Worthing High School for Boys was founded in 1924, was enlarged three times before 1929 and again in 1934 and became a grammar school following the Education Act of 1944. It was a financial challenge for my parents to furnish me with the innumerable items of uniform and kit required and they shopped diligently around known suppliers. But suitably attired on the first day of term in the autumn of 1960 I cycled nervously to the school grounds on Broadwater Road, discovering a ramshackle mix of old and new buildings and an adjacent play area-cum-rugby pitch. I was seemingly randomly assigned to Jutes House, one of four possibilities, the others being Angles, Saxons and Vikings. My first-year form teacher was ‘Horace’ Anderson, a teacher of German and a mild and fair-minded man. I was disconcerted at first because I seemed to be the only new pupil addressed by my second rather than first name, but Mr Anderson took me aside to explain that this was because I was more mature than many others. He was in wrong: I was simply shy and correspondingly reserved. I have wondered since how many others I might have misled in this way. I was I think made form captain.
Grammar schools tended to be – often pale – imitations of the leading public schools. Hence the house system and its allied hierarchical and inflexible structures; the staff seemed to know their place in the pecking order and all taught in university gowns invariably besmirched in chalk (Ron’s felt stigma would have been even more pronounced here than it became at St Andrews). The headmaster was T.A. (‘Taffy’) Evans, the only truly charismatic presence I have ever have encountered. He had a booming voice that seemed to command more respect than obedience. I was not of course privy to the staff-room tittle-tattle, but he appeared to me always to stand effortlessly astride the social structure and order of the school. As for the teachers, I need only draw attention to a handful who influenced me most. Before discussing ‘O’ and ‘A’ level exams, I must say a word or two about my participation and interest in sport, which in later years was to lead to the publication of two singe-authored books.
Ron had sparked my interest in sport early on and at Lyndhurst Road primary school I had already had my appetite further whetted. Watching the 1958 FA Cup Final on TV, when Bolton Wanders defeated a post-Munich Manchester United 2:0, I had also acquired a Division One team to follow (and, oddly enough I still do routinely check their results). Ron was an Arsenal supported and had often performed in a gymnastic display team on their pitch prior to home matches, hence getting in free. But Worthing High School was a rugby-playing outfit (compulsory rugby in the winter and cricket and track-and-field in the summer). Above average height and weight, I was initially inserted into the second row of the scrum; but one Wednesday afternoon I found myself in space and made a run. From then onwards I was a left-winger. I was nothing like as talented as Ron had been, but I did have a turn of speed and I was pleased later to be selected for the Sussex Schools XV. Most of my abiding memories of sport derive from sprinting. A few prompt moments of almost visceral recall. A first memory is precious despite its inauspicious outcome. Our under-15 team was competing in a sevens tournament in Llanelli and we were drawn against Coleshill Secondary Modern captained by Phil Bennett. He broke free and I lined him up as he galloped down the touchline, my single advantage being flatline speed. He side-stepped me at the last minute and I vividly recall both throwing up my arms in disbelief and his toothy grin as he continued unimpeded on his way. I write this shortly after hearing of Phil’s premature death aged 73. What a terrific and popular player he was and anybody interested in rugby union laments his passing. A second example is the scoring of a try for the school against the old-boys team, the Old Azurians. It was an annual fixture that the 700+ boys were compelled to watch from the touchlines. I was the sole fifth-former selected and in the dying seconds our captain and fly half, Ian Wright, who went on to play for the senior England XV in 1970-71, made a break, the ball reached me on the wing, and I handed off our coach Peter Benson, who was still playing wing-forward for Rosslyn Park, and outsprinted the defence to score between the posts. Despite Wright’s conversion, we lost 14:11 though. One other event, this time in track and field, has stayed with me in all its appalling detail. Entered for the 220 yards at the Sussex Championships at the Withdean Stadium in Brighton, I misjudged a final I should comfortably have won. I surged just too late: the first three of us were given the same time (to a tenth of a second), but I was placed third. The first two went on to compete at the National Championships. Ludicrously, I still cringe at this missed opportunity.
Sport was an important part of my school engagement and had a considerable public-school-like kudos attached to it. I would add in passing that nobody should be compelled to play a contact sport like rugby, the more so since the scary risks associated with it are now being documented. On another personal note, I lost a tooth in a collision and, after being tackled by our coach Peter Benson, suffered lasting ligament and cartilage damage that stopped me playing post-school (parents might sue these days, but it was an innocent enough tackle and he was a good man). Nor should schools put their sporting reputations above giving pupils options to sample and enjoy a variety of sports or other forms of health-bestowing exercise.
