© Oxford Brookes University 2012

The Royal College of Physicians and Oxford Brookes University Medical Sciences Video Archive MSVA 163

Dame Bridget Ogilvie DBE DSc in interview with Dr Max Blythe Oxford 16 May 1997 Interview One

MB Dame Bridget Ogilvie, you were born in March 1938, eighteen months before World War II, in New South Wales on a property where your father was farming sheep.

BO Yes, that’s right. Father was quite an enthusiastic but not tremendously successful farmer.

MB Yes, I heard tell. A great character though.

BO Yes, he was. We had merinos. It was mountainous country, a little bit like the Yorkshire Dales probably, and in those early days the winters were very severe there. The sheep didn’t do too well because of the food under this very poor environment and a lack of certain minerals in the soil, so the wool was very fine because the sheep were half-starving and they were very susceptible to disease.

MB The winters were cold?

BO Oh yes, very cold. Much colder than here in many ways.

MB So, on this station among these gentle undulating uplands, you grew up. How many acres did the station have?

BO Well, it was about three thousand acres. It was on the New England tableland, which is about three thousand feet above sea level with a very severe climate in winter, a diurnal fluctuation in temperature from Fahrenheit minus ten or twelve degrees up to sixty degrees during the day, so it’s a very severe environment for anything that wants to grow in the winter.

MB Take me to that station, Bridget, and tell me a little bit about it. Paint it for me.

BO Well, we lived ten miles from the nearest town, which nowadays is nothing at all.

MB Which was called?

BO Millinus, which in those days had a dirt track and, of course, the war, as you rightly said, broke out shortly after I was born, and so although Australia was not, in terms of people coming and invading the country, involved in the War, we had severe rationing, shortage of petrol and all the rest of it, so my early days were spent very much at home on the farm.

MB And a bit isolated?

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BO Quite isolated even though it was near this town of about 6,000 people.

MB With little petrol available?

BO That’s right. Father and mother had enough petrol to go to town about once a week, and so that was quite a big expedition and on the whole they left the kids at home because we did have some help in the house and help on the farm. So father and mother would go and have some time off in town and leave us at home. I was really very much a farm child in the first part of my life up to my primary years at school. That was also a country school, a small, one teacher school with thirty children in the whole school, all in one room, from the ages of six to twelve with, luckily for us, a really brilliant teacher. He not only managed to get the brighter children on further than you would expect into the high school years while we were still at the primary school, but he also taught the children who were a little bit below average and got them up to surprisingly high levels of education. So I was intellectually extremely lucky to have this privileged environment.

MB Perhaps we should put this man on the record?

BO Yes, his name was A B Clarke. He was a rather quiet man, his hobby was French-polishing, strangely enough, and he always insisted that he only wanted a small school and he didn’t want to go to a bigger school, although the education department wanted him to go on elsewhere and have more influence over more children. Interestingly enough, of course, when you’re six to twelve you think anybody over the age of eighteen is Methuselah, you know, but about three years ago I discovered that he was still alive and as it turned out in his early nineties, so I wrote to him to say I was so glad to get in touch with him and to thank him for this wonderful education he gave me. Initially, he was a bit concerned because I joined this class when I was nearly six actually, with three boys, Johnnie Pilling, Vincent Winter, Neil Hamilton and myself, and for the first year I didn’t really know what it was all about, so at the end of the year A B Clarke came to my father and said, ‘John Ogilvie, I regret to tell you that I’m afraid your daughter’s a bit backward.’ And father, who by then knew very well that I was always pretty slow on the uptake, said, ‘Well, Abe, yes I know she seems that way, but please give her a second chance.’ So we had a little exam and that galvanised me into action and I got the message! So I didn’t come bottom of the class again after that.

MB But this A B Clarke, he just poured himself out. He wanted to give so much?

BO Yes, he was a brilliant teacher actually. I know now, looking back, what he did. First of all, there was very firm discipline in those days, there was no nonsense and if you misbehaved you were either thrown out and made to walk home, which could be a five mile walk in those days, or he used a stick, which of course is politically very incorrect these days. He used the brighter children to teach the others and I remember now that what he used to do when he was teaching a new arithmetic trick, say long division, he’d teach me and then when he saw I’d got it, he’d leave me to teach the others in my class, and so there was always a low hum of conversation in the classroom. And we were also taught that when we’d finished the set work, we’d get out a book, once we’d learnt to read, and read. So he really had a gift, this man.

MB Good school dynamic?

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BO Oh, tremendous dynamic and of course a tremendous mixed range of abilities of children. So he was a most gifted man. I was very lucky.

MB Was he a mathematician?

BO No, I think he was just trained as a primary school teacher in the New South Wales Department of Education.

MB But you’ve shot off after the hare with that because we were talking about home and you’ve already been to school. Just going back to that home, tell me about father and mother. Let’s talk about father because I think you formed a close relationship with him first?

BO Yes, I think it’s probably quite normal for girls to form a particularly close relationship with their father at the end of the first ten years.

MB But this was a bit special?

BO We had a very special relationship, yes, because I used to help on the farm a great deal once I’d learnt to ride a horse, because we did most of the things with the sheep on horseback.

MB This was before school?

BO Yes. Well, about the same time I started at school I would help, but quite often I would be kept back from school to help on the farm and occasionally I used to ride my horse to school for the fun of it really more than anything else, which was a five mile ride.

MB And occasionally you used to ride on horseback with father on incredible gallops?

BO Oh yes. Well, my father was a gentle man and really great fun, but actually during World War II, believe it or not, he joined the regiment which was formed in that part of New South Wales, which was still a mounted regiment, the Hunter River Lancers, because the Hunter River runs a bit further south from Newcastle up the Hunter Valley. And most of my father’s friends were majors or colonels or something, but father was never very keen on fighting. He used to say, ‘I think I was a bit too intelligent because I could always realise that the gun emplacements were in the wrong place.’ The guns were wood because the real guns had all been sent to Britain after the beginning of the war. He had a great mate, a lifelong mate, called Doug Abbott and he and Doug were both privates when all their friends were officers, and one day one of their mutual friends, Major White, came to them and said, ‘Ogilvie, Abbott, we need a corporal and a lance corporal. Now you two can toss for it.’ So, before they tossed, they agreed that they’d split the difference in pay because they were all terribly hard up, you know. It was the end of the Depression when war broke out and father always used to say with a twinkle in his eye, ‘Having said that, every time I came out of the pay tent – O coming rather further down the alphabet than A for Abbott – there’d be that so-and-so Abbott sitting there waiting with his hand out.’ These little stories were very characteristic of my father, little stories against himself partly, and his great friend Doug Abbott.

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MB Didn’t that regiment go into decline when Singapore fell?

BO Yes. Well, when Singapore fell they realised that maybe horses and chaps with hats and plumes on them...

MB That’s really what they wore? Incredible for playing soldiers.

BO Oh yes. Father had two horses, Laddie and Grey, two grey horses which were trained to wheel on the word of command and gallop and do all these things, and when he was thrown out of this regiment when it was disbanded, because he was also in a reserved occupation, they decided that maybe Ogilvie would be better off at home, he took these two horses with him. Father and I were great buddies and we used to get behind the barn out of sight of the house and father used to get me to stand there with my hands clasped above my head and then he’d come at me full gallop on one of these horses, lean out of the saddle, scoop me up and put me down in front of him. And I’ll always remember the feeling of mixed fear and delight whilst this happened and then he’d say to me, ‘Don’t you tell your mother, will you? Much too dangerous.’

MB Those were great early memories?

BO Very early. I couldn’t have been more than four or five when this happened and it’s interesting because my sister, who is one year younger, and my brother, who is five years younger, have no memories of any of that. At the same time as that early memory, we used to have draft horses working on the farm as well as riding horses, and I can remember very vividly the rows of draft horses up in the shed each with their name written on the manger, holding the reins and helping while we were collecting hay and things like that.

MB But they don’t remember that?

BO No, they don’t remember that because then that all changed and became mechanised. So it’s extraordinary just how quickly things can change.

MB You also have a very early memory of casting away dolls?

BO Yes. Well, from the time I was about six I could really ride and I used to help a lot on the place, mainly just collecting sheep together for drenching for parasite diseases or for shearing and all the rest of it, and I spent a great deal of my time out with the men on the place. And I can remember vividly, I can still see it in my mind’s eye, sitting out under a rose arbour that mother had – it must have been late in the autumn with all the rose petals blowing in the wind – and with my dolls, looking at them and thinking ‘these are very boring’ and marching firmly into the house and handing them over to my sister and that was it! Yes, I spent my time then doing things.

MB Bridget, I just want to stay with that agricultural background for a moment because you clearly were deeply involved in the welfare of sheep very early and agriculture really did catch hold.

BO Well, I think, as with many farm children, you actually are a member of the team as soon as you can ride and do things, and as soon as you have a sense of

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responsibility. I earnt my pocket money by taking cattle to the market and all the rest of it, and I learnt very early on to have a sense of freedom with responsibility. And I think that was the wonderful thing about that childhood, coupled with the most enormously strong family life, tremendously strong parents, and a happy family atmosphere.

