Barry Supple interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 3rd July 2010 0:05:07 Born in the London Hospital in Whitechapel in 1930 where my parents lived; I cannot go back further than grandparents, and I know nothing of the origins of either of my grandmothers; both sets came from Poland, my father's in the late 1890s, the other certainly in 1905 when my mother's father came as a refugee from conscription during the Russian-Japanese war; I know a little bit about their geographic origin as I am visiting Poland for the first time shortly to look at the two villages that are involved; they are in Eastern Poland; they came over with large families and numbers of siblings; the families were very close so I knew all the siblings and their descendants; there were between seven and nine siblings in each family; sadly, like so many young people I did not ask them the right questions when they were alive, so I do not know what the did in Poland; my grandfathers came over when they were young men, probably in their late teens, so would not have much record of work in Poland; when they came to this country my mother's father worked as a casual labourer - the 1911 census described him as employed in 'cigarette box manufacture'; he subsequently went on to selling bananas from a barrow in Ridley Road; I believe that my father's father worked as a tailor but his sight deteriorated so he did not work in his middle and later years; both sets came to Whitechapel in East London; I have the addresses but have never tracked down the places; they stayed there into my parents’ generation when they moved into what were then the leafy suburbs of Hackney in the middle to late 1930s; I don't remember my first years in Whitechapel but I do remember Dalston, the part of Hackney where we lived from about 1938; the whole family moved; my mother's family was much the stronger element, and we lived with my grandmother and other of my mother's siblings before they were married; my parents married in 1928 and stayed within the extended family from then on, so it was a very large household; they were Jewish on both sides but none of them was particularly religious; whether they were observant or not rather depends on the definition one has; they did observe the two or three major holidays which social pressure and community momentum obliged them to - the Day of Atonement, New Year and Passover; I don't recall the details as I became very irreligious, but it was just a matter of attending synagogue when you ought to; I was bar mitzvahed at the age of thirteen and marriages took place in synagogue, but it was a social ambience rather than belief that prompted it 5:24:01 My father was a tailor; he was born in 1904; my mother before marriage was a seamstress in a furrier's, in a fur factory; she was born in 1907; I never asked them how they met, but I have some very nice photographs of them as a young couple; my father stayed the rest of his life as a journeyman tailor; he was a part of the structure of industry which was a putting-out system to small workshops and private houses; my mother stopped working when she married; my father did for a brief period try to be an entrepreneur, and failed, in the 1950s; my father was a relaxed and very intelligent person who would have benefitted from an education that he didn't receive; he left school at the age of twelve and commuted by train to work from Reading during the First World War; he was always ambitious for learning; he was a strongish character who fostered his two sons (I had a brother), and was sceptical in terms of religion and politics; he was quite left-wing and was an active member of the International Ladies Garment Union; that I suppose had a slight influence on me, sometimes reactionary; he was a man whom I grew greatly to respect, feeling he was a strong personality whom I admired, was tolerant of his sons and very kind; my mother was very maternal; she was the eldest of eight, and like her mother held the family together, in the sense that she took a lot of the decisions and had fairly strong opinions; she was a loving person and also very kind, perhaps more demonstrative than my father; I suppose you could say they did cosset me; I was the first born and their only child for eight years; they were full of admiration for me, and were rather proud of my achievements in school and at university; on the whole I don't think I have anything to complain about in terms of my relationship with them; in the end I suppose I admired my father more, as a benchmark of an intelligent approach to the world, of a keen view of the political atmosphere around us, more encouraging of study and reading, buying me books when I was in my early teens; on the whole I think their influences were pretty powerful; as I grew older, and even now, I still feel that my father is the one I want to impress; I am sorry that he was not around to see what happened because he died when I was still at Sussex University; he did not see me get a Chair and Cambridge or become the Master of a College, which he would have felt powerfully about 10:43:17 An early memory that I have is of my mother falling off a roundabout on holiday somewhere, probably at Walton on the Naze; I think the reason that it is powerful is that at that time I had mixed feelings about it; I think she must have done something that I didn't like because I was both anguished and slightly pleased about what I took to be a punishment; I have a memory, which is obviously not true, of her flying through the air; I can't identify when that was but it would have been before the Second World War, probably about 1937-8; there is a haziness because I also have other memories; I do remember the time that I first learnt that death was inevitable because an aunt, a sibling of my mother's, informed me; I must have been six or seven and was devastated by it and my parents were very upset, and they berated this aunt, Frances; that memory was quite strong, both because of the incident and seeing my parents' reaction and defensiveness towards me; I have