it had been taken over by, the editor was a guy called Dr Michael O’Donnell, who became a, who was a good medical writer who became, joined the GMC eventually, General Medical Council. And, also working there then was, Paul Vaughan worked there for a time, I don’t know if you know Paul Vaughan, he’s quite a well- known journalist. And, Derek, a food man on the radio. Do you know the Food Programme, Sheila Dillon? And before him was a very fine chap called Derek something who started it all off, and he, he used to do stuff. Anyway… And a chap called Peter Bunyard, who later became well-known in the Ecologist magazine. And a chap called Fred Kavalier, who became a, a GP in North London, he actually read medicine as a result of going to World Medicine. American chap, jolly nice chap. And again, they were basically the main people.

[02:43] So, in this first period there, could you tell me more about each of those people as people, and then, I’ll ask you sort of, what they tended to be doing.

Yes.

So, firstly, Donald Gould?

Yes. Well he was a doctor, obviously. He had been, he was… He was the son of, as he used to say, he was the son of the manse. So his father was a vicar. He was one of these chaps who had been turned off religion. I mean, at the age of eleven or so he said he was very very passionately devout, religious. But he was turned off it by what he saw as actually being sort of, well the way he told it later, so I’m not telling any tales out of school, his father he thought was rather a harsh, even, some respects, yeah, well a very harsh man, and he thought this was incompatible with Christian charity. And later began to Colin Tudge Page 35 C1672/17 Track 3 think that Christian charity was a, didn’t really exist basically, you know. It was a bit of a fake, frankly, and that turned him off religion. But he was a very humane, passionate man. He was a naval surgeon in the war. He tells a story against himself, which I think was after the war, as a young doctor, very sort of, you know, when one is keen and sharp and keen to show how clever he was. He had this old woman thrown out of hospital because, he said, she didn’t require hospital treatment any more. And what he later realised, which, everybody knew she didn’t need hospital treatment, but she had nowhere else to go, so they were just looking after her. And then he realised that, you know, being professional medicine, professional doctor, great, but it’s actually very much secondary to the, to the compassion, to the point of the thing. And, he became somewhat of an anti-intellectual, if you know what I mean, in that kind of way. And for example, when Christiaan Barnard did the heart transplant, first heart transplant, Donald railed against this for years as being, you know, as it were, medicine gone mad, as opposed to being compassionate treatment of people, and so on, so on, so on. So, I regarded him as, as… And then, he was a very very good writer. He left World Medicine, I think, basically they thought, the American publishers I think, or maybe it was English published by that time, but, the publisher didn’t seem to think he edited it terribly well. So, he, he had… Bernard Dixon by that time had left and gone to New Scientist, who was a sort of, steering the ship, you know. So Donald left, and became a freelance writer, wrote a lot for New Statesman. And as I say, was a very very good writer, excellent. And wrote for New Scientist. Became editor of New Scientist for a time actually, briefly. And, yeah, that was Donald. And then became a freelance for the rest of his life.

When you say that he was talking, as he told it later, when he was talking about his faith, the existence of it as a child and presumably then the absence of it later, when was this, when was he telling this and why?

Well, when he died, at his funeral, and I went to that you see, a booklet, a short sort of pamphlet, was produced by his family, of some of his writings. I think this is… And he wrote an essay about this. Actually, either that, or, he had already written an essay about this, which was read out at the funeral by one of his family, I can’t remember which. I think it was the latter actually. Somebody read it out at the funeral. So he never discussed it with me, or, anybody else that I know. But he, but he recorded it And it was read out. His funeral incidentally, he said if anybody turns up in black, they will be thrown out. [laughs] So I went in a white suit. And it ended with fireworks, which was a wonderful touch. [laughs] But he was, as I say, I think he was a great man, but he, he would never sort of, plug himself into, you know, any kind of official system you see. So he, he didn’t become rich and famous, but… Morally he was tremendous, and he was a clever man and a good writer. Who else do you want to know about? Bernard you k now about because you’ve done…

[07:17] Well, yes, but I’d like to know about him from your point of view.

Colin Tudge Page 36 C1672/17 Track 3

Well, he was a good friend for a long time, to me. And he was, the point about him was, he is very very clever, and he was very conscientious. So he kind of, steered the ship. And Donald was a bit wild, but Bernard steered the ship. And remained as a steady hand at the tiller really for the rest of his career. If I was being, I shouldn’t say this, but, when he left New Scientist, much later, we all thought he was going to go away and write the great book, about the future of the world and the future of science. And to be honest, he never really did it. He stayed writing the kind of stuff he had always written, very high class, very good. But for example, that first book he wrote, well the one where he talked about, what was it called? What I Believe [Journeys in Belief]. And then another one, I think before that, called What Is Science For?. And he was, in his early days, you know, the great popular philosopher of science, and everybody felt in those days, or I certainly did, this is the Seventies, that there were really tremendously important things to be said, and that Bernard was the man who was going to say them. But actually, he didn’t. I shouldn’t be saying this. But that’s, that is the case. But he remained a, a good friend until we, we sort of fell out about, I don’t know, ten years ago. Because he didn’t like the way I was going. I was sort of, you know, writing about, this kind of stuff, science and religion and all that kind of stuff, and he thought I was going off the rails. So we stopped talking to each other more or less.

What…

They’re the main ones, they’re the main ones.

In a bit more detail, what was, what were you and other people expecting him to, in a bit more detail, what were you expecting him to write that he did not write in, for example, What Is Science For??

Well What Is Science For? was a very good preliminary foray. The point is that, I think in those days in general, the philosophy of science hadn’t been worked out to the degree that it is now, and the kind of discussions we’re having now about, you know, the limits of science on the one hand, and the limits of religious thinking on the other, hadn’t been spelled out properly. That book, for example, hadn’t been written.

The Golden String.

The Golden String. Richard… Griffiths’s autobiog. There wasn’t a great literature. And to the point where, for example, what’s his name, John Hedley Brooke’s book Science and Religion written in the early Nineties, came as a great, I think the word would be revelation, you know, that, actually these two disciplines could talk to each other. So, you can imagine that… And then now that’s sort of in a sense, amongst some people is a commonplace, but before that, they did look like two alien views of the world with a complete, a huge gap between them. And Stephen Jay Gould, I think in the late 1980s, talked about, you know, what was it, non-overlapping magisteria. And that was the sort of, best that anybody had done, you know, they were, they belong to different worlds. And now one can see the Colin Tudge Page 37 C1672/17 Track 3 nature of the dialogue between the two. But in those days, not, that one felt that there ought to be, another… It was felt that, somebody with a huge brain and interest had to somehow bring these two great disciplines together. And I personally, and I think a few other people, had the feeling at that time, on the basis of what Bernard had written, he might be the man to do it. And he never wrote that book. And now he’s not going to write it, because he’s abandoned, I think, serious thought about religion. But now it doesn’t matter, because I think, I think now, thanks to people like him and, and also to people like Rupert and to Peter Medawar and a few others like that, well mention Peter Russell, Goswami, I think it’s now falling into place very nicely. So that’s what I meant. He didn’t even write that book. But the extent to which the book was felt to be necessary, by some of us anyway, I think there was a very strong, there’s a huge mystery that needs to be sorted. Mystery is the wrong word, but you know, gap.

[11:53] Thank you. Christine Doyle?

Mm?

Christine Doyle was another one.

Well, she was a very good journalist. She went on to be the medical correspondent of the Observer. I don’t know what happened to her really. I saw her a few years, a few times. She was a, you know, she was good. But… And she was a journalist, she is a journalist. Well she’s probably retired now, I imagine she’s in her mid-seventies, possible even late seventies. But, well I can’t say much about her. She wrote well.

What did you do there?

I was an editorial assistant. I wrote short things, reports. There was a parent magazine called Medical World News, based in America, which was kind of the same as World Medicine. World Medicine was meant to be an English version of it really. And one of my little, early tasks, actually was to sort of, translate these American articles in Medical World News into English articles, which, by changing the emphases and things like that. And I used to write reports, well short, on meetings and stuff. And, more and more I got into writing proper features. And I think I wrote some rather good features in the late Nineties. But quite sort of, down the line, you know. I remember I did a very long, you wouldn’t do it nowadays, because you’d look it up on Google, but I did a very long piece on ulcerative colitis, what was known of ulcerative colitis, which in the late Sixties was, you know, is it or isn’t it an autoimmune disease, and all that kind of stuff. And how autoimmune diseases work, and all that stuff. Which was quite new then. So that was the kind of stuff I did. And, one or two people who knew about ulcerative colitis said that was a good, that was a good summary of what was known. That’s what I did, wrote features. And a few news stories. Colin Tudge Page 38 C1672/17 Track 3

Here at World Medicine was Bernard Dixon’s interest in relations, or at least, I would say, I say relations between science and religion, but at least, interest in things beyond science and science. Was that apparent?

Not really. No. For New Scientist... for World Medicine itself, he was a bacteriologist, you know, doctorate. He wrote…. Well he, he wrote about science, and he wrote about it very well very well, because he, because he was good at it. And he understood the philosophy of science, you know, its limits and stuff. That’s what he mainly, that’s what he wrote about, and it was good.

[14:31] Could you talk about, then, the relationship that led to your first marriage, how it started, what you did together?

I don’t really want to talk about it. I mean, Rosemary is a very nice person. But we probably weren’t very suited much really. But we had three very nice children, who are now all doing well, and I’ve got four grandchildren. And, I don’t see Rosemary very often. We don’t… Maybe we meet round at my daughter’s or something like that. And I have visited a few times. But, don’t see much of her. But, in so far as it’s compatible with not seeing much of her, we’re probably good friends. There’s not really much to say, you know.

But at this time, in the, when you first met.

Well… [pause] Attraction, and we got married. I mean that’s, not much to tell really.

[15:29] OK. Thank you. Could you then, tell me more, then, about the next post, and how it came about. This is Farmers’ Weekly.

Farmers’ Weekly.

Which derived from a project that you had to do for World Medicine.

Yes. Plus, as I said, I never really wanted to be a doctor. And therefore in a sense, I never really wanted to work for a medical magazine. But, but there were lots of… If you wanted to be a journalist writing about science, there weren’t that many opportunities. And medicine, there was lots of money going into medicine in those days, and there was no restriction, I believe, on how much pharmaceutical companies could spend. And, and it was, you know, it was, they were supported by ads, they weren’t, they weren’t trade, house magazines, but they were supported by ads. So you had editorial freedom, but you had, that was where the money came from. And it was a bottomless pit. The other thing which Colin Tudge Page 39 C1672/17 Track 3 is very relevant, although, was that Britain itself, at that time, was still an imperial power, even though, you know, a lot of the Commonwealth had actually gone, but it still had this tremendous dominance. So the wealth of the country, and the country in general, was buoyed up by our, basically, exploitation of most of the rest of the world, or great chunks of the rest of the world. So it was an artificial, you know, it was basically a post-imperial economy, which was rich. And, plus this, huge input of pharmaceutical money. Where am I going with that? What was the question? Oh yes, where to go next. But, so I, that’s why I worked for the medical magazine, because it was a place to work, and I could write about stuff that interested me up to a point, like autoimmunity you know, that’s a good, good subject. But I had always been interested in agriculture. I could say a little bit about that though. At the age of ten, when we were actually in Bolton, the family was all there, and we went for a great ramble around Bolton, I can’t remember exactly where. I think it was Barrow Bridge in fact. And in those days, very un… no, no buildings really, very un-built-up. Beautiful wild country, lovely, moorland and then some woodland and so on. Beautiful. And we went for this long walk. And part of it involved going through a farm, which was an old-fashioned mixed farm, where the farmer had calves, and actually was, was a dairy farm, and actually was able just to give us some milk or sell us some milk, which you’re not allowed to do now of course, strictly illegal. And, yeah, it struck me as being just a stunning place to work and be. And I was already interested a bit in farming, but this sort of, pinned it down, and remained with me. Although being a farmer always seemed a far too remote thing, I mean how on earth would you even begin? I never really wanted to read agriculture at university, as I say, I wanted to read veterinary, but… So I had it there in the background . And then, this magazine struck me as being such an interesting place. Wouldn’t it be fun to write about cattle and sheep, chickens and wheat and things like that. So I worked for them, and I really enjoyed it. Brilliant stuff.

Other than this walk through the farm, how else, what other sort of, milestones are there in your interest in agriculture from that point to, to Farmers’ Weekly?

Yes. In the late Fifties, for reasons… In the late Fifties I went on holiday in Cornwall with a friend from school, and some of his friends, he knew some local farmers. And, we visited their local farm, and then, a couple of years later I wrote to them, when I was between school and university I think, and said, is there any chance for me to come and work for you in harvest? So I went to work for them for two weeks, three weeks, one harvest. So I spent, you know, that amount of time on the farm working. And that also increased my interest. Again, we’re talking Fifties. Affluent time for farming. Because the Government still took it seriously then. After the war you know. And Cornwall, wonderful. On the whole beautiful weather. View of the sea from the farm, I think, as I remember, may be a false memory. But you know what I mean, just stunning. And so interesting actually. I mean that’s the thing about farming, it’s so, there’s so much to it, so many...

What was interesting to you about it then?

Colin Tudge Page 40 C1672/17 Track 3

Oh well, just… Actually, the technicalities of it, I mean how do you, how physically do you harvest it, and, the way you have to fit in the harvest with the weather. So, I said it was beautifully sunny; actually it rained a lot. So, you have to wait for the barley to dry before you can harvest it. So you’re sitting there, you might have a beautiful sunny day, but, if it’s been rained on the night before, you can’t do it. And then I remember once, I think it was the second week, you know, we’d had a, we’d had no chance at all of harvesting, and then on the Sunday it was beautifully sunny, and it had been dry, but they didn’t work on Sundays. And so, I think, possibly a religious thing but they just didn’t work on Sundays. So that was it. And, but it was the timing, you know. But in the end we got it in. And of course if you leave it too long, it will sprout in the field and then it will all go mouldy, and if you store it when it’s dry, unless you’ve got a dryer, which is incredibly expensive, it will go mouldy, and all that stuff. It’s the, it’s the logistics and technicalities.

And what about the, how, how did you feel about the, the physical experience of farm work?

Well, our job as boys, I mean we were all big boys, by then eighteen, was, was to carry the sacks of corn from… It was a sort of primitive combine harvester, which, it came out of a shoot into a sack, and you then had to sort of, tie up the sack and carry the sack into the barn. Nowadays I think it’s all mechanised. And the thing was, the combine harvester by modern standards was tiny. So it was, it was a, it was a, it was chaps, physical manpower plus this. So we were basically responsible for the labouring. But in those days, it was all right. And I might say, the labouring wasn’t easy, because, the sacks, the biggest sacks weighed, two hundredweight. Six, sixteen stone. Which, I don’t know what that is in kilograms, you probably think in kilograms, but sixteen stone is the size of, I don’t know, Lennox Lewis. And we were only, eleven or twelve stone, so you were carrying more than your own weight, and having to sort of, dump these things into a barn and so on. So it was very hard, physically. But OK if you’re that sort of age. And you played rugby and squash and stuff.

[22:40] Thank you. Could you, as you did for World Medicine, could you describe, you know, the offices of Farmers’ Weekly as place physically to start with?

Yes, that was open-plan. That was in Fleet Street, in one of the old, you know, well you’ve seen the Fleet Street buildings. They’re sort of, 19… They’re pre-war office buildings. And that was open- plan. I think there were several rooms, but they were all sort of open-plan. So we just sat in desks and, very boring, but you were always working. The editor had his own room, and the deputy had his own room, and the news editor had his own room. And the masses sat out… There weren’t that many masses, you know, half a dozen journalists, and then the art lot over there. Yeah, pretty standard.. Big typewriters. Because word processors didn’t come in till later obviously.

And could you describe a typical sort of working day there?

Colin Tudge Page 41 C1672/17 Track 3

Well, I spent a lot of time out of the office, but if it was in the office, I mean for example, during the, what do you call it? There was a big outbreak of fowl pest when I was there, and it was my job to keep abreast of the fowl pest epidemic and write about it. And every day there would be bulletins of one kind or another in the form of press releases. Because no, no fax and all that. Maybe come through on fax, but not on, you know, what that thing is called [computer].

Yes.

So, so these little bits of paper would come and be stuck on your desk, and basically my job was to turn these reports about what’s happened into a sort of running commentary on the… And so you would, you would do that, but you would also ring up people and get comments and so on, so on. That sort of typical journalist’s day really. And at lunchtime you’d go down the pub, which I wasn’t very good at, because it sent me asleep. So I didn’t do it much. And, no, and then you went home. But, other days, which, with luck you, you would go out to various farms all over the country, which was again a great revelation. Because all you see of the countryside on a train or a car is what’s next to the train or the car, but once you go and see people living in the heart of Lincolnshire or the heart of Kent, heart of Yorkshire, in those days, still in the Seventies, you realise how kind of, remote they are, and how, that’s a different world. Very, very beautiful often. So that was stunning, and that was a revelation. One of the ones, or, several I remember in particular. One was when I did a story down in Kent, I can’t remember what it was, but I stayed in a pub, and one of the points was that it was, it was, the pub was in the heart of mining country. And I was only very dimly aware that Kent had a mining industry, but it did, it was flourishing, big, at that time. So to be suddenly among miners, I mean they weren’t wearing their funny hats and all that, but, in a mining community, forty miles from London, was, was quite a revelation to me. I hadn’t realised there was, such a thing existed. And another story I did up in Cumbria, might still have been called Cumberland then, Lake District, was on Herdwick sheep, and Herwicks are now quite famous. You know, there’s the sheep, multi-coloured, and they change colour as they get older and so on. And there was an industry based on their wool, which is very hard and very, you can make carpets and tweedy jackets. Couldn’t make trousers, because they were too itchy. But anyway, that was, that was, you know, that was a, that was a great story, enjoyed that. And then of course I did all the, later I did all the ARFC stuff. So I went to the Rowett, where I met Bob Orskov. And Rothamsted. And the PBI, Cambridge, Plant Breeding Institute, and all the places in Scotland, Pentland [Pentlands Research Instiute] and so on. So, it was a real revelation and really good. I should have stayed there. But didn’t. We’ve probably had enough for now haven’t we, it’s getting on for one.

[end of session]

[End of Track 3] Colin Tudge Page 42 C1672/17 Track 4

[Track 4]

Could you start today by telling me about something that I didn’t ask you about last time, and that’s the, the political outlook or engagement of your parents?

Oh yeah. Well my father, who was… Where shall I start? My father was in the Army, from about 1928, and he took being in the Army very seriously. And the Army… He had it in his head, I don’t know whether it’s true, that as a, as an army person, a soldier, you weren’t allowed to be political. So he made a point of being not political. But in so far as he had any politics, he used to vote Liberal, which in those days, you know, wasted vote. I don’t… There may have been one Liberal MP, but that was about, Jo Grimond possibly, but that was it. No, before him. Anyway, Jo Grimond. Anyway, so he was a so-called Liberal but basically nothing much. My mother was a, was, she voted Tory, she just, you know, thought she… The sort of… She wasn’t really working-class, but working-class Tory, you know, that you need these leaders, and you need gentlemen and all that. Which to be fair they were in those days, there were decent chaps. But she was a Tory. Whereas other members of my family, my paternal grandfather for example was staunch Labour, a miner, you know, obviously. So, but basically, basically, basically non-political but basically, Liberal, Tory.

Do you remember any discussion of politics at home?

Not until I was fifteen, because, they took the view that politics only leads to arguments. Politics and religion were more or less banned as subjects. And, given that people argued about politics at Christmas when they had too much to drink, it did lead to arguments. But it was, I think quite, in a sense destructive, because it takes away sort of, a lot of the intellectual basis of what you might talk about. But at the age of fifteen, sixteen, things changed, because, I became very good friends with a chap at school called David Lieberman who was CND, very strong CND, and Labour Party. So, I tried to instil nuclear disarmament into them. So for a short time we had what could pass as political discussions. That’s as near as I got.

What do you remember of their response to that attempt to- ?

Oh, they weren’t, they were… They, they rode it. But they sort of… Oh, and Bevan himself, you know, Nye Bevan, took the view that you had to have a nuclear weapon, even though he was, you know, very much the, very much the Left and very much sort of, pacific, although he wasn’t a pacifist. So, you know, that, it wasn’t a, wasn’t a reactionary view, it was quite a sensible view.

And what do you remember doing with this friend David in, I don’t know, any activism or, or simply discussion of these things?

At home? Colin Tudge Page 43 C1672/17 Track 4

No, with… I mean, age fifteen, sixteen, so this was happening at school.

Oh yes, at school. At school. But I was never an activist. I mean I probably should have been an activist of some kind. But I’ve never been on a march for example. Don’t know why, but I never have. So, I was never an activist No.

[03:32] And can you tell me about the development of your political interests from that point onwards? So, through the period that we covered last time, which was university and beginnings of your journalism career.

Well I have at times, to my shame, from time to time been quite right-wing. I mean in my last year at… No, no. There was a short period at school when I sort of embraced the public school business, you know, of being a sort of, member of a, of a superior class, because one was at that school. But it wasn’t… But, well, some people stay in that mould, I mean some, some Hooray Henrys have lower middle class origins et cetera. But, it was, it never sat easily really. I mean, deep down, I actually conserved the kind of, Sunday school style of Christianity that I had got from primary school, you know, justice and equality and… So that was always there. And later I began… Well, certainly when Wilson came to power, we weren’t allowed to vote in those days, but, 1960, something like that, I was very much on the side of Wilson, and had thought that the Tories were, you know, fuddy-duddies and, passé and so on. And of course the Wilson government was of very high quality. So from then on I could call myself a socialist, and, let’s just say, 1960 onwards, but could also call myself a, a serious Labour supporter, although again I never actually became an active member of a party. So that was where that was where that began. I think for a time too in the Seventies it was quite fashionable, around the world, to be what people thought was a Marxist. And, you know, the Canadians at that time, I can’t remember the name of the prime minister, but his wife was a sort of committed commie, and people like Vanessa Redgrave and so on. So for a time I seriously thought of myself as a Marxist. And for a time I seriously thought of myself as a Maoist. And I think, if Mao had been the man that people thought he was, or that I thought he was, he would a good model. But I think he wasn’t actually; I think he actually was rather vicious and dogmatic and not very pleasant. Anyway, I rejected. It took me a long time to seriously distinguish between Labour Party type socialism, I mean traditional Labour Party type socialism, which is basically social democracy, and is basically about, well you know, decency and brotherhood and sisterhood and all that kind of stuff, but, allows a great deal of personal freedom. It’s based on the idea really, it should be, that you, that you voluntarily embrace this philosophy. Rather like being a monk or a nun, that you voluntarily embrace something that actually is quite restrictive, very restrictive in their case. Whereas, of course, the Maoist/Stalinist view, and the Pol Pot view, is a bit later, is that, either you followed that line or you were dead. Or you were so badly treated that you wish you were dead. So… But it took me a long time to realise the distinction. Whereas, other people who were a bit brighter, or, or, you know, more politically alert, well I wasn’t Colin Tudge Page 44 C1672/17 Track 4 that politically astute, realised the difference. I mean, Nye Bevan for example, who was basically my kind of socialist, but he spent his whole life arguing with, with representatives of Stalin. I mean he saw very clearly the difference between Stalinist style, what’s it called, socialism, and social democracy, which is Labour style socialism. So I was a, a left of centre, left, very much a left social democrat, and that’s roughly where I remain. Marx, I think, is very interesting in all this, because Marx wasn’t anything like Stalin made, or Lenin indeed, made him out to be, or Mao made him out to be. He wasn’t… He hated the idea of dictatorship for example. He was a, a democrat. And, at the end of his life, or near the end of his life, he said, ‘I don’t know what I am politically, but I’m certainly not a Marxist.’ [laughs] And, so… But once, once I managed to distinguish between that, then I was able to say, I am a left-wing social democrat.

[08:18] When you were at university, so this is before the period that you’re talking about where you were exploring Marxism and Maoism, but when you were at university, were you engaged in any, in anything political?

No. To my shame again. I didn’t, I… I wasted my time at university. Should have been involved politically, but wasn’t.

So the CND interest didn’t continue after you…?

That sort of died away. Mhm.

[08:49] Could you tell me, then, in more detail about how it was that, or how you went about exploring Marxism and Maoism in the Seventies? So this would have been about, roughly at the time that you’re beginning to write.

That’s right. Well, it was actually through being at World Medicine, for the second time. Well no no. Let’s go back a little bit. When I was at World Medicine, when I was at New Scientist, I came across a lot of, I knocked about with a lot of people who were very much concerned with Third World affairs, people like Jon Tinker and others who, Michael Allaby and so on. There were lots in this time. And in fact, New Scientist at that time was so political that it, sometimes the science got almost completely lost. And in fact it merged with New Society, and New Society was seen to be the senior partner I think at one point. Anyway, so I was first really exposed to serious, you know, global type left-wing thinking there. And then when I went to World Medicine again, for the second time, in the early Seventies, there were two characters there in particular, Geoff Watts, who went on to become a radio presenter and is still around as far as I know, and Fred Kavalier with a k, who became a doctor, and is a doctor to my knowledge still, though I’ve lost touch, and they were both seriously left-wing, Geoff in particular was a serious Marxist, and, for a time, not any more really I don’t think, and Fred went to Colin Tudge Page 45 C1672/17 Track 4

China in the early Seventies, which was a very unusual thing to do at that time, and was absolutely besotted by what he saw there, and he thought the Maoist sort of agrarian way of life was just wonderful. And he came back telling tales of how the people were so fantastically helpful, and they lived in these beautiful villages, and so on. So for a time I had this kind of agrarian view of Maoism, which I thought was absolutely it. And actually, I think it possibly is. The only trouble is it wasn’t really what was going on in China, not really, not when you read other stuff. But… Where am I going with this? Anyway, there, my sort of serious left-wingery became properly established. But it was only later, after that even, that I realised that actually you had to temper this with… You couldn’t just have a centralised economy and have a humane, convivial society. It doesn’t work. Never has. So you had to have, as I say, something like social democracy where people are allowed a great deal of personal freedom, and where they are allowed in particular free enterprise and investment and so on. But, as I’ve now realised in the last few years putting the whole thing together, that has to be tempered by morality, and the morality might be called Christian, because it’s all, well it’s actually universal, but it’s to do with justice and equality and humility, and, also with what one could call socialism, which, as I see socialism, is a political system based on these fundamental principles. So, hence the expression social democracy, although, it very often gets… Like all political slogans, whatever it is, they become seriously corrupted. But that’s roughly it.

[12:19] What do you remember of what Geoff and Fred and perhaps others at World Medicine were saying about the relations between their political outlook and the sort of, funding source of, of World Medicine being industry?

We never really brought that to the fore, and should have done. I mean it was an obvious paradox. ba- ba-ba-ba I don’t know what one says about that, except that, any port in a storm. I mean, if you want to do, if you want to be a writer, who are you going to work for? And all writers have faced this. So, they’ve all had to have patrons, they’ve all had to write for people. Some of them were able to found their own magazines, like, well you know, I’m just reading about Leavis, Frank, what’s his name, F L Leavis, at, it’s Cambridge, it’s written there. What is his initials?

F R Leavis, A Life in Criticism.

That’s right, F R Leavis. Well he, I remember him briefly when I was at Cambridge, I did actually sort of see him around. Anyway, but, the point is about Leavis, and others like him, is that he founded his own magazine called Scrutiny, and, he sort of, went along from hand to mouth, people just sort of, pay for it as they go, just about paid for the typewriter, that kind of thing. So you can do it that way. Even he, though, had to have some kind of a salary from Cambridge itself, lecturing and so on. But you’ve got to get your money from somewhere. So he said things like, ‘Well, you know, OK, these pharmaceutical companies, we don’t like them, but, that’s where the money is, let’s take advantage of it.’ So that was basically how, how you get round it. But on the other hand, the magazine itself, under Colin Tudge Page 46 C1672/17 Track 4 its two editors, Donald Gould and later Michael O’Donnell, very jealously guarded their editorial freedom. So if you wanted to say something nasty about the drug companies, you did. And I might say that… And that was the same when I worked on Farmers’ Weekly in the early Seventies. And I remember at Farmers’ Weekly in the early Seventies the deputy editor, who was called Frank Butcher, got very very annoyed indeed when the magazine ran an article on arable farming opposite an advertisement for tractors. Because he said, ‘This looks like promo, you can’t do this.’ Well nowadays, complete reversal, and I hope I’m not talking out of turn here, I don’t think so, you wouldn’t run an article on arable without asking some tractor manufacturer if he’d like to take out an ad. It’s a complete reversal of the thing. So the point was, that it was possible to take the money from these rich companies, but at the same time conserve editorial freedom. And that’s how I think one conserves one’s sense of rightness. [15:10] However, underpinning all that was that in the Sixties and Seventies, which we used to write about but didn’t fully realise, was the extent to which the West, and the extraordinary sort of luxury of the times, that it was, it was a very affluent time for us, if you were in the right place. Depended on the Third World flogging us stuff for next to nothing, and being enslaved. So, there was a conflict there, very definitely. But we, we never resolved it in our own heads. Very few people have, nobody ever has. Well, no, I don’t think so. [15:48] I don’t know how… Yes. Well, for example, we now, I now, now, want to start running this website on the College for Real Farming and Food Culture. Well that costs money, it’s got to be paid for. And I have to eat, and all that kind of stuff. But again, it should not be conceived as a profit-making organisation. This is the thing. The precedent that makes it respectable in my mind is the idea of Saint Francis, or, or indeed actually all of those early chaps, that you could live as a mendicant monk, and provided you were doing stuff that was good for the world as a whole, as they conceived their life of prayer was, then it was OK to say, well, ‘Give us a bob, because I need a, I need to buy some bread.’ But that was as far as it went. That’s as far as it goes I think. If you want to stay really honest.

[16:42] Thank you. And your own, and your own sort of reading on Marxism and Maoism at this time? You’ve said, for example, that Geoff Watts was a Marxist, that Fred actually went to China. What did your own explorations of this involve?

Not much. I mean, I was never, I was never much to plunge into big tomes. I think I may have started Das Kapital but I, it’s fairly unreadable unless you’re dedicated. So it was all rather peripheral; you know I would read- I don’t know whether New Internationalist existed in those days, but, you would read articles in magazines like that, that would allude to, but without ever getting to serious scholarship. And after all, you know, for example if you start looking at the Russian Revolution and what Lenin thought and Trotsky thought and all the other people thought, it’s just so fantastic. I mean Colin Tudge Page 47 C1672/17 Track 4 you know, it takes a lifetime, so, you’ve got to stop somewhere. So one stops with general principles, ideas.

[17:45] Before we go to the, the second period at World Medicine, I just want to ask you a few more questions about Farmers’ Weekly.

Oh yes.

And in particular, because, as you pointed out last time, they weren’t going to survive very long in that form, could you describe, in as much detail as you can remember, the agricultural research establishments that you visited, and what they were doing?

Mm. I think, on the one hand the Agricultural Research, Agricultural Research… Sorry. The Agricultural and Food Research Council, it was called. And there was… And it had about thirty of these research stations all over the, all over Britain. And, there were also a back-up of experimental husbandry farms, and then behind that, but independent of all that, there was quite a few seriously dedicated agricultural colleges, and universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Bristol, all had agricultural departments, which were very good and independent et cetera. Now the AFRC research stations, taken all in all, were fabulous. I mean some were much better than others, but it all depended on the director. But they, basically, I think they got their money from, from the Government, and, then it was up to the director and the board of each individual council, research station, to decide what they did with it I think. That was more or less how it worked. Well the money came through the Agricultural and Food Research Council itself, but, tremendous amount of autonomy on the ground. And, some of the research they did was just absolutely excellent. And it was designed to help farmers, in other words, it was designed to help all of us, because we all depend on farmers. And, I just had some wonderful times there. I mean, you know, the quality of the science was excellent, the motivation was excellent, et cetera. And that extended into some of the places abroad, which, well all of them probably, but, ones I visited, like ICRISAT in Hyderabad, India, which is the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, where they grow things like cow peas and millet and sorghum and so on. And again, very high quality research, and very much geared to the real needs of the people. I mean crops like cow peas are not commercial crops but they are very useful to people who live in dry areas, and want to eat and want to feed their cattle. It’s mostly cattle feed, that particular one. So, but now… But, so, that was how it should have been, and that’s how it should be. And then it was closed down as an act of what I think is government-sponsored vandalism on a huge scale, I mean worse than the dissolution of the monasteries, in about 1980 onwards, primarily I think by Keith Joseph. And Keith Joseph is an example of what George Orwell warned us about, that, you know, beware of intellectuals, because intellectuals get carried away by big ideas, and then behave in ways that are, lose all sense of what’s real in the world, and are incredibly stupid. And Keith Joseph became hooked on the idea of the global market, and profit, short-term, and said, these agricultural Colin Tudge Page 48 C1672/17 Track 4 research centres don’t deliver short-term profit, therefore, they’re no good, and the whole thing was dissolved really. But they were excellent, they were a model of what should be. And I think one of the things we need to do in this country, it’s not going to happen but it should happen, is to restore those institutions, working in much the same way as they did then, and worldwide, we should this worldwide network of, of these independent or quasi-independent institutions. And, this is what science should be about, it should be independent. And in so far as it’s applied, it should be applied to the real needs of people, or to the real needs of the biosphere Whereas now of course it’s all geared to the profits of corporates who basically run the show. And, anyway, that’s what they were like. Do you want me to go into more detail or whatever? [22:11] Well for example, the one that I think was my favourite was the Rowett Research Institute, r-o-w-e-t-t, which was in Aberdeen. And the director was Kenneth Blaxter, Sir Kenneth Blaxter, b-l-a-x-t-e-r. And he, he was, well, one of the great agricultural scientists. There’s been a sort of, there’s a shortlist, maybe over the whole century, possibly fifty, but, of outstanding people who were not only great agriculturalists but were also very very good scientists. And he was one of them. And, the Rowett in those days was dedicated to animal nutrition, and it veered between animal nutrition and human nutrition, but he was an animal man. And, well, one of his things was, he was the guy who really introduced the idea of farming red deer. Now his initial idea was that you could manage red deer for food, as opposed to shooting by Dutchmen, on the, on the Scottish hills, on the Cairngorms and all that. And, the problem there, or the question was, a) could you manage them, given that they’re very very skittish, and they don’t, they’re not going to move around compliantly in the way that cattle do. So how do you manage them? And b) can you actually fatten them up? Because… Well not fatten them up, but, get them to a sort of slaughterable weight, to, on wild Scottish pasture, which basically is heather and, and very rough grasses? And, the point is, it wasn’t really a success. The reason being that if you try to… Well, it’s the same kind of thing that people have encountered in Africa, when they try to farm things like eland, antelope, which are huge, and very good for meat in theory. But the point is, if you give the animal its freedom, then you get all the advantages of an animal feeding on pasture which is essentially free, and doing its own thing, but, a) well, not likely to grow at the kind of rate you’d want it to, but even, even if you found that acceptable, which you might, how do you actually, in the end, manage them and slaughter them? You’ve got to slaughter them. Well if you shoot them out on the hill, is the sort of, you know, traditional shooters’ way, you then stick it on the back of a pony, and you bring it down. And by the time you get it down, you’ve got a sort of matted corpse full of blood, which is OK for people, you know, who like having feasts in the Highlands, bagpipes and all that stuff, and like sort of, this kind of meat, but if you want to sell it commercially, in an ordinary butcher, then these kind of, you know, this blooded corpse is not going to work, you know, you have to have something that looks more like lamb. So then, in order to get that effect, you have to get the animal into a slaughterhouse, slaughter it properly. And then the question arises, how do you slaughter an animal which is essentially wild, in a humane way at all? But then, in order to make it manageable, you have to bring it in, corral it and all that kind of stuff. If you do all that, you find you’ve actually lost the advantage of it being a wild animal in the first place. It’s no longer making use of the Colin Tudge Page 49 C1672/17 Track 4 landscape. So you might as well have stuck with cattle. So that was the problem However, at the time that Ken Blaxter did it, there was a huge fashion for low fat meat, because that was the beginning of the thing that, heart disease and fat. So people started to say, well venison’s a good meat anyway, because, you know, it is low fat intrinsically. [26:09] So that was when, really when deer farming started properly, and it’s to some extent in this country, to a huge extent in New Zealand. But that was just one thing that Ken Blaxter did. The main thing that he did was to encourage very very good scientists to do their thing, which is what great directors do. And the guy who I got to know well, and he’s still a good friend, and I dedicated my latest book to him, is a chap called Bob Orskov, Professor E R Orskov, o-r-s-k-o-v, who is in fact a Dane, and was born in Jutland on a peasant farm, and he was just a brilliant, and is, a brilliant animal nutritionist. And it was he who introduced me to the subtleties of grazing ruminant animals on, well, on different kinds of pasture. And he just pointed out, one of the things he pointed out was the, which I hadn’t realised, was the fact that different ruminants have very, or, or non-ruminants, like horses, have very different strategies for dealing with rough pasture. So animals like cows, cattle, are actually very good at processing grass and other such herbage, but they keep it in their guts for a long time, get every last drop out of it Things like horses, and to a significant extent deer, shove the stuff, if it’s got low grade stuff, they shove the stuff through very quickly, get the best of it, but then they eat a lot. Now the point is that the first tactic, being very conservative and, and frugal, is very good if you’ve got rich pasture, because you’re getting the best out of it. If you’ve got really poor pasture, then you don’t want to hang about with stuff that’s not very good. So, for poor pasture, the other tactic is better, horses and deer and so on, so on, so on. Now I frankly… And, and within the cattle themselves, you get different breeds who are good for different things. Like Holsteins for example are good, in so far as any cow is good, at processing very high, high grade fodder, and concentrates. Whereas, say, the zebus of India, which live on rubbish, and they can get by on almost nothing. Now, if you’re talking about milk in this context, a Holstein will yield, oh, how many gallons? I can’t, I… In those days about 1,000 or more gallons; nowadays it would be 1500 gallons a year. What’s that in litres? Seven and a half… No, no more than that. I can’t work it out. I can not do litres to gallons. But lots. But let’s say the Holstein has 1,000-plus, which would be very modest for that, whereas the zebu would do 300 gallons-plus, in other words a threefold mark-up. But, take into account whether you can afford the feed for the Holstein, or whether you prefer to feed them on paper bags and, and thistles and God knows what, or straw from the cow peas, and so, stalks from the cow peas, and, you know, realistically, the zebu is better. And one of the great flaws in the modern world of course is that Westerners being Westerners, think they’re always right, so they have been exporting Holsteins to the world at large, saying, this is the brilliant cattle, they yield four or five times as much as yours, they must be better. And governments and other people in other countries, for all kinds of reasons, either they’re beguiled by this, or they are, you know, they take the backhanders where they’re going, or they’ve got some weird idea about modernity, this is the, this is the fancy way, so they buy in these Holsteins. It’s happened dozens and dozens of times, and the result is disaster, because they can’t afford the feed, and because the Holsteins need a great deal of water. And if you’re in a dry area, they, they die. And they can’t Colin Tudge Page 50 C1672/17 Track 4 take the sun either. But this is, and this is a sort of typical story of Westerners imposing their very different conditions on the rest of the world. But it was Bob, this is the point, Bob Orskov, who introduced me to all these subtleties.