MB Which I’m going to come to in a moment. I’m just going to ask one question first. You obviously grew up and matured quite quickly in that environment, getting to know people and working on the farm with adults. It was really a very early adulthood, wasn’t it?

BO Yes. I think that’s characteristic of farm children, you know. I’ve read that many Americans say ‘If you have a choice, give me a farm kid because a) they’ll be hard working and b) they’ll be responsible.’ But you learn very young.

MB Was it a farmstead home that the family had built?

BO Yes. When my father first moved there it was just more or less a shed and progressively over the many years they lived there – my parents married in ‘35 and they lived there until the early Seventies – they rebuilt the house around them several times, as the financial fortunes ebbed and flowed, so to speak. So early days, of course, were open fires, what we call kerosene but you’d call paraffin lamps, no electricity, and the hot water came from an old-fashioned copper initially, you know, a brick thing with a copper lining and you’d put the fire underneath it and scoop the hot water out from the top. So we didn’t have electricity in any form until I was about thirteen or thereabouts and then we had a little engine, a low-voltage machine, which was fine for lighting but not for much else. Then eventually when I was in my twenties we went on to mains electricity. So it was very much a farm childhood and a wonderful, wonderful early life. I was very fortunate.

MB You obviously have wonderful recollections of that family life which you’ve already made very clear. I want to take mother in at this stage because she was a great person with a great breadth and massive intelligence, a wonderful actor. Just introduce her.

BO Well, my father was a rather reserved man but was, actually, a very powerful character. He liked to sit back and watch mother perform because mother was a very powerful personality, very vivacious, tremendously quick-witted and great fun, with a tremendous sparkle. I mean, as a young woman when she was at secondary school she used to win all the prizes for acting.

MB Was she at the girls’ grammar?

BO Grammar school, yes, at Darlinghurst in Sydney. She was a very powerful personality and I was a bit afraid of her, I have to say, when I was young, because of the sheer force of her personality, you know. She was always the centre of everything.

MB Larger than life?

BO Well, in a way, yes. Full of self-confidence, but her self-confidence was really incredibly based on the strength of her marriage, because mother’s self-confidence

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always waxed and waned according to how strong father was, you know. I realised this later, of course, but it was a very powerful relationship between my parents. They were very different people, very, very interesting, but mother was such fun, you know, always fun to have around. And of course family life was very much centred in the big farm kitchen where we had a wood fire and then eventually a sort of Aga cooker. It was a typical farm kitchen with a big table in the middle and chairs, and everything happened there and mother would be cooking dinner and everything.

MB She was a doing lady, she wasn’t just a lady figure on the farm, she was very much into it?

BO Everybody worked hard on the farm and we used to have these wonderful gatherings while we were preparing for meals. You sort of learnt to cook and all the rest of it because mother just said, ‘Do that, darling,’ while she was doing something else and telling stories and waving the spoon about while she sort of acted something out in the middle of all of this, father sitting there smiling with amusement and pleasure. It was wonderful.

MB It was alive. It was incredibly alive.

BO Yes, you always had a great sense of life and vivacity when my mother was around. She was a tremendously exciting person.

MB Since talking about her on several occasions, Bridget, I’ve often wondered why she didn’t go off to university. She obviously had a great intellect. Why she didn’t act even?

BO Well, her father lost all his money during the Depression and she had, and still has, three sisters and a brother and she and her next elder sister went off to boarding school. Her grandfather then lost his money and so they were quite poor, I have to say, at that time. And mother also, although she was highly intelligent, was lousy at maths, and in those days you couldn’t go to university without mathematics. Anyway, she didn’t really want to do that. She always wanted to marry and have a family. I think that was what she always wanted to do, and she met father quite soon after she left school. Father was eight years her senior and I think she decided then that this was the man for her. I think father took a little longer.

MB She was a McCrae?

BO She was a McCrae, yes.

MB And there were Everinghams also in that family?

BO Yes. Well, there was a long line of these rather exciting women, primarily from the Everingham line, and father always used to say with a twinkle in his eye that of course he’d married into this family of convict ancestry.

MB They came out very early?

BO Yes, well, the original Everingham was actually sent out on the first fleet and he

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was an educated man. Very few of the people on the first fleet to Australia, whether they were soldiers or convicts, were educated and he did time for seven years. I am told that he was sent out for stealing two books from his father’s library, so I guess when he finished his time he decided that he’d stay. He was put to work as secretary to the first colonial architect, who built all those wonderful early buildings in Sydney, and he went on and the family flourished. The Everingham family is everywhere in Australia.

MB What might have been a personal disaster turned out into quite a success story?

BO Yes, I think so for him.

MB And your father was quite happy to refer to that convict ancestry.

BO Yes, he used to love that, you know, with a little sparkle. He had a great way of teasing.

MB Just looking at father’s family background, the Ogilvies and the Mylnes?

BO Yes, my father’s family were Ogilvie, his mother was a Mylne. Again, it’s another Scottish family in terms of descent and most of the people who went to Australia in those early days, of course, were primarily from the Celtic fringe. I guess my own family background is rather illustrative because of my eight great grandparents, five were of Scottish descent, one Irish, one French and one English, and I think that’s pretty typical.

MB Yes, there was quite a remarkable Irish one?

BO Yes. Well, my Irish ancestor was the wife of my great grandfather Ogilvie and she was the twelfth child of a Protestant clergyman from Cork. Quite an amazing thought, isn’t it? Beautiful girl, she was.

MB Taking that Ogilvie line back a little further, the 1790-1800 sort of period, there were great members of the Royal Navy in the family. It’s got a great Naval history?

BO Yes. Well, the original Ogilvie who went to Australia in 1824 was, with his two brothers, in the British Navy all through the Napoleonic Wars. And William, my ancestor, became infatuated with Nelson as they all did if they had any contact with him. And there is a record that he was promoted from midshipman to lieutenant by Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen, and I think two of his brothers actually served on the Victory. So all the family were in the Navy during those wars. I’m always fascinated when I see that wonderful opera Billy Budd, the Benjamin Britten opera, because that is about the British Navy at the time those ancestors were in it. And I’ve always been very interested because Captain William, after thirty years in the British Navy, in the Napoleonic Wars – huge navy, huge army – it was disbanded, and that was when the big free migration to colonies occurred. He was a very unusual man, Captain William, because he was known by his contemporaries in Australia as ‘Mother Ogilvie’ for his high liberal views, and I’m always fascinated how somebody who completed thirty years in the British Navy could have such high liberal views. So I’d like to meet him if you really do meet your ancestors in the hereafter. I’d much like to talk to him about how he could retain such an attitude.

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MB Wasn’t he a beneficiary in Nelson’s will?

BO Well I’m told, although I haven’t actually seen the documentary evidence, that Nelson left his cabin furniture to William Ogilvie, and some of my distant family connections have got all that in the family somewhere. His favourite midshipman he said, so William Ogilvie should have his cabin furniture.

MB He was the Ogilvie migration to Australia, but two other brothers perished trying to achieve the same?

BO Yes. Well, William had married and had a young family at the end of the wars and he had two brothers who had not married and they were given a grant of land in Australia. They went off by sea to take it up and were drowned en route so William decided that he would go out and take up this grant of land and so that’s how the family came to Australia. Tough times.

MB Fascinating times.

BO Yes, very interesting.

MB I’m also mindful apart from this Naval background that, bearing in mind that we are in Oxford recording today, there was an Oxford background that started quite early?

BO Yes, for reasons that I don’t understand, but have maybe to do with the Scottish descent, the family were always very keen on education and my father went to Oxford as an undergraduate, as did his father and his uncle and his brother. They all were Oxford graduates in the early days at the end of the last century and the beginning of this, so there has always been a connection there, but I don’t know the root of it.

MB A Balliol connection?

BO Yes, they were all at Balliol.

MB And that had its influence on you. I think you got talked into Oxbridge?

BO Well, whatever my feelings about the Oxbridge system, I am fully aware of my debt to Balliol College, Oxford, because father had a rather chequered education until he got to Oxford. He was the youngest child and he used to say to me, again smiling, ‘By the time it came to me, the youngest child in a family of six, they got a bit bored, so they didn’t worry about my education too much.’ But anyway he went off to Oxford and that was a really life enhancing and transforming experience for him and I know his passion for educating me really stems from that experience. So I feel very grateful to Balliol College.

MB There is a debt to Oxbridge?

BO Yes, there is a debt.

MB We’ll also see a slightly lower debt when you come to actually have a direct link!

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BO Yes, indeed.

MB Bridget, we’ve not said anything about your sister and brother. Perhaps we could just start their lives off with their home life, just to get the balance?

BO Yes. Well, I have a younger sister and a brother. My sister who is terribly different from me is only fifteen months younger than me and my brother is five years, and they actually formed a pair in their early days. I was much more separate from them, mainly because I was so involved on the farm and the five-year gap between me and my brother was a big gap at that age. We really only caught up when he was in his twenties. Now, of course, we’re very close friends, but that was a very big gap at that time. So I didn’t see very much of them really. I was busy doing my own thing.

MB You were caught up and focussed on other things?

BO Yes. Busy.

MB Before I actually go back to the school that we grabbed you from and brought you back to the homestead, I really would like just to talk about that ancestor, William, in one other way and the fact that you’ve often said that he had two very, very different careers and that that’s also been a model for you in a way.