If my life-long addiction to sport was reinforced by my school escapades, one further interlude that occurred at this time should at least get a mention. I had what might be called a ‘religious time-out’. I’m sure it was not coincidental that my attendance at St George’s Church in East Worthing cemented several teenage friendships, afforded opportunities for playing badminton and table tennis on Saturday evenings after school rugby matches and, decisively, introduced me to girls. Interestingly three of the four girlfriends I acquired were attendees at the local secondary modern for girls, Davisons. In a short selection of poems recently published in my Rhythmic Musings, I included a poem which captures the complex of activities and emotions that characterised my flirtation with the divine:
God
I was religious once.
I stood by Splash Point on Worthing
beach and mimed hymns
before and after the local curate
said a few words.
It was an adolescent interlude
made all the more uplifting
by the companionship of girls
from our youth club.
After rugby on Saturdays
I used to cycle to the hall
beside the Victorian gothic
parish church in St George’s Rd
to play badminton, to talk
or to try and fathom which if any
of the girls might welcome
an opportunity to spend
time with me with a view
to auditioning for the role
of ‘girlfriend’.
It wasn’t a simple matter,
this appointing of a special
friend because I was shy;
nor did God help much
since he was all eyes and ears
and apparently omniscient,
but it was an apprenticeship
of sorts.
Thomas Hewitt was vicar,
Garth and Gareth’s dad,
the first now a gospel singer,
the other an ex-BBC journalist;
we saw little of them, oddly,
perhaps because they skipped
local state schooling.
I was confirmed into the C of E,
having attended Thomas’
preparatory classes.
It all seems so very strange now,
that Christian sojourn by the sea;
we travelled en masse to hear
Billy Graham, and I think a couple
accepted his invitation for instant
salvation; but I stayed seated.
I’m an atheist now, inclined
to be dismissive of talk of gods;
Kierkegaard advocated a ‘leap of faith’
but it strikes me that you’d jump
from the solid ground of philosophy
to pitch in the quick-sands of theology.
I was possibly a better person – whatever
that means – during my temporary
abandonment of reason, plus
I found four girlfriends at St George’s,
But these are psychosocial phenomena.
I’m glad I returned to philosophy.
For all the diversionary temptations of sport and faith, it was school study – ‘work’ – that mattered most in the long run. When asked I had no idea at the age of 14 what I wanted to ‘be’ when I left school and I plumped more or less randomly for solicitor, which meant I had to do Latin at O level (remember Peter Cook in Pete and Dud: ‘I wanted to be a judge, but I didn’t have the Latin’). I ended up sitting nine O levels, securing eight at reasonable grades in those pre-grade-inflationary times, but failing my single science, biology, because I messed up the practical component. I opted to study English, history and economics at A level. The English teaching was shared by ‘Max’ Fuller, who endeared himself to me and others by admitting how much easier it had been for his generation of ‘traditionals’ to get into Oxford or Cambridge than it would be for us (most of the staff had been Oxbridge educated), and by Mr West, whom I got to know better. Mr West shuffled around the classroom with a slightly stooping and apologetic gait and communicated in a nasal drawl. He introduced us not only to Shakespeare but to Marlowe, Milton, Spencer, Dickens and Hardy and I lapped it up. He must have recognised this because he made me a co-editor of the school magazine, The Azurian. The history syllabus was supervised by Mr Ludlow, an enthusiastic if lugubrious man whom I later discovered was deeply involved in local history projects around Worthing’s environs and stretching to sites on the South Downs. Relative newcomer Mr Austin taught economics and I remember him chiefly for the ease with which we were able to divert him off-piste to relay diversionary anecdotes.
It was taken for granted by many of us that we would go on to further study at university: such was the grammar school ethos at the time. In fact, a mere 51,189 people were to obtain university degrees in 1970, with 15,901 going on to achieve a higher degree. At the age of 18 I was still undecided on a career, but I pulled economic history out of the hat and caught a train up to Nottingham University for an interview, stopping on the way to buy my first pipe and a pouch of St Bruno. It didn’t go particularly well, but this was not to matter because when I sat the exams disappointments awaited. My grades in English and economics were mediocre, and we all failed history. Mr Ludlow was distraught – it was indeed not what he or we deserved – but official school protests were repelled. I was destined to re-sit. Three observations are pertinent. First, I was not entirely surprised, possibly because I had a premonition that all had not gone well. Second, when my parents told me they were happy to continue to support me while I re-took the exams, it shocked me: I had given absolutely no thought to what my under-performing might mean for them, materially. And third, returning to school, a failure, when my friends and peers had departed to higher education was a painful and traumatic experience. I had gone from the school long-list for Oxbridge to this. Against the personal pleas of the headmaster, I stopped playing rugby and focused totally on the re-sits, studying mostly under my own steam at home. When the results were in, he summoned me once more to his study to convey the results personally, and my success seemed to give him genuine pleasure. I attended fresh interviews at Hull and Surrey Universities, liked both, and opted for the location nearer to home. Home at this point had shifted from our council house in East Worthing to owner-occupation at 43 Gerald Road in posher West Worthing. Both Ron’s parents had died aged 78, Edith in 1962 and Ernest, lost on his own, a year later. It was the money left by the sale of their bungalow in East Preston, shared with Ron’s brother Ken, that enabled my parents to purchase their first house.
