NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

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

Yorick Wilks

Interviewed by Paul Merchant

C1672/24

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The British Library National Life Stories

Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1672/24

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

Interviewee’s surname: Wilks Title: Professor

Interviewee’s forename: Yorick Sex: Male

Occupation: Computer scientist Date and place of birth: 27th October 1939, London Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation:

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 02/08/2016 (Track 1)

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 1 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 2 hrs. 49 min. 28 sec.

Additional material:

Copyright/Clearance: OPEN

Interviewer’s comments:

[Track 1]

Now, at the beginning of this interview, which will focus on the Epiphany Philosophers, could you say something of what, something of your life before the point that you arrive in Cambridge, and, presumably at that point, join the group.

I was a typical working-class, north London child of my time. Born just before the Second World War. My father was a cabinet maker. My mother had been somewhat middle-class by origin, but had been sort of proletarianised by my father. In the war, they both worked on bomber construction, so I was a nursery child and was evacuated to Torquay where I was eventually brought up, after my father died. So, my father died very young, when I was eleven. So my family broke up, I didn’t have a great family life, and, we left north London, Edmonton it was, a very working-class suburb, and we moved to Torquay where I went to grammar school. So, I got out of being a sort of working-class boy by going to Torquay Grammar School and then Cambridge. Cambridge, I went there to do physics, which is what I was best at I thought. When I got there I decided I’d do maths instead. After I’d done a year of mathematics I realised, although I had been good at maths in Torquay, people in Cambridge were so good at maths, there was simply no point in competing. I was a small fish in a huge pond. So I shifted to philosophy, which I had always been interested in. So my degree was in, mathematics initially, but I shifted to the metaphysical, metaphysical and ethical philosophy link. [01:33] Curiously, and this is sashaying now into the connection with the EPs, because it starts there, I was at Pembroke College in Cambridge, I… Pembroke didn’t have very many people who did philosophy. And, they had a part-time philosophy tutor who was brought in as it were, being a men’s college in those days, called Margaret Masterman. She was the wife of one of the two philosophy professors. And she loomed large in my life after that in the EP. She, she was the EPs in some sense. She was certainly the most important intellectual influence in my life, aside from the EPs. She was the philosophy tutor for Pembroke. And so she became my tutor for metaphysical and ethical philosophy. Now this in some ways was a disaster for me, although not ultimately, in the short run it was a disaster, because Margaret wasn’t much of a philosopher, couldn’t teach it, didn’t want to. Took the job. I didn’t learn much from her. I taught myself all I knew. In those days that wasn’t surprising, you did teach yourself. I had taught myself enough to get a 2:1. But I, I certainly didn’t get a First, which I might conceivably have done if I had been properly taught and properly disciplined. I wasn’t, I was, you know, I was slacking off, and, Margaret didn’t demand essays, and… Margaret wanted to inspire. Margaret was an inspirer, a charismatic person, as much in philosophy as in religion, that we’ll get to in time. So Margaret thought that metaphysics was desperately important, and I caught that from her and believed it. I still believe it, that metaphysics isn’t a joke, it’s desperately important. Now that was good. The trouble was, to get the degree in Cambridge you had to actually read metaphysicians, you had to actually read Kant, and Kant was the special author in my last year. Margaret had never read Kant in her life, I mean she had no idea what was in there. So it was all sort of self-taught, and it wasn’t totally successful, although in those days, a First was quite rare, there was only one First in philosophy ever. So a 2:1 was quite good enough to do research. So I wasn’t damaged really. I was piqued I didn’t get a First, but that’s, that’s life. So I did learn some philosophy. I learnt that metaphysics was terribly important. But what I got from Margaret was this very peculiar thing. You see Margaret’s day job as it were had nothing to do with philosophy. She ran a, a unit, we’ll get to this, but she ran a research unit where she worked on computers and language. So for her there was no real difference between working on computers and language and thinking about metaphysics. She had been a pupil of Wittgenstein’s, she believed that the core of philosophy was about language, that was common belief at the time, still is in some quarters. She had been in Wittgenstein’s classes. He had thrown her out, he didn’t like women, he didn’t like ugly people, and he thought she was both, chucked her out. But she knew Wittgenstein. And therefore, Margaret believed that metaphysics was important, metaphysics was about language; she was doing research on language in computers; therefore you could do research on metaphysics with language and computers. That was simple for her, she didn’t do it, but she thought you could. So I became the person whose mission that became. So, after I had graduated in Cambridge in ’62 she offered me a job to join her research unit, which I took. And that was where I first met the Epiphany Philosophers.

[04:37] Could you say more about Margaret Masterman’s belief in metaphysics as important?

Yes. It’s… I haven’t got this straight in my mind, so I’m free-associating now, but it’s coherent. [pause] I mean, I don’t want to go off into a mini spiel about Wittgenstein. What Wittgenstein really believed about philosophy and metaphysics is a matter of dispute. He told all his pupils not take philosophy jobs, to go out and get real jobs, not to do philosophy, and they took him at his word. On the other hand, he obviously thought philosophy was desperately important, and metaphysics. He wasn’t against metaphysics. He knew that what he was doing was metaphysics, which made him exceptional in his time, because, nearly all the people he would have talked to, from Bertrand Russell in this country to the logical positivists in Austria, and he was Austrian don’t forget, would all have hated metaphysics. They thought it was nonsense. In fact that was the starting point of my own work, was the logical positivists’ belief that, it wasn’t just metaphysics - their belief - it wasn’t just that metaphysics was nonsense, it was pernicious nonsense that rested on a grammatical fallacy, and that, as it were, linguistics could demonstrate the fallacy. Now this, this was already moving from metaphysis and language, almost into the areas of grammar and language, which is where I sort of ended up. So there was already that link firmly there. There was a man called Carnap, who was a terribly famous Austrian philosopher, who Wittgenstein didn’t like. Carnap was the head of the Vienna Circle. Carnap published a, a series of books but, his great books are about what he calls logical syntax. His great work is called Die Logische Syntax der Sprache, The Logical Syntax of Language. And for him, if you knew what the logical syntax of language was, you could prove that metaphysics was nonsense, because, metaphysics simply didn’t obey the syntax of language. This is not the way Wittgenstein went at it, but, they weren’t that different. The trouble was, Wittgenstein liked metaphysics really, he thought language games were, language games that showed you the structure of language didn’t abolish things, they just revealed how they were. So an insight that many people will take from Wittgenstein is that, it isn’t that religious argument’s wrong, it’s just different. It isn’t that metaphysics is wrong, it’s just different. Just like history is different. It says somewhere that, you know, historians have a special way of arguing. That’s how historians argue. It’s a perfectly good language game that historians play, and it’s perfectly legitimate. So somewhere, Margaret certainly would have thought that Wittgenstein thought that metaphysics was a legitimate way of playing language, as long as it was exposed for what it was, and wasn’t thought as mysterious or magical. It wasn’t up for abolition. And that was the link for her, and I think once she got into empirical language work and machine, she thought that somehow those researches could be moved into the world of language and machines. She thought Wittgenstein, who was an engineer after all, would have liked language and machines, and she might have been right.

[07:38] Could you then describe your work at Margaret Masterman’s centre that you say you joined after your degree?

Yes. It was this little museum called Adie’s Museum, No. 20 Millington Road, Cambridge. It’s now been turned into an executive home. [laughs] But Adie’s Museum had been the museum of an eccentric person called Adie presumably, who had been interested in Buddhism, and he had inserted into the walls of this little museum… The museum was just a shed really, it was a garage converted into a sort of, it was still a garage really, it was just a, a garage with a big open space. And there was a conservatory built on one side, and a cellar underneath., and a couple of rooms on the back, and a toilet. So in a sense it was a garage with sheds attached. But that became Cambridge Language Research Unit. When we eventually got a computer, it was installed in the middle in the garage bit. And, there was a tiny shed on the side called the conference room and the library. Tiny things. They were just like people’s conservatories really. And, he installed these little Buddhist sculptures into the walls that were probably worth a fortune. But that’s probably all been abolished now, and, but it was lovely to sit in a room and look at these little tiny sculptures in the walls. And that was her language unit, which she had founded somewhere around 1955. She had found a way, goodness knows how, looking back, because she had no academic reputation at that point, but she had found a way, she never quite told me how she pulled it off, of getting American government grants, defence grants. And before one thinks defence grants, what this has got to with defence, you have to remember that, in those days, and even today, American defence grants, weren’t like our defence grants, they would support anything. Anything that took their fancy. The American project managers in Washington, they nearly always were in Washington, were Renaissance princes. They could support anything that crossed their path. They had enormous freedom. You didn’t really have to demonstrate any connection to American military need. So, for example, the Navy ONR, Office of Naval Research, ONR was a, it still is, a famous rich funding organisation, ONR was known to support the best mathematics in the world. Mathematics. I mean, that didn’t advance the Cold War. But that’s how it was. And Margaret found ways of getting to the American Air Force, the National Science Foundation, a range of research funding institutes in Washington, and getting money to support machine translation. That’s what her institute was for. It was there to do machine translation. They never did machine translation. They thought about the theories that would drive machine translation. And there was a huge vogue for machine translation at that point, in the late Fifties. It was all shut down after a government report in ’62, which may or may not be relevant for us. But at that time, machine translation was fresh and wonderful in America. In Britain there was such work, as well as Margaret’s eccentric unit. Russians were big in it. French were big in it. Probably other people were big in it. So machine translation, that was the first great wave. It wasn’t very successful, any of it, but it wasn’t a total failure either. And of course how it’s a huge success. By persistence it’s worked. But, that’s how Margaret got her money. And, those of us who watched Margaret, thought it was magic. I mean, how could this stocky, overweight, upper-class woman get money out of Washington? But she did. I may not have answered the question. I may have gone on, but I’ve reached a stopping point there.

[10:58] Machine translation, for the listener who doesn’t know what that is?

Translating from one language to another by machine. An old dream, the dream goes back a long way. I mean, I don’t know when the first references to it are; I haven’t done the history of it. Certainly people were talking about it long before they could do it. There’s a memo in ’46 from some US government official saying, you know, ‘We must now do translation with computers.’ Because, as you know, the Second World War essentially gave birth to computers, both here and in America, the Turing machines in Bletchley. The Americans had similar things. It’s a dispute who had the first real computers. But, computers were real, a real possibility when even they couldn't do much. They knew they were coming. And, why shouldn’t they do machine translation? That was driven by the Cold War. It was to find out what the Russians were doing, and writing, in science, by a country like Britain and American who didn’t know any Russian. They didn’t have enough people who know Russian. So the first whole aim of machine translation, for the military, was to translate Russian science, so that our scientists could know what they were doing, the Russians. That’s what the French drive was. And corresponding in Moscow, where there was huge machine translation, was to read what Anglophone scientists were doing, you know, yah. That was the drive. It wasn’t stupid work, and it wasn’t done in one way. There are several theories of how to do machine translation, which I won’t go on about, but all those theories were present in those days in essence, and they just didn’t have the computer capacity to carry them out. Certainly not the way that’s proved successful. What’s proved successful now, in the hands of people like Google, is what’s called statistical translation, whereby, to put it in one sentence, you gather enormous numbers of translations, from language A to language B, work out statistics, and just use the statistics to do the translation. No grammar, no syntax, no meaning. Just do statistics. People thought that was impossible, but it’s turned out to be right. Well, right enough. Not completely right. It will never be perfect. Margaret didn’t believe, if she knew about the statistical theory, which she probably didn’t, didn’t believe that. Margaret was a deep believer in meaning, which is odd, because Wittgenstein, to go back for a second, had been very sceptical about the notion of meaning. He thought meaning was a kind of, I don’t know, chasing, chasing a sort of ghost. Meaning was a kind of ghost. For Wittgenstein, language was really something we do, it was a performative act, it was a, a skill, it was, part of it was body and mind. It wasn’t some abstract formal business. But Margaret listened to him, but she thought meaning could be tacked down, and tacked down to a machine. And in that sense, although she, whether she knew it or not, she was on the side of the logicians. You see the logicians didn’t like Wittgenstein, because, they thought that the meaning of language did exist, and could be expressed in logic. And all you had to have was the right logic. And those people have never gone way, they’re around today. And they thought, having got the right logic of course to express the meaning of language, once you had got the meaning of language you could do translation, into the logic, out of the logic. Margaret didn’t believe in logic at all. But she did believe there was some way of writing down, in a way a machine could understand, what the meaning was. But it wasn’t going to be logic. So she was neither in the logic camp nor in the Wittgenstein camp. She was ploughing a different middle way, which other people have followed. And it’s that way I followed.

[14:17] Could you tell the story, then, of your first experiences with, or the story of first hearing about, the Epiphany Philosophers?

Once you worked in Margaret’s Language Research Unit, you couldn’t miss the Epiphany Philosophers, because they were there. And here’s the bizarre thing. You see, about half the workers at the Language Research Unit, when I say the workers, I mean there were only about, maximum, even with people who came in occasionally, there weren’t more than ten of us, so we’re not talking industry here, about half the people in EPs – sorry, in the Language Research Unit, were Epiphany Philosophers, and half weren’t. Of the half who weren’t, they were pretty passionately not. I mean, the two most famous people are the married couple, Roger Needham, who became Professor of Computing at Cambridge and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and one of the most, possibly the most powerful computer scientist in Britain, dead now, his wife Karen Spärck Jones. Both of these worked at Margaret’s CLRU. Karen got her thesis there, you know, in my time. Karen was only a couple of years older than me, although she’s now dead. And she eventually became a professor in the computing lab in Cambridge too. And they were passionately anti-EP. They didn’t approve of any of it. In some ways Karen was a woman a bit like Margaret. She was assertive, the more masculine one of the couple, tough, feminist, what we would now call feminist, although the word wasn’t used then. Abrasive. But basically nice. I mean I, Karen and I were pretty close, doing PhDs around the same time. But Karen hated the whole religious aspect of CLRU, which was the EPs. No one was pushed to going into EPs, it was just a question, were you interested. And the concrete manifestation of this was, that upstairs on the first floor of this garage, over the garage, there was a push button on a wooden panel wall, and the push button, the door opened, and behind there was a space which was the chapel. So there was a chapel on the first floor of the unit where, not in my time but before my time, I joined it in ’62 when I graduated, but, the place had been going for six or eight years then, Margaret used to have double, two services a day, Matins and Evensong, and they were always Anglicans, the EPs, really, basically. Quaker hangers-on, Buddhist hangers-on, but, underneath they were, they were Anglicans. Margaret used to have two services a day reading Matins and Evensong in the chapel. Which of course, that had died out by the time I got there, but it drove the non-EP people mad, [laughs] the idea that upstairs in their research lab, these people would take Matins and Evensong. I mean, they, they were quite cross about it. But of course they worked for Margaret, so they couldn’t attack her. They just made clear to her their disapproval.

How did they make that disapproval?

I don’t know actually. It’s a good question. You were never in any doubt what Karen Spärck Jones thought. So Margaret can’t have been in ignorance. These women, you know, one senior, one junior, both very Cambridge women, both having been at Newnham, twenty years difference in age, rivals for sort of, mm, woman power in the research unit, Margaret was clearly the boss, but, but Margaret had stranger features than Karen. I mean, Karen was in that sense a more conventional personality, half Norwegian. Her father was on the last boat out of Norway, they said, in ’40. So Karen had no difficulty telling Margaret that she didn’t approve of things she did, and Margaret was able to take people telling her they didn’t approve of her She was very, Margaret was very strange. She was both, although authoritarian and charismatic, like religious leaders tend to be, you know, all the, all the American cults you read about, you know, you, in Margaret there was some element of that, but also she had sort of, upper-class manners, and, and, almost a sort of Fabian, Bloomsbury background which said you ought to be awfully tolerant of people who don’t agree with you. So you could tell Margaret what you thought if you got her in the right mood. She was like a Japanese leader in that sense: a couple of drinks and you could tell her what you thought. And she’d take it. She wouldn’t fire you. Wouldn’t have fired anybody. Unthinkable. [laughs]

[18:21] Could you just go briefly into her Fabian-Bloomsbury background?

Well, of course I, it was long before my time. Her father was a Cabinet minister, Masterman, who was in the Lloyd George Cabinet in ‘11 that brought in, it’s the first bit of social welfare. The first pre… You know, we think of the welfare state as starting after the Second War, after Lord what’s his name, oh God, the name’s gone, you know the man I mean, the Liberal peer who, who wrote the blueprint for the welfare state in the Second World War. Sorry. Anyone listening knows his name, and I’m having an old person moment. People think that is our welfare state, but that’s not strictly true. Back in 1911 Lloyd George thought there should be some form of national insurance scheme, some sort of pension scheme for old age. Lloyd George had those ideas. The Prussians were doing it, so he’d have known the Germans were doing it. They did it first. So the 1911 Cabinet, which Margaret’s father was in, he was called Neville Masterman, he was very much in that group of liberal Liberals, not, not driven by free market but driven by the sort of principals that became the Labour Party and Fabianism, wanting to improve the state of the working classes, who brought in that. So Margaret was… And that in a sense was the foundation of Margaret’s political thought, if she had any, although, she was not a political person. Her mother was a Cavendish from the sort of, a small branch of the Duke of Devonshire family, so, her mother was very upper-class. So Margaret had these upper-class things from her mother. And so, she was this sort of strange mixture of upper-class, de haut en bas, you know, noblesse oblige, all those clichés. That, somehow in her upbringing she had met a lot of, as you did in that circle, I think she knew Bloomsbury people, I know she had met Virginia Woolf. Margaret wrote novels. Margaret had a couple of good novels published, there are some in the university library. One’s called Death of a Friend, where it refers to a Quaker. Margaret was sort of, interested in religion, even in those days. She had worked in the theatre before she married her husband, in Brighton, she said. Called it her lesbian phase. So she had written novels, she knew artists. She would paint in an amateurish way, and she had the Bloomsbury sort of, I think of, affectation of wanting to sort of, paint everything around you, you know. I said, she, she would repaint all the doors in her house with sort of, semi-abstract sort of, I can’t explain exactly. I didn’t care for it, but it wasn’t unattractive. There was something that… The doors in the house would get repainted. Most people don’t do that. I don’t mean paint all over. I mean paint things on them, you know. I like that, I think it’s rather grand. She didn’t have any particular… She didn’t have any respect for bourgeois life, that’s right. She had the upper-class contempt for bourgeois life. Exactly. So she didn’t want a bourgeois life, although it was an utterly bourgeois home. But, it was weirdly attractive for someone like me, who had never seen sort of upper-class people at it, you know, and… Of course they were much, they’d swear, they said things that middle-class people wouldn’t say, you know what I mean? They were utterly frank and, they had that, those habits that you, I now associate with Bloomsburyites, of being outrageous. Although in fact they lived utterly conventional lives, sexually and morally, you know. [21:23] Those were the Braithwaites. And they lived at No. 11 Millington Road, which was just across the street from the, 20 Millington Road, the research unit. And they lived in this bizarre kind of, commune existence. Shall I talk about 11 Millington Road?

