David Good

David Good Interview on 1 March 2024

The interview took place in a set of rooms which were busy on that day, so there are some voices off camera from time to time. Apologies.

AM

So it's a great pleasure to have a chance at last to talk seriously to David Good. David, I always start by saying when and where were you born?

DG

I was born in a small place that was then outside London in northwest Kent, a small place called Swanley. My parents had lived in London all their lives until they moved out there, from Bermondsey and Loughborough Junction, and they moved out just before I was born. So my sisters were born in Rowcross Street, Bermondsey, and I would have been born there if they hadn't moved out to this small town just south of the Dartford Tunnel.

AM

Right, and when?

DG

I was born in 1952, late 52.

AM

Okay, so very young. I'm glad to say.

DG

Can you repeat that?

AM

And I ask people to talk a little bit about their family influences, usually going back to their grandparents. There's John Gurdon went back to the Norman Conquest, but you don't need to do that. Can you tell me anything about your maternal or paternal grandparents?

DG

Yes, on my mother's side, there's a rather sad repeated history on my mother's side because her mother died when my mother was five, and her mother had died when she was five. So I never knew my maternal grandmother, although my maternal step-grandmother was a very kind, nice person. My maternal grandfather was a railwayman, a rather fortunate man in terms of his experience of the First War because at age 18, despite being in a protected profession, he signed up. So from August 1914 until late 1917, he served in the First War. He was invalidated out once and went back. When he died at the age of 96, he still had an open wound in his left leg, a sinus that went all the way down. And there's an interesting story that connects down the family line because the second time he was badly wounded, everybody else just left him for dead. And new American troops coming in saw this body twitching. Now bodies twitch as they decay, and they didn't think he was decaying, so they pulled him out, got him in American Field Hospital and saved his life. So that would have been quite an interesting end to this story that would never have been told.

AM

Indeed. So that's one side, what about the other?

DG

The other side was, there's an interesting backdrop there because on my father's side, my grandfather that side was badly gashed during the First War. He had been a trainee goldsmith before the war, was unable to take that up after the war. And then he became various points, he was bus conductor, he ran errands on the stock exchange, he had those sorts of jobs. Very quiet man, I always remember him just sitting in the corner smoking his pipe. And he lived in this little house right between the Bricklayers Arms goods depot and a tannery I think it was. That was when London was really an industrial city then, and where they lived was right in the heart of that in Bermondsey. But the family, it turned out my brother-in-law discovered this recently, and it's funny how if you have a brother-in-law who's a genealogical sleuth, discovered that in fact the family on that side came from Cork in Ireland. And my paternal grandfather was born about a year or two after the family had left Cork to come to London. There's every reason to believe they left because it wasn't very safe there. So my father ended his life in Ireland, he lived the last 20 odd years of his life in Ireland. At that point, because he didn't know about this history, he was seeking Irish citizenship via his second marriage to an Irish woman, and having lived there for 20 years. And he didn't know that actually he was simply entitled to it. A curious background there.

AM

So coming down to your parents, tell me something about what they did and what their character and how they influenced you.

DG

Oh well, in a way two very different people. To begin with my mum, for reasons I'll come to in a minute, I was very much closer to my mother than I was to my father. He was a fairly distant person, I'll come back to that in a minute. But both of them left school at I think 15. My mother worked in various factories, she then became a clippy on the buses. During the war she was partly on the buses and then she was partly a land army girl up in Lincolnshire. Then she didn't like being up there and much preferred to be with the bombs down in London with her friends. And she married my father in '41 and just after that, because he'd been in the army since the outbreak of war because previously he was in the territorials, she married him just before he was shipped out to North Africa. And she didn't see him again until 1945. At which point they had two daughters after he came back from the war and I should say the unexpected late arrival.

AM

Yes, I understand, it was 10 years after they married you were born.

DG

Yes, 10-11 years, yes. So in a funny kind of way I was born into a family that already existed because my two sisters are six, seven years older than me. And I mean the whole family set up was very kind and supportive. So I've always suspected that my two sisters thought, now we have a real live doll. And I was very fond of my mother and we were very close. But often, certainly as I was growing up, because when I was born my sisters were first going to school, then when I went to primary school they went to secondary school. So we never overlapped in that sense. And I think a lot of the time I was alone with my mother. So a very close relationship formed. My father was, I've come to realise in later years, his experience in the army and the fighting through the Western Desert, up through Italy, he ended the war in Austria, escorting white Russians back to Stalin's Russia. I think it had a profound impact on him in a way that very few of us realised at the time. I mean people didn't talk about it, could have taken a cue from the impact of the First War on his father. But my maternal grandfather really went through some real horrors in the First World War, but then was just a robust, get on with life kind of man. He was always a railway man. And was quite a different character. So when my father was... he'd much prefer to be out in the garden. They'd moved out of London to be in the countryside. They had a small holding, they kept chickens. Trying to create something that was a retreat from the horrors they'd seen. I mean, thinking back to my childhood days, those areas of basically Southwark, very heavily bombed in the war. And it was a retreat from that experience. So yes, I mean, he was in the territorials before the war started. When the war started, he was 18. As the war started, all the territorials were made regulars and took over the post that the regulars then left to go off to be in northern France.

AM

What did he do?

DG

He became a gunner. And it was quite an interesting role because he was in the Light Field Artillery. So if you take, for example, the Battle of El Alamein, there's a big barrage and of course, there's infantry then advance following the sappers who were clearing the minefields. And then the kind of gun he fired, there were little gun crew that would have the gun, a little truck, a limber to carry all the ammunition. And as the infantry advanced, they would follow up to provide the close infantry support, which is a fairly hazardous place to be.