other memories, mostly concerned with this rather riotous family of siblings who lived together in the same house 13:08:22 I first went to a school called Sigdon Road Elementary School which is in Hackney; I suppose there were about 30-40 boys in the class; I have a memory of the smell of Lifebuoy soap that our middle-class teacher, Mr Griffiths, must have used; he was very impressive, clean-shaven and well-spoken in a suit and tie; I was in that school until the war started; I was immediately evacuated with a group that included my two young aunts, who were five and seven years older, to Hockwold, a tiny village in Norfolk, where many year's later I taught a WEA class as a graduate student; we were not there for very long, but were evacuated again in 1940, again with my aunts, for a longer period; my mother joined us with my younger brother, and her mother and another aunt, and we set up home in Witney near Oxford; it is countryside and I discovered bluebells and birds’ eggs and things of that bucolic sort; I joined the Sea Cadets in Witney, but I don't recall having hobbies; the only teaching incident that I recall there was that two of the pupils were twin sons of the headmaster; and no doubt in order to show his independence he caned them once in front of the whole school. I do remember that the same headmaster told my parents that I ought to prepare myself as there was a chance I could get into Christ's Hospital; I suspect that he was suggesting that I ought to study hard, but Christ's Hospital loomed as a missed opportunity in those early years; we were in Witney 1940-41 and then came back to London in 1941; I was evacuated again in 1942 after I "won the scholarship" at the age of eleven, and went to King's Lynn where my London school had gone; it was the well known Hackney Downs Grammar School for boys; Harold Pinter joined the school when it returned to London in 1943; in King's Lynn we were billeted on another grammar school and I remember getting into trouble because I argued that Paris was spelt PAREE because that was how it was pronounced in French; I shudder to recall it but I know I was very obstinate; I made one or two friends there with whom I have re-established contact because Hackney Downs School for Boys is one of the few state schools that has a web site, a good magazine, and an association (the Clove Club); next week I shall be visited by somebody I was at school with from America, and we are all going over to see another friend who was Head Boy when I was his deputy – over sixty years since we were schoolmates. 19:50:00 In retrospect, and obliquely perceived at the time, the school was of very high quality and had good masters; there is an interesting question about why the masters were so good and it was possibly because of the lack of alternatives for people who were well-educated; two or three of them still live very strongly in my memory; one was Joe Brearley who figures strongly in Harold Pinter’s memoirs because he was an English master who was a theatrical enthusiast; he directed 'Macbeth' and 'Romeo and Juliet' which were two outstanding productions with Harold in the lead; he never taught me but I came into contact with him because of drama where I was quite active; he was an exceptional man because he transcended the ambience and structure of the school; he was an intellectual, literary, wanted boys to talk about poetry and drama, and took us to interesting plays; at another level there was a man called Kenneth Hooton who was an historian who enthused me with a love for economic history; it was one of the few schools then that offered economic history at 'A' level; he was a scholarly influence; then there was a fine and curious man called Percy Coffin who was a geographer who retooled himself as an economist in order to teach us economics; it was a rich tapestry as there were lots of other masters whom I could talk about; drama and sport were the two principle activities I engaged in; I ran, played cricket and soccer for the school team; I played in the soccer team from an early age because I was a goalkeeper and did not need to be as robust as older players; drama materialized with the production of 'Macbeth' in 1947 when I was sixteen; we were all dressed in army cadet corps uniforms: Harold Pinter was Macbeth and I was Malcolm; I remember Brearley rather nicely mocking me when I asked who had murdered my father in what he called, a dinner party manner (Oh, by whom?); the next year there was an extraordinary production of 'Romeo and Juliet', with Harold as Romeo; I have not seen many school productions but I doubt if many would have had the impact that this had; I played Mercutio, and the boy Henry Grinberg who played Tybalt, is the man coming over next week from New York; in our last year Harold and I wanted to do 'Hamlet' but Brearley refused. We concocted a scheme to put it on privately but it didn't come to anything; the novel I will never write is about middle-aged men in their ‘fifties and ‘sixties who come together finally to do it; Harold was very precocious and had a pulling power on the rest of us; he was precocious both in his person - his relationship with girls, for example - but also in his literary interests; he stimulated us to get concerned with conventional people like George Bernard Shaw, but also with Henry Miller; he wrote a lot, and was a very strong personality and very likeable; he and I were great friends and it was because of this friendship that our fathers became partners in the unsuccessful entrepreneurial tailoring venture. Harold had a strong temper; I remember claiming in the course of a hot argument that the reason he liked D.H. Lawrence was because of the dirty bits; he almost felled me to the ground because of this silly comment. We went on holiday together - once in France when we were sixteen or seventeen, hitchhiking, when I almost persuaded him to take an interest in politics; he did once join the Army Cadet Corps but could never swing his arms with the correct legs when marching; later on he was a conscientious objector. He was a