Horace Barlow interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 5th March 2012

0:05:07 Born in Chesham Bois in 1921; I have known about my connection with Charles Darwin - my great-great grandfather - since I was very small; my mother was a Darwin, the eldest child of Horace Darwin; my father was the oldest son of Thomas Barlow who had the distinction of having a disease named after him, and was the physician to Queen Victoria's household; he had distinguished between two forms of scurvy - scurvy-rickets as it is sometimes called - rickets due to shortage of vitamin C whereas the rickets commonly known in England was due to lack of vitamin D; I saw a lot of him as he used to come to inspect his grandchildren; he was a wonderful old man; in 1929 my family moved from Chesham Bois to the house that he had built in 1901; the rewards for being a famous physician then were large, but he also came from a cotton family in Lancashire; my mother was very enthusiastic about her grandfather and in those days thought he was rather under-rated, though by the time she died she realized that public opinion had risen almost to the point of matching her own; I knew Gwen Ravarat [writer of 'Period Piece'] as quite a formidable character; her mother was American and she was married to a French man; my parents were members of the intelligentsia and upper middle classes, anxious not to be regarded as aristocratic; an enormous number of our friends were in fact our relatives, so the house was always full of other Darwins and Wedgewoods, so we saw a lot of them; my father rose to be a senior member of the Civil Service; he read classics at Oxford before joining the Civil Service; he continued in it long after normal retirement and had many other occupations in London; he had much less influence on me than my mother; she took the attitude that bringing up children was not his job; I realized that my mental attitudes were not those of a classical scholar at Oxford but much closer to my mother's; she was one of William Bateson's "students" though she never came to the University, but she worked in Bateson's group counting seeds; she tried to make me a botanist but I rebelled against that, though not against science; she was very observant and would always be pointing out Darwinian details; I don't ever remember going to Bateson's house in Granchester as a child; William Bateson's wife was a friend of my mother's; when Gregory Bateson was out in Bali he met Margaret Mead; Beatrice Bateson, his mother, felt she was too old to go out and inspect her so she sent my mother instead; she flew off in an Imperial Airlines plane and we saw her off from Hendon; that must have been 1937-8; my mother got on very well with Margaret Mead - she was not altogether convinced by her, but very impressed by her breadth of knowledge and energy; she came and stayed with us many times; I was even more sceptical than my mother and thought she was a very impressive person; Gregory was born 1904 and my mother, in 1886, so there was quite a big age difference between them; I never got on close intellectual terms with Gregory even though we were to some extent interested in the same sort of thing, both in cybernetics and psychology, and his ideas were always interesting; however, my model of a scientist was taken from my mother and not from Gregory; my mother was interested in genetics and the paper for which she was famous was on the reproductive system in plants like cowslips; my mother reasoned like a scientist whereas Gregory was a guru - he liked to think things out for himself; he obviously influenced many others too; I saw him once or twice when I went to Berkeley