AM

What did he do after the war? What was his profession, job?

DG

Well, before the war, he had been a junior at the Junior Carlton Club, and he became a lifelong working class Tory. My mother, by contrast, was a lifelong socialist. There was a real tension there. I mean, she was amongst the people demonstrating against Mosely and the fascists and such like. But after the war, he'd always been very good with numbers and he'd always been somebody who took bets. And I didn't realise it until I went to university and learnt about these things. But basically, he had a job working for a proper credit office bookmaker. But he also had a street pitch, which is actually a criminal activity in the late 1940s, early 1950s. According to stories from my mother, he got stung rather badly over certain sorts of things. And when you're in that world, you take the rough with the smooth. But when the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act came in and set up betting shops, he then was recruited to oversee the development of that for another bookmaker in South London. Even then, it was a very, how shall we say, disreputable profession. I remember hearing one thing from him early on, when he first got a car, he was really annoyed that because he had that profession, he had to pay so much more on his car insurance. Because it was one of those professions that was seen as very, very dodgy.

AM

What is your earliest firm, concrete memory? At what age?

DG

I must have been about four or five. If I think about it, I can probably track it to Christmas 1956, where I had as a present, a very small teddy bear with a bright red bow on it, round his collar. And I remember that. There's some fragmented memories after that, various things around birthdays and things at school. When I was at school, the school I went to was a very old-fashioned school in various ways.

AM

Primary school.

DG

Primary school, yes. It had very big classes, I mean, class numbers varied between 40 and 45. Lots of the kids, there was a traveller site near where we lived, so there was lots of traveller children. There was quite a lot of people who, a lot of kids who were children of farm workers and, you know, horticultural workers. So at certain times of year, some of them would just go missing because they were out in the fields. I quite enjoyed it there because I very quickly learnt to read. And given the nature of the school, there were two or three of us that learnt to read quickly. Why, I don't know. I mean, there weren't very many books in the house, but I just picked it up very quickly. And we were always, having learnt to read quickly, we were delegated to teach other children to read, or learn how to read.

AM

What was the school called?

DG

It was called Birchwood County Primary School. One of the interesting things was it had a German headmistress, which given the post-war era, her name was Miss Hofst. I think she'd been a refugee before the war. Probably, well, part of that German community that exiled itself, for what reason I never knew. But she was a very kindly presence.

AM

Around that time, apart from, what I say, reading, did you have any passions or hobbies that were really important to you?

DG

Well, given that we had quite a large garden, I was very fond of helping my father in the garden. I suppose in a way it was a way of getting close to him. But he was always doing things and looking after the chickens. And he did lots of gardening, and my maternal grandfather was a great gardener. So that's another connection. Apart from that, and going out with other local kids, we had bikes. We'd go off, I mean, at that point, London was gradually creeping out, but it was still quite rural. It's not now. It's horribly built up now.

AM

Sarah, my wife, was living in an equivalent area of North London where it was still very rural, and she biked out into the country. Then you went on from that school where?

DG

Oh, well, because at that time there was still the 11 plus. And out of this class of, I think, about 40, 45 kids, two of us passed the 11 plus. I think the standard rate at that point was about one in four. In my school it was about one in 20. Gives you some indication of what it was like. And I passed so well, in fact, the local Kent County Council were willing to pay for me to go to Dulwich College. I won a scholarship. But my father's view was, no, no, no, he won't like that, he wouldn't go there. So I went to the local grammar school, which was, it professed to have a very long history, dated its history back to the 15th century, but in fact had been re-founded in the 19th century, and had all sorts of pretensions around the local, local sort of squirearchy, I suppose, of being a proper school of one sort or another. And then there were these London overspill kids like me that turned up, which I think, you know, they didn't really like.
AM

What was it called?

DG

It was called Dartford Grammar School.

AM

Dartford Grammar School.

DG

It was noted at the time because one of its former pupils, who they absolutely loathed at the time, but they adore now, was Mick Jagger. Of course, the kids thought he was a hero.

AM

Yes. Religion. Around the age of 14, 15, I was confirmed being C of E. What was your religious trajectory?

DG

Well, when I was a child, it was interesting because my sisters always went to Sunday school. And at the point where I joined primary school, they went to secondary school. And at that point, they stopped going to Sunday school, the local church, and it was never suggested that I might. And I never requested it. So, apart from going to things like funerals and christenings and weddings, as somebody once put it to me, the hatched, matched and scratched services, no religious influence at all. My mother was quite religious in a low church kind of way. So, she always taught me to be very respectful of religious things. But I think very strongly took the view that you should be observant of other people's attendance to the kind of formalities of the religion, like the music and sermons and so forth. And very keen that we follow a certain kind of good life in those terms. But always act as if the spiritual bit was up to you. Almost verging on a Quaker kind of view.

AM

So, the spiritual bit being up to you, how has it been?

DG

Well, I suppose I was very heavily influenced by my mother. Lots of her creed was about how you treated other people. Now, of course, at school in those days, every morning you'd have assembly, both at primary school and secondary school. And the only ones who weren't in assembly were those who were declared Catholics and declared Jews or declared Hindus. We did have one Muslim boy in the school I was in. That was a time when there was, as you'll know, a lot of immigration from the subcontinent. And quite a few in the area I grew up in.

AM

Would you describe yourself as agnostic?

