John Pilgrim

INTERVIEW WITH JOHN PILGRIM, 1ST FEBRUARY 2024

AM

So it's a great pleasure, an unexpected pleasure, to have a chance to talk to John Pilgrim. John, when and where were you born?

JP

I was born in Palmer's Green Hospital in Edmonton, London, and that was in 1929, December the 3rd.

AM

Thank you. And it's interesting to hear about a person's antecedents, their ancestors, going back perhaps to their grandparents. So can you tell me something about your grandparents and parents?

JP

Yes, indeed. My father's parents were goldsmiths and silversmiths, and they lived at Shepherd's Bush, where I visited once or twice as a small child and was appalled by the magnificence of my grandpa, who never spoke a word to me as far as I remember. And my mum's parents were called Turpin. One of our famous ancestors, actually going back about three generations, was an Indian lady from Mysore who came with a staff sergeant, I think, and married. And I always feel I've inherited some of the genes I possess from her, and I'm really quite proud of it. But the professional side of my mum's and dad's lives was largely that of commercial art. They both, I think, went to the Slade to study, and she became a commercial artist doing studies of dresses for Gamages in Oxford Street. And dad was a microscopic artist working for the Ferens Instituteat the Middlesex Hospital. And I occasionally went to Middlesex and was appalled by the specimens in bottles. But I kept white mice, regrettably, for their use. But I realise now that I was really rather fond of the mice and didn't think much about what was going to happen to them. But dad had to switch because of the introduction of the microscopic photography, of course. He has one rather beautiful plate in Britain's Histology of the Blood, I think it's called, which looks like a Kandinsky plate with cubists, little microscopic pictures on it. And he became a senior technician at the Ferens. So that's what he did all his life.

AM

Can I perhaps rather rudely ask whether the fact that your father's family were goldsmiths, silversmiths, in the Jewish part of London suggests that they had Jewish antecedents?

JP

No, I don't think so. Or I would have known. No, I think they were slightly Anglican and more Masons than Jewish, I should say.

AM

That's interesting. So, just finishing on your parents, tell me something about their character and how you think that might have influenced you.

JP

Oh goodness, yes. My mum was loving and a caring woman. We're talking about wartime, actually. So that I went to a secondary school in 1940. I had five years at the Tiddalhurst and Sidcup County Grammar School. And I mention this simply because my parents' position towards us as children from the age of about 10 was dictated by the fact my dad was away at Norwood where the public health laboratories were located for the London Health Services and was doing all the stuff on milk and water and so on and so forth. So we only saw him once or twice a month for much of the war. And mum was working at Twiners factory which was producing machinery parts. Now that didn't really affect, I don't think, my early life. They were loving parents. Dad was inclined to be a bit bad-tempered occasionally. I remember him throwing the kipper that mum had produced on a Friday evening out into the garden. Of course, it wasn't a proper meal, but that's just one of those occasional flare-ups, I suppose. He was just a little bit intimidating.

AM

Were they encouraging of your academic and reading interests?

JP

They were, like a lot of suburban families. By this time we'd moved from Catford when I was a baby at about the age of two as part of the diaspora out into the suburbs. We lived at Sidcup. And like everybody, housewives, I think Dan outwrote, mum borrowed from the mobile library that came out in a van. It's quite advanced when you think about it. We had a case full of Dickens, which I read into. But I suspect that a large amount of my reading experience was that of Hotspur and Wizard, which were very well written. I also had Chum's annual magnificent volumes.

AM The Beano and the Dandy?

JP

The Beano and the Dandy were a little bit later, I think, but certainly we were into that when they arrived. But the Hotspur and the Wizard were texts, and they were stories, and they were well written about battles on the North-West Frontier. A lot of it was colonial stuff, or it was public school life. 'Rogers of the Third of Remove', which we grammar school boys lapped up, though we didn't live the life.

AM

I always tend to ask people what their first concrete memory was and at what age.

JP

Oh, indeed, yes, I have a very early one. I must have been about two, I think, and it was at the sea. And I dropped my bucket under the water and went in after it. And I remember my grandpa saying, “Did you see the Tinker Boys?”

AM

Where was this?

JP

This was on the south coast? I'll remember exactly where, but I do have a photograph or two of that beach with my mum with the shaggy black dog and my sister Beana and me, and a black sedan car behind. Beana, my sister, is a year older and the reason she's called Beana, her real name is Mary. Mary Elizabeth, very royalist. But Beana is Bambina from the ice cream man on the corner, I suppose, in one of those London suburbs, who used to call her Bambina and shout out.

