Faith Raven

Duration: 55 mins 57 secs
Faith Raven's image
Description: Faith Raven interviewed by Alan Macfarlane on 20th September 2016, summarized by Sarah Harrison
 
Created: 2016-12-04 09:51
Collection: Film Interviews with Leading Thinkers
Interviews of people associated with King's College, Cambridge
Publisher: University of Cambridge
Copyright: Prof Alan Macfarlane
Language: eng (English)
Transcript:
Faith Raven interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 20th September

2016 0:04:16
Born 1930 in London by caesarian section; had a sister three years and nine months older than me; my parents were very keen to have two children although they were both quite old; my father was about sixty and my mother twenty-five years younger, and they had had a dead baby in between which must have been traumatic for my mother; both my parents came from the Smith family who were bankers who had started in Nottingham in the seventeenth century; they went on to become very rich bankers, mainly living in Hertfordshire, and several of them going to Trinity College, Cambridge; the bank eventually became the National Provincial, then the National Westminster, and now the Royal Bank of Scotland

1:56:18 I think my parents were both quite direct people; my father being over sixty when I came to consciousness, and also rather deaf, was quite a remote figure; he went to work, not in banking, as his father had become a wharfinger, a partner in a firm which stretched from the south bank of the Thames from London Bridge to Tower Bridge, unloading and storing merchandise, particularly food, from all round the world; my grandfather at one moment became the Governor of the Bank of England, which I think in those days was for quite a short time; my father did not do that but he became a director of many different companies because, not marrying until he was in his fifties, he had quite a lot of time to do so; he divided his time between living in the house which had been his parents in Roehampton, a beautiful house on the edge of Richmond Park, but also in the 1890s, having bought land in Rutland in the village of Langham, farmed there until he died; it was finally sold after my mother died; also, about the time of my birth he was told by a friend from Trinity of the sale of a large estate on the Sound of Mull in north Argyll; he was thinking about buying that but because the doctors were worried about my mother travelling when she was already pregnant with me, she wasn't allowed to go and see the estate; he took a friend with him to look at it and at first thought he would not buy it; however, within forty-eight hours the price went down; the Forestry Commission had been offered this large estate but had also turned it down; so my father bought it, at the same time selling about a quarter of it to the Forestry Commission, neither of them realizing that underneath the Forestry Commission and a bit of Ardtornish land were some very valuable silica deposits; in 1940 when the Germans had taken over the silica deposits in northern France and Belgium this deposit became very important for making optical lenses, and it is still being used to make glass
5:19:24 I don't know that mother was very good with babies and we had a nannie and a nursery maid, but she was particularly good with children from the age of five to teenage; I don't think she understood teenagers and would have found teenage revolt quite difficult to cope with; she was a semi-believing Christian Scientist; both my parents were keen members of the Church of England, but for my mother this was alongside Christian Science; as a very devoted husband, my father would allow her to read him the morning lessons and bit of the Bible from Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures; we were brought up to think that these were good books, but my mother still believed in going to a doctor if necessary so it was not a very rigid framework
6:44:07 I can remember being in the nursery in the West Highlands and also in the nursery in London, in a house in Charles Street, Mayfair; there we went out and walked in Hyde Park and we had guinea pigs, one of which disappeared into the wall and was never seen again; we went down to the farm in Rutland sometimes at the weekend; I remember being on a rocking horse; my mother didn't believe in us having other big toys as she was very keen that we shouldn't be spoilt; she had a woman who gave her massage who gave us a present of a big toy which we could swing on; when we were at Ardtornish our nursery was on the second floor and our mother must have been very taken with the ideas of the Red Indians because we had trapezes and ropes to climb on; we went to Scotland for between two and three months in the summer, otherwise we lived in London and in Rutland until the war came, then we went to Scotland for about a year; we had an English governess and a French governess, and at the same time still had our nannie, and there were other staff in the house; I have written a bit about what we did in the war; my father was still working in London and continued working at Hay's Wharf until he was about eighty; during the war they took a house outside London so they kept away from the bombing as much as they could . 