DG

Yes, I mean, I suppose agnostic. I've never been so arrogant as to think we have the answer to everything. And I do find the kind of protestations of folks like Richard Dawkins to sort of somewhat miss the point. Because a number of people do have profound spiritual experiences which lead them to religion. Who am I to gainsay their experience? I've always been very open-minded about it. I know when I go into the chapel and you see certain parts of the service, you can see how the music and various other aspects of the services, it really can raise the hairs on the back of your neck. So I suppose I'm open-minded, agnostic perhaps. Never wishing to sort of tell other people they've made a mistake. I've always had quite a dislike for those who go for the, shall we say, the strict religious pretensions that force something on somebody else. As may be no surprise to you.

AM

The evangelical stuff. You mentioned the music that raises the hairs on your neck. Has music been important to you?

DG

I've always liked some music but I've never, I had absolutely zero musical education. The schools I went to, there was no option to do music. I mean I think there were, going back to what I was saying about the secondary school, there's always a certain group of kids in the school who seem to be involved in things that the rest of us were never invited to. When I think back in the first couple of years at school, I was very good at the mathematics we were doing. I'd regularly be vying for top of the class with another boy. And then, you know, suddenly he seemed to be doing a lot better. I discovered much later on that he was being, his father ran the local Ford dealership. And it was arranged for him to have special education in mathematics outside, because clearly he was very good at mathematics. And things like that never came the way of individuals like myself, or indeed other kids from my kind of background.

AM

Were there any teachers at that school, the grammar school, who have influenced you?

DG

Oh yes, there were some, there were some really rather.., I think we were lucky in the quality of some of the teachers we had. I can think of some mathematics and physics teachers, and one English teacher, who were really rather good. And in a funny kind of way, they had their eye out, not for drilling the curriculum into you, but helping you sort of develop. I mean, in those days, I think we were very lucky in school, the way the curriculum was configured. So, for example, in the sixth form, when you were doing physics, you just did lots of experiments. And then you were trying to figure out why the experiment worked out that way. And thus, the theory was introduced and the mathematics was introduced. And because we had such, you know, thoughtful, intelligent mathematics and physics teachers, it was a very rich educational experience. Always, always appearing in terms of the ways in which they liked it, when we were a bit awkward about the subject matter. I remember one occasion when we were doing a class on mathematics... on magnetic force fields and such, and you sit around these big tables and all these little compasses to see the magnetic force field. And we knew this was coming up. So, one of my mates had a steel ruler up his sleeve and distorted the magnetic field. This then led the teacher, who was the supply teacher, who was with us at that time, to call in the head and say, oh, you've got some magnetic anomaly here, it must be something beneath the school. And the senior physics teacher looked at us, his name was Mr. Matthews. He looked at us all and he went over to my friend and picked up his sleeve. And he thought it was a good thing. So, I was very lucky in that respect.

AM

Were there any other things that you were keen on, like sports or drama or local politics?

DG

I liked going fishing.

AM

This was corse fishing?

DG

Yes. Near where I lived there was a lot of old clay pits and such, like going fishing, those were things that local kids did. When I had been at primary school, all my friends there, none of them passed 11+. So, they all went off to the local secondary schools. Remember, have you ever heard of the comedian Mark Steele?

AM

Yes, of course.

DG

He came from Swanley. I remember hearing an interview with him about where he grew up, and he said, I've only got one bit of advice, don't come from Swanley. But actually, I had a very contented childhood in various ways. So, while I can see why he said what he said, I never quite realised quite how it was until I left. I suppose that's true for all of us. Other things I did? I liked tinkering with things. So, very early on I got a bike, I was always improving it, fixing it. And as soon as I could, aged 16, I got a motorbike and worked with friends on motorbikes. As soon as I got to 17, I've been working, I mean, during all of this, by the way, I've been working every weekend, every summer holiday in betting offices and betting shops. So, by the time I was 17, well, by the time I was 16, I could happily buy myself a new motorbike with money I'd saved. By the time I was 17, I bought a kit car, which I made, and I bought other cars which I fixed up. So, I suppose, really, what I was interested in was mechanics. It was rather funny, because at the school I went to, there was clearly a little group of us they didn't like, because we had motorbikes and we had cars, and we had girlfriends, which is not what you were meant to do. So, when we got through to the sixth form, there's about 100 kids in the sixth form, and there were six of us they didn't make into prefects.

AM

You were one of them?

DG

Yes, and of course, they thought this was a mark of disgrace and disgust, and actually, within the group of kids, it was a mark of prestige. You were the cool ones that had the motorbikes that weren't prefects, that had leather jackets. Quite funny.

AM

You had to specialise for A level, what subjects?

DG

Oh, all science subjects. Science and mathematics.

AM

Physics, chemistry and mathematics?

DG

Yes. Further maths, applied maths, pure maths, that kind of thing. I mean, partly because, this sounds terrible to say, but A, I found it easy, and B, I was quite interested in history and literature, I used to read lots of novels and such, but those poor lads had many more classes, and they ended up writing very long notes and lots of essays. I just couldn't be bothered, why not take these courses that took less time? You had all these free periods when you had to be studying, but you could do the homework in an hour or so. Then you'd go off, we had a common room, you'd go off and you could play cards, or you could bunk off.

AM

So, you went to Sussex University afterwards?