AM

That's nice.

JP

And I've called her Beana all her life.

AM

She's still alive?

JP

She died about eight years ago.

AM

When you were sort of five, six, seven, eight, did you have any particular hobbies or did you collect things?

JP

Yes, I used to collect stones and bash them open for the crystal inside. And I also, not until I was a bit older, but I boxed at the Sidcup Boys Club. I joined the Cubs and enjoyed that, but then I didn't much like the Scouts, I thought it was too regimented.

AM

So you were moved out in the war, was that the case? Is that why you went to Sidcup?

JP

No, no, we went to Sidcup in 1932. So I was in three then. And during war we stayed put. In fact, the pavement changes colour between Sidcup and New Eltham, which is London. So Sidcup pavements outside Old Farm Avenue were pink. And then 450 yards away was the boundary with New Eltham and the pavement changed to white. But during that time I was digging on our allotment at the back of the house. But also we took a second allotment actually in New Eltham and I used to skate, roller skate with a wheelbarrow and bring the spuds back up home. We lived entirely, I think, off our own produce, that and chickens during wartime.

AM

Nice picture. What was your first school like?

JP

My first school was a halfway school and I went there at four, which was a year younger than everybody else. And I swear that affected my life. I still regard everybody else as being older than me. It's helped quite a lot. And what I mainly remember at halfway was a girl called Windy in a blue raincoat into which I would bury my nose for protection at the age of four in the playground.


AM

And then you moved on to what was your next school?

JP

My next school was, I think it was called Oak Hill and that was an elementary school, you know, between whatever was eight and eleven.

AM

Do you remember anything about that school?

JP

Oh, quite a lot.

AM

Was there any particular teacher who...

JP

Yes, some whose name I can't remember. Oh, yes, Miss Furze, who was a rather pretty woman. I met her about five years after I'd left school when I was a young adolescent and she was very coy. I remember. I thought, oh, yes, actually you're rather attractive. But I hadn't thought that when I was being taught by her. And there was another whose name I don't remember, but slightly sterner stuff. And I got a caning, or rather ruler, on my hand because I wouldn't stop laughing at the attempts of my closest friend, Leslie MacNorton, who had a constantly dripping nose. And we were supposed to draw a Christmas tree and Leslie couldn't get the zigzag coming down again to match the one that had gone up. So he was ending up halfway down his tree and he kept doing it. It was killingly funny, I thought. I couldn't stop laughing and she was very cross with me. She said, “Johnny Pilgrim, I never thought I'd have to do this to you”. So I think I was a bit of a goody, goody, really. Yeah.

AM

And then you passed your 11 plus, obviously.

JP

Exactly.

AM

And went to Sidcup...

JP

Sidcup and Chislehurst County Grammar School for boys.

AM

And what was that like?

JP

Good. It was in a modern art deco building at Crittalls Corner on the Sidcup bypass. It had very good architectural characteristics and a nice staff, but they were depleted by wartime, of course. And we had some odd, funny old guys and some young people who were filling in while everyone had gone to war. But we also had at least two very influential teachers. One was the Welshman called Jenkins, who taught me French and with whom I got on well. And French has always been a love of my life. I think because of his influences. And an English teacher who told us stories every Friday instead of teaching, he made up a rather lovely story called 'The Will in the Windows' about a gentleman thief. That was thoroughly amoral stuff. And Jenkins also was very good at that kind of thing. He explained how to tell whether your socks needed washing or not. You throw them at the wall at night and if they stick on the wall, that's okay. But if they've climbed up the wall and across the ceiling, then it's time to change them. So we had some pleasant people.

AM

Were you beginning to specialise in, well, you'd have to for A-level?

JP

Well, the family was supposed to be moving to Durham at the time when I was due to do highers. And then Dad was offered a thumping increase in salary to a thousand a year, which he couldn't resist, which I think was the killing of him. Otherwise, we would have gone to Durham University where he was offered the position as head of laboratories. And we would have gone to university. That was the idea. So I spent, I suppose, about four or five weeks at Sixth Form doing French with our very good headmaster, Macdonald Bailey, I think his name was, who studied at the Sorbonne, a serious scholar. But then, I don't know how this was decided, but I went and did a job in the city as an office boy.

AM

So you left school, I think you said...

JP

At 15.

AM

At 15. So it's going to be interesting to see how you got to university from that situation.

