Mark Smith

Mark Smith interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 18th September 2018

0:05:11 Born in Norwich in 1960 and lived there until I was ten when we came to Cambridge; We lived in a village called Barford, about seven miles outside Norwich; my father was a civil servant and worked for the Ministry of Defence on R.A.F bases; he worked at R.A.F. Whattan; my mother was a housewife; during a round of defence cuts in 1970 that airbase was shut down so he was given the choice of going to R.A.F. Wyton near Huntingdon or to the north of Scotland, so he chose to come here; I was very glad at the time because the north of Scotland seemed a long was away; with hindsight, I am very keen on mountains these days and am in the flattest part of the country; my mother's mother lived in Norwich and I used to see her quite often and would stay at her house sometimes; I just remember her husband who died when I was about three or four; my father's father I never knew; he died in the fifties, and his mother, my grandmother, died when I was about nine; we also used to visit her, also in Norwich where she ran a pub; my maternal grandfather was in insurance and in the Merchant Navy during the war; my grandmother used to tell me of the awful times he had in Russian convoys, and sunk twice; my grandmother did not work and lived until she was about ninety-five

3:03:12 My parents were fairly average; my father worked a lot; as well as his job as a civil servant, while we were in Norwich he had a chicken farm; we had a house with two large fields and a large shed with 2,500 chickens in it which he did when he came home from work and at weekends; when we moved here that was all sold and he gave up chickens; my mother was lovely but she died when I was eleven, a year after we came here, of cancer; I remember her very fondly; my first school was Barnham Broom Primary School; I remember quite enjoying it and having a good time there; it was in the next village; there was a school in our village and I don't know why I wasn't sent there; I can remember, and I can't have been very old, being snowed in; we lived at the top of a long drive on a slope and I remember trying to help my father dig the snow off the slope to get the car out; I seem to remember that there was a lot of snow and it was higher than me, so that must have been early mid-sixties I guess; in the countryside we were pretty much allowed to do what we wanted; there was a farm next door and I was very friendly with the children there; Charley was the same age as me and he had a slightly younger sister, and we just used to roam around; I don't remember collecting eggs; we dug up a wasp's nest once which seemed a good idea at the time; we just used to play on the farm or in the surrounding fields, doing things that were extremely dangerous like driving tractors when I was eight or nine; it was a happy childhood

6:29:20 We rented a house in Cambridge for six months and then bought a house in Milton; I went to what was the High School for Boys which is now Hills Road Sixth Form College; I was there for a few year and then went to Impington Village College which had a completely different regime; I didn't enjoy secondary school that much; I wasn't particularly academic, not excessively sporty; I didn't particularly enjoy the High School because of the strict discipline that was enforced there; I don't suppose anybody did but it was of it's time; for various reasons I stopped going and then went to Impington, which was a very progress, liberal regime, where seemingly you could come and go as you pleased and nobody cared; some of the subjects I found interesting, but it very much depends on the teaching; at the High School I did Latin for three years and had a fantastic teacher; he was prone to screaming and violence sometimes but was also extremely interesting; he got us to do Latin plays in a contemporary style; he was a great teacher; however, Latin was streamed and I dropped down a set and then it wasn't an option; I left before I took 'O' levels and did them at Impington; on hobbies - I joined the local Sea Cadet Corps when I was about thirteen which had a unit on the riverside, it is not there any more; I was there for about three and a half years, until I left school at about sixteen and a half, and I spent a lot of time there; they had boats, and used to salvage and rebuild boats; it was a vaguely Naval-themed cadet force so you wore a Naval uniform, but they did all sorts of other stuff - expeditions to the Peak District, and you got to go on courses at Naval bases during the holidays as well; it led me into the Navy, which seemed a good idea at the time but I didn't enjoy it