[30:20] Thank you. You said last time that you don’t really know why you left Farmers’ Weekly. Have you, have you got any sort of idea of why you moved back to World Medicine from Farmers’ Weekly? What prompted…

Well, it wasn’t my... Yes. Sorry to interrupt you. It wasn’t my intention to go back to World Medicine. I think, I was quite young, so, I don’t know, twenty-five, twenty-six, at the time, or maybe older than that. No no, maybe, maybe thirty. But quite, quite a young thirty. My wife was pregnant, Rosemary, was pregnant for the second time, and I’ve heard it said that when men’s wives are pregnant, they tend to get very restless and want to do something different. Don’t know why. A sort of inbuilt psychology. So I had that going on. I also had the feeling that I was kind of marking time, I felt, at Farmers’ Weekly, because I had done the sort of things I wanted to do. I had written some nice articles. And I thought, where do you go from here? And I thought, hugely irresponsibly, that I would cut myself adrift and, and sell my wares on the great world. And actually the great world doesn’t really exist you know. I mean, it’s pure luck if you get a job in, good job in journalism. And that actually, frankly, is why I went back to World Medicine, because there was a billet. No, I went to New Scientist for a time, as a part-time freelance. Wasn’t earning a living there, as part-timer. And then I went back to Farmers’ Weekly – to World Medicine. That’s why.

Yes, you were a, you were what they called the biology consultant, weren’t you, for New Scientist, for a while?

That’s the sort of thing, yes.

Yes.

Yeah yeah. Don’t know how you knew that, but yes.

Because I looked at the, I’ve been looking at the mastheads and…

Oh right. Oh, well, jolly good.

[32:13] And I wanted to ask you about one particular time, and that’s the, the review you wrote on a meeting at the Royal Society, which was organised by Sir Ernest Chain?

Colin Tudge Page 51 C1672/17 Track 4

Oh yeah yes.

Who was chair of the British Nutrition Foundation, and adviser to something called the Office of Health Economics. Anyway, there was a meeting at the Royal Society that had academics and food technologists, and food industry scientists.

Yup.

And you wrote a, a comment on it for the New Scientist in 1974, and a longer article in World Medicine. And, can you… Well, could you start by telling me about that meeting that you wrote about?

Yes.

So describe the meeting, and then tell the story of your writing on it, and then what happened after that.

Yes. Well the Royal Society every now and again… It should be a total… I think it should be a totally independent society, but OK, we live in the real world. So, it sort of, ran a, it started to run meetings that are kind of, quasi-sponsored, I suppose you could say collaborative meetings. And this was a collaborative meeting. Sir Ernst Chain was very distinguished, I think he had a Nobel Prize, for helping to develop penicillin during and after the war, from being a sort of, experimental drug to being mass-produced commercially, et cetera. So it was, he had done some very very good stuff. And he was I think a co-organiser of the meeting. There was an absolute parallel between that meeting and the kind of meetings that people have now on GMOs, genetically modified organisms, so-called, genetically engineered organisms. And the point was, OK, there was a, there was perceived to be, and indeed there was, a huge world food problem, probably worse than now in a way, because they just didn’t know what to do about it, and there were lots of… There were famines actually, there had been famines. And it was perceived, as many people still perceive, that one of the great culprits was meat, too much meat. It was also perceived, which I think is complete nonsense actually, shows how uncritical scientists can be sometimes, that human beings have this sort of innate desire to eat loads and loads of meat, that we are kind of, carnivores manqué, who need only wealth in order to eat like sheep dogs. [laughs] Sheep dogs will eat anything, as you probably know. So, this specific meeting was about, how do we solve the world’s food problems, with particular interest in meat substitutes? And the great meat substitute of the day, well it still is, was what we call textured vegetable proteins, and the idea was that you extract proteins from various plant sources, and fungal sources, and even in VP’s case they talked about bacterial sources, you extract the protein, and you make it into threads, and you roll it all together, hence textured. And you make something that roughly resembles meat. And then you add the flavour sort of ad hoc. And this kind of stuff is still around, as you know. But then, it was sort of seen as a world saver. And the scientists who were there, as they do now with GMOs, were hurling themselves into it with huge enthusiasm, because they really were sort of, uncritical Colin Tudge Page 52 C1672/17 Track 4 technophiles, and they really do believe that the problems of the world lie with applying, you know, some new magic bullet, some new high technology. And they also believe, because that’s how they’ve been brought up, that they, given the that they are the technologists, or they are the scientists, that they must be in charge, because they know and we don’t. And we should jolly well do what they say. Now they’re not, they are being arrogant but in a sense that’s, it’s not, arrogance isn’t the point. The point is, they have a, a real belief in what they’re doing, and in their own ability to deliver. So this whole meeting, I think it was two days, maybe three days, was about various forms of TVP, textured vegetable protein, and people were talking about protein from beans, which is the most obvious source, also from leaves, which is an interesting source still, but leave that one aside, as I say, from fungi, and from bacteria, in the case of BP, who thought you could grow bacteria on oil, which you can, of course, and that that would be a good way of producing… Because they’ve got a, they had oil coming out of their ears in those days, you know, this was, I think, probably before OPEC or, not, possibly not, not… Anyway, that was it. [37:07] And, I, I looked at this, and I… And I had been to the World Food Conference already at this time, I’m pretty sure. And, there were people at the time who were saying… Oh, there were long books written on this, including by some very good people, saying, look, we must have all this meat, because we need huge amounts of protein. And, if we don’t have meat, we have to have protein of very very high quality, of the kind that you could sort of, you know, simulate. And, I thought, if this is the case… This was the subject of my first book, The Famine Business, one of the subjects. If that was true, that you needed all this protein, then most of the people in the people in the world would already be dead. And they weren’t. And the people who actually had the least protein probably, like the Indians, and the Chinese, and, certainly the Indians, were, were breeding the quickest. And they still managed to produce loads of Nobel Prize winners and all the rest. I mean they weren’t, [laughs] they weren’t in any sense inferior human beings. So, it could not be true that we needed all this protein. There must be something wrong with the theory. And then it struck me, look, if you’re making TVPs out of beans, why not eat beans? And I was very interested in cooking at the time, I was quite obsessed with cooking. And, you know, I just sort of, looked at the fact that there were thousands and thousands of bean recipes around from all over the world. And another thing that came sort of, to the fore at that time, was that bean protein, or legume protein, is rich in lysine, which is one of the essential amino acids, and wheat, or, cereal protein, tends to be low in lysine. That was, that was what was believed at the time, I think it still is, but, I haven’t kept up to date. So the point was, if you put beans protein and cereal protein together, the surplus of lysine in one would compensate for the lack in the other. And the bean protein combination therefore was absolutely right. And it was pointed out, and I can’t remember the name of the doctor who pointed it out, but it’s a good chap, that, in every cuisine you look at, you will find this legume-cereal combination. So in India, for example, it’s dahl and rice, or dahl and chapatti; and in China it will be soya and rice, or mung bean and rice, something like that. And, in Britain, this chap, I think it was Donald Naismith was his name, if not, forgive me all of you, he said, you know, in Britain, what is the equivalent of the bean-cereal thing? And, beans on toast. Perfect combination. So then it struck me, well, it’s, you know, it’s obvious, what are these people Colin Tudge Page 53 C1672/17 Track 4 talking about? Because actually, if you want, if you want protein… First of all, we don’t need all that much protein; and secondly, if we did, beans and cereal will do everything that’s necessary; and thirdly, there is no evidence really that people have this fantastic urge to eat more and more meat, you know, they’re perfectly happy with dahl and rice and beans on, if that’s how you’re kind of brought up. So it seemed to me the whole thing was entirely spurious. So then I said to myself, well why are they doing it? And the answer of course is the same as the reason they’re developing GMOs, which is, it’s extremely profitable for those who are in charge. And, of course it imposes a top-down structure, political structure, on something that could otherwise be democratic. I mean, anyone can grow beans, anyone can grow cereal, anyone can put the two together. So, if that’s what you let people do, then you’ve got a nicely democratic, well you’ve got food sovereignty, basically. Whereas, if you say you need TVPs, or nowadays you need GMOs, it’s all got to be controlled by the, basically the oligarchy and that, which is, the oligarchy consisting of scientists/high technologists, governments, corporates, and banks, a pernicious combination. [41:33] Anyway. In 1974, I’d forgotten it was ’74, but you say it’s ’74, all this came to me in a flash really. It’s scam. So I wrote about it being a scam. Whereupon Ernst Chain, Sir Ernst, wrote to the editor of World Medicine, Michael O’Donnell, and said, ‘You must sack this man, he has no right at all to criticise the Royal Society in this way.’ He did actually say, ‘He’s got no right to criticise the Royal Society.’ And Michael, who was very much an independent editor, very good editor, said, you know, to hell with that. So, as it were, I got away with it. But, that was the sort of, the beginning of my own radicalisation, together with the World Food Conference itself, which I realise was politically very suspect.

[42:26] What did you see at the meeting, the Royal Society meeting, what was happening there? Presumably you were there in order to report on it.

That’s right.

As an observer.

That’s right.

What, what did you see, you know, happening at this meeting that led on to the writing about it?

Well, I mean, my job as a reporter for World Medicine, and part-time for New Scientist, was to go to meetings like that, and report on them. So that was the first thing. And the meeting itself was like any other academic meeting, or, you know, quasi-academic meeting, where you get a series of speakers, who are all very eminent, except for, you always have a few young ones who aren’t, but, bright young things. And they show lots of slides with graphs and prove beyond any doubt that what they’re talking Colin Tudge Page 54 C1672/17 Track 4 about is, [laughs] what the world needs. Well that’s how it is. I mean, you’ve been to these meetings, you know what they’re like, and, they’re all the same in structure.

[43:27] And did, apart from Ernst writing to your editor, was there any other contact between you and he over this?

Not really, no. One man who was a, who was a PR man for, and I’m not sure what company, but one of the big companies, I’d say Unilever but I don’t know that it was, I can’t remember, rang me up at work and said, ‘How dare you speak like this,’ you know, about… And I just said, ‘Well, because it’s, because it’s true really.’ [laughs] I mean, what are you talking about? you know. But it is true. And it remains true, in principle.

And…

Sorry. Another thing you see, all these technologists, they come along one after the other. DDT was one. Actually, when, it struck… You know, I learnt the other day. But when radium was first discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, for a time, you know, the radiation from radium was billed as a world saver, you know, eat these radium pills because they’ll cure everything you’ve got. Well nowadays we know that’s not really quite right. And another example would be, there was a time when children, babies in utero were exposed to hyperbaric oxygen, because it, you know, oxygen’s good stuff isn’t it, and of course they, it had hugely destructive effect, and produced microphthalmia, I mean, the eyes didn’t develop properly, among other things. So, you know, there’s always been these magic bullets, and there’s always been enthusiasts, one could call them zealots, within science, who are pushing this, because, as soon as they see, you know, some spark, a possibility, they’re out there, they want to run with it. And of course, then, immediately you get huge commercial pressure, and very often if you’ve got governments like ours you get huge government backing, because they’re always looking for distractions, they’re always looking for magic bullets. And, so there’s been a whole series. DDT, as I say, in the 1930s, great world saver, and then, you know, the other, the other organochlorines, and then the other, organophosphorus, et cetera, compounds. And this was another in that series. Ah, protein deficiency. TVPs, textured… Now it’s GMOs. What will it be next year? I don’t know. Ten years’ time.

[45:49] In criticising you, one of the things that Ernst Chain says, well he says two things. One, that you’re leading a campaign against the food industry basically.

Yes.

And the other one… And he also says, and, ‘Colin Tudge is a Maoist.’ Colin Tudge Page 55 C1672/17 Track 4

Ah, how interesting.

And this is before your first book. So… [laughter]

How do you know all this? Where was this written?

This was in the New Scientist.

Was it really?

Around the time. Yes. Where would he have, you know, where would he have got information on you of that kind?

You mean how...

However flawed it might be.

Yes. How did he get it into his head, do you mean?

Yes.

Um, um-um-um-um. Well in a sense, I was against the food industry, because, it seemed to me that the food in… Well the food industry defined as people in those days like, I don’t know, well I’ll mention Unilever again, although they’re not necessarily the worst, Nestlé’s, et cetera, they were pretending to save the world, in all sorts of ways. And governments, Britain’s government then wasn’t as bad as it is now, but governments basically believe what they say because they, you know, they like to, you know, it’s all part of the same thing. So they were deeply pernicious, because actually what they were offering was clearly not what the world needed. And clearly they weren’t, weren’t offering it out of, for altruistic reasons, they were offering it because it makes them better and rich. Now, I’m not saying that they were evil, because, they weren’t trying to do harm, but, they have, as I would say these days, backed the wrong horse. You’re not going to solve the world’s problems by simply sort of, going down a sort of, what would nowadays be called a neo-liberal route, and trying to make lots of money by doing a particular thing. And, so I was against them, yeah. And, as for being a Maoist, well, at the time I was certainly toying with Maoism, as I perceived it to be. So that was a, a fairly just criticism.

How would he have known that? That’s what I’m interested in.

Do you know, I don’t know. He must have read between the lines or something. Of course, the point… Well again, that Maoism, as people perceived it to be, was very fashionable at that time. So it Colin Tudge Page 56 C1672/17 Track 4 would be very easy to say, well everybody that criticises us must be a Maoist. It’s like kids in the playground you know, the teacher tells them off, and they say, ‘You’re a fascist.’ You know, it’s… [laughs]

[48:25] Tell me, then, please, about the World Food Conference, which you think you had gone to before this Royal Society meeting.

Yeah.

What do you remember of it?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think I worked for World Medicine at the time, I can’t actually remember. May have been New Scientist. But… Where was I going with this? It was in Rome. I was quite young. I was tremendously flattered to be, you know, have the opportunity to go to such an important sounding conference. And, the World Food, it was convened by Henry Kissinger, and it was convened because, or in the wake of, a whole series of famines, in India, Africa, et cetera, about which it didn’t, it didn’t seem to be possible really to do much about them in those days. There was a certain feeling of helplessness. And of course people were very Malthusian in those days, still, still believed that the world population was going to double and double and double and then we’re all going to die. And at that time, the Seventies, I think the world population was probably rising as fast as it ever has. I think there was actually a global rise, certainly in Africa four per cent a year, something like that. I think the global, the global figure was over two per cent. Well two per cent actually means that you double the population every forty years, and of course it’s compound interest, not even fifty years but forty years. Well forty years, and in eighty years you double it and double it again, that’s a four-fold increase. That’s within the lifetime of one person. And then if you multiply it again, and say, well, another forty years of that, a couple of generations, you’ve increased it by twenty-something times. So it just looked as if we were absolutely heading for the buffers at a fantastic rate. And of course, it was either, it was about then that the Chinese introduced their one child per family kind of rule. It was roughly about that time. And the Indians were, you know, getting radios in return for vasectomies and all that kind of stuff. So this, it was a, population was a very big issue. And it really did look, as I said, as if the world was in deep trouble. So to hold a world food conference by the United Nations, which I believe was the, well it was, it was the first of its kind, was a very big deal. [50:41] Now I went along there, and I had already done quite a lot of stuff with, you know, going round the Agricultural and Food Research Council, institutes, so I knew what good science was, agricultural science. I went there expecting to hear some very high-class analyses and very high-class, with some very very good science being brought to bear, all that kind of stuff. And I was actually shocked to find that actually, and my impression anyway, was that very few countries that were there were actually focused on the real problems. And basically, everybody was fighting their own political corner in the Colin Tudge Page 57 C1672/17 Track 4 same way that they do all the time. So, basically, it seemed to me that the British, for example, were simply trying to say, well, yes, bad things happening in the world, but it’s not our fault. We’re doing all we can. And the Americans, not our fault. We can do more, we should export more maize, to the… So everybody basically were saying, yeah, it’s not our fault, and we should just go on doing as, what we’re doing now, only more so. And you come back to sort of, Einstein’s point, that you will never solve a problem by applying the same thinking that caused the problem in the first place. And this is a prime example of, I didn’t quote Einstein at the time. There were a few countries who did seem to be focused on the problem, but, once seen. One of them was China, which basically was the great maverick in those days. So to see a Chinese person at all, was a great sort of, leap forward if you know what I mean, as Mao himself would doubtless say. So there were a few sort of chaps, I think they were mainly chaps, there may have been some women, mooching about in sort of, you know, those blue denim suits [laughs], pretending they didn’t speak English, which they did of course. But they were saying, you know, actually focusing on what you might call Third World problems and saying, you know, we’ve got to rethink what we do, and things like that. The Canadians, if memory serves, also took that kind of line. Because the Canadians at the time were, were keen to show their difference from the USA, and were actually quite left-wing, and I believe, one of the, the wife of one of the presidents at the time, I can’t remember the name, Trudeau? something like that, not Trudeau, something like that, was actually, she declared herself to be a Marxist, and a very fashionable Marxist, what you might call a champagne Marxist. But, anyway, that was, so that was, they took a line like that. The Algerians seemed to be focused on the real problems. But then of course, they were fighting the French, so they, again, wanted to distance themselves. But my, still my point is that they, I couldn’t find anybody, apart from the Catholic Church, who were actually focused, we’re talking about humanitarian principles. And I suppose other churches would, but they just didn’t, if you see what I mean. I mean, the Catholic Church is actually very political in a way that most churches are not. But they were there, saying, you know, we’ve got to be, take the humane view, what is the compassionate view, and so on. But the countries, not, apart from those that have a special interest. And I found this deeply disappointing, because, I said to myself, well, you know, nobody’s ever going to solve a problem, a real problem with the world, at the political level, because the politicians, and their representatives, are not trying to solve the problems. They’re trying to maintain their own position in the world. It is rather like, now I think of it, a parallel, though it might not sound like a parallel, but is. Richard Feynman. You remember when one of the rockets went up, and something went wrong with the rubber rings that were the seals, and, well you know, one of the seals on the rocket broke, and the rocket collapsed because all the steam escaped. [laughs] Putting it crudely. And it fell out of the sky. And, Feynman was called in to, among other people, to try and solve the problem. And he said… He wrote a book about this. All the others were sort of flapping about and saying, you know, it’s impossible to see, and he picked up one of the rubber rings that were supposed to provide the seal, dropped it into some iced water, whereupon it stiffened up, whereupon it was no longer functional as a seal. And he said, this is what happened. The rocket sat on the launch pad during the night; it was launched at sub-zero temperature in the morning, and it was, the rings had already, you know, gone into this hard state. But the point he made was that it was as if the meeting, that was set up by NASA Colin Tudge Page 58 C1672/17 Track 4 to solve this technical problem, was set up in such a way that it couldn’t possibly solve the problem. Because it was conceived as a, as a sort of political issue, and that basically as a sort of political cover- up. And that was ostensibly what it was. And it’s the same kind of thing, you see what I mean. And the question arises, where in the world are you ever going to get a group of people who, a) are focused on the real problem, which is, you know, scientific, moral, to do with compassion et cetera, who also have power, which has to do with politics and economic power and so on.

[56:02] Did you go here with anyone else, as a journalist, to this conference?

[pause] I think… [pause] I think… Sorry, my memory is a bit hazy. But I believe that there was a, there was a… It was either this meeting or another one, but it must have been this one, there was a conference newspaper, which was… Yeah, but it was, it was a very good newspaper, it was edited by a very good journalist whose name I’ve forgotten. But other people there included Peter Bunyard, who I’ve stayed friends with throughout my life, who writes about the Third World and environment and so on. I’ve mentioned him before actually. And, so yes, I was part of that group. Yeah. And Robin Sharp, who’s another of these characters.

And were you involved in interviewing the representatives of different countries at the conference?

I’m ashamed to say, I never did. I tend to watch from a distance. I should, I should engage more. [laughs]

[57:04] Could you give me your memories of, of time spent… Well perhaps we ought to start with, could you give us a, a sort of, sense of your home life at this time? So, we don’t at the moment know where you are living. We know that you’ve got one daughter and one on the way.

Yes.

So, a sense of your sort of, life at home.

Well we, we lived as a, as a very pleasant little family I think, in South London, a variety of addresses. I think by then we were in Dulwich, at a house that we bought for £7,000 and now change hands at about a million and a half. ba-ba-ba-ba And, well, my children were born in 1970, 1972 and 1974. So, there we were, living in South London. I was commuting to central London, either to World Medicine or New Scientist or whatever. And, I sometimes, later I cycled, well, I don’t know whether I was at that stage. And, yeah, that was it basically. Very ordinary suburban life. And I played squash, I played a lot of chess. That was it.

Colin Tudge Page 59 C1672/17 Track 4

What memories do you have of time spent with the children when they were young? In the same way that I asked you about what you could remember of time spent with your mum and dad when you were young, what do you remember doing with them?

Well we always took them out on a Sunday. I used to play squash on a Saturday, slightly to my shame, but I did. But we, we always took them out on a Sunday, we made a point of that, year after year after year. And, I’m afraid – well no, not I’m afraid, but we tended to take them to the kind of places that I liked. So we took them to Kew Gardens quite a lot. But also, I was at that time, I’m pretty sure, a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, and, so we used to take them to the zoo, [laughs] practically every week. Which for me as a Fellow was free. And we could walk to the front of the queue. Oh it was all very pleasant. They, I think, possibly didn’t like the zoo as much as I did after a time, but, nevertheless, that was one of our main things. And occasionally to other places. But that was the main thing. And, they were at primary school, and we took them to school and all that kind of stuff.

When you say, to, partly to your shame, you played squash on Saturday, what did you mean?

Oh only that I possibly should have taken the kids out on Saturday afternoon as well. On the other hand, they probably didn’t want to be taken out, you know what I mean, it’s a… So, I’m not really ashamed.

[59:40] Thank you. Now, perhaps you could tell me about the writing of your first book, The Famine Business.

Yeah. Yeah.

Although, there is one before that with Michael Allaby isn’t there? Home Farm.

Oh no, that came after, I think.

OK.

I think that came after.

OK.

The very first book I wrote actually was, well no, my, when I was a part-timer at New Scientist, which I suppose was 1970, and that was on lasers. And it was only 12,000 words.. And I didn’t know anything about lasers frankly, it’s not my subject. But, as a, you know, I had a bit of, I did know sort of, science. And, so I, I swatted up basically and wrote this book, which some people said they thought was quite Colin Tudge Page 60 C1672/17 Track 4 good. And I, it still stands me in good stead, about wavelengths and all that kind of thing. Anyway, so that was the first. [1:00:32] But the second one I’m pretty sure, which was the first real book, because 12,000 words is, is an extended pamphlet really, was The Famine Business. And Michael O’Donnell was extremely nice to me, because, I, by that time I was back with New Scientist – with, with World Medicine, and I said to Michael, ‘Look, I really want time off to write this book.’ I didn’t have any money actually, so, I don’t know how I was going to do it, but, well apart from the salary, but, I need to write this book. And he said, ‘Well write it.’ And I mean, he said, ‘Just sit in the office and do it.’ Which was very generous of him. And, without that I… And so I published it, and it went down very well with, with the few people that read it. [laughs] And some people are still kind enough to remember it. I’m pretty sure that the second book, which I wrote with Mike Allaby, which was called, I can’t remember what it was called…

Home Farm?

What?

Was it called Home Farm?

Home Farm. And it was about the whole business of, of how you, you know, how you become a small farmer on your own, still writing about that stuff. It was a bit later, that was… And that was based largely on all the stuff I had learnt at Farmers’ Weekly, and at places like the Rowett and so on. So I actually could speak with some, small authority. There was a huge number of very basic ideas you see, which a lot of people, even in farming, don’t realise. For example, sheep. There was a very very good thinking biologist who I knew quite well at the time called, he was one of the few knights in this game, called Sir Colin Spedding, who was one of the great names of agriculture. And he just pointed out that, what you want to do when you’re producing lambs, say, it would apply to any animal, but, the cost of the lamb, or the piglet or the calf, is partly the cost of feeding that animal to the, from birth to slaughter, but also the cost of maintaining the mother. And the mother of course is a much bigger animal than the, than the baby. So what you want to do is get as much, as it were, offspring as possible from the smallest possible mother, because small animals eat less than big animals. And in the case of pigs, what you, what commercial farmers try to do is to maximise the number of piglets. Well in the case of sheep, you, there’s a strict limit on how many you can get. I mean there are some breeds like the Finns which will produce up to five lambs per go, but you don’t want to do that really, because, a ewe cannot suckle five lambs, she’s only got two nipples, so she can’t do that. Whereas a pig can go up to twelve or more at a time. So, with sheep, twins is probably the ideal. And the problem is to get twins, because, if you get, if you fall short then you get only one, and if you get triplets, you’ve got, you’ve got an orphan lamb basically, you’ve got to find somebody else to look after it. But so, anyway, but the point is, you want to get two lambs per ewe. But also, you want the lambs to be fast-growing animals, Colin Tudge Page 61 C1672/17 Track 4 and you want the ewe to be a small animal. Well if you get a, a big lamb out of a small ewe, that can be quite cruel, so, and the same would apply to cattle. So what you want to do is, what they do do, is to cross the small ewe, which would generally be a hill ewe, with a big ram, which, might be a Leicester for example like that. And, anyway, that’s the point. Therefore, you can then get two lambs which are born at a reasonable size but grow very quickly because of their Leicester origins, lowland origins, but the ewe is a very economical beastie who feeds on grass and stuff. And you… Now I wrote about all this, and, I was surprised to find that, certainly one or two people who actually kept sheep, and knew this kind of stuff perfectly well intuitively, didn’t sort of, put two and two together and realise the reasons for it. And that was the first time I sort of, realised that there are people doing things who don’t recognise the fundamental reasons why they do them, which is quite important I think. And I was in this peculiar position of having this insight because of the people I had spoken to, but not actually doing it myself. So, I’m still in that weird position really. [laughs]

[1:05:24] Could you say something about the, what might be called the sort of, political content of The Famine Business?

Oh yes. Well it was very left-wing. I mention Marx a great deal throughout it, because basically the question arises, I mean, let us say you’re focused on the question of how you produce enough food for everybody, and make sure that everybody has fair shares. What political system will deliver this? And one that’s based purely on the profits of individual companies that do things that are profitable and nothing else, is not going to hack it. Apparently with the pharmaceutical industry actually. I mean nobody doubts that the pharmaceutical industry at its best can produce fabulous drugs, and often do it very efficiently. And they, they have employed in their time some of the very best scientists, let alone best pharmacologists. But, it simply is the case, everybody recognises this, that they focus, they’re much more inclined for example to focus on chronic diseases of rich people, where they can sell loads of drugs throughout their life at great expense, than they are to focus on the acute diseases of poor people, which are much more common and cause much more misery, but poor people, haven’t got any money, and once you’ve cured it you’ve cured it so there’s no follow-up. All that stuff. So they, they can do the job but they can’t focus on what’s really important. And the same applies to agriculture as a whole. And the question then is, what political system would enable the world to function, et cetera? Now the only thing I could come up with at the time was this idea of a sort of, Marxist, Maoist world really. I say Maoist because, Mao, certainly in much of his writing, and in fact the way China was, was very agrarian, and of course Russia never really was, you know. China… I’m never, I’ve never been a Stalin fan anyway, obviously, well, pretty obviously. But Stalin, you know, was basically, conceived of the countryside as being a factory, an urban model, whereas Mao, for a time at any rate, was prepared to build, or wanted to build, agriculture based on the small farm, small traditional farm, which seemed to me to be right. I’ve abandoned that Maoist view, I mean that’s a long time ago, but the same principle applies, the question is, a)… Well, the point is, a) you want an world agriculture that is based on small, mixed farms with lots of, lots of farmers, but b) you want to devise an economy and a Colin Tudge Page 62 C1672/17 Track 4 political system which will support that. And simple handing it over to the corporates, which is what the present Government does, Liz Truss simply wants to give away British agriculture to, basically the highest bidder, the biggest corporate, that’s, that is going to make things worse. It’s already making things worse. But still… So the question is, as I say, what’s the, what’s the right economic political system? The right economic system, I would now say, was what is, people are calling economic democracy, which is a sort of, variation of social democracy, or, basically, it should be green economic democracy. That is the right kind of economy you need. And that sort of assumes that you need a political system which is fundamentally democratic, however you manage to organise that. So, yes, so my… Anyway, the answer to question is, that book was fundamentally saying the same things I’m saying now, except that then, because I didn’t know much, and the ideas weren’t so developed anyway, I sort of opted for Marxism, whereas now I would opt for economic democracy.

[1:09:31] What do you remember of the reaction to it in terms of reviews and comment and so on?

The reviews were, were very, very favourable. I mean, and, and it got reviewed in very good places, like the Sunday Times – well Sunday Times, and the Observer. Gerald Leach, who worked for the Observer, I don’t know if you know, remember his name, but, he wrote a very good review. And I, I got some very good reviews in America. I got loads of excellent reviews. It was published by Faber and Faber, high profile publishers. I didn’t make any money out of it. [laughs] I don’t think it sold many copies. And it went into Penguin. But people still remember it, and people still have copies of it.

Did it result, did it lead to invitations to talk in particular places, or to do things that you would not otherwise have done?

Yes, it did lead to invitation to talk. But I was actually quite a bad lecturer in those days. I think I’ve improved. But… I hope so. But, lectures I remember giving in the wake of that book, on the whole weren’t very good, and they didn’t lead to much. I tell you what one of the problems was. I knew I was going out on a limb, because this was a very radical book, but I kind of suspected that I didn’t really know enough to be able to back up all the ideas. And if anybody attacked me, I, you know, I could well be floored. That’s what I thought. But I thought, it’s worth taking a chance on this, because you’re never going to be good enough to answer every possible criticism. So, I was too diffident in promoting it. Well now, forty years later, I think I was right enough, and nowadays I do have answers to most of the difficult questions that people did ask in those days. Like, you know, they would ask a question like, what about personal freedom, isn’t that important? You have a Maoist system, you sacrifice all that. Well now I know the answer to that, you know, it’s what I said, it’s the social democracy, and it’s the voluntary embracing of an idea which is socially good.

[1:11:41] What other criticisms of it do you remember then, if that was one of them? Colin Tudge Page 63 C1672/17 Track 4

[pause] I don’t remember serious criticism. I mean… Well, I mean I, I remember criticisms from one or two people who simply got it wrong, and one or two people who said, this man is a, oh I can’t remember now, but, this man is a commie, and, deserves to be shot. But you know, that’s basically loony stuff. But the serious people in serious places were very good about it. Almost to the point of, I was quite embarrassed, because I didn’t know that I could back it up, you see what I mean.

And did it lead to any sort of, correspondence, people writing to you from out of the blue about one thing…?

Quite a bit, yes. Unfortunately of course in those days, no email, so, letters tended to be, well you know, a hell of a problem really, they were a bind. So, not as much as one might have hoped, actually. I was quite disappointed with the way, you know, it did receive a very good press et cetera et cetera, but then, nothing much came of it frankly. I’ve stayed interested but nothing much came of it, really. Now… No, well, that, full stop really. [laughs]

[1:12:53] Thank you. Now can you tell me, tell the story of the move from World Medicine to New Scientist? This is in 1980. You had already been its biology consultant, but you are moving now, in 1980, to it as Features Editor.

Yes.

And you are there from 1980 to 1985. So, why, in 1980, are you moving from World Medicine to New Scientist as Features Editor?

Well again, one always feels of any job that you’ve sort of done it, you know. And New Scientist for me, New Scientist began, the very first edition, when I was in the second form at school, when I was about thirteen. And it just seemed to me, it was, to me, a wonderful thing. And the idea that you could make a living by writing about science seemed to be a wonderful thing. I mean, the people who were writing in those days were people like, Peter Stubbs stands out in my memory for some reason. And I felt, well, how wonderful to be Peter Stubbs, what a… So, I mean, New Scientist had always been in the back of my mind as some kind of, goal. And, over the years I had written a few things for it, worked for it, freelance, for a bit. And when this job came up, I mean, it just looked like a great leap up. And it was the place I had always had in mind. So I, yeah, great, seized it with both hands.

What was the, what did the interview involve?

Oh a chat with the editor, Michael Kenward at that time. Bernard had left. And we, I think we went out for… Well, with New Scientist you… I also had to be sort of vetted by the staff, because it was a Colin Tudge Page 64 C1672/17 Track 4 very democratic set-up. So we, I remember we went out for a drink one lunchtime, to some place in the Tottenham Court Road. And I obviously passed the interview. [laughs] One of the reasons that I got invited actually was that, by the time I left New Scientist there was a chap working for New Scientist called Dick Fifield, who was working was a managing editor, and he had worked for a time at World Medicine, so I knew him quite well, he was a friend of mine. So when this vacancy came up, he, he was the guy who suggested to Mike Kenward that he can ask me. So, so when I went there, I had this friend Dick, and I knew some of the other chaps anyway, vaguely.

[End of Track 4] Colin Tudge Page 65 C1672/17 Track 5

[Track 5]

Could you describe New Scientist at the time that you’re starting as Features Editor in 1980? Describe it as a physical, physical sort of place, but also, tell me about some of your colleagues. You’ve got a list from the masthead.

Well I think, we moved offices several times, and once… I think when joined, possibly we were in Longacre, in an old building that belonged to Odhams originally, which was taken over by IPC, which owned, what do you call it? Which owned New Scientist.

Ah.

So, I think we’re there. And then, we moved to a newish office in New Oxford Street, just round the corner basically. And in both cases they were open-plan-ish, entirely unexceptional, you know, and just, lots of desks and… The editor had his own room, but apart from that, we didn’t. That’s fine. The editor was, when I joined, was Michael Kenward, who was basically a very nice chap, and one should stress that. He was also quite abrasive, [laughs] and he tended to be quite abrasive with outsiders, including members of the Royal Society. And I, I don’t know, some of us felt it should be more diplomatic than that. And, for this kind of reason I kind of… We never fell out, I don’t think, one could say, but, but we, I treated him badly I think. I don’t think he treated me badly, but I think I treated him badly. And I regret that, because he’s basically a nice chap, good bloke. And he’s a good writer, and a very intelligent man, writes good books. And he’s, he’s still, he, as far as I know he’s still around, but I haven’t seen him for, for a long, long time. Lawrence McGinty was the news editor, and was a very very good news editor, and he went on to, you know, he liked holding lots of copy in his hands of six different articles, and, juggling them, that kind of thing. And, he went then to work for ITN. But in a sense, he and I should have been a perfect match, complement, because he was the kind of guy who was a real newspaper man, science background, but a real newspaper man. And the real newspaper men, they just love the fact that, you know, a periodical is coming out, and there’s a deadline, and you have bylines and all that kind of stuff. And I’ve been on press tours with guys like this, and they wait for the morning papers to come out, you know, see who said what about what, you know. It’s that kind of mentality. And I think Lawrence had this. And, well I didn’t. The other kind of journalist, if one was, divided it into two, other people who were basically academics manqué, or writers basically, people like Orwell, who actually liked writing discursive essays, which is what I like doing. And if they get discursive enough, they become books. But it’s not the same as being a news man and being really alert to the, to the latest thing that’s happening. And whereas somebody like Lawrence would, relishes the latest thing that’s happening, love of the phone ringing and, you know, frantic, something frantic’s happened and rush off immediately, I actually hate that. And I’m thinking about something else, if you don’t mind, and that kind of thing. Anyway, that’s that. Another guy, well, not another guy but, Georgina Ferry was also there. She’s still a very good friend, she lives round the corner, in Oxford, she’s a very, is very hard-working, and a good thinker, and a good writer, and, Colin Tudge Page 66 C1672/17 Track 5 you know, what can I say? She’s a, she’s still a good friend. And, Peter Marsh, who was a technology editor. Very good at telling jokes, Peter, he used to tell shaggy dog stories, huge length. [laughs] Usually quite a good punch line. But, I, I don’t see much of Peter, in fact very little, but I, I’ve met him once in a book fair, and we exchange Christmas cards, so I can still say that. So I regard him as a sort of a friend, although actually I haven’t seen him for, twenty years, except for this once. And among the consultants was Jeremy Cherfas, who was a very very good biologist. He was the biology editor before I took over as Features Editor. And, he worked for the BBC for a time. He had been, he had worked for Clare College, Cambridge, he was at Clare. And, no, he had also worked at Oxford as a, he could have been an academic, and, apparently didn’t choose to be. He worked for the BBC for a time, and was tipped for a time as the next Attenborough, because he was actually rather good on the television, but he, well I hope he won’t mind me saying this, he has a habit of falling out with people in charge. And in the end he went to work in Rome for one of the international agencies that deals with seeds, and I can’t remember what it’s called, but he’s been there ever since, maybe fifteen years. He remains a friend, although we don’t see him really, because he’s in Rome. And the other chap, the last really, who I really remember as, you know, as being sort of, important in my life, is Ziauddin Sardar, who is Pakistani. And he wrote about politics, and he has written more… and, he’s a physicist basically, but he writes more and more about Islam and Islam science. And he’s been on television quite a lot, and so on, so on. But he, he is now regarded as a serious Muslim or Islamic scholar. And I haven’t seen him for twenty-odd years, so, which I regret, because, I think there’s lots of things I’d like to talk to him about. But there we are. I’ve tried to get in touch but I can’t seem to track him down. So they’re the, they’re the main people of the people on this list.