JP

Yes. Well, I'd gone on doing..., I suppose I had in mind that I would like to do that. I think, though, it's worth saying that only two boys out of about 100 in my year went to university. I'm not sure how that bears on the statistics overall, but in 1945, the incidence of people going to university was very low. Indeed, there weren't the universities. And so anyway, I went on doing evening classes at Lewisham and eventually at Goldsmiths. Initially, because by that time I had passed the civil service exam as a clerical officer. I went to work at the Crown Agents for the Colonies, which says quite a lot about my subsequent life and career. And I spent about two or three years doing work on, mainly I think on the coding of commercially sensitive supplies to colonial governments. The Crown Agents, then the Crown Agents for the Colonies, who were responsible for sending all of the supplies, equipment needed by colonial governments. Everything from locomotives and bridges to khaki-drill uniform and whatever. And I did coding of the correspondence and I also did the vetting of testimonials for young men, mainly young men applying for technical posts. We were the technical. At that time, this was a very class-related distinction between people who were technical and people who were policy or doctors or professionals or whatever. And indeed that was marked out at the Crown Agents at 4 Millbank at that time by the fact that the loo in the corner of the first floor, I suppose it was, had executive officers on the upper level and clerical on the lower level. And making the transition to the executive level was one of the ambitions of my young life. In any case, I continued to do evening classes, revising my Latin, which I'd failed at school because I needed Latin to get into university. By that time, I was thinking of getting into university and so I did some Latin at Lewisham. LCC ran at that time marvellous evening classes. And I think there are many people, perhaps of my generation in particular, who are now retired perhaps, but have been eminent in public life, who made that transition because of the evening school educational system of the LCC and I suppose in other cities as well. But a lot of us I think were bereft of the education which would have been part of normal life because of the depletion of resources during the Second World War. And it's quite a good education in a way because you're working and you're learning a lot about other things and you're not still a kid. I mean you stop being quite early. So I spent, I suppose, three years. I got exemption from National Service, which was obligatory for then and for another four or five years. And passed the exam. Did rather well in some subjects, particularly English and French. I think I came first nationally in précis element and second in composition in English. So I've always been good at writing.

AM

What exam's were these? A levels?

JP

Civil Service exam. So it covered all the branches. You could choose where you went. But anyway, by that time I had become quite well educated in the politics of independence of African countries and of India. And I would go out from Sidcup to Charing Cross in the morning with my bowler hat and rolled fox umbrella and read The Times and New Statesman. And knew quite a lot, I guess, about the underlying factors in the politics of independence. And particularly of the issue of land and population, which continued to interest me. And when I did go into National Service, it was to the Royal Engineers and I'd contacted our liaison officer at the Crown Agents with the War Office. And got a posting to East Africa. So while the other squaddies were all sent off to B.A.O.R., I was Sapper Pilgrim sent off to Mombasa. And I spent my service at a place called McKinnon Road as a company clerk with some Indian, from Mombasa, there was a big Indian population, big Pakistani now, Gujarati people, nice people. And they were doing typing and stuff and I headed the company office after a couple of months. And had rather a good 15 months of it. I'd been boxing at school and there were very few people who were trained boxers and I boxed for the regiment and became welter-weight champion in South African armed services. And led a Christmas expedition to climb Kilimanjaro and for being such a good soldier, I was given a two year holiday on the farm of the governor of Kenya, Philip Mitchell. And I spent time in his library and there was one article particularly lying around of a senior veterinary officer pointing out in very explicit terms how excessive cattle population on the farms of Kikuyu would lead to trouble. And I became increasingly aware also of the pending, or expected, pending Mau Mau rebellion. These surrounding farmers in Nakuru were stockpiling arms in the expectation of an armed revolt, which it never became really, against the whites. They had their cats strung up on their verandas to frighten them. But the people who mainly suffered in Mau Mau are the Kikuyu. So it was a kind of a loyalist government oriented Kikuyu. Who were almost a target, but not. This was never a full scale revolution. It was never a military or a terrorist movement other than adopting ritualistic behaviour. And the amount of killing that went on. But I think it was only about 30 white people who were killed. But anyway, that was after I'd come back to the UK and some aspects of it was still going on when I was here in 1954. I think Mau Mau probably lasted from about 1953 through to 1958 or something like that. But I wrote one or two bits in Varsity about that experience. And while I was here, leaping a bit, I know, I formed the Kenya Field Group and I was the Cambridge rep on Trevor Huddleston's anti-apartheid group.

AM

Just going back, I mean, the Cambridge bit obviously interests me. How is it that you decided to come to Cambridge?