good close friend and I knew his parents very well; many years later, Harold confessed to having had an affair with the Aunt Frances who in my infancy had told me about the existence of death. When my grandmother was killed by a bus in 1947 I could not play in the school football team the next day, and I had to put a note through his door to tell him, and he told me later this became the basis of a short story that he never published. Harold was flamboyantly egocentric; I went with him one day to Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, and to my embarrassment he stood on a box and told the crowd that he would like to read some poems by a gifted and up-and-coming poet called Harold Pinter! He was a good sportsman as well; he left school early and went to RADA; when I came to Cambridge as a graduate student, he was doing quite well as an actor and I wrote to him and we re-established contact, but not very much; I did not see him properly until 1958 when I came back from America, and went to see him and his then wife and child; we did re-establish contact much later when I took exception to something about me in one of his biographies 29:24:14 I became interested in politics at school in a rather self-consciously intellectual way, reading Marx, Plekhanov and Lenin; I remember being rather embarrassed when my father found me reading Plekhanov, feeling I wanted to keep his opinion at arm's length and follow my own inclinations; I was certainly left-wing and interested in the intellectual roots of socialism; on religion, I think there is an ambiguity that is distinctive to Jews, but probably Muslims feel the same, which is the pull between one's reaction to the belief which can be sceptical and rejectionist, and the ethnic element which is pretty powerful. Quite early on, encouraged by my father, I was sceptical, but never would have dreamt of not being Bar Mitzvahed because that is what happened in that community; the only Hebrew that I ever learned was in order to read the section of the law which was relevant to the timing of the ceremony; I never went to the synagogue again, and walked out of my brother's Bar Mitzvah because I had a soccer match; over the years I have never dissociated myself from the Jewish background but never felt that I wanted to be identified as a religious Jew; the only times I have been back to a synagogue is for weddings. My father’s family’s original name was ‘Sopel’. I have looked at the digital archives from the village they came from called Suchowola (near Bialystock), and there were Sopels there; I know that they were the same Sopels because my father always used to tell me that when his father and uncles came to this country, one was left behind – and was killed in the Holocaust. Sure enough, that uncle was recorded in the Holocaust archive with two sons. The name was corrupted early on by common usage into Supple. One of my father's traits that I have inherited is an excessive respect for bureaucracy; he registered me at birth as Sopel, even though he was always called Supple, and my mother was outraged as she thought it would give me a lot of trouble in later years; sure enough, later on I had to go to a notary public and certify that my name was Supple by common usage; curiously, even the American immigration authorities accepted that. As Master of St Catherine's in 1984-93 I used to go to evensong quite often, which I suppose I rationalized on two grounds - one, that I could listen to the preacher who was not necessarily religious, the other was that it gave me a contemplative moment away from the stress and strife of the College. I thought of it as a collegiate ritual; actually admitting Fellows is a much more explicit form of that and I accepted it as such, even though I was usually averse to ritual, as I saw it as part of the obligations. The admission ritual is expressly Christian at St Catherine's, but there was a way of avoiding the word Christ which I did for Jewish Fellows 36:58:13 I went to the LSE as an undergraduate. Given my future appointment as Director of the Leverhulme Trust, one of the pleasant ironies of life was that I got a Leverhulme scholarship to LSE. At the time of my interview I was reading 'The Horse's Mouth' by Joyce Cary and that greatly impressed my interviewers including T.S. Ashton who was chairing; I was also interviewed at University College London, but went to the LSE to read economics in 1949. I suppose in retrospect it would have been more interesting to have gone to a residential university and then as a graduate student to have gone there, but it was pleasant. I was quite active athletically and socially, as well as academically. I did quite well as a student, being very much influenced by Jack Fisher: at that age one is very impressed by the sort of relaxed cynicism of someone like Jack, and his perception and cutting-edge of his mind was pretty powerful; I did his special subject, sixteenth-century economic history, so got quite close to him. When I composed a proposal for research for Cambridge Jack’s one comment was that I had obviously read a lot of Ernest Hemingway. He was a good lecturer for those who were keen, rather like Lance Beales whose lectures were difficult because few people understood what he was saying. Jack was probably a much better small group teacher. T.S. Ashton was the most straight-forward, good lecturer. I was also very active in LSE sports and in the Students' Union where I took the role of grants officer. Tawney had retired by the time I got to LSE although I did go to some lectures he gave on Lionel Cranfield. Later, when I was a Cambridge research student I thought I really ought to see him as I was working on the 1600-1640 period, the period he was interested in with Cranfield. He entertained me in his flat in Mecklenburg Square, but I was disappointed because, although he was a lovely man, he wasn't really very interested in what I was doing. I am not sure how old he was then (in 1953-4); but he was very disorganised and the notorious herbal tobacco that he smoked hit me. His wife was