BO Yes. It’s very curious that one should be so influenced by somebody that one’s never actually met, but I’ve always been very fascinated by this man who had two entirely different careers. He lived to be in his eighties and his first career was in the British Navy and the second one, starting with nothing, was as a pioneer in the Australian bush, ending up prosperous with a house in Sydney and an estate, a vineyard, and all that sort of thing. So I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of having two careers and that, as you have already indicated, made it possible for me to change my career quite sharply in mid-life through that influence, curiously. It’s an odd thing, but it’s true.

MB I’ve got a hint that you may actually go beyond and have three careers, Bridget?

BO Yes, who knows?

MB Just moving now towards school and away from that ancestry a bit into your life and the pattern of that. We’ve talked about the influence of A B Clarke and that school. Did you make friends in that school very early? Was it an influential time? You were a bit of a child loner out on the property at home. Were you a natural friend maker?

BO It was very difficult in those days because it was in the war and immediately after the war, don’t forget, with rationing and all the rest of it, so you couldn’t get together with other children very easily, and although there were farms nearby and that sort of thing, you didn’t get together for frivolous reasons. Really, my life as a young child was very much focussed on the family and the farm. I was friendly at school. We used to play marbles and rounders and all those things, but as soon as you got on the school bus at 4 o’clock, you’d go back home. We didn’t get together very much as children.

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MB This close family basis to life in those early years, I heard you mention on one occasion, had important holiday breaks when you’d all go off to Grafton and make a journey that had, I think, an influence because you talked with great passion about three types of terrain that you travelled through and the geology. Was that really an early impact?

BO I think it was a very early impact because the New England tableland in New South Wales is three thousand feet up and has a temperate climate with apples, pears, and peaches, all that sort of thing. And then there is a very, very sharp drop down to the coastal plain through dense eucalyptus forests, and a tremendously dangerous -windy and dusty in those days – dirt road, and you get down to the coastal plain and the vegetation is quite different with sugar cane, mangoes and bananas, all those sorts of things, and a totally different climate. So I was unconsciously tremendously influenced by that and, of course, the rugged terrain with the rivers cutting back into it, all those wonderful gorges and all the rest of it, so you could see geology in action. Both in terms of botany and geology, I was tremendously influenced and interested from an early age. I think zoologically there’s not so much change in Australia, of course. A little bit, but not nearly so much. So it did have a deep impact on me.

MB I’m fascinated by it happening so early. There was a real feel for that country?

BO We all used to look forward to those trips to the coast. Although it’s only 120 miles, in those days it was a tremendous expedition with cars that were not at all that reliable.

MB Anything could go wrong.

BO Yes, and did! We had tremendous expeditions with cars breaking down and tyres puncturing, all sorts of things. But anyway, it was always tremendous fun.

MB Bridget, we’re at primary school. We’ve had that early slowness overcome by a new impetus, we’ve got you really being taught by an exciting figure who prized getting things right that drew you. You then go off to school somewhere quite exciting and probably quite demanding, you go as a boarder to Armidale.

BO Yes, I went to boarding school then, an all girls’ school in Armidale, which was about eighty miles from home, but still up on that New England tableland. The school was interesting because they didn’t make huge demands on you, it wasn’t a force- feeding sort of school. You were heavily encouraged to work at your own pace and there were some very gifted teachers as well as some rather lousy teachers, I realise now. The two teachers who had the greatest impact on me was, firstly, the most remarkable English teacher who influenced every child that went through the school, a rather severe looking upright daughter of the manse, Ruth Young, and she had an incredible gift for interesting you in English, she really was extraordinary. She was very good with every child because they were mixed ability classes, not streamed in any way, but nonetheless she had the gift of maximising every child, and if she knew you were good and bright, she’d mark you accordingly. I’ll never forget one essay I did for her where she gave me ten out of ten, or the one essay where she gave me two out of ten because she knew I’d made no effort whatever. She didn’t say much, but she just knew how to make you perform.

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MB How did she do this Bridget? What was the magic?

BO Well, it’s very hard to explain actually. She excited you and she demanded things of you without...

MB Was she a great performer or was she a very sincere conveyer of facts?

BO No, no. She was very upright and what my father would have described as of ‘no shape much’. But she was a very powerful influence and at the same time with the children of lesser ability, she’d modulate herself and then...

MB She’d draw them along to where they could get.

BO Yes. So, my lifelong enthusiasm and liking for English and reading and all that sort of thing comes from her, and I was tremendously drawn to that side of academic life. But then my biological background in terms of the farm and the environment in which I grew up was always there. In fact, I found biology so easy, I didn’t see why you really had to study it actually.

MB It was on the back porch almost all the time?

BO Yes, that’s right, and in fact the biology teacher was not very good. The other teacher who had a huge impact on me was the chemistry teacher. In my last two years at school we had four teachers; the first three were really pretty awful and then we had this brilliant woman who came to us about six months before the end of our schooldays, took one look, and said, ‘Girls, girls, you’re in trouble here, but I can get you through providing you work.’ She was a woman called Dorothy Shepherd and she was newly out of teacher training college having done her degree, and she just had an incredible gift for explaining and illustrating chemical principles and we got through all right with six months intensive teaching from her.

MB Chemistry really registered at that level?

BO So those were the two really seminal teachers after my primary school teacher. But otherwise, we had quite a lot of freedom and we just had to learn to work at our own pace, and as I had already learnt under A B Clarke at my primary school to work alone, which was his great gift, from the age of five, there was no difficulty for me to do that.

MB You were very lucky with these three teachers?

BO Yes, but the groundwork was set by A B Clarke. He taught all of us to work alone.

MB That primary school was really in a way the beginning and the end?

BO Yes, it was. That was the seminal education.

MB Better than Cambridge ever was?

BO Oh yes. That was the key educational experience. So, naturally as a consequence of that, I am very biased towards the general necessity for excellent

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primary teaching because I just know how important it can be, and not just for myself, there were many children who were really rather backward but who went on and did very nicely thank you, due to that early experience with A B Clarke.

MB Staying with boarding school life for a while longer, that was comfortable. You were living now with friends and you were able to make friends and sustain them because it was all round the clock. You were a bit of an athlete and an outdoor soul, getting involved in a lot of other things apart from learning biology and chemistry?

BO Yes. Well, we were all obliged to be athletic because we had compulsory sport for one hour every day, but that wasn’t difficult, I always enjoyed that kind of thing and I made lifelong friends there. In fact, I’m going off at the end of this year with a whole lot of my ex-school friends for a holiday in Italy, so that illustrates what powerful friendships we made in those years. Great friends.

MB Now, I’m not going to let you get away from this athletics bit and the sport. You performed and did things, but you weren’t a ball-game player. You leapt around and ran a lot?

BO I was really most involved in team games, hockey and tennis.

MB Really. So that was it?

BO Yes. I enjoyed it.

MB That was an important part of it?

BO It also kept you warm in those cold winters!

MB Bridget, this is always a difficult question, but while you were there and stacking up, as it were, and thinking about what am I likely to be able to do, because I think we probably all go through that adolescent period of working out what we might amount to, did you feel quite early on that you might like a university career?

BO Oh yes. There was never any question of it really. The interesting thing about my father, in particular, is he simply assumed that I’d get on and go to university. I mean, it was never discussed, it was a complete assumption.

MB It was a family seeing women having really strong careers?

BO Yes, because father’s sisters – his younger sisters in particular – were amongst the early pioneers in their own fields.

MB And mother had an influential sister who was a good role model?

BO Yes, absolutely. I had very powerful female role models other than my mother and my aunts on both sides of the family. Until quite recently I’ve never understood this thing about role models and then of course I realised that mine were very powerful from my family background, so I didn’t need them in later life, I had them always.

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MB When you came to choose university you actually read pure science at the University of Queensland, which is a curious choice. I think you may have said to me on one occasion that you were probably pushed away from medicine by an over enthusiasm at home for that?

BO Not at home so much. One of the aunts, actually, was always very keen for me to do medicine and being awkward like many children, I wasn’t very keen. Also, I was terribly put off by the long course, I have to say. I didn’t really want to spend all that time studying and also I didn’t want to go to university in Armidale – although there was a new university there – after all those years at school there. So, I thought I’d go off to the University of Queensland to do pure science and I was very immature and young and I didn’t enjoy the course. I found it too factual and not sufficiently analytical and I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but I managed to get through that year.

MB This was principally botany and chemistry?

BO Botany, zoology, chemistry and mathematics I did at that time. But then I read about this brand new course at the University of New England, which was called rural science, but was agriculture with a particular emphasis on the animal production side of agriculture. And I went to see the dean on one occasion and talked to him about the course and liked him tremendously. I liked the idea of being in on a new course and he said to me that if I got through all right then I could go straight into the second year of the course in the first group of students, and so that’s what I did and I never looked back.

MB Who was this dean?

BO A man called Bill McClymont1 who again had a tremendous influence on me. He was so enthusiastic and he was delighted at the thought of having a woman in his class because in that particular year there were no women at that time. And he was a very informal chap. I remember him sitting back at his desk, rocking back in his chair and actually putting his feet up on his desk with his tie flying over his shoulder and he said, ‘Oh, that will be wonderful. It will make the fellows work!’