DG

Yes. I mean, I had, around that time, just as I was finishing my O levels, I mean, that was an era when, if you were good at what you were doing, and you did quite a few O levels early and then went on to various advanced things at age 16, around that time my parents' marriage started falling apart. There's a long story there which I won't speak about now. But I did try.. the university I first went to, on the advice of the school's career master. I had wanted to go to LSE, and the headmaster didn't think that people like me should go to LSE, because he'd been there, and it was the time of all the student rebellions and such like. And so he wrote this, I discovered later from the careers master I met many years later, he wrote this, a reference which said, they absolutely in no way should take me. So, I ended up being told to apply to, I mean, it's quite astonishing I think about it now, to apply to do an accountancy degree. And they weren't sure I should go and do that, maybe I should just go off and be an articled clerk in an accountancy firm. But I was getting very good science A levels, clearly had a strong interest in mechanical things, nobody thought to say, why don't you go off and do an engineering degree? Quite sort of disgraceful advice, if I think back on it. So anyway, there was then interegnum, I had this false start around an accountancy degree. And then three years later, I got very interested in psychology and psychiatry. My father had a breakdown, I got very interested in those sorts of things. And I'd worked for a while running betting shops.

AM

This was after you left school?

DG

Yes. I'd also worked for a while as a psychiatric nurse, which was very powerful in it's sort of impact on you. Impact on me, I should say.

AM

So, what was the gap between school and university?

DG

Oh, I started university, I started a degree at Sussex at age 21.

AM

Well, it's not very long, three years.

DG

But it was a very important three years. Like I say, working in a psychiatric hospital as a nurse was really quite impactful because I arrived to start the job. In those days, even as an auxiliary, you did all sorts of things that even qualified nurses don't do now. So, quite a remarkable experience in all sorts of ways, working with the patients. It was in this very, I mean, it's the area of London, it was an old workhouse hospital that had four wards in it that were... this is a period when they experimented with the idea that psychiatric wards could be part of a general hospital. So, you're part of a general hospital looking after people who came from very impoverished circumstances. So, in that area, there were lots of the Peabody estates. I remember having lots of very depressed, unhappy young women brought in from these horrible conditions on these housing estates. We'd have lots of down and outs brought in from Camberwell Green. I mean, when you're at that age, you're still getting to know the world. I used to have very long hair then, by the way, and a long beard. And then you're dealing with these down and outs that have been brought in from Camberwell Green. And by the way, I used to see them on the other side when I was working in Betting shops on Camberwell Green, or in Brixton, or Catford, Lewisham, Peckham, those sorts of places. And you take such a person and you realise quite what a dreadful state they're in. They're usually brought in because they've taken too much of too many different things and they're very deranged. And you have to get them physically well before you can do anything else with them. We have such a person come in, you cut their clothes off and you bathe them. You realise how the very first colour of the water is this kind of very brown, yellowy water. You're a young person, aged 19, doing this, it teaches you quite a lot, actually.

AM

So after those.., what made you think that you would like to go to university and why Sussex?

DG

Well, I was looking for somewhere I could go and do a psychology degree that would put me on a pathway to become a clinical psychologist. Because having worked very closely with..., I mean I was very lucky, there were a number of clinical psychologists and psychiatrists on the ward who recognised something in me and I got involved in all sorts of things. One thing that gave me a particular insight into probably where my father had suffered through the war was we had this man brought in who was deeply depressed and I won't go into all the symptoms. But anyway, they used to use a process then called abreaction. They'd put somebody, in this case using ether, into a, you know, somewhat of a, I'm not quite sure how one would describe the state, but such that they would talk more freely. Anyway, it was a nice sunny day and we were in this room with a Venetian blind, but the sunlight was coming through a Venetian blind. And the registrar who was doing this procedure wanted me to help him, so I went in. And we were.., this man suddenly started getting into some very bad memories and he'd actually..., and a little piece of the backstory, my father should have gone to the last group going into Singapore before it fell. And because he had appendicitis, he didn't. And so 80% of his mates, I mean it was very much a mates battalion in South London, so 80% of his mates were killed. So it's a terrible story there, but this man had been captured in Singapore and had been horribly tortured and he had survived the war, quite surprisingly, and he thought I and the registrar were Japanese soldiers who were torturing him. And, you know, you're a 19, 20 year old, I think it was something like that at the time. Witnessing that really pulls you up sharp and it's a dramatic experience in the moment. There were quite a few experiences like that, so I think it had a big impact on me. And that encouraged me to think of doing a psychology degree. I looked around, Sussex seemed like a very nice place to go. Brighton looked a bit like London by the sea. Sussex had a good reputation. And so I applied there. Now, history meant that the way things worked out was very different to what I planned at that point. But that was the thing that led me to a psychology degree.

AM

So three years as an undergraduate there, were there any, again, any teachers or fellow students who were really influenced you?

DG

Some teachers were really very, very important. I remember them very well, in fact. I should add that when I started during that first year, they were planning this new degree that was to have its first entry group the following year. First advertised entry group, they've been experimenting with the courses before that. But we were asked, they put out a call to students who were doing philosophy, psychology and anthropology. Would you like to take as a key part of your course, because of course, the Sussex was half in psychology, 60 percent in psychology and 40 percent in what they call contextual subjects. So courses like from Plato to NATO, those kind of grand survey courses. Would you prefer to do this other constituent who would take up that 40 percent of your time? Then you would take these additional courses in philosophy, linguistics, AI. Yeah, I mean, those sorts... and anthropology. And there's a group of about 25 of us who said, well, that sounds interesting. So we signed up for it. I mean, turned out the curriculum they put on was something like a whole extra degree course. Because I didn't really know what they were doing. But there were some fabulously committed teachers who wanted to make this new degree work. And one of them was a man called, he was one of the first professors of artificial intelligence in the country.

AM

Sloman? No not Sloman.

