TRINITY FWOOARR 

Anthony – 1956, that’s my very first Spring there [Cambridge]. One has to earn an oar, one receives an oar if one does four bumps ie four nights of the races, well.. called nights but in the afternoon. The main race is in the Spring term but these ones were I think…. Is it May races? Yes the May races, and I rowed because it was a family tradition, after all my grandfather Brown rowed for Cambridge, he was in the Cambridge Rowing Eight, yes the Oxford Cambridge boat race, various other people, Uncle Sam Beale and another relation on that side. I wasn’t quite as heavy as them, but similar build. They were in posh boats, and my father was a very keen oarsmen and rowed for first and third Trinity. Because Trinity is so large, it had two boats. One for Old Etonians which was first Trinity and one for the hoi polloi which was third trinity. Father was in…… it must have been around then when they amalgamated, because he often referred to rowing for Third Trinity, and his oar that he won was first and third Trinity after they had amalgamated, so when I got to Trinity I decided  it was the thing to do, so I joined the rowing, but all keen rowers rowed effectively seven days a week and I wasn’t for that so I volunteered for I think two or three outings a week so I never had a chance to get into a good boat and hence I was in the 8th boat I think (laughs) which means I was about the worst oarsmen in Trinity, but because of my weight etc I fitted in the boat and it was a sheer fluke that that first year started in Sep or Oct 1955 and so I was obviously in the boat right through the season and so in the main races the following summer term I was in the  8th boat and so one wins one oar if one bumps four boats on four consecutive nights. Races take place on four afternoons or evenings in the summer, and the River Cam is so narrow that you can’t race side by side, you race in a row, which in fact is rather more exciting because anybody standing watching… the parade takes longer as everybody comes past and they probably have about ten boats in each class, I can’t remember……. 

So that was the first and third Trinity 7th boat, and when you bump somebody you have to immediately pull to the side to let everyone else get past. You actually go level, but it’s very difficult, I mean we are all very honest, so the cox sitting in the rear of the boat in front has to put up his hand when he sees you are level. Occasionally you bang into each other but that’s only because the river is so narrow. Occasionally if someone is about to bump you and they bump someone in front it is very difficult to keep out of their way in the excitement of it all and sometimes there is a traffic jam [laughs] and general pile up but that’s rare. 

We were very disappointed because we bumped the first boat, and then the next night we failed to bump the boat in front, so there was no chance of getting four bumps, but on the third day we over bumped which meant that the boat in front of us bumped the one in front of that, and we then bumped the one that had started off three in front of us – that’s called an over bump – so that qualifies for 3 bumps and that made our 4th bump, so on the 4th day all we had to day was run clear and keep ahead. (If someone bumps you, you go down a bump). So anyway we did that and all the people got given their oar…. It never was their oar, it is some rotten old ones. 

I rowed again another year, but I didn’t row after that. I never particularly enjoyed it, but then I never particularly enjoyed any sport. At Cargilfield I don’t really remember, but at Rugby yes I found it tedious. The trouble was that being big and bulky I was a natural forward at rugger, but I never particularly enjoyed it. I much preferred cricket although I was hopeless at anything. All I could do was field relatively well – big hands – but it was so lovely fielding in the summer – a bit like Ferdinand the Bull sniffing the flowers. 

But sport was never in my blood, in the sense that it is in Susan’s family. And then at Rugby I was a loner, and so I enjoyed cross country running because that got me out of doors and so rain and mud and sleet didn’t worry me. It was the same in your day – one had to do a day’s exercise if matches were called off, I always opted for a cross country run. I got into trouble because I had done a lot of cross country running, I thought for my last year I would run in the Crick [a well known Rugby half marathon run starting in the village of Crick south of Rugby] and so I was more successful than most of the running 8 and so I got into awful trouble for not having run officially and got into the running team etc. But I wasn’t particularly good at it, I just had stamina. 

[Mil – so you left Rugby and then did a National Service, so you joined the National Service at 18? And then did it for how long?]

Two years. ’48 – ’53 was Rugby, ’53 – ’55 was National Service, ’55 – ’58 was Trinity, ’58 – ’60 was my apprenticeship and so it was 1960 that I became and engineer and had a decent salary. 

[Mil – there’s a very interesting photograph that shows a party [at Cambridge]. You and mum are there, and Anthony her brother, Elinor’s dad, and Claire. And all these people are still part of your life. Is Cambridge where you first met mum?]