JP

I was studying at Birkbeck College in 1951, after having come back from armed service. I resigned after about 18 months. I was feeling pretty bad actually. I think I was quite ill for quite a long period and I couldn't take the routine working at an office. And I left and became a gardener for Islington Borough Council. But working at night at Birkbeck, which is a marvellous institution, I'm sure you're familiar with it. It is a full university college of London University, but it takes mainly teachers and civil servants and people working during the day-time. And I did Latin, Greek, ancient history, French, and in and out of English literature and so on. And I did, I think, pretty well at the intermediate arts exam, which is a kind of intermediate stage, which is very easily, I think, part of the system. Which brings you up to a certain point and you can work on from there. But instead of continuing at Birkbeck, I wrote, I think, to all 27 colleges here in Cambridge at the time. And the only answers I got were from Trinity and King's.

AM

Interesting.

JP

And I applied for Classics and at Trinity I was interviewed and asked to parse a piece of Greek. That was it. I was hopeless at Greek and they didn't consider me. But Patrick Wilkinson interviewed me here and we talked about Africa. He was very proud of the scholar who was just doing his PhD from Ghana. His name for the moment, I don't remember. And King's were besides that, you know, I had discussions with John Raven, who was my supervisor for a while. And the interest in encouraging the presence of Africans here and of having an active voice in the politics of independence, particularly of Africa, was very strong. So that was the setting. And to be honest, I didn't work very hard as an academic. Frankly, I still don't. But it was enough to give me a love of Latin. I was talking just recently here with Latinists, both those on High Table and one or two post- grads, who were doing Classics related studies. And Latin doesn't leave you. You have a feeling for language, for how words are constructed, which I think is quite precious. So that was good. But Donald Lucas, bless him, said, John, look, this isn't going to get you anywhere near what you want to do, which they knew was to get out to Kenya again and do some work on the issue of land. And why don't you do social anthropology? In any case, he said, you'll always be a classic. Which I'm sure was an intentional double-entendre.

AM

This was a one or two year Part One?

JP

Two years.

AM

So you finished the two year Part One and then you changed to social anthropology.

JP

Yes.

AM

In about 1956, was it?

JP

Yes, that would be so, yes.

AM

And this is obviously, since I am a social anthropologist and in the department, this is a part that particularly interests me. Tell me about some of your teachers there. Yes, I think very different. Edmund Leach lectured in a way which is electrifying, because he would stop. He would let what was going on in his mind. And if he hadn't finished thinking about something, he'd stop for five minutes and review how the problem he was explaining would perhaps be better explained or how he would understand it to himself better. And then he'd go on and so on. So you were really living out the thought process with Edmund. Mayer was well set in his concerns with ritual processes among the Talensi, but he also understood the interaction between ritual and social organisation in terms of the location of graves and the way in which tenure, access to rights, was signified by ritual, especially by funerals among the Talensi. And Audrey Richards, in a quite different way, much more pragmatic, much more concerned with the here and now of land tenure among the work practices among the Bemba, but also with fieldwork. And we weren't very well taught about how to do fieldwork. I'm not sure that our teachers were very good at it anyway, except for Richards. And she introduced the idea of using quantity, quantitative. She was very clear in saying, we're not doing statistically valid or significant studies. We don't try to do that. But you can use a community survey to take from the numerical results evidence of institutional structures, which you can't get at in any other way. And you can also do a useful job in making clear that what you're finding is significant, is happening at a significant level. And we have that responsibility. She didn't really say this, I'm just interpreting for her. But we have a responsibility to be doing a job with social anthropologists, but in Eastern Africa in particular. It's essential that government agencies and others understand the relationship between marriage, kinship, access to land, how people organize their livelihood systems. And that has stuck with me. Jack Goody was very apart. He wasn't my supervisor, but he was in charge of postgraduates doing teaching and research. And I didn't get it. We didn't get on, really. When I came back from doing fieldwork, I'd been away for two and a half years. I was having another spell of depression and I couldn't work. And he and Stenning had picked up on some stupidity that went on when I presented findings to a Kenya government representative and the district commissioner. I wrote a report for the East African Social Science Research, Applied Research Centre. The first commission that they had was the report which I did on land enclosure among the Kipsigis in Karaito district. And as part of that, I reviewed the proposed law on land inheritance, which was a concoction intended to put in practice the colonial agricultural services determination to avoid fragmentation of farms. As they saw a great evil in the fragmentation of land and intended this inheritance law, which is being pushed through the Kipsigis law panel, which I had taken part in. That would interpose now the system by which there would be single male inheritance. And a study which I'd done actually in the first eight months when I got to Macquarie and went into the field. I spent several months looking and using Audrey's approach. I did a quick survey in two districts of Karaito to see how many people were living on pieces of land on farms and recording. And the paper is still here. We still have it, land ownership. But that formed part of the report. It's a fairly substantial piece of work, it's about 130 pages, which demonstrated that you couldn't introduce single inheritance. Especially not male inheritance, without driving most of the population off the land. And that was the fierce argument which ensued. And I found myself subject to a dirty tricks operation in which supposedly I had been sleeping with the local girls.

