Julian Hunt interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 1st May and 3rd June 2009

0:09:07 Born in Ootacamund in 1941; father was a District Officer in the I.C.S. so lived in different parts of India until we finally returned in 1947 at Independence; of India, remember seeing villagers bringing in a dead tiger; developed a fear of painted faces from seeing naked holy men; later, at the Dragon School, when boys put makeup on for plays, had to cover my face; in India recently, went on a bus where the driver's face was painted in garish colours which rekindled feeling of childhood terror; we came back from India on leave during the War in a convoy; remember we had to sing-song "I'm H A P P Y..." which I did with tears rolling down my face; remember snake charmers coming to entertain us at Christmas, and my father chasing buffaloes off the lawn; my mother found the heat difficult and felt angry; she would spend hot afternoons trying to teach me to read; remember getting stuck on the word "the" and having to be put in another room, shouting and screaming; we had an ayah, and one of the naughty things my brother and I did was to take the ayah's soap and throw it down in the bathroom, then turn the bathroom into a skating rink; never got to know young Indian boys of our own age and only ever saw Indian servants - a typical colonial life; perhaps the most frightening event of all was Christmas Day, probably 1945-6, in Madras where we were living; we went to a Christmas party on the beach and Father Christmas arrived on a landing craft, through the waves; thought it most frightening and ran away from this most awful apparition I could imagine

7:14:03 When we came back to England in 1947 we lived in Oxford, close to my mother's parents; my grandfather was Maxwell Garnett, a scientist, a Fellow of Trinity who had written important papers on mathematics; he became an internationalist, Secretary of the League of Nations; he was strong primitive Christian; used to take us for walks in the park; we used to all eat in the basement of their house which they ran as a communal canteen into which we all put our ration books; I also saw quite a lot of my other grandparent, my father's father, who lived in Woodstock Road; he had been the Chief Inspector of Schools in Oxford; after about a year my father joined the  Commonwealth Relations Office and went to Pakistan, and I became a boarder at the Dragon School; my brother and I were looked after by a guardian who lived next door to my grandparents so we spent a lot of time with them; I was perhaps brought up more by them than my own parents; on one hand I had Macaulay, mathematics and sailing with my mother's father and Grandfather Hunt, who had been a prisoner in the First World War, but was a great lover of German; my other grandparents shared this love as they saw Germany as the Mecca of civilization; my great-grandfather had been in Munich to do medicine and that was where my grandfather grew up; because he had been a prisoner, he used to invite German prisoners of war, who still remained in camps after the War, to afternoon tea; we used to play battleships and submarines with them; it was a very broadening experience for us; he used to go down to Oxford Prison as a prison visitor and then come back and tell us about them; we were being told how the world was and how it had changed; my other grandfather, when he wasn't telling us about the Battle of Waterloo would be telling us in great detail of all the countries created by the Treaty of Versailles; I think very few children have that broad experience at such an early age; it is never quite as vivid if you learn later on

13:05:22 My mother was away with my father for some of the time; think that the lack of parents did not affect me greatly as in India we were looked after by other people most of the time; in England it was just more of the same; I was probably a difficult and not a very loveable child, whereas my younger brother, Simon, was very jolly; my mother could respond to him and he was much more affected by their absence; on the other hand I was a zealous correspondent and poured out my troubles in Sunday letters; I was always very pleased to see them; my father played with us a lot when he was home; grandparents were terribly important and I spent more Sundays with them than I did with my parents; I first went to the State primary school called Cutteslowe in North Oxford which was very fashionable at the time; there was a wall in North Oxford built to separate the owner-occupied houses from the council estate; the school was on the estate so people from the owner-occupied side had to drive out of Oxford and in again to reach the school; during the War, a soldier on leave drove a tank through the wall; I was at the school from 1947-49; in the beginning noticed boys played at being aircraft with arms wide apart, by 1949 they had become jets with arm sloping behind; notice that children quickly pick up on new technologies and they enter their games

18:14:11 On games, already I was building with bricks and playing with trains; my mathematical grandfather could build bridges using old-fashioned Victorian wooden bricks which spanned about five feet by putting weights on one side; my interest in mathematics and science was very much connected to these experiences; my mother's parents had a place in the Isle of Wight and during holidays we would sail and row, and look through telescopes etc., and all the time it was through the prism of this grandfather who was a scientist; I went to the Dragon in 1949, firstly as a day boy, staying with the guardian; in January 1951 I went to Wilding's which was a small house at the Dragon; that was just terrible; tried to encourage a boy who was beaten to go to the Police Station and complain; L.A. Wilding was quite a brilliant teacher and wrote many books on Latin, and he had been a Fellow of New College; he was the form master of the top class of Dragons and pushed boys through the scholarship exams to Eton and Winchester; he smoked like a chimney and was very angry; in the morning he would even make jokes at breakfast - we all ate together at the family table; on Sundays he would carve a huge pork joint which he would give to guests and we would wonder how much would be left for us; I had my inadvertent revenge when my uncle visited and left me a pineapple; in 1951 that was like gold in England; I had not finished it by the end of term and when we came back in May we were in bed when there was a shout, "Who has taken the pineapple?"; it turned out that he had bought himself a pineapple but I had seen it that afternoon and thought it was my old one; I had shared it out and we had all eaten it; hazing and fights between boys; on Sundays we would write letters home and the housemaster would inspect them; I was writing about how terrible the boys were and he took my letter, crumpled it up, and asked me why I felt this, and whether it was my own fault that they were nasty to me;  a rather severe form of therapy - Dragon style; food in this house was not bad but then went on to School House after about a year and a half where the food was diabolical; sleepwalking at Wilding's; became happier and more confident in School House

