NATIONAL LIFE STORIES ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews Colin Tudge Interviewed by Paul Merchant C1672/17 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: C1672/17 Collection title: ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ Life Story Interviews Interviewee’s surname: Tudge Title: Mr Interviewee’s forename: Colin Sex: Male Occupation: Science writer Date and place of birth: 22nd April 1943, Camberwell London Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: clarinet housewife player in Grenadier Guards Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to): 28/1/16 (track 1-3), 9/2/16 (track 4-6), 11/3/16 (track 7-8), 17/5/16 (track 9-10) Location of interview: Interviewees' home, Oxford Name of interviewer: Paul Merchant Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661on compact flash Recording format : audio file 12 WAV 24 bit 48 kHz 2-channel Total no. of tracks 10 Mono or stereo: Stereo Total Duration: 9 hrs. 03 min. 57 sec. Additional material: Copyright/Clearance: OPEN Interviewer’s comments: Colin Tudge Page 1 C1672/17 Track 1 [Track 1] Could you start by telling me, then, when and where you were born? I was born in King’s College Hospital in Camberwell. [laughs] It's a well known resort for drunks on a Saturday night, but I doubt that it was then. It was the war: 1943. Well that’s it, where and when: April the 22nd 1943. Thanks. And then, can you tell me about the life of your father, to start with? Yeah. He was a very nice man, my father. He was probably the nicest man I think I’ve ever met actually. Really super chap. But he was a, he was the son of a coal miner in Bolton, Lancs, and my grandfather, whose picture’s downstairs on the wall incidentally, was down the mine, so was my father, was down the mine for something like fifty years, which is almost unbelievable, because, well I mean why didn’t he die, you know, several times? But he didn’t. And my father, born in Bolton, he had sort of, two… I don’t think mining was ever an option for him, but, his mother, my grandmother, was a, a small, a primary school teacher, and she had sort of, aspirations for her sons, there were two of them. And my father, who was called Cyril, was sort of, trained as they say, or educated, as a bookkeeper, and he absolutely hated this. [laughs] So he thought, you know, I can either stay in the mill, because the other great thing around there was the mill, as a bookkeeper, or I can do something else. And he had an uncle who, for some reason, and nobody, I don’t know how or why, was a very very good clarinet player, who was in the Grenadier Guards band, and this uncle, who was Uncle Peter, my Great- Uncle Peter, said, told my father he could be a musician and could come and… And that’s what my father did, he came to London at the age of seventeen, and he was a self-taught clarinet player, very very good. He joined the Army at the age of seventeen in 1928, and he was in the Army for, well over forty years, as a musician in the Grenadier Guards. And he made a reasonable living. Worked incredibly hard, as you had to, and brought us all up. And so, moved to South London. So I was born in South London. My mother was the daughter of a Guards musician, in a different regiment as it happens but it doesn’t matter. So that’s, there were three of us, and I was born in South London, as I said. And, one of the very fortunate things… I might as well ramble on, mightn’t I? Yes, that’s… [02:29] One of the very fortunate things, we had a very very good local primary school called Dulwich Hamlet, and now people, the middle classes queue up for miles around to go to Dulwich Hamlet [laughs], but in those days it was just the local school. But it was very good. And one of the nice things about it, well, first of all the school teachers were mostly, they were either older women, mostly, who had probably lost husbands, sweethearts et cetera in the First World War, some spinsters, they were a bit crotchety, but there were these very nice married women, middle aged. And, blokes back from the war, who were Colin Tudge Page 2 C1672/17 Track 1 kind of, you know, no-nonsense but basically very nice. So it was… And the headmistress, for most of my time there, was a very Christian lady, and it was a very Christian… It was a Church of England school. And my introduction to Christianity was not sort of, hyper-religious, it wasn’t this sort of, you know, nuns with moustaches beating you up that you hear from some people, Catholics for example. It was just all about being kind and cooperative, and all that kind of stuff. Also, I was very fortunate in that the local, the school nearby, not the nearest, yeah, almost the nearest, was Dulwich College, which in those days was a perfectly respectable down-the-line public school, fee-paying et cetera. However, after the Second World War it acquired a headmaster called Horace Gilkes. He wasn’t called Horace, I can’t remember his Christian name, Gilkes, g-i-l-k-e-s, who was a serious socialist. I think he may have been a member of the Communist Party. But anyway, he was a serious socialist, although he was also seriously middle class. And he said the school should be open to scholarship boys. And in those days, you know, with direct grants, governments paid for scholarships, so eighty-five per cent of the pupils were scholarship boys. And I was one of them. Incidentally… No, it’s not… Yeah, no, the rest of it’s the detail, doesn’t matter. That’s the important thing from my point of view. Actually, I’ll tell you the detail, though you needn’t have it on tape. As many details as you like. Yeah, but, I, I think I’d probably rather you didn’t use this. But in those days, around Britain and public schools probably in particular, there was terrific anti-Semitism, and Dulwich, like most schools, had subliminally an anti-Semitic policy. One of the troubles of that, besides the fact that it was horrible, I mean this is after the Nazis and all that, but, besides the fact that it was horrible, was that it was, it was economically very damaging, because, you know, the Jews were the people who actually had some money, and they could send their sons to public school. So Gilkes, for reasons that were mostly socialist – well, basically socialist, altruistic, wanted to throw the school open, and he wanted to throw it open to Jews as well as to everybody else. But it was also a financial incentive in that these were the people that could actually pay. So we had, I don’t say we had loads of Jews but we had a decent Jewish population, many of whom were, well, some of my best friends, as they say. [laughs] In fact my very best friend was a Jewish chap. So that was him. But that was the school. And the point is, the ethos of the school in those days, and I was there in the Fifties, left in about ’61, or ’62, ’61 I think, was, under Gilkes, was that, yes, you did well, you worked hard, you became a professional, basically doctor or a lawyer were the main things, not much talk about finance actually, not much talk about industry, but basically doctor or lawyer, and the reason you did that was, for the service of other human beings. It wasn’t about getting rich, it wasn’t about being famous; it was about being a, taking your place in society and, you know. So it was the kind of, it was, it was, oh, in a sense it was seriously socialist, in a sense it was kind of old-fashioned Toryism, in that you got, you know, you got to the top as it were, but, noblesse oblige, you used your… So it was quite paternalistic. But basically very very well-motivated. That was the motiv… When my son went there in the Eighties, I sent him there in the Eighties, foolishly, because we still lived in Dulwich, the ethos had changed completely, which I didn’t really realise, because I wasn’t paying enough attention, and it became very much about, you come to Colin Tudge Page 3 C1672/17 Track 1 this school so that you can get yourself a profession in, banking or whatever, medicine, whatever it is, in order to get to the top, in order to be rich, in order to… A complete change of mindset.