10:48:14 My parents were not religious; I don't think they were non-believers, but they didn't go to Church; I went to Sunday School briefly, around seven or eight but not for long; I can't remember why that was; at home there was no religion at all and we made up our own minds about that sort of thing; I don't think I am an atheist, I don't know whether there is or isn't a God, but I don't think there is, and it doesn't matter to me at all; I don't go to King's Chapel at all, and only go to a church for funeral and weddings, that's all; I have always enjoyed contemporary music; I don't play anything and have no musical talents myself, but enjoy going to see music and have done since I was fourteen or so; I like popular, rock, electronic, various sorts of music - I have quite broad tastes; I love Nick Cave, the Australian singer, and the Bad Seeds who I've seen a number of times; I also very much like Patti Smith who I've seen lots of times as well; I go to the Junction in Cambridge, and there are a couple of pubs here that have live music, or further afield to London; politics interests me but I've not been involved in any party-political things, though I have been on a few demonstrations; I went on anti-Nazi League demonstrations in the '70s and similar events here more recently, but never joined a political party, but my sympathies lie with the Labour Party, though I find many of our politicians disappointing

15:29:04 When I left school I joined the Navy which you could then join at sixteen; I was in for six months; you go to Plymouth to do your basic training where I'd been several times before with the Sea Cadets and knew what it was like; I didn't really enjoy it; we seemed to spend an awful lot of time doing nothing or doing what seemed like pointless things that I'd spent several years before partly doing; for some strange reason I decided that I was going to go on submarines as you got paid more and could grow your hair long; I went to Portsmouth for two months and did absolutely nothing there, just waiting for things to happen; because I was under 18 there was a thing called pre-voluntary release, that if you joined at 16 you could leave at any time in your first six months; so on the last day of my six months I applied for that; it was either that or stay for another three years which I decided I didn't want to do; there were lots of people shouting at me all the time and as I got a bit older I found that rather tiresome; I have a general dislike of over-disciplined things; my father then encouraged me to go to C.C.A.T as it then was, the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology, and I did a catering course; I didn't particularly enjoy that; all my friends were working and had money and I didn't, so I got a job at St Catherine's College; I was probably just over eighteen then, and I worked as a waiter; I quite enjoyed it; I was then living in rented houses with groups of friends and we were having a great time; I quite enjoyed the college atmosphere and was there for about three or four years; the Master at that time was Swinnerton-Dyer

18:52:20 I came here, to King's, in April 1982; it was just at the end of the Provostship of Edmund Leach who was followed by Bernard Williams; there was and still is a slightly different atmosphere between St Catherine's and King's which has always had a more liberal feel to it; I don't really know how to articulate that but it feels slightly different to me; maybe it is the people it attracts; it used to have a radical feel though I'm not sure it has that any more; King's was one of the first colleges to accept women students and I'm sure that is part of the different feel of the College as well; my job was Assistant Butler; this job no longer exists and my job was rearranged in about 2000; I had that job until George Brownstone retired, so for four or five years; the Butler's role then was quite different to how it is now; then the Butler looked after the Fellows' catering needs, so lunch service and dinner service was done by him and his assistants; everything that happened in the SCR (Senior Combination Room) and the Wine Room, all the College meetings, that was all dealt with by the Butler and his assistants, and also the management of the wine cellar; it has always been a slightly separate department from the Catering Manager; there was a Catering Manager then, Michael Roberts, and they looked after all the cafeteria and conference food service whereas the Butler's department looked after the High Table service; so it was the serving not the cooking, which was done separately; now I don't do very much butlering as such; since then the wine cellar has expanded enormously and the sales of wine have expanded a lot as well, so 80-90% of my time now is spent looking after the wine cellar and wine sales; the only thing that I still do from the earlier period is to look after the wine nights on Tuesday and Thursday during term and service of wine during College dinners; all the other service, the lunch service and High Table service is now done by the catering department, and there are no Assistant Butlers; it seemed odd that there were these two separate departments so it made sense to amalgamate them into one, so when the current Wine Steward, Professor de Bolla, took over from Dr Ken Moody in 1994, he was keen to expand the wine cellar; there were moves to change the department around in later years but there was some resistance on the catering side; then a new Bursar, Roger Salmon, came in the the late 90s who was happy for us to change things; so that gave the impetus to redesign the department, how it was staffed and what I did; that is when it changed a lot; the cellars were not made larger but there was a lot more in them, and the amount of wine that was sold has increased dramatically as well; wine is sold to Fellows of the College and to Alumni - mostly to Alumni - and this makes a profit for the College; I do not go on wine buying expeditions, most of the importers come here because they do so much business in Cambridge so there are lots of tastings here; so coming up in the Autumn there will be tastings nearly every day at some college or other; I don't go to them all, but for a month in Autumn and again in Spring there are these tastings; I have been on a couple of trips with importers in the past but that is not a regular occurrence unfortunately; the wine business is such that you have to build relationships with importers to get the sort of things you might want to get because they are a limited supply; there might only be ten cases in the country of something you want, so you have to have a relationship with people which builds up over the years; most of our wine probably comes from France because it is still the biggest and best country in the world for wine; the range has expanded greatly since Pete de Bolla took over so there is wine from all over the world now; we are not getting any wine from China yet but I imagine that might happen as a lot of big French companies are investing there

