Philip Steadman Born 1942. Autobiographical life story. Available online at www.livesretold.co.uk. Image from the cover of Issue 4 of Form Magazine, edited by Philip Steadman. Contents 1. My Parents 2. My Early Life 3. Dragon School 4. Winchester College 5. Cambridge University 6. Working with Leslie Martin 7. Open University 8. Vermeer's Camera 9. Epilogue 10. Curiosities The text of this life story is transcribed, with thanks and acknowledgement, from the collection of Filmed Interviews with Leading Thinkers at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. The interview was carried out by Prof. Alan Macfarlane on 19th February 2020 and was transcribed by Sarah Harrison. It can be seen here: https://www.sms.cam.ac.uk/media/3174579 1 2 1. My Parents I was born in Northwich, Cheshire, in 1942 to Dorothy and Fred Steadman; we were living in Northwich because my father was a chemical engineer. He worked for ICI at a factory making caustic soda. We lived in a village called Hartford, in Walnut Lane in a small house. Later my father moved up in the works at Winnington and we moved to 'Walnut Lodge', which was the big house at the end of the lane, which had the walnuts as far as I can remember. I don't know where my father and mother met; my mother died when I was sixteen and I never talked to her about it when I was growing up, though I wish I had. They either met in Wakefield, Yorkshire, where they both grew up or they met at Oxford where my father read chemistry and my mother, English literature. Most of my family came from Yorkshire; my father's father was a coal miner in Wakefield. I never met him as he died before I was born. My mother's father whose name I never knew, was always called "Pa", and I met him lots of times. He was a bookbinder and worked in a printing works that made ledgers and account books, and I went to see that with him. My father wrote a little memoir for us, possibly with a view to publication, so I learnt more about his life before I was born, and I have been looking at it again more recently. In my grandfather's house there were some books, and some music I think; my father got to grammar school at Wakefield which he describes in the 1930s where the teaching was rather dilatory though one might have imagined it was rather academic. You could learn if you wanted to, and he and a friend of his called Jewett decided that they did want to learn mathematics and science, and did reasonably well. They decided they would try for Oxford, which was a fantastical idea of course. They told the science master that they were not going to be at school much the next week as they were trying for Oxford. The master said nothing, nor offered any help, and they didn't get in. Later there was a competitive examination at the school for miners' sons for scholarships, which he won. So he got to Oxford and got a First in chemistry. I know less about my mother's trajectory, but she also must have followed something of a similar route. As I said her father worked in bookbinding; I was fascinated by his work as he did those old account books with ruled lines; you had long sheets of paper that were pushed through on a gantry with lots of pens across which made all the lines. Then you turned it round and made all the lines going in the other direction. Then he did the marbling for the endpapers. He had a party trick; you could give him a stack of paper and he would feel one with his fingers, then go through with his thumb and tell you how many there were. Whether he could actually do it I don't know as I never thought of testing. My brother did some work trying to follow the family further back and ran out in the eighteenth century; I think there was a family bible which had some names. I think they were small farmers in Yorkshire mostly My father as you can imagine was a driven man really; very kind, but he was also a 3 bit daunting to me; we would shake hands when we met. He was intellectual, with wide interests, reading and so on. He played the French horn. I had an elder brother, James, dead now, but my brother I think was very much in his shadow, and he too read chemistry at Oxford and went into ICI; I rather thought that he shouldn't have done that. I as a second son escaped a bit but I always felt that I never quite lived up to my father's expectations, though I did later on. Even when I was a lecturer here in Cambridge he would ask when I was going to get a real job; but later on I did things that pleased him. I only knew my mother as child; I think she was a romantic; she did like poetry, she liked gardening. We went to France a few times and she loved France and Switzerland. I wish I knew more; that is how I would characterize her; I think that if she had been born a generation later she would have had a career of some kind. I learnt from my sister just last week that my mother was a teacher for a time but didn't enjoy it and gave it up, but I'm sure she would have done other things other than just becoming a housewife and looking after us. My family on my father's side were very much involved in education and all valued it; my father's younger sister, Nell, became a primary school teacher; his brother, Ralph, became a university lecturer in either physics or chemistry, so his family certainly went into education. ___________________________________________________________________ 4 2. My Early Life On my first memory, I find it difficult to answer. I do have memories of the first house we lived in, not very strong but I can sort of see it and the garden. I have memories of places rather than events so I can remember quite well the houses we lived in and the school. I went to a nursery school called The Grange School; I remember playing under a big holly tree with toy cars but I don't know how old I was. Some of the things I do remember were a few memories of the war; there were gas masks in the house and an Anderson shelter in the garden. My father was in a reserved occupation so was there during the war, but he volunteered for the Royal Observer Corps so he sat on a roof watching the planes that were going over to bomb Liverpool docks. He told me he read 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' while he was waiting; he had a set of cards with the silhouettes of German and English aeroplanes and later we played with them when we were children. I can remember events at the nursery school; the school was in several buildings but one of them was a modern building, rather fine, very small classroom building with big windows facing south, with a climbing frame. When I became an architect and studied architecture here I discovered this building was designed by Leslie Martin, Professor of Architecture when I became a student here. I can remember the building well so maybe it had some kind of influence. It had, of course, very small chairs and furniture, and this climbing frame which I later found was inspired by Le Corbusier's brise-soleil for the League of Nations building, on a kind of six foot scale. I remember I was in a play, 'Alice through the Looking Glass', and played a lizard and Miss Taylor lowered me down a chimney, though I can't remember quite why. We did sewing and we made gollywogs - I should hardly say the word - out of black American cloth; well, there were gollywogs on jars of marmalade in those days. I always enjoyed making things, models, though that I suppose was a bit later. I made model buildings. I loved drawing and still do. I decided I wanted to be an architect quite early on, when I was about ten. I have no idea why, I didn't know what an architect was, or knew any, and there were none in the family. I knew it involved buildings and went to see old churches and made drawings. A bit later I did painting; my father was a kind of Sunday painter and we made paintings together. I usually chose architectural subjects. At my father's works they had quite a lot of buildings they had accumulated, various old houses and so on, and there was a surveyor in charge of them. My father arranged for me to shadow him; I didn't learn much about architecture but did learn a lot about rot which didn't come in very useful later on, but from very early on I knew I wanted to become an architect. ___________________________________________________________________ 5 3. Dragon School Dragon School, Oxford. I don't know why my parents sent me to the Dragon School in Oxford. I guess they wanted me and my brother to have the best education they could give us.