Yes please.

Oh gosh, it was so strange. Margaret and Richard, Richard was the older husband, the Professor of Moral Philosophy. Ten or more years older than Margaret. She had been his student, which as not unconventional in those days, his philosophy student. Margaret… The division of labour was… They didn’t do housework, they didn’t approve of housework, that was bourgeois. She did the outside and he did the inside. This meant that he did the work. This slightly ancient professor of moral philosophy, he loaded the coke in the boiler and did the washing-up. Cooking didn’t really get done much. I don’t know if there was cooking even. Richard did the washing-up and did the coke in the boiler. Margaret did the outside, which meant she’d occasionally snip the head off a plant, but… But he had the worst of the deal. And that was how it was. I spent a lot of evenings washing-up with her. Because at one stage during my time in the unit I lived in their house; lots of people did. I mean, you know, stray people would come and go, you know. So Richard and Margaret lived there. They always had an au pair. But I think, cooking and washing-up was mainly done by the au pair girl, they, they were into the au pair thing. They didn’t see that as slavery. But there were caravans in the garden, there were two hideous immobile green painted caravans. In one lived Ted Bastin, who was a major figure in the EPs and will undoubtedly come up, because, for me, Ted, with Margaret, shared the kind of, genuine religious, charismatic element in the EPs. They were really the religious figures. They really meant it. They weren’t hangers-on, they, they drove it. Richard and Margaret, I mean he was like a son to the Braithwaites. The Braithwaites had two kids of their own. One of them, a daughter, was my contemporary in college. But the children didn’t play any part in the EPs, they were gone. So Ted was the grown-up son living in the garden. An unmarried physicist of, in those days, forty-ish. An eccentric, an eccentric, outlying physicist. He had some similarities in his career with Rupert Sheldrake. They were both Fellows of King’s, they had both taken an unconventional path that cut them off from conventional science. Rupert you know about from your interviews. Ted you won’t, but we could perhaps talk about Ted later and his unconventional use of quantum physics, which were important to the EPs. In the other caravan lived Margaret’s sister Dorothy Masterman, who was even more upper-class than Margaret, and wore tweeds, and was mad as a hatter. And she, she was schizophrenic. But again, I admired them so much I think, or I do now. They didn’t try and isolate Dorothy or put her in an institution. Schizophrenic sister, so we lived with her. Yeah, they just put up with it. And she was, bonkers. I mean, I’ll just say one thing, I’m sorry, it sounds absurd. She always collected the unused toast after breakfast, which was made from sliced bread, and was white, square toast out of a packet. And she took the toast. And she did this right away. She stacked it in the windowsill of the downstairs lavatory. And the downstairs lavatory had a window out onto the front. And she stacked the toast, and you can get four slices into the window. You stack it. And the pile would grow and grow and grow, over weeks, months. All old toast. And after a while, after a few months, of course the toast completely obscured the window. These piles, they were stable piles, because it was brick-like, like Roman tile. The piles would reach two or three feet in height. And then when it got too much, Richard would take all the piles and they’d be thrown away. But I mean, it was just a sign that they lived with someone who was completely bonkers. And in a way, it worried one, because, Margaret did have some features of mental disorder, but, and of course a lot of religious charismatic people do. I don’t mean like, don’t get me wrong, don’t for heaven’s sake think that I thought Margaret was mad, of course she wasn’t. But she had some of the instability and hysteria that goes with, I think, a religious sensibility, a real religious sensibility. I mean real, real thing. You know, not like most of us. And, the kind of religious sensibility that really disturbs religious people. Because when it breaks into a religion, that kind of thing, it utterly, you know, disturbs the stability of religious institutions, they can’t bear it. Of course there are some religions, especially in America, that thrive on it, but not round here. And Margaret was disturbing and disrupting. One of the things I always think about Margaret, looking back, is, she didn’t like stability, either in the research unit or in the EPs. If things were going calmly and well, she would find some way of breaking it up. It would be called, if you’re a Freudian it would be called hysteria, but that doesn’t capture it. She would find some way of stirring up the atmosphere, so there’d be rows, tension, and resolution. Because, only if that happened could she be emotionally satisfied. Again, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think of it in any way as mental disorder. I think it was just a special kind of disruptive personality, which is also a very creative personality. Which she was.

[26:24] You joined the Language Research Unit, and said that about half and half were also involved in…

Roughly.

Why did you become involved in the half that were?

Good. Yes, yes. I mean, it’s hard to answer really, without, you know, self-examination, although I’ve thought about it. [pause] My parents had no religion of any kind. I mean, I suppose they’d have said they were Anglican, Church of England, if anything. My father was a soldier, he’d have said Church of England when he joined the Army, as good you say. My mother probably would have said the same. But they never to church, and I don’t think I was, they didn’t even baptise me. So, they clearly were not even… I’ve no idea where they got married. Again, it’s sad you can’t ask your parents things when they’re dead, because I, how did they get married? I don’t know. I wish I knew. But I think, looking back, I always had a sort of religious sensibility. Not in the charismatic, dynamic sense of Margaret, of wanting to get into it, take things over, start things up, but in a more than formal sense, because, I had no formal sense of religion, because of never going to church. I mean they didn’t come up. I mean they were, churches were just buildings, you know. And school services in those days were everywhere but meant nothing. But, I know looking back, and even when we were north London, in Edmonton, I would haunt one particular drab old church down the road. I used to, it was… I’ve always had an affection for these drab, run-down looking city churches. I prefer them almost to these sort of, nice looking Cotswold cottage churches, you know. And so I certainly went there. And then, when my family broke up, my father died when I was eleven, and, he left nothing, so, my mother not only had to keep working, but she had to go away to work. She went to a hotel in the Midlands where she was a receptionist and bookkeeper. So my brother and I we were just fostered out at, I was twelve, thirteen, my brother was six, so, we were, my brother stayed with my grandmother in Torquay, I stayed in Torquay, but I was fostered out to the family of a schoolmaster, who took me in. I mean amazing act. He already had three kids. But they took me in, and my mother paid them a pittance, and they kept me virtually through my grammar school years. Which was an amazing gesture, I mean, I’m going down to Devon next week and my son and I are going to go and visit the youngest child of those people. [pause – emotional] I find it extraordinary that they took me in. [pause] But, the point of this is, they were quite religious, the people who took me in were. He was Anglican, she was a Baptist. He was an Anglican lay preacher, but of a very evangelical type, Low Church. She was an active Baptist. So, I usually went to the Baptist church in the mornings, and he rode off on his motorcycle to take services in some village Anglican church Sunday evenings. They were serious. I mean they didn’t take Sunday newspapers. They were not puritanical in the sense that, they wanted to stop people doing anything, but they didn’t drink and they didn’t take Sunday papers. But you wouldn’t have said, talking to them, they were puritanical people. They had no, of those features, none of those features. They were very very good people. So, I started going to the Baptist church where she went in Barton, Torquay. It was one of those big, lively Baptist churches. I quite liked it. And, he used to go to things like the Billy Graham, when Billy Graham came here on a mission. Must… I can easily date it from Wikipedia, but I would guess, looking back, it was around, blub-blub-blub-blub-blub. ’54, ’55, when I was in my grammar school years. And, I went down to London with him and a bunch of people. One of the… What he did on Saturday – Sunday afternoons, between the two services, was, he ran a Bible reading class in Torquay called Crusaders. I don’t know if it still exists even. They wore special little enamel badges, and they had Bible reading classes on Sunday afternoons. For boys, it was only boys, funnily enough. And, that’s what he did. I mean it was, you know, and he thought that was part of his, it’s what he had to do. And he took us down to Billy Graham in London, to one of the big things, Billy Graham would take over Wembley Stadium, and, thousands of people, enormous stuff, and, used to go forward and receive Jesus, and, I think I probably did. I think I did. And also, they’d go off into sort of, in Devon, into sort of, weekends of, evangelical weekends in marquees in the gardens of big homes, and, they were nice. I mean, I was already thinking about girls in those days, and you met girls that way, you know, I didn’t meet girls any other way. I was in a boys’ grammar school. So these were all fun. I was into it. I mean I liked hymns. I’ve always been a singer, and, I used to be a good singer. And, I loved it. And… But then, I struck out on my own, in the sense that, I didn’t go on going to their church. Although I lived with them, I moved to a, Anglican church in town, in Torquay, and became a choirboy there, and then a choir man. I’ve always sung in choirs, mm, secular and religious. And, I had a decent voice. I used to sing opera as well. And, so I used to go to that church. And it had no connection to the foster people I’m talking… And they again, didn’t mind. They didn’t say, ‘Oh don’t go to another church.’ They said, fine, go to your own, you know. Well, off you go. So I used to go to two services a week there, two services on Sunday there. I was very attached to the vicar there, a Welshman. And, he baptised me and got me confirmed there. [31:44] So I guess in that sense, yes, well I guess what I’m working up to with all this talk, it’s about me, not about the EPs, I’m sorry, but is that, I therefore became more than just a formal churchgoer. I liked it. I liked it and I miss it, and I still miss it if I don’t have it. I’m not as regular as I was, but I’m pretty regular. I mean I still like it. I, I like the Church of England. I like what it… I like the flavour of it. [pause – emotional] But that was me anyway. So I stayed in that kind of, Anglican choir man mode, essentially till I left, till I left school, in Torquay. Yes yes. Yes, no that was… So that, I mean I can’t, that’s not giving you the history of my religious opinions, just, giving you, if I had any opinions. I was just, a relatively conventional person. I mean, in those days, I went to Cambridge in, I spent a year in London between school and… I wouldn’t have called it a gap year in those days. I don’t know why. I think I did it because, a girlfriend of mine, although, in those days girlfriends didn’t mean anything reactive, but the girl who I thought was my girlfriend, from the girls’ grammar school, moved to London, and I moved to London to be near her. And therefore put off Cambridge for a year. Or maybe Cambridge put off taking me for a year, I can’t remember now, but… So, ’58/59, I spent in London. Where again, I adopted one of these kind of, Pimlico, I lived in Pimlico, I adopted one of these Pimlico dark city churches where I sang in the choir. Miserable, dark churches with few people. But I liked it that way. And, yah, and then, and then I went to Cambridge in ’59, where I became a pretty regular chapel person, sang in the choir, won the Bible reading prize, that kind of thing. It’s hard looking back, because, I’m sure your people all know this, and certainly anybody who knows the history of English religion knows, and recent contemporary religion, that people were just a lot more religiously observant in ’59 than they are now. So if you were in a Cambridge college in ’59, it wasn’t thought eccentric to go to chapel; it was quite normal. You didn’t have to go to chapel, like I the nineteenth century when everybody went to chapel because they had to. No. But a solid chunk of people still did, and thought it was quite normal. And, the whole sort of, atmosphere at a Cambridge college was, there were graces before meals. I mean, it’s part of that sort of, old formality of English life that still persists in certain places. Americans, when they come to this country, can’t believe that Parliament starts with prayers. But it isn’t because the MPs believe in anything; it’s just that Parliament starts with prayers. [vocal sound] They just keep doing it. So masters of colleges, even if they’re Jews, which they often are, still start dinner with the grace, because that’s what you do. So, there was this sort of, built into the furniture kind of form of religion in the Fifties, which is still there in the most formal sense. But now it’s more formal, and there’s much less chapel-going. Yes. It was quite normal for most people – well, not most, no, huge chunk of the people you knew, as undergraduates, to be conventionally religious, and particularly conventionally Anglican.

[34:33] Were you a member of any other religious societies as an undergraduate?

Yah. Yah. I, I slacked off, I think, at Cambridge. I worked like a dog for my A Levels, did very well. And… But when I got to Cambridge, I think I in some way or, in spite of all the move from maths to philosophy, and, I wanted to do philosophy, I wanted to get a good degree, I wanted to do it, I was interested, but underneath I was slacking off. I was slacking off in part because, as I said, Margaret was no driver. If I didn’t… The norm then was, you produced an essay for your tutor every week, in an arts subject, and I was, I had moved to an arts subject. Now, of course that was funny, because I had no experience of writing for, in an arts subject. I had come, all my sixth form had been physics and maths. I had… I had always written things, so I mean it wasn’t that I couldn’t write, I could write, I can write, I always wrote. But I, I had not done arts subjects, and therefore, didn’t have the long history of, school history, of writing essays. But that was all right, I was pretty good at it. Although I could have been a mathematicians, I could do it. But, I was with Margaret, who didn’t demand much. She demanded devotion and interest, and commitment, but not much in the way of hard work. So, my undergraduate days, as I say, were somewhat slacked off. So to answer your question, I’d done a lot of other things. I mean I, I joined the Student Christian Movement, which was the… There were two main sort of, standard Christian student organisations in those days. There must have been lots of others too. But there was CICCU, which was evangelicals, and there was the SCM, the Student Christian Movement, which was the more staid, Anglican-y one. And I joined the SCM, the more staid, Anglican-y one. And, I was around and in it for a long time. Went to their, you know, all their weekends out in mills and so on. I could have taken it over and been head of it. I didn’t because I felt guilty. Because I had been sleeping with a girl from Newnham, and, I felt guilty about that. And it wasn’t, I mean, by today’s standards the sex was minimalist, I mean, you know, but, it had enough effect on me, that I thought, oh I can’t take over a religious society. Woo-woo-woo. Nowadays I probably would, but, those days, nah, thought, can’t do that. So I turned down the chance to run the SCM in Cambridge. I’m not sure I was going to get it anyway, but, I was certainly one of the people who could have done. And, so I joined that. But I also spent a lot of time in left-wing politics, and increasingly in theatre. Theatre became my dominating Cambridge passion. I was in the, you know, in the college choir, the chapel choir, I love singing. But theatre increasingly took over everything. And that’s what I increasingly did in my life. I almost became a, when I moved to Los Angeles later, this isn’t part of this, your story, but, I became a professional actor for a while. But… And have acted recently. But, that is nothing to do with EPs. All that meant was, yes, there were other religious societies that I was attached to. But once I had got into the EPs, with, after I graduated in ’62, the other sort of things fell away, because, the EPs absorbed what sort of religious energy there was. Because, you know, the EPs, were pretty busy in those days. When Margaret was in her pomps [?], I mean, there was a lot going on, and we’ll talk about that later perhaps.

[37:45] Yes. Could you, before we go on to your memories of the first, of your experience of the first meetings of the Epiphany Philosophers, could you say a bit more about the house, 11 Millington Road?

Oh right.

Even if, even if it’s possible in your memory to take us on a, on a tour of…

Yes. Yes, it… Yes. Yes. I mean, I keep saying yes, it’s because it’s a good question. Because, it was so eccentric. It was a large sort of, sub-Lutyens, Arts and Crafts-y house, of the kind that Cambridge had, oh, quite a few of, built for dons. They, I don’t think, owned it even. I think they rented it from Lady X, whose name I forget, who had been a friend of theirs. I don’t think they ever owned it. Well they brought their children up there. They were there for many, many years. And, the large lounge downstairs that one… They were the doors Margaret painted most frequently. Large lounge, full of sort of, sofas. I think, there were bare boards on the floor, like we have here in the room we’re sitting in, because, that became a sort of, bourgeois affectation. But, she was there ahead. She had sanded boards. I think they were painted blue. And those were the door she would paint. Downstairs there was the, the lavatory by the front door where Dorothy stacked the toast. There was a scrubby little kitchen. The kitchen was small. Nowadays we like kitchens, but in those days kitchens were scrubby and small, and, you couldn’t do anything much, and, nobody had any idea of kitchen equipment, you know, or, cheffery, you know. And they, they kept things in a pantry, like we all did. They may not even have had a refrigerator, I don’t even know if they did. My family didn’t have a refrigerator. It wasn’t that strange then. They had a, the affectation that I attached later to rich people, or some rich people, which is that they were quite mean in the following sense. All food had to be finished up. I think it was a combination of sort of, the meanness that the wealthy sometimes have, but also wartime. Like me, they were wartime people, and it was part of wartime ethics that food must be finished. So anything that went in the pantry came out again. And lunch there was always on… The dining room was behind the kitchen, looked onto the garden. A very bare, I mean, a bare table, like the one we’re sitting on, but, but barer than this. They didn’t have knickknacks. That was bourgeois; you know, there were bare things. I’ll go upstairs in a minute. But, but lunch, and I would often, was often there for lunch, even, aside from the short period I lived there, but lunch consisted usually of bits of food brought out of the pantry, and the pantry was a marble shelf, you know, Richard would go and get the stuff, pass it through the hatch. Lunch consisted of bits of meat and cheese that had to be eaten until it was gone. You know what I mean? There wasn’t going to be any more lunch until [laughs] the last bits of dinner had gone from the previous day’s. I’m a bit like this myself, even now. My wife is American, doesn’t see why one should finish things up. But, that was, it was wartime, but also this sort of, thing of, you don’t waste money. And they, they were certainly comfortably off. I mean they certainly… I’m certain they had money besides Richard’s salary as the professor. I’d like to talk a bit, if you want to ask, talk more about Richard later, because…

Yes.

Richard’s also an interesting person. Not just a shadow of Margaret, so, I would like to say that later.

No. And, and he supervises your thesis.

He supervised my thesis. Yes.

Yes.