A brief word of context is in order before I develop the narrative. Teachers in schools matter and can turn individual lives around. As I have intimated, I had and have reason enough to be grateful for the good teachers at Worthing High School who greatly outnumbered the occasional dubious ones. But I have many times had to contest a false inference that people drew then and still draw, namely, that good schools and teachers underwrite, even guarantee, upward social mobility. The sociological truth has long been that excellent teaching, and the evolving education system per se, have a limited effect on mobility. As Bukodi and Goldthorpe found in their recent Social Mobility and Education in Britain, it is an advantageous parental background that is most telling for upward social mobility; and, as was the case in the 1960s, it remains difficult for pupils lacking this kickstart mechanism to break into elite fields. At the time of writing, upwards social mobility in Britain has stalled, but until recently it was largely a function of the creation of additional professional and middle-class jobs. Issues like this will be revisited in later sketches.
In October 1968 I signed up for a course in Human Relations at Surrey University, which was comprised of modules in philosophy, psychology and sociology; at the end of the first year two were to be selected from this trio and it was my initial intent to abandon sociology. The university, which received its charter in 1966, was in its final year at Battersea (it had in its previous incarnation been Battersea College of Advanced Technology), and I was given a room at nearby Courland Grove Hall of Residence. There were no fees to pay for us babyboomers, though contributions to living expenses were means-tested and I had to switch from pints to half-pints by half-term. On the academic front I soon tired of psychology, which somehow failed to marry quite intensive lab-based study with looser or less disciplined excursions into social psychology. Philosophy was my first love. The lecturers were committed first and foremost to teaching and featured Andrew Haines, Pat Smart, John Heron and Irene Brennan. I relished it and all my coursework unexpectedly attracted ‘firsts’. What has stuck with me is Irene Brennan’s sessions on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and de Beauvoir, not because I was convinced by their arguments but because what they wrote ‘mattered’ so much more than the austere, self-absorbed and smug stuff circulating at Oxford in particular; Cambridge had at least been home to the eccentric but remarkable Wittgenstein for whose writings I retain huge respect. Oh, and we read original texts, which might astonish contemporary undergraduates. Indeed, I recall sitting up half the night at Courland Grove perusing Kant’s Critique and progressing only to page four.
Sociology too was well taught, the more so when in 1969 we moved from Battersea to Guildford and Asher Tropp, fresh from publishing his study of Schoolmasters, arrived from the LSE as inaugural Professor of Sociology and Head of Department. Other lecturers included Keith McDonald, Brian Darling, Kate Evans, Colin Tipton and Mike Hornsby-Smith. Noteworthy were the deep political engagements of Brian Darling, who was a contributor to the influential May Day Manifesto of 1968, and Colin Tipton, who regularly distributed pamphlets for the Socialist Workers Party on the resolutely bourgeois streets of Guildford and, more salient for us at the time, provided a generous and much-appreciated interface with his students. Darling clearly alienated Tropp by his political absences, with the result that adverts for jobs elsewhere were sometimes anonymously deposited in his pigeon-hole. I learned a good deal about sociology during my three years as an undergraduate at Surrey. I also recall Tropp’s words of advice: ‘don’t bother doing a Masters degree, just get your hands dirty doing research.’ By a circuitous route I ended up taking his advice. As for the content of the Surrey courses, suffice to say that they were largely underpinned by what at that time remained something of a theoretical orthodoxy, namely, Parsonian ‘structural-functionalism’. Parsons’ The Social System, published in 1951, survived as a core text well into the 1960s, if one increasingly critiqued by symbolic and other varieties of interactionism.