even more disorganised and used to come in late when he lectured on Cranfield; I was struck also by the fact that when Tawney lectured in his beautifully modulated prose, I believe he had it committed to memory; there was one point where he was interrupted by his wife coming in late and be went back three sentences and they were exactly the same as the first time around. Tawney was saint-like - a man without obvious faults, but Jack Fisher was rather cynical about him. In fact, Jack only ever produced a few articles and his work on Cranfield never appeared. However, his influence lived on because of the seminal articles and the people he influenced; I used to see him in later years when I was at Sussex, when other devotees entertained him to lunch every few months and I used to come up to London. He suffered very badly from arthritis but refused to acknowledge it; he did attract a lot of devotion. In my first year at LSE I was influenced very briefly by Karl Popper; I went to his lectures as a first-year student and was so profoundly impressed that I was tempted to change from economics to philosophy. I went up to him after one of his lectures to try to arrange a meeting to talk about it, but he was obviously too busy, and that turned me off it completely; in economics, there was Phelps Brown whom I met in later years when I went to Oxford, who was not so much an influence but one whose lectures were attractive; there was also the formidable Arnold Plant, a very conservative economist who stimulated us; the other important lecturer was Harold Laski who died in my second year; although I hadn't thought of it like that, when he did die I felt somewhat bereft as he was someone I could have got to in need; I learned later that he was in fact very good with and to students, and many years later I found that my wife, who had been at the LSE at some stage, had gone to see him for advice; in economic theory, I did have a little run-in with Lionel Robins because I studied what were then called the BSc(Econ) under new regulations, and he rather progressively organised a meeting with students to see what they felt. There, I had the temerity to say something mildly critical, I can't remember what, but he slapped me down. My personal advisor was the economist Alan Peacock, and I had to tell him the disappointing news that I wanted to change from economics to economic history. But he was very understanding and I kept in touch with him over the years 47:27:16 I can't entirely remember why I wanted to come to Cambridge, but there was an open scholarship at Christ's; I suppose I was influenced by the thought of winning a scholarship and getting some sort of financial base, as well as by making a change, and because Cambridge was the home of economic history - Postan was here, Charles Wilson, and others. I was awarded the research student scholarship to my father's ill-concealed delight; I established contact almost immediately with Jack Plumb who was Graduate Tutor; I got on very well with him and he was kind to me; I think that with Jack Plumb, his own origins as a grammar school boy coming into the slightly alien atmosphere of Cambridge, made him very sympathetic to people, not only to those like Neil McKendrick from his own school, but to people like me; he invited me to tea-parties to meet other fellows; there was a time when I was feeling rather unhappy and lonely so I went to see him, and he was very good; he organised teaching for me right from the start, which was a strange experience since I had never lectured or taught before; my actual supervisor was Charles Wilson at Jesus, who was equally nice but in a quite different way; he hardly interfered with my work, and offered very little advice. Rather, he seemed to want to do nothing but talk about the bursarship of Jesus, which he then occupied. Over the years I remained close to Jack Plumb, and when I came back to Cambridge in 1981 he bullied the fellows of Christ's to give me a professorial fellowship. I got to know him quite well when he was Master of Christ's, but his influence was very long-lasting. Quentin Skinner, Roy Porter, Simon Sharma and Neil McKendrick, were all his students; I met them all on his eightieth birthday when they gave a dinner party for him; he seemed very pleased by what I said then and rewarded me by offering me the opportunity of giving lunch to Princess Margaret! Which I accepted. Jack could be very hurtful, but could also be a charming, even endearing, man and patron. I only came across Geoffrey Elton when I came back to the Chair of Economic History. Like some others, he was without any conscience when it came to supporting his own students; I also met Eric Hobsbawm when I was a graduate student; he asked me where I had come from and I said "the School" rather pompously; he quite rightly asked me which school it was; at the time he was the Ehrman Fellow at King's – a post that Plumb encouraged me to apply for later. (I was unsuccessful.) 54:10:04 My PhD was very much a derivative from Jack Fisher’s interests: it was on commercial crisis and change from 1600 to 1642 which later became a book; initially I had intended to take the whole hundred years from the middle of the sixteenth to middle of the seventeenth century but that was too big a bite so I halved it. It was a continuation of the work initiated by Jack, and no doubt he was capable of writing it but didn't. He had written on fluctuations in the wool trade in the late sixteenth century, so it was with his advice that I did it. I had to work on archives in the Public Record Office in London for a fair amount of time, and it was at that point that I wondered if I should have gone to Cambridge as an undergraduate first and then to LSE as a research student. Charles Wilson gave me a lot of free rein as he did not know much about the topic, although he was quite interested and encouraging. He was very conscientious on reading my drafts and came to Postan's seminar when I talked. Flatteringly, he appropriated some of it to use himself at a later stage. But he was also very helpful