Michael Bate interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 2nd July 2008

0:09:07 Born in Epsom in 1943; father was in the RAF; have a vague memory of my father returning looking very yellow from Burma; he was a doctor and was involved in the repatriation of prisoners; apart from that I have no recollection of Epsom; my parents families were very different though they were both pious; my paternal grandfather was the Dean of York, of Methodist stock, though had returned to the Church of England; he married a feisty Scottish woman whom he met when here at Magdalene; he was intensely scholarly and was a prolific author; Isabel, his wife, whom I knew as a delightful and caring grandmother, was mischievous and beautiful; mother's family was completely different; think there must have been some tension between the families; remember my paternal grandmother being dismissive about my maternal grandmother; on my mother's side they were rather grand with houses in London and the country, with a large estate in South Wales which my cousin still owns; their name was Bosanquet, Huguenots, who became very successful in London and bought this estate in Monmouthshire; as children we went to this decaying house and ran riot; remember my paternal grandmother coming to visit there and describing the house as being like a workhouse; my mother's father was a judge and they had servants; gradually these things fell away so I never knew the butler, but the gardeners were still there and a wonderful chauffeur, Mr Bray, who gradually became the person who did everything; he was very important in my early life as somebody I tagged along with; my grandfather died in the early 1950's and my grandmother became aware of her social responsibilities and ran a family planning clinic in Newport; believe that in her youth she had been a Fabian; a great-uncle on the Bosanquet side had been Archbishop of Canterbury; an interesting woman called Mrs Fletcher, a Bosanquet, an early Methodist, used to haunt us with her portrait that hung in the billiard room; parents were not exactly pious but were committed to religion; we went to church; my sister and I rebelled in adolescence so think we were a disappointment to our parents

10:04:12 I went on a pilgrimage to Santiago at the beginning of which you were asked why you are making the pilgrimage; seemed to me that doing it for spiritual refreshment was the reason, and in the end that turned out to be true; I do seek for spiritual refreshment; I acknowledge that there is a mystery and we fool ourselves completely if we think there is not; I feel that the mystery is less apparent to man in the 21st century, at least in the Western world, than once it was; I think that is a great pity; I don't subscribe to a particular religion; I am like my maternal grandmother who refused to say the Creed because she couldn't bring herself to say things that she didn't believe in; we were deeply shocked by that as children; on the other hand I can get very engaged and interested in conversations of how the sort of religion that I was brought up with could actually change to become something that one could feel at ease with; an instance of such a conversation was a man called Richard Acland who gave a series of broadcasts about religion which I found deeply inspiring; he is my grandmother's cousin; it is a deeply unsatisfactory area of my life because I feel that I don't make enough time for reflection; I don't agree with Dawkin's view; I often find him extremely invigorating but I really feel that he does himself and everyone else a disservice by being so categorical and wrong about certain things, in particular his view that science has disproved religion; it misses so much that is important; have never thought about Buddhism, probably because I don't make time to do so; I have encountered Hinduism and that I find almost repellent but puzzling, as some of the most religious Hindus that I know are delightful people

19:08:00 Had an extremely stable and loving upbringing; my father was a scholarly man which manifested itself in later life; he was a doctor, a pathologist; think he had a dreadful experience on a bomber station during the war which may have driven him away from general practice and into laboratory-based doctoring; he was fairly stern, very loving, utterly reliable; mother was a musician, a viola player, who had suppressed her own ambitions to bring us up; a characteristic of both parents was that they were pretty anti-social and found entertaining and dealing with people very tiresome; we formed a tightly-knit, easy-going family unit; this has had consequences for my sister and myself; my mother was artistically inclined; she played the piano and in later life took up silversmithing and she painted; in later life she had a series of strokes, one of which removed her interest in music; my parents retired to Monmouthshire; my mother lost her power of speech and swallowing with her last stroke, yet lived another two and a half years, manifestly frustrated; it reminds me of one of the things I have always found difficult about Christianity as I see no virtue in suffering and it diminishes the impact of the crucifixion for me; parents very different in temperament and I do wonder which of their characteristics I have inherited; in many ways I think I am much more like my mother though I also feel my father in myself

29:02:04 Music is very important to me but unfortunately I never learnt to play an instrument as a child; there was a time when I would only listen to Bach but I am much more catholic now and love both Brahms and Britten; one of the delights of Cambridge is the music; my mother must have despaired of me as she knew I could break through to some understanding and I just feel that I am on the edge of that now; again, it is a question of time; when I was a Ph.D. student in Cambridge I lived in a flat in Petty Cury with a group, one of whom was a man called Hugh Haughton who was deeply into Wagner; Hugh raged at the idea that you could listen to music and do something else at the same time; I don't want to listen to music and do something else

