NATIONAL LIFE STORIES ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Don Cupitt Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1672/20 This transcript is copyright of the British Library Board. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] IMPORTANT Access to this interview and transcript is for private research only. Please refer to the Oral History curators at the British Library prior to any publication or broadcast from this document. Oral History The British Library 96 Euston Road London NW1 2DB 020 7412 7404 [email protected] Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators ([email protected]) The British Library National Life Stories Interview Summary Sheet Title Page Ref no: C1672/20 Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews Interviewee’s surname: Cupitt Title: Mr Interviewee’s Don Sex: Male forename: Occupation: Philosopher Date and place of birth: 22nd May 1934, Oldham, Lancashire , UK Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: engineer and manager Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 21/5/16 (track 1-2), 07/06/2016 (track 3), 23/06/2016 (track 4-5) Location of interview: Interviewees' rooms in Emmanuel College Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661on compact flash Recording format : audio file 12 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel Total no. of tracks 5 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 7 hrs. 59 min. 05 sec. Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: OPEN Interviewer’s comments: Don Cupitt Page 1 C1672/20 Track 1 [Track 1] Could you start by telling me when and where you were born? I was born at Oldham in Lancashire, on May the 22nd 1934, my parents being Robert and Nora Cupitt. The place of birth was a maternity home. I think in those days women went into such a place. It was a substitute for the old practice of confinement. But the belief was that, childbirth was a period when you needed very special protection and seclusion. And can you tell me about the life of your father, in as much detail as you can? Yes. My father’s family came from Nottinghamshire. I remember Bertram Cupitt, my grandfather, who was a plumber, fought in the Royal Engineers during World War I. But I remember him, his eighty years as a good, solid Victorian craftsman, with a very firm identity. My grandmother was Emma Hester Wayman[ph]. A quite different character. A frustrated intellectual. She had been longing to be a doctor, and she got a place at Nottingham University Medical School to read medicine, but her family wouldn’t let her take it up, she had to stay at home and look after the children. So all her life she was in search of a knowledge that had been forbidden her, and therefore keen on every sort of spiritualism, theosophy, divination of every kind, and the wisdom of the East. My father grew up very secular, but with perhaps a questioning, doubting side to him that came from his mother, and came out more strongly in me. My father was only five foot eight in height. I am six foot four. He was stocky and short, good-looking, black-haired. From early on he was obviously a leader and organiser. He started as a gas engineer; at the time when I was born he was putting in the gas mains around Oldham. And later he became a heating and ventilating engineer, who put in hot air ducting systems to heat factories. And it was that that really counted when the war came along, because it was seen that he would be useful organising the mass-production of war materials, in particular aircraft bodies. So my father was above all an engineer, a heating and ventilating engineer, or a sheet metal fabricator. Very active, very hard-working, but successful during the war. He established factories, trained the workforce and so on. I’ll tell one story about the war years. My father worked with a firm called Fletcher Brothers on the west side of Don Cupitt Page 2 C1672/20 Track 1 Birmingham. They fabricated the bodies of fighter aircraft. In 1940 it was a matter of producing these things as fast as could possibly be done, as the Germans were shooting them down every day. Harry Fletcher went over to having a triple workforce, each shift worked eight hours a day. Fletcher himself for weeks never left his desk. Meals were brought to him at his desk, and he slept a few hours here and there, basically falling forward on his desk. So he worked straight round the clock through much of 1940, with the factory working three times its normal rate. My father helped to set up that system. All sorts of things were done. Training often women workers to produce war materials under extreme pressure, because of course, as everybody knows, we had gone into World War II with not nearly enough stocks of weapons. [04:09] Thank you. What do you remember of time spent with the paternal grandparents? You say you remember your grandfather for example. Yes. I think I was well under ten when they both died in their sixties. Bertram Cupitt, the plumber, I remember watching him work in the old-fashioned way, with a blowlamp and solder and a cloth, making a joint in lead pipes. Very old-fashioned plumbing. The other grandfather was a butcher, I also remember, faintly, but he had two marriages, and I’m not quite sure which marriage I’m descended from. He was John Gregson senior. And, one of his sons was also called John Gregson, a man much admired in the family. He looked much like me. He became a geography teacher. When the war came along he went in the Navy and became a Met officer, and ended rather senior in the Navy. So he made it comfortably into the middle class as it were. Though most of my family were traditional northern industrial, and, very simple in background. [05:22] Can you tell me now then about the life of your mother? My mother went to school, learnt to write in rather schoolgirly hand, left at fourteen. Worked for Singer sewing machine, Singer sewing machines, and, married my father when she was nineteen. I remember fifty-nine and a half years later how utterly bereft Don Cupitt Page 3 C1672/20 Track 1 she was, because she had never been an adult on her own. She had always been married to an organising, driving, energetic man, who did everything for her. And we found in his car his last Valentine to her, already purchased, and it had to be decided whether we should give it to her. And we found that she didn’t know how to fill a car with petrol. My father had always seen that she had got into the car and it was full of petrol. She was desperately under-educated. She was devoted to her children, and a great make-doer-and-mender, naturally, with her background in dressmaking and so on, very good at that kind of thing. She kept an immaculate home. But all the children went off to boarding schools and then to universities, and then fled the nest. So she grew gradually lonelier and more depressed as she got old, and had no cultural resources to fall back on. I do remember once talking her into spending a few days Pevser-ing in Suffolk. We got a copy of Pevsner. I said, ‘Let’s go and see some beautiful buildings, stay at pubs and just drive round Suffolk, and see the famous churches and so on.’ But I’m afraid she got terribly bored after a day or two; she didn’t know what she was looking at when she looked at a building. She couldn’t read the history of a building off looking at the building. She hadn’t got the education that, all Cupitts know you must get, you must know these things, you must strive for education, all of it you can get. She hadn’t got that, and so she was unhappy. And we were sorry when she also got something that she passed on to me, macular degeneration. She couldn’t see either. So, she had little else but the radio to comfort her in her last years, and was, yes, a bit unhappy. Proud in a way that they had educated their children by sending them to public school, but this of course had itself brought cultural distance between the children and the parents, as everybody who is the first in their family to go to university will know. But, at the end of the war my father had become quite senior, and was earning a good income, because of his very energetic work producing munitions. So he decided that all the children would be sent to public schools, the boys to Charterhouse, and the girls to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. So we were all educated to go into a higher social class than we had been born into. But that was the way it went. Both the girls became doctors.