and wise when at some stage I stumbled across papers of Thomas Mun in the Public Record Office. Mun was a seventeenth-century economist who really devised the concept of the balance of payments. He propounded this in a pamphlet, published posthumously, called 'England's Treasure by Foreign Trade'. I discovered the submission he had made to a commission of enquiry in 1621 which had it all there; but just as I was about to publish it, someone else found it and did so; I went in some distress to Wilson but he calmed me down and said I could publish it as well, since there was room for more than one act of publicity and the issue was not all that grave. Charles was very philosophic in the same way that Jack Plumb was in later years when I failed to be elected to the Mastership of Christ's. In Jack’s words, "Doors Open" - and that is what I called my autobiography. I did not meet Hugh Trevor-Roper at that time, but did later, once when he came to Sussex to give lectures on Christian Europe, and then when I was Master of St Catharine's and he became Master of Peterhouse, but I only knew him socially and not academically; Lawrence Stone I knew a bit but was not close to him. Second Part 0:05:07 Charles Wilson had written and published the first serious academic company history in Britain - on Unilever. This had established him in the new field and drawn him to the attention of the Harvard Business School, which was looking for a successor to N. S. B. Gras who was a pioneer in business history. Wilson declined the job-offer but when they asked him to name somebody else, possibly a young scholar, he named me. That was in 1955, as I was finishing my PhD. I was then approached, flew to Cologne for an interview with the Dean of the School, and was invited to go there, initially as a visiting lecturer on a trial basis. And so, at the callow age of 24, I went to the Harvard Business School where the average age of the students was about twenty-eight or thirty. It was the first time I had been to America, and I had only been out of England twice before - to go to France. But before leaving Britain, I was examined for my PhD by Fisher and Postan. It was characteristic of Jack Fisher that prt way through the oral he noted that I hadn't mentioned the Council of the North as one of my sources; I fudged a reply and then he suggested that the reason might have been that they had all been burnt in the nineteenth century! Postan was a sort of influence and I saw him from time to time; I used to go regularly to his seminar. When I submitted an article for publication he suggested I should study the style of someone I did not admire; it was only after I came back to Cambridge in 1981 that we got to know each other. Postan was an extraordinary man because he combined a sort of flamboyant neglect of some things with profound perceptive insights; a bit like Jack Fisher, he would cut to the problem; he established a powerful reputation also outside the academic world; he was very friendly with Hugh Gaitskell and gave him advice; he married Eileen Power which was an interesting pairing, as was his subsequent marriage to a member of the aristocracy. 5:21:21 I was to be in America for five years. Within a few months of arriving, and after the initial excitement I felt I ought to come back as I was lonely and missed Cambridge. At that point I declined an opportunity, which I still regret, of getting an immigrant visa; and by the time I wanted one, it was too late because the law had changed: people on exchange visitor visa (like me) had to leave the country for two years before returning back again; the Americans introduced it in order to protect the schemes that had brought over people from less developed countries, who came on a visitor’s visa to study and then stayed on. By 1960 I had married and had children who were American, and would have liked to have stayed then, but having had my five years I had to leave. I did the next best thing and went to Canada for a two-year job at McGill, thinking I would then go back to America. But by then I discovered that there was nothing on the horizon in American academia that attracted me – although there was a job at MIT which I would have taken if offered, to replace Walt Rostow who had moved off to the Kennedy administration. On the other hand, Sussex University has just started and Asa Briggs, whom I knew well, was very persuasive, so we came back to England. In fact, I had found Canada an unsatisfactory compromise between America and Britain, more parochial and less exciting than I wanted it to be 9:05:12 The founders had always intended the University of Sussex to start in October 1962, which is when I went there, but in the event, because of pressure of students it was had been opened on a shoestring in 1961, not on the site it now occupies but in a house in Brighton, with Asa Briggs and about seven other academics. In 1962 it moved to the main site in portacabins and one permanent building, and that is when I went back; it was very exciting because one was actually creating it; I remember years later Asa saying that he regretted not keeping a diary as it was the creation of a University from scratch was such a rare event in history. One was constructing a curriculum, recruiting people and organizing a governance structure. I became Secretary of the School of Social Sciences while Asa was Dean and Pro-Vice Chancellor, so I was pretty much near the levers of influence and power; devising courses that were new, like 'Contemporary Britain' or 'The Modern European Mind'; I stayed for sixteen years; every time I thought of leaving something else intervened. In the August of 1962, just before I started at Sussex, the University of Michigan invited me to go and talk about possibilities; I went and was impressed, and at that stage was very much missing America; I sort of accepted the post and then came back and realised that my wife and children now back with the family, and my own parents too, would have thought it worrying and feckless of me to go back, even before I started at Sussex, so I