But as the years have gone on, I’ve thought more of Richard and seen him less as in Margaret’s shadow, you know. That’s later perhaps. But, go over the garden and the lunches and… They would have people to lunch sometimes. But they didn’t get much for lunch. I mean it was funny, how they would invite people to lunch but then they got very little. They got sort of, bread and bits of scraps from dinners before. But they didn’t mind, because, that’s how it was at the Braithwaites, you know, it was, it was all part of this, this… It was, again, I think it was going back to Bloomsbury, it was, healthy, spare living because your minds were on higher things. It all came from people like Keynes and so on. I mean, if your mind was on the higher – or, actually Keynes was a luxurious liver, I take that back. But, as you know, the was an element in Bloomsbury that, your mind was on higher things, and therefore, having lunch wasn’t really very important. They were not self-indulgent at all. Terrible clothes that, you know - didn’t keep the place clean, didn’t care what they ate. I think Virginia Woolf must have been a bit like that. You know, you can’t imagine Virginia Woolf setting out to a decent lunch, you know. Nah. Thinking about too much. Too worried. [42:00] Upstairs, there were two more floors. Margaret’s room, which was bizarre, because Margaret spent a lot of her time squatting on the floor, on the bare boards. She worked by squatting on the floor, and writing. She had a very dramatic art school kind of writing. I have some of it in my, I don’t have many files left, I threw away most of my papers, but, I kept some of Margaret’s handwritten papers, because, her writing as dramatic, and, I would call it art school, utterly legible, utterly dark ink. She had an aesthetic sensibility. And she liked drawing diagrams. She liked to illustrate both religion and language research with special diagrams. She was… One of her famous diagrams which appears in her religious writings is, what she called a graph theory of the Trinity. Graph theory was something sort of, she had heard of, it’s a piece of, weak mathematics. And the Trinity obviously is a difficult concept of, you know, three things, one thing, ra. But Margaret thought she had found a graph theoretic representation with lines and points of the Trinity. And she drew it into things. Then she found that some Middle Age… Sorry. Middle Aged. Some mediaeval theologian had drawn the same picture. And she was very chuffed by that, that a mediaeval theologian had drawn a graph theory of the Trinity, you know, its bits connected with nodes, and this writing on the nodes. It almost looks semi- mathematical, you know, if you know what I mean. I could draw it now from memory. So Margaret sat on the floor, writing… She never typed, she never used a computer. She could type, I’ve seen her type occasionally, but, she basically sat on the floor, writing her book. And relaxing all the time by playing patience. She loved playing patience. I’ve never seen the attraction myself, but, you would come in to see her, and patience wasn’t coming out right. You know, patience has to come out. You have two columns. If it wasn’t coming out right, she’d get quite testy. ‘The damn things not coming out,’ she’d say. You know, which I couldn’t see, why you would play cards with yourself. It wasn’t obvious. But Margaret’s room was spare, it was very much her room, her room where she did her work. And again, this is so Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, you know, the Virginia Woolf… The room of one’s own, where Margaret did her work, Margaret did her thinking. Richard had the matching bedroom on the other side of the stairs, facing the garden. And then, Ted of course, the other major figure, didn’t live in the house at all, he lived in this caravan. [44:15] But the other figure we haven’t touched on yet, who lived on the top floor, for much of this period, was called Dorothy Emmet, who you’ve almost certainly heard of by now. She of course became the founding editor of the journal Theoria to Theory. And Dorothy was an intriguing character. And, she, she lived on the second floor. And that was her domain really. Some of those had been the bedrooms of their two children, but they were long gone, and didn’t come back. I never saw the children in the house as adults. That’s very strange. Because our adult children come back all the time, but theirs didn’t . They had their own lives, somewhere else. Dorothy lived on the top floor. And Dorothy kept writing into her nineties. I mean, Dorothy was writing philosophy books at ninety. So she was a real scholar. Dorothy was a real philosopher in a way Margaret wasn’t. And the dynamic between these two women was fascinating. Because, Margaret envied Dorothy that she was a real scholar and philosopher, and Dorothy envied Margaret that she was a real charismatic figure. So they envied each other. When I say envy, I don’t mean in a bad way. I mean they recognised the virtue in each other. Each would like to have had some of that. But Dorothy was a real philosopher. She was the first, she was probably the first major woman philosopher in Britain actually. And she became Professor of Philosophy and Dean of Arts at Manchester. She never married, she had been a very good looking woman I think, but she had chosen academia, not marriage. She always used to say that as a young woman, you know, she, she had Ghandi in the back of her car. Ghandi once travelled in the back of her Austin 7, she said. She was very proud of that as a young woman, she was meeting people like Ghandi, you know, as a philosopher, and probably a Fabian, I mean, you know, she was in those political movements of the Thirties. And Dorothy took early retirement from Manchester as Professor of Philosophy and Dean, to come to Cambridge and be with the Braithwaites, and be part of this house commune. Didn’t call it their house a commune of course, that’s what we would call it now, because, you know, we use the word commune from, California history as it were. They never thought of that word. They were just people who lived together who shared religious interests. And scientific interests. Philosophical interests. But Dorothy, Dorothy was very interested in metaphysics, but in a scholarly way. So Dorothy wrote great books on Whitehead, who was Russell’s collaborator on Principia Mathematica. Whitehead was one of the great British metaphysicians, process theory it was called. So Dorothy was really a discipline of Whitehead, writing books about him. I don’t believe Dorothy had any original philosophical ideas. But most philosophers don’t. But she was just a great scholar of Whitehead and that kind of metaphysical thinking, that, nod to science, believed in science, and avoided being… Whitehead’s work was never condemned as metaphysics by the people I talked about earlier who hated metaphysics. Whitehead did a science-y kind of metaphysics that, somehow was almost respectable in philosophy. Although now it looks really out of date. But, there are still people who believe in Whitehead. He wasn’t much of a logician. He wrote with Russell, but, he could do the logic but he didn’t like it. But that was Dorothy. And, Dorothy, at the end of her life, produced these books on conversations with philosophers, which are probably one of her best works. She had known Popper and all these people. So her, her personal, and it’s like what we’re doing now, her personal reminiscences of knowing all these people, and Wittgenstein and Popper, was very valuable, because, very few philosophers do that, they don’t tell you about the people they’ve known and what they thought, you know what I mean? They do it scholarly. And Dorothy as both a scholar and a good writer. And she lived upstairs, and, she was there for years. And together they started the greatest enterprise of the piece which was the journal. And Dorothy edited it for, twenty years. She lived on and, didn’t leave that house until she went into an old people’s home.

[47:53] Do you remember the appearance of Richard’s room and the appearance of Dorothy’s room? You’ve told us a bit, I think, you’ve given us a sense of…

No, I can’t. I never went into Richard’s bedroom. No. I used to go into his study at King’s to see him, while he was my adviser, so I’d visit him in King’s, where he had a room in that great Gibbs building that runs between the King’s Parade and the river. He was a Senior Fellow and one of the two philosophy professors. He was a great man as it were. I never went into his bedroom, never had cause. Although of course, I was with them in a domestic situation, not in that house but when we went to the mill. We’ll probably get to the mill, if you’ve heard of the mill.

Yes.

Dorothy, I did go upstairs, because Dorothy had a bedroom on one side of the house, and a sitting room on the other. So, I would go and see Dorothy and we would talk. Dorothy and I were never close. I was close to Richard in a funny way, because I was his student. He wasn’t an intimate man with anybody really. Well, wife probably, I don’t know. But Richard wasn’t close to people. He had ways of holding them off, old school type. Dorothy was the same. Dorothy was warm but quite cold at the same time. I don’t think… I used to think maybe Dorothy didn’t take to me. But I don’t think… I think, looking back, that was probably silliness. I think Dorothy didn’t take to anybody. Although she was full of warm feelings, I know she was. But she lived a repressed life as a scholar. She probably never had sexual activity of any kind. A repressed scholarly life, she’d put all that part of her aside. Dorothy didn’t hug you or kiss you. Margaret did. Margaret was both emotional and tactile, and, you know, huggy. Well, you might not want it, but she was. She wasn’t afraid of contact of any sort. Dorothy and Richard didn’t. So going to… So, that left me with… I never worried about whether Richard liked me or not. I think, I’m sure Richard liked me, I mean Richard, Richard dealt with his pupils all the same way, it was all affectionate and pleasant. Dorothy, you never knew though, because… Maybe in a woman you expect, maybe this is just sexism, maybe in a woman you expect more affection and warmth, I don’t know, if you’re a man. But Dorothy didn’t have it. And yet, you know, she would have done anything for anybody. She was a kind, charitable person. And much of the fun in being in EPs was seeing her, the three, the four of them actually of course, the dynamic of the EPs was basically, Richard and Margaret, Dorothy and Ted, they were the four principals. Although there were some other sub-principals, who we may mention. Mm… We should talk about Joan, the, the working-class woman who we may get to, I don’t know. But most of the dynamic of meetings, at the mill and in Cambridge, was the struggles between Dorothy, Margaret, Ted, and Richard, and their very different take on everything, and what they thought they were doing, and what was it all about. In the end, they all would defer to Margaret in the end, she would always win. But they would put up a heck of a resistance sometimes to what she was up to. So Dorothy could, of course Dorothy could hold her own, she was a major philosopher. But in the end, she didn’t have the kind of, character and power of Margaret. Margaret’s power was, I mean, I’ve never seen anybody like her. She had that devastating character. She could reduce, you know, strong men to tears. I mean, she was extraordinary.

[51:03] When was your first EP meeting?

I can’t pin that down now. But, there were two kinds of activity. As I say, the chapel, the little hidden chapel in the CLRU, was never used when I was there. People didn’t even go in there to get away. It was just wasn’t used much. It was a funny space. Cushions on the floor for kneeling on, and, maybe a cross in the corner, but it wasn’t used. So EP meetings. I think the first ones were probably in their house. But very soon after I arrived, in fact, actually when I was still an undergraduate… I’m sorry. Before I began to work for Margaret, when I was still an undergraduate, and a student, they began to build Marion Close. You’ll hear of Marion Close if you haven’t already, I mean, because that became the building they built. And that actually became their capital. So when I talked about EP funds earlier, EPs at the end had some money, it was simply the property value, since anything in Cambridge has property value. And they built Marion Close. And so, the meetings were of two kinds really after Marion Close got going: in Marion Close, which is up on the Girton Road – the Huntingdon Road, down a side street, and the quarterly meetings in the windmill in Norfolk. Later on there were other meetings in, other eccentric places. I mean, Margaret had some extraordinary affection for Steinerism. I didn’t believe a word it. I mean, because, you know, Rudolf Steiner, doctrines of sort of, slightly mysticism and education. But Margaret always fobbed it off as saying, well no no, she didn’t believe it, I mean, but, you know, some EPs were Steiner people, and therefore, you know, we must pay them respect. So, I think once or twice we went off to an EP meeting in a Steiner school. Very odd, because, you know, Rudolf Steiner things are pretty eccentric. They may have disappeared by now. I mean they’re weird. They, they come from a sort of, clutch of nineteenth century, non-religious beliefs, but, mystically infused theories of education and society. There’s quite a few of them around, I mean I can name several of them, I mean I’m not a historian of religion, but, I know these things are around still, and still have devotees, you know. You don’t class them as religions. But they’re more than Montessori. Montessori is merely a teaching skill as it were, and a belief about children. Steiner was, on the edge of mysticism. It was almost up towards Gurdjieff, if that word means anything to you. Oh, well don’t worry. Gurdjieff was a mad Russian mystic, who had a, there were Gurdjieff cults all over the place. I knew undergraduates who believed in Gurdjieff. Mad as a hatter, I mean some Russian mystic, but, rather scary. Almost like a pre-ancestor of Scientology, if you know what that is. It almost… I say that, because, not because it was American, but because it, it was a kind of pseudo religion – pseudo, what’s a pseudo religion? A kind of religion and mysticism that involved taking power over other people through psychological techniques. You could say all religion’s like that, but some of it’s blatantly so. Scientology is blatantly so, has psychological tricks and technique. Gurdjieff was a bit like that. So, Margaret had a slight affection for these weirdnesses, not Gurdjieff, actually, but Steiner. So, we did meet in other places occasionally. But they always rest on personal relations with her. It was because she knew somebody who had a nice place to go. In that case it was rather upper class, you know, if you’ve got a nice country house, we’ll come to yours, you know. But basically, all the meetings were quarterly meetings in the windmill, and the meetings in Marion Close up the road, which, would be religious services on the upper floor of Marion Close, and the same services as we had in Norfolk. And, religious and scientific discussions downstairs. Later on, if you want, I’ll take you through the Marion Close building, because, the structure of that building was quite interesting too.

[54:44] Perhaps now is the time to do that.

Yah. Yah.

We’ll stick to the, we’ll focus on the Cambridge meeting, then we’ll move to the special quarterly meetings.

Yah. Good.

But, but to begin with, the cam meetings then. Could you take us on that tour, so we get the setting?

Yes. Yes. And they bring in Ted a lot, which is important, because we need to get Ted in here.

Yes.

And other people, but, certainly Ted, because Ted, you can’t have the EPs without Ted, Ted Bastin, who is now dead unfortunately. He died, five years ago. [pause] Margaret… A thing we haven’t talked about already is that Margaret always had this affection for religious orders. Nuns and monks. She liked ’em. And so, often the people who would come to EP meetings would be nuns and monks, through, attracted by what Margaret was doing. Margaret always thought of nuns as rather… Margaret would like to have been a woman priest, but there were no Anglican women priests. She was always part of the campaign for women priests, now over of course. But nuns therefore were, and especially mother superiors, were the kind of women priests who hadn’t quite made it. Though she liked them. And she got on well with nuns. And, monks too, but especially nuns. Better than with priests. I mean, well, we may get to this later, but Margaret always had a difficult relation with Anglican priests in Cambridge, because, Anglican priests were a bit leery of dealing with EPs, because they were clearly sort of fringe people, a bit difficult, you know, couldn’t be controlled. Weren’t part of the regular flock. And yet they couldn’t be too snooty because, Margaret was so well-connected. Margaret would suddenly pull down that she knew some bishop or something, you know, I mean it was all part of the upper-class thing, you know. I mean, it could be the Archbishop of Canterbury, you know. So she didn’t get on so well with priests, but she needed priests, because if we were going to have Mass in Marion Close, she had to have a priest. I mean she, she wasn’t a religious rebel in that sense, she was very conventional, they were Anglican services, Matins and Evensong, and there’d be Mass and Communion, you know, would just be regular, and there’d be a priest. But she had to get a priest to come and do it. It wasn’t she didn’t want to, but, she could always usually find some tame priest who would. And Rowan Williams, who became Archbishop of course, was one of those. He, he was a, he liked Margaret, and he used to come along. And did the stuff. [pause] But I brought up the nuns for the following reason. That Margaret used to… And I went with her a number of times – I went with her, I would have gone, because we did these things. She would like to have, go to services in the chapel in the garden of these nuns on the Huntingdon Road. These nuns were Anglican nuns, again it was all conventionally Anglican. In those days there were more Anglican monks and nuns than there are now, not Catholic ones. And, the nuns had a chapel in their… Their monastery was just a big… Their convent, excuse, me, was just a big, middle-class house, on the Huntingdon Road, probably a don’s house. But they had turned it into a convent. And it had a big garden. I’m working to Marion Close, you’ll see the point. And in the garden there was their chapel, and Margaret liked their chapel, and used it. Not used in the sense she could take any control over it, but she’d go to services there, and she’d… Margaret loved singing plainchant, so did Ted. Plainchant was very much part of the EPs. A lot of people couldn’t stand that, because they couldn’t read plainchant notation, which is difficult to sing. But they liked it, and they, Margaret liked singing chanted stuff. She thought it was the real thing. Which normally you associate with High Church nowadays. And Margaret did a deal with the nuns that they would sell the EPs a strip at the bottom of their garden, which was fenced off – there was never a wall, just a sort of, a simple fence – the nuns gave over for cash suppose. I don’t know where the cash came from actually. The Braithwaites maybe just came up with it. Probably didn’t cost a lot. A strip of their garden, probably, [vocal sounds], thirty feet deep, and probably, 100 or more feet wide, and it had its own, it didn’t have to go through the convent, had its own door onto a little side street called Marion Close. And it had its own big wooden doors. So you’d go through the wooden doors of this wall, into this strip of land they’d bought, which had nothing on it but a small gardener’s hut, for keeping tools. And on that land the EPs built Marion Close. And we’d actually build it. So I as an undergraduate helped with the building. They must have had an architect or a builder to do it, because, we were all amateurs, and we’d just give labour. I fell through the roof and broke and broke my ribs, and, I didn’t know I had broken my ribs till I had an X-ray many many years later, and, they told me, ‘Oh you broke your ribs.’ And I realised, I’d been falling through the roof in Marion Close. So I was up there putting tiles on the roof, and, you know, and a lot of people were helping. There must have been, you know, ten, fifteen people helping to build this thing. So it was a long, undistinguished brick building of two floors, with sloping roof, so, the upper floor was under the, under the, under the, the pointy roof. An outside staircase by which you could reach the upper floor, and an inside staircase in the centre. And again, it was all very non-bourgeois in the sense it was scruffy. Concrete floors, big fireplaces made of brick, which you could burn fires. Margaret and Ted loved, we all love fires, burning things. Always had to have a fire if we had a meeting, even in summer had to have a fire. And so, the building was divided, the staircase in the centre, where you entered through French doors from the side. And the building was divided into two halves. The slightly bigger half was Ted’s workshop. Ted’s workshop meant, where Ted would do his physics. Now of course, Ted wasn’t a practical physicist, he was a theoretical physicist, a quantum physicist, so, Ted didn’t do any physics except on paper. But Ted was a tinkerer; Ted liked cars, he liked engines, utterly practical man, never happier than when he was fiddling with some mechanism. So, Ted’s half, which is where we had the meetings, because they were laid out with the familiar sofas and lounges, but in the middle was Ted’s work bench where Ted could fiddle with things. So, meetings were always held in this atmosphere of, Ted might be fiddling with a mechanism that he was taking to pieces or rebuilding, you know, he couldn’t stop himself. Very practical man. A strange man. We’ll come to him. The other half of the building, slightly smaller, was Margaret’s. And that had a bathroom, the only bathroom, loo, shower, and Margaret’s retreat room. Margaret’s motivation for having the Marion Close was so she could go into retreat. Margaret was a deep believer in monastic retreats, you had to remove yourself from the world. I mean, you know, it’s familiar now, I mean, you can buy a thing called The Good Retreat Guide, you know, you can go off to retreats in rural places. Catholic and Anglican, orthodox. And Margaret would go into retreat. Now, this was funny, because, this meant she was unavailable to do her job, like, both directing the Language Research Unit, and indeed being my adviser when I was an undergraduate. Wasn’t around. But actually, no, you could, you could go up and see her in retreat. The funny thing about retreat for Margaret was, you could go and visit her. Which again is odd. You know, if you’re in retreat, nobody visits you. You sit there and eat boring food and pray. Oh no no, you can visit Margaret. Although the Language Research Unit people couldn’t visit her, they would never come up there, because they didn’t approve of that. But I would go and visit, you know, and, she’d, [sigh] funny. So, she did have… I say bare concrete floor, it’s not terribly fair. Margaret had a kind of, coconut matting on the floor, but it was all, again, spare and basic, and, the brick walls were never covered with anything. And, so that was it. [1:01:43] So the meetings we had were in Ted’s workshop. And they usually took place at the weekends, on Saturdays. And there were lots of them. Sometimes I think, at least once a month, and maybe more. And there were quite a few hangers-on from Cambridge of, people would come to Cambridge for the meetings, and we, we haven’t talked about some of the secondary figures. We could if I can pull them back to my mind. People in Cambridge, students like me, other people, some people from the Language Research Unit. And, some people came on a quite casual basis. I can remember, oh, is one of the very early… Eccentric people, I mean, Joyce Cary was a famous novelist in those days, wrote The Horse’s Mouth, and, his daughter was an eccentric, strange woman. She was always there. She never said anything, but, she’d like being in this sort of religious discussion atmosphere. But they weren’t meant to be pointless discussions. The EP discussions were always meant to be focused, high level discussions on the relation of religion and science, which is where we’re talking. And, their mutual relation, and their mutual influence, and how to have an original view on that. This is what Fraser tried to tackle in his essay that you’ve read. My take isn’t quite the same as Fraser’s, although, I’m not sure in this conversation we’re going to get to any clearer view than me. I won’t get to any clearer view than Fraser did, but, I don’t take it quite the way he did. Well we may get to that point later. But they were serious discussions. So, I’m not trying to make it all sound just like a, a vague chat. It was all meant to be focused. They, these people were deadly, the leaders were deadly serious. They didn’t want to waste time on chat. Richard Braithwaite was usually there, I mean, Richard was a philosophy professor, he didn’t want to waste time on chatting. He had no small talk. Never heard Richard have small talk. Margaret could do small talk, she could do anything, but, they weren’t for small talk. It must be focused. Dorothy had no small talk. There was no possibility of having small talk with Dorothy. Ted had small talk, Ted would talk about cricket and cars. But, you’ve got the idea. Some did, some didn’t. But these were serious discussions on religion and philosophy. And so was the mill. I mean, that was it, it was all meant to be focussed in sessions, and to get to some conclusion. And to think about publication. I mean I think T to T started because they thought, oh we’re thinking good thoughts here; we should write this out. We should have somewhere to publish it.