MB And it did?

BO It did indeed, yes.

MB Bridget, I’m going to take you back to Queensland. I haven’t quite had enough of the Queensland story. You were only there for a year at the University of Queensland?

BO Yes.

MB But you never went anywhere for a year without bringing more back than we’ve suggested. You went on expeditions and did things in the bush?

BO Well, that was actually when I was at Armidale. MB That came later?

1 Professor Gordon Lee (Bill) McClymont, Foundation Dean of the Faculty of Rural Science at the University of England, Armidale.

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BO Yes. We did a lot of botany as part of this course, and geology as well as all the animal things. And the professor of botany was a great expert on the flora of western New South Wales and central Australia, and his mate was a professor of botany at Sydney University, so one day he organised an expedition to central Australia with students from Armidale and from Sydney. So, off we all went by train to Broken Hill and then by bus to a place called Pippingarra and we stayed on this rather beaten up farmstead. There was an ancient woolshed, which we slept in, and the fire for cooking food for forty people was an old wood-burning stove that had been through two floods, and then just open fires. And when we arrived they said, ‘Well, the meat’s hanging in the meat-safe.’ So I went and looked and there was an animal that had been slaughtered and the carcass had been hung up but it hadn’t been cut up, and so here are all these kids who didn’t have a clue about all of this. Fortunately, with my background I knew what to do even if I didn’t have to do it myself, so I quickly took over the cooking arrangements and managed to get food for all this party in these rather awkward circumstances, and thanks to that, I think, I managed to get through one of my exams that I was rather afraid of. One of the things we had to do was structural botany where you had to cut sections with a cutthroat razor and I never liked doing it – I’m not particularly good with my hands. And during the practical classes I was paired for this with a chap from Thailand, who was incredibly good at this sort of thing. So, come the practical exam, I was a bit worried about this, but I went down with flu so they had to reorganise it, but it was reorganised on a day when I had to do something else, so the professor of botany, thinking I think of the wonderful way I had cooked for him, said, ‘Ah, Bridget, I’ll give you a mark based on the average for all the other exams, so we won’t worry about that.’ So I always feel that my cooking prowess near Pippingarra got me through a very difficult exam.

MB This botany professor, wasn’t he called Beadle?

BO Yes, Beadle. You know about him?

MB Yes, he wrote quite a bit on the Australia flora.

BO Yes, he was a real expert.

MB But he was very supportive?

BO Yes, he was and it was very interesting to go with him, of course, because you’d walk across the landscape and he’d tell you about every single thing that was growing there, no matter what stage it was in or its habits. It was a wonderful expedition. Such fun.

MB Bridget, apart from leading all these guys you were with a merry dance because you were anxious to work and get on faster than they were doing, I guess the spirit was quite good that came out of that because, as far as I know, it was a really lively and helpful group to you?

BO Oh yes. Yes, I was the only girl that year and they were really nice to me. They were a bit shocked with the first lot of exam results after I’d joined them, where my name was rather higher up the list than theirs, but from that moment on they took me into the group and they were wonderful to me actually. There was one chap that the others didn’t

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like very much. He used to occasionally beat me in exams and they used to get very cross with me actually because they much preferred me to him! So they were highly supportive of me. I had a wonderful time.

MB We’ve talked about the primary school and then this University of New England, that’s the next great event isn’t it, in terms of the learning career?

BO It was because being a new course...

MB A lot of hands on activity though, wasn’t there?

BO Yes, with a tremendously enthusiastic staff who’d just joined the university. In fact, they very often turned up the day before they had to lecture to us. None of the practical classes worked much, so you learnt right from the beginning that things aren’t quite as simple as they might seem, so we spent lots of time analysing when things went wrong. Because of that closeness and the enthusiasm, I had a wonderful time as an undergraduate. And I learnt then that the key thing of course was the staff to student ratio. There were only nine in the graduating class, twenty-seven when I joined, the others fell by the wayside.

MB Quite an erosion?

BO Yes, but that was usual in Australia in those days.

MB People were recruited in larger numbers and fell away?

BO Yes. If you got through the leaving certificate, you automatically had a university place, but then there was great attrition in the first and second years. So only about one in three usually graduated without repeating a year.

MB Bridget, you’ve given that new course a very exciting press. Obviously, there was a lot of hands on experience, but were there any other things you brought away from it that were to be significant?

BO Yes. Well, the course set out to give you an integrative feeling about all aspects of animal production, whether it was plants, soil science, disease, physiology, the lot. And I think the great thing it did for us was to give us an introduction to a wide variety of scientific topics up to the graduating time, so when I graduated in the wonderful Sixties – I’m one of that very privileged generation – I was offered places to do PhDs or further training in botany, soil science, geology, physiology, microbiology, pathology, nutrition, parasitology, you know. So it allowed you to delay the decision making process of what you did with the rest of your life until much later. And I think that was a great advantage, as it does with any professional course, be it medicine, engineering etc. It introduces you to many subjects and helps you to learn to integrate information.

MB So a broad canvas opened up at that stage with a chance of selecting then, because you did develop skills in different areas?

BO Yes, that’s right, and also you learnt the language of many subjects. For

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example, although I didn’t pursue geology any further, I knew enough about it to follow the fascinating developments over the years in the scientific literature about plate tectonics and how the continents have moved about on the surface of the earth, although it was nothing to do with the things that I was involved with.

MB Bridget, there are just a couple of things before we wind down for a short break. I’m just interested in that period. We’ve talked about the dean and we’ve talked about the professor of botany, are there any other figures that we ought to include in the story from Armidale?

BO Oh yes, the other very influential person was the man who taught me half the Parasitology course, a man called Bill Southcott, who actually worked for the CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, and came in part-time to teach us parasitology. He taught us helminthology and protozoology and he taught in a totally pragmatic way, you know, in a problem solving way again. He didn’t expect us to know all the details of spicules and all those other things that I’ve always found rather boring, but he insisted that we learnt enough so that if he set us a problem in parasitology, for example, talking about a flock of sheep infected with this and that, then we could use our knowledge about parasitology to solve the problem. Whereas, the enterology side of parasitology was taught by one of the professors of zoology and that was all descriptive, spicules, numbers of eggs, shapes of this and that, and I always found that deadly boring. I’ve always been much more interested in problem solving.

MB And then you got into helminthology at that stage and he didn’t know what he was letting you loose on? Did that begin to make an impact right away? Did you have research feelings for this?

BO Well, the two people who influenced me most was Bill McClymont whose field was nutrition and Bill Southcott who’s was parasitology, and they were both interested in problem solving. I initially got interested in the problem of nutrition of animals and the heavy burden of infection, because the things are related, and then as I developed that project for my honours year that led me to wondering about the immune system. So that was how I got into it. I wasn’t taught much about immunology in those days because there wasn’t actually much to know. Poor nutrition weakens the immune system and increases susceptibility to infection and that’s how I got into immunology, through that.

MB You’re really giving us the basis of what was to be a research interest. I’m going to hold that for a moment and finally just ask about the continuing spirited sportswoman and whether the fun and jinks went on all through the Armidale years?

BO Well, I didn’t participate in sport very much there, no. We had a lot of sports of all sorts, which I won’t go into in detail, in practical classes and other such things because we had to do nine months practical experience in vacations, and so I found myself in all sorts of unlikely situations when I was getting my practical experience. The experience I most remember was when I had to do a month at what was then Gatton Agricultural College in Southern Queensland which was, of course, generally an all-male establishment in those days, and it was the most beaten up place I’ve ever been to. I remember the bathrooms, which were concrete blocks, all sort of rather damp and they’d long since destroyed all the fittings, so you turned on the shower and there was no shower rose and

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this great gallop of water would come out and splash everywhere and the whole place was full of those beautiful little green frogs. Do you remember them?

MB Yes. Aren’t they wonderful?

BO Wonderful, yes.

MB So you were sharing life with them?

BO Yes, and lots of other life went on at that agricultural college as well, particularly in the haystacks. I remember we used to have to assemble on the farm square every morning to be given our allotted task for the day, feeding the pigs or ploughing or whatever we had to do, mixed girls and boys from various places, and one day one of the farm-hands turned up with a snake curled up on a stick and he said in a laconic voice, ‘Found this in the haystack shed,’ and there were several very white faces in the group of us there! But it was fun.

MB Bridget, at that point, before we take you to research, I’m going to wind down and have a short coffee break.

*****

MB Bridget, before we took our break we were talking about you being a young scientist facing research with great research prospects in the Sixties, and really being offered a range of opportunities to do research at university. Take me into that story.

BO Well, I graduated right at the end of the Fifties and we were probably the most privileged generation that has ever been because we just graduated at a time when the huge expansion in tertiary education and universities took place, not only in Australia but here and right throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. So all of us who graduated at that time had endless opportunities for jobs, and when I graduated I was given all these offers to do this, that and the other and it wasn’t because I was particularly special, it was because of the opportunities of the time. The course I did was a four year course, the last year was an honours year when we all did a research project and a small thesis, and then my mentors and Bill McClymont, in particular, decided that I was likely to do well enough to be eligible for a scholarship. The Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme had just been set up so he nominated me in the first round of Commonwealth Scholarship awards in the Australian section of that, and I was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship on the basis of my undergraduate results, and with the support of Bill I set off to come over here to do my PhD. This was partly, I think, because Bill McClymont and many of the staff at the university had themselves had postgraduate training in the UK, some of them in the United States but mainly in the UK at that time.