AM

And you were subject to this in Africa?

JP

Yes. But I think that the senior district officer who engineered this to discredit the research, because they were passionate about their determination to introduce what they called a yeoman farmer program of small commercial farms all over East Africa. And I think that got back to Jack and one chose, I think Southall, Aidan, was a pretty.. rather kind of guy I don't get on with. And I think that he had picked up on it. And although it was totally discredited, the attack on me and the district commissioner, and in fact the government accepted my report, the inheritance law was dropped. But I think Aidan, rather, who having on that first paper which I did at the annual conference in 1957? No, 59. 1959, I went out in 59. It was in 59. I had written home and said, you know, John had no problem with getting a PhD. Now, I think was swayed by this rubbish. And I came back, not really under a cloud, but Jack, I think, and Stenning were pretty distant and I didn't get much help. And I wasn't really in a very good way, I don't think. I guess it's a little bit like the idea of post-traumatic stress, but I think, you know, coming out of the army, I experienced the same thing. Coming back from fieldwork, you kind of institutionalise into what you've been doing, but you're bereft when you get back. And the college wasn't all that helpful, I don't think. I wondered whether to talk about that at any time, but it made it very difficult. I got married here in 1962 to my lovely Japanese wife, Mariko. Mayer had, I think, great value for my work. I'd done one or two good papers here, but I wasn't publishing anything very much. I hadn't done a presentation of a thesis, but he nominated me for Edinburgh post with Kenneth Little at the Department of Social Anthropology. And I spent the next four years teaching the foundation year course at Edinburgh.

AM

Just before you leave Cambridge, there were one or two other figures who may have taught you.. more peripheral. One was Gwilym Jones, GI Jones.

JP

Yes, GI Jones.

AM

He was running the colonial masters courses. Did you encounter GI?

JP

Well, I liked him very much, but I don't think I was supervised by him. I went to some of his lectures, but he struck me as a good guy and not at all academic. But I don't know really more than that. But I enjoyed him as a man.

AM

What about Rio Fortune? Was he still there?

JP

Rio Fortune. Practically nobody was going to his lectures except Rury, my wife. Found herself on her own listening to Rio for two or three lectures. And he'd had an unhappy time with his own wife, who was Margaret Mead, who had been Rury's teacher and supporter at Columbia in New York. But beyond that, he was a rather distant figure.

AM

Who were your contemporaries? Was Ray Abrahams your contemporary?

JP

Oh, Ray and Hugh, the guy who did the Hadza.

AM

Oh yes, James Woodburn.

JP

James, James Woodburn. They were my main... And then Masai, who is the...

AM

Jean Lafontaine?

JP

No, Jean. Yes, I was very friendly with Jean and ultimately she was my examiner.

AM

Really? So you did get a Ph.D, did you?

JP

No, I didn't. I settled for an M.Litt, which they offered me on the grounds that I'd had six years or seven years at it.

AM

I just wanted those sort of footnotes, but returning to Edinburgh now, what was Edinburgh like and who struck you as interesting there?

JP

Gosh, we were having babies. That was the main thing that happened in Edinburgh and I was teaching this foundation course and I loved it. I really enjoyed teaching. It was always seminar, but a big group. It's not the kind of tutorial that we have here. So I would have as many as 15 or 20, but I would always turn it into a discourse and a dialogue with them. There were several people. Sandy Robertson at Edinburgh and Charles Yendish. Actually, Charles was with us out in Sierra Leone. The fifth and sixth years of my attachment to Edinburgh were in Sierra Leone setting up a School of Development Studies, which failed lamentably. Kenneth denounced me for having failed the department and we parted company. He asked me, do you want to go back to teaching? Do you want to come back to teach? I said no, I didn't want to come back to teach. I wanted to go out to Kenya and do research, but that led to my leaving Edinburgh. The next thing was I taken on by UNESCO and went to help develop the research facility in the Chulalongkorn University Social Science Research Institute (Thailand).

AM

So, Edinburgh?

JP

Yes, at Edinburgh my colleagues were Mary Noble, Michael Banton, Mike Carter, who was a sociologist, Jimmy Littlewhite.