[1:03:50] How would, then, a typical meeting at Marion Close start? I can imagine you sitting around, Ted towards the middle, playing with something on his desk. How does it begin, and continue, how does this non-trivial, non-small talk start and go on?

I think they had the idea that meetings should be chaired, and that it should be shared. But my memory is that, it would usually end up with Dorothy chairing it. Because she was that kind of person. She had been a dean after all, you know, she… They wanted to keep up some formality [laughs], and Dorothy knew what it was to chair a meeting. Margaret of course had no concept of how to chair a meeting. Margaret would sit silent for a long period and then burst into things and, take ’em over. Do you down, you know. And, others would obey more or less the rules. Ted did a bit of the Margaret, but other people would obey the rules. So, rules of discussion, rules of meetings. So, basically, it was Dorothy who chaired things, because Dorothy was the conventional person. That was what Dorothy offered, a conventional link to the academic world, utter respectability, which Margaret liked, because Margaret wasn’t respectable, you know, Margaret was not a respectable philosopher. Margaret’s papers in the, I said earlier, Margaret’s papers in philosophy journals were thought extremely eccentric by philosophers. A lot of philosophers to this day, if they’ve heard of Margaret, can’t bear the fact she had papers in the Aristotelean Society, because they didn’t think they should be there. And they are odd. I mean, it’s almost worth… Well maybe, not in this conversation, but, we might talk later about there being an EP website or something. But I mean, that’s not your problem, I know, it’s my problem. But, what I’m saying is, in the EP website, which I told you I’m working on with Rupert and Fraser, and my wife is doing the webbing, I’d probably like to have a link to Margaret’s philosophical articles. They don’t have any obvious religious content, but, all her stuff links together in some funny way. And her would-be philosophy papers, in, say, the Aristotelean Society, are worth pointing to on such a web, because you can see in the quality of her mind, and her beliefs about language and the relationship to Chinese, and things like that, and it’s all, it’s all one for her really, but it’s also historically interesting about English philosophy and thought, in that, someone like Margaret could get into the Aristotelean Society and give these papers. I think you could now. I think we talked at lunch about the rise of administration and so on. And academic subjects have become more professional in the last forty years, in some ways to their detriment. So, someone like Margaret could say, not crazy things, but, extraordinarily off-the-wall things, and get them into the best philosophy journals. The Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society are, with Mind, the two most respectable philosophical sources in England – in Britain, and in the world in some ways, I mean Americans defer to them too. They have their own. But they’re not going to get into the Aristotelean Society, and not just because her husband was influential, she could do it. And, this is interesting. It shows you a change in intellectual climate.

[1:06:50] Could you talk at this moment about something that you talked about before we started the recording earlier today about Margaret’s view of professional philosophy in terms of its sort of, gender, gendered nature.

Oh yes. Yes. Well Margaret had all the features we would now associate with strong feminism. She applied that to the issue of women priests, which she thought was a scandal, she thought there should be women priests. This is interesting, because all her instincts in Anglicanism were High Church, singing chants, incense, liked all that. So, although EP meetings of course were in a sense just bear and spare, if she had to go to a church, she liked High Churches. I think. So I, I’m a High Church Anglican. But, in spite of all that, she was strongly feminist about women priests. Now, I’m sure you know enough of the history of English religion to know that’s a funny mix. By and large it’s the High Church Anglicans who fought like dogs, tigers, excuse me, not to have women priests. And they still do, around this town. My God, woo! Some of them won’t let women priests into their church yet, still. But Margaret, no no, she had this mix. High Church in performance, but utterly committed to the equality of women and women being priests, and, I think she probably thought women were in some ways more interestingly religious than men, and… I know what she meant. She never, I never remember her ever saying that. But I know that’s what she felt. I know what she means, because, if you look back at the history of religion, I mean, often the, the core of a cult has been a woman. That’s true in American modern religions, you know, you can look back at American folk religions, and find some raging woman at the core of it who spoke in tongues. I mean, it’s not unfamiliar. And so I think Margaret thought that, I think she probably thought women were actually more interestingly religious than men. She wasn’t a woman, she wasn’t a female superiorist or anything like that, and she never put men down as such. She made jokes, but, she wasn’t really like a modern feminist. She was much more like a Virginia Woolf feminist, who, just took it for granted that women were at least as smart as men, and, we should take the consequences, you know. [pause] I lost the thread I was following. You asked me something and I haven’t answered it.

About the way that, you spoke off the recording about the way in which she may have used her marriage to advance her and others’…

Yah. Philosophy. Yes. Sorry. I got onto religion and I should have been back on philosophy [pause] Margaret did modern languages at Newnham. She was a fluent French speaker. She spoke the kind of French the Queen speaks, which is both fluent and peculiar. I know this because I drove to Italy once with her and two other people in a car, and would see her speak to French farmers when we wanted to camp, and, she had this fluent French that, as I say, sounded like the Queen’s. I mean, it was totally fluent, but totally odd. Even I can tell that. [laughs] She was modern languages. And… So she only got into philosophy as a graduate student. She never got any PhD or attempted it. But, she married Braithwaite as his student, she must have been studying philosophy. And, Braithwaite didn’t want to go to Wittgenstein’s seminars, so, he sent Margaret. Margaret went to Wittgenstein’s seminars instead of Richard. Richard was already a rising young philosopher of obvious talent. Wittgenstein, I think I said earlier, threw Margaret out of the seminars because he didn’t like women, didn’t like ugly people, and he thought she was both. He was not only gay, he was, pretty anti-women, Wittgenstein, frankly. But she never held it against him, funnily enough. She was a Wittgenstein believer. Didn’t hold that against him. That again is odd, you know. It didn’t make her give up believing that he was the greatest philosopher of the century. She had obviously, I think, been hurt, looking back, she must have been very hurt by being thrown out. But that got her going, and… [pause] She never, I don’t think she ever really tried for an academic philosophy job. Because I think she knew in her heart she wasn’t qualified in some way. Well look, I mean she was, as I said already, she was the tutor in philosophy in my college, so, she must have been able to get enough respectability in Cambridge to be the Pembroke College philosophy tutor. But she never applied for a paid post I don’t think. And, she had this attitude towards… This I think was part of her anti-male sexism, and there was an element of it. She believed that men, to a greater degree, had the academic world sewn up, and it was prejudiced against her, and that, it didn’t… She, she almost believed it didn’t do her any good to be married to Richard. She thought it almost did her harm, did her harm. But I believe the reverse, I think I maybe have said this earlier today. I believe she got a lot of what she did get because she was Richard’s wife. There’s a, there’s a difference of view there. I mean, it doesn’t mean either of us could see it clearly. I mean I don’t think she would have had papers in the Aristotelean Society particularly if Richard hadn’t been her husband. And people did defer to her because she was Richard’s wife. Even if they thought she was nuts or difficult, both. The important thing behind all this is that, Richard believed Margaret was utterly original. She thought Richard was a wonderful philosopher of the old school, of the kind she didn’t want to be, as was Dorothy. But Richard and Dorothy, as first-rate British philosophers, both believed that Margaret had an original spark that they didn’t. So that was what, they deeply believed in her. Not only in religion but, but in, in artificial intelligence and computing too. They thought Margaret was on to something. And she was. I believed it too, and still do. Wasn’t able to carry it out or follow it through, but she did, she was utterly original. So, anyway, to focus back on your point. Yes, there was a tension there, she thought that academia had it sewn up for men, she would never be able to get a proper job. If she thought she’d lose… I don’t think she thought. She was able to live perfectly comfortably as Richard’s wife, on the edge of Cambridge philosophy, going to all the meetings, giving a lecture when she wanted to. So, I don’t think she had to fight. Her thing was the Language Research Unit. Which of course philosophers never took seriously, they weren’t interested, it wasn’t interesting. Nowadays things have changed. You probably know this. I mean philosophers now will pay attention to artificial intelligence, will pay attention to, even computational linguistics and, the findings, if there are any, in computers and language, but, in those days they just thought that was the most boring stuff, that was bad engineering at best.

[1:12:58] Could you tell stories in fine detail of the windmill retreat, the four times a year.

Yes. Yes. They were sort of the heart of the whole business. Every quarter. The windmill was at Burnhan Overy Staithe mill, a collection of villages called Burnham, there are seven of them on the Norfolk coast. The Trust… Burnham mill belonged to a man called Hughes I believe, who they knew. At some stage around then, and certainly since, Hughes gave the mill to the National Trust, which is, you can now rent it from the National Trust to live in. But they had an arrangement with Hughes, I think it was pre-National Trust, that they could go there. Whether they paid him or not, I’ve no idea. I don’t know about, it wasn’t discussed. The mill was this sort of, tower mill, I think five floors, with a cap on, with sails, and the bottom was a… The rooms were all circular of course. We slept on various tiers going up. There wasn’t much privacy, because, there were stairs all the way up so we had to walk through every circular floor. The very top floor was the chapel. Right under the cap was the chapel where the services were twice a day. Plus Mass occasionally. They tried to have Mass during the week-long retreat if they could, if they could find a priest. Not always. The ground floor was the comfy… Again, a sort of, I can only describe it as the same sort of, you know, anti-bourgeois, Bloomsbury comfort, comfort but no, no bourgeois style, no cleanliness, no, no polishing of anything, you know, no knickknacks. It was all, just old-fashioned sofas, you know what I mean? It was, functional. High thinking. So, we always had our meetings siting in that big lounge. There was a, a kitchen and bathroom, Spartan bathroom, I mean, taking baths wasn’t any fun there. Spartan bathroom and loo, only one loo for the whole mill. And kitchen off. And there was a whole rota of, washing-up and cooking, that was all shared like a commune should. Anyone could come to the mill who wanted to come. I mean there was no… Margaret had to say OK, but she never kept anybody away as to my knowledge. So I mean there’d be, probably twenty people. Cooking and washing-up all shared. You know, meals on the big table in the lounge, the biggest circular room. And then when the meals were cleared away, we’d sit down and have these sessions. But we tend - we didn’t work in the afternoon, so afternoons were either snoozing or healthy walking. You know, lots of walking, down to the beach. Again, all part of the healthy Bloomsbury thing, you know, exercise. Very British sort of country life, of those days. New to me, I mean I… What you have to remember from the background I’ve told you - this is all very new world to me, although after having been at Cambridge for three years I was getting used to it. [pause] And there were sessions. They would perhaps sometimes give a topic label to the whole mill. I can’t remember now, I mean, I could dig down and find it, find things, possibly, I’m not sure. I mean… But it was always religion and science, and… For example, they might decide to focus on Ted’s theories of physics for a while, which was funny, because, most of us didn’t know much about physics, and Ted’s views on quantum physics were extraordinary. And, they’re more respectable than they were, we might talk about that later. But, not, most of those people were not competent to have a discussion on the nature of quantum physics. [pause] [1:16:28] A character I haven’t mentioned so far… I mentioned the four as the core of the thing, Dorothy, Margaret, Richard and Ted. But there were other people who were very, had been around for a long time, and were very… The Parker-Rhodes couple, Fred and Damaris Parker-Rhodes were pretty important. And, Joan, and, sorry, Joan’s last name is going out of my head. Joan was very important. Oh Lord, I know Joan’s name perfectly well. She’s dead. All those people are dead now. In fact everybody we’ve talked about is dead. Joan was a working-class woman, cockney accent, overweight, never married, was a lesbian I think, but that didn’t come up. I wouldn’t think sexually active. Very religious. Quite unsatisfied with conventional religion. She again thought Margaret had, had something of a truth to offer, and followed her. The Parker-Rhodeses were a much more complex couple. Fred Parker-Rhodes was in a sense, you could say the main theoretician of the Language Research Unit. He worked upstairs, right outside the chapel door, with his dog. He write the same time every morning, went home exactly at the same time every afternoon. Walked through the Botanical Garden where he was a Fellow, was allowed to pick flowers. Fred was a sort of upper-class Scotsman, English accent. By training, he was a statistical mycologist of the statistics of fungi. But he was an absolutely, insatiable polymath. We thought he spoke about twenty languages. He said after the first ten it got easier. He taught himself a great deal of mathematics, and much of what Margaret knew about interesting mathematics, like graph theory, and things like that, she had got from Fred. Fred wrote an extraordinary range of papers and notations and, he became the, he became the theoretical underpinning of both Ted Bastin’s work in quantum physics and the underpinning of quite a chunk of the language theory work as well. He believed in graph structures and could draw graph structures and do algebraic manipulations of graph structures. He invented an extraordinary technique. He typed everything, unlike Margaret who didn’t type. Fred typed everything, he typed endless papers. Put them in drawers. He said once that he had written a history of the world because he wanted to know about the history of the world so he wrote a history of the world. Stuck it in a drawer. Fred invented a typographic originality I thought was brilliant. Mathematicians love having symbols, as you know, and they sometimes run out of symbols, because Greeks, and the Greek alphabet’s got twenty- seven letters or whatever it is. So Fred would advance the carriage of the typewriter half a space. He’d type a letter, say capital B, but he’d advance the carriage half a space, half a space, type another capital letter, say A, and you would achieve a character which was the letter A typed over the letter B, but not right over, half over. And he’d consistently use original characters like that. They looked like a form of crazy Hebrew. He’d use characters like that in his mathematical papers, you know. I mean, extraordinary man. Extraordinary man. I, I did an obituary essay for him which some people have liked on the Web. Because he, he was an extraordinary, original man. What his religious views were, we never quite knew. They were both Quakers, he and his wife. His wife was a classic sort of, puritanical Quaker, who didn’t really approve of Margaret, and thought Margaret had too much influence over her husband Fred. But came to everything anyway. Fred was a, a relaxed religious Quaker. Whether he had any firm religious views or not, I don’t know. He certainly clung tightly to the EPs. But he never to my… And he went to all the services. But he never to my knowledge expressed a religious view of any kind, although he may well have had them. He may well not - he may have been a sceptical atheist, it doesn’t matter. He found that atmosphere to be the discussion he wanted to be in, you know, when… There was no test of being there; anyone could be there. I’m never certain Richard Braithwaite believed anything either, or, I think, he was an, he was an observing Anglican from a Quaker family. They didn’t make professions. You didn’t know, and you didn’t speculate, we didn’t speculate much. Some you knew, I mean Dorothy and Margaret, Joan. It was the women you knew; it was the men who were more mysterious. Yah. [1:20:50] So, the Parker-Rhodes were important, because, if, say, we devoted a mill session to Ted’s physics, Ted’s physics, Fred would be vital, because Fred had provided the original algebra that underpinned Ted’s theory of quantum physics. And some physicists would come along. There was a man called Clive, oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m showing several dementias today. Well, especially on people’s last names. There was a famous professor of physics in London. He was a proper professor of physics, unlike Ted. And he was a devotee of Fred’s theory of physics. And he would come. He was secretary of the Prayer Book Society, so he was a very conventional Anglican. But he and Ted were part of this fringe physics movement. To put it in a nutshell, it was a belief that quanta were in some sense cybernetic entities. The quanta were not to be understood simply as physical entities, like, much more atoms, which is what a lot of people think they are, which they’re not. Quanta of light, you know, quanta are the particles of light. But they also, as well as being particles, you know, waves, they display wave phenomena, the duality of quantum theory, they can appear both as waves, as particles. One of the great mysteries of quantum theory, you probably know, is the dual slit experiment where the particle appears to go through both slits, which it can’t. So it must be a wave. But it is a particle. [vocal sound] But Ted had a different theory, which is that quanta are not either waves or particles, but are basically computational constructs. They’re essentially cybernetic. He actually said the phrase, that quanta were self-organising systems, whose nature could be probed with an algebra that you can compute over on a machine. And, so Ted was in the Language Research Unit. He didn’t do work on language at all; he was a sub-part of CLRU, which was quantum theory and computing, not language and computing. But, Margaret said that was a respectable part of the Language Research Unit, so what, you know. And Ted produced giant computer programs that used to run on the main Cambridge machine, computing over his theory of quanta. And so we had discussions at the mill on what the implications of this theory were. But the funny thing about, well two anecdotal things about this are important. One, the computer lab at Cambridge used to treat Ted’s programs as a joke, because they never ended. So they’d take the tape, they were tapes in those days, paper tapes, they’d take the tape off the shelf and run it again when there was nothing else going on on the computer, you know. They’d run it at night when there was nothing else going on. Because Ted’s programs would run forever. I’m not sure they ever finished. That was one interesting fact, I thought. But the other, more important, fact is that, Ted’s views on quanta look much more modern now than they did then. There’s a whole… Well, I go to meetings here in Oxford on it. Not that I know much about it. But there’s a whole world now called quantum information theory, which is both, two things at once. It’s both a theory of, could quanta be the basis of a different kind of computer, because they could store information in a different way if we could get the information back; but also, at the same time, they're physical theories of, is the fundamental structure of the universe not solid stuff but information? That is seriously discussed now by physicists. I mean, I don’t quite know what it means, but that’s where Ted was. His claim that quantum information objects, and he said that in 1965, I mean, that’s fifty years ago, and people are now producing that as a novel idea. Ted was saying that fifty years ago. Ted was extraordinarily original. He produced a book of essays… There were other physicists who believed along the lines, Born, Max Born was one. Not Max Born, David, David Bohm, David Bohm. Got the name wrong. David Bohm in London thought along the same lines. And they produced a Cambridge book about that time called Quantum Theory and Beyond. Long out of print. I’ve got a copy. But that now looks way ahead of its time. So, it’s important to make this point, that, Ted wasn’t a mad scientist. He was rejected by scientists, but, time has vindicated him. His theory of the universe as consisting of information, now looks possible if only we knew what it meant. What that had to do with EP religion isn’t clear, but on the other hand, it sort of suggests, I mean, if the universe doesn’t really consist of, [knocking on table] tables, but the whole universe is an information construct, that does have sort of implications for religion. The trouble is, no one knows what they are. But, you can see how some theologians would seize on that and think, whoa, it’s going our way matey. Because, you know, the thing theologians are in a way most afraid of is, the world just consists of lots of solid stuff, and it’s as boring as that, and they’ll go on forever, and that’s boring. The idea that the world consists of information is, reeeee! [celebratory noise]. You see the drift. And Ted was there. Ted was at that. Margaret drifted with it, because she liked what Ted was saying. I don’t think she understood it, but then neither did I. The only person there who have possibly understood what Ted was saying, of the core EPs, was Fred Parker-Rhodes. Because as I say, he did the algebras that supported his computations. So those are the Parker-Rhodeses. [1:26:05] Joan I’ve talked about, was a powerful figure in debates. She was a sort of, loud-mouth cockney who never minded offending Margaret in saying what she said. Maybe by the end if the afternoon I’ll remember what he surname was. I feel guilty I don’t. Rupert may remember, in his conversation with you. And I can retrieve it, I know I can. But they were important people in that they were not the key four, but were just clustered round them. There wasn’t any explicit hierarchy. I don’t think we had, did we even have a president or secretary? I don’t think they had any roles. I think that would be too middle class. Later on we did. I mean I ended up as the last President of the EPs, but by that time was a joke. Because once Margaret and Ted had gone, the life had all gone out of it, and that’s, we’re talking now, ten years ago. And it was kept going towards the end, we might get to this towards the end, simply by spending some of the remaining money on promoting Ted’s physics. We’ll get to that perhaps. That will be the sort of closing chapter maybe. [1:27:00] But, so… Can I say one anecdote about the mill that I…?