27:47:19 Since coming to King's in 1982, the people that make up King's has changed a bit; there are many more women and it's much more diverse than it used to be, which is a good thing; it still has that liberal, easy-going feel to it, but it doesn't seem as traditional as it was; I do not have much contact with the students though they come and buy wine from me when they have a Formal, so I get to know a few of them; we do a tasting for the freshers when they come, which the Student Union organizes; there are a few people who I still sell wine to that I knew as students thirty years ago, alumni whom I remember or remember me when they were here; we send out list of wines to alumni by e-mail and there is a database of about 650 people; we also have a sale at Christmas and in the Summer and they buy lots of wine from that; we have to be competitive; anyone can find out the value of something these days, so we have to offer them things that they couldn't get elsewhere or at a cheaper price; because of those relationships that we have built up with wine merchants we can do that; the other advantage here is that we don't have capital cost of storage, so we can offer wines that have been in the cellar for ten or even twenty years at extremely good prices; it is a near perfect cellar in terms of storage; it is not true that the cellar stretches half-way across King's Parade; it is underneath the floor space of the Hall; I have never discovered any secret passages that burrow under Cambridge or the Chapel; I personally like lots of wine; one of the great things about working here is that I get the opportunity of tasting lots of wines that I perhaps wouldn't do otherwise, and sometimes some very grand things that I certainly couldn't afford to buy myself; I like French, Spanish, lots of wines, and perhaps edge towards red rather than white

32:18:23 I have been married for nearly thirty years and have a son and a daughter; my son is coincidentally, and not with any encouragement from me, working as a sommelier in a restaurant in Cambridge and has been doing so for three or four years; he is also a drummer in a band; ideally I think he'd like to be a full-time drummer, but it's not as simple as that; he doesn't live at home but with his girlfriend; my daughter is at university in Norwich doing international development and anthropology

33:21:17 Of the Fellowship, Keith Hopkins was a lovely man and I used to enjoy working and having a glass of wine with him when he was Vice-Provost, and he was on the wine committee; I occasionally see his widow; he had some wine in the cellar which is still there and she comes back two or three times a year to collect some; Tony Tanner was also a very nice man, very easy to talk to; I very much enjoy working with Pete de Bolla; he knew a lot about wine before he became Wine Steward; we are lucky to have him and he puts an enormous amount of work into it which is perhaps not obvious to everybody; going to wine tastings is not always as much fun as it sounds but he goes to a lot, here and in London; I feel we work well together; of Provosts, Pat Bateson and Dusha were a lovely couple, Professor Williams also a very nice man, and also out current Provost

36:38:15 On the negative side, not much has ever upset me about the College; I'm not somebody who lets things irritate me very much and I can ignore it; a few people can be difficult, but you have to accept that this is a Cambridge college and all the things that go with that; there are certain people that use that as an excuse to act in a certain way that they might not do elsewhere; if that really bothered me I wouldn't have stayed here so long; to be a good Butler, it is much the same as in any industry where you are dealing with the public; you have to be patient, tactful, and it helps to have a good memory of people and their tastes; it helps when people come back to a High Table dinner, for example, I think it is appreciated if you remember who they are