MB What was the guiding star that brought you to Cambridge?

BO Well, the way the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme operates is that you can nominate the subjects you want to do and make suggestions as to where the most appropriate place is, and the two most appropriate places then in the field I was interested in were Glasgow University Veterinary School and Cambridge University Veterinary School. And as it happened, the man who was my PhD supervisor had been

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out in Australia on a visiting fellowship in my penultimate year and we met and so he invited me to come and do a PhD with him.

MB This was Lawson Soulsby?

BO This was Lawson Soulsby, yes.

MB So, he was influential in that decision?

BO With Bill McClymont, yes. So, I had his support at the UK end and Bill Southcott’s backing at the Australian end.

MB Bridget, we talked about that last project. That was a significant project? BO Well, significant I’m not sure, but what I did was to combine my interest in nutrition and parasitology because I did a small research project which was simply asking the question: ‘Are sheep capable of metabolising fats?’ So that if you by-pass the complex guts of the sheep, can they then metabolise them and lay them down in their tissues. Normally, of course, unsaturated fats that are fed to sheep are saturated by the action of the bacteria in the complex stomachs and nothing gets through to the small intestine. So we put a little cannula in the small intestine of the sheep and poured in linseed oil emulsified with slaughterhouse bile for about a month and the animal was slaughtered and lo and behold, there were all these unsaturated fats in the tissues. Curiously enough, that turned up as a paper in Nature to my amazement when I was in the second year of my PhD training in Cambridge. I didn’t know about it and there it suddenly was. They just published it with my name on it. So, quite by accident I got a Nature paper out of my undergraduate project.

MB Powerful stuff.

BO It was. And at the same time I was very interested in parasitology, and not just parasitology, but in infections and how much more virulent they were in animals that were malnourished. And that led me to get interested in the immune response, hence Lawson Soulsby, who was a pioneer in studying the immune response to parasitic infections, particularly helminths, and hence my enthusiasm to go and do a PhD with him at Cambridge.

MB You arrive in Cambridge.

BO Yes, in the first batch of Commonwealth Scholars. It was great fun. We came by ship, of course...

MB Oh, you came by ship?

BO Yes, the New Zealanders came across to Sydney and then we picked up people from all around Australia and we went to Sri Lanka and India and through the Suez Canal and we had a whale of a time, all these students on this ship. It took six weeks and we were all being looked after by the British Council and they sent us all this little booklet, which was designed for their students, which was called ‘How to live in Britain’, which was full of quaint things and we used to have a lot of laughs about this. One of the things that we used to fall about with laughter over was it said that ‘In Britain when you meet people, you don’t shake hands but you give a faint smile and say ‘How do you do.’ So, we used

18 © Oxford Brookes University 2012 to practise giving a faint smile and saying, ‘How do you do.’ And it also had advice for young women, as I then was, and it said solemnly, ‘In Britain, it is quite acceptable for young women to live alone and entertain gentlemen friends, but this liberty should not be mistaken for license.’ But fortunately, I soon discovered that English people were not quite as pompous or as uptight as that hilarious series of instructions.

MB It was an incredible booklet to get though?

BO I’m sorry I didn’t keep it actually, it was so funny.

MB It would have been a pure treasure. Right, did you go straight to Cambridge?

BO Well, we had a few days in London because we were in the first batch of Commonwealth Scholars and we were well entertained. There was a gathering at Lancaster House or was it Marlborough House, I’m not sure now.

MB You were well feted all the way though?

BO We had dinner at the Guildhall in London, Mansion House, all that sort of thing. We were well looked after.

MB I presume coming away from home, although it was such a close family, wasn’t a great wrench having been at boarding school and having been at university for four years?

BO I’ve lived away from home since I was twelve so that wasn’t a difficulty.

MB I don’t think Cambridge was your idea of Mecca when you got there?

BO No, it wasn’t actually.

MB Tell me about that disappointment at Cambridge. You went to Girton, that was a college that proved the first great disappointment, wasn’t it?

BO Well, because of my father’s experience I had quite considerable expectations, and the truth of the matter was that in those days the colleges were not at all interested in postgraduate students, they were a bit of a nuisance actually. So, instructed by my father, I turned up via a bicycle, actually. I’d never ridden a bicycle, I didn’t know you had to learn, so I just hopped onto this bicycle and ploughed my way out to Girton and they were rather startled to find this person turning up and not at all interested. Then I quickly discovered from my fellow PhD students that Girton was not terribly interested in PhD students. So I just never bothered going because I lived out and at the end of the first term I had this little form to fill in about whether I’d kept term, which you had to do formally, so I filled it in and signed it and I had a letter from my tutor saying, ‘Tut, tut’ that I had signed my own residence certificate and furthermore I never turned up at the college and surely this was not the behaviour expected of a Commonwealth Scholar. Well, I thought this was quite lunatic actually because in the last two years I was at Armidale University, I’d been in charge of a mixed sex residence, so to be treated like a moronic thirteen year old was not something I was prepared to put up with.

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MB So you got on your bike again and went back?

BO Yes, I did.

MB To sort them out.

BO So I said that I thought this was an extraordinary way to treat somebody who was of mature age and that I’d done all the things that I thought were appropriate, instructed by my Balliol father, and they didn’t seem to give a toss about PhD students. And this unfortunate woman was taken aback by this and said, ‘Oh dear, nobody has ever spoken about Girton like that before!’

MB You shattered this little woman.

BO So I said ‘Well, it’s time they did actually.’

MB This was your tutor.

BO Yes, so I more or less fell out with the college, and then she wrote to Lawson Soulsby, who also didn’t have a college. Of course, many academics in Cambridge didn’t have a college. We got on very well and he came into the lab holding this letter by one corner and saying, ‘Bridget, what have you been up to?’ And they’d written to him saying, ‘What about this girl. Is she all right?’ And so he said, ‘Oh, I’ll fix that.’ And so he wrote a letter and showed it to me, which said, ‘Bridget Ogilvie is the greatest thing since sliced bread,’ or words to that effect. So no more was said actually.

MB And now you have a very respectable link with that college?

BO Well, as they say ‘The wheels of God grind slowly, but they do grind exceedingly fine.’ And many years later, to my embarrassment, I had a letter from the College inviting me to become an Honorary Fellow – much to the vast entertainment of my friends – so I decided that it would really be too gauche to refuse. So I am now an Honorary Fellow of Girton, so all is forgiven.

MB Cambridge in itself though, that must have been impressive?

BO Well, I had a lot of fun. All those chaps I came over with. Yes, I had a lot of fun.

MB You were always out. You had a very good leisure balance?

BO Oh yes, it was fun. Well, I was very independent from an early stage actually, by family background and primary school.

MB Wickedly independent.

BO Probably almost too independent, actually, but it was very fortunate that I had the kind of PhD, the old-fashioned kind of PhD, you know, ‘here’s a bench, get on with it and come to me with your thesis in three years.’

MB That was it. That was the flavour that was struck right from the start? BO

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More or less, yes. That suited me very well actually.

MB Because you just did. You worked from 9 til 5.30 every day and then you went off and did your thing?

BO Yes, that’s right. In those days you were not expected to work as PhD students are now, with much longer hours than that.

MB Whatever happened to the cultural soul. Had you become involved in the arts and music? We’ve talked of you becoming a scientist.

BO No, not very much I have to say at that time. Again, because of the lack of electricity at home, we didn’t have a radio or gramophone or anything, although my father was always very keen on classical music. So that really came much later in my life, actually, that interest. It began at Cambridge because I used to come up to London quite a lot with various friends and go to the opera.

MB Or listen to the madrigals?

BO Yes, or go to art exhibitions. So, that was the beginning.

MB Part of the story we will trace in due course, but we can put the first pointer in there.

BO Yes, there was plenty of that kind of thing in Cambridge.

MB Talking of Lawson Soulsby and this ‘here’s the PhD project’, you turned his suggestion down though. You said ‘I’m not going to do that one.’ Tell me what he set you?

BO Well, when I started my PhD the first, and still only the first, vaccine for worms, for helminths, had just been invented by a group at the Glasgow Veterinary School and this was a vaccine for cattle lungworm. They discovered that if you take the infective stages and irradiate them with a certain dose, they will develop so far but not to the pathogenic stages which are the much more mature stages in the life cycle.

MB That’s a five--stage life cycle?

BO Yes, all nematodes have a five-stage life cycle and normally the infective stage is the third stage. So, they irradiated them so that they didn’t get through the first moult and so were not nearly so pathogenic, but that stimulated in that particular host/parasite relationship a good immune response in protected cattle. As far as I am aware that vaccine is still being used, actually. So all of us were busy trying to find out what these parasites produced that induced the immune response, because it was known even then that it was very difficult to vaccinate with extracts, it had to be a living something but attenuated in the case of these things. I was set to work to try and culture parasites in this most incredible soup – whole extracts of the early stages of eggs and things like that – and I quickly decided that this really didn’t suit my temperament. I was bored stiff trying to get these parasites to develop in this gloopy mixture.