DG

Aaron was there. He was in the philosophy department. The professor of AI was a man called Max Clowse who was famous at the time. It was a time when people were thinking much more about symbol manipulation as the story. And he worked on vision. And he was one who developed, he was thinking about how you could apply grammatical ideas from Chomsky to the parsing of the visual world. And he came up with something called the Huffman-Clowse line labelling system that actually saw these paradoxical figures like the Penrose triangle or the Necker cubes or such like, that's actually being driven by ungrammatical configurations of line labelling. He was an incredibly thoughtful man. The course they set up, to this day I wonder how they got away with it. The first books we read on this course were 'Learning the Law' by Glanville Williams, 'Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' by Irving Goffman, Gombrich 'Art and Illusion', they got us to read some other Gombrich books. One by H. L. A. Hart and some by John Austin.

AM

A lot of law.

DG

Yes. And the view was, these are people who thought very hard about the structure of the world in a way that is really very important for how we think about these computational ideas. And then once you got into the course, various bits of philosophy were put your way. And then you had these courses. I remember one of the courses in linguistics had another very important teacher there, Gerald Gazdar, who was working on natural language pragmatics. And that then opened the window into the thought that you could study these humanistic things and these very humanistic aspects of psychology, but you could see a pathway to a very formal version. And with that background as a school student in mathematics and physics, the idea that you could treat seriously the humanistic elements in the context of a very well worked out, rigorous mathematical structure in linguistics, very attractive. And sort of at the same time doing these courses in these different ways, and then being taught how to implement it by very good courses in programming languages like POP2, POP11, Prolog, those sorts of programming languages, provided a very rich education. They also... we worked twice as hard as in Braille, but it was interesting, so it sort of pulled you on.

AM

Did you mention that Geoff Hinton was there?

DG

He was there as a postdoc at the time. I knew him a little bit, I was at various things, because one of my good friends, Charlotte, who was in fact Ken Berrill's daughter, was a fellow undergraduate on the course. We're still friends now, I mean she lives out at Wimpole, that kind of way. So she knew him then, but what he was doing was raising all sorts of issues that kind of surfaced in the course. And Max was very interested in his observations on looking forward, about what this would mean. I mean other good teachers on the course, I mean two very good ones, one was really quite influential, I thought she was a terrific teacher, was Maggie Boden.

AM

Oh yes, I've interviewed Maggie.

DG

Have you? Right. No, she was terrific because A, she was an excellent philosopher in thinking about the things we were doing, and reaching out into what was then. I mean most of what we did wasn't around very much by way of published literature, because there really wasn't very much. So you'd have technical reports from the MIT AI lab, or technical reports that were written within the department. Plus, like I say, these very unusual things, but they were bringing them all together in a way that was very stimulating. And Maggie was very good because, I remember one occasion she was giving a talk to the Philosophical Society, it was an undergraduate society. And I happened to be walking down and she was walking along, and so she was more than happy to talk to an undergraduate. And she was very candid about how doing these things made her feel a little nervous. And so she and indeed people like Aaron and Max and Gerald, later on John Lyons came there. Oh yes. They were very open people. I think, I mean we were the guinea pigs on the course. So how we were finding it was very important in how they shaped it and developed it. Which made for a very rich educational experience. If I hadn't been on that course, I might have ended up just doing psychology, going off being a clinical psychologist. But this, shall we say, turned my head.

AM

Was there anything else that was happening at that time? Do you have love affairs, or do you get involved in student politics?

DG

I didn't really get involved in student politics. Student politics was very active at Sussex at the time. But there, I mean, how shall I put it? One of my then girlfriends, I heard by the by that I and a good friend who came from Romford, or Hornchurch, we were viewed as rough trade. So we, I mean, I didn't know I had an accent until I went there. And somebody said, you come from London, don't you? I said, how do you tell?

AM

That's quite a posh place, Sussex.

DG

Yes, it was very. It was quite funny because I and this friend, he crashed out rather sadly partway through it, all got a bit too much for him. But we were trying to, shall we say, you know, rise, raise ourselves up social scale. We realized that most of the ones who were very active in politics, we effectively mocked these. I remember one, one character I sort of knew reasonably well. He was part of the CPGBML, Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist Leninist, very much out there, such like. I saw him when we finished and he was rather neatly dressed. He was about to drive off in a sports car, a nice Triumph Spitfire. So I said, oh, that's a bit of a surprise. He said, oh yes, no, my dad bought it for me. I've got a job in the city.

AM

Very British.

DG

Made me very deeply cynical about the politicians. I did get woven into one thing. Having had all this experience of working and running betting shops and knowing how to manage things, I got woven into being the treasurer of the student rag week. So, you know, recruited bands to appear, ran a lottery, looked after the finances, dealt with the charity commission, did all those sorts of things. And it's funny, I mean, it's just reminded me because all those experiences, when I got to the point of retirement age, you know, people worry about, do I have enough? I mean, it's a small part of the pension, but do you have enough national insurance contributions, enough years to get the full pension? I looked up my record and you have to get up to 40 years. I have 47 years of contributions. Because every summer, lots of my friends would go off travelling, go abroad and such. Like the day the term ends at Christmas, at Easter and for the summer, it would end on a Friday. On a Saturday, I'd be working a betting shop until the Saturday before the term started. And lots of my friends would either go travelling or they'd just claim the dole. And I never did any of that. It was a very, very sort of distinctive experience.

AM

After your undergraduate degree, what did you do then?