[06:02] What do you remember of his interests then, at the time that you’re here, the five years that you’re here?

What I remember what, sorry?

Of his interest in science and Islam at the time, was that…

Ah. Well he was one of the first guys, to my knowledge, to point out that Islam had made serious contributions to the history of science. There’s a whole load of science which comes from, which, dreamed up by the Arabs, which are remembered by Muslim scholars or, or put together by Muslim scholars. And, you know, there are words like algebra, which is Islamic, and so on, so on. So he pointed out the debt that modern science owes to Islam, or to Islamic scholars. And, he also, well emphasised, re-emphasised, the sort of, importance of the sort of spiritual base of one’s approach to life. So, he was important to me. And, he was very politically aware of course, being Pakistani. And he and I went to Malaysia together at one point. And he’s written, I think he’s written, it was a whole book, about, and certainly a television series, on the modern forms of Islam which, it takes very different forms in Pakistan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, et cetera, and Africa. So it’s the diversity of Colin Tudge Page 67 C1672/17 Track 5 different beasts really. Which can be very very different from, from what one might call traditional forms. So, that’s what I remember about Zia.

What did you do, what do you remember of the trip to Malaysia with him?

That was very good. We went, oh I can’t remember when it was, early Eighties. I think we were away for quite a long time. And… Several weeks. It was a conference on Penang, about the environment of Penang and the way it was being wrecked. And, well I did the same kind of job there as I did at the World Food Conference, I was there to report on this great conference. I don’t know whether I did a very good job, but, you know, that was it basically.

Had you developed by this time an interest in relations between science and faith? So at the time that you’re, for example, in Malaysia with Zia, had you, had you developed what later becomes a very significant interest in relations between science and faith, yet?

Not really, no. I think, I thought of them in two different, quite different categories in my head. I hadn’t put the things together properly. I was still a kind of materialist scientist you know, basically science can explain the world fairly exhaustively. But I also had this feeling that there was, as it were, more to, which I had always had, you know, that there’s more to life than meets the eye, if only one could pin it down. That it was, it wasn’t, it wasn’t a coherent. As indeed it isn’t for a lot of people. I mean, there’s a hell of lot of, as you know, very religious scientists, very committed Christians for example, some very committed Hindus, Muslims, the whole thing. Jews. But many of them just don’t put the two things together. And you know, the Stephen Jay Gould line of the non-overlapping magisteria, I think is what a lot of them think. There’s just two quite different ways of looking at the world, universe.

[09:29] And what do you remember of any discussions of relations between science and religion in the New Scientist offices, you meet…?

I don’t think I can remember any really. Certainly none of substance. Certainly none stands out in my mind.

What about discussions, then, of relations between science and politics, in New Scientist, over those…?

No. Not that I remember. Not that I remember. And again, a very important thing, I mean in the early Sixties, which is going back obviously, but, with CND, a very political thing, but significantly driven by various church people. There’s a chap whose name I always forget, I always get it wrong, John, it’s not John Pasmore, but it’s a very similar name to that. Do you know? He went to prison with, with Bertrand Russell. But him, he was very strong. And there was Canon Collins, he was very strong. Colin Tudge Page 68 C1672/17 Track 5

There was Bruce Kent. I mean there was this, a significant array of clerics who were very very political. And it’s a pity that that seems to have gone. I mean, Rowan Williams made a few seriously political comments. He always got rapped over the knuckles for it, but he did. And of course Pope Francis is, is saying very good things. I think Pope Francis, many people think Pope Francis is, is much more alert to the problems of the world than, and in that sense much more worldly, than most politicians, who are out with the fairies actually.

[11:02] I wondered if, although religion was not a, a subject that was discussed much in the New Scientist offices at the time that you were there, what about relations between science and, sort of, science and society? I don’t know, science and politics broadly, you know, the sort of, responsibility of science, all of that.

Yes.

Were there people at New Scientist… Presumably you had meetings to talk about content.

Mm.

What were, what were people exercised about, if you like?

Mm. Well from… Sorry, I…

It’s all right.

It’s all right I hope.

Mm.

From the late Sixties onwards, New Scientist became very very socially aware, and very politically aware. Left-wing, almost inclined to say as a matter of, you know, course really. At that time, roughly that time, there was a group called the Society for Social Responsibility in Science. That sort of arose at that time. And, so there were these two things, the Social Responsibility in Science on the one hand… [knocking sound] Hello. Sorry. So there was basically these two big issues, one was general social responsibility of science and scientists, and secondly, specific problems like the way we are treating the Third World, which at that time was the biggy. Still is, although it’s been slightly sidelined lately. And, there were people who were very very involved indeed, like John Tinker, who was, who… I can’t remember the name of the outfit he founded, but he went away to found an association that was specifically aimed at this kind of issue. There was Joe Hanlon, who I still see occasionally, who became very involved in Africa. And, actually a whole load of others. And at one time, as I say, the Colin Tudge Page 69 C1672/17 Track 5 magazine became so political that science almost got squeezed out. And in fact when I went there, I was quite determined to get the science back in, because I thought it had, you know, it shouldn’t be sidelined in a magazine called New Scientist. But yeah, very strong.

What do you remember, then, of the relations between New Scientist and, it’s sort of, Steven Rose’s organisation for the…

Yes. That’s right.

…social responsibility of science.

Yes.

Was it discussed?

Well we… Steven I think was always on the edge of New Scientist rather than being seriously involved. But yeah, I mean, you know, he was a presence. As I say, the association was a presence. [machine noises]

[End of Track 5] Colin Tudge Page 70 C1672/17 Track 6

[Track 6]

Before I ask you about your particular role at New Scientist, could you just expand on your, the comment you made that you don’t think you treated the editor well? What did you…

Well, it’s a very very difficult job, being an editor. And I’d say it’s a doubly difficult job being an editor of a magazine like that, which has a high technical content. And it’s quite political. Well, all, all magazines of that kind are. But also… No, I’d say that’s basically it. And things like… Yeah. So it’s a hard job. And, like everybody else… And he was quite young, early thirties I guess. I mean, everybody makes mistakes, but I used to criticise his mistakes with some vehemence. Whereas nowadays, I would, I wouldn’t. But you see, one lives one’s life back-to-front. [laughs]

[00:57] Thank you. And can you tell me work as Features Editor that stands out in your memory over those five years? Clearly, you won’t be able to remember every project you worked on and decision you made, but…

There aren’t… Funnily enough, there aren’t many things that stand out really. I mean, I used to like… Well, mm. I like writing better than I like editing actually. And my job as Features Editor was to commission, but I am not actually a very good researcher, so, I actually rely on people coming to tell me things, rather than going out and finding out things. To some extent at New Scientist that happened, because very good people wanted to get their articles in. So I would sit there like Lord Muck, [laughs] as my mother would say, and very good people would come and tell me about their work. So I, you know, got quite a lot that way. But I mean I learnt a hell of a lot as a researcher when I was doing a tour of the old Agricultural and Food Research Council places, because, you know, I knew where I was going, and what I was there for, and all that kind of stuff. But just sort of, finding out about stuff, I’m not actually very good at. So, I should have been a, I should have done more proper commissioning than I did. Yeah, I remember a few things. I mean, for example a chap called David Macdonald, who’s now a professor here, been a professor for quite a long time, I think he wrote his first popular article for us. He has now written some very fine books, a couple of which are up on my shelves. But he did his first articles on, for example, feral- urban foxes, urban cats, and I commissioned them, they were good. And, a chap, I can’t remember his name, but, you know, there were various good articles of that kind that I remember we… And one I did which I was proud of was about the physics of the cricket ball, by a chap who was at Imperial College, and I’m afraid I can’t remember his name. But this particular chap had opened the bowling for Worcester School with Imran Khan. [laughs] So he was quite a distinguished fast bowler in his own right. And that we spent a long time on, and that was when I first learnt about Reynolds numbers and late swerve, and why it was that, oh I can’t remember their names, people were able to swerve the ball, you know, and all that kind of stuff. And, what’s it called? Bernoulli effect, where the ball turns in the air because of the spin, and things like that. That was a very good article, I remember that with affection. So there’s a few of that kind. [pause] I Colin Tudge Page 71 C1672/17 Track 6 suppose, the one for which I might conceivably be remembered, I don’t know, well I… anyway, but I didn’t have any, I was just the editor, or rather the commissioner, was Rupert Sheldrake’s book, when he wrote his book called The New Science of Life, in the early 1980s, that was his first foray into proper print. Rupert was brought to my attention by Jeremy Cherfas, who as I said was a very good biologist, who was the, still the biology consultant. And Jeremy knew Rupert because they were both at Clare together, Clare College. And I believe that Rupert, who was a very good scientist, is a very good scientist, was Jeremy’s supervisor, or, yes, I think he was, supervisor. So, you know, they knew each other well. And Jeremy told me that there’s this strange chap [laughs] called Rupert Sheldrake, who has got this very weird idea about how life, you know, how, how life really works. And the idea of morphic resonance, and the idea of, what was it called? Oh I can’t remember. ba-ba-ba

There’s morphic fields, and morphic resonance as the process that links organic and non-organic things over space and time.

Yeah. But… There was another term, and I can’t remember, actually. And anyway, the point of it was that, simple sort of… If you want to explain, why is it that, say, two animals of the same species are the same, basically, well the standard explanation is that of course they’ve got the same genes. Rupert pointed out that, that’s, as it were, not a sufficient explanation in itself, which indeed it isn’t. And he suggested that between all things of a similar kind, whether they are living, i.e., for example animals, or whether they’re non-living, for example crystals, precedent matters. And, it’s possible for any one thing at any one time to take on lots of different forms, but once it’s taken on, something has taken on a particular form, for whatever reason, it will influence what others do in the future, by some process which at the moment remains mysterious. But… And he said, this should apply also to ideas, or to, to memories. And if you have thought something and know something, and learnt something, it should be easier for somebody else to learn the same thing again, because of, you know, they won’t have to learn it right, straight from scratch. And, Rupert had this idea. And it influences our view about how all life really works, for all sorts of reasons. And, nobody wanted to run this article. Well, no. I don’t know that nobody else wanted to run this article, but, Jeremy said, ‘If you run this article you’ll be pushing the boat out a long way, because this is crazy stuff basically.’ But I thought, no, this clever… Rupert is obviously such a clever fellow, and this is obviously such a, well it’s, it’s such an important idea if it’s right, that we ought to run it. But the main thing was that it is in theory, in principle, a testable idea, and being a testable idea, puts it by some definitions immediately within the paleas of science. [07:32 So, we ran this article, and, we also, I can’t remember the… I thought of it, or Rupert thought of it, whoever thought of it, we ran a competition to ask readers if they can think of a, of a test for Rupert’s idea. And Mike Kenward, the editor, went along with this, thought it was a good idea. So, we ran this competition. And, somebody came up with the idea that if you gave somebody, if somebody learnt something in a language they didn’t know, in other words, for them it was gobbledegook, difficult to learn therefore, that somebody else of, other people, once one person had learnt it, would find it easier Colin Tudge Page 72 C1672/17 Track 6 to learn that thing. And, that should be very testable. So we ran a competition along those lines, and I believe we got a sort of positive result, that, once one person had done it, others cracked it more easily. And we had a, we always did at New Scientist, anything that gave us an excuse to go out and have a meal, we took it, so we had a nice meal to celebrate this. Excuse me. [coughs] And wrote about it. Steven Rose was extremely sceptical, and so we invited Steven along, obviously. So we had a very nice evening with Rupert. Richard Dawkins was also there. He was also I think very sceptical. So it was a very pleasant evening with these kind of characters talking about Rupert’s idea and the fact that there was evidence now that could be right. And that’s basically it really. Except that Rupert of course has gone from strength to strength, then a whole series of books about, you know, does a dog know that its owners are coming home, and, basically about telepathy. And I would say, and many other people would say, that, that the evidence for telepathy, including Rupert’s own experiments, is now very strong, it’s more or less open and shut. And it also accords with common experience, which is not a bad thing. Because, it is so far in conflict with the scientific orthodoxy that it’s still not really taken seriously. There are one or two university departments devoted to it, but some of them seem to think that it’s their duty in life to disprove the idea of telepathy, rather than exploring it and see where it might go. [09:53] I had a conversation with John Maynard Smith about this. John Maynard Smith was, well you will know, but for the record, one of the great evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century, a very very good thinker, original thinker. And we would talk about telepathy and, the evidence for it. And I said to him, it seems to me that, all we have to assume is that telepathy, for modern human beings who tend to be the people who are tested, Westerners, the ability to be telepathic is actually much curtailed, you know, it’s been hugely reduced. So all we’ve got left in a way is the vestiges, which is much stronger in other people. But not only that… So, whether that’s true or not, the point is that it is a difficult thing, telepathy, and difficult to get, to reproduce, and very delicate. So, a question… Scientists like to deal with things that they demonstrate, or they like- sometimes like to say prove, by statistical means. Now to get statistically valid things, you have to have a lot of samples, and they have to be reproducible. Now if you have something that is very delicate and very difficult, it’s very hard to get a significantly, a statistically valid sample and, you know, get it done. And I gave John Maynard Smith the analogy of long jumping. For example, there’s only two long jumpers in the history of the whole world who have ever jumped twenty-nine feet. Don’t know what it is in metres, but in my day it was twenty-nine feet. And one of them was Bob Beamon, who did it in Mexico, once, never again, and the other was, I think he’s called Rob Powell. Actually he’s not called Rob. Whatever he’s called. Powell. And who did it, I think twice, maybe three times. Nobody else has done it. Now if you were to say to a scientist, ‘Can human beings jump twenty-nine feet?’ the answer would have to be, no. I mean you try and get people to do it, even the best long jumpers, in the laboratory or on the track, wherever, and then none of them will be able to do it. And you say, well there are these two records of somebody doing it. That’s anecdotal. It’s not, it’s not, you know, statistically valid, et cetera. But let’s suppose that telepathy was kind of, by analogy as hard as this, you would never be able to pin it down Colin Tudge Page 73 C1672/17 Track 6 by statistics, by the means that statisticians would recognise. And I think that’s very important. And John Maynard Smith was kind enough to say he thought it was important too. [12:33] So, one has to say with telepathy, I think it’s a real thing, I don’t think there’s any question about it actually. Incidentally, I had another conversation with Rupert about this, that, let us assume for a moment that telepathy, not only exists but is universal. In other words, you and I would not be able to communicate at all unless there was a telepathic relationship between us. And although it seems as if, or one interpretation is, that, we are conveying information to each other by words, that might not be what is really happening. What may be happening is that we are in communication telepathically, and that the words are sort of, modifying the signal. A different kind of idea. And, anyway, Rupert thought this was a reasonable way to look at it, and I think… But the point is, if telepathy was universal, it would be impossible to test. Because the only way you can test something is to compare something, a situation in which something exists, with something, a situation in which it doesn’t exist. Well if something is universal, it can never not exist. It’s like gravity, how do you… You know, there isn’t a circumstance in which gravity doesn’t exist, so… You see what I mean? So, it’s, I think it’s, I think, a) it’s, it is a fact, and b) it’s out there, but c) the fact that science can’t pin it down is a limitation of science rather than a limitation of the, or an indictment of the idea itself.

[14:07] Apart from reading studies such as Rupert’s that convince you of the existence of telepathy, do you have, in addition to that, your own experiences of it?

Oh yeah. Yes, I do. I mean everybody, I think, has experiences of, episodes that are sort of telepathic. I’ll tell you one thing actually that rather, frightens me rather. That every now and again for no reason at all I think of some famous person that I haven’t thought about for years and years and years. I mean, OK, you can say this is just coincidence et cetera et cetera. But, it happens more often – no no, quite often, strikingly often, that that person will be seriously in the news within a few days. Often they’ve died. So, it’s better if I don’t think about people… [laughs] But, yeah, it happens a lot and I regard that as telepathic. And also of course there’s the work that Rupert did on, how do people know, or do people know, when they’re being stared at? Well the point is, you know, and if you look at somebody, you know, look at the back of their head while they’re sitting there, they will often turn round. Who’s that looking at me? And we’ve all experienced this. It’s not coincidence. It is, you know, it’s something we all feel. And Rupert has shown that it’s statistically demonstrable. So, you know… Instead of saying this is all rubbish, let’s try and disprove it and get that magician, Randi, whatever his name is, to, or James Randi, his name is, to, to rubbish it, instead of saying that, why don’t we say, yes, this is very interesting, let’s, let’s really have a look, and, which some people are doing. Well Rupert, Rupert’s among them. But it’s still getting a seriously bad time.

[15:52] Colin Tudge Page 74 C1672/17 Track 6

Now, the article that you commissioned in New Scientist on A New Science of Life came out before the book. Had you read the book, had you read the draft as it were, the, the pre-published copy of it, before you…?

I had certainly read something. I can’t remember what. And I had also talked to Rupert. That’s as best as I can remember.

Did you talk to him in person?

Yeah, I think so. Yes.

And could you tell me more about the, the meal that...?

Oh, it wasn’t very interesting. We just went down to a restaurant, and drank a lot, which we did in those days, and talked about it. And… Oh the chap who had suggested the test, which I think was, somebody had to learn something in Japanese, or something like that, was also there, and, you know, I think we presented him with a prize or something, so… It was that kind of thing. It was an excuse for a jolly, and an excuse for a nice article as well.

Did Rupert go to that?

Yeah, yeah.

So Rupert, Steven Rose…

Richard Dawkins, me, Michael Kenward, whoever it was won the prize, and probably one or two other people, can’t remember who else was there.

What impression did you get, then, of Richard Dawkins on that?

Oh he was sceptical. And Rupert’s always very – sorry, not Rupert, Richard is always very charming. I think, well he’s, he is a sceptic on, on that kind of thing. I don’t think he and Rupert get on particularly well personally. But, you know, because they’re very different people. And, you know, Richard’s Richard. [laughs]

You had read The Selfish Gene by this time?

Oh I think so, yes. Yes. Yeah. And it’s very good of course.

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What do you remember of the response to your, to the article and to your sort of short editorial in the same issue, in the letters of…?

I don’t remember much about it frankly. I tend not to read responses really. Should do, but, don’t, you know.

The key response came from Louis Wolpert, and then there were sort of…

Oh Lewis did it. Yes, what did he say? [laughs]

That, the fact that something is testable doesn’t make it scientific.

Oh yes. Yeah.

So… And then, there developed a whole sort of series of letters where that seemed to be the key issue, you know, does testability equal science?

Yes. Well one of the things he said, as I remember now, you’re minding me, was that if I were to say the moon is made of green cheese, that would be a testable hypothesis. It would also be a very silly hypothesis. One of the points that Karl Popper made, and he was the chap who is known for the whole testable hypothesis idea, was that you, you have to stay within the bounds of common sense, because actually Popper was a very sensible, down to earth chap. And Rupert followed up on that, and said, look, one of the things is that, OK, anybody can propose a daft idea, but are you prepared to put money on it? And, would you, you know, would you make a risk on the back of it? Well, if Rupert was prepared – sorry, if Lewis was prepared to make a bet on the back of the green cheese hypothesis, then we’ll say, OK, you’re taking it seriously, let’s test it. But if not, well forget it, it’s a joke. But the point about Rupert’s idea was that it wasn’t a joke, it was a serious idea, which he said he was perfectly prepared to put money on, and in fact actually has, he’s invested a great deal of his money in, in research of one kind or another. So it’s totally different. And one of the interesting things about science, or, about everything really, but, people forget it in the context of science, is that you really in the end, although science is intended in a way to improve on common sense, or to improve on first intuitions, you have to limit it by common sense. You can’t, well, you know, you can’t just fantasise. So, I think Lewis is quite wrong. I think Lewis, I don’t want to speak ill of… Is he still alive? Oh. Well I don’t want to speak ill of somebody who’s not here to defend themselves, but I actually think he’s a very doubtful philosopher of science. You know, I don’t think he… Yeah. I think he gets it wrong. [laughs] [20:23] I’ll tell you, actually, one little thing is that, I mean, I’ve heard Lewis say on the radio, I wasn’t, not in a conversation I’ve had with him, on the radio, that, you know, science deals with things that are sort of unequivocal. So that, he gives the impression that, as I’ve written in various places, that, science is a Colin Tudge Page 76 C1672/17 Track 6 kind of great edifice, which is built together rock by rock, or stone by stone, and glued together by theories, mortared together by theories, that are tested and tested and tested to breaking point, so that in the end this edifice can’t be wrong. And that’s just quite untrue, you know. I mean once you look closely at what people call facts, well it’s even quite difficult to pin down what a fact is, and as for theories, you can test them and test them until you’re blue in the face and they always seem to stand up. At no point can you say, that is absolutely open and shut and proven, or at least you cannot say there’s nothing else going on. So it’s, the idea that science is an edifice is quite wrong. And I’ve made the analogy that it’s much more like a, a landscape painting, an oil painting, which you can continuously or forever overpaint, and change, but it’s like an oil painting that is being written by, or painted by, 1,000 different people at different times as a huge composite. But, you know, the Thomas Kuhn idea that every now and again, that the ideas of any particular science become sort of too unwieldy and, and there are too many exceptions, and you can’t, it doesn’t work any more, you have to take the whole thing to bits and start again, what you call a paradigm shift. This would apply to this landscape painting metaphor, that you would… And there comes a time when the painting becomes too messy, because, too many people are trying to add bits, so you chuck it away and you start with a fresh canvas. And that’s what science is like. It is not like an edifice, absolutely nothing like an edifice. It’s a story. I’ll go on in this vein because, that, this is the thing about, all human understanding of anything is in the end a story that we tell ourselves, and Kant and various other philosophers have said, you could never see reality as it, as it were, really is. Assuming there is a thing called reality. You, you know, it’s always, it’s always this, it’s always a story that we tell ourselves, a narrative. And, I would say, if you want to follow this through, that what we call truth, scientific truth or any other truth, in the end is a story that we tell ourselves, that we find satisfying. And we say, gosh, that’s it, you know, that’s it, that’s sewn up. [23:10] Now, to just take an example. One of the great stories that seems to be absolutely brilliant and perfect, and I always thought, for years I thought it was really, is the whole sort of, what was properly called neo-Darwinism, where you start with Darwin, natural selection; you add Gregor Mendel, the mechanism, the selection of genes; you throw in a few twentieth-century thinkers like Dobzhansky and so on; and then finally, you get to the Fifties and the elaboration of DNA, the structure of DNA, how DNA actually works, how the genes are turned on and off. So you stick that onto the neo-Darwinian idea, paradigm, and you’ve got a beautifully complete picture of, of how biology works. Is there anything else to be said? Well lots of biologists have said, no, there isn’t, that’s it, that’s biology done. And it isn’t. [laughs] I mean, well, first of all, in points of detail, the more you look at evolution, the more you look at natural selection, as Darwin himself anticipated, the more you see that natural selection is not the whole story. Darwin said that. The more you look at genetics, the more you see, well, particularly the modern idea of epigenetics, the more you see that there isn’t a simple relationship between the gene and the phenotype. It’s, it’s non-linear relationship. And, the more you look at the way genes actually work, the molecular biology, the more you see that the gene is in constant dialogue with everything around it, and is influenced by everything around it, and, you know, epigenetics being part of it. And, you realise the whole thing, although it’s a beautiful story, it’s actually no more than an Colin Tudge Page 77 C1672/17 Track 6 abstraction of something that is actually far more complicated than that. And I would extend this, and while I’m in this vein I might as well extend it, that, this applies to the whole kind of materialist agenda. Because, one would say, look, you know, the natural selection/gene/DNA story is so beautiful and complete, and it’s very much a materialist explanation, you know, it’s just talking about what molecules do and what atoms do, and, natural forces, that you really don’t need anything else. So the idea that there is anything more going on, more to the universe than meets the eye, any kind of, you know, transcendent dimension, any kind of underlying intelligence, is completely superfluous. Well first of all, you can say actually, as I’ve just said, the Darwin-Mendel/DNA story, isn’t quite as sewn up as some people would like to think. And secondly, you could say even if it was beautifully complete, you could never say that there’s nothing else going on, it doesn’t exclude other things happening. So, well, the question, the big questions remain open. [26:10] And then there’s a final thing, a propos, you know, how do you know what’s true? Truth is a story that you tell yourself. Well, the question… Or, that you think is, you find satisfying. The question, right, is, how do you know anything is true in the end? And there are some scientists, and I think I’m almost inclined to put Lewis in this category, though I shouldn’t, who think that you, in a sense, genuinely do demonstrate things by science beyond, not only all reasonable doubt but beyond all possible doubt, just by the sheer weight of so-called evidence. And… I think I’m losing my thread. [pause] Oh yeah. The idea then is that truth as it were emerges from the evidence, naturally, as it were. It’s, it’s almost arises, we might say, algorithmically. It’s like a formula. This, this, ‘therefore that’. And the point is that, in the end, that’s not how scientists or anybody else ever know that something is true. And whenever you look at any idea in science, you always find that there is some kind of alternative notion that could be tested. Why do you, at any one time, take it to be the case that a particular explanation is the one that you favour? And in the end it’s not a, not that nature comes with a label round it saying, this is true; it is the fact that you feel intuitively that it is the case. And, intuition plays a fantastic, well it’s a key, to, to science. And there are various, people have expressed this in various ways. I mean, Paul Dirac used to say it’s more important to find beauty in your equations than it is to, you know, that they should add up in a way. And that’s not quite true, but you know what I mean. Of course they add up. And, it relates back to John Keats’s line, you know, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’ And actually, in the end, what, why scientists think that any one idea is true, is not simply the weight of the evidence, or anything else, but the intuition, that because of the evidence in a way, or even despite the evidence, such and such a thing must be true, that’s an intuitive thing. And, once you start seeing that science is first of all a narrative, a story, like anything else, and secondly that it depends on your, in the end on your own personal response to, to the story, then it’s in a quite different light, actually. It suddenly, you see that it’s actually, in a sense, in the same category as anything else, even, everything else, even though it’s dealing with testable hypotheses and so on. And the truth that it deals with, ‘the truth’ in inverted commas, are never complete, and even if they were, it’s impossible to, it’s, it’s actually a foolish concept that the truth can ever be complete. But even if it was, you wouldn’t know that it was. So it’s, it’s always dealing with things that aren’t certain. It only ever looks at a part of what’s going on, one thing at a time as it were. It only looks at the things that the scientist thinks he or she can deal Colin Tudge Page 78 C1672/17 Track 6 with. Peter Medawar’s line, ‘Science is the art of the soluble.’ So it’s always uncertain, it’s always partial. It’s always an abstraction of the whole. Can’t be more than that. And, therefore the idea that it is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is intrinsically daft.

[29:55] Thank you. Could you then take us on through your life story from New Scientist to the radio? So this is in the mid-Eighties.

Yes.

What happens.

Well, when I was on… When I was still at World Medicine, Geoff Watts, who I mentioned earlier, went to work for the radio, went to work for BBC Radio 4, as a medical correspondent. Did programmes, all sorts. And, I did odd bits of radio for, for Science Now, probably because of my connection with Geoff, who was, you know… And after I had done one or two bits, I wrote to the, or, I think I wrote, or, yeah, I wrote, to the chief producer, who was Geoff Deehan, and asked him if there were any jobs. And he wrote back and said, ‘No, but I’ll let you know if there are.’ And it was exactly the same thing that happened on Farmers’ Weekly. And, actually a couple of weeks later he rang back and said, ‘Yes, I can offer you a job as a presenter on Radio 4, on Science Now,’ as it was in those days. And I thought, well it’s time for a change, you can’t go on doing the same job forever and ever and ever. So I thought, jolly good. And went to do it. That’s it. In fact, I was never as at home on… I enjoyed writing scripts, although it’s a very different discipline. Because, as they say, twenty seconds is a long time in radio. So, if you were doing a Science Now, you had to get from one item that might be about physics, and in twenty-five seconds you had to get from there to introducing a new, a totally different item, that might be about molecular biology, say. Or, yeah, thirty seconds almost at most. So you had to get the words really tight. But at the same time it had to sound like a human being speaking; it couldn’t be like a telegram. So it was a good challenge, writing it. But I, that, that I could do. But I never really enjoyed the, the speaking in front of a mic, for some reason. I think I’d be much better at it now. But, it’s along, you know, it’s, late now. [laughs] So that was it. So I went to the radio, and I did that. And I did that for… Well I worked for Radio 4. And then I thought, actually, what we really need on radio is, is a programme on science which is more discursive. And I think it was my idea that we should do a programme which I wanted to call Science on Three, and I think it was called Science on Three for a time. It would be longer than, what’s it called, Science Now, it would be forty-five minutes rather than thirty, and would be a series of interviews with, just very very good people, to talk, not to confront them, you know, the usual sort of confrontational thing, and have a big argument about their ideas, but just to ask them what their ideas were, and get them to talk about them. So we interviewed some very very good people, I mean including John Maynard Smith. Jane Goodall stands out in my mind. Robert May stands out in my mind, later fellow of the Royal, President of the Royal Society. And Martin Rees, and people like that And basically, you could, because you Colin Tudge Page 79 C1672/17 Track 6 were the BBC you could go anywhere in the world, and ask to talk to people, and they would talk to you And there are several people I should have spoken to and didn’t, which I regret, including Noam Chomsky. But, anyway, it was very good, I enjoyed the programme. But they discontinued it in favour of something else.

[33:34] What do you remember about each of those memorable interviews? You mentioned Jon Maynard Smith, Jane Goodall, Bob May and Martin…

Well Jane Goodall I thought was very memorable. She’s, she was an extremely nice person. I imagine she still is an extremely nice person. And the work she did on chimpanzees was world changing. Because, actually, when she first wrote about chimpanzees for Nature, her observations of them in the wild, in Gombe, I think it’s, Tanganyika probably as it was then, Tanzania, she referred to certain chimps as adolescent, and others as being infant, and others as being, you know… She actually gave them names. And the editors of Nature said, ‘You can’t do this. You can’t refer to a chimpanzee as an adolescent, that’s anthropomorphic.’ You know, you can refer to them as a, as a, I don’t know, sub- adult male, or a sub-adult female. And you can’t give them names, you know, they’re just animals, so just give them numbers. That’s the way to do it. And she, I think, dug her heels in and said, this is nonsense. And she, by her observations of the subtlety of the way they behaved, and their interactions, demonstrated I think really for the first time that animals, wild animals, really do have personality, and that the personality is quite subtle, you know, some are confident, some less confident; some are calm, and some are quite erratic, and all these kind of things. Some are jealous. Some are nice. But also, that the, that the personality of the individuals really matters. It’s like the old-fashioned view of history, old-fashioned view of history is that history is determined by the personality of individuals. And there’s another view which says, no, it’s all, you know, it’s all down to trends in the end, sort of, I suppose that would be a sort of Hegelian view. But she said, ‘No no, the personalities matter.’ And, also, their behaviour cannot be explained in the kind of behavioural, behaviourist sort of ways that was then still fashionable, where you basically tried to explain the behaviour of all animals, and even human beings, in purely mechanistic terms, one reflex leading to another, et cetera. You can’t do that, she said. And, this, I think this actually, more than anything else, changed people’s entire attitude to what animals are really like. And just to be slightly anecdotal, if you… No. Well, anecdotal. If you… There’s a wonderful book written, I think in the Fifties, yeah it was in the Fifties, by Konrad Lorenz, you know, who’s the Austrian biologist, ethologist, observer of behaviour, in which he is, he is sort of, actually very anthropomorphic, and he talks about geese falling in love, and, little jackdaws being very plucky, or, or being very nouveau riche, and this kind of thing. But in the introduction, it’s a totally self-contradictory introduction: on the one hand he says, you know, ‘Of course when I use these terms, they’re purely metaphorical. I mean, by no means will I ever dream of being anthropomorphic.’ I mean, actually, you know, just a way of getting ideas across. On the other hand, he said… Actually the people I think really describe animals well, well one of them he, he mentioned two, one of them, I can’t think of her name, but, one of them was Rudyard Kipling. And he said he thought that Jungle Colin Tudge Page 80 C1672/17 Track 6

Book really kind of, [laughs] hit it on the head, of the way animals are and how they interact. You could have thrown, although he didn’t, for example, Tarka the Otter, Henry Williamson, in which the animals, otters and herons and all sorts of beasties, have a personal relationship with each other in the wild. But the point is that, there was always the sort of, literature which was kind of, not, not a respectable scientific literature, in fact was novelistic, literary, which talked about animals in these terms. But Lorenz, who was one of the great pioneers of animal behaviour, actually deep down, this is what he thought. But he wasn’t prepared to say so, because that would have, stopped him being a scientist. Well I think, Jane Goodall, without embracing necessarily Rudyard Kipling, was not afraid to say, no, animals have personality, they do think, and what they think matters, et cetera et cetera et cetera. And I think that’s a neat transformation. And I went on from there. [38:19] I also interviewed, I think in my Radio 3 programmes, a chap called Pat Bateson, Sir Patrick Bateson, FRS, who among other things did the study on deer to show that deer hunting with dogs was actually very very cruel for various reasons. But, when I interviewed Pat Bateson, he said, anthropomorphism, that anthropomorphism has always been regarded as the great sin, the idea that we should compare other animals with ourselves. But, he said, actually, if you apply anthropomorphism sensibly, and again this idea of sense comes in, it’s, it is heuristic. In other words, you learn a great deal from it. And the behaviourist idea was, in effect, that, for minimalist purposes, and for materialist minimalist purposes, you should treat animals as, as if they were just clockwork toys, full stop, and that behaviourism was animals perceived as clockwork toys. And what became clear, and I’m just moving forward to the 1980s, as a result largely of Jane Goodall’s work but also other people, was that that just will not do. And actually, as Pat Bateson said, it can make more sense to compare, to assume that an animal is like us, until proved otherwise, or until you can demonstrate the differences, than to assume that it’s nothing like us at all. And the guy who since then, I don’t think I interviewed him on the radio, but I’ve spoken to him since, who sort of goes along with that very well in modern times, is Frans de Waal, Dutch biologist, who just says, you know, who basically is perfectly happy to entertain, at least anthropomorphic sounding explanations of what animals do. [40:16] So, the whole shift has happened, actually, in the last twenty, twenty-five years. And… Or forty years in fact. But, basically the last twenty-five years. Which I think was driven by Jane Goodall, probably, more than anybody else. That’s a huge thing to have done. And it changes not only one’s attitude to what animals are like, and how they behave, and all that kind of stuff, but also to one’s, to how you treat them. I mean, it has huge, what do you call it, welfare implications. And she said she went to a meeting once on AIDS, the AIDS virus, and there was a guy there, a scientist, very good scientist, who was saying, ‘I don’t care if I – well, I do care, but, basically, I don’t care if I eliminate every chimpanzee there is, if it enables me to produce a vaccine against AIDS.’ And this was an extreme statement of what was actually a general feeling. And Jane Goodall spoke at this meeting, and she said, ‘I didn’t try to argue with him; I just showed the films of the chimps, and described what had gone on.’ And, basically, the people just realised that these creatures that they were treating as, you know, toys, were in fact not. They were beings. Not human beings but chimpanzee beings, and deserve to be Colin Tudge Page 81 C1672/17 Track 6 taken seriously. And nowadays you see this kind of approach being applied to all kinds of creatures, certainly to elephants, certainly to wild dogs, certainly to hyenas. I saw a programme on the other day about ratels, honey badgers as they’re better known, which sort of, made the same point, the incredible subtlety of their behaviour cannot be explained in simple, et cetera, terms. And once you enter this territory, then, then you start to see biology, or certainly the biology of behaviour, as literature. I mean, you know, would Chekhov have made a better job of explaining what animals, how animals behave, than, than Pavlov, for example? Well the answer is, of course. [laughs] Or B F Skinner.

[42:33] Thank you. OK. Bob May was another one that you said…

Oh yes. Actually, do you know, I can’t remember what I talked to Bob May about. But he’s just a clever fellow.

Martin Rees?

Well the usual stuff, about the expanding universe and all that kind of thing. Which was sort of, newish in those days.

To what extent were these interviews biographical, to what extent were you asking them about their lives, as opposed to their ideas and work?

No. Just ideas. Basically. I suppose I asked Jane Goodall, ‘What were you doing sitting in the middle of the jungle for…?’ And, you know, it was Louis Leakey who put her up to it. Things like that. But…

Thank you. Oh, John Maynard Smith was one, wasn’t he?

Yes. What did we talk to him about? [pause] Certainly about evolutionary ideas. I think it was the extent to which natural selection is a complete, or can be seen as a complete explanation of how evolution works. I think it was there. I honestly don’t remember. I just remember I spoke to him at length, which was nice. And, actually, somebody I do remember I spoke to, although it wasn’t on this programme, so I won’t mention it really, but, Richard Leakey, but that was when I was at New Scientist, who had just, what was it? Oh, it might have been the Laetoli footprints, you know, that kind of thing.