declined the offer. The same sort of thing happened in 1964 when I was invited back to Harvard as a visiting professor when Alexander Gerschenkron came to England. (I introduced him to Jack Fisher and heard that the two warily circled each other like jungle beasts.) Harvard was exciting and I was tempted to stay, but Asa Briggs got me a promotion even before I returned to Sussex. In 1964 I had got a contingent immigrant visa even though I was only going for three months; my wife had one, and two of the children were already American citizens; I was offered a job at Berkeley, and hosted there by Henry Rosovsky, a historian who subsequently became Dean of Harvard. I was on the point of accepting when Henry phoned me to say that he could no longer advise me to go to Berkeley as he was leaving and so was another friend and distinguished economic historian, David Landes, and that there was turmoil and anarchy on campus. It was the beginning of the student rebellion, and Henry described it as becoming like the University of Saigon. That put me off, and since I didn't want to go to Brandeis University, which was another alternative, I came back to Britain thinking I would have a quiet life. But neither Henry at Harvard nor I, a little later at Sussex, could enjoy tranquillity: student unrest saw to that. I was attracted to America because I am a bit of a materialist and consumerist, and enjoyed that side of life there; I also enjoyed the possibilities, and the openness of American universities; I found it very relaxing and uninhibited so have always felt myself to be a pseudo-American. In fact, I had thought I might get a job there after retirement but found myself embedded in English life. Forty years later, even when, sadly, my first wife died and I remarried an American, and we did think of moving to the USA, it was not to be: I resisted it because my children and grandchildren are here, and I sensed that it was too late. Nevertheless, I have always been hugely interested in American history, society, politics and literature, and I have been back very frequently; if I had my time over again I would have stayed there. Paradoxically, one of the attractions of America is that there are times that you despair of the society, particularly the Vietnam War and what it did to universities, but it nevertheless comes through and somehow reinvents itself. I remember thinking that in 1976 when Americans were celebrating the Bi-centenary. It is a society of perpetual possibility. I often recall that it was in the Spring of 1960 when I knew I had to leave America, and Canada became a possibility, before flying to McGill for my job interview that I read De Tocqueville and realized what I was leaving. More than this, I have a strong memory of driving with my young family to Montreal, and hearing a Mormon choir poignantly singing 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' on the car radio. 20:11:19 At Sussex, I went on to succeed Asa first as the Dean of the School and then as Chairman of the Arts Deans; when the University was split into two, I became Pro-Vice Chancellor for that part of the University which was Arts and Social Studies, and became very much embedded in the bureaucracy. I found it interesting and possible to combine with academic work, though I could have done much more of the latter if I had not been an administrator. One of the essays I will never write is on why economic historians have become such utility players in the world of academic administration. It seems to me to be a matter of smoke and mirrors as the humanities people think that economic historians are social scientists and vice-versa, and each thinks they know more than they do. I am a list man who draws up the list to get things out of my head rather than to do things in an orderly way; I tend to react at once to issues and problems that arise as they arise; I am not a good organiser but a fairly hard worker, and would stay up late to do things. Thinking back, I am not sure I had a great system; I neglected academic potential and could have written more; my output has not been huge, but I have been fortunate that things I have done have had some prominence; I did not lose a lot of sleep over administrative issues and I always did have the feeling that a lot of the issues that were brought to me, certainly when I was at college, by fellows, were often dissolved by talking them over. I think I was probably quite a good chairman so didn't waste a lot of time in meetings; I do take administration seriously but it doesn't occupy my entire life. 25:46:10 In my academic work, I sit at a desk, I don't listen to music, or work in the evenings; I might at times have verged on being a neglectful father in that I would work through the weekends; I have my thoughts about historical issues by trying to write them down and seeing parallels as I write. When I was a research student I did all the inductive work first, but in later years I wanted to write before I was ready. I am sad that over the last seventeen years, since leaving Cambridge, I haven't been very productive; in the late ‘sixties when Asa Briggs became Vice Chancellor of Sussex and I was Pro-Vice Chancellor, we pioneered the use of a management consultancy firm, McKinseys, to come and investigate us; and I remember Jack Fisher predicting that they would ask if we were centralized or decentralized, and whatever we said they would tell us to do the opposite – which was exactly what happened. We decentralized, and that created a structure of sub-institutions; at that time I was writing the history of the Royal Exchange Assurance and the insurance industry, and I think I saw this there; I wrote a history that had a lot in it about delegation, decentralization and subordinate institutions, which paralleled what was happening in the University. But that is the furthest I have got in seeing an idea from the outside rather than building it up from the inside. I also found myself writing a history of the coal industry at the time of the coal strike in 1984-5, so there were echo effects there; I