Mm.

My wife knows this well, because, [laughs] I only have to say the word ‘delicious fish skins’ and my wife knows it’s this anecdote coming on. Richard Braithwaite, Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge, this utterly distinguished man, but also a wartime man who didn’t think you should waste food. I, sitting at dinner in the mill pushed a fish skin under the table towards the Parker-Rhodeses’ dog, who was called Shep. I can remember the dog’s name but… Towards Shep. Richard Braithwaite saw what I was doing, and said, ‘Don’t do that!’ H said, ‘Delicious fish skins.’ Richard, the Professor of Philosophy, not a young man, and not a nimble man, a heavyweight man with thin legs, gets off his chair, gets under the table. Fights the fish skin off the dog. Brings it out, and puts it on his own plate and eats it. His compulsion not to have food wasted on dogs extended to getting under the table and fighting the dog for a fish skin, which, I mean I just find it inconceivable, if I hadn’t sat there and seen it. And the phrase ‘delicious fish skins’. Oh God. Sorry. End of, end of… I can’t… [1:28:13] Oh. The key fact about the mill I haven’t got to, sorry, can I just say…?

Yes, please. Yes, continue to talk both about the, the sort of internal geography of the mill and what happens there.

OK. The key piece of the mill I haven’t described, which is crucial, is the core. All I talked about is meals and discussions. But, discussions were important. But the key thing really were the services. Well, from Margaret’s point of view I think. Matins and Evensong upstairs in the, thing. We’d gather at certain times of day, no bell was rung, but you knew what the time was. Morning and evening. And, of course, if there’s one thing that outsiders know about the EPs, who have any acquaintance, is that they dressed up. This is known to outsiders, and thought to be ridiculous. Well of course it isn’t any more ridiculous than churches. I mean, priests up, you know, choirboys dress up. So what? But, they had developed this cult – cult, cult. They had cultivated this method, they had ordered these albs, and everybody wore the same white clothes. It was mean to be democratic. You’ve heard all this probably from Rupert or elsewhere. Is what I’m saying new to you, or…?

This is excellent. Yes, keep going.

OK. OK.

In as much detail as you remember.

Yeah yeah, sure sure. [laughs] It’s not difficult to tell, there’s nothing embarrassing about it. I was so used to it at the time, it seemed quite conventional, but, looking back, it looks a little odd. So they ordered albs. Albs are simple, white, long-sleeved, neck-to-floor garments with a single button. You tie them with a white rope round the side. And you wear a collar. A collar is a thing with a coloured band. It’s exactly like priests wear in the Anglican Church. You put it over your head, you tie it under your arms, you tie it, then you… And when you’ve put your alb on, you pull it down, so it forms a coloured collar round your neck. It’s quite nice. And… But everybody had to wear these. So we had lots of them. So whenever we went to the mill, they had to be transported there, because they didn’t live there. They were used at Marion Close as well, for the services there. In a minute I’ll come to the transport to Marion Close, because that’s quite fun too. So there’d be morning and evening, Matins and Evensong. Oh, and Margaret liked Compline too. So sometimes there was Compline. Compline is the last of the monastic daily offices. It’s the one before you go to bed. Compline’s rather nice actually. It’s got, it’s got nice bits of the Bible. It’s got that wnderful bit about protected in the night from the, oh I don’t know. The lion, the lion roar, it’s about seeking whom he may devour. It’s really scary stuff for kids, you know, you know - you need watching for that to keep you safe at night. Complines are really good services. You know, the monastics had a, a series of offices. Matins, None, Terce, Compline is the last. Sext. They were named after the hours. You know, None is nine o’clock, Sext is six o’clock, Terce is three o’clock. Monks are always getting up at all hours of the day to have services. But no, I wouldn’t do that, but, sometimes you’d have Compline after Evensong. She didn’t just decide it. I mean it was sort of, the group decided, but Margaret knew what she wanted. They wore albs, and they had the two services, kneeling on cushions. Nobody leading it particularly, it sort of led itself. But the key thing about it which is, a bit I remember most distinctly, is, we had a printed sheet called chapter of faults. I think Margaret devised this. I assume. I never asked who had devised it. I would bet it was Margaret. And chapter of faults was a, a sort of, set, a reading where everybody confessed as a group, just like general confession, Matins. Boring. Ordinary. But, here’s the good thing. In the gap in the middle, which was the main thing, everybody in the room was supposed to confess their faults in the previous twenty-four hours. And in that sense, that does have some of the sort of features you associate with American cults and so on, you know. It was a good idea. It wasn’t stupid. Because what it meant was that, a group of people living together, highly-strung people, weird people some of them, living together in that tight community, treading on each other’s toes as it were, pissing each other off, having a thing where you apologise each day for what you’ve done isn’t a totally crazy idea, because it, it gets things out in the open. But, it was more than that. It was, one did suspect that, and quite often Margaret was manipulating it, to get at somebody . Or, perhaps someone was trying to get at Margaret. It doesn’t, it could be, although, she was the more dynamic person. But, there were special ways in which people would confess their faults so as to implicate others. None of these were serious. Things like, finishing up more food than you should. I mean, we’re talking, the bar’s low here, do you know what I mean? [laughs] We’re not talking big stuff, there’s no, there’s no sort of adultery or murder in this. But it was quite funny, looking back. I didn’t think it was funny at the time. But it wasn’t that, I mean don’t get me wrong. I could tell this story and make it sound like an atmosphere of fear and terror. That’s not true at all. Nothing bad could happen, there were no punishments. Nothing happened. There was nothing terrible about anything in the EPs. [1:33:00] Margaret’s rages could be terrible. Margaret might not speak to you for a day. Margaret could be awful, but she didn’t attempt to do anything terrible to people. I mean to say, she never fired anybody from the lab. Never threw anybody out of the EPs. The worst you would get was, Margaret in a rage. Of which she was completely aware, of the nature of her own rage and moods. She, in some sense she was an artist in her moods, do you know what I mean? So… I mustn’t give the impression that this is some sort of terror. If anybody was terrified by this, they were pretty weak characters, you know what I mean? They, they really couldn’t take it, you know. Anyone who could take it, could take it. There is… I would generalise, and my own first wife, who died later, English wife, she used to come along, and, she was a pretty tolerant sort of person, I mean you know, she could take it. But you had a general feeling that, if there were tensions, Margaret didn’t always get on with the wives of the men in a group. And, this is funny, because of course, it sounds like anti-feminism. I mean Margaret ought to have… But Margaret had a history of not backing women. I mean, this was said about Karen Spärck Jones too, that, it’s said about a lot of famous academic women I could name, they’re not very good at supporting women. And this is very weird. It’s almost as if there’s some element of, I’ve made it, so should you. I’ve suffered, so should you. In the EPs though I think and extra element, that, I didn’t have any great insight at the time, but I think I have it now, I think it was likely that the wives of men there probably somewhere, at some level, resented the hold that Margaret had over their husbands. Margaret clearly had a hold over these men. I mean not exploited or sexual - no, no, no but they were fascinated by her. Not a good-looking woman, I mean this is not sexual. The wives must have, I believe, I never discussed this frankly with my wife, because, there was never any intention about it, but, I believe that deep down Margaret could have this hold over people, men or women or, animals, and that some people probably resented an alienation of affection, and I think that was an element in the tensions at the mill. Yes. And for Damaris Parker-Rhodes, the wife of Fred who was the genius of quantum algebra, I’m sure Damaris’s hostility to Margaret, which she pretended sort of, was aesthetic or religious, was in fact a sort of, fact that she thought her husband was sort of, Margaret’s lapdog, and, would do whatever job Margaret gave him. Yah.

Would he?

Well, I mean she didn’t humiliate Fred . Fred was a passive character, who never wanted a fight, never wanted to argue. He would, he would… No, he didn’t argue. He, he would state his views, but he never argued. And he didn’t have philosophical talents, he was a mathematician really, and art. But, Margaret used to use him a bit shamelessly in the lab, because, the Cambridge Language Research Unit, because Fred would assist in all projects because he had this wide ability to see abstract structures in any field, and try to offer something. He was a positive man. ‘Yah, I’ll do an algebra for that,’ do you know what I mean? Whether you wanted it or not. My first job there was on syntax, I dropped it after a year, but, Fred had provided a very complicated graph theory of syntax, to how to program parsing language on a computer. It doesn’t really matter, but I’ll… But, so, yah, that was Fred. [1:36:15] There’s one other element about the mill I haven’t touched on. Can I?

Yes.

OK. Well part of the ceremony which was such fun, was preparing for the mill. Because Ted, as I said, was the practical man. Ted had a range of bizarre vehicles. And, driving to the mill was crucial. I mean we, we could all have gone on a train. No, no no no no. We had to go in a convoy, like a funeral procession, of cars. And all the stuff had to be transported in a trailer. Stuff meant all these robes, all these hymn books, all these prayer books, all these chants for the services. Bring the extra stuff for the kitchen, maybe food. Food. Food, a lot of food. Didn’t want to shop while we were there. That was wasted time. So, Ted had a trailer, an ordinary, two-wheel trailer that you put on the back of a Range Rover. But what was interesting was, the cars Ted had. Ted was a car man, loved cars. So he had an Austin Healey, which was an old sports car of those days, a wonderful, dramatic, beautiful British car. He used to let me drive it all the time. I mean, he wasn’t selfish. I mean, he let me drive his Austin Healey for weeks when he drove something else. But the big vehicle he had that went to the mill was called Alcuin. Alcuin was a unique thing. They were built by Humber in the Second War as desert staff cars. Cars, painted khaki, to transport generals and the general staff across the desert. But what they were, looking back, they were the origin of the Range Rover. They were exactly the shape of the Range Rover. But khaki. And built out of much cruder looking parts. But the same four-wheel drive, you pulled a lever up, and it went into four-wheel drive. And they really were, they really were Range Rover built by a child mechanic in 1940. You know what I mean? And Ted had two of them. One for spare parts. And, so Alcuin pulled the trailer, and… [referring to microphone] I think I’ve messed this up, sorry, I can’t put it back. No no, I’ve got it. Alcuin pulled the trailer. So Ted was the gang master, the route master. So you had to turn up several hours before you left Cambridge, at No. 11 Millington Road, and Ted supervised the packing of the trailer. And this is all part of the ritual of leaving, every quarter, the ritual of leaving. I know it sounds silly, me describing it, but it was huge fun. It was an adventure. Every quarter was an adventure. And we’d have a special route, which wasn’t the big road route, we had a special sneaky route, to go on the small roads, led by the staff car, great khaki thing. If you can imagine a Range Rover sixty years old, seventy years old, made of crude looking armoured plate, pulling the trailer, followed by maybe eight cars. And we slowly progressed. I think we’d stop in some transport café. Again, I would have stopped at a decent restaurant myself now, but they didn’t. They stopped for a sandwich in a transport café. Because, we didn’t care about food really. And it took a long time to get there, quite slowly. And we arrived at the mill with this. And then there was the unpacking. [1:39:05] But, going to the mill itself had a ritual flavour. A thing I haven’t mentioned already, that is probably more important for the core of this discussion, which is that Margaret… I haven’t touched on this before; I’m sorry, I’m just moving on, but I’ll just put this footnote in. And I haven’t touched on it. A core belief of Margaret, and she said this, it isn’t a secret, was that ritual and religion was not accidental. We all know that religions all have rituals. High Anglicanism is pretty big on it, so are the Catholics, and, Baptists less so. But Margaret thought that ritual, and especially singing, are not accidental. She believed that the origin, or the source. the seat, of religion in humans, is partly biological. And therefore, rhythm, rituals, singings, performances, dances, we didn’t do any dancing, but all these things were not tack-ons to religion. They were in some ways the heart of it. So there were days when you didn’t think that Margaret thought that religion was about transcendental claims about the universe at all. It was really about human biology, that going through certain kinds of ritual was good for you. Now of course, experiment, as you know, since then has turned out that she’s right, I mean, you know, this is good for people actually. But, that’s not all that consoling, because it doesn’t make claims for religion any more true; it just means it’s a way of living longer and being healthier. But that was very close to one of Margaret’s important things. So all this transporting of stuff to the mill, and all the capering about in the mill, wasn’t just tack-on for Margaret, or fun, it was, that’s what religion’s about, and the Church of England should be about. [pause] Is this, are we doing the right stuff, or…?

[1:40:50] Yes, this is excellent. Thank you.

OK.

Could you say more about how Fred Parker-Rhodes’s wife in fact expressed her opposition to Margaret, and then, more about your theory about what that, what was actually going on.

Well I’m not sure I can say more than I did. [pause] Damaris was a stiff, puritanical woman. Basically nice, like everybody was. Generous, charitable. I don’t think there were any nasty people there actually. They all had their quirks, but I wouldn’t say anybody was nasty or evil or… Evil. There aren’t many evil people are there? There certainly weren’t in this lot. But on the other hand, they had all the usual neuroses of the English middle classes and… So Damaris was a stiff, puritanical and thin woman, and I don’t think liked the role her husband had at either the Language Unit or in the EPs. But on the other hand, she was a very religious person. And she thought she should be there. She didn’t go around saying, ‘I shouldn’t be there.’ I mean she had views on how the EPs should be. An element I haven’t brought up perhaps is that, although the Anglican, although the EPs were in form very obviously Anglican, eccentric Anglican, largely High Church Anglican, they always attracted a bunch of Quakers. Because Quakers are a funny bunch, because they don’t have any ritual of their own at all. I mean it makes it easier for them to latch on to somebody else’s. They didn’t have any rival ritual. Quakers just sit there, you know, in… And the chapter of faults where people confess was very Quaker, I mean Quakers just sit there quietly and then say something. So that all fitted. There have always been… And Richard Braithwaite, the husband, he came from a famous Quaker family, the Braithwaites, the north. He went to Bootham School, which is a famous Quaker public school. So, there was always a Quaker element in the EPs. And Margaret respected Quakers. She didn’t think they talked a lot, and they were deep, you know, she liked that. And they also attracted Buddhists in the same way. We’ve always had Buddhist hangers-on. And, when we ceased to use Marion Close, it was rented out to the Buddhists in Cambridge. So, Damaris wasn’t anti the EPs. I think there was this, I can’t call it jealousy, because that’s too silly. Jealousy sounds like sexual jealousy, which there’s no element of. It was more a power thing. That she thought Margaret had the power, and Frederick was too under the, under Margaret’s hold. Never said this, this is me saying this, but I’m quite convinced I’m right. And Damaris resented that, because Damaris was the wife and she should have the power if anybody did. Frederick was a very malleable man who wanted a quiet life, a quiet life where he could get on with his work, and think. Utterly eccentric, utterly intellectual man, one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. We used to joke about Fred that, if you asked him if he was hungry, he’d look at his watch. You know, his hunger depended on what time it was. He once came back from a funeral to work, and I said, you know, ‘How was it Fred?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘very satisfactory. Very satisfactory.’ Fred didn’t say the things you automatically expected. He was eccentric and weird. Deeply learned, twenty languages, knew everything. Modest, quiet, quiet lifer. But, Damaris wasn’t. As I say, she was a small, irritable, itchy person. And so that was really… And she would, sometimes in meetings, burst out when she couldn’t take it any more and sort of, say, ‘Margaret, this isn’t the way to do things,’ or, ‘This is an absurd discussion.’ And, Margaret would tolerate it, and, if she disagreed with it, she might have a row, but, you know, they might be non-speakers for twenty-four hours. But, again, the nice thing about them was, they had ways of dealing with that. Nobody really ever stalked out. You know, they, they had ways of managing aggression. Looking back, I admire that enormously. So, in that sense, Damaris was the most vocal and senior of the wives of the men who took part. So, that’s why it’s easy to seize on her. A lot of the wives were younger, like my own, who didn’t burst out, but may have felt some of the same things as Damaris.

What did your wife say about the group?

