This second and no less contingent set of memories takes me through my years at university and their immediate sequelae. They are memories, it has to be said, of a very different era and set of student experiences. Nor is the difference merely material, dependent on the fact that we babyboomers were funded for our studies. I refer below to teaching ‘philosoophy of education’ to PGCE candidates – that is, mature teachers looking for additional credentials. The likes of the IOE’s Richard Peters, whose textbook held sway then, emphasised that education is intrinsically worthwhile. In other words, it cannot be ‘reduced to’, or properly assessed in terms of, extrinsic factors like employability. I think he was right and I will return to this insight later.
- I mentioned in an earlier fragment that the necessity of retaking my A-levels was a blessing in disguise in several senses. It gave me time to reconsider what to study, and although I was initially drawn to philosophy and psychology, I was fatefully introduced also to sociology at Surrey University, which I attended from 1968. The Department of Sociology was brand new, with Asher Tropp recruited from LSE its first Head. The teaching was solid. Asher himself was excellent, specialising at that time on Latin America (though he was to publish relatively little in those relaxed, long-gone days). Two lecturers stood out for their approaches: Colin Tipton, who specialised in South-East Asian studies, and Irene Brennan, a philosopher who taught epistemology and introduced us to German and French existentialism, an unusual departure from the largely turgid Oxbridge-dominated Anglo-Saxon linguistic philosophy of the day (though I loved Wittgenstein). What made these two distinctive was their willingness to engage informally with students, and to do so more or less as equals. We had coffees, mingled and debated with this duo. I’m sure I’m not the only one who recalls their engaging openness with a lingering appreciation.
- We were a mixed bunch of undergrads, with just the one student, Angela Little, standing out as exceptional: she was the only one of us that got what was then a rare thing, a ‘first-class honours degree’; and she was as likeable and modest as she was talented. We recently re-established contact when I discovered that she went on to become a celebrated Professor of Education at the IOE, now part and parcel of UCL. By my second year I had dropped psychology and was resolved to specialise in philosophy. By this time too Annette and I were ‘together’, renting accomodation in the middle of Albury Heath.
- When I venture onto the Surrey campus these days – as a Visiting Professor of Sociology – memories attach themselves to many of the buildings, for all the shifts of usage and developments. So to the walkway into Guildford and the town’s surviving cafes and bars. Annette and I once returned as alumni post-1971, but it was all very flat and we resolved not to do so again.
- After my brief interlude studying for a Ph.D in philosophy at Birkbeck College with David Hamlyn (and Roger Scruton), I took a ‘paid’ position as research assistant in sociology at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
- I started my sociology Ph.D with Anthony Hopkins, a consultant neurologist at St Bartholomew’s HMS, and George Brown in 1972. Shortly after, Anthony (never Tony to me) suggested we give a paper at a European conference. I declined on the grounds that it would be inappropriate to use (his) funding in this way as we had no data and nothing to say. It was a different era, and maybe I was a bit pious, but what goes around comes around.
- In 1975 I was appointed to my first lectureship, a half-time post at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. The moment I remember with particular poignancy – and it was connected to the seemingly magical phrase ‘university lecturer’ – was breaking into a skip while passing by the pond in Rosebery Park in Epsom. It was pure jubilation, as I had ‘made it’, however modestly.
- I gave my initial lecture at Charing Cross under the watchful eye of David Blane. I felt I’d been articulate and coherent, and Dave was encouraging; but in fact I’d been incomprehensible to smart medical students unaquainted with sociology and its concept of ‘the social’. A lesson learned.
- My Head of Department at Charing Cross was Steve Hirsch, a noted psychiatrist. We got on well enough think. At one point he said to me: ‘I don’t know what you do Graham. I’d like you to keep a diary for a while’. My response was: ‘I don’t know what you do either, so I’ll keep a diary if you do’. He grinned and it was forgotten. I think it was a significant exchange. I was of course lucky: if Steve hadn’t ‘grinned’ I could have been in trouble (I can’t remember now, maybe I just calculated right). But I sometimes now recall and cite this episode: it is important, and increasingly urgent in the 21st century that we fight for our academic freedom and spaces. What if I’d filled in a diary? Well, I was half-time! But I spent many a happy and fulfilled hour walking up and down Charing Cross Road visiting the second-hand bookshops. Was this not ‘educational’? Did it not seep into and inform my thinking? Fight back.
- It was while I was at Charing Cross that I hit upon a ruse to stop external examiners messing about with the examination papers we set. I included two or three deliberate spelling mistakes in the draft questions, and more often than not correcting these satisfied any impulse they might harbour for further ‘interference’. (I tried it out successfully first with George Brown, my Ph.D supervisor.)
- During the early 1970s I undertook several part-time teaching appointments to help make ends meet. These included teaching philosophy of education on the PGCE course at the Polytechnic of the South Bank (where I encountered Peters’ definition of education as ‘intrinsically worthwhile’, a sentiment I whole-heartedly endorse and should blog about), as well as extra-mural classes in sociology in Surrey citadels like Surbiton. I travelled everywhere by train and bus. I sometimes now want to remind successive generations that we babyboomers often worked quite hard to get established, for all our time-bound privileges: in fact I taught four evenings a week for quite a while.