Ron and Margaret were not especially political, though each had by this time voted in turn for each of the main parties (then Conservative, Labour and Liberal). But I’d arrived at Surrey on a daily diet of the Daily Telegraph on weekdays (for Ron) and the Sunday Express at weekends (for Margaret). Ron liked the Telegraph, or ‘Torygraph’, for its crossword and, admittedly, me for its comprehensive sports coverage. Sociology shifted my perspective, and when Ron posted me a column from the Telegraph attacking sociology and sociologists I was ready and equipped to call it out as ideologically-motivated. However, despite my appreciation and enjoyment of sociology, philosophy remained my first love. Pat Smart encouraged me to think of applying for the Oxford B.Phil in philosophy, recruiting Daniel O’Connor at Exeter as an advocate. Once more I tripped up in my final exams, getting a decent upper-second but failing to do myself proper justice in one or more philosophy papers. I wasn’t, it appeared, a reliable performer in exams! I was however accepted to do an M.Phil/Ph.D at Birkbeck College, University of London, under the watchful guidance of David Hamlyn. I duly reported for study in the autumn of 1971 and attended an informative series of seminars in epistemology with Hamlyn and Roger Scruton: I gave one on Merleau-Ponty and perception which seemed to go well. Scruton, incidentally, was a good philosopher and teacher for all that his reactionary politics has put him beyond the pale for many. However, my personal, social and material circumstances had changed by this time. In the second year of my undergraduate studies at Surrey I had formed what was to be a lasting relationship with fellow student Annette. In our second year we had begun to cohabit and by the third we had rented half a quaint cottage on rural Albury Heath, where Annette’s daughter Nikki attended her first school. I could no longer afford to remain a non-earning semi-perpetual student.
Reluctant to burn my boats, I opted to postpone my philosophical studies and to search for paid work. In 1972 this was far less of a hassle than it would become in later years, despite the fact that Annette and I were among a mushrooming number of graduates in sociology (totally 1,768 in 1971, up from 724 in 1966 and a mere 200 in 1952). However, while I was reconciled to applying for jobs in sociology, the second string to my bow, I had no clear notion either of areas of expertise or even interest or of the state of the market. So it was pure chance that the dice landed as they did. I put in for a job as a research associate to a consultant neurologist at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical school who was interested in, and had funding from the British Epilepsy Association for, an investigation of the nature and extent of the stigma associated with epilepsy amongst adults living in the community. It was a job accompanied by the opportunity to take a M.Phil/Ph.D in sociology to be supervised by George Brown, then Reader in Sociology in Margot Jefferys’ influential Unit in Medical Sociology at Bedford College, University of London. I applied and was successful. A sign of the time half a century ago: one application, one academic job. It was a three-year appointment, starting on a salary a little over £1,600. With some regret I officially withdrew from Birkbeck College. What happened in my new job is a topic for the next chapter, but it should be recorded here that I was in the process of being ‘re-labelled’ independently of my own wishes or feelings. In the eyes of others, which I was to learn is what counted, I was no longer an apprentice philosopher, I was a real-time sociologist. More than this, I was a medical sociologist. It was an identity I was ‘ascribed’ rather than one I had aimed at or ‘achieved’, and it was one I never entirely shook off, at least until retirement in 2013.
At the conclusion of the last sketch I drew on the writings of Sartre to venture a few remarks on the nature of the internal conversations children might be said to have with themselves. By the time I belatedly left school in 1968, and certainly by the time I graduated in 1971, I was no longer a child, or even a youth – indeed, I was in the process of becoming a partner and a father – so how might these ‘new’ ongoing dialogues with self be captured? It is not that the Sartrean concepts of hexus, the practico-inert and spontaneity are entirely unhelpful here, but rather that Margaret Archer’s account of internal conversations comes increasingly into play and in some ways refines the Sartrean frame expediently for sociological purposes. Drawing appropriately enough on personal research with her students, she distinguishes three principal types of internal conversation, plus one add-on; and she sees these, veering away from Sartre’s existentialist/Marxist philosophy, as governing people’s responses to social conditioning. For her, the internal conversation is the missing link between society and the individual, between structure and agency. Her types are, first, ’communicative reflexives’, comprising people whose internal conversations require completion and confirmation by others before leading to determinate courses of action. Second are ‘autonomous reflexives’, who sustain self-contained internal conversations, leading directly to action. And third are the ‘meta-reflexives’, denoting those who are critically reflexive about their own internal conversations and critical about effective action in society. Archer’s addendum, a fourth type of internal conversation, she calls ‘fractured reflexives’, and those falling into this residual category have internal conversations that intensify their distress and disorientation rather than leading to purposeful courses of action.
I was to use this typology in later publications on health and sport, but of immediate concern is how my own conversations with self might have moved on as childhood transitioned to adulthood. I may not be the most reliable or ultimate judge, but I suspect that my lot as an only child and my slow emergence from the chrysalis of infancy towards shyness and reserve constituted some sort of apprenticeship as a meta-reflexive. I was and am by nature a quiet, contemplative being capable of thinking myself into delaying action or inaction. But Archer’s types of internal conversation are what Weber called ideal types: they represent pure versions from which we all deviate on occasion. Notwithstanding any leaning towards meta-reflexivity, fed no doubt by both upward and downward causality (involving biological, psychological and social mechanisms), I have I am sure often slipped into communicative reflexivity, and even experienced moments of autonomous reflexivity.