This was before the radio?

This is before.

Colin Tudge Page 82 C1672/17 Track 6

That’s OK. You can tell me. Tell me.

[44:02] Well, it was the Seventies, Eighties, and, it was again a sort of transitional period. You could say that every period in science is a transitional period. But this is a specially transitional period really. Or Sixties, up to the Eighties. Because, hitherto, well, hitherto people had been very keen to draw a fairly straight line between, well, primitive human beings were seen to be people like the Neanderthals. No no no no. Sorry. Between apes, starting a long, long time ago, five, seven million years ago, to us. And there was a fairly straight line drawn which went from… Well the first ones that were known about were the australopithecines, Australopithecus. The first one known was Australopithecus africanus. And then, as you remember, I can’t remember his name, discovered Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, in Ethiopia. Afarensis comes from the district of Afar, which is in Ethiopia. And, so… But… And then, Australopithecus africanus was seen to be a bit of a diversion from that, but basically, you went from apes to Australopithecus afarensis through to what was then called Homo erectus – well no, Homo habilis first, the first known human being, ish, and then Homo erectus, and then Homo sapiens, and Homo neanderthalensis. But it basically was a straight line with a few bifurcations. And the point is that in the Sixties and the, in the Sixties on to the Eighties, and still, still happening now, more and more species have come on board. And the original idea was, you know, the sort of straight line progress. It wasn’t a religious idea, but it was, it matched fairly well, as well as Darwinian ideas can match, with the idea that God had us in mind all along. And once you started discovering there were lots of side branches, you realised that there’s nothing really special about human evolution. And, if God does, did have us in line all along, He went about it in a very sort of, [laughs] circuitous and strange way. And so… And… But, it was, that was the beginning of that, you know, the realisation of the, the bushiness of the human evolutionary tree. And now of course, I don’t know how many species there are now between Australopithecus afarensis and us, or, earlier than that, there are earlier australopithecines than that. But there must be twenty, possibly more. Well, all sorts of diversions.

[46:50] You say that this, this Radio 3 programme was, came to an end.

Yes.

Do you remember, do you know more about why, when and why?

Well, the director at the time, whose name again I can’t remember, of Radio 3, he, he wasn’t really interested much in the programme anyway, in fact he was interested in music, and his great thing was the Proms. But leaving that aside, he wanted a programme that was sort of, more controversial and all that kind of stuff. And, he, I… For whatever reason. Actually I think he asked me, as I remember, to do some kind of treatment on it, what such a programme would look like. And I did, but I don’t think it got through to him, or something like that. I wasn’t very pushy. And I’d sort of had enough though Colin Tudge Page 83 C1672/17 Track 6 then anyway, more or less. You get fed up with a job after a few years, however good the job is. And, so he, so he got rid of me, and did a different kind of programme with different people. I think, what it could have been and what I could have made happen was the same kind of programme as Melvyn Bragg does, you know, what’s it, In Our Time or something like that.

Mhm.

Except that I, I do know Melvyn Bragg, I’ve met him a few times, and I don’t have his energy. He, I did an interview with him once, and he no sooner finished it than he was rushing off up to Edinburgh to some festival or other. And, he was full of enthusiasm for the fact that he had to go to, you know, was going up to this thing. Well I wouldn’t have been. I’d have wanted a couple of days off, frankly. [laughs] So, there’s one difference between me and Melvyn as I like to call him.

[end of session]

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[Track 7]

The first question today then is, when did you read The Selfish Gene, which came out during the period we talked about last time?

Oh, I don’t know. I imagine about 1980. I don’t know that it’s made that much impact on me. I mean I thought it was a very very well written book, and it’s a very good description of gene level selection. But he acknowledges himself, Dawkins, that it’s not an original work of biology; it’s a, it’s a very good report of Bill Hamilton and John Maynard Smith, Williams, and, a chap whose name I’ve forgotten. So it was a good summary of an idea that was very strong, and… But, the significance of that idea, I think, well, it undoubtedly has faded over the years. Because he talked specifically about gene level selection, and other people took it up to mean gene level selection is the only thing that counts. And it’s now obvious that it isn’t. I mean, selection applies, as Stephen Jay Gould and Lewontin said right early on, selection applies at every level; every level at which you have something that theoretically reproduces and is different, and can be selected, it applies. So it also applies at the species level and a group level and everything else. And certainly at the individual level, which is where Darwin said. So it’s, it’s a big idea but not that big. And the other thing that’s become very obvious, I was involved with evolutionary psychology for, about a decade, never did it but I was involved with a group that did do it, is that the… I mean there’s kind of an assumption that, well a) that there’s a one-to-one relationship between a gene and the phenotype in general, despite things like polygenetics and all that stuff, but, generally speaking it’s a sort of, as people said, digital code, one-to-one relationship. And secondly, that there was a, virtually a one-to-one relationship between the gene and phenotypes in the form of behaviour, in other words, items of behaviour. Well both these things are now known, as they were at the time, to be profoundly untrue; the relationship between the genome as a whole and the phenotype as a whole is unquestionably nonlinear. So, one, you know, one begins to say, yes, you know, a) gene level selection isn’t all there is, and b) when you do look at it, it tells you things that are interesting and worth knowing, beyond any question, but it’s not the kind of universal gateway into understanding how evolution works, and certainly not into how biology works. Good ingredient is all it is. But for some reason The Selfish Gene has been, well it was a sort of a watershed, but it’s been seen as being absolutely transformational, and it actually wasn’t, it was just, part of the ongoing, unfolding dialogue really.

Do you remember that at the time then, that that was the response to it at the time?

No, I think at the time, well, I mean, I don’t know how much attention I was paying, but got the impression at the time that, it was taken to be, you know, a transformation, a paradigm shift as they would say. And, after all, the whole idea of evolutionary psychology, well it didn’t depend exclusively on Dawkins by any means, but the group I belonged to, Dawkins was taken as the kind of central reference point, what does Dawkins say on this? In the same way that, you know, when people are talking about natural selection they still, quite rightly, say, what did Darwin say on this? Colin Tudge Page 85 C1672/17 Track 7

[03:38] Authority figures in science are tremendously important, much more important than scientists generally like to admit. I could divert here if that’s OK. I mean for example, one of the things that scientists and atheists accuse theologians of, or religions in general, is dogma. And they say it’s just a dogma. And often, for reasons, they confuse dogma with papal infallibility. And they think that papal infallibility means that, when the Pope says something, it’s true, which is not what it means at all; and secondly, they feel that this is how dogmas arise, either the Pope or somebody very very clever says something and that’s accepted for all time. Well if you look at, the people I think who talk most about dogma are the Catholics, and if you talk, if you look at what dogma actually means, it means a summary of the best thought on a particular subject at a particular time. And it might take 400 years for that to come about, and it will come about, be seen as a dogma, only as a result of the very best scholars putting their knives to it. And then, when the dogma appears, it isn’t a truth for all time, it’s an interim statement, and is regarded in that way. The scientist who did understand what a dogma really is, was of course Francis Crick, who talked about the central dogma of genes, DNA makes RNA makes protein. And a lot of other scientists said, ‘You can’t say that, Francis,’ because, you know, we don’t know that that’s going to last forever, and it, we do know that there is reverse transcription, and all that stuff. And, Crick said, quite rightly, a dogma isn’t a once-for-all statement, top of the head for all time. It is a summary of best thought so far. And that was the summary of best thought so far. My point is, that people who criticise theology, criticise religion, say, a) that it all depends on dogma, with a misunderstanding of what dogma is, and b) that it all depends on authority, you know, Augustin or Aquinas or whoever it might be. And, to an extent, well to a very great extent it true, theology does depend on particular authorities who are perceived to be, you know, superior in their insight, but, they are constantly assailed, all the authorities are constantly subjected to massive deep criticism, including Augustin and Aquinas and Luther and all the rest of them, but also, what the critics miss is, the science is incredibly, yes, I’d say incredibly, subject to or dependent on the voice of authority. So, if… I mean for example, Darwin evolutionary ideas didn’t catch on in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, because the chief, the most important biologist at the time in Germany was Virchow. I think it’s pronounced virkov. It’s spelt Virchow. You might be able to throw light on this. Anyway, let’s say Virchow [virkov], sounds good. And he just didn’t like evolution, and he didn’t like, [laughs] as far as I can see, he didn’t like Darwin. Possibly for chauvinist reasons, you know, I mean, he wasn’t a good German, obviously. So, for years they said, no no no, evolution, not good idea. Because Virchow had said it. And so, you see this all the way through science. And today, if scientists, as it were, step out of line, step outside what is called ‘the paradigm’, then, they can have a very bad time, to the point of losing their jobs, or being threatened with their, you know, their pensions being suspended. Seriously bad time. So, if we talk about dogma and authority, and, you know, just top-down decree of what is the case, science is as guilty as anything, but it’s in a sense neither science nor religion are more guilty than anything else, because the same applies to historical studies, same applies in politics, same applies, economics, you know, good Marxist or not a good Marxist, et cetera. So, there’s something deeply pernicious about the whole thing. Anyway, Dawkins I think was seen as a kind of a, a dogma, and it’s… Those days are past, we’ve moved on. Colin Tudge Page 86 C1672/17 Track 7

[07:59] Even if it involves stepping out of the chronology, could you, as you have mentioned it there, tell me about this evolutionary psychology group that you were involved with for a decade.

Yes.

Which decade was it, and…?

Oh it was during the 1990s. Yes. And it’s a group which still goes on. It’s a very good group, very high class thinkers, at the London School of Economics, which was led by Dr Helena Cronin. And I felt very privileged, quite rightly, to be a member of it. And we used to meet every week and discuss various issues to do with evolution, evolutionary psychology. So that was it. And it sort of, I don’t know whether… Yes, well the group still more or less exists I believe. One or two, one of the characters who was there at the time as a young chap, research, you know, what do you call them, research student, whatever…

Fellow, Assistant, Associate?

Yes. Doing PhD, called Oliver Curry. He now is a, has been for some time, a research fellow here, at Oxford. So, you know, many of them went on to do very, very good things. And others of them were doing good things already. So, they pushed ahead. For a time they almost sort of carried the, carried the sort of, flag of evolutionary psychology. And people used to come from all over the world. In addition to the little meetings we used to hold, sort of, private seminars, we used to have public meetings, anyone was invited to, and people came from all over the world to them. And people like, John Maynard Smith used to come down from Oxford, Patrick Bateson from Cambridge, and Dan Dennett was there once from Boston. And so it goes on. Bernard Williams from, Oxford I think. And so on.

[09:52] How did your involvement in the group begin?

Well, funnily enough I’m not a hundred per cent sure, but I had written various… I used to write for New Scientist, and do the stuff on the BBC, and I think… Oh I think, I did some programmes on evolution on the radio. And Helena Cronin, who was the boss of this, liked the programmes, and she invited me to join in. I think I was rather grandly called a visiting research fellow for a time.

Yes, and it was, I think the dates are 1995 to 2005.

Was it really? Oh goodness me. Colin Tudge Page 87 C1672/17 Track 7

But could you give us, then, a sense of, sort of, take yourself back to those private meetings, and, give us a sense of, who was there, and what’s being discussed, and how it’s being discussed.

Well I mean, Helena obviously was there. The professor of philosophy was, I’ve forgotten his name, a very nice chap, very clever, very good. And, oh God, I’ve forgotten their names to be honest. But, there was a professor of, or one of the senior people in sociology, and another bloke from economics. Another, there was few biologists, including Dr Jennifer Scott, who went and did some very very good work on gorillas. And, others, not many, not more than about a dozen, of all sort of, you might say ranks. I mean ranging from students, as Oliver Curry was in those days, a graduate student., to, profs, and very well-established profs. And not more than about fifteen at any one time, usually, no, they were usually more about ten. And, you would just raise different topics that you wanted to, you know, chew over for an hour, having had a week to think about, or more than that. And, to be honest, I can’t really remember much about it, except we had good conversations.

[11:52] And you were saying that in this group, Richard Dawkins was seen by some at least to be a sort of, authority figure on the evolutionary…

On the whole matter of, you know, yeah, basically, yeah, the relationship between phenotype and genotype. Gene level selection was very definitely the thing. There was one guy there, I can’t remember his name either, but he, he sort of spanned, and I think deeply perniciously, that’s why probably I’ve forgotten his name, he sort of hopped between business, commerce, and evolutionary biology, and he was a very very good thinker. But his thesis was, which became quite strong for a time, quite widely believed, that the evolutionary principles, you know, natural selection basically, did apply to business. And… But, the implication is, you know, that, the relationship between neo- Darwinism and neo-liberalism, he was defending, saying, you know, the market really does work like an ecosystem, and you really do have to be competitive, and, you know, the survival of the fittest and all that kind of thing. And I think all that thinking has been seriously modified since then. Well it should have been anyway, it certainly has been by me. And nowadays, people stress, you know, much more than ever did, the whole business of cooperation for example in business, and you can see that the neo-liberal model, which he defended to the death, you know, the market will sort everything out, simply doesn’t work. And as Milton Friedman himself, you know, one of the principal founders of neo-liberalism, said, you know, the market does not deliver social justice. And of course it doesn’t. And what’s more important than social justice? So it’s, it was, the idea that, there is a kind of idea that springs from this, that the global market, the neo-liberal free, so-called, market, is a) Darwinian, and therefore it is natural, and therefore it is OK. Well that’s wrong at every turn. I mean it isn’t sort of, you can see the parallels with Darwin, but, you know, there’s a lot more to evolution than, than this cutthroat nature red in tooth and claw, which of course is Tennyson rather than Darwin. And it simply isn’t true, therefore, to say that the economic model is therefore representing, representative of all Colin Tudge Page 88 C1672/17 Track 7 nature; it represents perhaps one aspect of nature. And of course you cannot argue, because something is natural, even if it is, that it is therefore right. I mean this is naturalistic fantasy, as G E Moore said. So, it’s, it’s completely, it’s a wrong thesis. But it’s deeply pernicious. And I believe it’s still taught in business schools you know.

[14:49] Did you challenge this at the time, in these seminars?

No. Because, I mean, as you said, it was, ended, my association ended in 2005. I don’t remember going much once we got past 2000 and a bit. And, these ideas, I didn’t really formulate clearly in my head until after that. I’m still thinking you see. [laughs] So, that hadn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t really work it out properly till after that. And summarised it of course, this whole thesis, in that book, the last one but one, called Why Genes Are Not Selfish And People Are Nice.

Yes, I mean, what I’m trying to discover is the, the sort of, timing of your move from being, as you said last time, a materialist scientist like anyone else, to someone who writes that book. And so…

Yeah.

I mean I think, in one sense we could picture you at this seminar, quietly thinking and observing, and that this slowly accumulates into a position where you’re making strong arguments against this sort of thing, or whether you’re already at this time starting to sort of fire off alternative ways of thinking.

Well certainly, and I do remember that, you know, as I said, people had to propose subjects for the… And one that I proposed towards the end of my stay there was, as it were, the position of religion in people’s thinking where… But, my thinking on it was sort of, was only semi-developed. I mean I was talking about cultivation of intuition, which I think is right But what I missed out at that point was the whole idea, which is the very big central idea, of transcendence, which I hadn’t really embraced then. Although of course it’s key. So, I was taking a kind of, we might call rational view of religion, but, trying to instate religion as being an important thing, whereas that lot was, quite, quite severely atheistic for the most part. However, what really brought about the switch to my present position, I think, well, first of all, I think I said earlier, when I was, almost as a child, I had had a sort of, sense of transcendence. But, basically, because I started going out with Ruth, my second wife, Ruth West, whose whole sort of background is this kind of stuff. I mean she has, well, in various disciplines, she has a kind of, strong spiritual background. I mean she started off, as a child, she was born into a family of the Salvation Army, and she’s very very clever, Ruth, and she started taking, I think started taking Christianity seriously. And then, sort of, started taking Sufi versions of Islam seriously. And, and has always been, had a strong feeling that, you know, life is really a search for God, a search, insight. And when I first started knocking about with her in about 2000, I had known her earlier for various reasons, because she was… Anyway, she was a friend of somebody else. But, I was taking the, you know, the Colin Tudge Page 89 C1672/17 Track 7 rationalist view, oh you’re, you’ll soon grow out of that, kind of stuff. And of course it worked the other way round, and I though, no, actually, what she’s saying is, is right, it’s bang on the button. And it was, it was, yeah, it was a sort of rationalisation of what I already in my bones felt to be true. And this is incidentally how I think, if there is such a thing as wisdom, and I’m not saying that I’ve got wisdom, [laughs] certainly not, but, if there is such a thing, it is this dialogue, it’s a reach through this dialogue between intuition and, as it were, rationality, as people say. Huge mistake to say rationality is all there is. Huge mistake just to be intuitive and go with your gut, as it were. But the dialogue between the two is where it all counts. And actually, many of the greatest religious thinkers have actually said precisely that. You know, it’s this, if, if one substitutes, say, the word faith from the word intuition, then, well, you look at the great theologians, let us say Aquinas, and on the one hand this tremendously strong faith, and on the other hand, there’s never been anybody who was better at thinking straight. And the same would apply, possibly less, slightly, to Luther. And to all the greats really.

[19:35] Thank you. When you say that that group was atheistic for the most part, who did you have in mind when you added for the most part, who were you thinking?

Well, I think one or two of the conversations I had with, for example Jenifer, Jennifer Scott, who is now in America, married with children, and, I wish I could think of her name, another young woman who was there, who was a psychologist, a medical psychologist, suggested that they were sympathetic to the idea of transcendence and, et cetera et cetera, and there’s more to the universe than meets the eye, and so on. But others have just rejected it out of hand. But it wasn’t, you know… Yeah. So that’s what I mean by the most part.

Where did you feel that some of these well-known scientists who came to join the group stood on that sort of debate, for example, John Maynard Smith, who I know that you had met in other contexts, but in this…?

Yes. He didn’t come to our little seminars.

OK. But he came to the public…?

He came to the big meetings, and, we used to have dinner afterwards, so we had good conversations. I think he was quite atheistic, but I didn’t really discuss it with him. But I remember once we had a very good conversation about telepathy, and, he was puzzled by it, because like many scientists, and he was an engineer before he was a biologist, he always wanted to know the mechanism. So what is the mechanism of telepathy? And, at that time, you know, there wasn’t a sort of plausible mechanism. Well nowadays, I mean it’s only ten years later, or, perhaps a bit more, fifteen, Al-Khalili’s recent book, talking about quantum effects in biology, and there’s a great deal that happens in biology at the Colin Tudge Page 90 C1672/17 Track 7 sort of, physiological biochemical level, that actually can’t be explained in simple biochemical terms, because things happen too quickly, for example. And it’s becoming more and more obvious that quantum effects, which hitherto one said had nothing to do with biology really, are, play a key part in things like animal navigation, but in other things as well. And of course, some people, sort of way out physicists, have been saying for a long time that, not only telepathy but consciousness, for example, and, well transmission of thought, depends for… it’s a sort of, in a sense a random guess, this, but it kind of, fits, on quantum entanglement, which nobody understands but people now realise is an absolutely key significance. And, well, I think, if John was around now, he died some time… and we had a, not me but somebody who knows about it, had a serous conversation with him about quantum entanglement and transmission of information between human beings, he would be very sympathetic to the idea. So he was very open-minded, I think. Yes he was, there’s no question. Whereas not everybody in that field is.

[22:40] Thank you. Can we talk some more about your, your radio work?

Mm.

This is partly because, I mean last time you mentioned some of the people that you had met in the programme, the Radio 3 programme that involved conversations with scientists.

Mhm.

And, I’ve spotted some other ones that you might be able to say something about. It seems as if there was a programme that might have been called Spectrum.

That’s right. Well, at first it was called Science on Three, and then they, as it were, the powers that be, decided that they should call it Spectrum. And it was forty-five minutes, Radio 3, just straightforward conversation, serial, not dragging, no discussion really. And I used to do, usually three interviews of about quarter of an hour each with different people, in extens… Not attacking them like is often the custom, but just having a conversation. It was a bit, not dissimilar from the kind of thing Melvyn Bragg does. And if I had played my cards properly, maybe I could have been the next Melvyn Bragg, although he’s got much more energy than I have. [laughs] I couldn’t run about like he does. Anyway, yeah, so, that was it.

How were the scientists chosen?

Oh. Mixture of, who does one know that one would like to speak to, that’s quite a big thing. And then, articles, you know, in various journals, and you’d say, gosh that’s an interesting subject, let’s talk to him about that, or her about that. So we used to have conversations about things I know very little Colin Tudge Page 91 C1672/17 Track 7 about, like, particle physics, as well as people, as well as biology which I felt more at home with. Did you want to talk about one or two people that stand out in my mind?

You’ve mentioned a few people that stand out in your mind, but I’m going to remind you of some people that maybe you didn’t think of last time, but, I might be able to jog your memory on. But before we get to that, can you say even more about how people are chosen, and about the role of the sort of, the relative roles of yourself, but also the producers, and, it seems as if Deborah Cohen was very often producing these programmes.

Yes.

But there was also someone called Nicholas Morgan and Joane Brown? I’m not sure if I’m saying that name…

Oh, I don’t remember Joanne Brown. Really?

Oh, I think I’m probably saying the name wrong. I don’t think it is Joanne], but that’s the spelling. Juane, is it?

Oh Julian.

Ah, OK.

Julian Brown. Yes. Julian.

OK. So those three.

Yup.

So, what I want to sort of… Because, if you look, for example, at the BBC archive, there’s a website called Genome that lists programmes, you can search for your name, and you get the programme, the scientist involved, and the producer.

Mm.

And, what I’m interested in is how that programme ended up being made, as opposed to any other programme. Why was, why was there an interview with that person rather than another?

Mm.

Colin Tudge Page 92 C1672/17 Track 7

So what sort of conversations happened behind the scenes? Remember that people listening to this don’t know anything about, may not know anything about radio.

Mm.

So, should we imagine a small group of you sitting around discussing what the next three programmes might be? What, what actually goes on?

Well, anything I’m involved in tends to be… No that’s not quite true. But it was actually much more relaxed than that, and much more informal. And if I was making a programme, say, with Nick Morgan, who is a very very clever fellow, I can’t remember what he… I think he read Classics at Oxford. But then he was very interested in particle physics, and he knew everything about music. A sort of… You know, and he spoke about eight languages, I don’t know. Clever chap. But, so he would have read something very… I mean, I think he read a lot of Scientific American in those days. So he will have read something that really took his fancy. And I can’t think of anything off the top of my head. At least. I can think of a biological one that he read, by a chap called James Gould, an American biologist, who was just tremendously interested in bees and how they get about and all that kind of thing. So, he said, ‘I’d just like to talk to this man Gould about bees.’ And I thought, jolly good idea. I had people in my head who I really wanted to talk to, talk about, like Jane Goodall, like John Maynard Smith, like, at one point we went to talk to Ernst Mayr, who was one of the great biologists of the twentieth century. And we did a trip round America. So it was basically, an ego trip for me – not ego trip, but you know, a sort of, trip to talk to all the people I thought I really want toed to talk to. Combined with what the producers had been reading, and what even I had been reading, and, was in the news and things like that. And then people who were available. And you put all these things together, and you, you know, you get nice people. Sydney Brenner was one person we talked to, which, for example. But, there are so many that, you know, it’s not difficult, and, you’re spoilt for choice. Because they all enjoy talking on the BBC.

[27:56] And what sort of conversations do you remember about the sort of, balance of what might be called, informing the listener, and sort of, entertaining the listener?

Oh.

What sort of…

Well Radio 3, I mean… I think, if entertainment is in your, forefront of your mind, it’s not going to be very good. And what’s in the forefront of your mind is actually having a good conversation. Because it’s always interesting to listen to other people’s conversations, even if they’re about things you don’t know anything about. [laughs] But, you know, just getting scientists to talk about their ideas, and, Colin Tudge Page 93 C1672/17 Track 7 making them clear but not in a patronising way. Because, I mean one of the things is that, if you talk quite esoterically above people’s heads, I mean not because you’re too clever for them but because it’s just about something they hadn’t thought of, then, you cotton on. I mean, you must have listened to lots of conversations where you don’t really know what they’re talking about, but it sounds good. [laughs] And it’s intriguing. And that’s, that’s basically it. I think it is… I mean actually, look, this is relevant. I, reading in the Guardian the other day… Oh, do you know the critic, his surname is Kermode, and I can’t think of his Christian name.

Mark Kermode.

Mark Kermode. And he said, the point about great works of art is that you don’t, you don’t understand them the first time you look at them. So how do you ever get involved? Well, you don’t understand them, but there’s something about them that you find intriguing. And then you start to look seriously. And once you start looking seriously, you begin to see what it’s all about. And in a sense, this was what I, well I didn’t spell it out like this, but this is what we were trying do with these programmes. A serious conversation. And if people are sort of intrigued by it, then you’ve done your job. And they’ll pick up enough to be able to sort of, look out for it, and, you know, they do their own stuff after that. That’s what, in a sense that’s what education is, rather than feeding people with facts. And… But, sorry to keep coughing, I hope it’s not going to interrupt you.

No that’s fine.

Excuse me. [coughs] It’s all right. But, sorry, I’m going to… Oh yes. I think it was, was it Saint Augustin or was it Saint Anselm? You possibly don’t know.

No.

But one of them said ‘Give me faith that I might understand.’ And a lot of people have had trouble with this, atheists, you know, they say, this is ludicrous, and all that kind of stuff. But the point is, if you just interpret the idea of ‘give me faith’ loosely, what it really means is that, give me an intimation that there is a real point in this. And, once you have this feeling, actually, look, I’m not sure what’s going on, but I can sense that it’s interesting, it’s then that you start becoming alert, and aware, and it’s then that you start understanding, and you don’t start understanding until that point. But it’s quite interesting, that.

[30:59] Can you tell me about the other producers then. Deborah Cohen.

Well she, she was, I believe… Yes, her background was in physics. She’s still there, God knows how many years later. And she was a very good professional radio producer, has made very very good, Colin Tudge Page 94 C1672/17 Track 7 competent programmes. Julian was and is extremely bright, a physicist. He’s written, I’ve got one or two of his books up here. He wrote a book with Paul Davies about the ghost in the machine. And, so, well he was just a very very good thinker. And Nick Morgan was a very good thinker. And another one who isn’t down there was Alison Richards, who read English at Oxford, another very very good thinker. One interesting thing is, incidentally, everybody says you can’t really get into science, you can’t think about science, unless you have a formal scientific education. When I think both Alison and Nick, one was English, one was Classics, disprove that. Because, just because they were very very clever, and they took an interest, they have a very acute knowledge of, and a feeling for it. Whereas some other people who read science, OK, they know lots of facts, and they can do the maths as they say, but they don’t really understand, actually, they don’t understand the limits of science and, et cetera. So…

[32:25] To what extent was relations between religion and science of interest to you and the producers of these programmes? And if not, the relations between religion and science, wider debates about the relations between, say, materiality and, something beyond the material.

Mm.

To what extent was that kind of argument part of what you were talking and thinking about?

It wasn’t, funnily enough. It should have been; it would be now. But there was a key book written in 1993 I think by John Hedley Brooke, just called Science and Religion. And John Hedley Brooke is still around, Lancaster. And he was at Oxford for a time. And, it wasn’t really till I read that book, and then we moved up to Oxford, because I was with Ruth by that time, in the mid-Nineties…. No, no, I wasn’t. Sorry, I beg your pardon. It wasn’t until later, a) I started my, when I got to know John Hedley Brooke slightly, read his book, that I actually had a handle on it, when I knew what I wanted to talk about. As I say, I put my toe in the water at the LSE meeting, about, you know, where does religion fit, but, didn’t do it formally. I’d like to do it again, now, but nobody ever asks me now, because I’m too far away from it. But, I suppose the nearest we got to the kind of conversation I would, you know, would like to have had, or would have now, was with Jane Goodall, who was talking about, you know, attitudes to animals, and Abdus Salam, who was a good Muslim and Nobel Prize winner, physicist, who established the university of the Third World in, in Trieste. And, he, I mean he never stopped being, I believe, he never stopped being a good Muslim. But I never got into a proper conversation about, you know, particle physics and Islam. [phone ringing] Sorry, that’ll stop, Ruth will pick it up.

[34:35] So there wasn’t… One of the things you were talking about then wasn’t sort of reductionism in science, and those sort of questions?

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No.

Yes.

Didn’t really do much of that.

Other programmes that I wondered whether you remembered are, one in 1991 with Richard Dawkins, ‘Caddis houses and thrushes’ nests’. ‘Richard Dawkins talks about the influence of genes on the world outside the bodies of animals and plants.’ This is listed as involving you talking to him, but, I wonder if you…

Oh, to be honest, I do not remember a thing about it. [laughs]

OK. John Krebs, talking about ecology and agriculture?

Oh yes. John at the time, well now Sir John, might even… No, Lord, Lord Krebs is what he is now. House of Lords and all that. And, well we have a mixed relationship, don’t really know each other very much any more. But he was, and, well he still is in a way, a very good field biologist, and a good evolutionary thinker. And he did excellent work on optimum foraging strategy. And as you, optimum foraging strategy is that, you know, if you are going to be a wild animal, and you’re going to eat stuff, whether it’s berries or whether it’s rabbits, or, earth worms, you’ve, you can’t afford to make too many mistakes, because, you know, you’ll waste the time. And birds for example often have a few hours at most in which to feed, and something goes wrong, you know. So the question he was asking is, how does an animal plan its strategy, when does it, you know… And, just a small example that stays in my mind but it’s an interesting one, is, for example, if you see blackbirds feeding on the berries on a cotoneaster bush, they will sort of, go to one branch and eat a couple of berries, and then they’ll move to another one, even though there’s still plenty of berries left on the one they’ve just left. Or they’d even go to another bush. And you say to yourself, well why are they doing this? Why don’t they just sit there and eat them all? The answer is, because the blackbird knows that there’s a sparrowhawk somewhere waiting to get it, or there’s a cat somewhere waiting to get it. So it knows that you shouldn’t spend too much time in any one place. So, a lot of what an animal does looks random and silly, but actually, as Inspector Clouseau would say, it’s all a carefully laid plan. And he studied this, and worked out what they do and why, which is, it’s very good.

Michael Ruse, talking about homosexuality.

Who?

Michael Ruse?

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Oh yes. Yes, well he’s, he’s a, he’s a philosopher, who at that time was in Canada, I think he probably still is. And he, he’s an Englishman. Well he, he specialised as a philosopher in Darwinian matters and hence more broadly in biological issues. And, we talked about… I, I don’t… I don’t know that it was a terribly satisfactory conversation actually. But, that was one thing we talked about. What is the evolutionary significance of homosexuality, I think it was. And… Oh, well, actually, I don’t know whether we talked about this, but, but you know, the issue of polymorphism comes into it. This is where evolutionary psychology comes into it. That… Excuse me, sorry. [coughs] That if you want to pass on your genes, the best way of course is to have children. You’ve got to look after them though, and this is something that evolutionary psychologists tended to miss, because, for example, they said, you expect men to have thousands of children, because we’ve got, we produce millions of sperm. Well actually, very few men do have lots and lots and lots of children. And even people like, you know, Eastern potentates that have all the women they want coming, walking past their door, I think the record is something, recorded, is something like 800, which is a lot, but it’s nothing like, you know, is biologically possible; it could be millions. Whereas, you would expect women to have very few, and in fact the record for a woman, which is obviously freakish but it is a record, is about sixty. So, the point is that the ratio between, you might think on purely sort of, genetic whatever it is, crude arithmetical grounds, that the ratio of maximum men to maximum women would be about 100 to one, even 1,000 to one. But actually, it isn’t. And what strikes me… It’s about ten to one at most really. And what strikes me as being much more important than the huge difference between men and women in their fecundity, or potential fecundity, is the lack of difference. And, despite their huge difference in physiological potential. And the real reason of course is that it’s just as good for a man in his, in hereditary purposes, passing on his genes, to look, it’s just as necessary for him to look after his children, as it is for a woman to look after her children. So, it isn’t true that the man shouldn’t or doesn’t invest in the child, he does, enormously. And, anyway, so the point is that, the best way to pass on your genes, theoretically and in fact, is to have children, but also to make damn sure that you look after them. The second best way is to look after your children’s relatives. I mean your… Sorry. Your relatives’ children, your brothers’ children, or your sister’s children, your nephews and nieces, because, you haven’t, your children will share half your genes, but they’ll share, I think it’s, I can’t work… It’s not, it’s a quarter, it’s more than a quarter of the genes. So it’s still a good deal to look after your nephews and nieces. [40:22] Well one thing about being a homosexual is that, you’re spared the competition of fighting for a female mate. I know there’s probably lots of infighting among homosexuals. But, if you devote your life to being a carer for your family, that actually, from an evolutionary point of view, is a pretty good way to do things. And of course you can, if you haven’t, you’re not lumbered with children of your own, burdened, you can do that kind of thing. So, there’s, there’s, there are very good evolutionary reasons from a sort of group point of view… Not that… No. There’s…. At every level of selection, there are good evolutionary reasons for, for being a sort of caring, non-reproducing individual. So that was, I think we had that kind of conversation, but I’m not sure.

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[41:17] Thank you. And, Stephen Jay Gould, do you remember your conversation with him?

Yeah, I never, I never really got on with Stephen Jay Gould, because I think… He was actually quite arrogant. But he, he talked, his big thing of course was punctuated equilibrium. And he went through a stage of thinking that punctuated… You know what punctuated equilibrium is? And he went through a stage of thinking that that in a sense is all there is, you know, that evolution always proceeds in these great jerks. Or that, an evolutionary sort of switch is, it’s always a… Yeah. You suddenly get a big rash of new species appearing. And I think most people think now that, there’s a germ, more than a germ of truth in what, in that thesis, in other words, things do tend to go along for a long time more or less the same, and then, you get rather a sudden change. But it’s not, it’s, it’s not the kind of thing that wipes… People, some people, including him at the time, more or less argued that this wipes Darwin’s gradualism off the map. And it doesn’t actually. It’s just something happens along the way, you know.

[42:25] Can you say how his arrogance was manifest? Because it’s, it matches things other people have said about him, but I wondered what you experience in particular was.

Well I do remember - which was a minor thing - I interviewed him in Berlin, we went to this big long conference in Berlin, and he said, ‘The only time I can especially talk to you is half-past eight in the morning.’ Not many people would say that. OK, it might have been eight o’clock. Most people would say, well, you know, lunchtime or, tea break or something, but, Stephen Jay Gould, eight o’clock in the morning. So we, we, the producer and I were there, the producer in fact was Julian Brown. And we get to the place. Stephen wasn’t there. Stephen was, I don’t know, late. Well at one point I decided, I’ll go and wash my hands, as they say. And I was drying them, which, it takes about thirty seconds as you know, one of those dryers, and Gould turned up at last, fifteen, twenty minutes late. And, I emerge within fifteen, twenty seconds, but by that time he had decided he’d waited long enough, and was engaged in this somewhat sort of hifalutin conversation with one of the cleaners about Brecht. For no particular reason, you know. I mean, the great Marxian, and, he wanted to show you he was a democrat and talk to cleaners. But, it was all kind of, in my opinion, a bit of an act, to put us in our place, and, et cetera. And I thought, you don’t have to do this. [laughs] And… So… And he was a good biologist, he was a very good thinker, but he, you know, he wasn’t the only one. And John Maynard Smith never rated him very highly for example.

On what grounds?

Well, John Maynard... Gould gave the impression that because of his own interventions, and Lewontin’s, on punctuated equilibrium being the be all and end all, that he somewhat obscured Darwin’s own message, and made Darwin look sidelined almost. And, John Maynard Smith simply pointed out, and it’s right, that this isn’t the case. And he regarded this somewhat as an exercise in Colin Tudge Page 98 C1672/17 Track 7 obfuscation. Also, well since you ask me the question, I’m putting the boot into a man who’s no longer here to defend himself, but he did, Gould, towards the very end of his life, when he knew he was dying, he was very brave about the end of his life, started to take religion slightly seriously. But then he produced this great Gouldian phrase that religion and science are two non-overlapping magisteria, the two great areas of thought, both to be taken seriously, but they don’t overlap. Well they do. You see that’s sort of, ignorant. And one point of John Hedley Brooke’s book, the main point, is the constant flow of ideas between one and the other, theology and science. And interestingly, science has got a lot of very big ideas from religion, as well as the other way round. I mean science… Religion, it’s not going to be stuck in the mud forever, obviously has to take science seriously, and does, but, people don’t realise it’s the other way round as well. And, one of the points that John Maynard Smith made was that, the whole idea of… Darwin tried to understand how it is that animals and plants are adapted so well to their environment. But as he said, the whole issue of adaptation was originally sort of, pointed to by theologians, who saw it as, you know, but the only thing I can come up with is, God’s providence. Which, you could say, is not a bad idea anyway, because, I mean many people have said, if God wanted to use natural selection as a mechanism for shaping animals and plants, why not? It actually works extremely well. But I mean, it was, it was a theological idea, which Darwin took up. There are many other examples and off the top of my head I can’t necessarily think of them.

[46:42] Thank you. There’s just a couple more. Dan McKenzie? He was involved in the, wrote the first paper on plate tectonics, and he was one of your…

Oh did he?

He was one of your…

Well I’d forgotten. You see, I’ve not got a very good memory.

No, this, I do realise this is a slightly unfair longshot, but as I’ve got these down…

No no.

Yes, I have been successful in jogging your memory about some of them, so that’s great. And another one was John Barrow.

Yes. Let me just say something about Dan.

OK, please, yes.

Plate tectonics. Colin Tudge Page 99 C1672/17 Track 7

Yes.