DG

Well, it was, coming up to the end of the undergraduate degree, it was always a bit of a surprise to me that I did so well. You got a first. Yes, I was top by a long way. The highest firsts were offered on this joint course. I mean, the one bit of it was, I mean, I got first in everything. But if you looked at me in the first couple of years, in various ways, you would have seen me bumping along the bottom. A, because I was very driven by what interested me. I think all those early childhood experiences of being in a school where you were something of an outlier, really what you did was you followed your nose and you weren't really much given to doing what you were told. But in the final year, the way in which the examination system was set up really played to my strengths because, I mean, between that final year at Sussex, between Christmas and June, I wrote more submitted pieces, dissertations, take away exams, and plus we had all the regular kind of three hour sit down exams. I ended up writing during that period because you had to submit something. And, you know, they were asking you quite tough things to do. I remember on the linguistics take away exam, you collected one morning, you collected Monday lunchtime, you had to end it on Friday lunchtime. Some really tough linguistics questions, but that suited me down to the ground. I could sit there and puzzle away. And in course of doing all that, I wrote more for my undergraduate degree than I wrote for my PhD. So it was quite an interesting experience. It turned out, much to my surprise, apparently not to the people who were teaching me, I came top of the class by a very long way.

AM

You mentioned something which probably applied then, which is that you didn't take notes, you just sat and listened.

DG

Yes, I couldn't take a note to save my life.

AM

Have you got a photographic memory or something?

DG

Well, I must have, but not photographic in a simple sense. But I would sit in lectures, and I was vaguely terrified at times with my mates writing stuff down. And I would sit there and I thought, I can't understand this person, I've got to listen. So I would just sit there trying to understand what the argument was, rather than take down notes. It actually stood me in very good stead.

AM

Have you done that ever since?

DG

Yes.

AM

So you don't take notes on anything?

DG

Not really, no.

AM

Interesting, but you can recall enough.

DG

Yes. And it seems I have a very good memory.

AM

It seems you do. You haven't thought of so far.

DG

Well, some of those early experiences, I remember when I was... You could only work in betting shops after the age of 18, so that's when I started managing them. Before that I had to work in the credit office. And sometimes in the year, big public holidays like bank holidays and such like, there may be 10, 12 race meetings on, 6 to 8 meetings on the card. There'd be greyhound races. You'd have to remember who was an on-runner, who came first, second, third, what the prices were, across this huge array of material, where you'd mark up a sheet, but basically you spent time looking at the sheet. You occasionally did it to cross-check something. But you'd A, have to remember all that stuff, and B, you'd then at the same time be doing this mental arithmetic. So say we present this person had five shilling each way Yankee on these four horses. Three of them had come second and one had won. Calculate how much they were due. You had to do it very quickly. And so you couldn't be forever looking backwards and forwards and writing stuff down. You just had to do it. It's quite an interesting regime. So I think it shaped the way I approach things. And understanding mattered. Notes didn't.

AM

Very interesting.

DG

It's a very different educational and academic trajectory, I think.

AM

Fascinating. So you did better than expected by some. What did you do?

DG

Well, during that final year, I was encouraged to apply for PhD places. Bit of a surprise, actually, that I was encouraged to do that. I also applied for positions on clinical psychology courses because that had been my original target. I thought, well, I'll keep that because that'd be a good thing to do. And I applied to three places here -. Experimental psychology, Oxford and Sussex. All three places offered me a place. Two of them, Sussex and here, offered me money. And I would have done a computational linguistics PhD at Sussex, which I was very attracted by. A completely different career from now. But it was one of my teachers, Gerald, Gerald Gazdah, who said, he gave a couple of very good pieces of advice about doing a PhD. He said, as much as I'd like you to stay here, it's probably very much more in your interest that you go somewhere else. Because you have a network of connections here. You always have those. You get experience of being... other things taken for granted if you go elsewhere. The things you take for granted here aren't. And you make a new network. So I applied to Oxford and here. And he also said, think very hard about what your relationship would be like with your supervisor. Now, at Oxford, the interview was a pretty grim experience. My racing background comes to the fore. I remember it very well because it was jump and Gold Cup day. A horse called Davey Lad won. There's a certain aspect to that. But the yes, that part again. At Oxford, I had to turn up at this corridor, sat outside the room rather later than scheduled. Two people called me in. They took great delight in being awkward. I think they didn't like the course I was doing at Sussex. It was quite clear they wanted to have at me for what I took to be good about that. But anyway, they offered me a place. So I obviously acquitted myself. They didn't offer me money. I didn't like them. And then I had an interview here in experimental psychology, which was not the obvious place, given what I wanted to do. I wanted to study human conversation, the kind of social psychology of that. But the person here in experimental psychology, I turned up... Brian Butterworth was his name. I turned up. He immediately invited me in. He said, oh, want a cup of coffee. He went off and made me a coffee, said, chat to one of my graduate students. I started chatting to him. Then he came back and we talked a bit more about what I was interested in, what he was interested in. And then we went for a walk around the town. We went for tea. And there was some European football match on the TV that evening, which I want to get back and see. And he said, well, why don't you catch a later train, come back to where I'm living and we can watch it there, have a bite to eat. And I thought, this is exactly what I want by way of a supervisor, somebody I can talk to. Because what I really appreciated about that education experience at Sussex was no one was telling me to hand in work, but everybody was willing to talk. There's often seminars. We didn't have things like the supervision system here. But in the nature of the course, doing lots of programming, you're always in the debugging room, drinking cups of coffee. Faculty members were there to have the experience of working with people. And I felt I'd got a lot from those sorts of conversations. And what I wanted in a supervisor, not somebody said, well, have you done this first thing in your first experiment? Not that at all. I wanted somebody I could bounce ideas off. And Brian was terrific for that.