I was at Cambridge at exactly the same time as [Alison’s brother] ’55 – ’58 in different faculties. We only met because of colleagues in the same regiment in National Service – someone called Graham Nash, a Welshman from the Forest of Dean. He was never a great pal, but I knew him well, so when he went to Trinity at the same time as me, he was also studying engineering, and so we naturally saw a lot of each other, and he shared rooms in his first year with John Murray, Alison’s first cousin from Edinburgh and so my friend then became John Murray. I dropped Graham Nash, and took up John Murray and John Murray was unquestionably my best friend. The first real friend I had. I’d had friends at Cargilfield and I had friends at Rugby etc but John …. It would be wrong to say the first… two or three of my friends at Rugby were good friends, I went and stayed with them – Charles Blackwell and John Andrews in particular – but John Murray became a very close buddy and we used to do things together – we climbed hills together, we used to do things in the summer together – he came and stayed at Bog Hall and I went and stayed with him in Edinburgh and met his sister Francis and his father was the Sheriff – and I stayed with him at a cottage – they always went back to a cottage on Royal Deeside and so I spent a week up there one year with them all, so he was a very close friend. So inevitably, with his being a first cousin to Anthony, all at Trinity at the same time, inevitably I was drawn into many of Anthony’s parties, and that photo was one of Anthony’s parties with all of his friends. I never knew Anthony well at Trinity, I mean I sat next to him at meals at often as not, but our lives were very different. I was an engineer just as John Murray was a scientist, so we had lectures starting at 9 every morning 5 days a week with lectures on Saturdays and lectures in the afternoon 2 or 3 days a week so we were a group apart from Anthony’s mob who were all reading English or classics or something if they were unlucky and got up late for breakfast and drifted here there and everywhere and lay on The Backs – this is a warped opinion of someone who shows his envy coming out. I was very happy and didn’t have envy, and naturally regretted not having some of the leisure which they had. They were a different class altogether and they met when I would be doing my homework – we had quite a lot of evening work in our rooms. He was out having parties, or having discussions in their rooms or meeting after dinner in the hall at Trinity.  I was very much apart from them and these people like Julian Hodgson, I think he was a lawyer, that’s almost as idle as being a classicist – [laughs] my warped opinion coming out.  Then there was a great character Theodore Bull who was also in the photograph. I don’t think he had his princess from African who he eventually married. They were philosophers and talkers and they lived the life ones reads of people when they are up at Cambridge, whereas I led the life of an ordinary working man. 

So anyway I was well drawn into that, and I met Alison’s mother, Joan, before I met Alison. In that very first year when Graham Nash and John Murray were sharing rooms I was playing squash with John and we’d gone back to his rooms to change. He was in his bedroom changing, I was left in the living room, the rooms came into the living room with two rooms off, John’s and Grahams, so I was changing in the living room when Joan barged in with hardly a knock on the door, saw me standing naked, and she was so well bred, had obviously learned it in finishing school, and she managed to somehow look in the other direction or through me or something – it was totally un-embarrassing as I put a towel round me and she asked me…. I think she said ‘I’m John’s aunt, I will come back in a minute’. I quickly dressed and told John and she came back, I don’t know if I was still there, and so that was how I first met Joan. 

And my first meeting with Alison was at Francis Murray’s wedding, when Francis married ….. Duncan Macrae Gibson in Edinburgh and Alison was a bridesmaid. And I think on that occasion …. I didn’t fall for Alison then, that was when I first met her, I didn’t notice girls in those days having lived with sisters all my life girls were just the other side of life they weren’t part of my life. I’d not had a girlfriend and it was sometime after that something got in my mind, maybe worry that I was gay as I’d had no girlfriends, and naturally brought up in a totally male society of Cargilfield, Rugby, the army, Trinity College which was certainly then all male, I was naturally attracted to this man or that man and it had meant absolutely nothing to me but I suddenly got this great fear was I gay.. we didn’t use that word, it was always homosexual, and I looked at myself and my life and thought I’m not aware that there is anything sexual about me and any of these men that I’ve noticed as opposed to met. By that stage I had left Trinity and was starting work, and it was after finishing my apprenticeship I first started noticing girls…. one or two of the secretaries when I first started dictating letters… one of the challenges of life was dictating a letter as one didn’t have machines… we all did dictating to the typing pool, and the typing pool at L Stern and company was selected, the person who chose people from interviews was my cousin Tim Gordon Brown, who, he was effectively the assistant managing director to my father, he was my father’s assistant, he was an engineer, and he had an eye for the girls and so all the girls in the typing pool were attractive, and for years and years Forbes Pearson and I used to make jokes, not sexual things like Harvey Weinstein, but made jokes about Tim and the girls he selected, and so I was in my late 20s before I first noticed a girl. I remember there was the one that Forbes Pearson fell for was called of all names Elizabeth Taylor. I fell for a lovely redhead called Mary Burns, but there was also another girl, but that was my first observation of a girl who was attractive. I wouldn’t have dared put my arm around her. [Mil asks, did you do anything about it]. Absolutely not! I was sexless. She became my secretary. I never took any of those girls out. No no no. Plenty of people broke rank etc but I was totally conventional and I never said anything inappropriate. It was very embarrassing when it came to St Valentines Day because I received so many cards and they all came from the typing pool. They were all so conventional…. Roses are red, violets are blue, I love you or something….Ghastly things, no imagination at all, and that was the thing that challenged my interest in girls. They may have been beautiful or I might have found them attractive but they just had, they possessed nothing….. and Alison was the first one that attracted me in the sense that she had imagination. I don’t know what it was but I fell fairly rapidly as I think you know but it took me almost ten years to catch her. After Francis’s wedding there would have been John Murray’s wedding, I clearly hadn’t fallen for Alison then because I remember quite clearly the most attractive girls were the two Whitley sisters. He was ministers of St Giles and these two girls, Elizabeth was the really attractive one but Mary was easier to talk to because she was a scientist and they were first cousins of Penny Robinson who was marrying John Murray and so the fact that I remember them at the wedding and not Alison is an indication…. Oh no no no…… Yes…… (trying to figure out when this is)