Oh well she didn’t really. She thought… My wife was a nominal Anglican. I don’t think she was terribly religious, really. But she, she liked it, and it was all part of social life. But she liked the people. She was a good woman who, she was a doctor. Died in Africa of a thing she got from a patient. She liked the people. I mean, she thought they were fascinating, and was intrigued by them almost as specimens. Because they were, very very very interesting people. And they were a lot more fun than most people. You never knew what they’d do next. I mean, crazy as hell. They weren’t crazy, no no. They were just interesting. Interesting and complex, and, very complex creatures. Yes.

[1:45:25] And across the two places where discussions were held, are there, are there particular discussions, or, particular themes returned to that stand out in your memory?

Yes. Well, and by the way, I mean, either on the website I’m engaged in with my wife, who you can hear in the corridor, or, some other way, I would like to give you a copy… I’ll have to put it on a USB really, because it’s too big to email. But I’ve got this digitised form, I’ll show it to you in a minute, when we stop, of the first EP conference, which they published in soft cover in, before my time, ’54. But that alone gives you a very clear view of what they talked about. Because it didn’t change very much. There are the same things there of, the nature of monasticism. But again, always asking questions like, what’s the biological basis of monasticism, what purpose does it serve? Why is it important? They came back to that a lot. There were a lot of monastics there, amongst some nuns. Is it a special form of human life that has a value, as opposed to just swearing off sex, and not eating much? Does it have any value for the mind? Is fasting good for the mind? Margaret believed in fasting. Again, a lot of recent physiologists confirmed her view. I mean, there are reasons to believe that’s right. So what is the life function of religion? And it came back to that. But the core thing, and this, Fraser touched on this in the essay that you know about, the core issue was, and they’d come back to this always, and hence the title Theoria to Theory of the journal, that’s what the title means, they believe that there was a contemplative tradition, at least in the East, called theoria, a Greek word, a contemplative tradition in the Greek philosophers and fathers of the Church, which could put people into a state of mind where, the insight into the nature of things. And that insight into the nature of things could then be translated into, extend into scientific terms. So, they were interested, like any sane person is, in the nature of scientific creativity. But, you know, I’m sure your listeners will, readers if this is transcribed ever, will know the classics. I mean so much of scientific discovery has come from amazing insights. I mean the great thing are, Kekulé and the carbon ring, you know. Kekulé sees the, the uroboros, the snake swallowing its tail. And at that moment he realises how the carbon ring is constructed. So he sees the image of the snake, then he wakes up, if he’s asleep, and he goes off, and he describes the carbon ring, which solved a great mystery as to how the carbon ring in chemistry could be constructed. It was a ring. They hadn’t thought the ends connected. Because the snake swallows its tail. And, so, that is a classic and, there have been a whole lot of books, I mean nothing to do with religion, on what is the nature of scientific insight. And we know that the greatest scientists often achieve their insights in bizarre ways. I mean, it doesn’t come from, you know, it doesn’t come the way the layman thinks. Some of it’s weird. So they really, the EPs were sort of, wanting to think that that process, which is real, was somehow connected with religious insight, that religious insight was a different way of looking at the universe, and seeing the nature of the universe. Which could lead to science. That meant that they weren’t in any way associated with the kind of cheap discussions we’re all familiar with, from the traditional way, which is, a scientific explanation versus a religious expression. They weren’t going back to the kind of nineteenth century thing of, you know… Well, the crudest form, skip the nineteenth century, the crudest thing is modern America, where you have creationist schools and evolutionary schools, you know, and, one mustn’t be taught in the same high school. And of course this is the deepest nonsense and deepest madness. One way out of this is what the modern Pope has come round to, saying, ‘No no no, there’s no clash. These are, all alternative explanations are the same thing.’ That’s not completely satisfactory either. Because, how can you have two completely different interpretations of the same thing? It doesn’t make sense. I mean, the science is clearly the explanation. So, [vocal sound]. So the EPs weren’t like that. The EPs were quite, were all, either scientists, or they believed in science. They thought science did indeed have explanation. [1:49:32] What made them differ from a lot of scientists was, two things I think. One is, where the nature of scientific creativity comes from, and could that come from religious insights? The other thing, which I think, we did discuss this. I mean, this in a way was buried in Ted’s work. It’s very much the sort of, way I think, if I ever think about these things any more, which is that we see a snapshot of science now, the science we see the snapshot of now, would have been inconceivable to our ancestors of 300 years ago. If you had shown Newton 200 years… mm, 300 years ago, what modern science was like, he’d have been astounded. He couldn’t have believed that that’s where it would go. I mean he, he’d have caught on, because he was smart. But it had no relation to the world he thought it was. So, we’re still in early days. So, I think, one EP view, not often made concrete but you will find it in EP writings, is that we have no idea what scientific explanation will turn out to be. My hunch is, it’s going to be a hell of a lot weirder than we think. Hence, Ted’s stuff on, is the fundamental basis of matter information theoretic? I mean, you know, even fifty years ago Ted was one of the very few people who could contemplate that sentence without thinking it was mad. But, in other words, it’s a quite different attitude from the other attitudes I was contrasting it with, which is that, we don’t know what science will be like, we don’t know what the ultimate structures of the world will be. We should be open to all kinds of stuff. It may turn out to be very, very weird. That may turn out to support religious attitudes, or it may not. But it’s sure going to be weird. One of Ted’s most famous things was the – not famous for Ted of course, he didn’t think of it, but a thing he would come back to in conversation, was, do you know… Rutherford I think was the first person to say. Do you know this thing about, I’m not sure I can state it well, because my physics is childhood physics. I think I can. The extraordinary connections between the very big and the very small. Are you aware of what I’m talking about?

Mhm.

Yah. And it’s this, and Ted used to go on about, the magic number 137. There is some extraordinary ratio in the universe between the constants of the world of quantum physics and the world of cosmology and the universe. And the constants that appear in the equations, ought, in common sense, to be unrelated, because, the physics of the cosmos and the future of the universe in a sense, on the face of it, has nothing to do with the physics of quantum physics of the very small. But they do. They are intimately related. And some of the, some of the functions are directly related to particularly the cosmological constants. And this number 137 keeps appearing. And Ted, [laughs] Ted used to go on to that. I mean I don’t think, you can’t draw any conclusions from that, nothing follows, but how very odd. All part of the idea that, the universe is weird and will get, well it won’t get weirder, because it’s how it is, but our knowledge of the universe will get much weirder than we can imagine. So I think the EPs were onto that. And it gave them a much, quite different attitude to science from either what you might call an American creationist attitude, of papal compromise, or several of the other intermediate positions.

[1:52:43] Do you remember the Epiphany Philosophers talking about other individuals and groups writing about the relations between science and religion? For example, the kinds of, what Fraser regards as more conservative science-religion books that started to come out at around the time the journal started, Ian Barbour is the one that came out in ’66, but, increasingly through the Seventies and Eighties there are, especially scientists who are Christians writing about science and religion, and I’m thinking of people like John Polkinghorne and so on.

Yes yes yes.

Were… I think Fraser’s right, that that’s a very different kind of approach.

Yes, it is.

But were they talked, were they talked about or discussed by the Epiphany Philosophers?

The answer’s no. Fraser knows about them, because Fraser is also a scholar in what was his day job for, you know… And it was his job to… He knows Polkinghorne well, I mean I knew Polkinghorne a bit, and used to… But never met him through the EPs. I met him, other discussion circles in Cambridge. But, you know, he was a priest and a physicist. And those people were the EPs too. I mean I’m sure Polkinghorne and Margaret knew each other, but they were different enough in character and belief that they probably never interacted very interestingly. But to answer your question, I think in that sense it’s the narrowness of EPs. They, most of them probably weren’t very interested in what those other groups were saying. They certainly didn’t go out looking for them, or thinking about them. They were interested in what they were saying. It’s a bit… There’s a famous quote, you may know it, in… [laughs] A famous quote in the beginning of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, his first book, where he says somewhere, something like, I’m not word perfect, but you get the idea, ’Well,’ he says, ‘you know, many of the things I’m saying there have been said by others, but I’m not worried about that. You know, I’m thinking this now, and here it is. And I can’t be bothered. If someone else has thought it, great,’ you know. ‘I’m thinking it now.’ Those are not his words. But that’s the idea. And in a funny way I think that was Margaret’s attitude, and, dragged EPs with her. They, in all the writings in Theoria to Theory you don’t get, I don’t think, I could be wrong, going back and reading it, didn’t read every issue, I suspect there are very few discussions of what you’re talking about, contemporary, interesting discussions of the relation of science and religion outside the conventional ones, I suspect not. And again, ignorance, sheer ignorance, they were perhaps obsessed with their own interestingness, and didn’t look out. I mean, you know, I know now, although I don’t do much reading in it, I’m well aware now, I mean Keith Ward and people like this, there’s lots of very interesting people. Ian Chalmers. There’s lots of very interesting people out there with good things to say. I don’t pursue those now, I think because I’m lazy and, stuck in my own work. But, one should. But EPs didn’t. No.

[1:55:34] Thank you. What do you remember of visits to the EPs from sort of, extra outsiders to the group? People like Arthur Koestler I think came at one point, and Uri Geller, and, other…

Yes.

Other people who, who interested the group but were not part of the group, what do you remember?

Yes. There were always people coming and going. And since, after a couple of, or, how many years, after… After four years at Margaret’s, I’m talking to myself now, after four years at Margaret’s lab, I went to America, to do my PhD. I mean I, I did it because one of Margaret’s sponsors, one of Margaret’s own paymasters in the Air Force, Rowena Swanson, she suddenly said to – a middle aged, tough, tough tough woman, Jewish woman. She suddenly said to me one day on one of her visits to Cambridge, she said, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Yorick,’ you know, I mean, ‘how are you going to do this thesis? Where are you going to be computing? Are you going to be doing here in Cambridge?’ I said, ‘No, I can’t.’ Margaret’s thing wasn’t part of the university you know, and therefore I couldn’t nominally, officially, get into the computing lab without a lot of fuss. Karen Spärck Jones did do so, but I didn’t. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ll give you a grant. Come to America and do it.’ So I did. So I, January the 1st ’67 roughly I took off to America, did my computing there. And that was the start of my life in America, I’ve spent half my life there you know, married two Americans. Came back, came at intervals, saw the EPs. But, I, my constant contact with the EPs was quite different after January the 1st ’67, because I only came back on sort of, either prolonged visits to Cambridge or visits that didn’t involve Cambridge at all. So, although I stayed in EP, and I stayed, I became a trustee, and the eventual president, was Margaret’s literary executor. So she must have trusted me in some way, or she wouldn’t have thought I was the… She must have thought I was the person who was most likely to get her views in language out into the world, and she was probably right, I mean there was nobody else more likely to. Nobody else who owed her more, or was more likely to seize it and do it. But, that meant a connection continued but it wasn’t a physical connection, so I didn’t see her. So when you talk of people coming, I wouldn’t have seen them. I didn’t know until Fraser told me that Rowan Williams had been around. I never saw Arthur Koestler there. I now believe he was there. There were lots of ;people like this. I mean, I wasn’t around when Rupert was around really. I saw Rupert on visits back. We’ve seen more of each other now, in recent years, after I’m back in Oxford, or at least, not in Oxford, but when I’m back in England. So, no I didn’t know that. There were a lot of people like that who knew about the EPs, were intrigued by them, and either stayed or horrified and went away and thought, this is not for me. Polkinghorne was probably one of those. I don’t know. And, if I rack my brains now… Oh Geller you mentioned. Yah, well Ted had a sort of, intellectual flirtation with Geller. I think that was one of the weakest parts of Ted’s, his… [coughing] I can remember it so well, because, I was in Stanford at the time, the time being, ’70, ’71, and Ted came out and stayed with me, because, I was the person living at Stanford he knew. [coughing] That was fun, to see him, because I always liked Ted. And, Ted was there partly to investigate Geller. Because, he thought there was something in Geller. I don’t think I ever did much. I mean I’m, I’m pretty convinced Geller’s a fraud. He’s just a very good magician, you know. Lots of people have tried to prove this, I think it’s probably true. But Ted wanted to take it seriously, in the sense of, you know, subjecting him to real experiments to see what happened. And there are certain… And Geller was clearly a very magnetic character, and they saw a lot of each other incidentally; Geller must have been in the Bay Area. They saw a lot of each other. So Geller probably visited in Cambridge, I don’t know, I can’t remember. I never met Geller. But Ted, while was staying with me, was seeing Geller. I never came along. So… I think Ted in the end realised that Geller was a fake, but he would have liked it to have been true. Ted felt the same about cold fusion when that came along. He’d like that to have been true. It’s not even absolutely certain it isn’t. It isn’t certain that there isn’t some form of cold fusion that might be true. I’ve seen quite respectable physicists think that there might be something, but not that version. A footnote to that. While he was in Stanford there was another experiment going on in the psych lab in Stanford called distant vision. Have you herd of this one? Oh it’s quite fun. And Ted got quite wrapped up in that. It was more fun than Geller in a way. And I think probably more, more real. Ted always wanted to see if there was anything in parapsychology, the fact that people can know things in ways they shouldn’t. And, you know, there are people who know how the cards will fall, there are. And we don’t know why. It’s against statistics that they do. Distant vision was an experiment in Stanford basically where, one bunch of people go out into the wilderness in California; another bunch of people stay at home. And the people who have gone out there into nowhere, they’ve been told where to go but, the people staying behind don’t know where they’ve gone, try to convey to them by, processes, what it is they can see and where they are. And they draw what they can see, and look at it. A bit like perhaps parapsychology with cards - distant vision it’s called. And the funny thing is, the results are better than chance. Some of those people, again all these things, some people can do it and some people can’t. Some people back at Stanford did appear to be able to know, ‘know’ in inverted commas, what those people are seeing, and it’s utterly mysterious. I mean, I’m very open-minded about this, I mean I don’t have any strong views on parapsychology myself. I mean, I don t think it’s necessarily connected with religion at all. I mean, you probably know this, the Russians, the Soviets, the good old Soviets, they put masses of money into Moscow. Moscow had an institute of parapsychology long before anybody in Britain thought about it. Koestler founded the chair of parapsychology at Edinburgh, which Edinburgh’s been embarrassed by ever since and doesn’t like to fill, because they’re embarrassed. The Russians weren’t the least embarrassed. The Soviets had, you know, institutes of it., and, they thought they could use it for the Cold War, to do the Americans down, you know. There’s that joke American film called The Men Who Stare at Goats, you know, which, have you heard of that film?

Mm.

Which of course is, it’s a sort of semi-fake account of American defence trying the same game. Beside the point. Ted definitely had a weakness for Geller, and a weakness for parapsychology in any form. Not that he believed all of it, but he did want to try and do experiments. He was an experimentalist. He deeply believed that you should find out if it was true. Which, many people wouldn’t even give it the credit of finding out, you know what I mean? It’s a bit like, in that sense, Rupert is the continuation of Ted’s attitudes. Because Rupert is an experimentalist in a, essentially in a form of parapsychology, where he rigorously tests things, gets results that people don’t like. So in that sense I think, I hadn't seen this since then, but Rupert is carrying out, in a different area, very much the kind of things Ted did, yah? And, both, both Fellows of King’s, Rupert and Ted, both utterly respectable scientists with impeccable backgrounds, both gone into places where regular science can’t stand them. You know about the Nature prize to show Rupert up, don’t you?

Mm.

Yah.

[2:02:31] You said that you were going to tell me more about the character of Richard, and perhaps you might want to do this with some comments on your… I know we haven’t all that much time left.

No, I, I’ve got all day. I don’t want to waste your time, that’s what I’m… I mean I don’t want to keep you here all night if you don’t want to, but, I’ll stay as long as you want.

OK. But, your PhD, Argument and Proof in Metaphysics: From an Empirical Point of View, was supervised by Richard.

Yah it was.

Perhaps you could say something about what it involved.

My thesis says something about Richard’s views, as far as I know them.

Yes.

Me first. [pause] My thesis was very eccentric. I think probably looking back it was very original. But that didn’t matter. Because, there wasn’t anywhere to publish it, so what did it matter? But, it was the only philosophy PhD in Cambridge that involved a lot of computing and had a big computer program at the back. And although they gave it to me, they sort of made clear they didn’t want any more theses with computing at the back, because, that wasn’t what philosophy theses are about. It’s that yellow volume over there. And in fact, the fact it’s yellow is relevant, which shows something bad about my personality, because, you know, you have your thesis bound, as you know, and when I… [laughs] When I had my thesis bound, you’re supposed to have it bound in blue or black. I had mine in yellow. Because it meant it would stand out on the shelf. So I mean, that tells you something bad about me right there. And, so my thesis was, to take the theory of semantic representation I had developed by thinking about what Margaret was up to. Margaret, I said this about a couple of hours ago, that Margaret had a view that there could be semantic representations which were not logical, but captured meaning. I developed such a system, and it was based not, bits of it on Margaret, bits of it other people in the Language Research Unit, who had gone away before I came. A man called Richens, R H Richens, who developed a language for biological classification called NUDE. He called it NUDE because it was meant to be a language of naked ideas. It was a joke. It was fifty monosyllabic classifiers, like folk, man, be, stuff, thing, that you could combine into algebraic formulas, and could use that very very tiny language to capture meaning. And I had got that idea from Richens, and I expanded the vocabulary to about 100, and developed this little tree-like algebra for expressing meaning in these nested, nested bracketed formulas. But that didn’t owe anything to Margaret; that I owed to Richens. And I didn’t know it at the time but linguistics was going the same way. My life was funny, because, there was no artificial intelligence in those days. There were people doing what we now call artificial intelligence. But, it wasn’t called that. In Edinburgh it was called machine intelligence. The word artificial intelligence hadn’t been, phrase hadn’t been created. But now it’s clear that’s what I was doing. But linguistics was also at the time, and I didn’t know much about linguistics, the little I knew, I didn’t like, I was against Chomsky and all his works. Chomsky didn’t like meaning representation. But some Chomskyans did, and it turned out, after my time, other Chomskyans were inventing meaning representations which turned out to be awfully like what I was doing. In some senses, one of the places where computer people, like Arwas[?], were actually ahead of the linguists, but the linguists never admitted it. Because, they didn’t think computer people could come up with things, because linguists came up with them. So if computer people came up with them, they must be fake. But it was the same idea. It was the idea you could have a language for semantic representation. The bit I had got from Margaret was this idea that, you could break language structure down, not by grammar but by just sort of, compact triples of things, as if, everything fell into the form A relationship B, aRb. So every clause, every phrase. So you could represent language, not with a syntax of the conventional grammar sense or Chomsky sense, but with a sequence of linked triples like this. And I took that from her. And, she called them semantic templates, and I called them templates too. But the difference I made was, I put every node of the triple, one of these very complex formulas, which she wasn’t, that wasn’t her thing, she wasn’t interested in that. An extra thing she had, that never interested me, and this was very important for her later… I know you want me to get to Richard, but can I just put this thing…

Yes, of course.