AM

And the PhD was on what?

DG

The title of it was categories in the study of social interaction. It was mostly about how you can see the background from what is an undergraduate in this. Could you deploy ideas from ordinary language philosophy, particularly Austinian ideas around speech categories? Could you use that to create a grammar of conversation? And in doing that, then looking very hard at when you got into certain problems in the formalisms you might use for that. Could ideas from Gricean pragmatics help you solve those problems? And once you started writing that wasn't solving the problems, could you look to other dimensions of what was going on? I characteristics of the speech stream and the non-verbal communication to resolve that problem. Obviously, bitten off far too much than I could chew. But the examiners liked it. I read it before I was examined and I said, oh, God, they wouldn't give me a PhD for this. And lo and behold, they said, fine, do a few typos and we'll pass it. It was very nice.

AM

Were you at King's?

DG

No, I was at Darwin. One if the ironies there was I was looking for a college that I thought, wow, one of these Cambridge places. Again, think of that sort of Sussex experience or indeed the grammar school experience or indeed the primary school experience. I thought, well, Darwin it's all graduate students. Plus point. Lots of people from overseas. Plus point. When I turned up there seemed to be full of people who now got this mentality of I made it Cambridge. I'm now a Cambridge man at last. Again, I was like an outlier.

AM

Geoffrey Lloyd wasn't Master by then?

DG

No, Moses Finlay was. He was quite an interesting influence in a certain sort of way because he would offer views about what academic life was. I remember him giving various talks, when we were first there. He was always fond of certain wicked asides of one sort or another. I remember once he said, well, you've got two options in academic career. You can either read a lot or you can write a lot, which I thought was a wonderful line. I had very little to do with the college because if you're in something like the Department of Experimental Psychology. Oh, and the starting point of that was that was when I first arrived. A, it looked like they had a room for me. But because the paperwork didn't come through from the SSRC as it then was, they just threw me out my room. So a week before I was due to arrive, I have no room. And then the paperwork turned up and they managed to put me in a place they had rented from Selwyn. And then during that first term, the SSRC went through one of its things. It wasn't going to pay college fees. So then they said to me, well, if SSRC is not going to pay college fees, you'll have to pay for them. Remember before I even went to Sussex, my parents had broken up. So I had a full grant. I couldn't have gone unless I'd had a full grant and fees had been paid. So I was living alone with my mum. As I said, well, I've got no money. Where am I going to get money from? I said, if I, you know, I'll just have to leave. And so the first year of doing the PhD, there was this cloud. So I didn't feel very positive towards Darwin, I have to say. And the friends I had, I shared with some very good friends in the house I shared, but we were always seen as somewhat sort of not quite the right calibre, I think. I remember one of my friends, Paul, he was very active in the anti-Nazi league. And he had a couple of other friends who were just doing one year's master's courses. I was the only one doing a PhD. They left and I had actually gone into Darwin for lunch with a couple of people one day. Then Bursar sat down next to me and he was sort of chatting. He said, you lived in the house? I said, yes, I lived there. He said, Paul Robert's lived there, didn't he? He said, yes, good friend, good friend. He said to me, wasn't some kind of Nazi, was he? I said, no, quite the opposite. He said, well, you found all this material there after you'd moved out. I said, no, it's anti-Nazi league. It was, so I had very little to do with Darwin while I was there.

AM

So when you finished the PhD, what happened? Did you come to King's?

DG

No, I finished the PhD, remember it was the time of the first Thatcher administration. I was finishing my PhD in, yes, '79, '80 was the year I was finishing. I suppose when she got in May '79, so that was the end of my second year of my PhD. It was clear things were going to get very much worse in all sorts of ways. And so halfway through my third year, being so inclined, I thought, well, got to have some money coming in. So I started applying for jobs. Nobody thought the same money to apply for a research fellowship. By that time, my supervisor had left Cambridge and gone off to a job at the UCL. I was basically just on my own. I was in touch with him from time to time, but basically left to my own devices. So I started looking through all the job listings, started applying for lots of jobs. A temporary lectureship came up at Sussex in the old department I'd been in. It was a one year temporary lectureship, but I was told the person we're appointing, we expect to get confirmation it will carry on after that year. So, you know, we're looking to appoint somebody with that prospect. So I applied, I was interviewed. They seemed to like me. They offered me the job. And I started. I actually started even before the third year was up on my PhD. Finished writing up when I was in that first year at Sussex. Went down there and during the first year, I think it was something like February, I was called into the Dean's office and he said, well, we thought it would be this way when we appointed you, but it's not that way. So this job ends September the 30th this year. Ah, so I started applying like crazy all over the place and a job, an assistant lectureship, came up in the old SPS faculty and I applied.

AM

SPS non-faculty.

DG

Well, yes, it was just the SPS committee then. So interestingly, having been in the old department I'd been an undergraduate in, the post I was in was assigned to the department I'd been a postgraduate in. And it was replacing, I don't know if you remember him, David Ingleby.

AM

Of course, yes.

DG

And there was a lot to do with that. The person who'd held the position before me was Mary Sissons, who taught me when I was at Sussex. And neither of them had been upgraded. So I was sort of taking over a job where the track record had been not very promising. But anyway, I started there in, when was it? That must have been, that must have been autumn 81, if I think about it.

AM

Was Martin Richards there?

DG

Oh, Martin was there, as was Colin Fraser. They were the two other psychologists in the department.

AM

Now, how did you get on with Martin?