33:20:09 My first school was in Holmbury St Mary in Surrey; we lived in an idyllic cottage called 'Cherry Tree Cottage'; there, my first real memory is of digging a hole in the ground and being frustrated by a red brick; I must have been four or five at the time; I do have memories going back further but may not be real; one of an air raid, where I would have been less than two, but I do remember being carried down a staircase and my mother telling our nanny to go and get a blanket; we went to a village school called Cocker's Hill; all I can remember is being taught to urinate properly; from there we moved to Dulwich to a huge Victorian house owned by Dulwich College, and we went to a fairly violent and difficult school called Oakfield which was a rude awakening into the rough and tumble of the playground; probably a salutary experience; both sister and I hated it; remember a friend called John Ford who stepped on an iron spike in the playground; at that time we lived among bomb sites and buddleia and school was tough and hateful; aged eight we moved to a slummy part of North Kensington which was better for my father as he was working at St Mary's; for one memorable term I went to Norland Place in Holland Park Avenue where my mother had been; there, for the first time, I encountered girls and fell in love; it was green and blue and beautiful; at the end of that term I was sent to my first boarding school, Southey Hall in Surrey; there I encountered Latin, matron and dormitories; it was horrible leaving home and I was very home sick but it was all right; I turned out to be extremely good at Latin and Mr Macdonald adopted me as a favourite child and nurtured my excellence; by contrast I was hopeless at maths; it was a traditional English prep school and it collapsed two years after; the headmaster had a nervous breakdown; in a way that was awful for me because I had some very good friends whom I valued; when the school collapsed a group of us were sent to another prep school in Berkshire, but my special friends didn't come and I never saw them again; I still resent that; in comparison, the other school was rather pathetic; it lacked the Victorian customs; I went from there back to London, to St Paul's and that is where I spent the remainder of my school days; have to say that apart from The Norland and occasionally at Southey Hall, I hated every minute that I was at school; think it was partly because all of them, apart from The Norland, were based on fear; think that that is something that persists in middle-class life in England; fear of failure, of deadlines, of not succeeding; the fear initially was of being beaten which went on until the end of my time at St Paul's; think the really debilitating thing about school was that life was always postponed; the next important thing was to pass common entrance and then things would start, and then 'A'; when you got to university, to an extent, life did begin; remember swearing an oath to myself on the parade ground at St Paul's that I would never become a schoolmaster; on the other hand, St Paul's was extremely influential; I went there with the idea that I would become a diplomat; I did French, Latin and history, English and German, and excelled at all of those; at 'O' level I got through everything; at that point I had to decide what to specialize in; I was good at modern languages so thought of adding Italian and Russian but found that neither were taught; suggested I could continue with French and German but should do history; I was outraged as I did not want to do history; I had seen people in white coats cutting up dogfish and thought them the most interesting people in the school, and this would be the thing to do; they were appalled that I should want to do biology; huge pressure was brought to bear on me; they told me that it was quite out of the question, that I had a brilliant future ahead of me and was throwing it away; that I would disappear down the black hole of science; I persisted; they were right and it was awful; I was already known to be useless at maths so useless at chemistry and physics; I was pretty good at biology but couldn't understand chemistry and physics at all;  it was not until I got to Oxford that I discovered that physics had some relevance for biology; my good fortune was that the biology teacher at St Paul's was an inspirational man called Sid Pask; he taught Jonathan Miller as well and think he also thought Pask inspirational; he was a bluff and difficult man but he brought to teaching the idea of not knowing or understanding, thinking about what one wanted to do next; at the end of my first year he wrote in my report that I should attempt a university scholarship in another two years; I thought I was a useless failure and a university future was not featuring so this transformed my view of what was possible; I began to work hard and in the second year had the good fortune of having a friendly New Zealander to teach me physics; his view was that biologists were completely hopeless at physics so we would concentrate on things that didn't involve numbers; that way he would get us through, and he did; came back to biology in my third year, with chemistry; Mr Pask was just wonderful

53:41:09 I was hopeless at games, except for rugby; I was the hooker; that started at prep school; think the good thing about rugger was that when I started it, the school was starting it, so nobody quite knew what to do so we had to teach ourselves; with cricket and football, I never received any instructions; at St Paul's I was put into the under fourteens as a hooker; after a bit I was told I was just not big enough so no longer played it seriously; I was surprisingly good in the Combined Cadet Force; had a capacity for ordering people around which exposed my theatrical leanings; at Oxford I became an actor which was extremely helpful when it came to lecturing; aware of the importance of performance; I was a rather keen natural historian but not in any organized way; at the house in Wales can remember damming streams, chasing field mice and fishing in the lake; father encouraged me to collect newts and sticklebacks and put them in tanks; the thing that I loved about biology was this wonderful watery world; think that is really why I wanted to be a biologist; I was pretty hopeless at school, weedy and slightly scholarly; the most awful thing that happened to me was when a new High Master appeared named Howarth; he thought he would bring in a bright new future for the school; he made me a prefect on the basis that intellectual excellence should be rewarded; it was ghastly trying to exert authority over musclely adolescents; made my hatred of school even worse; because I was in London and a day boy I had an intense life outside school; by the age of fifteen-sixteen the Aldermaston Marches had begun and I went on one briefly from Kensington High Street to Trafalgar Square; went and saw 'On the Beach' with Robert Acland; a transforming moment as so outraged by the thought of nuclear annihilation that I became a rabid nuclear disarmer; went to RAF Wittering with the Cadet Corp to see what they claimed was an atom bomb; thus during the latter part of my school life I became extremely rebellious and formed a lot of good friendships among the nuclear disarmament community