I mean here’s a classic example, as you know, it’s a classic story, but, Wegener came up with the idea, round about the time of the First World War, of continental drift. And at first I believe the idea was very well received. Because, you know, the different continents really do fit together, if you cut them out in cardboard and plug them together, they fit beautifully. So how else? And of course the correspondences in rocks between one continent and the next, the one nearest. Anyway. But Wegener was well received at first. And then people said, this is nonsense, there is no mechanism that can possibly explain how continents could drift. Since there is no mechanism, it cannot have happened. And they came up with all sorts of ingenious ideas to explain how it was, for example, that some groups of animals had got from one continent to the other with 1,000 miles of oceans between them. And they invented all sorts of ad hoc things, which were believed in preference to continental drift, even though there was no evidence for them. Like, there was a land bridge between South America and Africa, sort of, causeway. Yeah, how? But, it illustrates a tremendous amount that’s interesting about science. That scientists will refuse, very often, well, to entertain an idea, unless they can see the mechanism. And it doesn’t occur to them that actually, there is a new mechanism to be found, and it’s the whole business of paradigm shift, you’re stuck in this paradigm, you don’t want to conceive that there might be another paradigm we haven’t got to yet. And you can cover that with, with the whole idea of dogma, that an authority locked into one paradigm will tell the others what to think. And poor old Wegener, I believe, for about forty years was, was sort of sidelined. But then, I think it was in the Fifties, it might have been the Sixties, probably the Sixties, wasn’t it? You will know. Sixties. People discovered, began to realise that the ocean floor was splitting, and that was when we, people had got the idea of plate tectonics. But, this phenomenon, that somebody who’s observed something, you know, almost indisputably, but it is rejected unless they already think they know how it works, is universal. Same applies, for example, to telepathy. I mean I think Rupert Sheldrake has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt, as if we didn’t know, that telepathy exists, it’s a fact. But, it’s rejected because, people don’t understand the mechanism, or they haven’t a clue. This means that science doesn’t move the way that it… I mean it’s necessary that science should be conservative, otherwise you’d go chasing every old hare that tops up. But, I think it overdoes the conservatism, on the whole. Anyway, so that was the conversation I had with Dan McKenzie, I believe. And who was the other person?

[50:02] John Barrow?

Yeah, John is just an exceedingly clever fellow from Sussex, who, particle physicist, who also talks about religion and… Actually, to be honest, I don’t understand what John Barrow is talking about. He’s too clever. [laughs]

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I wondered whether it, science and religion was something that might have been covered in your conversation with him, but perhaps, you don’t remember.

I’m sure we touched on it, but, we would have done but, I’ll have to read… I’ve got… I’d have to read him again.

[50:36] Another thing that made me think that perhaps some of the things that you end up writing about in Why Genes Aren’t Selfish and People Are Nice, you are already thinking about at this time in radio, is that, in 1984 you had a programme called Beastly Thoughts, and the description of it is, ‘Colin Tudge examines the idea that animals are a lot smarter than we think.’

Oh yes.

Which is, which is part of, one small part of the argument of why genes are selfish.

Yes. I think the point was that, during… I really get the impression that… Well, let’s go back a bit. In the 1950s, as you almost certainly know, Konrad Lorenz, who, together with Niko Tinbergen, had sort of founded the new, the science of ethology, the study of behaviour of creatures in a natural state, wrote this book called King Solomon’s Ring, in which he described animals in wonderfully anthropocentric terms. You know, he talked about geese falling in… Did I say this before? He talked about geese falling in love, for example. And he talked about jackdaws being terribly proud. And he talked about a female jackdaw being a nasty nouveau riche, and, she got off with the chief jackdaw and then bossed everybody else about, which, proper jack… you know, aristocratic jackdaws don’t do. They only boss the next one in line. They don’t boss everybody. Anyway, so he wrote in terribly anthropomorphic terms. But in the introduction, this is, I think, most interesting, or the preface, to King Solomon’s Ring, he says, ‘I know I’m speaking in anthropomorphic terms in this book, but you know, this is just metaphor. You must understand that these things are just, these creatures are, you know, they don’t think like us, they don’t feel like us, you know, they just…’ ba-ba-ba He then goes on to say… Because that was of course the dogma of the day, that was, you know, behaviourism rule, you looked at animals as if they were just machines, in the way that Descartes had recommended 300 years earlier. But then he went to say, on to say, ‘On the other hand, I think the guy that really gets to the heart of animals, really expresses brilliantly what they’re like, is Kipling, in The Jungle Book.’ Well that’s really, [laughs] completely opposite. And what one feels about Lorenz is that, he knew in his bones that animals are much more like us as it were than scientists had allowed, and philosophers, had allowed themselves to think over the previous 300 years. But he also knew that if he said that, as a scientist, he would be kicked into touch. But, two things started to happen I think most, let’s say the Seventies, really started a bit before that. Everything starts before you think it does. One is that people began to realise that the behaviourist of how animals behave, now that’s treating them as machines, and trying to explain that behaviour purely in terms of strings of reflexes, action and reaction, was, it didn’t Colin Tudge Page 101 C1672/17 Track 7 really, in the end it didn’t get to it. Your explanations became so complicated, that they were no longer of any use, no longer… It’s rather like that people went to great lengths, astronomers in the sort of, fifteenth century I believe, or, you can correct me, I’m sure you know more about this, but, there was this model of, of astronomy, which I think was Ptolemy, but somebody like that, or Aristotle, one of the two, about planets going round the Sun, and they were circulating… You know, the idea was, they must go in circles, because that was perfection. And, but the more astronomers looked at planets, the more they realise that this didn’t actually fit, isn’t what they really do. But they went to enormous lengths to explain why they got the appearances that they did, in order, as it were, to protect the original theory. And, and in the end they said, well it doesn’t work, and actually, then Kepler came along and said, no, they go around in ellipses, and suddenly everything was all right. But, the same thing happened, it seems to me, that people were falling over themselves to demonstrate that behaviourism must be right, machine view of animals. And yet, the more they looked at them in the field, the more they saw that it just wasn’t true. And, this is very, you’re looking at a real paradigm shift. A key person in this, I’m sure she was in this programme, was Jane Goodall, because she went to look at chimpanzees first-hand in, I think it was Tanganyika it was in those days, Tanzania as it now is. And she actually lived with them, she lived next door. And the extent to which people didn’t know anything about wild chimpanzees in those days is stunning. I mean people thought they were purely vegetarian for example, very crude. And they had a very crude idea of how their social structure was. I mean, primitive to the enth degree. This was about 1960-something. And Jane Goodall just watched them and lived with them, and saw how intricate their family relationships were, and incidentally, show that they were also hunters when they wanted to be. And, the idea was that chimps in the wild were supposed to be very, I think they’re supposed to be gentle, or something like that, and she, no, they’re complete swine really. [laughs] Cruel beasts. Anyway, but she, when she wrote in Nature her first paper, wrote, she referred, for example, to the animal, the young ones as sort of, middle, you know, the youth ones, as adolescents, and she referred to them by name. And she named them, Naomi and Richard and things like that. And, the editor said, ‘You can’t do that. You can’t refer them to as adolescents, that is, that is anthropomorphism. You must call them sub-adult males, or sub-adult females, or... And you can’t refer to them by name, you have to give them numbers, M1, M2, et cetera, Male 1.’ And Jane got all, resisted this, and I think the paper went in more or less as she had written it. But the point is, you see, the sort of mania against anthropomorphism, so-called, was so strong. But, after she had done her work and people began to see the significance, they realised that the old machine model just didn’t work, you know, any more than it does for us really. You can take… Works up to a point, but, not very far. And, she really established the idea that, chimpanzees, you know, must be seen as if they have personality, because they do have personality. And she saw that the fortunes of a group depends very much on the personality of the, of the chief players, and if you have an alfa male, or an alfa female, who is kind of, calm and wise, then generally speaking the group will prosper rather well, and if he’s a complete maniac, which often is the case, then they don’t. You know, they do less well. And, well that was a great insight, you know. I mean, because hitherto, animals had just been treated, a chimpanzee is a species and it behaves like this. A lion is a species and it behaves like that. And people began to see it’s not true. And individual matters. Colin Tudge Page 102 C1672/17 Track 7

[57:57] Actually, this business of seeing chimpanzees as just a kind of, each one as a representative of a species, doing the same old stuff, is reflected in the language, when people are saying, we... they still say it, ‘We went on safari and we saw lots of elephant, and lots of lion, and lots…’ And, it’s a big generic… They’re not, no, they’re all different. [laughs] Anyway. This kind of observation said they’re all different. Laboratory observations, much more close, instead of just putting them in mazes, they started giving them a bit of freedom, let them do what they, what they would normally do, and indeed field observations, you saw that they had this enormous flexibility of behaviour. And, you got to the point where… And you also saw, they had tremendous range of emotion. I mean, David Hume in the eighteenth century said, well you know, animals, obviously they feel fear, and they feel hunger, and they feel lust, and that’s basically the end of it. And people still think that. Anybody that knows an animal, anybody that keeps a dog, or keeps a cat, or a budgerigar, knows that that’s not true I mean they can, they can be depressed and happy and all that stuff. They can certainly be jealous. And there’s new work, incidentally, that shows that dogs, for example, have a tremendous sense of justice and injustice, and they know when they’re hard done by, and they get very annoyed. Anyway, the point is, people began to realise in the Seventies and Eighties that, actually, a wide palette of emotions, and, and you know, more complex behaviour than can be explained by machine. [59:32] And then… I interviewed, I think in that programme, Sir Patrick Bateson, Pat Bateson, who, who was a very fine animal behaviour psychologist, and he said… And the first, the clearest thing I ever heard, anthropomorphism, he said, applied carefully to animals, is heuristic. In other words, you can’t really understand them unless you start more or less with the premise that they are human, unless they’re proven, shown otherwise. One has to start by empathising with them. Because… And, more and more work has shown that, since then has shown, that this is really the case. And some of the best, most significant work in this field is by Francoise Wemelsfelder, at Edinburgh University, who has shown, for example, if you ask people to look a pig, say, and judge what its mood is, and people will say, well that pig looks depressed, and that pig looks very happy, and that one looks relaxed, and that one looks rather scared, if you do that, and then you correlate what they say with other physiological parameters, like, you know, adrenaline levels and cortisone levels and all that stuff, you find there’s a very close correlation. And what this suggests is that actually you can and should empathise with the animal. Well you can’t empathise with a computer: well you can actually, but, no you can’t. Or a car. So this suggests that the animal was really, there’s a lot going on in its head. And one of the things that Descartes did say, right at the beginning, was, the difference between human beings and animals is that we have verbal language and they don’t. Well, he then went on to say, since they don’t have verbal language, they can’t possibly think, because you can’t think without verbal language, and therefore they’re, you know, therefore they’re just machines. But, he got, the ‘therefore’ is wrong. But I think he was right about saying that what they lack is verbal language. So they, well, that’s a big drawback, because it means they can’t communicate complicated thoughts quickly, and they can’t refer back to things that happened and say, ‘Do you remember?’ Like I am failing to remember. So, that’s a big drawback. But, it doesn’t mean that everything else isn’t going on in their heads, you know, emotional Colin Tudge Page 103 C1672/17 Track 7 entanglements and, et cetera. And indeed memories, but a nonverbal form. And the other thing that’s become very apparent in the last thirty-odd years is the extent to which thinking doesn’t depend on language, and it’s, it’s, in a sense it’s a common sense thing, because, one marshals one’s thoughts, as we know, far more quickly than, than you can possibly verbalise them. So that people who are known as wits will come back instantly, almost before the sentence is finished, with a clever response. Well that’s, that’s happened in no time at all. And that’s got to be nonverbal, pre-verbal. Anyway, put all that together, and you begin to, that was, as I say, that programme, what, was done in the Eighties, something like that?

Mm.

I think that was when people really began to see that you have to take animals much more seriously. Where this hasn’t got through to anybody… And incidentally, I think not unrelated to all this, the American sort of research lot have now stopped doing research on chimpanzees, I don’t know if you knew that, and they’ve, they’ve pensioned off all the chimpanzees that are in their medical laboratories, and put them into proper, you know, they can live out their lives in rest homes. So, you know, there’s a, I think, the recognition that these things are not just beasties for us to, is probably getting through at that level. Where it doesn’t seem to have got through, I think, is in commercial agriculture, where they’re still treated as, things that grow and produce meat and then should be knocked on the head. Which is very sad. But it will come. But that was the time when the switch I think was made.

[1:03:53] What do you remember of home life at this time when you’re on the radio? Your children would have been, I guess sort of, twelve years old, roughly. What was…

Who was twelve years old?

Your, I think your children by now, we’ve got to the point where they’re…

Oh, well, it was a, it was a very normal suburban existence. I mean…

What was the extent of your wife’s interest in the content of your work?

She wasn’t terribly interested in it. But that’s OK. And that’s, you know, sometimes… It’s, I think it’s a good thing if spouses are very interested in what their spouse does, but it’s not, it’s not compulsory. And she wasn’t very interested in science. But her sister was a doctor, example, is a doctor, and, brother-in-law was a doctor. I mean you know, there was… We talked about stuff. But, no, she wasn’t… Yeah.

And to what extent were your children involved in your work? I don’t know whether they… Colin Tudge Page 104 C1672/17 Track 7

No they weren’t.

…were interested.

They weren’t. And it’s… Well, the interesting thing is that they didn’t seem to be. But, they all say it sort of rubbed off on them. And for example, my eldest daughter, my elder daughter, eldest child, she did environmental biology at university and she is now, at the age of forty-something, she’s done that kind of stuff, now training to be a schoolteacher, teaching biology. My second daughter taught science, and then – biology, and then, is now a doctor. And my son is a journalist. So, I don’t know, it might be genetic, [laughs] but that’s, it’s possible that what I did rubbed off on them.

If we visited your home at this time, would there have been any sign around the place of what you did at work, you know, in other words…?

On yeah, there was loads of stuff. I mean, I had a, you know, I had my own study. So… And I had a very primitive computer. And there were lots of books. So yes, lots. I kept having to make shelves to put new files on. I keep too many files. I don’t know what’s in them, but you know.

[1:06:11] Now can you take us then on from… You say at some point, you said last time, at some point you put in a proposal for a slightly new programme but there was a change of director of a particular radio station, and you’re not quite sure that the programme didn’t continue, and anyway, you felt you might want to do something else anyway. So could you take us on through the Nineties and tell us what happens next?

Well, I suppose, in a sense, I mean I enjoyed my time with the radio. But radio was never my thing. Some people really love getting into a studio. And I, I never do. I don’t like studios, and I don’t like talking into… I like talking to you, you know, but, I don’t like sitting in a studio with a microphone in front of me, et cetera. So, it was never my thing. Writing was always my thing, that’s what I enjoyed. And I was getting, even though it was a wonderful job, I mean fantastically enviable job, I was getting a bit bored with doing the same old stuff every week. Anyway, it was actually not me, but it was the director of Radio 3, who was John Drummond, who came up with this idea for a new radio programme that should be, more controversial, more confrontational, which would be discussing big issues, like, I suppose, is genetic engineering a good thing? That kind of stuff. And should we be building, well it wasn’t Trident in those days, but whatever it was. You know, that kind of stuff. And I frankly wasn’t very interested in that. I don’t like the confrontational stuff. And I don’t… And I’m just not very good at conducting that kind of thing. Some people are brilliant at it, and I’m just, don’t. I let people ramble. And that doesn’t work at all. So… And my heart was never in it. And I, I was supposed to put up a proposal, and I put up a very half-hearted proposal, and didn’t get the job there. And, so… Colin Tudge Page 105 C1672/17 Track 7

Oh I was only on a year contract, I was on a year contract that renewed itself for five or six or, some years. And then, John Drummond decided to, not to give me another contract. Well that’s all right, that happens. So I became freelance as we say. Another word for unemployed. But I was quite lucky because I had some book contracts, and, you know, things began to work out OK.

So could you describe your working life from that point?

Well I then, we still lived in South London, Dulwich, ish. Well it was Dulwich, yes. So I used to just, sit and write books all day. And I wrote, I think I still had odd columns, so I used to write columns. And I did some work for the Agricultural and Food Research Council as it was, writing reports, which was terrific fun, enjoyed that. Knew more about agricultural research in this country probably than anybody else for a time, because I went to talk to everybody that was doing it. [pause] Yeah, so, we got by. I didn’t, you know, it was a bit up and down, but we got by.

[1:09:15] Was your wife working at this time?

Yes. She went to work in the Imperial War Museum, which was a nice job, interviewing… Those days she was still interviewing, or helping to interview, World War I vets, who were still around. There aren’t any left, as you know, but there were then. So that… They were doing the same kind of job that you are doing basically.

[1:09:39] Can you tell me, then, about this work for the Agricultural and Food Research Council?

Ah, well… Yeah. Well the Agricultural and Food Research Council was one of the most brilliant institutions, ever, in the world. And it grew up… Well basically, the research stations themselves had grown up since the 1840s, with the foundation of Rothamsted, and then they gradually accumulated. And the British Government for a time, at times, has taken agriculture very seriously, realise that you’ve got to produce a certain amount of your own food, and all that kind of stuff. And that it was a serious employer, et cetera. And they also knew that there was a huge amount of research to be done. So they had research stations that were devoted to every aspect really of agriculture, animal nutrition, plant physiology, growing plants, everything, soil. And they had… And, in different regions, because it’s different in Scotland from down here. So, they had, I think there was something, getting on for thirty of these wonderful laboratories. And behind them, although I didn’t visit them, they had the experimental husbandry farms, where people, well tried out new ideas, and saw what kind of husbandry really worked and what didn’t. Practical side. But the Agricultural and Food Research Council institutes did, often did very basic stuff, but they also did, you know, hands-on, how does the animal function, type stuff. And my job, which I did for, I think three years, was to go round to all of them and write a report about what they were doing, basically for popular purposes. I think it was for Colin Tudge Page 106 C1672/17 Track 7 governments and so on, but it was, you know, a general sort of end-of-term statement about what they were up to. But all of them in one book, in one little brochure. So I just turned up, places like the Rowett in Aberdeen, animal nutrition, and the Hill Farming Research Organisation in the Highlands to talk about deer, and, interviewed the people that they nominated, and wrote a report, put them all together. And I enjoyed that, that was good.

You had done some things…

And now they’re all closed of course, this is the point. Along came Keith Joseph in the, it was the dogma of neo-liberalism, they didn’t call it that then, in about 1980, and said, these institutions don’t pay, and they don’t return a short-term profit. And, anyway, we don’t need to grow food here anyway, because we can get it from Poland half the price, and Africa. So, rubbish. And they, either they’ve just gone, or, they’ve been privatised. And just a few are left that you absolutely have to hang on to. But basically, they’re gone. And this I regard as a huge act of vandalism, I mean government-sponsored vandalism. And we’ll never get them back. And nowadays various people are trying to, to redo what those places should have done. There’s one or two university departments that are still doing good basic research on agriculture, but most of the research that’s done on agriculture is done, basically by corporates, for the benefit of corporates, which is quite different from doing it for the benefit of humanity as a whole. Very, not enough is done. And when you want to do experimental husbandry, it seems to be done mainly by the farmers themselves at their own expense. And the Soil Association is taking part in a new initiative of sort of, farmer-led scientific research, quasi-scientific research. Hands-on. And, it’s very heroic. The Prince’s Trust is involved, all that stuff. But it strikes me that what they’re doing is reinventing, you know, rather small form, what the experimental husbandry farms did as a matter of course forty years ago. It’s just ridiculous. I mean the Government no longer governs basically, it’s just handed over control to the corporates. And, they say, you know, the civil society et cetera. Well, basically means you’re on your own John. [laughs] So it’s, it’s a des… I mean, serious destruction.

Were they there… Because these are stations that you would have visited earlier, working on Farmers’ Weekly.

Yeah, most… Many of them, not all of them, yeah.

So they were still in the Nineties going. I mean, the privatisation hadn’t…

No, not in the Nineties. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. [pause] My chronology is getting mixed up.

I wonder here, because, we’re… This is after you’ve been on the radio, and you have gone freelance

Colin Tudge Page 107 C1672/17 Track 7

Yeah. I’m still doing it.

You were still, at that stage…

Yeah.

…visiting research…

Do you know, I can’t now put it together. But you’re right. You see how one’s memory plays tricks.

Could it be that you’re remembering the Farmers’ Weekly?

No.

No. This is a separate work…

Separate work. Me working for the Agricultural and Food Research Council.

So perhaps it was earlier, perhaps it was… Perhaps it was at the time that you were also… Perhaps it was a time when you were still on the radio, in the Eighties, before…

It might have been the Eighties.

Because I know that you did a radio programme which was called something like, which was about laboratories. [looking at notes] It was, it was called In Passing. Oh, Science Now, In Passing. ‘Colin Tudge passes through some of the leading laboratories here and abroad.’ And one of them was the Hill Farming Research institute, but there were other ones.

Yes. I didn’t know I’d done that on the radio. Yeah. Well then, it must been in the Eighties.

But it was certainly before they were privatised, you were writing these reports?

Oh definitely, yes.

Yes.

Yeah yeah. And, so, so sorry, what… It was 1990 I think that I stopped working for the BBC. I started, I was writing books. Well, you know, I had been writing books anyway but that became my chief source of income. And at that time, over a couple of years without being paid, I worked for, I did a lot of work with the Zoological Society of London, trying to stop them closing the zoo. That was Colin Tudge Page 108 C1672/17 Track 7 how we spent that time, yes. And I did go, I did lose a lot of money over a fairly short period of time. Mm.

You lost a lot of money?

Well because, I mean although we survived my loss of job with the BBC, and I did get book contracts, wasn’t earning anything like as much as I had been in the past, but we still managed to get by somehow. I can’t remember how now. I think we may have borrowed money against the house. Something like that.

[1:16:42] Thank you. And when did you… You say in Why Genes Are Not Selfish that you take Christianity seriously and spend a lot of time in churches and seek out the company of clerics.

Mm.

Is that a reference to sort of, your life more recently, or, in this period, in the 1990s, would you have visited churches or, or been interested in…?

Well, yeah, only in a desultory fashion. I think if I had found anybody where I lived in South London with whom to converse about this kind of stuff, I probably would. What I found is that, a lot of people who are interested in this kind of stuff, who… For example, they don’t go to church, because, they can’t find one that speaks to them, if you know what I mean. I mean for example, you go to a lot of churches and the vicar will give a perfectly good sermon, but, it’s about, well I don’t know, it’s not about something that, it doesn’t strike any chords with you. So it’s a very personal thing, you have to strike a chord. And for example, all these mediaeval types, monks and stuff, sometimes they spent their entire life, decades, trying to find somebody who they could really converse with. And I just didn’t meet anybody then. And I don’t think I got into this, I don’t think… I didn’t start to feel, you know, I was getting anywhere, basically till I got married to Ruth, or started going out with Ruth, who was, obviously cottoned on to things. And, I think through her I met one or two people who one, you know, one felt was talking to one, and of course read John Hedley Brooke, and so on. Oxford of course is, is, you know, there’s a lot of people. Not that I spend much time really, I must confess. But they are around.

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[Track 8]

Could you, then, talk about some of the books that you were working on, now that you are freelance, in the 1990s, after the radio.

Well just to put it in perspective. I had already written three or four books.

Yes.

The first one ever was The Famine Business, which is 1977, which was about agriculture, and basically, yes, we’ve done that one. Home Farm, 1977, did with Mike Allaby, who’s still around, and that was about self-sufficiency and that kind of stuff. And then Future Cook was about the relationship between good farming and good cooking. And it’s the same theme that I’m still developing thirty-odd years later, which is that, good farming, i.e. the kind that’s sustainable and provides good food, matches great cooking perfectly. All the great cuisines are based on really good local cooking. And all we need to do for the future… Good local farming. All we need to do for the future is to learn to cook. The future need not be austere. If we only learnt to cook as our ancestors cooked, or as the Turks, or the, Provençale people, or Chinese, we could eat very very well. We can, for example, easily produce enough meat to support all the world’s great cuisines. Can’t produce enough for everybody to have hamburgers every, three times a day, but then we don’t need to. But… So, that’s what that was about, and that’s what I’m still writing about. The Food Connection, 1985, was about, basically nutrition theory as it was then. Food Crops For the Future, 1988, was about, well, breeding plants, and I was quite enthusiastic about GMOs at that time. Because they were new, and lots of promise, but haven’t lived up to it obviously. And then, we get at last to the 1990s. The first one in the 1990s was Global Ecology, which I actually wrote for the Natural History Museum in London, as to accompany their exhibition on ecology, which they did at the time. And, one of the things that came in very useful was, I had actually done quite a lot of radio programmes of an ecological kind, so I was kind of, I had already interviewed a lot of very good people, you know, who, with key ideas. So that was that. Then, early 1990s, I said, I became very involved in London Zoo. Because I was a scientific fellow, and we campaigned, some of us fellows, against the closure of London Zoo, which was then imminent. But, at the time, also, I was writing about the role of zoos in conservation, lots and lots of aspects to it, including the behaviour of animals in zoos. That was called Last Animals at the Zoo. And, maybe I should update that, but, anyway, it was a jolly good book if I say so myself. And then, the other theme that I had been working on, you know, at New Scientist in, and, in the radio and so on, was the whole bossiness of genetics and genetic engineering, which I’d already done at school, so, in 1993, The Engineer in the Garden was about genetic engineering. And then, The Day Before Yesterday… Ah. The Day Before Yesterday, 1995, was about human evolution, drawing largely on conferences I had been to in the Eighties with the BBC, including the Raymond Dart diamond centenary in, or whatever it’s called, diamond jubilee, in South Africa. He had been the guy that discovered Australopithecus africanus. He was then, ninety-odd. And I enjoyed that one, The Day Before Yesterday. Then, when I Colin Tudge Page 110 C1672/17 Track 8 was working with the LSE lot, evolutionary psychology, they decided to do a series of books on aspects of Darwinism, and I wrote one called Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers, which didn’t really have much to do with Darwinism, but it was about, as it were, the true origins of agriculture. Because the people had always said, you know, the dogma was that, agriculture began 10,000 years ago, and then, everything was terrific. And the reality is that it, the beginnings of agriculture can be possibly 100,000 years old, and what you see at 10,000 years ago, the Neolithic Revolution as it’s called, is, the beginnings of agriculture that you could actually see. In other words, they do it on such an extensive scale, and in such a distinctive way, that you can see that they’re doing it, you get caches of barley which is different from the wild barley, and so on. That means they’re already pretty well advanced actually. And they already knew how to herd animals and breed plants and so on. And I’d like to say, a propos agriculture, agricultural scientists these days tend to think that there wasn’t any agriculture worth talking about until they came on the scene and, you know, started talking about fertilisers and DDT and all that. And in fact all the very very big problems of agriculture were solved in prehistoric times, because people had already worked out how to turn wild plants, which usually are pretty toxic and pretty fibrous, into plants that you could actually eat without killing yourself. And how to turn wild animals, which are usually very skittish, and often very seriously dangerous, into domestic animals that you can muck about with. So they had already solved the big problems. And then you had to cultivate. And they were already very aware of things like soil erosion, although they didn’t necessarily act on it. So, you know, the point was… And of course the other point was, that, the myth has it that when people were hunter-gatherers, they were having a very rough time, and when they started to farm, everything was terrific. Because that’s the sort of Western myth, you know, must be advanced if we… But, the truth is, again, exactly opposite actually, that, hunter-gatherers at their best have a very easy time, and the first farmers clearly had a very bad time., because, all sorts of reasons. And, the real reason why farming caught on the way it did, is because if you farm, even though you’re having a bad time, you’ll be able to sustain a higher population. And once you’re sustaining a higher population, you’ve got to farm, because, you’ve got to feed the people that are already there. So, it’s a sort of loop, but it’s not a pleasant loop. And, for most of its existence, including now, it’s depended on slavery, and, you know, people worked ridiculously hard in order just to stay alive. But of course, you did produce a surplus that way, which is how you got cities and all that kind of stuff. Although there possibly were perfectly good cities before farming really caught on, which is interesting. Anyway. So that was that one, what’s it called, Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers. That was 1998. We’re almost into this century. [07:10] And then, 2000… Oh, I had an American agent at that time called John Brockman, who was a very go- getter man, New York. Yes. He said, I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences, but he said, ‘Colin, I am a Jewish hustler.’ And he was. He went, you know, he would sell books very sort of, aggressively to American publishers, and British publishers. And so he got very big advances. Anyway… Which was jolly good for the authors. He… Dolly the sheep was born in 1996, as you remember, and it was quite a big deal. And John Brockman said to me, ‘Why don’t you write a book about Dolly the sheep and all that goes with it.’ And so I did. And we got a nice advance. And that was published in 2000. Colin Tudge Page 111 C1672/17 Track 8

And then, there was a book I really, really wanted to write, and I must have been writing for a long time already, called The Variety of Life, which is, the subtitle is A Survey and a Celebration of All the Animals That Have Ever – All the Creatures That Have Ever Lived. Which it is. It deals with all the main taxa that we know about from, well, four million years ago basically. Melvyn Bragg, incidentally, said he thought that the subtitle of the book, Survey and a Celebration et cetera, was the best subtitle he had ever come across, so I was quite pleased about that. [laughs] Anyway, I liked that book. But it’s, it’s out of date now. I’d like to review it, revise it, but I, I never will. [08:48] And then, in 2001, well the year after it seems, I published another book just to update The Engineer in… basically, an update of The Engineer in the Garden, called In Mendel’s Footnotes. Because it occurred to me that actually Mendel, Gregor Mendel, in the 1860s, more or less said it all, I think. Big ideas were there in Mendel, although he was ignored, in the way that Wegener was ignored for about forty years. And, so I wrote a… Anyway, I wrote a book along those lines. There’s lots of aspects of Mendel that I find very appealing. Like the fact that he was a peasant, born into a peasant family in what is now Czechoslovakia – oh, no, what is now the Czech Republic. Was then, then, probably Bohemia, but I’m not sure. Whatever it was. Anyway, the point was, at that time Europe, because he was born in the early nineteenth century, was still officially feudal. And one interesting thing about that is, for example, his father had a small patch of land, which I don’t think he owned, but, you know, it was good, what do you call it, security of tenure, but in order to pay for it he had to work for the local lord for two days a week, something like that, maybe three. So it was a, you know, a real feudal system. And that didn’t end until the 1840s. But the other side of it, because we all know that feudalism is terrible, is that, it wasn’t necessarily, because, the local dignitaries sort of spotted that this little lad Mendel, who was pottering about the fields, but also went to, you know, the local primary school, was actually rather bright. And they took him under their wing, as they did with bright kids. And he went on to the polytechnic and then he went on to the University of Vienna. And then the only way he could actually make a living, I think he did physics for a time, was to become a monk. And he went to St Thomas’ monastery in Brno, and later became the abbot. But that’s where he did his genetic experiments. And they were wonderful experiments, beautifully elegant. And he founded the whole of modern genetics in my opinion, on the basis of a few peas and runner beans and antirrhinums. And he saw everything, all the main things, you know, he saw that, that inheritance was particulate, i.e. genes, well they weren’t called genes then, but, they call them factors, carry particular genetic, particular trays from one generation to the next. He saw that they operated independently. So that you could have, you know, you could have, ginger hair and green eyes, or you could have green hair and blue eyes, all that kind of stuff. He also saw that there were polygenic characters, more than one gene on the same character. He also saw that some characteristics were dominant over others. Well you start putting these things together, and you’ve more or less got it, that’s more or less it. And he sent his paper to Darwin, because he saw that it had this tremendous connection with natural selection. Darwin didn’t read his paper; we know that because they used to have to cut the pages in those days in order to read it, and copies of Mendel’s papers have been found in Darwin’s desk uncut. [laughs] But, you know, Darwin worried all his life about the mechanism of heredity, but, you know, Mendel had told him. The Colin Tudge Page 112 C1672/17 Track 8 other little myth about Mendel is that he was just totally obscure, and he wasn’t actually. He knew many of the great scientists in Europe and they knew him, like Doppler of the Doppler effect, for example, and others. So he was a respected figure in Central European science. But, you know, he depended for a living on working at the monastery. And the other interesting thing is that the monastery gave him more or less carte blanche to do his work. And, you know, the monasteries in those days, far from being the kind of obstructers of science, as, again, the popular mythology has it, were actually acting as, as quite significant research stations. Very very interested in science. The Vatican still of course has its own scientific, scientists, on board, and do some very good stuff. Anyway. So Mendel. Everything about him appeals to me, you know, his humble origins and et cetera. And the way that once you look at his life, myths are exploded all the way along. So, I wrote that book, In Mendel’s Footnotes it’s called. And… I don’t think that’s how it was published, but that’s what it should be published [as], that’s what is meant: 'In Mendel’s Footnotes' to do with the fact that I think it was A N Whitehead who said that all philosophy is footnotes to Plato. So my little allusion was that all genetics is footnotes to Mendel. [laughs] Not many people believe that. [13:53] Anyway, then, by this time, just after this, was when I really got together with Ruth. And we moved up to Oxford. We decided to get together and moved up to Oxford. And I said, I don’t know what to do next, you know, I’ve run out of things to write about really. And she said, ‘Why don’t you go back to agriculture,’ which is, sort of, you know, ‘you were quite good at that in your youth.’ So I wrote this book called So Shall We Reap, 2003. Incidentally, I thought, So Shall We Reap, everyone will get the allusion to that, you know, Saint Paul, as you sow, so shall you, as we sow, so shall we reap, et cetera et cetera. And, obviously, the allusion to modern agriculture is very clear. But I found that some people actually said, ‘What does reap mean?’ [laughs] Never mind Saint Paul. Anyway, that was 2003. Then, as a result of knowing Ruth, she had a scholarship at Green College, Oxford, it’s now called Green Templeton College, but it was called Green in those days, and, as a result of having this… No. it wasn’t a fellowship, it was a scholarship. As a result of that, we used to have dinner in hall, and she was already good friends with the professor of forestry, Prof Jeff Burley, a very very fine man. And we had a conversation with him over dinner one evening, and, he was talking about, obviously his life with trees, well he… And, it suddenly occurred to me, I could write a book about trees. I’d really like to write a book about trees. So, I, I prepared a treatment and sent it to Penguin – no, to my agent, who was then Felicity Bryan, based at Oxford, and she said… Anyway, Penguin took it up, and that was my most successful book, we really enjoyed that. For some reason I had some money then, I think I had just sold the house or something. And we, we went to Brazil and we went to India, and, I had already been to China recently, I had been to Australia fairly recently, New Zealand fairly recently. We also went to the United States, California. Went to Costa Rica. And so on. So I had a, I did a wonderful world tour, talking to people about trees, all recommended by Jeff Burley, because he just knows everybody. Most of them had been in his department at Oxford. Of course the forestry department’s been closed down now. Anyway. But, so that’s how that one came about. [16:29] Colin Tudge Page 113 C1672/17 Track 8

And then, in 2007 I decided to try and write a short version of So shall We Reap, and I wrote Feeding People is Easy. And then, I thought, having had a great success with trees, it was a very successful book, why not take another taxon and do it? So I did Consider the Birds, the title thought up by Penguin, and of course it’s another sort of biblical allusion, to consider the birds, they, consider the… You know, it’s in that passage about, ‘Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin.’ And something about birds is in there too. So that was one. And… But that didn’t do so well, because… Of course, birdie people, I discovered, are primarily interested in identification. And so, twitchers' books do very well. Discussing the biology, and the psychology; the taxonomy doesn’t go down so well. Anyway, that one. [17:29] And then, oh… Oh, and, a film company, Atlantic in fact, were doing a programme about some fossil that they had discovered, somebody had discovered, that the discoverers hypothesised might be sort of, ancestral human but thirty-something million years old. And most people think it’s a lemur. But… [laughs] These chaps were arguing, no, it’s probably on the human, human-y line. And, so this Atlantic company said, ‘Why don’t you write a book about this?’ So I did, and it was published, and it was called The Link, published in 2009. Enjoyed writing about it. I had to write it in a ridiculously short time. Five weeks actually. [laughs] But it’s, it’s all right, it’s all right. And then, another version of the whole farming thing, called Good Food For Everyone Forever. And then I thought, it was then that I really said, OK, I want a complete change, and wrote this sort of, essentially philosophical book, Why Genes Are Not Selfish And People Are Nice. 2013. And now here we are in 2016, and I have just published, or, Green Books, Cambridge, has just published my latest book, which is called Six Steps Back to the Land. And the point about that is that it’s, OK, it’s about the same kind of stuff that my other farming books were about, you know, relationship, how to feed the world and all that kind of stuff, but, between, over the last five or six years, more than that, over the last decade, in the background, Ruth and I had been developing the Campaign for Real Farming, the Oxford Real Farming Conference, and Funding Enlightened Agriculture, and now the College for Enlightened Agriculture. So what Six Steps Back to the Land is about, it’s about feeding the world, but it also develops the very specific thesis that we need a complete change in the way we approach things, the agrarian renaissance. And this complete change, the new agriculture that we need must be based on small mixed farms, with focus on food for local populations, or, the national population. In other words, a high degree of self-reliance within every country. And, that… But that, the Government, who of course are the sort of, now an arm of the corporates basically, they just represent the corporates, the powers that be in other words, the oligarchy, together with their chosen intellectual advisers, scientists and economists, are hell bent on the totally opposite strategy, of huge mono-cultural farms, aimed at exports where all the stuff is regarded as a commodity to be sold. So, what I’m saying in this book is, actually, we need a whole new generation of small mixed farmers. It’s got to come from the population at large, we need probably eight, ten times as many farmers as we’ve got in this country. And so, how do people at large become farmers? And it discusses that, in significant detail. So that’s, that’s the books.

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[21:06] Thank you. Can I take you back over a number of those things?

Please do.

One thing you said is that, when you began to write these books at home, you had the advantage of having met ecologists, or least scientists working in ecology. Could you say something about that? Are these people that, that you met during your radio career, during working in New Scientist? Because, one gets the impression that, over the period that we’ve been talking about, molecular biology tends to be the kind of biology that attracts attention.