9:23:12 I was sent to a boarding school when I was twelve, a very high-church school with a lot of going to chapel; it was at Ascot; my memory is that I didn't enjoy any of it but I found some letters from myself to my mother saying that we were having quite a good time; we went for walks in crocodiles, and having had a very free time during the war in the Highlands or Rutland it seemed to be very perverse to be made to walk in a crocodile; I stayed there until I was fifteen and taking School Certificate when I was very keen to leave; my mother discovered my father had a friend who knew someone who was running a school in Switzerland, so in 1946 I was sent out there for three terms; after that I went to a finishing school to do French and German in Oxford, with about seven or eight other girls of sixteen; after that I was coached and then was accepted into St Anne's College where there was no boarding; most of the girls lived out in houses or hostels but I managed to find myself a Don and his wife from Christ Church, the successor, teaching mathematics, to Lewis Carroll; I had quite a good time lodging with them in the Iffley Road for the time that I was at Oxford; I was reading history; although I didn't enjoy any of it a great deal, but I was very interested in history; so it has left me with a historical turn of mind so that I see things in chronological order
11:45:21 At school we were very carefully prepared for Confirmation by a Dean from Windsor; otherwise all I can remember is too many Anglo-Catholic services and I drifted away from that a good deal; I remain a communicating member of the Church of England but rather intermittent, and I feel more that I am of the non-conformist hue and do from time to time go the the Church of Scotland in the West Highlands, which I think I feel more at home with; my mother had a Christian Science guru she consulted from time to time but also believed in going to a doctor; she was very concerned about the health of my father; he was born in 1869 so by the time we got to the war he was over seventy; they were very devoted and she was very frightened of losing him; he lived to within a day or two of being eighty-nine so it was a success that she was looking after him so well; it meant that if we were ill as children we were immediately put to bed and a great fuss was made of it; we had to stay in bed until our temperatures went down, not particularly for our health but particularly that we would not give infections to him; as he was at work most days and as we were often away, even so we were put to bed for any small cold or illness
14:28:15 My father was at Trinity but while there had made friends with Monty James at King's; not marrying until he was in his fifties he came down quite often to have Christmas in King's and he must have heard the ghost stories straight from the horse's mouth; he was not mentioned by my father particularly as he was not very talkative, although when they had friends to stay they found him very amusing; I think like a lot of older people he didn't talk about the past; I knew that Monty James was my sister's Godfather and I believe once that my sister was taken down to see him at Eton
15:44:06 I was rather conspicuously not interested in plants because my sister took up plants; my mother thought that we should have an interest each and she was keen on botany and birds; she said that my sister should do botany and that I should do geology; I wasn't interested in geology, but because my sister was interested in botany it became a non-interest of mine; it became very difficult because my husband was a very keen botanist; I became a keen horticulturalist but I distinguished very clearly between the wild plants and the horticultural ones, although I am now very keen on growing wild plants in my garden; I was educated according to the P.N.E.U., (the Parents National Education Union), and botany was quite and important part, and belonging to the Wild Flower Society; we had to note down what flowers were flowering on the 1st March each year, and I remember doing that; my father would take us to look at churches and other architectural buildings, and I was therefore much more interested in the history than in the wild life
17:34:14 When I was at the finishing school in Oxford I enjoyed going to Kenneth Clark's lectures; at St Anne's I did political theory with Iris Murdoch, but neither she nor I was interested in it; that was about my third or fourth term; I became extremely interested in it when I was put on to somebody to do revision, and I think I probably got my best paper in political theory; I then became very interested in the Italian Renaissance which was my special subject for which I learnt quite a bit of Italy; I have since enjoyed going to Italy and renting a house in the town of Asolo in Northern Italy which I have done many times until recently; after Oxford I went to the L.S.E and I remember joining almost every of the societies but I went to very few of them; I think I was always rather unclubbable; at Oxford I lived on the Iffley Road with a bicycle with an engine, and then once or twice I had a car; with the bicycle I could get about quite rapidly; I didn't get involved in politics; I'm not musical so I couldn't do that; I went to