remember the then Warden of Nuffield College, Michael Brock, asking what I thought of it, and replying that when the Bishops intervene the strike will end. When I was a graduate student I was a pioneer of methodology; I had Cope-Chat files that were programmable around the edges, on which I kept all my notes. Sadly I lost the code so they are useless. Subsequently I made lots of notes on A4 paper. The thing that I found was a disadvantage as well as a blessing was the use of research assistants; when working on the Royal Exchange I used one full-time and he produced much too much for me to absorb; when I wrote on the coal industry I had unlimited typing aid at the National Coal Board, so I used to take a tape recorder into the Public Record Office and dictate and then it would be typed up; all I did was to transfer this huge pile from the Public Record Office to my desk and there was no absorption. The nearest I have come to genuine originality derived from my work on the early seventeenth-century, where I was interested in the relationship between economic thinking and events, a sensitivity to the symbiosis between the way people think about problems and the problems that arise - the balance of payments work is an example. The incidence of the fluctuations in Britain's cloth trade and the reactions of government and early economists to it, that is one approach. I did a fair amount of that in a different way later on when I got interested in twentieth-century economic policy and the concept of decline, and the interaction between how governments and thinkers like Keynes responded to the course of events, and the actual events themselves. It is really political economy and that is the title I used for the coal industry work as well; in that sense, although I don't think that people use it as much as I hoped, the coal industry book did say some useful things, but I think that it is the book on the insurance industry that made the most original contribution to a field that had been neglected, taking that industry seriously as an emblem of middle-class development. It got me interested in the concept of thrift and the government regulation of thrift in the nineteenth-century, on which I wrote a big article, on building societies and savings banks. There was the nature of the problem, housing, saving, on one hand and how you think about them and legislate for them on the other, and the social implications. I got interested in the topic of decline precisely because I was reviewing books about decline; I took a counter-intuitive view and perhaps obstinately wanted to find reasons why it was an exaggerated or misplaced view. When I was in America I was interested in economic development and theories of development, the concept of nineteenth-century growth and what explained it, and why backward countries had an advantage; but I have not looked more recently at the Asian giants. 36:51:04 I was eager to leave Sussex after sixteen years; some part of the time was unhappy because of student unrest and what I took to be Asa Briggs' toleration of a lot of it, although I would probably have done the same in his position; I applied for the chair of economic history here when David Joslin died in 1971; two days before the election I got cold feet; my family was well embedded, we had been instrumental in transforming the educational system in Sussex into a comprehensive system which we much favoured, I came up to Cambridge to scout out things and all the middle-class academics I talked to spoke of their worries about the end of grammar schools; housing was expensive and it suddenly seemed a very selfish thing to do; I drafted a letter withdrawing from the competition, went down to Brighton station with a colleague, Larry Lerner, who saw the letter in my hand and offered to post it; before I knew it he had put it in the post box; two days later on the day of the election, I got a call from Vice Chancellor asking if I was sure I wanted to withdraw; self-respect and a desire not to be humiliated made me confirm my decision; from then until 1978 hardly a day passed without my wishing it was otherwise; in 1978 the readership in recent social economic history at Oxford came vacant, and without hesitation I applied for it; Asa Briggs had left Sussex and gone to Worcester College, Oxford, and I had become the Pro-Vice Chancellor at Sussex, which was tedious. Alas, my father had died by the time I went to Oxford; Nuffield is a brilliant place to be; there are no undergraduates, and it’s quite wealthy, a small place, like a social science research institute, with good colleagues; we lived in a very nice house in North Oxford, and I could have happily spent the rest of my career there; then the Cambridge chair became vacant again when Donald Coleman retired early; I talked to Chelly Halsey at Nuffield and with Robin Matthews at Clare; I conducted a thought experiment: supposing I was on my deathbed and being asked why I had refused to take the Chair at Cambridge; I knew then that I had to apply, and I got it; although I was a Oxford Reader, I was a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield; they gave a generous allowance that brought salaries up to professorial level, so there was no financial inducement to come to Cambridge; I felt that, having been here as a graduate student, everywhere else, including Oxford, was slightly inferior; I also felt it was a more interesting place for economic history, and I also wanted to be in more of a traditional institution; Nuffield was a lovely place but is not a traditional college; also, I suppose I was thinking of my father and what he would have said because he was so pleased when I came here as a graduate student; I remember his saying when I came here how proud he was that Jack Plumb had asked me to do some teaching. 