Yes.

And, the discipline of ecology tends to lose out to that. And…

That’s right.

I had the sense that Bob May was the only ecologist that jumps out of the list of people that appear in your radio programmes for example.

Ah.

And he’s a rather special kind of ecologist, being quite a long way from a kind of, natural history.

Yeah. Yes.

But I wondered whether, to what extent you were, you did have contacts with what might be called ecologists…

Yes.

…over that part of your career, with, even with ecologists involved in nature conservation and that sort of thing.

Looking back I can’t honestly really remember. I mean I was very interested in the kind of theory you know, people like Paul Ehrlich, from the 1970s, again still around, talking about, you know, the future of the world, we’re all going to hell and all that kind of stuff. People like Peter Bunyan, if you know him. Teddy Goldsmith I was, knew roughly. All the sort of ecologist crowd. So, that was a very strong theme when I was at New Scientist. The actual biology of it, well, this dates to my university and school days. The ecologists I actually knew. Well, when I went to work for the London Zoo, I Colin Tudge Page 115 C1672/17 Track 8 mean, many of the people there, like Stephen Cobb, and through him, who’s a zoologist based in Oxford, who is very much an elephant man, and Mark Stanley Price, also based in Oxford, who, he’s interested in antelope. And a guy called Tim Halliday, who is, talks about the amphibians, one of the world authorities on amphibians. I mean, these, this is it, I mean, in a sense I don’t remember ever concertedly going round and talking to ecologists, but over the years I just had this kind of contact. And I felt I had a feel for it, you know what I mean. One of the things that people, you know, my background is general biology really, if you boil it down, but this gives you, I think, a proper feel for who’s who and what’s what, with a very strong taxonomic base. I mean at Cambridge we used to go through all the taxa, and what this animal’s like, what that plant’s like, and so on. Which I don’t think they do much any more, but it’s a good basis. This is the same thing that David Attenborough did some years before me, but the same kind of course, at the same place.

To what extent have you been involved with field ecologists? In other words, ecologists working in the field but not agricultural scientists as it were.

Not much really. I mean… Well, Jane Goodall, you know, just, to a small extent. Stephen Cobb. I’ve very rarely been out in the field. In fact I can’t… Well, no, hardly ever, actually. I mean apart from, you know, in an informal way

Thank you. John Brockman. Can you tell me more about John Brockman? He’s interesting because, around this time he develops an enthusiasm for something, or, he seems to develop an enthusiasm for something called, that he calls the Third Culture.

That’s right.

In other words, the idea that, scientists should, ought to emerge as the new sort of intellectual leaders.

Yes.

[24:56] And so, I was quite surprised when you said that he was your agent, because he seems in some ways sort of, very, to have a very different outlook to your own.

Oh he does. He does. But we, we got on well, we used to, I’ve visited him in, once in New York, and he’s, I’ve seen him in London a few times. I mean, when he said, ‘I am a Jewish hustler,’ well the story he tells is about his own father, who was a trader, and specialised at one time in flowers, and for some reason, I can’t remember what it was, his father realised that there was going to be a run on gladioli, and he actually got a corner in gladioli. I mean you have to move very very fast with flowers. So in the space of a few hours, starting about three o’clock in the morning, he managed to buy all the gladioli in [laughs], in the Eastern Seaboard. And made a killing, you know. But, you know, you’ve Colin Tudge Page 116 C1672/17 Track 8 got to have this kind of, what do you call it, opportunism and alertness. Well John became a, a literary agent, and applied the same mentality. And, he saw, I think it was in the 1990s, the Stephen Hawking’s, what’s it called, A Brief History of Time came out. And that did phenomenally well. And on the basis of that, John pointed out to all these publishers that actually, the thing that they really could make money out of, if they really put their minds to it, was science. And people who were writing science books at the time, like me, if they knew John Brockman, John would strike a very hard bargain on our behalf. Well on his own behalf as well, because he’s on ten per cent or whatever, whatever it is. But, you know, he, so he was applying this very sharp business sense to something that previously hadn’t had it. It was a different ethos. And he was very good at that, very successful. In saying… Times have changed of course, because print journalism is no longer what it was, et cetera et cetera, times are hard, but at that time there was a kind of bonanza period, thanks largely to John Brockman. And, whereas advances have just been a little bit that you could, you know, pay the gas bill with, now suddenly you can live for a year, or two years, off an advance. But, when he says, which he said to me, you know, ‘I’m a Jewish hustler,’ he was actually selling himself short, because he’s actually a serious intellectual. He’s very interested in ideas. Now, possibly because of the, the circles in which he moves, whatever, he, I think, was, and possibly still is, but I think was more than possibly still is – I haven’t really talked to him for about a decade – very sort of, taken with the sort of reductionist agenda. And he really did believe, as a lot of very, as a lot of scientists do, including, say, Peter Atkins, and I think including John – sorry, Richard Dawkins, that science can more or less tell us, not perhaps everything there is to know, but, everything that is worth knowing, and is knowable, and should be acted upon. So he just takes, you know, scientific ideas very very seriously. And he loves talking to really clever scientists, Murray Gell-Mann and all that kind of guy. And, anyway, he does it, you know, because he believes in it. But also… Except that I’ve lost my thread.

[28:37] So, you think that he sells himself short, in other words it’s a kind of, false modesty saying ‘I’m a Jewish hustler,’ because he, he actually..?

As I say, he’s a serious thinker, in addition to being a Jewish… I don’t think he’s ashamed of being a Jewish hustle. I mean, you know, he’s very, he’s a very very good businessman, and he knows how to, you know, turn the screws as it were. But he’s also a serious thinker, about, along these lines, you know, belief in science and reductionist method and all that kind of stuff. I haven’t spoken to him for a bit, but I very slightly get the impression that he may be softening that attitude, he may be beginning to take other things seriously. Ah. The other thing that he observed, which is, I think, where the Third Culture comes from, is that, what people call intellectuals tend to be, well tend to be artists basically, and possibly philosophers. And scientists have always been regarded as oddballs, or out there somewhere, geeks. And he wanted to say, no, they’re not, they’re not, they’re more than geeks, they’re people who change our world view, and in important ways, vital ways.

What’s your evidence for detecting the softening of…? Colin Tudge Page 117 C1672/17 Track 8

I don’t know. One or two emails that we’ve exchanged, and we don’t exchange emails very often, but occasionally. And I… Yeah. But I haven’t spoken to him for so long, so I can’t really, I can’t really comment.

Did he invite you to take part in the Third Culture project?

[pause] I don’t know whether… I think I might, I think in one of the books that he edited, I think I may have got a piece. So I think sort of, is the answer. I’ll say sort of. [laughs]

And can you…

I’m not part of his inner circle.

[30:28] For the, for someone who, for the listener who hasn’t tried to make a living out of writing books, can you give a sense, then, of, without, you know, asking you too sort of personal a question, but can you give a sense of sort of, the quantity of, sort of quantify the amount of money you can get by writing certain books, and, when you say that the advance really jumped up under Brockman, what sort of amounts of money are we sort of comparing?

Well, I mean, I went at a time when, the most I’ve ever got as an advance, not from one publisher but from America and Britain, was, was £100,000. I think, yeah, something like that. The second biggest was something like… Oh I can’t remember the second biggest. Maybe it comes down to thirty or forty. But, you know, a decent amount of money. Whereas the last book I wrote, that one behind you, I think I got three. And, the ones before that, you know, you know, So Shall… not So Shall We Reap, that was a bit… ba-ba-ba-ba Sorry, I’ll get there. The Day Before… No not that. Feeding People is Easy, say, I think something like 1100 quid. And I think I got something like 1100 quid for, ba-ba-ba, what’s it called? Why Genes Are Not Selfish and People Are Nice. Well, you can’t live for a year off 1100 quid. So it happened... So these days, as far as I’m concerned, I mean maybe I’m just not very successful any more, but, you know, writing books becomes a sort of hobby, but I’ve got a pension now so it doesn’t really bother me. Well I’d rather get thirty, forty thousand pound a go, but you know. Not essential.

[32:25] OK, could you now, then, tell me in more detail how it is that you met Ruth West? I think you suggested that you were, knew each other or were friends for some time before you sort of got together. And then, go on from there.

Colin Tudge Page 118 C1672/17 Track 8

Well, in the… When I was at New Scientist, go back to Rupert Sheldrake, I published the stuff about Rupert Sheldrake in New Scientist. Ruth at the time was working for a group whose name I can’t remember, but it consisted, the chief players were Brian Inglis, who had been Editor of the Spectator, a very good Irish journalist, and Arthur Koestler, who, you know, a serious Hungarian intellectual. And, these two guys were actually very very interested in parapsychology, because they said it’s been given short shrift. And Ruth worked for them. And, when she saw the article in New Scientist about Sheldrake, she said, she invited me as the sort of editor of it to, to some kind of soiree that Brian Inglis was running. Because he used to have soirees. And, so I went. And that’s where I really first met Ruth. And that was back in the 1980s. And then I got to know her a bit over the next few years, because, we sort of, moved in the same, roughly in the same circles. I mean, you know, we had a very good friend in common, I might as well mention his name, Jeremy Cherfas, who was a biologist on New Scientist and then we went to work for various other people. But, Jeremy, who was a friend in common. When I broke up with Ros, my first wife, round about 2000, I can’t remember the real date, I was then still living in South London, and Ruth was also living in South London, I think she lived at Camberwell or something like that. And she got in touch, because she knew that I was sort of, on my own, and she was on her own, she said, ‘Why don’t we have a drink?’ So, that was sort of the beginning. Things go on from there. And I think we got married, I don’t know, fourteen years ago, 2002. So I suppose things moved quite quickly. I think, something like that, yeah. I’m not very good at… Well, I’m good at dates when they’re other people’s dates. I can tell you when Mendel was born. [laughs] But I can’t tell you what I did.

[35:13] Can you say some more about the, the group that Ruth worked for, consisting of people including these two, Brian…

No, well, no no, basically, there were three. Just the three of them, Inglis, Koestler. And they were financed by, some kind of millionaire, whose name I can’t remember. But he was just the chap who put the money up, and was interested in parapsychology. Well, this is what I said, I mean, they were interested in parapsychology, and, I think both of them wrote books about it, Koestler and Inglis, pointing out that there was plenty of evidence that it was a real thing, and that the reason it was being treated so cavalierly was that it didn’t fit the paradigm, people couldn’t think of mechanisms, et cetera, so they do anything, go to any lengths to sort of, put the boot in. That was their thesis. And they were just interested in experiments of many kinds that were trying to demonstrate real telepathic effects. One of the things… Or, telepathy being one example of paranormal, or what’s called paranormal. This is where I had rather a good conversation with John Maynard Smith, and I’m quite pleased with my own contribution to it, because I said, look, people try to do experiments on telepathy. Since then Rupert Sheldrake has done quite a lot that’s, as you know, quite critical. But he said, people try to – I said, people try to do it, experiments, to demonstrate that it’s a real thing, and most of the experiments at best are equivocal. You’re not, you know, it’s not convincing. But I said, there was a possible explanation to do with this… excuse me [pause], that, that doesn’t sort of, deny the possibility of it Colin Tudge Page 119 C1672/17 Track 8 being real. And I said, for example, consider the fact that in all the history of long jumping, in the Olympics and other such things, only two men have jumped more than twenty-nine feet. And one was Bob Beamon, who did it once in Mexico City at altitude, and the other was, is it Rob Powell? Anyway, his surname his Powell, I can never remember his Christian name, who did it I think two or three times. That’s all that’s ever been done, in all that, all that time. Now if you, if you were a scientist, and your proposition was that people can jump twenty-nine feet, you would say, actually, there’s no statistical evidence that they can. There’s three outlying examples, but they don’t, you know, there are so few, in all the thousands of efforts, millions, that, we have to say, it can’t be done, it’s not a real phenomenon. But the real point, or, at least you could never demonstrate it statistically, you can get the best athletes in the world and put them in a line and say, ‘Go on, jump twenty-nine feet,’ they’re not going to do it. But, all that really proves is that it’s very very very difficult. And supposing we say, look, telepathy is actually hard, and it’s very hard under controlled conditions, it’s possibly easy if you’re an Australian Aborigine, because they seem to… It’s possibly easy if you’re Africans, I’ve heard of Africans doing extraordinary things. But it’s not easy if you’re a Western European, for whatever reason, overlaid by other things or whatever. So, when you get the, when you’re trying to do the experiments and you don’t get a result, well it’s because, you know, they can’t do it, because they’re below the threshold. And John Maynard Smith, I am pleased to say, took that seriously. So, yeah. And I think it’s a good idea. And we’re just not sensitive enough. But the experiments that Rupert Sheldrake does, of various kinds, you know, like looking at people, and are you looking at me or not, are of a kind of, well they’re kind of, a broad-brush, loose approach, which takes that into account, you know. Thousands of examples, et cetera, et cetera. So very small effects are picked up, and become statistically very significant.

[39:26] What was Ruth’s role in the group?

She organised the whole thing basically. She kept it together. Because these two guys were wild intellectuals. And, Ruth made it into a proper outfit that I think helped to finance research and, you know, got people together, that kind of thing.

[39:47] And can you talk now about the effect of the relationship with Ruth on your own thinking about questions of religion and of transcendence and that sort of thing?

Yes. Well I think she just, possibly started introducing me to people I hadn’t thought about, didn’t really know much about. We just had lots of conversations, basically. And, the penny dropped with me that, and we can, that, the whole idea of… like, a propos religion, you don’t start with religion. I remember John Humphrey, he did these series of radio programmes about, you know, people’s beliefs, and he said, ‘Of course the basic question is, do you believe in God?’ Well that is not the basic question, that’s a very very advanced kind of question. And the real point is, to take seriously, as Colin Tudge Page 120 C1672/17 Track 8 opposed to believe, the idea of transcendence. And transcendence, as one might define it loosely, simply is the idea that there is more to the universe than meets the eye. And the kind of big materialist agenda of sort of hardnosed reductionist scientists, not only is that hardnosed reductionist science can tell you, just about everything, but that there is nothing else. And the point is that, Peter Medawar made the point, Sir Peter Medawar, in the 1960s, who was a very good zoologist, and was also a good philosopher, and he simply pointed out that, as he said, ‘Science is the art of the soluble.’ And in this he was sort of, misquoting Bismarck who said ‘Politics is the art of the possible.’ And he said, the point about scientists is that they only look at the things that they know they can answer, or they’re pretty sure they can answer, in the time available, or with the grant money available. Didn’t actually say that, but you know. There’s no point in looking at questions you really can’t answer. There is no point in a scientist asking, is there such a thing as God? Because there’s no experiment you can do. So, in practice, then, because they’re interested in testable hypotheses, as Popper had said, they look at things that you can test and get an answer. So they look at the material world, primarily. I mean they can look at the non-material world in so far as they can look at psychology for example, but basically, they deal with the material world. There’s a world of difference between saying, we or I will look at the material world because that’s all I can really do, with the methods I have, and saying, therefore, the material world is all there is. Which effectively some of them say. [pause] [42:30] And once that sort of, one realises this sort of form of words, and then one says, well, the idea of transcendence is simply the idea there is more to the universe than meets the eye, when I say meets the eye, I mean can possibly meet the eye, ever, even when the eye is extended with telescopes and all the rest, and the hypothesis that there is more going on, one might gather, is sort of, so obviously true, actually. I mean it would be an extraordinary coincidence, I think Kant made this point, although he was talking about pre-evolution, you know, was writing at a time when evolution wasn’t known, but he was sort of saying, you know, the human brain is, is very limited in what we can understand. And when you sort of add in Darwin and say, well the human brain is basically about survival… The idea that the human brain should be capable of understanding everything that’s going on in the universe, is kind of rather reckless. So the idea there probably, could be more going on, et cetera et cetera, is, is, becomes very, well it’s sort of obvious. And it isn’t just a question of saying, there’s more going on that we haven’t got to yet, which is what Peter Atkins says, OK, there are unknowns but we’ll get to them, it’s question of saying, actually, the kind of things you don’t know are not divinable by the means that you – I don’t know whether there is a word divinable, but there ought to be, by the kind of methods that you’re bringing to bear, there are no testable hypotheses out there, it doesn’t mean to say it’s not important. If you start… And the idea that you’re not believing that there is transcendence, but you are taking the idea seriously, come back to the idea, you know, as it were, give me faith and I might understand, take seriously before you can even think about it. So then you start to say, are you… Then the basic question then is not, do you believe in God? which is a very big thing to say, and, specifically in God, but do you take seriously the idea of transcendence? Well, the answer is, yes, and why not? In fact anybody who isn’t a bigot, should. You could reject it but you have to take it seriously. The question of, then, the relationship between transcendence and God, well, there are lots Colin Tudge Page 121 C1672/17 Track 8 of ways of looking at it, but, I mean, one idea I find appealing, and again, I don’t say all these things are rue, I just say they’re worth taking seriously, is the idea that, intelligence is not something which springs from one’s own head, which is the illusion that people have, or the idea, but is something which is embedded in the universe, and that when we are conscious, we’re not creating consciousness, we are partaking of consciousness. And this is where I think the real significance of telepathy comes in. That, there’s an assumption that when you and I are talking to each other, that all the meaning is conveyed by the words. And in a sense that’s sort of true. But, I think it’s quite likely that we wouldn’t be able to talk to each other at all, unless there were already some kind of telepathic communication, unless we were both partaking of a universal intelligence, consciousness. And that what the words do in a sense is to modulate the signal that’s already there. [45:49] And, one physicist who, lots of physicists think roughly along these lines, who were sort of, taking this thing quite a long way, is Peter Russell, who you may or may not know, and you may not be interviewing. But he says, the point is that, what one might call universal consciousness, I don’t think he uses that term but I’m using it, is, you could equate that with God, God is universal consciousness. I don’t think that’s a million miles from Spinoza, but I don’t know. But that’s, that. So, it’s not a, you know, it’s an idea that sort of, people have. And it seems to me quite reasonable. So when you’re saying, you know… You see what I mean, that… ba-ba-ba-ba Transcendence then, you can say, in the form of universal intelligence, can be equated with God. And then the idea of belief. Well belief means that you really do think, you know in your bones that such and such a thing is true. Whereas taking seriously means that you probably don’t, you’re not absolutely convinced that it’s true, but you think it’s, it feels right, kind of thing. So what to me, I want to say, look, the idea of transcendence feels right to me. I also want to say that, when it comes to knowing things, or understanding things, in the end, although scientists say it’s all based on evidence et cetera et cetera, and logic and rationality and the answer becomes unequivocal, that’s not really true. In the end… Well first of all, the answers that you get when you do science are always ambiguous, there’s always the possibility that what you think is going on, isn’t. But the other thing is that, in the end, why does a scientist believe any particular piece of evidence, and reject others, which they do the whole time? Because evidence doesn’t mean proof. Evidence means a fact that is compatible with a certain idea. So why do they accept some facts as being really important, and others as not being very important, or being a mistake or something like that? And in the end, the only reason that anybody, including scientists, understand things, or say they understand things, or know things, is because intuition tells them that it’s right. And you see this all the time and you hear this all the time. For example, Paul Dirac, great mathematician, British I think, despite the name, said, you know, you should look for beauty in a equations. And it’s, you know, it reflects back to Keats, beauty is truth, truth beauty. Because you, you know, that’s, in the end that’s, your judgement of whether it’s true is actually aesthetic. And, even James Watson, co- discoverer of, you know, the structure of, 3D structure of DNA, who is a serious atheist I believe, certainly was, said, you know, when he found this molecule, something as beautiful as that has to be true. It’s this kind of thing. And, in the end it’s an intuitive feeling that it’s right or it’s not right. And so, the idea that that you should intuitively feel that transcendence is something to be taken seriously, Colin Tudge Page 122 C1672/17 Track 8 you should take your own intuition seriously, because in the end intuition is all there is. Or in the end, intuition is the ultimate arbiter. Now what you should do of course is to take your intuitions and subject them to rational critique, rational criticism. So what you then get is this dialogue between what one might call rationality and intuitive feeling of what’s right. And, that’s what all the great theologians have said, right from the beginning. I know I’ve said that earlier but that’s, that’s how it works. So, that’s it really.

What…

Sorry. One last thing.

Yes.

[49:50] There’s a professor of Islamic studies at Washington… that’s not… at the George Washington University in Washington DC. He, he talks about metaphysics. And he says, metaphysics… Two things. He says, first of all, metaphysics asks the ultimate questions, and secondly, he says, the great tragedy of the world is that the Western world, who after all set the pace these days, has forgotten what metaphysics is. Now, I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing, and I went to a lecture by him where he said this, and it’s in one of his books. First of all, he didn’t say, but, I’ve been asking myself, what are the ultimate questions? And the first ultimate question is, what is the universe really like? Well science answers, does its best to address the question of, it does its best, deals with what’s soluble, looks, therefore, primarily at the, at the material world, but doesn’t ask the question, is there a, as it were, a non-material world that’s important, that we’re not looking at? Because it can’t. It’s not its brief. It’s not what it does. So, metaphysics is actually asking, what is the universe really like? Whereas a scientist is asking, what is the material world like? in the end, when you boil it down. The second big question is, what is good? Well moral philosophers deal with that of course, but again, you have to get right back to the roots and ask, well why, why is it good? You know, why isn’t it good to kick somebody to death, you know, what’s… Et cetera. Many reasons why it’s not. But in the end, the kind of, you know, the sort of, what do you call it, instrumental reasons, the utilitarian reasons, don’t really add up, actually, because you are… So in the end, it comes back to a matter of being an intuitive thing, that you feel that some things are good and some things are bad. And related to that, I think, is the sort of Daoist idea that the universe has this kind of internal harmony, and, the essence of morality in the end is that you are conforming to the harmony, or you are adding to the harmony. And which is where you get things like, which is where the ideas of compassion and all that kind of thing come up. So, the roots of morality are also metaphysical. And then the third big question is, how do we know what’s true? Well again, the philosophers will, the science of the, the study of epistemology asks that very question, what is the nature of truth and so on. But again, as I just said, in the end, our judgement is intuitive, and this is kind of, you know, this is, not something you can pin down. And then the fourth thing is, a question which is a sort of meta question, which is, how come? Because Colin Tudge Page 123 C1672/17 Track 8 even if you can explain how everything is, which scientists do, you still have to say, well why should it be like that? Like, you know, is superstrings the universal explanation of what, of how the material world works? Well it may be in mathematical terms, but then you have to say, how come there are these things called superstrings that have this enormous potential and behave in this extraordinary way? Which of course is an unanswerable question. And in the end, you say, well, all the questions that metaphysics asks, are unanswerable, or unprovable, some cases even more or less untestable by any, you know, by any sort of formal means. And, therefore you get to the point where you say, well, science is rooted in mystery, moral philosophy is rooted in mystery. All the really big things we want to talk about are actually rooted in mystery. But metaphysics becomes the, as it were, the discipline of thinking about what is ultimately mysterious. It’s the art of the mysterious, actually, in the end. And, some people would say, look, a logical positivist would say, and the hardnosed scientist would say, well if it’s ultimately mysterious, and you can’t ever pin it down, it’s a waste of time. But, Seyyed makes the point, and he’s right, or Nasr makes the point, that, although you can’t sort of do the ultimate experiments that will pin things down, you can, nevertheless, improve on saying nothing, or in just, sort of, spinning top of the head things, top of the head ideas. And so, it becomes, you can do formal study un fact into things that are in the end unknowable,. and achieve greater or lesser degrees of satisfaction, which he says is worthwhile, and I agree, it is worthwhile. So in the end it’s all metaphysis.

[54:44] What was Ruth’s level of engagement with Christianity from the time that you got together?

Well she had gone off formal Christianity. I mean, she had been a member of the Salvation Army, she was brought up in a Salvation Army family, and, until she was well in her teens had done kind of, good works of a Salvation Army kind. Like running youth clubs for seriously, you know, kids who had a bad time basically, in the East End of London, that kind of thing. But, I think she, she fell out with the Salvation Army itself. Well, I think the particular people, there was a kind of, you know, it’s unfortunate really. There was an authoritarianness about them. And also I think she, she is an intellectual, and the theology that sort of, underpinned the Salvation Army, was a bit primitive I think for her. [laughs] She has tremendous admiration for some of the best, some of the Salvation Army people, including the founder, whose name I’ve forgotten, you might remember, mid-nineteenth century. I mean, you know, some of these people were seriously great, morally and in, you know, what they actually did. But, that, she went off that. And she went off the sort of, Christian, basically, the rather primitive Christian theology. I think, you know in the nineteenth century, it’s a big thesis this, starting round about sort of, 1820-ish, there was a huge reaction against formal Christianity. Well there was a resurgence at the beginning, you know, with the Oxford Movement and all that kind. But basically, huge numbers of intellectuals just turned away from Christianity. It had very little to do with Darwin. People, you know, rewrite history and say, once Darwin came along, people saw through it and that was the end. That’s not how it was at all. And Darwin himself was probably quite a religious sort of a guy. And, there were certainly clerics after Darwin who weren’t at all fazed by Darwin, you know, the idea that if God wants to work that way, well that’s fine by us, kind of thing. It wasn’t that, Colin Tudge Page 124 C1672/17 Track 8 it was something else. And it was possibly to do… I think it was to do very largely with, the realisation that, bits of the Bible could not be taken too literally, and once you start saying bits of the Bible can’t be taken too literally, starting perhaps with the earth sciences stuff, then, you say, well how much can? And you finish up with the idea that the whole thing is metaphorical, or poetical. Which some theologians say, some, some priests will say that. Anyway, where am I going with this? Anyway, sorry. Ruth’s disillusionment, it seems to me… Actually, sorry. To… A lot of the people who turned away from Christianity, for ostensibly were, in the nineteenth century, were seen to be intellectual reasons, including people like Thomas Hardy, and I think, Matthew Arnold, nevertheless, never stopped hankering after, you know, religious experience, after, what Christianity had been. I think George Eliot as well. They always took it, it was always there, they took it seriously, but the they couldn’t quite sort of, you know, they could no longer, as they say, swallow it. But they were mortified… But I think, Hardy in particular suffered greatly from this. Anyway, leaving that aside, I think that, Ruth felt the same. And this is something very big and very serious. But, you know, intellectually it doesn’t quite add up. But she became, I think, well you know, interested in religion in a broader sense, with Sufis and, Buddhists and people like that. As a lot of people do. And somewhere in the midst of all that, one feels there is wisdom. [laughs]

[end of session]

[End of Track 8] Colin Tudge Page 125 C1672/17 Track 9

[Track 9]

Could you start, in as much detail as possible, by telling me about the beginnings of, I think the first thing in a series of things you do concerned with new ways of thinking about agriculture, but I think this was the Campaign for Real Farming that came first, and your idea of enlightened agriculture.

Yes. Well to go right back to the beginning. I mean I, I always had a sort of, feeling in the background, although I’m a townie, that agriculture was kind of, special, you know, I just loved the idea of it. And this was right back in the Forties, and, yeah, Fifties, when agriculture of course was very very different from how it is now. And after I started writing, you know, journalism, I conceived of a… Well, actually I wrote a story about brucellosis for the magazine I was working for then, which was World Medicine. Brucellosis being a disease of cattle which can affect human beings rather nastily, and at that time was still really quite a big thing. And I knew that Farmers’ Weekly had done quite a lot on brucellosis, and, there wasn’t Google and all stuff in those days, so, you know, I... I rang up Farmers’ Weekly, who were in Fleet Street, and said, ‘Can I come and look at your stuff on brucellosis?’ And so I did. But anyway, when I got there, I thought, this is a place I would genuinely like to work. It had a nice atmosphere. It was in Fleet Street. Quite important, that. So it was like the real thing. And I applied to the editor, and he actually did give me a job. So I stayed there for several years. And so, my little yen, or my feeling, that agriculture was interesting, I was able, for about two and a half years, I shouldn’t have left but I just did for no reason, to get really stuck into it. And I realised it was just a tremendously interesting thing to be involved in. The other thing, though… Well at that time… You see, in the Forties, Fifties, Sixties, we were still kind of living, well, first of all a lot of it was kind of, still nineteenth century-ish, but also, we were living in the wake of the Second World War. Now the British Government only takes agriculture seriously when it gets a very nasty jolt. So it got a very nasty jolt in the Napoleonic Wars, when suddenly you couldn’t import any more. Another very nasty jolt in World War I, and then of course another one in, is World War II, with the U-boats preventing imports easily from America. And, during the wars, governments go all out to try and grow stuff, and then, after the wars they sort of continue their enthusiasm for a bit, and then, they lose interest and they say, it’s, actually it’s much cheaper to import stuff, so why are we bothering? 1970, which is roughly when I was there, it was a kind of, cusp period, when, they had had a couple of decades of euphoria, you know, I mean, post-war, well, euphoria in agricultural terms really, throwing money into it, supporting it. And then, you know, then they lapsed back to the sort of, old mentality. By the time we got to the end of the Seventies, well I had left by then, but the seeds were already there, it was getting worse than that, and people were beginning… Well, neo-liberalism was beginning to spring up. And, ba-ba-ba, you know, governments like Britain were beginning to say, really, why do we bother with agriculture at all? And just to fast-forward, in the 1990s, under Blair, I am told by a very senior civil servant who was, oh, in the agricultural side of things, that the Government was seriously considering getting shot of agriculture, British agriculture, in the same way that they got shot of mining. Because it was obviously so much cheaper to let the Americans and the Poles and the Africans grow stuff for us, and we could obviously just buy it in, so why on earth were we bothering? Colin Tudge Page 126 C1672/17 Track 9

And I do actually think that whereas mining was killed off basically because it didn’t really have many friends in high places, agriculture was not killed off because it did have friends in high places. And it’s pretty obvious that the world is run by people in high places. I mean, what makes sense and what the rest of us care about, what’s good for the rest of us, actually doesn’t matter a damn compared with what people in power want to happen. [04:27] Anyway, going back to the 1970s. After I left World Med… sorry, Farmers’ Weekly… Well, one thing that happened at Farmers’ Weekly was that I, I was, because I have a sort of science background, I was given the opportunity to go and visit all the old Agricultural and Food Research Council institutions, which were wonderful. I mean we had about thirty of them all over the country, dealing with all aspects of agriculture, supported by the Government. The findings went straight to the farmers. And if the findings were that, you know, that you could do things very cheaply and easily by, you know, not doing any high tech or anything, that was the, that was the finding that the farmers were told about. Whereas now, nothing that doesn’t make a profit for the corporates is, ever gets through. I could give you some examples, but you know, let’s move on. [05:25] After I left New Scientist… Sorry, after I left Farmers’ Weekly, I went to work for New Scientist, and I think it was while I was at New Scientist, it may have been just before, I attended the first World… No. Sorry. I’d better go back a bit. You can cut the bit, can’t you? After I left, what’s it called, Farmers’ Weekly, and wandered about a bit, I actually went back to World Medicine, and, while I was there, I had got the chance to go to the first ever World Food Conference, in Rome, in 1974, which was convened I believe by Henry Kissinger. Big international conference. At that time, early 1970s, there had been a series of famines in India and Africa, and it really looked as if we had a, a really really big world food crisis. The world population then was only about, two-thirds or, of what it is now, but it still seemed… Well, over-population was what everybody talked about in those days. Excuse me. [coughs] When I got to the World Food Conference, and I attended all the, and I worked for the sort of, conference newspaper that was set up ad hoc, so I got some nice insights, I was actually shocked, because I thought that the nation states and so on would all be focused on the real problem, how we produce enough food for people at large. And they weren’t. I mean, a very few people sort of were. The Chinese in those days, Mao Zedong, sort of were. The Algerians sort of were. The Canadians sort of were. All of them, when you think about it, have a kind of, special axe to grind, but they all sort of looked as if they were focused on the world’s food problems. So did the NGOs, Oxfam and so on, so did the Catholic Church, which was a very big presence there. But the ordinary sort of, you know, the conventional governments, like Britain’s, were clearly not interested in that at all. What they were interested in was demonstrating that what they were doing was already as good as could be done, and, absolutely not giving any more money to help the Third World, and so on and so on. In other words, they were protecting their own corners. And I realised then that that is the nature of real politics, that real people in real power are not interested in the world’s problems. Maybe in the United Nations, some of them, Ban Ki-moon and so on, but not in general. They’re interested in, in fighting their own corner. And of course, if you listen to the rhetoric of people like, Cameron, that’s all he’s interested in. Colin Tudge Page 127 C1672/17 Track 9