13:51:16 I was always interested in mechanical events and didn't take to botany; the natural history side of botany did not seem that real, and I was much more interested in steam engines; I remember our first car and the moment it came up the drive; it must have been about 1925; my father had driven it home having bought it in London; he was not a good driver and made terrible noises with the gears; my mother was much better; I was good at mathematics at school and not good at languages which gave them serious worries that I would not pass common entrance to get into a public school; I did succeed eventually as Winchester had a bigger weighting factor toward mathematics than to most foreign languages; my first school was a day school in Chesham Bois; I then went to a preparatory school run by relatives of the day school; it was a boarding school and I think I went about the age of six; I remember not liking it; I was rather a solitary boy; my mother was left partly in charge of the two youngest Cornford children; Gwen Ravarat, my mother and Frances Cornford [née Darwin] grew up together as children; Hugh Cornford was at the same preparatory school as I was; I was bullied and survived it in the way people do; I didn't mind very much about people's opinion of me so the bullying didn't hurt as much; I was good at some sport, archery for instance; for some reason the headmaster was an archery fan; the school was called Shortenhills; I do remember the headmaster, who had been an artillery officer, had an interest in mathematics; I remember almost all of the other teachers - M. Picarde who taught us French, Major Lownes, and there was one grubby sort of person who also taught us French who was only there for one term; I went on to Winchester; my parents had looked at other schools, some quite advanced and not all public schools; one of my brothers went to Marlborough, the other to Winchester; I was not an outstanding mathematician; at Winchester I can remember certain teachers; Winchester has a system of house tutors and Eric James, later headmaster of Manchester Grammar School, was mine; unlike many other masters at Winchester, he was liberal even somewhat left-leaning; I remember at the time of Munich there were only four people in the whole house of forty pupils who were in the least doubt that Chamberlain was a hero, whereas my mother, in particular, having connections with all sorts of people in Germany, knew what was going on; several German refugees came to stay with us in England; in the last summer holidays before the war we had two visitors from Germany; one was the son of quite a prominent Nazi, the other was a Jew who already foresaw what would happen and got out early; one had to be rather tactful about how they interacted with each other

25:18:12 At Winchester I was interested in photography; I was also interested in music but not good enough at it; I was taught piano to begin with but only reached about grade three; we had an aunt whom I later liked very much; she used to sing folk songs and I couldn't stand that; I later took up the flute and played in orchestras; I still play; music has been important in my life; I don't like listening to music as background; there is a quartet club in Cambridge and I still go to that quite often; I used to be in a quartet which met mostly in my house, but the first and second violins got married, had children, and the quartet came to an end; my taste is for early classical music in the main, but music has never taken over my life as it does with some mathematicians and other academics; it has been quite important but not overwhelmingly so

28:43:21 Eric Lucas was the biology teacher at Winchester, though I didn't do any there; I thought I was going to come here to do the natural science tripos, so physics and chemistry; this was just at the beginning of the war, and under strong pressure from my mother, I was encouraged to do medicine, partly that at the beginning of the war the Government became aware that it was going to be short of doctors, and exempted all medical students; I joined the biology course at Winchester right at the end, and spent my first two terms here cramming organic chemistry and biology in order to get through the first M.B.; my father went to Oxford but I had reacted against classics; for science, Cambridge was reckoned to be better, and also there were family links here; I came to Trinity; in those days it was just a matter of picking up the telephone, because it  happened that one of the tutors at Trinity had been at school with my father, at Marlborough

31:47:05 At Cambridge there were many people, and I became selectively friendly; I had been friendly with Hugh Cornford from my preparatory school and he remained a friend; he was a general practitioner in Cambridge for a long time; he was one of the saintliest people I know; I only remember his father as an old gentleman in an armchair; his mother was more obviously neurotic, and had a breakdown when her son, John, was killed in Spain; Francis, his father, was the writer of 'Microcosmographia Academica'; Dirac was at John's at the time but I don't think anybody knew Dirac; William Rushton, Andrew Huxley and Alan Hodgkin were there but were contemporaries of my brothers who were older than me; I did not have supervisions from any physicists as I was then doing biological subjects; William Rushton did influence me but I can't think of any others; I don't think my chemistry teachers were particularly distinguished whereas Rushton was; he was from Gresham's, Holt, which produced a number of distinguished people, including Hodgkin; my parents had considered sending me there too; Lord Adrian was a friend of the Darwins in Cambridge, and his son Richard was there