44:10:00 I came to Cambridge in 1981; did not have very much to do with the Cambridge Group for Population and Social Structure, although my wife and I became quite friendly with Peter Laslett; before that I had been Chairman of the Economic and Social History Committee of the SSRC, and we came up on a visitation; I remember asking Peter a rather inappropriate question about how much teaching they did, and he stormed out of the room; he felt I was pressing them on irrelevant issues to the main function of the group which was to research; I knew Tony Wrigley, Richard Smith and one or two others, but I didn't have much to do with the group intellectually; I had long since ceased to be an early-modernist, and was working on the twentieth-century coal industry and on American history; when I went to Oxford and asked the then secretary of the faculty what he thought I should lecture on he said it was entirely up to me; when I got to Cambridge there was a lecture slot for me and the curriculum had to be covered; the Faculty is much stronger here as an organization than it is in Oxford; there people only went to faculty meetings in order to vote down change; coming from Nuffield, the big difference here for me was the academic variety of the fellowship; it was also a bit like coming home to Christ's where I had been a graduate student; the collegiate life I found rather attractive, and they gave me a nice room, which didn't happen for everybody but was a bit of Jack Plumb's patronage; I met very congenial colleagues like David Cannadine; Quentin Skinner I had known before and he was instrumental in my putting in for the Chair; there was a much warmer, sympathetic attitude in Christ's than there had been in Nuffield; because I was a professor, I was much more able to feel myself part of the university structure in my field than at Oxford where the faculty structure hardly existed; here I was also a member of the economics faculty so that was interesting, though a bit fraught; I got to know Robin Matthews better and we collaborated in an article on Marshall; I enjoyed supervising; I didn't much enjoy lecturing as I don't think I am very good at it, therefore the audiences were not as numerous or ebullient as I wanted; I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of compiling a lecture, but preferred the personal contact of a supervision, and the ability to get one’s teeth into an essay; in fact, I didn't do much of it as I didn't teach a lot; I did not do as much PhD supervising as I would have liked; some of the thesis examining has been with more interesting people than those whom I was teaching; one was a man called Paul Johnson who worked on savings banks and thrift, and is now in Australia and was at the LSE, and David Feldman who went to Birkbeck 50:51:21 I am glad to have been Master of St Catherine's; I did it partly from a desire for esteem, and because it wasn't an administrative job that would preoccupy me, but was something I could do while remaining an academic intellectually; I had also had an unsuccessful bid for the Mastership at Christ's when Jack retired; that was a very fraught and peculiar business; they had elected the diplomat, Oliver Wright, before this, but then the Falkland's War broke out and Mrs Thatcher sent him to America, and there was another election; my opponent was Hans Kornberg and his supporters circulated a note before there was any other candidate, asking people to commit themselves to him, and enough did to sew up the election; within two or three months the St Catherine's opportunity occurred; I enjoyed discovering a new type of authority; my wife enjoyed it too, but in the middle of the Christ's election, which I had gone in for with out much consultation with the family, she confessed that she had once stood outside Christ's in the rain and looked at the Master's Lodge, and wondered what the future might hold for her; I realized then that this had been an unfair way of proceeding; in the St Catherine's case there was a lot of consultation and she enjoyed it; we went out of our way to make it a proper Lodge, and entertained people including students; I think people sometimes remember her more fondly than they remember me; on my academic work, I discussed a lot of things with her, and she actually helped me as a research assistant on occasions, and in Oxford also did a little paid research for Max Hartwell on his social and legal work; I discussed much with her, particularly when I was Master, where the nature of one's work is collaborative; she was very patient too in 1993 when I made yet another change and left it to work for Leverhulme 55:41:02 I had a call from a head-hunter saying they were looking for a Director for the Leverhulme, giving me a few names to ask my opinion on; at the end of the conversation I was asked if I would like to be considered and I said yes; I had been forty odd years in academic life, and had always thought that the head of a fairly wealthy academic foundation was a very attractive thing; it didn't have some of the obligations and need to argue about policy that could happen in a college; it seemed to me to offer scope for academic contribution and autonomy; my wife reminded me that I had originally got a scholarship from Leverhulme as an undergraduate; Charles Wilson had written the history of Unilever, an offshoot of the Leverhulme, and later on I was asked if I would like to write the fourth volume, but I did not; I went to Leverhulme in 1993 and it was very good, a well-endowed foundation with very liberal business men as trustees, willing both to encourage academic research and also to be receptive to new ideas; I soon discovered how pleasant people could be to you if you were head of a research institute; I travelled around a lot initially to see different universities where we had given grants; the Directorship was different but not demanding, and I was very interested both in the variety and the depth of things that I was doing, and got on very well with the board members; I stayed for eight very happy years; I went there when I was sixty-two and went on after the age of retirement had I stayed in Cambridge; it was an upheaval because I had to get a small flat in London but Cambridge remained our main base; I have written my autobiography, 'Doors Open', which was privately printed.