29:07:15 Skating on ice made by masters spraying the lawn with water, also skating on a flooded Port Meadow; remember running naked through the fields to swim in the river in summer; being taught to swim and a master who stamped on peoples' fingers if they tried to get out of the water; I tend to remember the bad stories about people being cruel and would empathise with the victims; masters used to regularly throw board erasers at your head; occasional public beatings in front of the whole school; I was taught by several masters who had taught my father at the Dragon in the late 1920s; some had been teaching there from 1916; there was a man who taught P.E. who had been a sergeant in the Army in the Boer War; he taught boxing and he tried to encourage me to fight on when my opponent was already in tears; Mr Retty used to teach us dancing which we did with other boys; my brother broke his finger dancing the Gallop; we did at least learn to dance and I found it very useful when I went to Poland for a conference, where Polish girls still knew how to dance the Polka; that was the first and last time outside the Dragon that I have actually danced it; a teacher I really liked was a man called F.E. Hicks; he had a boat which he moored on the Cherwell at the end of the playing fields; he believed in using mathematics to teach navigation; began to see that trigonometry was really useful; he had been a prisoner in the Second World War; I mention the wars because one was brought up with these tremendous memories from the people who taught us; they were not bitter about it, but we felt somehow fortunate that we were here because of their contributions and experiences

37:03:14 Called masters by nicknames which was supposed to make them like older brother; I felt an awkwardness in this as they still had to maintain discipline; in general the masters were kind; in my last year and a half at Dragons I was beginning to be very ill; although I was head of house I was beginning to get acute pains in my arm; this was caused by an incipient tumour developing on my spine which materialized later when I was at Westminster; when I left Dragons I was in hospital for six weeks in London, the Dragon masters came to see me; it was a school which made people very ambitious; we had a famous half-holiday when Gaitskell became Chancellor in 1951 as he was an Old Dragon; if you were in the scholarship form - upper one - your progress was charted on where you got on the railway from the school to your goal; same applied at Westminster with the station between it and Oxford or Cambridge; was never in either the annual Shakespeare play or Gilbert and Sullivan; inhibited by my fear of dressing up, also very bad at singing; the value was that one became familiar with much of Shakespeare which very few people were; enjoyed rugger, hockey and soccer; one of the pleasures was being taken to play matches in other schools in the masters' cars, and stopping on the way back for a drink in a pub and high tea in Oxford; I think what I learnt from that was the extraordinary sense of achievement of doing things in a group; the pleasure of the group was almost better than doing things individually for me; so much of science is the pleasure of doing it as a group

45:04:12 Gerd Sommerhoff's classes were not important to me as I was really interested in mathematics, mechanics and navigation which connected with my interests at home in building and meccano; Gerd was more interested in microscopes and looking at river water etc. but didn't connect with the scientific world that was being explained to me by my grandfather; a more profound experience was on two holidays when my parents were away I went to stay with a great-uncle in Scotland; he was Lewis Richardson, who was one of the most important King's scientists of the last century; he invented the kinds of mathematics that are used in weather forecasting, he then switched and applied mathematics to the study of war and psychology; he had continued to be an experimental and innovative scientist; people still talk about the things that he was doing when I was there as a boy; he wanted to paint his house but before buying paint we did experiments to find what sort of paint was needed; every morning he would take notes from the radio as he said he could not believe things written in newspapers; he never believed anything until he had done it, which was an extraordinary vision; it fitted with my own suspicious nature so it resonated with me, and is the sort of contrary view that scientists have to have; two of his famous books were published by Cambridge University Press but he had to pay to have them published; we later published his collected works despite the presses lack of enthusiasm

51:36:12 Remember the bullying of a boy in a wheelchair who had suffered from polio; at the Dragon we were very interested in politics and remember the 1952 American election, Ike versus Stevenson, where boys would go around wearing badges for Ike or Stevenson; all the common rooms had newspapers and every day we would read them; in upper 3A the master would give us a question every day that we would have to answer from the newspapers; this is very unusual now, and there is ignorance even among undergraduates; we were very political remember a marvellous debate between Guinness, who spoke as a Conservative, and Francis Hope, who later wrote for the 'New Statesman' and was killed in an air crash; nothing like that goes on in schools now; don't know whether that was because of the school or the period; J.B. Brown (Bruno), one of the masters, was a member of the Communist Party, he also produced the annual Gilbert and Sullivan; the Dragon had prefects and I was invited to be Head of House; I was invited by letter from 'Joc', the Head Master, to take the role on my own or with another boy; I agreed to the latter, but found one had no power except that you were called a Prefect; during the dark evening between tea and supper, and at weekends, your job was to reduce the level of mayhem; I used to use my brother as a spy; but you also had the role of speaking at the Sunday service; it was an interesting experience of leadership without power; pinups on study walls

57:34:24 I got a place at Westminster before I was thirteen; I had also taken the scholarship exam to St Pauls in the summer of 1954 but didn't get one there or at Westminster; they were formidable exams; you had optional papers in Latin and Greek verse; I was in the top stream at Westminster; I was a day boy when I started as my parents were in London at the time, but it was a difficult time because I was so ill; many nights I just couldn't sleep and my father used to read to me; I was in shattering pain and all the doctors said they were growing pains, but eventually I went to a doctor who was a distant relative; he started pressing vertebrae in my back and pressed one that made me jump in the air; I was sent to Queen's Square Hospital for Nervous Diseases; I was thirteen and a half in a ward of twenty-seven people, many of whom were seriously mentally disturbed or suffering from war injuries; in the mornings you sometimes woke to find people had died, so it was life in the raw