the L.S.E because we had a family tradition of doing social work; we had almost a second mother to us who was my father's niece, therefore a cousin of my mother's as well, who was a distinguished social worker; she was one of the early workers for the C.O.S., the Charity Organization Society which was the originator of what became the Family Welfare Association; she had gone to the L.S.E.; she, a Catholic, had had a love affair with a man who was going to be an Anglican Parson; they decided that they could not marry so she went to the L.S.E. and got very involved in Catholic adoption; she was the great link with the social work world which was why my sister first, and then I went to the L.S.E. and left not long before I got married; we got a social science certificate which also meant doing a certain amount of practical social work; I was at the L.S.E. in 1952 for a year. 21:45:00 I did some practical social work until I married in July 1954; we bought a house just outside Cambridge and I got involved in gardening; in 1956 my husband became Senior Tutor at King's so I spent quite a bit of time with him because he was keen that I should share in this, entertaining undergraduates; so I was cooking for them and giving parties; in the same year I had my eldest daughter for whom I employed a nannie as I had had myself; by 1963 I found I had five children so I was quite busy with four under four at one time
22:58:21 John Raven and I met when my sister took a party skiing; she was sharing the party with an ex-boyfriend who was a member of the Pit Club and at Trinity; he was looking round for one or two less conventional people as well so he invited a Kingsman called John Hoskins to come on the skiing expedition; John Hoskins and I were both rather out of the general atmosphere of the party which was more conventional; so we made friends and I came over to King's as the girlfriend of John Hoskins to whom I got engaged; he introduced me to John Raven with whom he was very friendly, and I married John Raven instead of John Hoskins; John Raven had just become a Fellow of King's; he had come over from Trinity, where he was a research Fellow, to teach classics and specialize in ancient philosophy; quite soon after that he was made Lay Dean and so he was busy in college before we married; he gave that up because the idea was that you had to have a Lay Dean in charge of discipline in the College living in the College; he then became Senior Tutor for about seven years. 24:58:13 The starting friend we had at King's was Stephen Glanville; my husband had rooms on the first floor of F staircase and Stephen was on the ground floor as Professor of Egyptology; my husband was one of the people leading the campaign to make him Provost, but he died very rapidly of a heart attack in 1956; then there was a question about whether a man who was also our friend, Dadie Rylands, who had become Godfather to my eldest daughter, should become Provost; he decided he didn't want to do it and handed it over to Noel Annan who, at thirty-nine, was considered quite young but on the whole gladly took it on, and on the whole did it very well I think; John Raven wasn't very sure that he was going to be able to work closely as Senior Tutor with Noel Annan, but they got on surprisingly well and enjoyed one another's company; Noel Annan took over from Stephen Glanville who was Provost for two years; we saw Dadie Rylands quite often; he enjoyed being in the countryside so he would come and stay with us in the West Highlands; he enjoyed bathing so if we found a stream he would dive in; he also did a good deal of walking; after John died, Dadie came and stayed with me many times and started reading to me in the evenings and read me a great deal on tape of English literature, which I still have and value; I don't listen to it all that often but I would like to find a good way of preserving it; Karl Sabbagh has transferred some of it on discs but it needs more done with it; there is also somebody Cribb who has been very interested in what Dadie did and his acting; I think a lot of Dadie's life was a performance; he was very friendly and very good company and would visit him once or twice a week, and as I was driving back to Shepreth would have a very small quantity of gin & french; he liked having somebody to talk to and many people have said that they visited him regularly when they turned up at his memorial service; in my view they didn't spend the time with him although he did have many friends; he went out to supper quite often, and the widows of some of the fellows of King's, like Sheila Munby the widow of the Librarian, Nora David who was herself in the House of Lords for Labour, Marni Hodgkin wife of Alan Hodgkin Nobel Prize winner and Master of Trinity, very often entertained Dadie; I think that this should be remembered if anybody starts writing Dadie's life because it was a very important time for him to not have to sit in his room; although he was very happy reading, on a dark evening he was very happy to walk out with a bottle of wine as a present; he was always good company; he did not talk about the Bloomsbury period but what was going on; sometimes he read to me but we also discussed what to eat; he liked plain nursery food so rice pudding became a great favourite; I think more people were fond of Dadie than he was fond of; he was somebody to take up, I think; we were friends with Tim and Sheila Munby; John Raven was the Godfather of Giles Munby who now does woodwork in the barn at Shepreth; the Munbys were very embedded in the Cambridge world; I went and had lunch with them once while I was at the L.S.E. and I just found that the conversation was a little bit too local to Cambridge; once I joined and knew the people I became interested in it; Tim took us out to collect furniture in Norfolk; he had many side skills, a many faceted person, but it was difficult to tell this from the conversation. 