Peter Gathercole

First Part

Interviewed and filmed by Professor Alan Macfarlane and Dr Amiria Henare, in Alan’s rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, 8 May 2003.

Childhood and family background

0:31 PG was born 27 March 1929 in Tilney St Lawrence, in the Norfolk fens, in a family of grocers.

0:03:56 1939-43 St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School, London

0:07:00 St. Paul’s was evacuated during the War to the Cathedral School in Truro, Cornwall. This move began PG’s association with Cornwall.

0:09:18 1943-46 Clifton College, Bristol

0:12:10 Introduction to Communism: in 1946, aged 17, PG fell in love with a communist student at the LSE.

0:18:12 Having written a critical editorial in the school magazine, PG was told by his headmaster at Clifton, “people like you should go to LSE, not Cambridge!”

1946-49 Army years

0:25:21 What was it like being a communist in the army?

PG: We weren’t meant to have any political affiliations as soldiers. But found a way within Army Education Unit of giving fair explanations of situations.

1949-52 Undergraduate years at Cambridge University

0:30:07 Met Jack Golson (see ANU festschrift paper 1996), and Max Cole (both history students and communists, like himself ) through the undergraduate branch of the Communist Party at Cambridge, which had some 33 members.

0:42:12 All party undergraduate members, whatever their subject, were encouraged to go to Eric Hobsbawm’s lectures on labour history from 1850.

1952-54 Institute of Archaeology, University of London

0:44:02 PG was studying full-time for two years at the Institute. He read a lot of Childe, and was fascinated by his Marxism, but couldn’t work it out – archaeological data seemed inherently limited by its focus on material culture – how could you study ideology, social and philosophical context?

1954-56 Department of Archaeology, Ethnology and Local History, Birmingham

0:49:10 Trainee assistant in museum, lectures included the ethnographic collections.

1956-58 Scunthorpe Museum

0:50:33 Curatorship. Advice from the party “be a good curator”.

1958-68 University of Otago, New Zealand

0:54:12  H.D.Skinner