38:10:05 Despite the war, there was always plenty to do in Cambridge; I opted out of the Home Guard into a division of it as a motor cycle despatch rider; that was great fun as we were expected to get to know the highways and byways of Norfolk; you had to provide your own motor bike, and at weekends you went off on trips into the countryside; the academic course was compressed and people probably worked a bit harder; the University kept most of it going with the supervision system, so it didn't really make all that much difference; the Rockefeller Foundation set up a series of medical scholarships using money that had been set aside for post doctoral students from Europe which could not be used for that purpose at the time; they spent the money on medical students instead and I was lucky enough to get a scholarship; I was supposed to go to medical school in America as soon as I left here, but I had got involved in an operational research group run by C.L. Brown on diving, at Hampstead in London; they wanted me to stay there so I delayed going for a year; that was a very good year as it was my first experience of working in a research lab for any length of time, and was also the first salary that I earned; this was in 1943; I was working on physiological problems of divers and discovered that that was the life for me, and not the cotton industry or other things that I was offered; I went to America after that for two years as a medical student at Harvard; the British Government forbade one being qualified as a doctor there in case one might become a doctor in America, however Harvard refused to be dictated to and went out of their way to give me one

42:45:04 America might have been thought to be a safer place than England at the time, but of the twenty of us that went at that time, two were torpedoed, another two got tuberculosis, and another two stayed on; America evolved to suit foreigners, so we were welcomed and had a very good time; they worked very hard and I was quite shocked when I came back after two years, and finished off at University College, just to find how little work English medical students did; that was despite the clinical training in England being better than in America as students here were given much more responsibility, and actual experience of clinical work; came back just at the end of the war; at the time one could qualify without doing any work as a resident in a hospital; I did that, and then had to decide whether to enter the rat race and do the necessary number of residencies and house jobs; as I wanted to do research I thought I ought to start straight away, so I enrolled as a PhD student with Lord Adrian; again that was simple once you had managed to get hold of him; I pursued him to the Physiology lab but he had a way of going down the central staircase two steps at a time very close to the wall, so he escaped me once or twice; at that time he was Master of Trinity; William Rushton had been my director of studies; Adrian was my doctorate supervisor but I only saw him about once a month in the lab; he was not exactly encouraging, but as soon as I wanted to do something different I don't think I ever got anything but negative advice; I decided that I wanted to work on physiology of vision and had a contemporary who was also doing that; it was at a time when you couldn't get money for grants very easily but there was an enormous amount of surplus war equipment for making neurophysiological apparatus; I you could get all this in government surplus stores for ridiculous prices; it was sold by the pound weight; much equipment was also made in our very good workshops; I had wanted to follow the work of Keffer Hartline on frog's retina, but was dissuaded by Adrian who said that he was a very clever man, a warning that I shouldn't go into that field; I worked first on eye movements and that was a matter of finding a good way of recording them; at that time there was a theory that eye movements were important as scanning images was a topic of interest with regard to television development; if that had been the case there was thought to be a lot more to be found out by following eye movements; in fact the pattern of eye movements was known since the early 1900s to be jerky movements from one fixation point to another so didn't encourage that theory at all

53:20:00 I failed to get a Fellowship at Trinity the first time I applied, but I did get one in 1950; I was there for the next three or four years although this included a year at Steve Kuffler's lab in Baltimore just before he moved up to Harvard; I went from Trinity to King's and from there to Berkeley, so by the time I went to Berkeley I had already spent three years in America; I was in King's for eight or nine years and then had an offer from Berkeley which sounded fun; however there was a long delay before I got my visa and I actually heard that I had got it on the day that Kennedy was assassinated; my first impression of King's was how different it was from Trinity; there was always a lively conversation going on somewhere at King's high table but not at Trinity; I knew Dadie Rylands but was not one of his boys;  Noel Annan was elected Provost during that time; his predecessor, Shepherd, I thought was a disappointment; Noel was lively, as was Kendall Dixon and Maurice, son of A.V. Hill, a geologist; Donald Parry was amiable and also a neurophysiologist like me; I don't think the intellectual calibre of people at King's was as high as at Trinity, but they were a less gloomy lot and more apt to talk to each other; I stayed in America almost ten years and enjoyed that; I was teaching in the optometry school and the teaching was quite easy; to fit a pair of glasses you don't need to know an awful lot about optics or physiology; there was interesting research going on and I was able to do what I wanted, and Berkeley is a very nice place