AM

Jimmy Littlejohn?

JP

Littlejohn. Those were the main people I remember. We didn't have a big academic discourse going on and in the second year I had to make a decision whether to accept what I was offered. I was immediately offered funding from the Colonial Office to go back and continue work in East Africa, actually on the Nandi, but it would have been the opportunity to complete my work on the Kipsigas. Kenneth wouldn't allow it, it seems rather strange nowadays, and insisted that I go to... I think there were funds offered by the Samuel organisation as well, and he said no, you have to do something in our departmental interest. And I want you to present a proposal for doing research on crofting, because I knew nothing about crofting, and it was humiliating to talk to a committee about my intention to do work on crofting, when they knew that I was an East Africanist. It's ridiculous. And so that fell through. And I was also offered the chair at the University in Rwanda by the Foreign Office. And I think that was with an intention to do stuff on Eastern African land and politics, which was of interest to them. And I didn't take any of it, because we were too strongly engaged in looking after our three babies. Three of all of them, of course, have gone and studied here.

AM

Yes, two in anthropology and two in...

JP

Two in anthropology, one at Robinson, and Nick at John's in engineering, where he took the Civils Prize, and then here to do his PhD on earthquake technology.

AM

And I taught both of your daughters.

JP

Yes, isn't that marvellous? Incidentally, you probably taught Sophie's husband, Tom Salter.

AM

I'm not vaguely familiar... Don't remember.

JP

He was here at King's with Anita. ... Oh no, that's Sophie's time.

AM

Okay, UNESCO.

JP

No, I think before UNESCO, in Edinburgh, I formed an association with the Department of Architecture and Planning in developing the Lothian's Regional Plan. And I did the housing policy and outreach, not outreach, the movement of people from Glasgow slums into new towns. So I did research with a group from the Department of Social Anthropology on comparing two communities and their reactions to different styles of housing, which was quite influential. And on that basis, Livingston New Town was created, and Rury, my wife and I, and the babies lived out in what was then a little village in Livingston, and now it's a big new town. But that was interesting because it concerned the question of migration and how do you overcome the problems of migration and resettlement, which have later on been of great interest to me. And still are, in relation to my East African work. The cycle of development in Kipsiga's traditional life had given way to work migration. And this element of families continuing to maintain a structure, but to engage in migration and to absorb both the livelihoods from migrant work, but to continue to live the traditional way, organised with the religious and ritual surroundings of that switch from what had been pastoral, human transhumance, which drew the young male labour, and among Kipsigas was organised in terms of age sets, the structural change taking place towards the modern setting of 1961, to migration into herding on white farm areas or into the police and army, was describable in anthropological terms in a way which I found very worthwhile. I went out wondering how do you describe a social system in terms of social change? I think the understanding of migration and how that constitutes a kind of approach towards the adoption of technology, of changing systems, is very interesting. And I've continued that in my work in South East Asia. From falling out with Kenneth at Edinburgh and saying, no, I'm not going back to teaching, and I didn't get any reply other than that of my National Health Papers. Then a few months later, the University at Edinburgh, Kenneth, who is a co-leader, passed on this invitation from UNESCO to be the advisor in the setting up of the Chulalongkorn University Social Science Research Institute. And I went out and joined Father Amut, a Jesuit, who had done his social anthropology degree. I think there was a batch of them out of China who went and did social anthropology and then led various research institutes all over East Africa, having been kicked out of China. That was an interesting aspect of the situation. He wasn't particularly good at the development angle, so I took over that for a year. And we did quite a big study on rural manpower for ILO, using his students out on Ayutthaya province. And after a year of that, which went very well, I wrote a book for UNESCO called 'Social Science Research and Rural Development', which was accepted as a policy statement of how they would run the operation at Chulalongkorn, but more generally as a policy. So that was a useful thing to do, very enjoyable. And then I was offered a UNICEF position as advisor on social survey to the Mekong River Basin River Commission, which essentially was about displacement of populations by irrigation and hydropower dams or any bridges they intended to develop. It was okay. I did a study of the Lampao irrigation dam in Kalasin province in the northwest, northeast Thailand, and published that as 'Human Resources in River Basin Development'. But that ran out and we were asked to do work in West Africa. TO HERE 56:54 That was a similar operation with the Pan-African Institute for Development in Cameroon. And if there's one thing that came out of that was the children's love of life in a rural African community. They went to school on Buea Mountain, at Buea on Mount Cameroon, the old English centre of British Cameroon. And I think there were 12 of them in the school, with three teachers from among the parents. And they went to school from seven till twelve. And that's where Anita and Sophie formed their love of things other than British life. They thoroughly enjoyed it, hated being brought back to England. But we came back, we bought a lovely old house in Shepton Mallet, on the edge of Shepton Mallet, a Jacobian house which had become a silk factory, drawing power from the stream running below, and had been improved in 1730, with a Palladian facade, seven windows across. And they all grew up there. I, in the meantime, in 1985, worked for about six years with the Pakistan Agricultural Development Bank for Agriculture, and introduced small farmer credit, well I didn't introduce it, it was a marvellous manager of the bank, director, Nishtar, Jameel Nishtar, who was a great democratic Pakistani, profoundly concerned to maintain small farmer agriculture as the basis of the agricultural system of Pakistan. And I was working as a company at that time, and we included computerisation of the system, but also the training of young horticulturists, the introduction of diverse agricultural systems. So I swung over very much towards a practical set of factors. In 1989 I was invited by the European Commission to head up a programme for the repatriation of 100,000 asylum seekers, boat people, who were in barbed wire camps in Hong Kong, barbed wire, and work with a team...