- My first paper at MedSoc in York must have been in the mid-to-late 1970s, and I was talking about my epilepsy study. As a nervous neophyte I’d written it out (the only time I ever did this). Mike Wadsworth was chair. When he announced that I had five minutes left I realised I’d barely begun. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. At first I just read very, very quickly; then I more or less randomly skipped pages, before sweating my way to a truncated conclusion. I survived and headed straight for the bar at the Viking Hotel. Lesson learned.
- I think the first edition of ‘Sociology as Applied to Medicine’, with Donald Patrick as senior co-editor, published in 1982, kick-started my career by getting my name about. It was a pioneering sociology textbook for medical students and immediately sold well. I can’t claim to have pre-calculated its import, though I was involved with Donald from the beginning of what was essentially a cross-London HMS collective project. Margot Jefferys was our wise and considerate mentor. The seventh edition saw the light of day recently in in 2018.
- I have at the time of writing examined around 40 Ph.Ds (I no longer keep count), but my first one involved a viva conducted with Ronnie Frankenburg. The thesis was ‘asymmetrical’ in that it had very long and very short chapters. Ronnie wanted it re-written, and I didn’t; and by a cunning act of effusive deference to Ronnie’s seniority I won the day.
- I cannot remember anything of the interview for what transpired to be my first full-time lectureship, at Middlesex HMS, in 1978. I imagine John Hinton, a gentle old-school academic and Professor and Head of the Department of Psychiatry, chaired the selection panel. It was, I later discovered, a close-run thing between me and Richard Compton, now a senior figure in British medical sociology and a much-valued colleague and friend.
- The first staff seminar I gave in John’s Department went ok, but not before an early alarm. I went to the loo immediately beforehand, and as I washed my hands managed to splash water down the front of my trousers. Adopting a posture a gymnast would have been proud of, I endeavoured to remove the wet patch under the hand dryer. This failed, so I untucked my shirt from my trousers and hoped this would not be seen as slovernly. A not dissimilar incident was to arise just before I lectured to the mass student body at the UCL HMS a few years later. I bent down to pick something up and split my trousers right up the back. What to do? Again I got away with it – at least I think I did – this time by tying my jumper around my waist and letting it fall over the offending chasm. Smart eh!
- Working life at the Middlesex HMS, and under the Hinton regime, was relaxed, exceptionally so when compared with what was to come. As I related in an earlier fragment, we had an extensive and insightful sociology course and enjoyed much closer contacts with our students. I had then an intake of 80 to handle, compared with the 360 Paul Higgs, Fiona Stevenson and I ended up with at UCL HMS; and these 80 were thrown together in a single-faculty institution, in class, laboratory and in their Hall of Residence at the rear of the Windeyer Building. This isolation and exclusivity may have been, was, educationally undesirable; but it meant that we, staff and students, comprised a kind of extended family, uncomfortably at times but supportively at best. I was able to see female students and personal tutees in my office without leaving the door open, to visit students in their rooms for coffee without having to pass an access test to their Hall of Residence. Different era!
- One student in the early 1980s knocked on my office door in the Wolfson Building and asked if she could do her elective with me. I managed to dissuade her, principally because I thought she would be foregoing a rare opportunity to travel abroad to sample another culture and healthcare system. She persisted, giggling, rather to my astonishment. Bumping into our psychiatric social worker, Margaret Bailey, in the corridor one day I told her this story. ‘She’s got a crush on you’, said Margaret. Perhaps she was right, though in my innocence it had never occurred to me (and I talked the student concerned into foreign travel).
- A handful of related memories. The first is that a two or three-hour set of lectures at Middlesex required a coffee break. It took me some months to recognise that when I called time for coffee I was at the front of the lecture theatre, the door was at the back, and that consequently I was 81st in the queue at the coffee machine.
- In the middle of one lecture on the third floor of the Windeyer Building, a female stripper appeared at the back of the theatre, a pre-arranged episode in celebration of a male student’s birthday. I waited for a moment. Obviously many students were ‘in on this’, and happy to be so. It quickly became apparent however that the woman they’d ‘employed’ was not expecting such a public performance and was anxious and unhappy. I took the initiative, improvised a rationale that released her from any ‘obligation’, and had a word with a very relieved woman outside of the theatre before she scurried off. I then explained what I’d done and why to the students, who seemed to accept it.
- The main resistance to our sociology teaching came not from the students but from our fellow teachers in the basic medical sciences. Mostly non-clinicians, a number of these had ideas about scientific endeavour that were as crude as they were innocent: anything outside of the laboratory was suspect. There were constant jibes. (When many years later I was awarded a Chair at UCL the response of a physiologist I taught with was ‘Good God!’)
- I taught at the Middlesex from 1978 until it was absorbed by UCL in, I think, 1987. Initially I was accompanied by Ray Fitzpatrick, who was half-time at the Middlesex and half-time with Margot Jefferys and George Brown at what was then Bedford College. He was not replaced when he left for Nuffield College, Oxford. (Paul Higgs was recruited in, resorting to memory once again, 1994, long after the UCL takeover). I was in fact quite contented on my own, though I was sad to see Ray go.