32:25:13 At Cambridge there was dining in, and I was told that some people gave their wives less money if they were dining in hall; I think John Raven didn't do that very much; he had wanted to get away from being a bachelor in college; during the war he had been a social worker in the East End of London, but after the war he belonged to a men's college; he wanted to get away from that and very much enjoyed being at Docwra Manor so dined in very little, I think; he also came to suffer from depression and cut off from a good many people towards the end of his life, except from the Leaches; Celia Leach and Edmund rented our cottage in the village and he saw a lot of Celia; we saw a certain amount of Patrick and Sidney Wilkinson; I got on well with both Celia and Edmund; I think not everybody got on with Edmund but to my surprise I once found that he was to go skiing, which I was keen on, and he invited me to go with him; we didn't ski together but we spent the evenings talking; we saw more of Celia who became a close friend of John Raven and went on after his death to be a close friend of mine; I would visit her in Barrington quite often; she hated eating always alone so very often she did have friends round; as she got towards ninety her energy decreased a little bit, but our friendship extended to include my eldest daughter, Anna, who saw her quite often when she was in Cambridge; I liked Edmund when I saw him though I saw very little of him; we were occasionally asked for a meal at the kitchen table but we were never asked to a formal meal in the Provost's dining room; they seemed to divide their friends into two groups and we didn't think that this was because we weren't friends, we were just different types of friends; I saw more of them both out in Barrington where they bought a bungalow; I didn't really know the Browns then but got to know them since; we knew Francis Haskell a little and I became quite a close friend, seeing him about twice a year with Larrisa Haskell; it's rather difficult to talk about the ones we didn't like.
36:38:13 I couldn't compare the atmosphere at King's at the time with other colleges as I didn't know any of them; King's made a point that they were on good terms with the undergraduates; as a Tutor, John had been very interested in their mental welfare and got deeply involved; one January I was away in London having twins in 1963 or 4; John was in King's much more and was deeply concerned with the worries between the undergraduates - one had fallen in love with another and this wasn't working out well; in a way, John was quite pleased when the family got going again; he was very concerned that somebody would commit suicide under his charge and I'm sure that didn't happen; John must have made friends with Morgan Forster; once, before we were engaged, I came over for the Christmas Eve service; the snow came down and it wasn't thought wise for me to drive myself back to Rutland; I spent the night in Morgan Forster's flat - two rooms he rented from Stephen and Patrick Wilkinson in Trumpington Street; Morgan was away, but in his bedroom and sitting room he only seemed to have books written by himself, which rather surprised me; he and his friend the policeman came and stayed with us in the West Highlands; we were rather surprised when having bought a live lobster that we had to cook, Morgan was willing to help put the lid on so that the lobster died quickly; he was having lunch with us just when I had been interviewed for a post-graduate diploma in criminology; I believe he said don't do it; I think he must have meant that reading sociology like that meant that I was going to be trained to think in stereotypes, and he didn't believe in stereotypes; but I may have got the whole conversation wrong, but he was quite a close friend; I can't remember how he spent his time at Ardtornish, but it was a rather short visit; the policeman's name was Bob, and he drove him about; Morgan was a very agreeable companion; I never met John Maynard Keynes, and Alan Turing had moved on long before; I think King's had forgotten Turing but have reinvented him; Bletchley was a secret for years though I think the Morrises were there; Tim Munby was a prisoner of war where he met all sorts of unexpected people like the Duke of Argyle, and in later years went shooting on his estate; my husband went for an interview as a pacifist and they more or less offered him the chance to go to Bletchley; he asked if it would save or lose more lives and then he said he was shown the door; so then he went and did social work in the East End of London.