AM

Repatriate them to where? To Vietnam?

JP

To Vietnam, back to Vietnam. And we did about six months' research. It was one of those occasions where you could use your own resources and your own ideas, and the Commission just left it to me to put together a team, mainly British, and we did research and presented a plan which was backed by the 24 countries which had joined to look at that particular issue as part of the settlement of problems of asylum seekers in South East Asia. And it was accepted. I had a very interesting interview with the hut leaders in Hong Kong. I'd previously been a candidate for the Labour Party for Parliament from my place in Somerset, and for the European Parliament, so I was versed in facing hostile crowds and questioners.

AM

Presume you didn't get into either of those?

JP

No, I didn't. It was impossible.

AM

Shepton, Mallet and Labour Party are not associated.

JP

Oh, there were still about 8,000 supporters, I think, for the Parliament. But when one of these grisly hut leaders, you know, the Hong Kong police were very good in laying it on, and one of them started making a slightly ranty sort of speech about how they would go on being opposed to communism and look forward to liberation, and I was able to say, you know, I'm not here to listen to speeches. If you're interested in information about the fact that you're able to go back to Vietnam with support for a job and an enterprise and credit and to rejoin your families, I'm happy to answer questions. And anyway, it worked, and I think right up to 1999, we continued to see 2,000 or so a month going back by air. In the first one, they had to stop the aircraft because one of the guys from the camp, a fisherman, had discovered the life jacket under his seat and blown it up, and so the plane couldn't take off. Otherwise, it worked very well. And then from there, I worked for about eight years as advisor on project systems to the commission, to the Human Resources Development Division, concerned with the accession to the European Union of the G8 countries. I did a number of missions. The first mission to Siberia and the Urals regions of Russia, but a lot of it in the Baltic states. But of course, this wasn't anthropology. When I had the opportunity to go and do work on social impact assessment and resettlement planning for reconstruction in Cambodia, which was in 1999, then I took that and dropped the consultancy with the European Commission, which had been worthwhile, but not all that academic or interesting. It was good work. I enjoyed it very much, but I was glad to get back to something closer to needing a research capability. And I then and now still regard myself as primarily a researcher. I'm an academic at heart. I'm just not very interested in other people's stuff. I like to do my own research. I wouldn't for one moment mean that aggressively. I just have to admit that I enjoy more getting the material and writing it up. I haven't done almost any publications. Nearly all of my 30 or 40 serious pieces of writing are buried in project files of the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank or government agencies. And it was with some pleasure that I joined the Royal University of Phnom Penh as an examiner in 2002, I suppose, and then was offered a visiting professorship, which I've kept up ever since. And that gave me a basis of raising funds for research from Canadian sources and from the CGIAR, which is the Council General for International Agricultural Research. I suppose it's about three fairly major research projects, which employed my colleagues at the Royal University. And I guess about eight or ten PhDs have risen from that. And it's a good system, I think, for universities like the Royal University of Phnom Penh, but more generally in that situation in a third world country, to be doing the grey reports and studies to involve students in doing research of that intermediate type. And for professionals to be getting Masters and then to be making that a step towards PhDs at internationally accredited universities. It's too easy to drop the standard, I think, and introduce a PhD level type of milestone within the regional university of that kind. It's much more valuable for them to be doing research which is relevant to their national development and to their social situation, which may be publishable. It has, in fact, in the Royal University of Phnom Penh, led to the guy that I taught 15 years ago now being the minister in charge of the titling, land titling of ethnic minorities, to the dean of the Faculty of Development Studies, who worked with me as a graduate some time ago. And I can see a progression of people who've worked alongside me on those issues that I've been talking about. But in Cambodia, post Khmer Rouge, internal problems of semi-fascist states imposing absurd agreements to hand land over to Vietnam, for example. Or in the recent work that I did with the Lao National University, where the prime minister had done a deal for the handing over of 9,000 hectares of dry teak up to our forests, the forests of the Brao, of the Brao people, for rubber plantation, for peanuts. Absurd, childish. And all you can do, really, I think, is create a generation of people who have the capability to handle those kind of issues, do the research, do the work. And that's happening, but very slowly. But as I say, I think it's been worthwhile to work with the university for the last 20 years now, the Royal University of Phnom Penh, where I could see real achievement within the academic framework. By God, it's hard going.