MB What was the idea of this, Bridget? Was the idea to get whole cultures of them

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and then look at how they developed?

BO Yes, it was to try and get them to develop through their life cycle in vitro which nobody has succeeded in doing ever since.

MB Nobody has ever done that?

BO No. So it wasn’t a project that appealed to me. I thought I’d try to find out in the model system exactly which stage in the life cycle would induce immunity and whether, in fact, the third stage larvae were the most immunogenic phases or whether the other stages were. So, I studied that in great detail in vivo and looked at the immune response to them using the techniques of the day.

MB So you went to Soulsby and told him that this was what you were going to do?

BO Well, I said ‘I’d like to change my project.’ So he said ‘Fine.’

MB He was a very hands-off kind of supervisor?

BO Yes, he was. He was busy writing what was to become a very useful and famous textbook of veterinary parasitology2. Then after I started, there were several others and we all worked together in different parasite systems and really sort of helped each other a lot. He wasn’t totally hands-off. He was very constructive if you went to him for help, but that was the style of the day.

MB You took the opportunity to develop a relationship through this?

BO Oh yes, we became very good friends actually and he’s remained a good friend. So that was quite interesting.

MB Was there anything about his character or anything that you’d like to put on the record?

BO Oh well, he’s a very ebullient, hail fellow well met, cheerful man, you know, and gets on very well with people. He did some very good work himself actually at that time on parasites. He mainly studied Ascaris in guinea pigs. We had similar sorts of interests. We were all interested in trying to locate the key antigens that turn on the immune response that protects. The trouble is you get lots of immune responses, but finding the one that actually interferes in the host-parasite relationship has always been difficult and, in fact, has not really been elucidated to this day. It’s a complicated thing. They’ve very complex organisms, of course.

MB Bridget, I was going to ask about the unit in Glasgow that came out with that first vaccine in the early Sixties. Was that a really massive, radical event in your field?

BO Oh, it was a huge event in veterinary parasitology and, in fact, there’s never been anything quite like it because there are very few vaccines for parasites of any kind,

2 Soulsby, E.J.L., 1965-. Textbook of Veterinary Clinical Parasitology. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications.

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MB Who was responsible for that?

BO Well, there was a group of four. There was a pathologist, Bill Jarrett, there was a chemist who was instrumental in thinking of the idea of irradiating, Bill Mulligan, there was George Ercott, who was the parasitologist, and Frank Jennings, who was also a pathologist/parasitologist, and they really had a major impact on the field. But that technique, which was applied to many different systems, didn’t work so well for various reasons. So there was a huge explosion of interest in that approach at that time.

MB Was there a good relationship between the Glasgow team and Cambridge?

BO Oh yes. They were very good to me and I worked a lot with them. We did some joint things together. I didn’t actually publish with them, but they quite often sent me material, once they got over the shock, these large powerful Scots, of having this ‘lassie from Australia’ competing with them. We remained very good friends.

MB Bridget, can you take me through, technically, that PhD project?

BO Well, I think my PhD project and the years after that were really a sort of definition of how you can study a host-parasite relationship of that complexity in a quantitative way. So my PhD work was largely, using living organisms, trying to find how powerful the immune stimulus was. I mean, for example, I showed, quite trivial really, that to immunise with irradiated infected larvae you’d need two or three doses of three thousand larvae, whereas a single female adult worm would immunise quite powerfully. So if you just took an adult worm from one animal and put it into another, there was a frightfully powerful antigenic stimulus from the adult, even if it wasn’t capable of producing eggs. So, in other words, I just quantitated the capacity of the living stages to produce the immune response and tried to begin to measure the immune response in different ways using the techniques available at the time, which were fairly elementary.

MB And chose a rat model?

BO I was working on a rat model, which was a very good model because it was very easy to maintain in a laboratory with a direct life cycle without an intermediary host. You could quantitate the infection very accurately, you could follow the infection accurately and you could see it being modulated.

MB Which species of parasites?

BO Well, it’s a worm called Nippostrongylus brasiliensis which has been used continually ever since then a great deal. A short life cycle, easy to manipulate, not on the whole infectious to people and not easily transmitted to other animals. It’s been used a great deal in studying the immune response. So having done that as a PhD student and having felt I really hadn’t got as much out of the Cambridge experience as I should have, I was lucky enough to get what was actually a Wellcome Animal Health Trust Scholarship to go to Mill Hill, to the National Institute for Medical Research.

MB I’m not letting you go there right away because there are a couple of things I

23 © Oxford Brookes University 2012 really do want to ask. What was the title of the thesis you came up with that you were just writing up as you went to Mill Hill? That’s giving you a hard time. Sorry.

BO I don’t think I can remember it. I think it was something like ‘Nippostrongylus brasiliensis: A Study of the Life Cycle and the Immune Response to the Life Cycle Stages’ – something like that.

MB So you were looking at all the stages and their antigenic potential?

BO Yes.

MB What happened essentially in that phase, if I can summarise it from where I’m at, is that you were looking at what happened in terms of host response?

BO Yes, in terms of the host response which acted back on the parasite itself, not in terms of what antibodies are produced in the circulation, because that told me nothing because I couldn’t find any correlation. The other thing I did was that I took animals that had become immune and then tried to block them using higher short bursts of cortisone to see at what stage the immune system acted back on the parasite, and again showing that the main response was back on the adult, or the late fourth stage larvae, so both sides of it in a quantitative way. I think one of the main things I did in my career as a bench scientist was to quantitate and to define in precise detail what you were dealing with and that made it much easier then to begin to analyse.

MB That was the bedrock of all that was to come.

BO Yes, it sounds so obvious now.

MB But it wasn’t, you were developing very new ground.

BO You had to define before you could really analyse properly.

MB We’ve talked about establishing that bedrock, but were there any points of real experimental excitement or a eureka moment at that time, or did that come later?

BO Well, I think it was really astonishing to me to discover that a single female worm would stimulate a powerful immune response when most people thought you needed thousands of larvae.

MB That was an exciting quantification?

BO Yes, because I started with three thousand and went right down and discovered that you only needed one. But it was nice to be able to quantitate using in vivo systems and I think that was very important actually for my subsequent work.

MB You talk about Lawson Soulsby and the reasonable opportunities you were offered of support and everything. Were there any other people who were supporting you in Cambridge, anybody else who influenced that drive you had, because you drove quite hard in those years at the bench, apart from all that play?

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BO I don’t think particularly at that time. I think the students who were with me, we all interacted together, but I don’t think there was anybody that I would wish to nominate. I think most of all I had fun actually in Cambridge.

MB I can sense that. I think you said at one time, ‘Having not done really what I wanted to do and become a proper immunologist in those Cambridge years, I wanted to go somewhere where I could.’

BO Yes, that’s what I decided I needed to do before I went back to Australia, that I really needed to have a post-doctoral period.

MB And was Mill Hill the obvious place?

BO Oh, at that time there was no question. I mean, Mill Hill at that time was developing a really major international reputation for immunology and there was a group of very seminal people there led by Peter Medawar, Avrion Mitchison, John Humphrey, Bridget Askonas. It was a very seminal time in immunology and all sorts of exciting things were happening and, of course, Peter Medawar was an extraordinarily charismatic individual and had a powerful impact.

MB Had you met him?

BO No, I didn’t actually. I just knew about him by reputation and I used to go to the odd lecture given by him and others, but I thought that would be a wonderful place, a sort of Mecca, to go and learn more immunology in more depth. So that’s what I decided I wanted to do next.

MB So you go there in 1964?

BO At the end of 1963.

MB Just before the PhD was published?

BO Yes, because I submitted my PhD in August 1963 and at that time Lawson Soulsby decided to go off to the States and take a chair in Philadelphia and they couldn’t find anybody who was willing to examine my thesis for one reason or another. I don’t think it was actually because of me though, so I didn’t actually have my thesis examined until the following March, which was a long time, and I’d moved on a long way.

MB Oh, you’d moved a long way by then because a big finding had taken place in your research that didn’t come out in the PhD, but which came very soon after you’d presented it?

BO Yes, I went to Mill Hill in October 1963 and continued to study that system and I was then switched to try and elucidate in more detail, because the techniques were becoming available, the nature of the host immune response. The person who really accidentally helped me to make what was probably the most important discovery I made during my time as a bench scientist was John Humphrey, who was then head of the division of immunology at Mill Hill, a much loved father of immunology in Britain.