[2:06:54] A thing that obsessed her in her later years was what she called breath groups. She became influenced by a Yugoslav, there was Yugoslavia then, a Yugoslav teacher of the deaf, called Guberina, and he had the belief, I think, it may have true even, true belief, that the origin of human language is based on rhythm and singing and chanting. Margaret liked that, because it meant that religious chants were therefore deeply connected to the origins of language, not an extra. That we started life in chanting and singing and verse. I think it’s probably true. I think, you know, look at Homer, Homer is verse. But it had to be chantable, or, how could Homer have remembered 3,000 lines? He didn’t write it down. He wasn’t literate. And so on. So Guberina believed that the origin of language was rhythmic, and that the fact that we are creatures that breathe isn’t accidental, it’s a language. Not an accident. Sentences look like a string of symbols. But, Guberina believed that the places where you breathe are crucial. Margaret believed this too. So Margaret thought that the breath groups, where we have to breathe, isn’t just a thing about lungs; it’s a sort of, pausing place that you could mark in… Actually, when she was writing on the floor, cross-legged, that’s what she was often doing. She was taking language and marking what she called breath groups, to be the sort of, primitive clause markers that were more fundamental than what grammarians said. Now of course, after it turned out they were in the same place as where grammarians would put punctuation, or the ends of clauses, you know, but, well she thought it was a different origin. She may have been right; it doesn’t matter. [2:08:26] I didn’t buy the breath group thing, but I developed a method for chunking language on a computer up into chunks onto which I could attach these templates of formulas, and create this very complicated structure and meaning representation. And it had a certain outing in artificial intelligence at the time, and other famous people who became more famous than me were doing similar things. So, there was an entirely artificial intelligence, after I went to Stanford in the Sixties, ’70, where that kind of representation in artificial intelligence was respectable. It’s not respectable now. We’ve changed the lot. But that was the kind of representation you could give to language. Because, the desire was, to represent English language, especially English, it was all done by English speakers in America, in a computer, and use that method to translate, paraphrase, do all the things that you want a language machine to do. You know, compress things into a summary, expand to, you know, to engage in dialogue with people, to translate, all the things you might want to do. This representation had become a core. And that became my doctrine that I adopted for my thesis in artificial intelligence, which I’m known for. If I’m known for anything in the encyclopaedias - of artificial intelligence, not real encyclopaedias - it’s for a doctrine called sematic preference, which, I had a little algorithm of how you would select the right interpretation. So far so good. My thesis meant taking that and turning it loose on metaphysical texts. So I took texts from famous metaphysicians: Kant, Descartes, Spinoza, and analysed them with this method, by a computer in Los Angeles where I went to work. I also had the idea of wanting to be a scientist, to have control text, which I took as Times editorials. And do the same thing to them. So I wanted to see what I could find that would be different between, like, Times editorials, it’s a boring text, and metaphysical argument. And there was one motivation by this which had been supplied by something Richard Braithwaite had said. So, I sometimes had the thought that Richard wasn’t interested in my thesis and contributed nothing. In a way he didn’t. He wasn’t interested in it in a way. He read it through and corrected some grammar, but he never took an interest in, basic. [2:10:36] But he provided one crucial thing. He turned me loose on a tiny paper that had been written by a man he had known who had died very young, just after the First War, called Bosanquet. He was part of a famous family who became bishops and professors and, one of those upper-class families. And Bosanquet, he may even have died in the First War, I’m not sure, doesn’t matter when he died. He young. And he wrote a tiny paper in Mind called ‘Remarks on Spinoza’s Ethics’. Boring. But Bosanquet, there’s one thing of his academic life had a very original idea, that Richard Braithwaite pushed at me. Bosanquet said that Spinoza’s metaphysics, although it appears to have a logical structure, which is what Spinoza claimed it did, it’s an argument for the nature of the universe, the logical structure, said Bosanquet, is all rubbish. That’s not a structure at all. The underlying structure of Bosanquet is a rhetorical structure. What Bosanquet is doing is trying to persuade you that words have senses different from what you thought. And he’s trying to convince you in the length of this famous book called Ethics, it’s not about ethics, it’s about metaphysics, that some of the words have meanings you didn’t think they had. So to take the famous example in Spinoza, that God has the meaning of nature. So when Spinoza speaks of God, he means nature. He’s a pantheist, nature is the god. I was fascinated by that, and seized on that. And I had been using my meaning representation as a way of, in computational linguistics, taking a text and trying to say, for each word in it, what the sense of the word is in that position. This has been, remained a classic, - a classic computation linguistic task. You know, I’ve had lots of students work on it, different methods, over the years. Sick of it. But my original thesis was to do that. And I was one of the first people to do that actually. Because this funny structure of trees and templates was to do that. I would find out that one, only one of these sematic formulae corresponded to the sense that this word has here. So the connection to metaphysics was this. I was trying to show, and believe me, the standard of proof was zilch, I mean there’s no proof, I just illustrated how it might be, that the argument of the metaphysical text I took wasn’t a logical structure. It was that the, there was an attempt to impose a new sense on a word that you wouldn’t have suspected if you had started with a dictionary, and that this methodology I had could discover what the representation of that new sense was. So it was what I called a sense discovery procedure, which would tell you what the new sense was. And therefore, metaphysics is basically, not logical argument. Metaphysics is creating new senses of words which the author wants you to accept. This to you probably sounds the drabbest of stuff, but, in computational linguistics this was very bizarre, fringe-y stuff. Over the years that people have accepted that you can have machines, they’d accept certainly now, machine programs to determine what the sense of a word in context is, but they are much less easy with the idea that there are new senses and they can detect it. But in recent years, things have been going my way. From the last big projects I’ve participated in in Florida, gigantic American defence project, they committed, like, fifty million to it, you won’t believe this, I mean, this got a page in the Economist, it was so bizarre. The Economist reported it in a whole page, that the, what’s now called IARPA, different from ARPA… IARPA is the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPA is the thing, agency the Americans set up to deal with the cyber war and intelligence. IARPA spend fifty million, it started, five years ago, and, we stayed in it for three years, on metaphor. IARPA devoted a project, with ten sites, including us in Florida, on the computational discovery of metaphor. Well of course what I was doing in my thesis was the discovery of metaphor.

Mm.

Discovering new senses of words. That’s what metaphor is. So in a funny way, all I’m saying about my own thesis is, which I don’t think all that well of these days, I did have the credentials, because I had been working on the computer discovery of metaphor in the 1960s, when saying that didn’t make sense, but I disguised it as an investigation on metaphysics, if you see what I mean. But I promptly, after that, to have a career, dropped the philosophy/metaphysics crap, although I did write philosophical articles; I mean, I did try and be a respectable philosopher, and, one, some bits of my thesis I did publish in Mind. I turned over directly to try and become an artificial intelligence person, and, concentrate on, as I have for fifty years, algorithms to understand language. But not by those methods. I, I changed my methods as I went on with the, with fashion, with realising some things didn’t work. Can I go back to Richard?

Mhm.

[2:15:11] So Richard provided me… He was my adviser. He was no good. I had to have Richard as my adviser, because I fell out with my first adviser. My first adviser in Cambridge was a famous New Zealand philosopher, who didn’t like me and I didn’t like him. And, we didn’t get on, and he didn’t think I was any good anyway. And, so, we wanted to get away from each other. So Margaret said, ‘Oh dear, what shall we do? I know what we’ll do. I’ll get my husband to advise you.’ [laughs] So he did. So poor Richard, who didn’t want anybody like me, because Richard was a philosopher of science. I wasn’t a philosopher of science. He wanted… His most famous book is called Scientific Explanation, which you’ve probably heard of. It is the famous book on, science runs by hypothetico-deductive explanations, which nobody believes now, but, great book, great man. Margaret said to Richard, who did as he was told usually, ‘Supervise Yorick.’ He said, ‘All right.’ ‘All right,’ said Richard. And he did. And he didn’t do me any harm, and he didn’t do me any good. The one great… The great piece of good he gave me was to give me that essay by Bosanquet, which became the germ of what I finally did. But Richard was a kind man, he never made me feel bad. I once went to him in King’s, and I was so in despair, like philosophy, like – sorry, PhD people… PhDs were lonelier then. They’re still lonely, I’m sure you know, but they were lonelier then, because there was no talking to other students. You were lonely. And I went to his room in King’s, and I, I think I broke down and cried. And Richard promptly went to his filing cabinet and got out a bottle of sherry. Pulled out a sherry glass and a bottle and gave me a drink. You wouldn’t do that now. They wouldn’t do that now I tell you. So Richard was a kind, nice man. I therefore, though, thought Richard was a satrap - a follower of Margaret. Margaret was the religious genius, the woman who knew about language, deep insights. She did. I mean, as I say, the Americans funded her forever. After the Americans funded her, the EU. The European grants. I’ve been with Margaret to Luxembourg where she wore this fisherman’s jersey, and this great strapping belt round her middle, big, stout woman, speaking her fluent ghastly French, bullying Commission officials in Luxembourg. They gave her money. You know, she still convinced them that she could do it. By this time she was over sixty. Margaret never washed her hair. Interesting fact about Margaret. A Gypsy had told her as a child that you should never wash your hair or it’ll go grey. And Margaret believed this. And Margaret never washed her hair. And it never went grey. She’d dust it with powder every month or two. Isn’t that nice? Isn’t that nice? It worked. It worked. It worked. Empirical proof. The Gypsy was right. [2:17:37] So Richard, I thought he was just Margaret’s follower, you know, a great man in his boring way. And that’s how Margaret sometimes presented Richard, as if… Richard was a famous man in a really dowdy part of philosophy, dowdy, philosophy of science. Richard wasn’t. Richard had some extraordinary ideas. Richard was amazing. Can I tell you the essay he did for his chair? There were only two chairs of philosophy in Cambridge, one was in metaphysics, and one was in ethics, right? Richard obviously had been eligible for metaphysics, because that’s close to science. Sort of. But the ethics chair became vacant. Richard didn’t know anything about ethics, but he had to go for it because it was vacant., and he wanted a chair, and there were only two. And Richard got it. Why did they give to him? He knew nothing about ethics. Never read an ethics book in life. You know, he knew people who taught ethics, but he didn’t know anything, and he didn’t care. Well, I don’t say he didn’t care. What do I know? But he had to give an inaugural lecture. You do, you know. So he did. So he sat down, and he wrote an inaugural lecture about something he knew about. And in doing so, he created a completely new subject, which is now big in the world. The title, do you know this one? I’ve got it over on my desk actually. I’m going to reread it for some other purposes of mine. Richard’s inaugural lecture is ‘The Theory of Games as a Tool for the Moral Philosopher’. Richard knew about theory of games. Theory of games is a sort of abstract algebra of chances and what this player will do if that player does; how much this player double-guesses that player; prisoner’s dilemma. You know that stuff? It’s game theory, right? Much used by defence theorists about the Cold War. Richard knew about the theory of games. Richard thought, maybe the theory of games could be the basis of an ethical theory. So he wrote it as an ethical theory, about you, when wanting to behave ethically, compute what the other person is going to do. He created a subject. I mean, people have written hundreds of books about it. Richard just created it from nowhere. Because he had to give a lecture, in a subject he knew nothing about. He later did another essay that became very famous, which you might have heard of, one of the others might have mentioned it, maybe Fraser will if Rupert didn’t. He did later in life write a book called, an essay, called ‘An Empiricist’s View of Religious Belief’. Have you heard of it? Oh OK. That’s his other famous lecture. I must make sure both these lectures go on our website. I’ve got the book now, I must have them digitised. I got it off Amazon the other day, last month. ‘An Empiricist’s View of Religious Belief’ is very very interesting. It’s the only declaration Richard ever made of any religious principles. And it’s not at all what… Well, not what you expect, but, it doesn’t go where you think. It’s about parables. He’s an empiricist. And he takes the view that, the parables have the same function as novels. Richard read a lot of novels. I think Richard read much philosophy. Richard loved novels. But Richard thought that novels were moral works. Richard thought that novels had the function of causing us to behave correctly. Because we see the perils of bad behaviour. Just like the parables. The parables for him are early novels, which show you correct behaviour and the penalties for bad behaviour. So for him the parables were crucial. And he thought that the empiricist’s view of religious belief is that, you tell if someone believes anything or not by the degree to which they adhere to the kind of ethical stance of the parables or not. Lot of people would say that, lot of Catholics would say that - if you give to the poor, you’re a better person than if you don’t. Blah blah. You can deny this too, I know. But, so Richard created this very strange essay, very well argued, that, the parables constitute the ground of an ethics which you can test in a sense. I think that’s what most people don’t like about it, that you can just test by looking, because, most Protestants can’t stand that idea, that you can tell who’s going to Heaven by what they do, you know, and Catholics like it. You get the idea. So, all I’m saying is that Richard crated these two essays which became more famous than his book. And he created essentially… Oh, and that second one has now got this… I’ve forgotten it, but there’s a name for that theory of ethics. So Richard created two new subjects with his stand-up lectures, not with his book. His book really, has vanished almost. It’s still in print I suppose, but… In his last years he was writing furiously in exercise books. He had a commission from a publisher to write a book called The Logic of God. Richard being a logician thought that you could get at this through logical formulae. So I, I would see him, he was in his dotage in some sense, I don’t believe there was anything in it myself, but I could be wrong, what do I know? I’m not a logician. Richard was covering exercise books with logical formulae, which in the end would reach towards some logic of God that would express the content of God. So in a funny way, in his late years, his decline, he almost turned back into a kind of mediaeval philosopher. It’s the kind of thing you can imagine Thomas Aquinas doing, you know, if he had had access to the right logic, sitting there doing it, you know. But Richard… All I’m saying is… Stupid thing to say. What I’m trying to convey is that my early view that Richard was the dull one, and Margaret was the insightful one, was definitely not simply true. Richard was full of interesting things. He just came over as the far more conventional thinker. Yah.

[2:23:04] Are you able to shed any light on, more light on a story that Fraser alludes to in the paper he has written about the, the final division of the space between the nuns and the house of the Epiphany Philosophers?

I wasn’t around for that. That was one of the periods when I was in America. I knew that some of the nuns in the convent turned against what was, what their predecessors had done, and sold off their… They came to disapprove of the EPs I suppose, or… Margaret, if Margaret was still functioning then, I don’t know who was around. Margaret wasn’t able to sort of evoke her protectors. Margaret was the kind of person who would go to bishops, you know, and get them on your side, and, sort these people out. The upper-class way of doing things. But Margaret may have been failing by then. You know, she died in a horrible way, you know, with motor neurone disease. Oh God. [sighs] Margaret was more than ten years younger than Richard, maybe twenty. Student. They set up all their financial affairs on the reasonable assumption that he would die first. On the contrary. She died first. What’s more, she died in the most horrible way, from motor neurone disease, Lou Gehrig's disease they call it in America. The thing where your functions disappear. They say your mind remains intact, but everything goes. You can’t swallow, you can’t speak. For a year or so it lasted, and she was writing on yellow pads. Dorothy, who turned out to be a saint, Dorothy fed her with a spoon for the last year of her life, as her body completely collapsed. And in the end you can’t breathe. They say your mind remains intact, but it isn’t true. I could see with Margaret, because the things she was scrawling on the pads didn’t make sense in the end. She died first. So it screwed up all their financial affairs, because then, I don’t know what their financial affairs were, but they had set them up the wrong way round. There was a point, there’s a reason for mentioning that about Margaret I’m sorry. The nuns. So, Margaret may well have been out of action when the nun thing broke down, I don’t know. Richard, after Margaret had gone, I mean Richard, Richard didn’t any longer take any interest in anything very much Went to an old people’s home and just became old and, died later. The EP staggered on in a strange sort of way. A thing we haven’t touched on that, you may not wish to do so, Rupert may have mentioned, is, there came a split in the EPs into two groups. Richard…

No.

Oh I’m surprised Rupert didn’t talk about it, because, he and I went different ways. Oh. Shall I tell you?

Yes please.

[2:25:21] OK. After Margaret and Ted had… After Margaret had gone… No, Ted hadn’t gone. After Margaret had gone, and I mean… Yes. The EPs became sort of, a bit rudderless after Margaret. They didn’t want to admit they were rudderless, because, that didn’t look good, you know what I mean? I mean, it would make it look as though everything depended on Margaret, and, she would have denied that. Maybe she thought in her private mind. That doesn’t seem right, you know. She’s gone, we can’t go on. So, but they did become a bit pointless. They did keep going. And people like Ted and Joan had some of the charismatic power and kept it going until sort of, they died one by one. Ted… Ted married a woman called Suzanne, who he met on a psychic TV show. Isn’t that wonderful? Ten had never married. Ted got to about fifty-five, and met Suzanne on a psychic TV show and married her, and they had a kid who is now a brilliant scientist himself. And they moved off to Wales. Suzanne couldn’t stand Margaret, so they moved away. But… Which is funny, I mean Ted sort of knew he’d get married one day, but he waited till he was fifty-five, you know, and just… And he was in the caravan of course, he had been in a caravan for all those years. The point of this story, they were rudderless after Margaret, and Ted was there. And, they kept on meeting. But, two big chunks, the two major chunks of EP life at that point turned out to be… And EP was still going, Dorothy kept it going, but I think she was coming to the end too, it couldn’t go on, either financial or, reasons, because she was tired and nobody else wanted it. But underneath that, there was another reason which is that, EP interest had split into two parts, neither of which corresponded to the old core that Margaret wanted. Ted’s stuff was alive and well. Because Ted was, Ted had sort of branched out, and had a group of people at Stanford who liked his theories. So they called themselves the, they called themselves the Advanced Natural Language Philosophy Association. They, I think they still exist. They’ve got a website. And they were quite lively, long after the EPs vanished. They were really physicists, who liked what Ted was doing and people like Ted. And had some Nobel Prize winners in America. They weren’t exactly explicitly religious, but religious people would attach themselves to them. And they came to worship – worship’s too strong a word. They came to enormously admire Fred Parker- Rhodes. So in Fred Parker-Rhodes’s last years, never having had a proper academic job in his life, he had worked for Margaret, Fred, and he didn’t need money, Fred was well off I think, he had Scottish lands, Fred became a, you can see a lot of references to Fred on the Web, because, this Alternative Natural Language Philosophy Association came to believe that Fred had done something really deep on quantum logic, and, people believe it. So Fred was enormously gratified, and used to go to these meetings. However, the point of this point is that Ted’s quantum interests remained. There was another group which includes Rupert, and, some of the other older EPs, who you’ve… [pause] Sorry. I’m pausing because I’m trying to get… Chris… There’s another physicist.