42:49:00 On the purchase of Docwra Manor: in 1954 when I was a the L.S.E. I came down for the weekend; John had said that there was a possibility that Dadie Rylands and possibly his mother, though I'm not sure whether she had died by then, were moving out from Cedar House in Grantchester, and that we could rent it from the College; if we couldn't there was the chance of a flat off Long Road where I believe the Browns also had a flat; I did not fancy the flat; it was painted in a margarine colour which was my least favourite and I didn't fancy anything about it at all; the next week John said that he had heard there was a house out in the countryside and that we could go and look at it; it was Elizabethan and the back and Queen Anne at the front; I thought that sounded a little more cheering so we went to look at it; my father had just given me some money so I was able to buy it for £6,000; it has a very old side but had a two brick facade put on the front in about 1740 with one panelled room inside, but most of it is sixteenth century with bits that are possibly earlier; it also has additions from the nineteenth and twentieth century, so it is a mixture; it had quite a large garden and then the farmyard, parts of which we were able to buy and a bit of the garden next door; it now totals two and a half acres; almost immediately we started to create the garden; the cyclamen that are flowering now were wedding presents in 1954; it is now open to the public on Wednesday and Friday all year and also often at other times too; it is a cottage garden with a lot of self-sown plants divided into different areas so that each has a different character; some of it is Mediterranean-type, we have quite a lot of herbs but there are a lot of walls so we have a number of climbers; the walls reflect that it had been a farm yard but we have increased that by planting yew and beech hedges
47:21:24 Ardtornish was bought in May 1930 but my mother didn't see it until August when she arrived with the nursery party including my sister and the nannie with me in arms, just four weeks old, with what was called a monthly nurse who was meant to get the breast-feeding established; she wasn't a success and was got rid of quite quickly; my mother then had to choose rooms in the house because there hadn't been any small children in the house before since it was built in 1890; she chose rooms on the floor above her bedroom for us; we went there for August and September every year until the war; then in 1938-9 my parents felt the whole thing had become too expensive and they rented it to the sister from whose executors they had bought it; one of the excitements of the first arrival was that the people of the island of St Kilda in the far north Hebrides had decided to move and arrived at Morvern to work for the Forestry Commission on some newly-acquired land the day before we did, I think in the same boat; my mother had to establish our nursery and was feeling rather exhausted so had asked my father to find people to cook as they were already asking people to stay; it is a house with a large number of rooms so he said that he would find the people who were running restaurant where he lunched at work; one day some of the local women came and said that they didn't know what she really like but their husbands were coming back drunk most evenings; the people were sent back to Hay's Wharf; my parents as their predecessors did, moved down between England and Scotland with one or two of the servants, and there was quite a big staff until the war. 50:47:10 The garden was already there though I don't think it was started in the nineteenth century although a certain number of the trees were planted; in the twentieth century, our predecessors Gerald Craig Sellar and his mother, Gertrude, had a gardener who got the V.M.H. which was one of the top medals; there was a staff of twelve gardeners and several were trained who went on to be heads of parks in Glasgow and other famous English parks; I think quite a lot of the ideas came from Kew via their head gardener; the flowers were all grown in a walled kitchen garden which is about half a mile away and the garden itself had some interesting shrubs and round beds between the grass; it is also very hilly in the garden so there are cliffs and rocks
52:35:00 I got very interested in the colonial situation in Africa; I had been out with my parents to South Africa twice as my mother was keen to get my father away from the English winter; the second time I wanted to do things on my own and found that we had friends who were working in the missions; so I went to Northern and Southern Rhodesia and visited one or two missions; this would have been in 1950-1; then my father's nephew had become head of Anglo-American and I went and stayed with them for two or three nights in Johannesburg; I flew back on my own, losing my passport just before I arrived at Heathrow or wherever it was; John had worked with somebody called Guy Clutton-Brock during the war and was later Godfather to Sally Clutton-Brock whom I am still in touch with; Guy went out to work in Southern Rhodesia on an Anglican farm; then he was imprisoned by one of the regimes and has become a hero of Zimbabwe and his ashes are buried on Heroes Hill; through all that I was the person who ran the office for his work with Michael Scott who was involved with the Nagas; Guy Clutton-Brock was Godfather to my daughter Anna and Michael Scott was Godfather to my son Andrew, so we cultivated people who were prisoners of conscience

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