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One Saturday morning I’d been at work and I was waiting at the bus-stop outside the Institute and John, in his characteristic fashion, stopped and gave me a lift down the hill to the tube station and very kindly asked me what I was doing. And I was telling him that what I was interested in was the immune response in rats to this particular parasite and I said, ‘One of the curious things about rats who become immune to this parasite is that they are very, very susceptible to anaphylactic shock,’ and it was known in those circles that only guinea pigs were actually susceptible to anaphylactic shock, and people. So John was fascinated immediately and he said, ‘I’ve just been to the library and seen a very interesting paper by a former associate of mine in a journal that’s come in today,’ and he told me what to look for and he said, ‘go up and look at that.’ So I went up and read this and it was somebody who’d just discovered something that they called mast cell sensitising antibodies, in rats immunised with albumin, or something in very low titre. And I realised that something that would release substances from mast cells may well underlie this sensitivity to anaphylactic shock, which we knew happened in these animals. So I went and got some of my serum collection and did a passive cutaneous anaphylaxis test, that is you take serum from an infected animal and you put it into the skin of an uninfected animal, wait several days so that the non-mast cell attaching antibodies could diffuse away, and then you inject in the tail vein of that animal an extract of the parasite together with a blue dye, and if the antigen fires the mast cells, because there’s this mast cell sensitising antibody on it, then you get a blue spot because of the release of fluid from the blood vessels, because a histamine comes out and acts on the blood vessels locally. And initially I didn’t see anything. I killed the rat that I’d done this test on and it was just completely blue. Fortunately, I had the wit to realise then that maybe I needed to titre this thing out, so I then did tests using much more dilute amounts of serum and discovered that I had massive levels of these sorts of antibodies in the serum of these animals that had recovered from infection. So this was really a very novel finding at the time. Now, these were what are now called IgE antibodies, but were then called mast cell sensitising antibodies, the antibodies which are, of course, produced when people become allergic. And from that we went on to realise that helminths were potent stimulators of this kind of immune response, so I spent a lot of time studying that.

MB That was a great eureka moment?

BO Yes, it was. It really was actually.

MB And that was based on a paper by Motor?

BO Yes, Motor, in some fairly obscure journal. But it was the group in Glasgow who’d shown initially that the rats who recovered from this infection were easily shockable because they were interested in it for another reason. I just put the two together thanks to John Humphrey and found this. I always remember rushing up to tell John Humphrey this and I said, ‘Well, I’m sure this is going to turn up in all infections.’ So, John did me a great favour and said, ‘Oh, but it won’t turn up in rabbits.’ So I managed to find a rabbit parasite system in the next few weeks and I ran up and said to John, ‘Well, John, here it is again.’ I mean, at the time, that was a very useful discovery because that system of using passive cutaneous anaphylaxis with antibodies stimulated by the parasite was used by drag firms who were trying to develop drags which block the release of histamine from mast cells for use in allergy. It was a useful model system for that purpose. I mean, that’s a long time ago and things have moved on since then.

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MB But it’s worth a research career to get something like that?

BO Yes, it was fun at the time.

MB It was an important stepping stone moment in the story of IgE?

BO Yes, it was indeed because then we had a wonderful system for studying the T- cell, the dependence of IgE, all sorts of things. So we did a lot of work looking at the parameters of that kind of antibody and how it’s produced.

MB You must have been regarded as a bit of a whiz-kid at Mill Hill?

BO Well, it was because of that that Peter Medawar then decided that he’d keep me on the staff actually. He and John Humphrey.

MB And they were going to be great friends anyway?

BO Well, they were my great supporters. The head of my department was Frank Hawking, he was Stephen Hawking’s father, and Frank was, I have to say, a fairly eccentric man. He always reminded me a little bit of Jacques Tati, all elbows and knees, you know! There are many stories about Frank.

MB Are you going to offer any to us?

BO Well, I think out of kindness to him, I won’t. The very important thing Frank did for all of us was that he was an excellent editor and wrote very well. He taught us all to write papers.

MB He really leaned on you when you were publishing?

BO Yes, he did actually.

MB That was invaluable, wasn’t it?

BO Yes, that was extraordinarily helpful and valuable. But it was Medawar, in particular, and John Humphrey who decided that they’d like to keep me and I remember vividly the moment that Medawar decided he would keep me, at least for a few years on contract, because I went there initially on a one year fellowship.

MB You’d been offered a posh job, hadn’t you?

BO Well, everybody was being offered jobs all over the place at that time.

MB You hadn’t been there long and you were offered this job?

BO Well, everybody was at that time, Max. Don’t forget the middle Sixties was the time when everybody was talking staff for the new universities, so of course I together with all my contemporaries were offered lots of things. But having discovered this within three months of my getting to Mill Hill, I really wanted to pursue it while I had

27 © Oxford Brookes University 2012 the opportunity and not move on. But anyway, I only had a one year fellowship which didn’t pay very well and dear Frank Hawking was absolutely hopeless at trying to persuade one’s sponsors to try and do something about this. He used to write terribly rude letters, which didn’t do any good at all. So I went to see Peter Medawar about this and also told him about the jobs that I’d been offered and I explained to him about a job that I’d been offered and the pros and cons of it, and I remember the moment of truth when he decided to keep me. After I’d gone on about this, he looked at me and he said, ‘Just tell me again who’s offered you that job?’ And I told him who it was and he looked at me with his mesmeric eyes and said, ‘What do you think of him?’ And I knew the moment of truth had come actually, this drowning woman, so I thought to myself very quickly, ‘Now how do I deal with this one? What do I say?’ So I looked him back in the eye and I said, ‘Well, he’s a tremendous operator, but a lousy scientist.’ And Peter threw himself back in his chair and he said, ‘Quite right, quite right. You stay here.’

MB The die was cast and was not going to be regretted.

BO No. I mean, I was kept on contract initially and then later on I was given a contract with unlimited tenure and stayed on for seventeen years there.

MB Did the relationship with Medawar happen quite early because I know you got to be close colleagues?

BO Not particularly close. I mean, I really admired Medawar because he was so charismatic and his gift with language was really extraordinary, but he was an incredibly egotistical man, you know. Before he had his stroke, his ego filled the room. He was enormously egotistical and I found that, I have to say, quite repellent. Whilst I admired him tremendously because of his gifts and his leadership and his capacity to talk about science and inspire interest in science and the philosophy of science, I found his huge egotistical persona not attractive. But he was very supportive of me.

MB But there was charm there?

BO Yes, and a wicked sense of humour too, and he made the division of parasitology because Frank Hawking really wasn’t capable of bringing it into the modern era. And Peter, who was quintessentially a zoologist, was very interested in these very complex and fascinating life-cycles and so he encouraged us all to get involved in studying the immune response to parasites, both in terms of trying to find out how immunity gets rid of parasites and equally importantly, and more difficult, why parasites on the whole manage to avoid the immune response and live for long periods of time within what should be an immunised host. So Peter Medawar really made the division of parasitology, which was very strong in the late Sixties and early Seventies at Mill Hill. It was a leading force in the world of parasitology.

MB And of course drew many, many influential figures to work under that banner?

BO Yes, so it was really Peter who made it. No doubt about it.

MB We’ve talked about John Humphrey, we’ve talked about Medawar, we’ve talked about Hawking. What of other people who also assisted you? Now, this was a real career that was developing at this time. Cambridge had been the kind of pilot scheme.

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This was real action now. Who were the other people who forged that, Bridget?

BO Well, I think I’ve always been independent to a fault, but I always kept in touch with what was going on in immunology using much less complex systems in the division of immunology and in several other divisions in Mill Hill. The work on dividing lymphocytes into T and B cells went on at that time, and so we were able to use the techniques that were being developed there in these much more complex systems. So it was a very symbiotic relationship, but not necessarily working together with them, because our core interests were rather different. So I knew them all but didn’t actually work closely with them.

MB So you fitted in comfortably but you really got down to your own bench?

BO Yes.

MB I think you said at one time that ‘I could really focus for periods of time, but then I could just open wide and do anything and go out and about.’

BO Yes. Well, I always found that the dilemma of being an experimentalist is that in order to make an impact you’ve got to focus, you’ve got to know your interests and pursue something in depth, but in fact a lot of the time it was really rather boring. Let’s face it, you know, doing experiments is like as they say, 95 per cent perspiration and 5 per cent inspiration. MB But that’s true?

BO Oh yes, but I always used to enjoy going to the wonderful library at Mill Hill. They had superb library staff, who were unusual amongst library staff because they were very keen for you to read their journals and books, and didn’t actually want them lining their racks, and so I developed a wide interest in all aspects of parasitology and the immune response to it. Although I always stuck with very precise experimental leads myself, I always had a wide knowledge of what was going on and wrote a lot of reviews and all the rest of it. So I dealt with the sort of boring aspects of research by taking an interest in everything else that was going on in that particular sphere and infectious diseases generally.

MB Bridget, I want to dissect a couple of things. You have said to me on one occasion that ‘My career was pretty accidental and it went along and a lot of things happened to me that I couldn’t have anticipated,’ but you’re also suggesting that there’s a planning mind. You were looking widely and thinking widely about the discipline. Did you have ambitions for this experimental work?

BO I absolutely loved doing experiments, there’s no doubt. I adored it. There’s no doubt about it that, as far as I was concerned, scientific research was organised play for adults, no question about it, and of course it was the wonderful days when you hardly had any assessments of any sort, the money was available and you just got on with it. That was the case really up until the early Seventies. It was an extraordinarily privileged time actually. But just at the time when interesting results were beginning to come out of those few of us who were working on the immune response to parasites in the early Seventies, the world suddenly got interested in Third World problems and the diseases of the Third World, the social conscience of the early Seventies, and so for that reason the very few of

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us who were in this field, who had any expertise in it, suddenly had our names in lights to a degree which was really a mismatch with what we’d actually achieved, it was just the scarcity value. So I got to start travelling the world and meeting people in my late twenties and early thirties at a time when, just by sheer luck, there was a turn round of events.