Chris Clarke?

Chris Clarke. Yes. But Chris Clarke, although he’s a physicist who worked with Ted, didn’t opt really to be so much with Ted’s interests. He opted with this other group, including Rupert, who were in this network that Rupert must have talked about called the Medical something Network?

Oh yes. Yes.

You’ve probably got something on that. Rupert will have told you about that.

I didn’t realise it was a split from the EP.

Yeah, well, it had independent origins but lots of them were members of the EPs. But what became clear was that, there was no longer enough common interest to hold us together. I was much in America at the time, and didn’t take much interest in this. But, for some reason I ended up as the last President of the EPs. But, that was after the split. There was an amicable split, where we decided to sell the Marion Close building and split the cash two ways. Half went to the Alternative Medical Network, and half went to the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association. Well no no. Half of it stayed with us, the remaining EPs, that’s Fraser, me, Ted. And we used to use a bit of it for grants, our half. So the medical people went off there, and we didn’t really see much of them again. I’ve only seen Rupert again in these recent years when we’ve tried to do this memorial together. But Fraser and Ted and I would turn up at these Applied Natural Language… Alternative Natural Language Philosophy meetings, which were too much about physics for me. I mean, I didn’t go regularly, but I would turn up out of loyalty, because it was the remaining last EP thing. And we would use the, half the money of the building, which sold for, oh, it sold for quarter of a million pounds, and that was a lot of money in, before 2000, you know. It was sold somewhere in the late Nineties, and, that was a chuck of money. Cambridge property prices being insane. That looked like money. So we got half of that. And we used it, with Ted’s agreement and, Ted’s encouragement, and Fraser’s complacence, like mine, we used it to fund needy people and grants for the Alternative Natural Philosophy, physicists, which I was uneasy about, because, I didn’t see why we should be using all this money on physics. But, on the other hand, it was a natural progression from the old Margaret days. It just wasn’t one that Margaret was particularly interested in. But she supported it, and, I thought, this is as good as a way to use the money as any. When that stopped, and when we decided to shut the EPs down ,the remaining half, not the Rupert half, the other half, we all agreed, Rupert – not Rupert, he wasn’t there, Ted, Fraser and I agreed to give the remaining money to Rupert’s Science and Philosophy and Religion Foundation, I’ve forgotten what it’s called, but, Fraser… Did I say Rupert there? Sorry. I’m getting tired.

Fraser.

Fraser will tell you the name of his foundation. And we gave him the remains of the money. Which I think by then was down to something of the order of 50,000. We hadn’t squandered it. We’d often handed out bits to needy PhD students who wanted to do religion and science things. I think there was still 50,000. Oh, no, something less, but, a chunk of money. And that went to Fraser. And, we didn’t think we had any right to say what Fraser should do with it. But then when we set up this web now, I went back to Fraser and said, ‘Could you give us some to put the web up?’ and he did. So I mean, there was never any, nothing but good feeling about all this, we just wanted to get money in a way that was consistent with the Charity Commissioners; it couldn’t be pocketed, it had to be spent on proper works, you know.

[2:31:43] There’s one person I’ve not mentioned. I’ve talked of sort of, not fringe but sort of, second tier people around. One very interesting person who you may have heard mention of, but he was a very famous person. He comes in that list with Geller and Koestler. Do you know who Anthony Appiah is?

No.

Oh. If you look him up on the Web, he’s terribly famous. He’s now called Kwame Anthony Appiah. He’s, he’s the Professor of, he was the Professor of African and American Studies at Princeton I think, or Yale, I forget, Princeton. He is now the same thing at New York University, or, City College of New York. It’s the place where they all go to when they go to Manhattan. Anthony is a well-built, half-English, half-African, exactly the same mix as Obama, exactly the same, which he trades on a little. And, he is very famous in America as, frankly, this sounds terrible, the only African American studies professor who is really any good. A lot of them are complete fakes, you know, rubbish stuff. Anthony’s first rate. And he was in EP. And Anthony’s background is fascinating. This is long before your time, but, we had a Chancellor of the Exchequer called Stafford Cripps, in the Attlee government after the war. Mean and miserable bastard. He had a daughter called Peggy Cripps. She went off to Ghana, or, here, and married Joe Appiah. Joe Appiah was a up-and-coming Ghana politician. Peggy Cripps married Anthony Appiah – sorry, Joe Appiah. A huge scandal in the 1950s. The idea of the Chancellor’s daughter marrying an African. Unthinkable. But, they had to put up with it, because I mean he was a Commonwealth person, I mean, they put up with it. Very successful marriage Joe Appiah was a natural anti person, got jailed by Nkrumah and people. But survived. And died some time ago. Peggy Cripps only died about ten years ago. She never came back. She lived her life in Ghana as a widow, and, you know. They had had several children, of whom the most famous is Anthony Appiah, now called Kwame Anthony Appiah. He was at Cambridge doing philosophy the same time as me. We knew each other through the EPs, we used to go on long walks on the beach at Norfolk, at the mill, you know. Lovely. He was here lecturing at Oxford last month, a wonderful lecture. He gave the Isaiah Berlin Memorial Lecture. He’s wonderful. He’s a brilliant lecturer. What I… This is wicked, wicked Britishness against America. Wicked. [laughs] Whatever the Americans expect from an African American studies professor, Anthony doesn’t fit the bill. He wears blue pinstripe suits, ties, pinstripe shirts, and has a cut glass public school accent. He still does, you know. You see why he doesn’t fit the model of the African… But he’s brilliant. And he’s written about, he’s written about the EPs. In fact, it might be worth turning up his writing. If you go onto the Web and say, Anthony Appiah EPs, you will see, he’s written at least one article on them in American publications. So, he’s a tremendous sort of, loyal, distant EP thing, and, he and Ted were very fond of each other. I did the Times obituary for Ted, I did a long one, a half a page, and they printed the whole thing with a lovely picture. But, I wrote around to various people who had known Ted. The Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, provided an anecdote; Anthony provided an anecdote. Anthony’s anecdote was that, when driving to London with Ted in his sports car, which he loved to do, Ted loved his sports car, [laughs] Ted was driving, Anthony in the seat trembling, Ted is driving this Austin Healey to London, and his other… He’s driving with his hand. His other hand, he’s got a pair of pliers, and under the dashboard he’s trying to adjust the, he’s trying to adjust the lead to the carburettor, or something, to change the speed or something. He’s got this pair of pliers up under the dashboard, trying to adjust something, while he’s driving. I… Oh. That was Ted. The tinkerer right - the tinkerer. So Anthony Appiah is a, utter, one of the most interesting EP sort of, circle. Still very much alive, very active, younger than me, quite a lot younger. And - it might be just down the road. I know you only do oral, don’t you, so I can’t tell you what to look at. But I’ll tell you the link to Anthony Appiah anyway, just for fun. I’ll send you the Anthony EP. I’ll also, if you like, send you a copy of the, of the EP’s first conference. I may just put it on a USB and mail you the USB, because… I’ll show you a copy now before you go.

Mhm.

But, it is the original EP conference document where they laid out, before my time, what they were going to do. And, that’s what they went on talking about forever. So, it’s kind of relevant.

[2:36:16] And Joan, is, the Joan that you mentioned as being in this second tier, was she the, the factory inspector business?

She was the factory inspector. But, if you know that, then you, somebody else has reminded you what her last name is. Because you’ve heard of her before.

Keeble I think perhaps.

No.

No?

No. Johan. I know it so well. If I remember her last name, which I will, I’ll put it in an email.

Oh we can put it into the content summary.

Yes. Joan X.

[2:36:40] This, I’ve got two final questions. One is inspired by your electronic bureaucrat article in Theoria to Theory in 1971. Which raises the question of what the group’s interest in politics was. Because, clearly in that article there’s an argument about a different use of computers and a different way of envisaging use of computers ought to be attracted to the Left, yet the Left aren’t interested.

Sure.

So, so… OK, I’ll ask the other question separately. So, what was the group’s interest in politics?

I have to say, not. And they didn’t have one. I mean, that was what I wanted to do, because I was interested in the future of artificial intelligence. And I was a bit of a leftie myself at the time, you know, used to write articles with Marxism in the title, which I don’t know. Although, I still think Marx was a wonderful person. I mean, sorry, I think Marx has lessons for our times, but I’m not a leftie any more. But, that was me, and they had printed it because, Dorothy would take anything she thought was interesting and had no prejudices, didn’t have to be about religion. Or it could be about science, and that was a kind of technology thing, and she did it. But as I may have said earlier, in a half-formed way, most of these people were utterly apolitical. Their minds weren’t there; their minds were on philosophy and religion, and, social things. I mean it’s funny, because as I said, Margaret’s father had been a Cabinet minister. You might have expected, thing All they inherited from that I think was a general Fabian approach. I’m sure they would all have voted Labour. But they weren’t socialist in any strong sense. No, I mean socialist in any sense. They were, they were Fabians, they, they believed in social progress, you know, doing good for the working class. Weren’t very fond of professionals. Certainly weren’t fond of the elite or the upper class. If you think of what the attitude of the Bloomsburyites and the Fabians were in the Twenties and Thirties, you’ve pretty much got their attitudes. I don’t know anybody there who we’ve gone through who I think of as having a distinct political attitude. Joan, a sort of proletarian factory inspector, I think I occasionally heard Joan come out with a kind of, slightly sort of ‘bash the bosses’ sort of attitude, from her life as an inspector, and I think she was a trade unionist. But again, that didn’t intrude into what she was really interested in, which was religion. But it was her natural instinct, or… She was probably more bolshie than Margaret. I don’t think Margaret had strong political views at all. No no, nor Ted. You, you would have found it hard to get them going on what was in the newspapers, although they may have read them, you know, in that sort of way. There was… Yeah. No, no. They would tell political jokes occasionally, but, they weren’t interested. No, no they weren’t interested. Sorry it’s disappointing, but it’s the truth I think.

[2:39:28] No, it’s interesting. And secondly, you spoke off the record earlier of your collection of essays of Margaret’s.

Well I’ve got some of her papers in her handwriting, yes, I have, yes.

Oh, no. That you, you…

Oh sorry. Sorry, sorry.

Almost a…

The Cambridge book I published.

Yes.

Yes. Yes. I’ll send you the link to that.

And, but that you suggested that you might have been, that, certain people were resistant to your approach.

Oh yes, yes. Yes.

So I wondered whether that was something that you could talk about.

Yes yes. Yes. Yes. This is a chapter that has no connection with EPs.

No.

This is the chapter in the… We’ve talked about the sort of decline and fall of the EPs.

Yes.

Here in short compass is that the decline and fall of CLRU, Cambridge Language Research Unit. I mean, people left, people went off to America, like me; other people went away. She had a deputy director called Stuart Linney, he was another South African philosopher. He went away. So, in the end, sort of, everybody had vanished. Only Fred stayed on, because Fred had nowhere else to go and lived in Cambridge, and didn’t, didn’t need a salary. Grants were dwindling. Well Fred didn’t need paying. Didn’t have any need for money. But she fell under the influence, I think it sort of, I think it shows a, a measure of her dwindling powers. She fell under the influence, I’m talking now probably of the, late Seventies, influence of some guys who, were not dishonest, but, they had their own intellectual interests, but they weren’t very intellectually powerful. They had none of the… I mean some of the people we’ve talked about were pretty weird, but, truthfully, they were all pretty first-rate, you know, I mean, academically all first-rate. Think what you like about ’em, they were, they were clever. They were good. They, they didn’t have to be freaks. I mean, if Rupert chose to be an eccentric, it was by choice. Rupert was a first-rate biologist. And so on. Fred ditto. Well, another story. But she fell into… There was a man called David Shillan, who was a phonetician. He got to know her, I don’t how. And he had a friend called Harry Rutherford, who was his business partner. I don’t know what business they were in, it was something to do with language teaching I think. It was, thoroughly respectable. But, they together, they were two friends, and Margaret had got interested in them, they… I must be careful what I say, because I don’t… It’s not I don’t want to be libellous, I don’t care about being libellous at this stage, they’re both death I’m sure. It’s hard to separate my own opinions from, from what was the truth. It was obvious to me at the time that these were guys who were muscling in on Margaret’s interests. They came from this interest I talked about of, the Yugoslav deaf teacher who believed that the core of language was these rhythm and periods and,… His success had been teaching profoundly deaf people to, to speak. And he believed you could do that by somehow getting rhythms in through their body. They could feel things through their body they couldn’t hear. I think it’s probably right. I think, he’s probably right. You could get rhythms from the floor into their body. Like Beethoven could hear things through, music through the vibration of the floor, even when he deaf. So there was something, there are some things in this as a, the rhythm can be transferred to the brain, the brain’s just a skull, I mean you know, inner skull. But this, so this made Margaret, this let Margaret meet David Shellan, and took an interest in that work. And phonetics. And David could see that Margaret was a good thing. And David and Harry wanted to join Margaret on European grants. And I was gone by then. And I don’t remember if there was anybody else was left around. But David and Harry teamed up with Margaret to look for European money, and, Margaret was definitely declining by then. It was pre her illness, but she declining. But they somehow convinced Margaret that they were the new CLRU, and CLRU could be revived under them. Everybody had gone. And there’d be a new awakening and a new beginning. And, in my view, complete rubbish. These men had no particular intellectual content. And Margaret’s pull with the UE was declining, and she was getting old, and, building up to being ill, and, you know, declining. However, the denouement was quite unpleasant in some ways. And I don’t know what happened to David Shellan, I never had any cross words with him. I didn’t have any cross words with any of them really. They came to the occasional EP meeting in Marion Close towards the end. They knew that that was the place to go to – I’m being cynical now, to be shown to be good guys. What I believe happened at the end, although, I’ve heard this from others who stayed in Cambridge where I wasn’t, I’ve heard this from Karen Spärck Jones and her husband, Roger Needham, who violently took against these men, they thought these men were conmen. These are two respectable, puritanical Cambridge academics, very senior, Roger became Pro-Vice- Chancellor, they were very anti these men. They’d stayed in touch with Margaret and thought these men were taking Margaret for a ride. They thought, and they may have been right, that these men wanted to get their hands on the building. Not so much David, David was an innocent, but Harry Rutherford, I’m not so sure. That he wanted to get… You see, it wasn’t clear who owned the building. I don’t think Margaret held the deeds. I think it was held by the unit as a trust. But I was never a trustee, and I’ve no idea who the trustees were, or what the, and I didn’t ask, what the ownership status of the building was. But of course, in the Cambridge of those days, that site must have been worth a million. I don’t know what happened in the end. I believe that Roger Needham and his wife Karen tried to make some moves to stop Harry Rutherford getting control of the building, and I don’t know how it ended up. It’s certainly an executive flat now, house now, and somebody must have made money. The money certainly, I’m sure, didn’t filter back to the Braithwaites, and certainly not to the EPps. They wouldn’t have done, the EPs were irrelevant. This was the Language Research Unit.

Mm.

Now whether Margaret had a financial interest in that trust, I don’t know. I suppose children know. I don’t know and I’ve never asked. [2:45:23] But, it came down to things like, what should happen to all the documents, because, down in the cellar underneath, we had what was probably one of the best and most extensive libraries of early work on machine translation computational linguistics, stretching from 1950. So, by 1990, where we now are, just before Margaret died, or after she died, those were a remarkable set of documents, I mean you know, they ought to have been in a, a college library or a university library. And, I was one of the people, along with these, Needhams, who tried to get them given to a university library. Newnham said they’d take them. There was a man called John, John Hutchins, you may have head of. No, why should you. John Hutchins is the official historian of machine translation. He works in the University of East Anglia in Norwich. And he said East Anglia would be happy to take these documents. I’m working back to the book, you’ll see I’m ending up there. But Harry Rutherford, who somehow was sort of, sitting in CLRU and using it as a kind of office, didn’t want these people to have the books, and the papers. In the end he threw them in a skip. So the whole, this whole library, unique in Britain, I mean there was no other centre in Britain would have had such a library, America possibly would have, many of them were American documents, that was where most of the stuff was done. But we were so tied up with America, we had them too. Harry, at the end, dumped them in a skip. The whole of this library. And, he knew that I was commissioned by Margaret in her will to collect her papers together, and he had got to me and tried to say that some of the papers he had written with Margaret at the end should be in the book. And I said, ‘Well Harry, no, sorry. No disrespect, but, all Margaret’s papers are her early ones.’ Before me. I wasn’t putting my papers in the book either, the stuff that I wrote with Margaret, compared with the early stuff she did, and I wanted to choose twelve of her early papers that I thought were highly original, put them in a book, put in explanatory notes, put in a preface. I’ll get a copy of the book and send it to you actually, so you can just at least have it. They’re easy to get now. It’s not worth much any more, that book. And, but Harry said, ‘No no no no. I did these papers with Margaret. The new second coming of CLRU is the important one.’ It was all rubbish, it was all complete crap. He did nothing. He wasn’t intellectual. I don’t know what he was by training. I think he was a, just a businessman. Nothing wrong with that. Anyway, that, all that held it up for a while, because, he managed to get the ear of a professor in Birmingham who had been close to Margaret, and his name escapes me now, and I probably should leave it off the tape, who supported his views - nobody else did, everybody in Cambridge though it’s all rubbish - and they tried to say that, ‘Well look, we are the remaining bit of CLRU, we can say what goes in this book.’ I don’t think there was any legal basis for them saying that. But the dragging effect was, it delayed it, and I having other things to do, and a living to earn, I dragged it out. And I didn’t get this book out until, you know, end of the century, beginning of this century. But I did eventually do it. And it’s a nice book, it’s, I like it. And… But they held it up, and they, the price was that they would only OK it if their papers could go in. And in the end their papers didn’t go in, and I went ahead anyway. So you will see, if you get a copy of the book, I’ll try and find one for you, that the papers are all Margaret’s. Plus some explanatory material from me and Karen Spärck Jones. And I wrote a long… You might be interested, I can send you a copy of that, email anyway.

Yes.

Have you seen my intro to the book? Oh well, it’s probably a document, if you have any space for documents, it doesn’t go into this I know that, but for your interest. My long introductory essay to the book is just a book about the themes in Margaret’s work. Nothing to do with religion. The themes in Margaret’s scientific work. And I, I think it’s as good a tribute to Margaret as you can get. Nobody else has done that length of analysis of what her themes were. So, it ties up with lots of things I’ve said today, and, I’ll just send you that intro as a separate file.

Thank you.

[End of Interview]