Oh it was when I was working in London for L Stern and company, so ’60 – ’65 was when I was still living at home and got Sydenham Lane. (Lots more figuring out, including Mil asking if Alison was pregnant when she got married, with Anthony saying “not as far as I know, but it was close”).

It must have been about 1964 when I proposed to mum, because I was in London, saw quite a bit of mum, and we had just built the most magnificent large cold store at Vauxhall right on the Thames, and I was very proud of this bit of refrigeration engineering, it was in the news, one saw the thing from all along the river Thames. I went there one evening to check it over, and I walked out onto the… it had it own pier so that frozen goods could be loaded and unloaded from barges on the river, and I just thought, standing there looking over more or less towards the Houses of Parliament under a lovely sky how romantic it was and so in fact when I for some reason went out for a meal with mum I don’t think I was intended to propose to her but anyway we went back, she somewhat reluctantly, to see this cold store… And on this jetty over the river Thames was very romantic and I asked her, and like mum you never get a straight no … not now… I was brushed off… [Mil asks, did you feel sad? No, Did you have a ring? no no none of that, Did you get down on one knee? No, probably just stood hand in hand, Were you in a relationship? No, no no]. We’d been to many things together, she had taken me to one or two proms, I had taken her to one or two theatre things, we’d eaten out, but it wasn’t at all regular. We never arranged the next… at one meeting we didn’t fix up the next one etc… it was much more remote than one gets in films and so on. 

[Mil – so it wasn’t a romantic relationship but you said you were holding hands]. That would have been pretty dashing of me, but I guess we might have stooped to holding hands, I was not a romantic person. 

[Mil, so having been told no, or not now, did you continue to see each other?]. Yes, nothing more was mentioned. 

[Was George on the scene at that time?] Yes I believe so, I had met George at mum’s flat. I wasn’t aware he was anyone special, there were always so many people in mum’s flat. The one I remember, George was there the day I went to pick mum up to take her out to something and Jacqueline Du Pre was there and she was surrounded by her well wishers lets call them because she had two Stradivarius cellos and she was having to choose which one she wanted. I think they were elderly admirers not amorous admirers, people who admired her playing and felt she ought to be supported, and probably in the musical network there are probably people who are tapped on the shoulder… so anyway I had a wonderful hour in mum’s flat with Jacqueline testing these cellos. All bright and cheerful, it didn’t seem she was being serious about choosing these instruments, which would be worth 2 or 3 million in today’s money but we didn’t think about that at all, and George was there, but didn’t play a prominent part but the fact he was there and was hanging on, he was in there effectively for the kill I would say. And we went out and mum never mentioned him and it was one of the most crushing moments of my life… I’d kept in touch with mum and I then returned to Glasgow to take over the management of Sterns, and I was invited out by John Murray and Penny as a newly married couple to their ghastly little farmhouse at the back of Milngavie, Clober Farmhouse I think it was called, and over supper said – they knew nothing about my connection to Alison – ‘Oh do you know Alison Roberts is getting engaged’, and Penny bustled off to get the letter, and I sat with John in deck chairs. It was such an uncomfortable meal, they didn’t have any chairs and so we were in canvas deck chairs which they had been given as wedding presents, sitting in these deck chairs around a high table, and Penny passed me the letter and there it was about her having accepted George Stricevic’s thing, and I just remember saying nothing to them because it wasn’t public news, it was just between me and mum, and I just had such a hollow feeling in my tummy. It was desperately sad, so there we are. I did send her a wedding present, which we still have. In those days I gave everybody oriental rug, I called them Persian rugs. She did invite me when they moved to West Linton, but after that, apart from Christmas cards, but I think that’s another session when mum is around, to say how we then resumed.