He says what’s good for, you know, we must do what’s good for Britain. He doesn’t really mean that, he means what’s good for his own supporters, but, basically it’s Britain. Never what’s good for the world, or what’s good for the biosphere. And I became totally disillusioned. Now, during my time at Farmers’ Weekly, and subsequently, and looking also at the science of nutrition, which I was able to do when I was at World Medicine, I had got to know some very very good scientists, and some very good people who were interested in policy, and I realised that if you, if we only focused our science and our, you know, our political energy on the problem of how you provide enough food for people, without wrecking the rest of the world, we could do it quite easily. And I wrote my first book on the back of that, in 1975, it was published in 1977 I think, by Faber and Faber, called The Famine Business, in which I argued that actually all the world’s food problems were caused by the very people who were ostensibly trying to cure them, notably the corporates. And that if only we sort of, you know, just focused on the business of growing good food, in the right places, and helped the right people to do it, in so far as they needed help, or left them alone, everything would be OK. And I have never had cause to change that idea. A lot of people thought that book was very good, but it didn’t really… Well I don’t know, it’s sort of had an impact but it didn’t… There were other books at the time that became very very famous, like, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet For a small Planet, Susan George’s How the Other Half Dies. Good books. But, you know, they, those sort of took off, and mine didn’t, as a sort of world seller, but it did have a sort of an impact on a lot of people. But that was the beginning of the thesis which I’ve carried forward ever since, that if we do, if we only focus on the business of growing good food for everybody, and helping those who do it well already, we’ll be fine. And that the people who are getting in the way are the very people who are in charge, namely governments and the corporates, to whom governments have ceded all serious power, and the banks to whom they have ceded all economic power. So they’re the people who are getting in the way; the people who are supposed to be our leaders, are in fact the people who are making it impossible for the rest of us to live. [10:44] Out of this… I sort of put a lot of these ideas to one side for a time, because nothing seemed to be happening frankly. I mean, neo-liberalism took over, and there was no point in talking to anybody, throughout the 1980s and ’90s. And then a bit of disillusionment set in, and it seemed to be worthwhile talking to people again. And I then teamed up with my present wife, Ruth, who said, ‘You should return to agriculture.’ This was about 2000. And write about it again. So I, so I started doing that again. And, at that time, whereas when I wrote The Famine Business I had coined the expression ‘rational agriculture’, I found that sort of blew up in my face, because, many people assume that rational must mean neo-liberal, lots more science, et cetera, whereas I was actually meaning the complete opposite. So I coined and said the expression ‘enlightened agriculture’. And everything sort of went on from there. And, in the early 2000s I wrote a book called, oh I can’t remember what it was called now actually. Oh. It was about… Oh, So Shall We Reap. Which of course is a, is a nice line from Saint Paul, ‘As we reap, so shall…’ ‘As you reap, so shall you...’ ‘As you sow, so shall you reap.’ And I thought, you see, naively, that everybody will understand what ‘so shall we reap’ means and would get the reference. And, [laughs] actually people asked me, ‘What does the word reap mean?’ and things like that. So you can’t overestimate really… Anyway, I wrote that, and that went down Colin Tudge Page 128 C1672/17 Track 9 fairly well. And then I just followed it up with others, Feeding People is Easy, and, then, what’s it called? Good Food for Everyone Forever. And then the latest one, published in 2014 I think, ’15, 2015, Six Steps Back to the Land. The point is you see that over time the thesis developed. Because, at the sort of, 2000 onwards, that sort of time, I was thinking about, what does enlightened agriculture really entail? And over time I worked out what it entails. But also, the question arises, OK, you’ve got this big idea; how will you put it into practice? If we fast-forward to two thousand and… I hate that expression, although I keep using it. You roll forward to 2015, to the latest book, Six Steps Back to the Land, I think I’m sort of beginning to get it straight, and now I think I have got it straight actually. And the point about enlightened agriculture is that there are… Well, first of all it is leading towards what people are beginning to call the agrarian renaissance. In other words, we need to rethink agriculture from first principles if we’re ever going to get anywhere. I would say, incidentally, that the agrarian renaissance is part of an even larger renaissance that world needs, and I would say that whereas the last renaissance was kind of driven to a very significant extent, I mean the Italian Renaissance, so-called, was driven to a very significant extent by bankers, intellectuals, artists, the next renaissance has to be democratic, has to be driven by humanity at large. But anyway, the world as a whole needs renaissance, rethink everything. But the agrarian renaissance, rethinking agriculture, is a very very good place to start. Because agriculture affects everything, and is affected by everything, and it’s very practical, so we can do it. [14:15] Enlightened agriculture is the means by which you achieve agrarian renaissance. Now enlightened agriculture, I began to realise, really has three component ideas, none of which are mine, but, they really pin it down. One is agro-ecology. The idea that, well, agriculture should be run along ecological lines. Basically, one says, each farm should be regarded as an ecosystem, self-containing and all that kind of stuff. Excuse me. [coughs] Essentially an emulation of nature. Excuse me, sorry. [clearing throat] And that agriculture as a whole should be seen as a, as far as possible, a positive contributor to the biosphere, and not simply as a way of pillaging all the resources as quickly as you can. Which is what present-day agriculture does. The second great component idea of agrarian renaissance – sorry, of enlightened agriculture, is, what I would call, or, and many other people called, economic democracy. And economic democracy obviously isn’t neo-liberalism, just the market, everyone let rip. it is in fact a kind of variation on a theme of social democracy, and social democracy, which was what everybody talked about when I was a student and so on, 1950s and Sixties, basically involves the mixed economy, some state ownership or government ownership, some private ownership, basically the two working synergistically. Economic democracy is a kind of three, tripartite mixed economy, as I see it. You have some kind of state ownership, you have a lot of private ownership, which should of course be based on small businesses, and not on corporates, but the third component is community ownership, the National Trust, the RSPB, would be examples. But, basically, one says, you know, why doesn’t every village just own its own land, and all that kind of stuff, have its own farms? And just as an aside, on the business of land ownership, it is the case that for £8,000 a head the British people could do a total buy-out of all Britain’s farmland, even though at the moment it is hugely over-priced because, you know, it’s just a matter of land speculation. [pause] Since we don’t need to buy it all in Colin Tudge Page 129 C1672/17 Track 9 order to achieve what we want, because some of it’s already well run, and so on, we could get away with buying about half of it. Excuse me. [coughs] In other words, for about £4,000 a head, the British people could buy all Britain’s farmland. That would mean… You would then take it out of the market, the land itself. That would mean that the land, the price of the land itself was no longer a factor in determining the price of food. That would be huge, that would bring it right down. £4,000 a head, fewer of us can, well, a lot of people could put their hands in their back pockets and pull out 4,000 quid; a lot of people couldn’t. But over a lifetime, I mean that’s a, you know, take it out as a loan, it’s nothing. It’s the price of a, I don’t know, a ten-year-old Skoda? I mean, you know, that kind of thing. A term and a half at a not very good university. You know what I mean, it’s, it’s nothing. And yet we could do that. Nobody, nobody’s ever suggested that we should. But I think we jolly well should start thinking about it. I mean we need land reform, and there have been lots of models of land reform, most of which has petered out. Some of which involved extreme violence, like cutting everybody’s heads off. [laughs] But this is an easy way, just a buy-out. And we have the power to do it. It’s not going to happen but, it’s, it’s that kind of thing, and it’s so easy. Anyway, that is economic democracy, the second great component of enlightened agriculture. The third is what people call food sovereignty, which basically means that people everywhere should have control over their own food supply. And I believe the term was coined in the 1990s, and the lead players in this is a group called Via Campesina, which is a world peasant organisation. Again it’s very interesting that a sort of social reform movement that really matters is peasant-driven, it’s not intellectual driven. Anyway… Well intellectuals among them, but you know what I mean. Will you excuse me. [pause in recording] So that’s the grand idea, of enlightened agriculture The general statement, if you want a sort of, one-line definition of enlightened agriculture, is that it’s farming that is designed expressly to provide good food for everybody, everywhere, without wrecking the rest of the world. And that, the important thing to say is that it’s very very possible. [19:26] Just to, well it’s kind of an aside, but it’s an essential point. World agricultural policy at the moment is driven by the, I don’t know whether it’s a belief but the dogma, that, we need to produce more and more and more, it’s very much productionist, that was summarised in a report produced in Britain in 2011 by Sir John Beddington for the Government, which said, we need to produce fifty per cent more food by 2015. A hundred per cent more. You know, other people have said, said we need 100 per cent more by the end of the century. And they produce all kind of spurious statistics to back this up, like, you know, the world population is growing from… and, a billion people are starving already. And, the demand for meat is going up and up and up. And there’s other pressures, like the need for biofuel and all this kind of stuff. So we must produce more and more and more. And that’s taken as an excuse for more and more and more high tech, and that’s taken as an excuse for more and more corporate control, because it’s kind of assumed that only corporates can produce high tech. It’s obviously a total lie, but that’s what has got into people’s heads. Now the fact is that this whole thing is untrue. And if the people who are putting these words around, these ideas around, know that it’s untrue, then of course they are lying through their teeth. And if they don’t know that it’s untrue, then they jolly well should. Because, you know, people in high places should be properly informed. The fact is that the world Colin Tudge Page 130 C1672/17 Track 9 population is now about seven billion, and we are already producing enough food to support about fourteen billion; in other words, about twice the present world population. And you can work this out for yourself very easily if you don’t believe it by looking at Google, look up the total production of cereals; it’s about, is it two or two and a half billion, about two billion tons of cereals. Two billion tons of cereals contains enough protein and calories to support seven billion people, to provide all the macronutrients needed by seven billion people. In other words, the present population. But in addition to that, cereals of course, although they are the biggest thing, food-wise, they actually provide only about half of our food, because we also have tubers and pulses and, oilseeds and, grass-fed animals, and, vegetables and fruits. Which not only provide a great deal more calories and protein, but also provide the bulk of the micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, and what I call crypto-nutrients but we needn’t get into that, unless you want to. Will you excuse me again. [coughs] I don’t know where this cough came from. [pause – drinking] [22:36] So anyway, again, we come back to the point that I made in the 1970s, that, well, it’s the same kind of point, now we are being totally misled. The second point is, here, that, OK, the present world population is rising, but according to the United Nations, who really have the best informed demographers, it should stabilise by about 2050, because the rate of growth is going down, the percentage rate of growth is going down. And we should stabilise at about ten billion. So we’re already producing about forty per cent more than we should ever need. So why all this production of stuff? Then you come on to things like the increased, apparent, you know, assumed, increased demand for meat. Well, actually, scientists should be more astute than this, and they should say, well what does this demand really mean? I mean, when most of us use the word demand, we mean, we go out, well I don’t, we demand, well, I demand my rights, that kind of stuff. Actually positively say, ‘I want this.’ Well I don’t think there is any evidence that people go out into the streets and say, ‘We want more meat.’ What demand actually means is, it’s a retrospective measure of how much you can sell to people. A totally different thing. And it is the case that whenever people emerge from poverty, as the Americans did after the Second World War, and therefore after the end of the Depression, and the Chinese are doing now, they tend to eat more meat. But let’s do a little sociology and just ask why. Is it because they have an insatiable demand for meat which has been suppressed, or is it because it’s a symbol of wealth which, doing things they couldn’t do before, and then it becomes fashionable and so on? I like to point out that when people are really rich, that they often turn away from meat. I mean you want to see the growth of vegetarianism, California, Germany, East Coast of America, that’s, you know, these are people that can afford everything they want, and they say, ‘No, can’t be bothered.’ And the ancient Chinese Mandarins, I mean the Romans were very vulgar and they ate everything that moved, but ancient Chinese Mandarins for example, the reason they invented Peking Duck, as it was called, and still is, is that they liked the skin of a chicken. [laughs] But they didn’t, couldn’t care less about the flesh. So they gave that to the servants and they made these lovely little pancakes with crispy chicken ducks – duck skin inside. You see what I mean? It’s not a love of the flesh, it’s just, well, you know, they like it but it’s not the big thing. And if you look at all the world’s great cuisines, like Turkish, southern Italian, well, yes, southern Italian, let’s just say that, India, China, and even the sort Colin Tudge Page 131 C1672/17 Track 9 of peasant cuisines in the north, when you look at the reality, they use meat sparingly, and they only use it really as a garnish, or as a stock, or for occasional feasts. What we’re saying here, we already produce easily enough meat to support that. Not by feeding loads of loads of grain, which we do at the moment, but you could feed all the, get all the meat you wanted by, just by grass feeding, which you, which, well you can’t grow cereals anyway, probably, and by, you know, integrating pigs and poultry into horticulture where they just eat leftovers and so on, so on. By this kind of means, no drain on the world’s resources at all, you could easily produce enough meat to support all the world’s great cuisines. Now what more do we want? What more does anybody want? But that doesn’t suit the mindset of the powers that be, because they want to sell more and more and more and more, so they came out with these spurious things like this tremendous demand for meat which must be satisfied, et cetera. [26:30] As for things like biofuel, that’s just the most ridiculous scam. I mean absurd. And you find people in America, I think it’s something like a third or even two-thirds of the American maize crop, which is a huge, was a huge input into the world’s food supply, maize being the third of the three great cereals after rice and wheat, is now used for biofuel. And the actual gain is, is really quite small, because you need a hell of a lot of oil, basically in the form of nitrogen fertiliser, in order to grow the stuff in the first place. So it’s a very small percentage grain. But it makes lots of people money, and what else drives the world now but money? Excuse me. [coughs] [27:22] In fact, the world’s agriculture as it now stands, which is called conventional, although it’s a huge novelty in the history of agriculture, can probably be called neo-liberal industrial. You know, well we know what it means, you know, vast fields, vast machines, fantastic quantities of nitrogen fertiliser, plus pesticide, plus insecticide, all the rest of it, herbicide. That’s what it means. And it just means more and more and more industrial chemistry, heavy, heavy engineering, and things like, well, biotech is just sort of, stuck on the edge as a kind of, cosmetic, you know, just, a way of making it look as if you’re making good the disaster that you’ve created with the industrial chemistry. Is where we’re at. What we actually need is enlightened agriculture. And enlightened agriculture, you can demonstrate quite easily, would be based on mixed farms which gives the agro-ecological input, low input farms which veer towards organic, although they don’t have to be purely organic. They would therefore be very very complicated, they would therefore be very labour-intensive – not labour-intensive, skills- intensive, because we’re not talking about coolies, we’re talking about lots and lots of good farmers Which means that there’s no real advantage in scale-up, which means that you finish up with lots and lots of small to medium size farms, although of course, they can all be sort of, linked together in cooperatives. So the practical demands of enlightened agriculture are totally opposite from those of neo-liberal industrial agriculture, in every respect, almost every respect. But the neo-liberal industrial, which is obviously doing tremendous harm and is not actually feeding the world, and never can, is the one that’s backed by what we might call the powers that be. Now that is a disastrous state of affairs. We need a complete reversal, agrarian renaissance, but it’s pretty obvious that it’s not going to be brought about by the powers that be, by the corporates and the banks and the Government, and the Colin Tudge Page 132 C1672/17 Track 9 intellectuals, the academic departments, who they effectively have bought. So it’s got to be brought about by people at large. [29:46] And, to go back to your question. In about 2007, something like that, 2006, my wife and I, excuse me [coughs], decided we would start a campaign to try to get a movement going to shift in the right, in this kind of direction, the direction of enlightened agriculture. I wanted to call it the Campaign for Enlightened Agriculture, but other people said, that’s not very catchy, so we changed it to the Campaign for Real Farming. Out of that, with input from a chap called Graham Harvey, who is a, a very good agricultural journalist, with a particular interest in livestock, he suggested that we should take, you know, our common interests and create the Oxford Real Farming Conference. And, which we did in 2010, the first one was held in 2010. Now the point is that in Oxford every year for the last six or so decades, they have held the Oxford Farming Conference, where the Establishment, the great and the good, come and tell us how well they’re doing. And to give you an example of the flavour, I think it was this year or, yeah, about this year, Liz Truss, who is now the, what do you call it, Secretary of State for Defra, Department of Environment, Rural Affairs, something like that… The word agriculture, incidentally, has been banned, banished, from English Government, British Government. We’re the only government in Europe I think who doesn’t have a department of agriculture, which is seen merely as a subset of sort of, biotech, and subset of, so-called rural affairs. Anyway, leave that aside. Liz Truss, who’s now the supremo, told us, told the farmers at the Oxford Farming Conference, that they must concentrate on growing pork, to sell to the Chinese, because that’s where the money is. Excuse me. [coughs] The year before, Owen Paterson, who was then the supremo, recommended to British farmers that they should be growing beef, to sell to the Chinese, because that’s where the money is. I mean that’s the mentality of these people. And of course it’s all backed by corporates, so it’s all, you need, you need GM, although you can’t have it yet, and it’s, you know, you need more of this and more of that, and so on. So we said, Graham and Ruth, my wife and I, said, we’ve got to have an antidote to this. So that was where the Oxford Real Farming Conference came from. We established the, we set up the first one, Ruth organised it, she does all the organising, in a nice library in the middle of Oxford, mediaeval library, in 2010. And I think something like eighty farmers, well eighty people turned up, most of whom were farmers, who we sort of personally invited, we just knew them more or less. And it was a success. So we did it again a bit bigger the following year, and the next few years we did the same kind of thing, bigger and bigger, in various colleges, Magdalen and one or two others, can’t remember them all. And then, in 2015 I think, we said, well it’s getting a bit too big. All the time we’ve had some backing from Peter Kindersley, of Sheepdrove, who never interfered with what we do and just, you know, underwrote the conference, made it possible. [pause] We said, we need a bigger venue that would make it all much, under one roof and so on, so we actually hired the Town Hall, which is a lovely old building in the middle of Oxford. It’s a sort of, you know, [laughs] Venetian palace really. And the Council were very nice to us actually. They, you know, they, they made us welcome basically. And, the first year we held it, I think we had something like six hundred and something farmers and other people, well, probably six hundred and something people in the two days, as opposed to the first one which half a day, six hundred or so people, including, about half of Colin Tudge Page 133 C1672/17 Track 9 them were farmers I guess. And this year, 2016, we’ve had about 750 over the two years [days], which is as big as the Town Hall will take, so it’s full to capacity. And, we are now much bigger than the official so-called Oxford Farming Conference. I don’t really like that. [laughs] They don’t quite know what to do about us. But they never actually bother to come and talk to us and ask, you know, so, I, I don’t care whether they do or not. So that was the Oxford Farming, Real Farming Conference. [34:28] Then, I can’t remember whose idea it was, but we said, look, you know, talking about it’s not enough. We’ve got to try and get, encourage the kind of farms and markets and other things that we really need to make the agrarian renaissance happen. So… Excuse me. [coughs] Again, largely through Ruth’s efforts, we established Funding Enlightened Agriculture, FEA, which now has a lovely board of trustees, and we get grants in from various places. And, we do what we said we’d do. We try and help new businesses, in farming and marketing and related things, to get going, small ones, ones that are run along the right sort of lines. We also collaborate in this, because collaboration is all, with other people thinking along the same lines, like the Ecological Land Co-Operative, which seeks to buy land in order to rent and then finally sell to small farmers, and so on. And, oh there’s another one whose name I’ve forgotten. It doesn’t matter, but that’s, there’s a few things lie this around. So that’s FEA. And then a few years ago, must have been about, I don’t know, 2010, ’12 – no, 2012, ’13, that kind of time, I said, well, actually, what we really need is a college for enlightened agriculture, where we can bring all the ideas together. And again, people said, college for enlightened agriculture doesn’t, you know, sounds a bit pompous or something. So we finished up calling it the College for Real Farming and Food Culture. Because one of the key points is that, you can’t really run, you can’t really establish enlightened agriculture as the norm, unless the people at large in the world around you give a damn. They’ve got to want to buy your stuff. And the only way they’re going to want to buy your stuff is if they are, if they care about food. And caring about food is what food culture is. And if you go to, even now if you go to Italy, you will find that people really do care about food. And, it’s not hard, in theory, for small farmers to sell, to exist, because they’ve got a market who cares about what they do. I’m told that in… [laughs] I was told the other day that in France there was this bus trip of, I think they were oldies, sort of, what do you call those things? What’s that… I can’t remember the name. But you know… What’s the name of the group in Britain that focuses on taking old people around the place? You get them on television a lot. Don’t matter. Doesn’t matter.

I’m thinking of the University of the Third Age, but that’s not…

No. No no.

Sort of lectures and…

It’s a… Oh I can’t remember what they’re called. Anyway. There are groups of people who realise that oldies are actually, well, they matter possibly but they’ve got money also, which is also… So they specialise in taking old… Anyway, this French lot, and they all go on this coach trip to, [laughs] some Colin Tudge Page 134 C1672/17 Track 9 art gallery or some beauty spot or something. But actually, all they’re really interested in is lunch. [laughs] And they spend half the time discussing what kind of sausages they’re going to… That’s what a food culture is, and that’s what it should be. So we’ve got to build this up as well. Because traditional cooking fits enlightened agriculture perfectly. And good cooking in general, and proper farming, go together beautifully. And industrial, neo-liberal agriculture produces, well, you know, it’s basically the hamburger, fried chicken culture. So, College for Real Farming and Food Culture. At the moment it exists in two forms, one of which is a website which we’ve only just, this being May 2016, we’ve only just got up and running. And I’m just trying to interest people in it now. And I hope it will grow and grow and grow and grow, and become a kind of, centre for the ideas that are needed to make the agrarian renaissance work. The second thing, part of the college… And that, we will call that the virtual college, the website. The second part of the college, which you could call the pop-up college, is that we are already organising seminars and things with like-minded institutions of various kinds. Excuse me. [coughs] And I should, earlier this year, have had a little seminar up at the Chisholme Institute in, in the Scottish Borders, which would have been the first, and then another one at Turvey Benedictine monastery in Bedfordshire, which would have been the second. Unfortunately I was ill and couldn’t do either of them. But they’re going to happen. And that is the beginnings of the sort of, pop-up college. Ideally, I suppose, although it worries me, you know, I personally don’t want to be too involved in the nuts and bolts, we would acquire a premises. And you can envisage that we can either have a nice country house, if anyone cares to give us one, with an experimental/model/farm, where we could involve the local people. I envisage something like, somewhere between, you know, a proper working farm and something like the horticultural display at Wisley, or Wisby, wherever it is, where people at large come and see how things are done. With local involvement though. That’s the kind of thing it would be wonderful to have. It would be great if we could set this up, might be a few million quid, which I don’t want to have anything to deal with. Even more interesting than that would be to have a network of these places all around the world, some of which might be quite grand, although there’s no need for them to be grand; some of them might be wooden shacks or grass. It doesn’t matter. But you know what I mean, centres. One little model is the Santa Fe Institute, well it’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and basically, it’s, it’s where physicists meet, and have, and talk things through, and then, clear off. You know, Fritjof Capra was one of the guys who was a big driver of this. Well it would be nice to have that for agriculture, and the college could be that. All that, however, is down the line. At the moment, the website, and pop-up. And if we can get those moving in the next few years, that could begin to make a difference, together with the Oxford Real Farming Conference, and FEA. So that basically is it, and where we’re at.

[41:24] Thank you. Was there any link between your return to working on agriculture, at the time or just after meeting Ruth, and your sort of, renewal of interest in metaphysics and spiritual questions and, Christianity?

Colin Tudge Page 135 C1672/17 Track 9

Well this kind of, as I think I may have said earlier, my sort of, interest in what I would now grandly call metaphysics and spirituality and so on, has been with me since I was about, I don’t know, six, or you could say ten, you know, early on. But, for whatever reasons, things being fashionable, the kind of people you meet, I sort of put all that to one side. So for a long time in my middle years I went through a phase of saying, you know, that’s all junk; basically, materialism works, Darwinism covers it all, and all that. It was really when I linked up with Ruth. And of course when I was at the LSE, in the early 2000s I think it was, might have been the late 1990s, that was the prevailing mood, it was very much a materialist, et cetera et cetera, set-up. When I linked up with Ruth properly after about 2000 and a bit, she of course was very involved in what matters one might call spirituality. And I began to get intrigued and read, reignited my interest, and for the first time began to think formally about these things. Over the years I had read the odd book, like, Huxley’s The Perennial Wisdom, and Koestler’s The Lotus and the Robot, which I really liked. And so on. But, I let the whole thing die, and go, and drift away. But then I began to think seriously. And so for the last, I’d say, ten years at least, actually, these things have become, to me, the most interesting thing of all. Now the website, the point about it is that it, or the college, is that it’s got to have a very wide intellectual brief. Because the point is that you, well, agriculture affects everthing, is affected by everything. You can’t put it right ad hoc. You can’t just say, let’s have, let’s do agriculture in enlightened ways with small farms and all that. First of all you’ve got to define what it is you’re really trying to achieve, which very few governments do incidentally. So I’m saying, or we are saying, what we’re trying to achieve is, convivial societies. I got the word convivial from Ivan Illich, from the 1960s. But convivial societies, within a flourishing biosphere. So there they, that’s the goal. [44:17] Now, in order to achieve this there are certain things you have to get right. What you actually do matters. And, proper agriculture, enlightened agriculture, and the establishment of food culture, are of course key. Lots of other things are key as well. You’ve got to build in the right sort of things, you’ve got to have the right, you know, you’ve got to have the right kind of education, you’ve got to have the right kind of medicine. But, you know, we’re focused on food and agriculture, and that I regard as the kind of, kingpin, anyway, is what interests me. Excuse me. [coughs] However, you’re never going to get enlightened agriculture working, and, well anything else working, but enlightened agriculture working, unless you have an economy that is sympathetic to it. And, the neo-liberal economy clearly isn’t, its ideals are totally at odds with it. And you’re never going to get the kind of economy you need until you have a government that wants, knows what you’re trying to do, and is prepared to take the economy in hand, which of course the last five or six governments, ever since Thatcher, have not done, they’ve given the neo-liberal economy, given it a free, a free head, hand. And you need law, laws that are on the side of what you’re trying to achieve. So that I regard as the infrastructure, law, economy and government, governments. But underneath that is the zeitgeist, you know, what do we all feel in our bones is actually important and actually true? And the zeitgeist, I am suggesting, has really three, well two, yeah, we could say two sort of functional components, one of which is science, which not only does things but also largely determines how we think about the world, and also moral philosophy, what do we actually think is right? Now both of these things, I suggest, you trace them back, they sort Colin Tudge Page 136 C1672/17 Track 9 of end in, they’re rooted in mystery in the end, both of them, and, they basically end, I would say, rooted in what I would call metaphysics, and other people also, some people would call metaphysics. Because metaphysics asks what, well what many people call the ultimate questions, metaphysics asks, what is the world really like? Is it really just materialist or is there more to it than that? It asks, how do we know what’s true? Now philosophy also asks that, I mean, conventional philosophy, but I think there are aspects of this question how do we know what's true - that ordinary kind of philosophy doesn’t get to. Like, ideas like revelation for example, and mystical insight. And then, the third, big question in the world, the ultimate question, is, what is good? And again, moral philosophy doesn’t quite get to the bottom of it actually. There is a fourth question that belongs exclusively to metaphysics, which you just have to say is there but you can’t hope to answer it, but that is the question, how come? Because, you know, you can do all the science you like, and you can explain, you can get the most unified or grand of unified theories which brings in bosons and leptons and antimatter and all- dark matter and, everything, theoretically you could do that. But then you still have to ask, how come, how come it’s- things are like that, that they can, that all these things could happen? Can’t answer that. But I don’t think you should ignore the question. [47:51] So, both these things, I suggest, are rooted in metaphysics. I would also say it’s very important to look at the arts, because the arts really do influence the way we think about everything, and they change our perspective, they change our mood, our attitude. So they feed in to the metaphysical underpinning. So they’ve got to be there, although, actually, it’s the metaphysics that really counts. So now, I’ve been really thinking seriously about metaphysics for the last few years, what is, how we get to grips with it. And actually asking the, you know, identifying what the fundamental questions are, is part of it. But the next part of course is, asking what people have said about all these things that generally looks as if it’s useful. One of the big essays that I’m writing at the moment, well the thing I’m involved in at the moment, which actually is already up to 20,000 words, which is a bit long, it’s [laughs], is, is the introduction to metaphysics, which I want to put on the website. Not many websites have essays of 20,000 words, so it’s a bit weird. But never mind, I want to, probably turn it into a book. But we’re more or less there really. So, that’s that. And one’s looking at, yeah, one’s looking at Christian mystics and Muslim mystics, and, you know, and so on, so on, so on, and at science and so on, and putting it all together.

[49:21] Would the people who come to the Oxford Real Farming Conference be surprised to see an essay on metaphysics on the college website, or…?

I think it’s, I think, quite a few of them would. Do you want me to say that again in case…? No, it’s all right. I think quite a few of the people who go to the Oxford Real Farming Conference would be surprised to see big essays on metaphysics. I know, I’ve met a couple already – no, well one in particular, who said, ‘What on earth is the point of this kind of stuff?’ Although, that essay isn’t actually up yet. I will answer what that is, what the point of it is. But, a lot of people wouldn’t be Colin Tudge Page 137 C1672/17 Track 9 surprised. I mean for one thing, I get the impression, or, I know, that there are a lot of people out there who think that this kind of thinking is essential. There are a lot of farmers, for example, who are deeply spiritual, not necessarily particularly belonging to a particular religion, but deeply spiritual people, and that is one reason why they do it, they just, you know, the contact with the earth, and all that kind of stuff. And they feel the kind of divinity of nature, and they’re working with it. And there are other people there who are very definitely religious, you know, Christian, in the main they’re Christian, including quite a few Quakers actually, who are driving the whole thing along. So some of them, well they might be surprised because, it’s not what you would normally get in an agricultural context. But I know that there are people who think, yes, it’s exactly what’s needed. And there are groups actually out there about theology and farming and all that kind of thing, there are some good groups. So, it’s not as outlandish as it seems. And I would like… I don’t mind talking to the converted, but I would also quite like to persuade other people that this is, this is, this should be thought about.

Looking at the, you’ve got on the website…

Excuse me, one other thing I’ve got to do is blow my nose. Oh dear.

[End of Track 9] Colin Tudge Page 138 C1672/17 Track 9

[Track 10]

Could you tell me about any specifically Christian elements of the, of the movement in the sense of, people involved in the Campaign for Real Farming, or at least in attendance at the Oxford Real Farming Conferences?

There were… As I said, there are quite a few Christians, bona fide signed-up Christians involved in the Oxford whole, you know, Oxford Real Farming Conference, probably the other one too, but you know, they are. But the fact that I think that they are specifically Christian, I think is a cultural thing. I mean we happen to live in England. I think it would work equally well in an Islamic context or, certainly an Indian context. So, I’d rather talk about it being a spiritual/religious thing. One thing is… Well let’s go back to the beginning. That, the mood that’s prevailed in, I’d say the Western world over the last, I don’t know, fifty years, 100 years, is what people have called scientism, where people say science tells you basically everything you need to know and we can rely on science. As opposed to, the kind of apotheosis of that was, logical positivism, after the First World War, where people said, look, science can really pin things down. And unless you can pin things down in the way that science does, forget it. So all ideas like kind of, God and so on, go out of the window, because you can’t even define God, so, what are you talking about? And A J Ayer, Freddie Ayer, who was the world’s, well Britain’s leading exponent of logical positivism, said, you know, god, the word god is literal gibberish, because you can’t define it so you don’t know what it means. Scientism says that, science tells, explains everything there is to know about the world, basically, or the universe, and that anything science can’t explain isn’t knowledge, and it’s stupid, so, you can forget about it. This seems to me to totally misconstrue the nature of science, and runs quite against what most people regard as serious philosophy of science over the past fifty, sixty, well, really the past 100 years. And there are several points, one of which is that science itself… Science has often been presented to us, not least by Lewis Wolpert, who you may or may not know, as a kind of, temple of, undeniable truth. So you have all these lovely facts, which are like stones, and then you have all these lovely theories, which are like mortar, which holds the stones together, and you finish up with a great tower of indisputable truth. Isn’t that wonderful? Well one thing that’s happened is that that vision of the sort of, inexorable, vulnerable, pregnable, that’s the word I’m looking for, tower of truth, is obviously going to be nonsense. And, well, start where you like, but, for example, Karl Popper in the 1930s said, you can’t actually prove anything in science. Things aren’t actually just, true by definition. You can disprove, but you can’t prove. And he said, you know, the ultimate test of a scientific hypothesis, first of all can you test it, but refine that and say, ‘Is it theoretically disprovable? And then, other people… So, you know, what science amounts to is the sum total of things that can’t be disproved, if you take Popper at his word. The chap who had tremendous influence on me was Sir Peter Medawar, biologist of the mid- twentieth century, one of the greats, who wrote a wonderful book called Science is the Art of the Soluble, or, actually the book is called The Art of the Soluble. And what that means is, scientists can only look at things that they think they have a reasonable chance of, basically answering, in the time available, with the resources available. Should we assume that what scientists happen to find soluble, Colin Tudge Page 139 C1672/17 Track 9 is all there is? Should we… They miss out the whole idea of, well spirituality et cetera, because they don’t know where to… Well, it’s not what they do. They don’t know where to start. But should we assume that because they miss it out, as a matter of strategy, that therefore it doesn’t exist? [04:40] And then you can go on and say, look, you know, mass… sorry, science really pins things down beautifully because it uses maths, and maths just can’t go wrong. Well there’s all sorts of things you could say about that, and I do say them on my website, but one of them is, Kurt Gödel, who in the 1920s I think, certainly by the Thirties, pointed out, he proved, I mean mathematically, that, a mathematical statement cannot be complete and consistent and certain, all at the same time. If you sort of, stir that idea up a bit, and take a few liberties, what it comes down to is that all mathematical statements, wonderful though they are, complete though they are in themselves, they all contain sort of arbitrary ideas that you can’t really, that you can’t really prove. Maths itself then, this great arbiter of truth and certainty, emerges as something that, you know, that’s actually got a human element in it, whether you like it or not. And, people say, you know, a propos science, that, science approves things rationally, you know, the great voice of reason is brought all the way, mechanisms of reason are brought to bear, and you finish up with answers that can’t be wrong. In reality that’s not how it works at all. In reality, as all philosophers of science agree, and all scientists know, the theories of science are, as they say, underdetermined by the data, the data itself never pins it down. And no matter how much maths you throw at it, there’s always going to be an element of subjectivity in there. I could give you examples of that, but, let’s just take my word for it. And in the end, when scientists say, ‘I think this is true,’ what they mean is, it isn’t actually the, that the data of the theorising that tell them that it’s true. In the end they just sort of, intuit that it’s true. They know it’s true. And, I don’t think anybody has ever been more sort of hardnosed and atheistic than James Watson, the co-discover of the structure of, three-dimensional structure of DNA, and he said, well at least I’ve heard, I’ve heard that he said, you know, the double helix model can’t, ‘I knew the double helix model must be right, because, something that beautiful had to be true.’ And Paul Dirac right back in the 1920s, mathematician, physicist, used to say, always look for beauty in your equations. And you come back to the idea that the sort of, realisation of truth is very like what Keats said, truth is, beauty is truth, truth is beauty, and that is all you need to know. And in the end then, the appreciation of truth actually is not an intellectual thing, it’s an aesthetic thing, it’s an emotional thing. That’s one thing. Science is much more of a human construct than one would like to think. And the more you get into the sociology of it and the politics of it, and all the rest of the stuff, and the philosophy of it, what other philosophers were saying at the time, the more you realise how kind of, vulnerable and flexible it really is. [07:58] The second thing is that you can do these… Well, let’s take the whole idea of evolution. There are a lot of evolutionary biologists who say, look, the idea of evolution by means of natural selection, and a few other refinements, really tells us everything we need to know about how life has come about. Throw in genetics, throw in molecular biology, and we’ve got the complete picture. And they said, there simply is no room in a, in an account like this, for, let us say, the account of Genesis, world created in seven days. There was no room for a creator, we don’t need it, the story is complete. Well, Colin Tudge Page 140 C1672/17 Track 9 several things wrong with that. One is that, well there’s all the innate uncertainties, but leave them aside, I mean I personally think the story of evolution as told, is as true as anything we’re ever likely to get. But it doesn’t exclude any other kind of explanation. I mean that simply is the case. It could still be the case that behind what we see, what actually happened, there is an agenda, there could still be a guiding force, an idea. And why not? This brings us to the great idea of, I think one of the central ideas of metaphysics, which runs through all the great religions, absolutely central, which is the idea of transcendence. I call it transcendence. The word’s used in other ways. I call it transcendence. And, the scientist, or the scientistic, materialist view of the world, says that the material world is all there is and all the rest is rubbish. The, what I call the transcendental view of the world says, actually, no, there really is, or there certainly could be, more to the universe than meets the eye. This is, it’s not specifically Christian or any other religious idea. Plato said the same thing. What you see, what we see of the world, is just the surface of things. The real action’s going on behind the scenes. And the real action includes the idea that there is an underlying intelligence, there is possibly a purpose, there is an agenda. These remain as possibilities. And there are several things here. One is that, there are lots of people in the world, and I’ve heard Lewis Wolpert say this, there is not a shred of evidence for any of this kind of stuff. Well I think people that say that kind of thing don’t really know what evidence is. Because evidence is not a proof that such a thing is the case. Evidence is a fact consistent with an idea. If evidence was proof, there’d be no need for courts of law. But there isn’t, evidence isn’t proof. You have, you know, you have a guy who is dead, and you have another guy with a stripe jersey or a gun, and you say, well, you know, put two and two together chaps. That’s evidence, these are facts consistent with the idea that the chap in the jersey…. Et cetera. But it’s not, it’s not a cast-iron demonstration that it’s the case. It is a fact consistent with. And lawyers know this, that’s why they argue all the time. And in the end the judge finishes up with what he calls the balance of probabilities, which is the best, actually, that a scientist can do. And then one says to oneself, well is it the case that there are no facts, or no observations, that one can make about the universe that are consistent with the idea that there is an underlying intelligence to making the whole thing work? And of course there are. I mean there are so many facts about the under… or, observations about the world, how it works, that are consistent with that idea, that as Richard Dawkins himself says, if you want to sort of, prove the kind of, the purely materialistic view, you first have to overcome what everybody in their bones feels is the case, and most people actually, surveys have done about this, do you feel in your bones that there is more… well they don’t ask this question, but that’s the question they should ask, do you feel in your bones that there is more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye? Or do you believe, do you have a feeling for transcendence? And most people in the world do. It’s an intuition. And what I say is, there’s absolutely no reason to ignore that intuition. And there’s nothing in science that tells you that that intuition is in any way foolish. So, why should it be put to one side? If it’s true, it’s, it’s very very important. Now you can’t actually directly test the idea of transcendence, sort of head on, by the means of science. And the logical positivists would therefore say, well, therefore it’s not worth thinking about. But who is to say the logical positivists are right? And as some bright spark said to them, I mean, the general idea that, you know, only what’s provable is worth taking seriously, that is itself not a provable proposition So, you’re, you’re resting the whole thing on, on assumption. And Colin Tudge Page 141 C1672/17 Track 9 somebody actually did put this point to Freddie Ayer, who said, no, well you have to take the idea that, only what we can, as it were, pin down and prove is, is true, that’s the only thing we… You have to take that as an axiom. Well come on. [laughs] An axiom is an assumption. It’s essentially a metaphysical idea. So, what I am saying is that, look, the idea of transcendence, which, as I say, is right at the centre, is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, which must, in a sensible world, be taken seriously. And once you do start taking it seriously, of course you get into theology and all sorts of stuff. And that becomes terribly interesting. [13:37] Also, at the heart, well people like Richard Dawkins have specifically pointed out, because he likes pointing these things out, that there are differences between different religions. And as he said, they can’t all be true, therefore. And the one sort of difference he pointed to, which is entirely and fantastically trivial, is the idea that Jews in church, or in temple, or synagogue, are supposed to wear hats, and Christian men in church are not supposed to wear hats, they’re supposed to be bareheaded. Well, there’s a difference. And this is somehow seen to be a moral difference. Well it isn’t of course. It’s just a question of manners and custom. And underneath manners and custom and tradition lies a much more important concept of core morality. And the very very interesting thing is that just as all the great religions share this central metaphysical notion of transcendence, so they also share a common morality. And the common morality they all share is that they all emphasise compassion. Christians talk about love, but you know, it’s basically compassion. They all emphasise humility, as did the Greeks of course, for whom the greatest sin was hubris, which is usurping the power of the gods, which is the exact antithesis of humility. The word hubris applies very much to the modern world, I mean much, most of what’s wrong actually in the modern world can be seen to be hubristic. And the third thing that all the great religions have in common is, which is a metaphysical concept, is the idea that nature itself must be treated with reverence. And of course if you treat nature with reverence, that immediately wipes out all this talk about natural resources and commodities and all, other stuff, which is now common parlance. Well, where does the idea of, that the world should be treated with reverence? What does it entail? Well, the idea of transcendence very much comes into it, and the idea is that, well, a key, a lovely way of putting it, was, the word numinous, coined by an early twentieth-century German theologian called Rudolf Otto, and the word numinous derives from the Latin numen, which means divine presence. And the idea of what people have started to call numinosity is that, people who really have a feeling for nature, feel a divine presence. Which is a transcendental idea, et cetera et cetera. And, well many people just do. I mean that’s it. You find it very strongly, for example, in Coleridge, and in Gerard Manly Hopkins, and a few other people like that. Not in all the Romantic poets incidentally, who mainly seem to be interested in scenery and aesthetics and, feeling good. But certainly in people like that, there it is, right at the core. So these ideas… So, you find all the great religions share the idea of transcendence, they all share the idea of compassion, humility, reverence for nature. And I can’t help thinking that those, just those, the shortlist of ideas, is enough to underpin a world that could really work. You base politics on that, compassionate politics. David Cameron talks about compassionate… I think he’s got, he’s got a new scriptwriter to write about compassion. It has nothing to do with, you know, his policies as far as I can Colin Tudge Page 142 C1672/17 Track 9 see. The neo-liberal economy, which prevails, is the very opposite. It talks about competition, ruthlessness, Devil take the hindmost. Economies don’t have to be like that. And, respect for nature. Well, you know, animal welfare, conservation. And you get all these things right, and as I said right at the beginning, we could easily, become, come down to earth, we could easily provide enough food for everybody, we already do. It’s just a question of making sure that it’s in the right places and it goes to the right people. And all that comes down to things like compassion. So it all fits.

[18:02] In as much detail as you can, can you tell me about the involvement of Crispin Tickell in this whole thing?