MB I’m going to keep you in the Sixties before you start all this globe-trotting and this developing career. You’ve got the IgE work going which wasn’t going to go away and that was a fascinating area, but you were looking increasingly at the product of the parasite in the host system?

BO Yes, that’s right and looking to see what happened to the parasite when the immune response affected it.

MB So, that was the second phase and you started that at Mill Hill and you had five or six years early work looking largely at what the host was inflicting?

BO Yes, defining the immune response. I mean, helminths were the most potent immunological stimulants, you get every class of antibodies simulated, M, A, G, E and then every kind of cell, huge numbers of mast cells. There are special mast cells that you find in the lining of the gut which proliferate in huge numbers after these infections have been there, acinophils and basophils. It’s as if the helminth switches everything on. So we defined all those, but of course when you have such a complex series of immune responses, to try and delineate which ones are the key ones proved to be very difficult.

MB And that didn’t work out. You got part of the way?

BO Well, we did some of the work there but, quite frankly, we didn’t have the sufficient techniques at that time and I decided that I didn’t have the skills to carry it on beyond a certain point and I think one of the things you have to do in research is to know when to quit. So, having done as much as we could and having realised that we were dealing with a massively complex interaction between host and parasite, then, by accident, I found all sorts of curious changes in the parasites themselves, so I had a lot of fun playing with that. That was really play, actually.

MB I just recall in my mind that that was the cholinesterase story. Is that right?

BO Yes, that led to that. I mean, it’s something that gave me a tremendous charge at the time, but it didn’t have the same impact generally. We discovered when the adult stages of these parasites were affected by the immune response, they were tremendously damaged. We saw huge damage to them.

MB So you can see great surface scarring?

BO No, internal organ degeneration really. But we knew all the time that there was lots and lots of evidence that the key antigens were things that the worm secretes, and any parasitic nematode has a large selection of glands which are clearly designed to produce secretions to be chucked out into the environment, presumably for feeding and such like, and so we decided to look to see what they produced. Then somebody else showed, using cytochemical methods, that the glands of this parasite were full of acetylcholinesterase. So then we went off to pursue what happened to the cholinesterase when the immune

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response affected the worm and found out all sorts of things. We had a lot of fun pursuing that.

MB This switches on a really major immunological response?

BO Yes, almost all gut nematodes secrete huge amounts of cholinesterase. Why nobody knows, but the nature of that cholinesterase, both qualitatively and quantitatively, changes once the parasite is affected by the immune response, so we pursued that hare for a long time.

MB Bridget, around 1970 you go to Australia, back to your homeland?

BO Yes, I took my first sabbatical leave when I was about thirty-three.

MB And you go to work at the CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation] on some kind of award?

BO Yes, I went as an Ian McMaster Fellow to the division of animal health at the CSIRO. The then head of the CSIRO I’d known since my Cambridge days when he worked at Babraham and he was a great friend of Lawson Soulsby and so I got to know him. He liked Aussies.

MB Who was this?

BO What was his name, Alan something, I can’t think. I’ll come back to that. He had three laboratories, one in Sydney, one in Melbourne, six hundred miles south more or less, and one in Brisbane. So he said to me when I won this fellowship that he would like me to work with him. So I said ‘Well, Alan, it sounds like fun, but I hope you don’t mind if I don’t do much.’ Anyway, as it turned out, I got on to this cholinesterase kick and realised when I got there that they had all these many different kind of sheep and cattle nematodes in pure culture and simply asked the question: ‘How many of these parasites secrete cholinesterase and where from?’ In Brisbane they had all the cattle parasites, in Sydney all the sheep parasites, and down in Melbourne they had various analytical techniques which they also had in Brisbane, so I had a whale of a time setting up experiments in each of these places and then saying, ‘Well, chaps, get on with it, bye-bye, I’m off!’

MB Telling all these Australian scientists at the CSIRO to get on with it while you travelled between laboratories, did that go down well? They all supported you, I think?

BO They’d all known me for years.

MB You published nine papers in a year?

BO Yes.

MB And they all needed a holiday when you came back. Is that right?

BO That’s right. They all took three months off, they told me! ‘Thank God Bridget is going, we can have three months off!’

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MB But you made friendships there. It was an important time for you?

BO Yes, well, I knew some of them before, actually from my undergraduate days.

MB So it was like going back home a bit but you really gave them a tough time again, a bit like those guys at Armidale. You fired it all up. Bridget, the CSIRO, you might have stayed there in a better social and employment climate?

BO Yes, I might have.

MB Tell me about that.

BO There were two reasons I didn’t go back after my PhD: one was because I’d had that exciting turn-on scientifically at Mill Hill and Medawar was supportive of me, and also just as I was offered jobs in the UK, I was offered lots in Australia. However, in those days women academics and women civil servants in the Commonwealth Public Service in Australia were paid 426 dollars a year less than men, regardless of whether you were a junior person or a senior person, so egged on by my dear father and all the men, I have to say, at senior level, I turned down all these job offers on the grounds that I’d never work for an organisation that had a tax on women. The CSIRO was an absolute byword in that incredibly male chauvinist country, my homeland, for male chauvinism. And when I was out on sabbatical in the early Seventies, it was the height of the big women’s movement with a big peak in activity then, and the CSIRO was known as the worst of them all, and one of these women went to see the chairman of the CSIRO to say to him, ‘How come there are no women at a senior level in your organisation?’ And he huffed and puffed and said, ‘Well, it’s not that we’re against women, it’s just we always give the best man the job!’ So there was a kind of a funny atmosphere. So, towards the end of my sabbatical year there when I was trying to decide what to do, they were looking for a head of one of these laboratories I’d been working in because the incumbent was about to retire, and all my friends asked me to go and see them. And I naturally assumed that I was, you know, an outsider who got to know the organisation and they were going to try a few ideas out on me. When I got there to my amazement there were all these fellows wriggling like eight year old schoolboys sitting on their seats and finally one of them blurted out, ‘Well, Bridget, we just wanted you to come and talk to us because we just wanted you to know that well, if you were a man, we’d be recommending you for the job!’

MB I bet they squirmed.

BO Well, I knew actually that they were in a very curious and funny way paying me a great compliment. They didn’t need to say a word, but they understood that I knew that if they’d recommended a woman for the job, especially a young woman -after all I was only thirty-three at the time – they’d be laughed at, so that gave me the message that I’d better not stay.

MB They felt they needed to explain.

BO Yes, although they were made to work hard, they actually quite liked it.

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MB Amazing moment.

BO Yes, it was actually. Quite a moment.

MB In that one year, did you have a chance to catch up with a whole range of Australian life, to see your parents and have a lot more time?

BO Well, I saw quite a lot of my parents and I saw a lot of friends and family. I had very good friends in Brisbane and I stayed with them while I was there, you know, and shared a flat with a group of friends that I’d known for years and, I think, at that time my brother was actually working in Melbourne, so I stayed with him while I was there and caught up with friends and family. So I’ve always maintained close connections with family and friends over the years in Australia.

MB I begun this interview today by talking about that family and those parents and that home. Perhaps we could wind down today by just mentioning them again. Were they were in the same home?

BO Yes, they were at that time. Father was getting towards retirement.

MB I think he retired in 1973 ?

BO He retired in 1973, yes, when he was seventy.

MB But both parents were still quite well?

BO Oh yes.

MB Firing strongly?

BO Yes. Father was clearly slowing down. He was still farming and riding horses and everything at that age, which was not an easy thing because he was not a gentleman farmer. He had working men’s hands and he was a hard-working, hands-on farmer, yes, but he was clearly approaching retirement at that time.

MB What was his view? He’d seen you come to Cambridge, follow the Oxbridge line that the family had enjoyed and he’d seen your career begin to move, and you’d had some recognition as a distinguished scientist, did that really give him a great deal of satisfaction?

BO Yes, I think it must have, of course. But because he’d always just assumed that I’d get on, and because a couple of his sisters had also gone on and made real careers for themselves, it was really a kind of assumption. I mean, I think he was proud, but I think it was really an assumption. I guess he realised when I was quite young that I was probably quite bright although there was not a sort of Calvinist attitude at all in the family, far from it, but there was a certain view of that sort. I mean, the general atmosphere was that certainly if you do have gifts, you should get on and do something with them. For sure. I mean, it was just an absolute assumption.

MB And mother, you’d started to get really quite close to her as a grown woman. You were close?

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BO Yes, I really began to get very close to my mother at that time. She was such fun. She had such insight and an incredible gift of understanding.

MB A kind of sixth sense or whatever they call it. She really did have insight, didn’t she?

BO I think she did actually, yes. Whatever it is called.

MB I mean, I’ve read about this lady and she is quite remarkable.

BO Yes, she really was. She was the centre of everything in that small country town and she was interesting because she was born, bred and lived all her life in a small country town, but she was anything but provincial and she had a gift of getting on with people of all kinds, all ages, both sexes, and she was exciting and fun to be with.

MB And she will continue in our story when we talk about this next time. Bridget, for today, thank you.

BO Thank you very much, Max, it’s always fun talking about things so close to my heart.

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