AM

One last, well, a couple of last questions, because we're just coming towards the end of this. One is, we didn't touch on your inner spiritual life, as it were, or absence thereof. I don't know until I get the answer. When I was in my teens, I was confirmed into the Church of England, and I went through quite a strong religious phase, and then lost my faith, and if I'm anything now, I'm a Buddhist. But I wondered whether religion or that sort of thing had meant anything to you during your life.

JP

Yes, indeed. I was an altar boy for our parish church up to the age of 14 or 15. And then one day I realised that I couldn't actually say the Creed, and I explained it to my vicar, Fr Sidney Groom, at Trinity Church, Sidcup. And he said, yes, many seminarists have the same problem. I couldn't believe that Christ rose up in the air and sat on the right hand of God the Father. And so I stopped being altar boy. And actually, what I gradually realised was that my understanding of household organisation, which we teach in social anthropology more strongly, actually in my day than now, is a very close expression of Christian notions of family within the Holy Trinity, and that I believe in the message that that provides about how people should lead. And that there is a spiritual context to that, that saying I believe in God the Father means nothing in itself as a statement of my day and age, but it certainly does mean something about the kind of society that we live in. And I've come to think that more clearly over the years, rather than becoming more confused. And I think it's a source of comfort that one's spiritual and cultural background are so strongly based around that religious aspect of life. And learning with people like Audrey Richards, who recognised the functional link of ritual with social organisation, has been a strong factor in the way I think about matters on a personal basis. I also nowadays enjoy singing.

AM

I was going to ask about music....

JP

Renaissance and spiritual stuff, I can practically match Kathleen Ferrier singing the Agnus Dei. And I sing with a professor of physics at Edinburgh, Murray Campbell, who is leader of the Edinburgh Renaissance Band, and is the expert on brass instruments. He's a professor of physics, but his work is...He about to produce a book called Sounding Brass. And I go to his place in Carlottes on Friday mornings and we sing a mixture of Baroque music, Dowland, 'Flew My Tears', and a French chanson. This chanson, a good way of keeping it up my French. J'attendrais...

AM Can you sing us something? You were just starting to sing.

JP

J'attendrais le jour et la nuit, j'attendrais toujours ton retour. J'attendrais qu'un oiseau qui s'enfuit, vienne chercher l'oubli dans son nid.

That's the lovely ending.

[Added comment by John Pilgrim]

My mother’s father was Bill Cogan and that was her maiden name. Her mother’s name was Turpin and she had the pixie looks of the Indian ancestress that we are all so fond of. Grandpa Cogan was a good friend of mine. He had run away from home when his father re-remarried in the face of antagonism from his new mom and joined. a circus troop, travelling the country as a fairground boxer. At the time when he walked into grandma’s sometime second hand furniture shop at Greenwich, and she fell for him he was a boxing instructor at Gentlemen’s clubs in London. He had some training in electrics too. He had a job on the docks for Siemens, fixing the light fittings on the end of those great cranes on the Thames. I remember we dipped our heads when Churchill’s barge came up the Thames at his funeral.

Grandpa in the days when I knew him well, had a flat in an old mews at the back of the High Street at Lee Green, where I would drop off from work to. He sold firewood kindling off a barrow around Lee and had a gadget on an old bench in the stable down below which I helped him with to prepare the wood. On one occasion I dropped in wearing my pin-stripe suit, to see if he was in his pub on the adjacent corner. He was nowhere to be seen. I asked the old guy sitting around.’ Is Bill Cogan anywhere around?
‘No Gov’, they said, ‘not seen him for months . At that moment. He walked in from the Gents and said Hello John. This is my grandson.’ ‘Oh’, they said . We thought you was the fuzz.']