Mm. Well Crispin, or Sir Crispin, is a seriously excellent man. He’s been Ambassador in several places, including Paris I think. The United Nations. And he’s one of these guys, I mean I’ve met, I’ve met a few ambassadors, and the ones I’ve met are very very special people. And one of the things about Crispin is that, for example, when he was, I think, Ambassador to Mexico, he began, he began to take the whole sort of Latin American culture very seriously, and, you know, learnt Spanish and, well, so on, so on. I mean he, wherever he goes, he takes it really seriously. He’s a very deep thinker. In recent years he’s become very involved in environmental matters, speaks particularly about, what do you call it, climate change. He is apparently not so distantly related to the Huxleys [laughs], who are, I think, related somewhere along the line to the Darwins, and to the Keyneses, and to the Wedgwoods. I mean, you know, it’s, it’s a sort of, there’s this huge dynasty to which he belongs. Excuse me. [coughs] Actually, Crispin likes to tell the story of when he went to, was taken to lunch by Aldous Huxley, quite a few years ago when Crispin was a little boy, and Huxley was just the most amazing speaker ever, you just sat back and listened, you know. [laughs] It wasn’t worth doing anything else. Anyway. Where was I going with this? He lives very near, I don’t know quite how… Oh, I know. Because Ruth, my wife was involved in Green College and he at the time was the, the Warden of Green College. They’re now called principals but he was the warden. And, my wife already knew him; I got to know him. And he’s been very supportive over the years of, of the ideas. And, he actually, I think, he made the keynote speech at the very first Oxford Real Farming Conference, and has been involved in most of them since. So, he’s been a very important supporter.

What is he, what’s his view of the sorts of things that you’ve been talking about today concerning relations between government, corporations and power? Does he, are these things that you talk with him about? Because he strikes me as someone who…

Sorry, can you speak up?

What is his view on the sorts of things you’ve been talking about today, on the relations between government and corporates and power? Because he strikes me as someone who would have some insight into sort of, how things are done in, in government. Colin Tudge Page 143 C1672/17 Track 9

Well the very first talk he gave to the Oxford Real Farming Conference, which is in fact on a website somewhere, it’s on the Web somewhere, in which he said… He sort of, attacked the idea of the free market. He says, there really is no such thing as a free market, never has been, never can be. So, in that kind of general way he’s on side. I don’t think he’s a… We haven’t talked about this much, but I don’t think he’s at all uncomfortable with the, with the spiritual aspects of all this stuff. He is much, he is more conservative than I am. I mean I frankly don’t know many politicians. I know a few, and one or two I do know, I actually rather like, and respect. Some of them are good. But on the whole I sort of, think, they’re a load of mountebanks, to put it politely. He knows many more politicians than I do, many more senior civil servants than I do. And he… Obviously, he’s an ambassador for goodness’ sake. And, he has much more respect for them than I do, basically because he knows them better. And he says, no there really are some very serious thinking people out there. And he does believe, I think, that you can work with these very serious thinking people and create a better world. Well, I’m very sceptical of that. I think actually, you have to start again. And basically, you should be involving people at large. And if the very clever people who are now in government, or in industry or whatever, choose to come on board, great, I mean they’ve clever, you know, and they’re nice, some of them, but, that’s not where you start. You start with humanity at large. So in that sense, we, we don’t, we don’t, we’re not, you know, at one. But in the big ideas, what we’re trying to achieve, yah.

Has he talked to you about his science advice on climate change, for example, from Margaret…

Sorry.

Has he talked about his relations with Margaret Thatcher, during that period?

Yeah. I think he… I don’t think he, I know that he doesn’t dislike Margaret Thatcher as much as I do and a great many other people do. And I think he, yes, he definitely, I think he definitely got across to her, that this was an important thing. Because I think it was him who, who sort of pushed this, made it happen. But I only think; I think you have to talk to Crispin.

[23:21] Now in terms of differences within the, within the movement, I think I detected in the video material on the Oxford Real Farming Conference just the possibility that it might attract certain sort of groups who you might not be sort of, entirely on the same page with politically, in the sense that it might attract, I think, very left sort of campaigning groups, especially sort of, of young people.

Mm.

And, that leads me on to a wider question, about whether there are any sort of tensions and differences within the group of people that you’ve attracted together in this sort of meeting. Colin Tudge Page 144 C1672/17 Track 9

Mm. I think tensions would certainly be putting it too strongly. I hope it’s a synergistic relationship. Certainly it’s not exactly homogenous, or homogeneous, homogenous, can’t remember which. But, it shouldn’t be either, should it? I mean, you know, it’s a broad church and all that. I personally am very at home with the radical left wing, provided they’re thinking radical left wing. I mean there’s a few people who think they’re radicals who are actually just, making a noise when you boil it down. And I, although, you know, I like the sort of… No, I don’t much. But, there are, there are people in that kind of, end of the spectrum who would quite like the Oxford Real Farming Conference to be a kind of, what do you call it? Jamboree is the wrong word, but you know, a kind of, love-in, sit round, sing folk songs and the world will be all right. Well it won’t. I will just say, though, I’m being a bit unfair, because a lot of people who do like sitting round singing folk songs are very serious people. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t much like folk songs, or I get cold sitting… Anyway, whatever it is. But anyway, I feel quite at home with that. The wing that isn’t very strong in our group but it’s there, which I don’t get on with – no, I do get on with them personally, but, I don’t, I think it’s wrong, is the sort of conservative wing. And there are people who, who embrace the idea of enlightened agriculture, you know, agro-ecology, all that, who think that you can get to where we want to be basically by doing deals with or moving with the status quo. So, for example, a guy, I won’t mention his name but he’s very strong in the Oxford Farming Conference, who sort of says, yes, I agree with all you are saying, you know, enlightened agriculture and more organic, all that stuff, but the way to do it is to talk to, well specifically, McDonald’s, Tesco, because they have the power, and if you can persuade them to change their ways by sort of, one per cent, that makes a huge impact. Other people, quite highly placed people, and indeed entire movements, have sort of gone down that kind of path, and thought, you know, basically, got into bed with, that’s not quite the word, but you know what I mean, allied themselves to the corporates. Now I think that’s a huge mistake. They just get sucked in. In the end they just become greenwash. Several of them have realised that they’re just being used as greenwash, and they’re out again. There’s a fundamental difference in philosophy between the corporate, not necessarily run by bad people, you know, again, lots of them very affable and all that, but, the role of the corporate is to kick back a lot of money to their shareholders, that’s what they’re for, and they compete to do that. And, the role of enlightened agriculture is to do, is to grow good food for everybody. Which is by no means necessarily the most profitable thing to do, in fact it usually isn’t. So there’s a fundamental incompatibility. And of course, there’s a fundamental incompatibility between the corporate ethic of competition, which makes a virtue of competitiveness, which we hear from Cameron every time he opens his mouth, and Osborne and all the rest of them, and, the need to be, for compassion, which is totally different, which is all about cooperation and so on, so on, so on. The idea of cooperation is, nowadays, it’s kind of, equated with socialism, which I think it probably is, and should be, but also, such as the kind of, loss of political acumen, that socialism is now equated with Stalinism, so that for the last thirty years, even the Labour Party, ever since Blair got in, has more or less banished the word socialism. I don’t know whether I said this in an earlier interview, perhaps not. But I gave a talk to the Labour Party a couple of years ago in Sussex, and they were all talking about socialism. And I said, ‘Should you be talking about socialism? Are you allowed to talk about Colin Tudge Page 145 C1672/17 Track 9 socialism?’ And they said, ‘Well no, not really, but you know, we’re in Sussex, nobody cares what we do.’ [laughs] It’s rather like in South America where they tend to say, you know, they’re all good Catholics, but nevertheless they practise contraception and all that stuff. And they tend to say, well you know, give unto the Pope that which is the Pope’s, and, we’ll sit here and get on with our real lives. But anyway, the point is… What is the point? [pause] Yes. We need a cooperative style of economy, and there are plenty of models out there, and basically, they can be embedded within social democracy. They’re not to be equated with Stalinism, which actually wasn’t really cooperative, it was much more top-down as we know, totalitarian et cetera. So, we need that. And of course, therefore, if you start going down the corporate route, cosying up, you’ve lost.

[29:24] Has there been any reaction to your conference from the conference up the road, or more generally from what, as you, you say, is now called conventional agriculture, in the same way that in an earlier part of your career, you were attacked really by a senior scientist over the reporting of a collection of food industry people and scientists, has there been any negative response to the existence of this movement?

Not, not that sort of, impinges really. I mean the basic point is that, the Oxford Farming Conference, in effect, I think, they say they haven’t, but in fact they have ignored us. They pretend we’re not there. And I have not exactly, well I have ignored them, basically because I don’t think it’s worth bothering to talk to them. Because, it seems to me that the priority is not to try to persuade people who are already, you know, stuck in their ways. They might be persuadable but a far as I’m concerned, the priority is to build the alternative; in other words, the priority is to build the, the Renaissance, focus on what you do, emphasise the positive. And let the rest, in the fullness of time, wither on the vine. And as I say, if the good people among them want to join in, terrific, but if they don’t, well, you know, let them do what they want. And I think that there are so many kind of… You hear football teams and cricket teams and athletes say the same thing. Don’t try to play the opposition’s game, you know, do you own thing, and you may win. But if you try and tailor what you do to the other side, you’re more likely to use, and you deserve to. You see what I mean?

[31:17] What was Ruth doing with Green College?

With what, sorry?

What was Ruth doing at Green College…

Oh.

…that meant she had these links? Colin Tudge Page 146 C1672/17 Track 9

Yes. Well in her earlier days she was very much involved with indigenous people, the rights of, movements of, all over the world. And, she was cooperating with a fellow of what was then called Green College, now called Green Templeton College, on, in his work he was very interested in indigenous peoples. So she was working with him. He was a fellow, and she had a scholarship, she was a scholar of Green College. And I think it was three years. And when we first started going out seriously, the scholarship was still running, but she was living in London, so we, well, it made sense to move to Oxford. Get more out of it. The great thing about that was of course, she already knew quite a few people in the college, who had become good friends and so on.

[32:18] Earlier in this series of recordings you talked about the experience of depression which came on in late childhood. To what extent has this been a feature of your adult life? Because you’ve hinted that it had been, I think, in these, in the very first session.

I’d forgotten I talked about that. Yeah, well, it’s been there you know. I mean I’ve always been quite diffident, I’ve always tended to keep my distance. And I’ve always tended to fear that I might slump back into that state. And that’s sort of, one reason for being slightly isolationist. And, this present way of life you know, pension, living here, doing lots of scribbling, suits me very well. But, that doesn’t mean to say I’m any kind of recluse, or unsociable. I mean, it’s jolly nice to meet people and talk to people. But I don’t naturally socialise in a conventional sense really. One thing actually is that I don’t like standing around holding a little glass, you know, the way you’re obliged to do. I find it very uncomfortable. But sitting around like this, having a nice chat, it’s great. You see what I mean. It’s, it’s fine, because actually, if you want to be a scribbler, which I always did, then this kind of, quite isolated way of life is, is forced on you anyway. So it suits me, it’s all right.

Why is it a defence against depression, the isolationist approach?

Well, I don’t know. It means… Well it means you can do your own thing, think your own thoughts. You’ve not, you’re not being distracted, if you see what I mean. You’re not being thrown off course. I don’t want to sound as if I’m Asperger or anything, which I’m not. Believe me. But, no, I’d forgotten I talked about that. But it did, it did make a difference. I mean I think it was one reason why I didn’t, for example… I mean one of the things that struck me which I could have done at the time quite easily at Cambridge was read medicine. But I didn’t, I didn’t welcome the sociality of it. I wanted just to, to sort of be, you know, more scholarly really.

What you didn’t want was the interaction with people, and that being part of the…

Yeah, milling around in hospitals doing ward rounds and all that kind of stuff. Yes, I don’t want to do this, kind of thing. A lot of these jobs, including, yeah, well mostly, including science really, require Colin Tudge Page 147 C1672/17 Track 9 you, certainly field science, require you to be very sociable. And on the whole, I don’t necessarily want to be sociable. I want to think my own thoughts. Don’t necessarily want to be on my own, but, if I’m going to think, I think my own thought in company with somebody else, you know what I mean? Otherwise, you don’t think your own thoughts, you’re just, carried along with the chitchat.

[35:26] Thank you. Could you say more about Why Genes Aren’t Selfish and People Are Nice? In particular… Well let’s start with the decision to give it that title.

Mm. Well, I thought for a long time, you know, Richard Dawkins’s notion of the selfish gene wasn’t quite right. This, I mean, The Selfish Gene does not imply, it’s not meant to imply, what most people think is true, which is that if you have so-called selfish genes that are fighting their own corner, that you necessarily finish up as a selfish person. In fact it could mean the precise opposite. The actual idea of a selfish gene that’s the gene fighting its own corner is what in some theories accounts for altruism. Because, for example, a mother sacrificing her life for her children is a form of altruism, but the point is that, the babies, her offspring, contain copies of her genes, so her throwing down her life for offspring is actually her own genes throwing down their life for themselves. So it’s actually, you know, selfish gene does not imply selfish people. However… Sorry, you’re sitting on one of your biros.

Oh thank you.

Not that it matters, but there you are. [pause] However, most people do think that, because you see something, the selfish gene, it’s a shocking kind of title, eye-catching title, and that’s what most people do think it means. And although Richard Dawkins has spent a lot of time saying, that’s not what it, that’s not what it means, nevertheless, it does. Also, however, by a line of thinking, I’m not quite sure I follow… I mean, Thatcher’s line, you remember, ‘there is no such thing as society’, came I believe from a conversation with Richard Dawkins, that actually, what you’ve got is not, is not people grouping together to, to be nice and to do good, convivial things, but you’ve got genes fighting their corner, and being, as it were, very pragmatic about it. So you have alliances and you have betrayals, it’s all very Machiavellian, but you don’t necessarily have this sort of great cohesive society. And I thought, this, this doesn’t feel right to me, for all sorts of reasons. And there’s a very very good book by a chap called Denis Noble, and do you know, I’ve forgotten the title, but it attacks the idea of the selfish gene, and says, and it quotes, for example, Dawkins saying that, in the genome, the gene is kind of, battling with all the other genes, and, and Denis Noble said, you can take exactly the same idea and turn it on its head, and say, actually, the gene is part of a cooperative, and it’s not the genes that are telling other people what to do, it’s the gene being trapped within the genome and obliged to do what the cooperative says. And he showed how you can take the sort of rhetoric of the selfish gene idea and just turn it completely on its head, and it sounds just as good the other way round as it did the first way round, which is just, wasn’t that good in the first place. So that was the first thing. People… Sorry. Colin Tudge Page 148 C1672/17 Track 9

The idea of the selfish gene, partly because it’s misconstrued, people think it means selfish people, but also because it seems to undermine the idea of our genuinely convivial society, seemed to me, well it, it gives the impression, in fact it more or less states, that people are not nice, basically we are Machiavellian. We cooperate, collaborate, in so far as it suits us, or it suits our genes. And then we put the boot in, if… Well, it’s like one of… Well, we’ve just been watching on the television Henry VI, and basically, you just, are not… Actually, the… Anyway, basically everybody just manoeuvres around each other and sticks the knife in, literally, when it suits them to do so. Excuse me. [coughs] And, there are many people, including a guy who has influenced me quite a lot called Frans de Haal. Is that right? I can never remember his name. Do you know who I mean? Frans de Waal, w-a-a-l. Dutchman. I met him. Who points out that actually, there’s a lot of altruistic behaviour among animals, that you can’t account for in terms of, you know, gene relatedness. There are genuine friendships among animals in the wild, genuine friendships among animals in the wild even of different species. You know, there is a lot more going on. And of course, if you look at human society, that is not only how it looks, but how it feels, that’s how it is. So this again is a kind of, idea, selfish gene, and, the sort of Machiavellian society, which has just been taken too far; it’s a piece of intellectualism which has been allowed to outgrow its strength and become fashionable, and just suited people like Mrs Thatcher. It underpins the idea of neo-liberalism as one big fight. And people have used the word ‘neo-liberalism’, which is – sorry, neo-Darwinian, which in fact has several meanings but is actually quite respectable, you know, it means the fusion of Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian genetics with molecular biology, these days. That’s fine, that’s what neo… But people have used it to sort of, argue that the selfish gene is neo-Darwinian, and therefore that the neo-liberal economy is neo- Darwinian. Well I prefer the term brute Darwinian, because, whereas neo-Darwinian is a respectable sort of scientific description of what’s going on, brute Darwinian is a misconstruction, misunderstanding of what Darwin is really saying. Because Darwin wasn’t really, I’m sure he was not trying to say that actually, animals just… therefore people just… It’s, that life is one big punch-up. It’s not… You know, Tennyson spoke of nature red in tooth and claw. Well he wasn’t trying to say that nature is red in tooth and claw, and that we put the boot in. And, so, you know, the idea underpinning neo-liberalism to me, and which now dominates a lot of biology, evolutionary thinking, is, it should, I think, properly be called brute Darwinian, in other words, a corruption of Darwin. Anyway, the point is, I said, ‘Look, if we look at things more dispassionately, and we don’t conclude that people are basically selfish and Machiavellian, all those things, there is very many good reason to think that people are nice. And if you take the sort of Denis Noble view of, of how the genes really work, then the selfish gene becomes a bad metaphor. So we just put the two things together. I didn’t actually think of the title, the title was thought of by the publisher, which is Floris, and I didn’t like it at first, but I thought, OK, it’s all right.

What didn’t you like about it at first?

I can’t remember. [laughs] I thought my own title was better, but I can’t remember what my own title was. [laughs] Colin Tudge Page 149 C1672/17 Track 9

[43:12] Thank you. Could you tell me about the response to it of people who read the draft, and people who read the actual published book? And I’m talking about people that you knew already.

Mm.

So, this is friends and colleagues that you might have asked to read the draft, or, who read the book, and, perhaps in an unsolicited way, commented to you about it.

Mm. I didn’t, funnily enough, ask many people to read it. I mean I never do for some reason. I mean I ask them if, if there are specific points I want to know, but on the whole I tend to just do it. And, that’s it. Obviously you have discussions with the publishers and editor, but, as far as it goes more or less. When it came to reviews, I had some very nice and pleasing reviews. I had one from some bloke, it’s out on the Web somewhere, and I say in this book that I’ve been thinking about it for, this book for about fifty years, and I think this bloke said something like, ‘Well you should have thought about it for another fifty.’ That kind of stuff. You know, that kind of stuff. But that doesn’t bother me, because, I spent the whole book slagging off people who I say are being dull, conventional, useless academics, so if I in turn get slagged off by a dull, conventional, useless academic, I can’t really complain, can I? [laughs] That’s life.

What was, what was the reaction of Bernard Dixon to it as your, your friend from New Scientist?

I… Well, I haven’t spoken to Bernard for about twenty years, but, I don’t think Bernard ever specifically commented on that book.

Oh, OK.

We had discussions of a kind of, about metaphysics, about, oh, twenty-five years ago, in which he made it clear that he wasn’t that interested. So that was, that was it basically.

Why were you talking to him about metaphysics?

Well he wrote a book, early on, maybe even have been in the Sixties, called, well he wrote one book called What is Science For? which was, you know, fairly obvious what that’s about. Another one called, I think it’s called What I Believe [Journeys in Belief], in which he talked to a lot of people, basically about their religious beliefs.

It was called Journeys in Belief, I think.

Colin Tudge Page 150 C1672/17 Track 9

Was it indeed.

About people who changed their minds, yes.

So I thought, Bernard was, was really interested in the same kind of things that I was interested in, and was going down the same kind of paths. And he’s a very clever chap of course, and is a nice chap. So, I was hoping for fruitful conversations. But then, he sort of made it clear that he wasn’t really interested after all, so, we left it there.

Earlier in the interview you said that at New Scientist people often said, or were expecting Bernard Dixon to write a book on this sort of thing.

Mm.

Which he never did.

Mm.

Was this, was the writing of this book in any way, were you writing a similar book to the one people were expecting at that time?

Very possibly was. And it’s very possible that I am projecting my own thoughts onto other people, you know what I mean. I mean I think, in my mind, I had this book and the website in my mind for a very long time, you know, in a sort of, primordial form. So I was sort of looking for other people to, you know, to pick up the baton and run with it. And, nobody did directly. So, probably never had it in mind to do this at all, but I just sort of, felt deep in my bones that that was what should happen.

A very striking bit of the book is when you were talking about doves and hawks.

Mm.

And come to the conclusion that the, the sociopaths are in charge.

Mm.

I wondered in your own life whether there have been occasions where you felt you’ve actually been meeting people who might be described as hawks in that analysis of…

Well I, I tend not to move in hawkish circles of course, because I avoid hawkish circles. So most of the people I have known have in fact been, dovish. But I mean, just observation of the world. I mean look Colin Tudge Page 151 C1672/17 Track 9 at the present Cabinet, or going back to… Well look at most Cabinets actually, but certainly go back to Thatcher. Or go to the corporates, the people who are actually in charge are the people that really want to dominate. And the people that want to dominate are not the people who ought to be in charge. One of the points I’ve been making in the latest metaphysics article is that, all the great people, who are seen as great leaders, religious, spiritual leaders, like Buddha, like the Jesus Christ, like Saint Francis, like Ghandi, like Tolstoy, all emphasise humility, and they all say, you know, the point is not to boss the rest of them about. There’s a very fine quote from Saint Mark, ostensibly of Jesus, where he says, ‘He who would be your leader must be your servant.’ And the whole point of being the leader is that you’re a servant to the people you are leading. It’s absolutely, you know, universal among people we regard as great prophets. Absolute opposite of what you see in modern politicians.

[48:50] Do you have a view on the role of science adviser to the Government? Of the people who have had that role.

Well on the whole, I mean, there have been some very good, clever people, let’s take nothing away from them as they say, but I don’t think they’ve been reflective. And I think people who get that kind of job don’t talk much about the limits of science; they talk about what science can do. So they tend not simply to be scientists, but to be scientistists, if you know what I mean. And, that’s a bit bad, because what you get then is basically a sort of gung-ho mentality, and you get a kind of, instant fix mentality, you know, a magic bullet mentality. I suppose… A very good example is, for example, the, the green revolution in Asia, and in Mexico, in the late Sixties, early Seventies, has many good things going for it. I mean, you know, the dwarf wheats and the dwarf rice varieties have a big role to play. But, there’s this overwhelming sense, overriding sense, that it’s a techno fix, and it’s not considering enough the political and the social implications of what’s happening. And that same mentality is now prevailing to the point where we commonly hear that we need a, what’s it called, a green revolution in Africa, and basically, they’re talking about GM in Africa, and, big, you know, big scale arable and all that kind of stuff, plantation, bung in the fertiliser, all that stuff. Well, that’s, that’s not good. And that it seems to me to be the kind of advice that you tend to get from the kind of people that become scientific government advisers. There’s plenty of very very good scientists in high places, fortunately, too, around the world, one of whom, well, Hans Herren, who is President of the Millennium Society in Washington, who is a, well I think he’s a very good scientist, and he’s a farmer, or he knows about agriculture, and he’s pushing the same kind of ideas that I am, and I got of my ideas from him. But he is not going to become a government adviser. The other interesting thing, though, is that several economics advisers to governments have been sort of, warning against neo-liberalism, saying, you’ve got think more broadly. I’m thinking of Aaron, and I can’t remember his name actually, but, the chap who had a Nobel Prize, begins with a K, Krug, Klug, something like that, who was an adviser to, possibly to Obama, but I think to… Well anyway, you know, American presidents. And he, he really isn’t saying, we should go down the neo-liberal route. But what difference did it make? I mean the Colin Tudge Page 152 C1672/17 Track 9 neo-liberal route is what we went down, I mean we are, they’re the archetypes. So that’s interesting too.

[51:57] We’re getting towards the end of the interview, but there are some other things that…

Sorry, I can’t hear.

Some other things that I’d like to cover in more detail. You mentioned that when you first came to Oxford, that…

Excuse me. Yup, sorry.

That some of your thinking on relations between science and religion was pushed along by relations with some people in Oxford, Paul and Chris Wordsworth, and John and Sally Lennox.

Mm.

Can you say more about the origin and development of your relationship with them?

Mm.

You know, what you talked about, how that was influential or not.

Well we both, we met… We met them both through Green College, and I think it’s probable that Ruth already knew them. She certainly knew Chris Wordsworth very well, wife of Paul. I had been, in my life at Cambridge, just because of the way it panned out, and, I think through my life at New Scientist, really had the idea that scientists on the whole tended to be non-religious people. It’s not really true actually. Great St Mary’s in Cambridge at the time I was there, and subsequently, largely full of scientists, but I didn’t realise that at the time. I wish I had. Anyway, I sort of had the idea that scientists are not, on the whole, very religious, very spiritual people. The point about John Lennox, professor, professor of mathematics, very highly rated in mathematics textbooks, is also a deeply religious man, a kind of, basically the evangelical tradition, Northern Irish, Protestant, and he now… and he was the chapel of, or the unofficial chaplain, of Green. Excuse me. [coughs] And he, he now spends a hell of a lot of time going round the world talking to Christian groups all over the place, and he’s debated with Richard Dawkins and various other people, Christopher Hitchens, about atheism and so on. So, him, and his wife Sally is also very devout. Paul and Chris Wordsworth both devout Christians. And it was kind of, this is the first time, as I say, I’d met people who were basically scientists or mathematicians who were also serious Christians, and it was quite, it was interesting to me, I had never really, I’d never really encountered that. And, Ruth and I, and, well, those four, we Colin Tudge Page 153 C1672/17 Track 9 had some very very good evenings round one of our houses, usually, usually Paul’s in fact, just discussing various religious matters. And to me they were very enlightening, and very good. So I learnt a huge amount from them. We don’t seem to do that any more, as it happens, but, you know, it was really quite formative.

Do you remember conversations about the relationship between science and religion in the lives of these people who you were meeting, and were being surprised by, by the fact that they were, they had both going on?

Not really. We didn’t really talk much about science and religion. We, we just took various texts which were proposed by John, and sort of, talked them through. One that stayed in my mind, I mean I knew about it already, because I had done some of this stuff, but you know Plato’s parable of the cave, where all the people sitting in the cave think they know what life is, and they don’t really, they’re just seeing shadows. And then one guy goes out and sees what the world is really like. Well the interesting thing is, which I had forgotten, is that he goes back into the cave and tells his fellow troglodytes what the world is really like. And that got into my head very clearly the realisation that the point of all this contemplation isn’t just to sort of, achieve spiritual enlightenment or get yourself to Heaven or all these other things, but it is to feed back whatever it is you’ve discovered into society as a whole, try to make the world a better place. And again, you look at the people who are regarded as great prophets, well including Jesus Christ himself very obviously, including Muhammad, including Ghandi, they threw themselves back into the world, and they taught, and they tried to improve things.

And so, this is, this sounds slightly more formal than I had imagined. What I had imagined was that you talked to each other at college dinners and things like this, but this sounds more like a, a group of people meeting to discuss a, almost like a book group, you’re discussing a particular reading.

Yeah, I mean they were convivial evenings. Actually you can’t, it’s very difficult to agree in college because it’s so echoic, it’s very hard to hear what anybody says. And the college dinners are quite expensive. So there’s good reason for not talking. And, you know, that’s a technical thing, but it is the case.

[57:16] Thank you. Another thing. Could you tell me about relations with the, is it the Beshara School, in Scotland?

Oh yeah. Well, it is now called the Chisholme Institute. Beshara, I believe, means good news, and it’s a group of people that’s been evolving since the Seventies. You know, there’s lots of these – no, not lots, but there are groups of people around who sort of come together and then they stay together and they form a movement. And the Beshara movement was inspired in particular by a Turkish chap who frankly, his surname is Bulent, I can’t remember his Christian name, but Bulent – no, it’s his Christian Colin Tudge Page 154 C1672/17 Track 9 name possibly. Anyway, I never knew him. But he was very very keen on the philosophy of Ibn Arabi, twelfth, thirteenth century Andalusian Muslim. Well he, generally known as a Sufi but he actually says himself that he doesn’t really care what he is, basically, he’s very happy to be a Jew or a Christian or a, or a Muslim. And of course at that time in Andalusia all three were living side by side very happily. So, sorry, so anyway, this Beshara group, they then, they started off I believe in Sussex, or somewhere like that, in the south, and then they moved up to this lovely country house in Scotland, in the Border country, called Chisholme. And they carried on their meetings and contemplations. I happened to get to know them again through Ruth, because Ruth was a very good friend of a family of people who were very involved, are very involved, with the Beshara centre, so I started going up there. And I’ve given some talks up there, and had some very good meetings up there. And indeed the first proper sort of pop-up meeting of the college should have been held at Beshara, or as it’s now called, the Chisholme Institute, but, it will be later in the year, I was ill, as I said.

[59:20] And the other is Schumacher College?

Oh yes. Schumacher College is named after, what’s his first name? He’s always called Ernst Schumacher, isn’t he? E F Schumacher. Anyway, he was, he was just a very good thinker, who was prominent in the mid-twentieth century. And he wrote a wonderful book which everybody knows called Small Is Beautiful, in which he, well it’s sort of obvious what it’s about really. Small-scale stuff, work, et cetera et cetera. And he is, he, down in Devon there is this place called Dartington Hall, which was founded by an Englishman and his rich wife, and I can’t remember their names, together with… Oh God, sorry, my brain’s going. Muslim poet, mid-twentieth century. Very well-known.

I know that… OK.

Very famous.

I know that your link here is with Satish Kumar.

Yes. Well anyway, they founded this place in the Thirties, Dartington Hall.

OK.

Which had all sorts of things, an art, an art college and all sorts of things attached to it. It was basically educational, very spiritual, et cetera. Had a farm. Satish Kumar was very involved in it. Satish, who I believe, it was him set up a kind of, oh, not exactly an annexe but a, an offshoot of Dartington, called Schumacher College, a small series of buildings on the edge of the Dartington estate, which was dedicated to courses that bring, that actually have an agenda very similar to my college, where they bring together science and spiritual thinking, and talk about the biosphere, and, all that stuff. And they Colin Tudge Page 155 C1672/17 Track 9 run very good courses, short courses, long courses. And it’s been going for fifty years or so, forty years or so. And it’s very good. Through Satish I got to know this. And, I’ve given some talks down there, and, and done a week’s course down there, and, you know, as I hope I still have, well I do have good relationships with them. And hope to be doing some ecology stuff down there with them.

Are you able to identify, for either of those sites, the Chisholme and Schumacher College, a sort of, any sort of identified influence on your sort of outlook and your work?

Well I think, the contact with… I don’t frankly know a great deal about Ibn Arabi, but, the idea of him, and there’s a, quite a few people in Oxford who are Ibn Arabi fans, certainly his ideas have rubbed off. And as people say, one of the central ideas of Ibn Arabi’s thinking is the idea of oneness, which you also of course, you find it very strongly in Sufism, very strongly in Buddhism, and the general notion is that although it looks as if everything, you know, all the living things and so on, people are divided up into individuals, and each of us has an ego, and in fact you can get beyond this and, we are actually all part of, well, many would say all part of God or aspects of God, and that in the end, if you sort of really work, go to work on your own consciousness, you begin to realise that this is the case, and you start to think, not as an ego but as a part of a whole. So this idea, I don’t really understand it, I mean I, I know what it means, but you know, I don’t feel it. But it’s, I do appreciate that the idea of oneness is a very serious concept, an aspect of the idea of transcendence. In fact in my book I am suggesting that there are two really big ideas about the way the world is, one of which is the general idea of transcendence, and the other is a sort of, particular idea of oneness. And I think it relates to the idea of universal intelligence and this kind of thing, universal consciousness and so on. So that certainly. And in, I think, you know, in Schumacher, I’ve been very impressed by the ideas of Stephan, Stephan… Oh God. Will it come back to me? Who wrote a book called Animate Earth. I keep thinking of Steffon Armitage, but actually Steffon Armitage is a rugby player, who now plays for, I think for to Toulon. He gets in the way. I can’t remember his surname.

And, about Animate Earth in particular?

Well Animate Earth is one of these, is a, is a very good treatment of the idea that, you know, human mind influences the world, you know, based on physics. Although Stephan in fact is a biologist, and he applies this to our relations with the natural world and so on. I think he’s a very good thinker. But I can’t remember his surname.

[1:04:52] Thank you. I think it’s in Six Steps Back to the Land you say that you find it ‘impossible to renounce my subscription to Nature,’ but then point out the sort of weakness of the philosophy that’s…

Yes.

Colin Tudge Page 156 C1672/17 Track 9

Could you say something about your view of current science journalism as someone who was working for quite a while in science journalism? So your view of New Scientist and the kind of, opinion part of Nature anyway as output.

Mm. Well actually, now I have given up on Nature, I got too far behind in the reading, and I haven’t read New Scientist hardly at all for, twenty-odd years actually. So I’m a bit behind. But, although I think I’m being a bit unfair possibly because I haven’t read enough, so I don’t know, but certainly the editorials I read in Nature, I’d say they were, they’re just not reflective enough. And basically, they, they just believe in the idea that science can solve our problems, and if only those politicians and people at large would realise this, give us more money, we could, we could do it. So, there’s quite a bit of stuff in science, it’s very pro-GM, because, isn’t it obvious that with GM crops you can produce bigger crops and, you know, ward off pests without adding pesticide and all that stiff. None of this is really true, but it’s the kind of belief, that’s where they’re going. But also, they don’t reflect on the fact, or on the idea, that actually, total yield isn’t really the problem anyway, or that, by doing that you will in fact be introducing industrial agriculture that will put millions out of work, as it already has, and so on. It doesn’t reflect enough. And I think, I’ve seen very very little reflection of, of the philosophy of science, or the fact that science itself is limited in what it can tell us about the world. Doesn’t necessarily explain the whole world and everything that works in it. Not many people, for example, in ordinary scientific journalism take Rupert Sheldrake seriously. Nature, as you probably know, twenty- odd years ago, thirty years ago possibly now, said, you know, his first book is ripe for burning. Well that’s just not the case you see. It should be looking at the things that Rupert’s looking at and taking them very seriously. He’s asking, for example, not only things specifically about, you know, the nature of telepathy, and I think it’s established beyond any reasonable doubt that it’s certainly worth taking seriously, but also asking whether the assumptions of science are necessarily correct. I mean we assume, for example, that scientific constants, which lie at the centre of scientific laws, are in fact constant. And he asks the question, is it so? Well it ought to be asked. It’s a scientific question, it’s also a metaphysical question. But not many people, science journalists, I would say, are interested in that kind of approach. So, my general criticism, that it’s not reflective. And I suggest in my latest essay that science should not be taught in the absence of the philosophy of science, and should not be taught in the absence of metaphysics, should not be taught in the absence of any sort of, political or social or economic context. And, in most science magazines, most of the time, and certainly in most science education, you just don’t get this context. And science on its own, without any restraint of this kind, moral, political, et cetera, is very dangerous. And we can see how dangerous it is. Which is a pity, because science, as we all know, I mean not only does it provide wonderful insights into the universe, which is just stunning, which is why it took me a long time to give up Nature, because I knew, I thought I was going to miss something big, but also, I mean, when you apply it to high technologies, you can get some wonderful results. And I for… Well, I think it’s a wonderful thing that… And modern medicine I think is terrific. It’s much too focused on the chronic diseases of the West rather than the things that, you know, kill people. Although since I suffer from the chronic diseases of the West, I’m not as bothered as I should be possibly. But, it is superb, it’s unbelievable Colin Tudge Page 157 C1672/17 Track 9 what they can do. So, you’re not going to complain about that, I’m not going to complain about that. But GM, for example, is probably very very damaging to the world as a whole. You see what I mean. There isn’t, we don’t get behind the right things.

[1:09:56] And what about science on the radio, is that, do you listen to science on the radio and have a view?

Almost… Very rarely. I’ll tell you one I do actually like, although I don’t think he’d like my metaphysical musing, is Jim Al-Khalili, who seems to me to get down to some very good things. And I, I saw a Horizon of his, and I bought a book of his, on the way that quantum physics is now beginning to play a serious part in biology, which hitherto have been regarded as being totally separate things to each other. But there are some very interesting central phenomena in biology, including navigation of birds, photosynthesis, which aren’t really explicable, except in terms of various quantum effects, like 'quantum tunnelling' and stuff like that. Most interesting. It could open, you know, this could be a real paradigm shift, that it could be that in fifty years’ time biology will look very different because of this realisation.

[1:10:59] And finally, could you talk about current and near future work?

Mm?

Could you talk now, finally, about what you’re working on now, and what you plan in the near future?

Mm. Well a few years ago I had it in my mind that I was going to redo my book The Variety of Life, because I’m very interested in taxonomy, and taxonomy has moved on. I had that in mind. And I had other such things in mind, but that was the main one. Now, I realise that time is limited. I mean I’m seventy-something you see, you can’t… So I don’t know how many more years one has got doing this stuff. And also, I’ve not got much energy. So, I’ve got to be focused. Having discovered the college and set it up, which is very broad-based after all, I think that’s quite enough, thank you very much. And, the website on the one hand, and pop-up courses as they turn up on the other, will keep me going very very happily. I’m aware, since it’s supposed to be an agricultural website, well is an agricultural website, that I ought to be getting seriously stuck in to things like, pasture feeding, which is very important for animals, and soil science, and all those other things which are clearly of huge import. And we will get stuck into them. But at the moment, I’m just quite, very intrigued by the metaphysics, which many people will consider to be peripheral, or even irrelevant, but it isn’t. So, I’m going to work that through. I don’t have to earn a living at the moment, because I have a modest pension, and, so I can sort of follow my nose. That’s what I’m going to do. If along the way books come out of it, short ones, that will be jolly good, but… And I’d quite like to turn the metaphysics thing into a book, because I think there are things, you know, there are things I could say. Colin Tudge Page 158 C1672/17 Track 9

But some of those things are going to appear on the website?

Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, the essay I’ve done for the website, I think is a skeleton of a nice book, and I’d like to, in the immediate term, persuade a publisher that it’s a skeleton of a nice book. And then put some nice bones on it, the bones being actually the quotes from good people largely. And, poems. And, yeah, and anecdotes.

[End of Track 10]

[End of Interview]