DG

I got on well with Martin and I've got on well with him over the years. I think he wanted one of the other applicants to get the post. But it's reminding me now, the interview experience was, shall we say, quite robust. Part of it was they let the students loose on you as well as the other candidates. And they saw that I'd been in the Department of Experimental Psychology, these were very radical SPS students. And they thought I must be some kind of rat runner or something. And kind of, it was really quite unpleasant to me actually. And anyway, they had one round of interviews for four people. Two of us got through to the second day, or kept overnight and stayed through to the second day. I was second in the room. And the person who was interviewed before me, who I think was probably the first choice, came out of the room. We sort of looked at each other. And she looked like she'd been run over by a bus. So I went into the room and it was in the Provost's Lodge at Newnham. And I'd never seen such a large interview committee. Because it went like that, across there and back down there. And there were even some members of the committee sitting just out of eyesight. And the sort of questioning started about me and what I'd done. I won't go into the details because some of them are still around. But somebody launched this ferocious attack on me. And seeing the person who'd gone in before me, I thought, well I can either try and be polite and kind. Or I can treat this as a fisticuffs. I did the latter. I remember dear old John Barnes. He was in the room sitting over there. And I remember the layout very well actually. I remember where everybody was sitting. So John was sitting over there. Geoff Hawthorne was in the room as well. And John was sitting there. And I sort of basically launched back. And I started getting into some of the formalisms that might be relevant to this argument. I just remember John Barnes laughing out loud. So I thought...

AM

Was Tony Giddens there?

DG

I remember Tony being in the room at the time. He was a little distant from SPS in those days. In my early time there, he would obviously lecture a lot. But it was only during the latter stage of my being there that you would see him there more and more. Because before we had a chair of sociology and all of the things that developed around that.

AM

So there are so many people there that I would like to talk to you about on another occasion. But moving on to... When did you come to King's?

DG

I came to King's in 1988. So that was during the... That was a funny process. Because during the period from, what was it, 1981-82 through to 1988. Because 1988 was the start of the SPS first year. And the year before that I'd taken over as secretary of the SPS committee. And helped Tony navigate all the things that gave us a first year in the subject. All the second year and third year reforms. And up until that point I'd done a lot of work for a lot of colleges. And none of them, I felt, some of them were better than some others. But I think none of them had treated me very kindly. I won't go into all the colleges. There were seven different colleges. I'd done a lot of work. I'd been paid for as director of studies and such like. But it got to the point where we were going to have this first year. And obviously you needed a full fellow in director of studies. And it all started being very nice to me. At that point I had done absolutely nothing for King's. And I was at home. Funnily enough I was in the bath. And my wife..., I think it was a Friday evening. And my wife brought in, we had a cordless phone... Very on the moment, you have a cordless phone. My wife said to me, somebody called Tess Adkins, the senior tutor at King's, is on the phone. She wants to talk to you. Do you mind talking to her? I said, well, just don't tell her I'm in the bath. So I had a chat and she said, would you be interested in being a fellow here in SPS? I said, well, that's a very nice idea. She said, would you come in and have lunch with us and send me a CV and such like. So I did. And I came in and we had a very good conversation. And Nick Mackintosh was there. Tony was there. John Dunn was there.

AM

John Barber.

DG

John Barber was there. And we had a very good conversation. A short while later, she said, we would like to offer you a fellowship. That was in early '88. And so first of October '88, I became a fellow. And I never regretted it.

AM

Good, I'm glad to hear that. Well, it's very appropriate because this is Tess Adkins' room that we're doing the interview in.

DG

It was my room at one point as well.

AM

It was your room at one point and John Barber's room for some period. So it's all associated with these people. We've just got about 10 or 15 minutes left.

DG

Yes, what is the time, by the way? Because I'm meant to be somewhere else at 12.30, so that's fine.

AM

Just 15 minutes. So much more to talk about, but one way to structure it is to ask you if you had three ideas or pieces of work or articles or books that you really like to be remembered by. And you felt, well, your most important contributions. What would they be? Desert Island discs of your own works.

DG

There's certain things I've done, very odd pieces. I'd also add to it, one of the things I've done in the course of my career is I've created institutions and arrangements. And they don't get the same note in the academy. I think they've had a profound effect on the academy. And some, some have failed because way ahead of their time. But others, I think, have persisted in quite useful ways. So let me give you some examples from both published work and other things. So one piece of work that's been widely cited, I really enjoyed doing, really forced me to think in a different kind of way. And both these are cases like that was when I started talking to Diego Gambetta and he said, I'm very interested in trust. And it seems to be at the margins of everybody's discipline. I think it ought to be the centre of something. He said, I've got people from philosophy, anthropology, politics, economics. But I'm looking for somebody who gives a psychological view on it. Now, having done so much work on the nature of human conversation and engagement between people, one of the things that comes up time and time again is that you can only really have a depth of understanding if you have a sense of mutuality. In a sense, that comes out of that whole line that comes from Grice. You can draw on all sorts of ideas from the psychological literature, which have largely been ignored, unfortunately. And you can also look at the dynamics of the interaction, which support the connection between people. And so that will be one that I learned a lot from. Other people have told me they really enjoyed reading and got involved.

AM

It came out as an edited volume, didn't it?

DG

That's right, yes. And over the years, lots of people have asked me for copies of it. It's been widely cited, less so now. But there seems to be a reawakening in that way of thinking about trust. Second one, that again I was invited to do something, it was by Esther Goody. She invited me to take part in a week-long workshop with a Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. It was like being an undergraduate again. She said, there's this interesting work on the evolution of intelligence. It's all based around animal models. My question is, what happens if you put language into that story? She said, now I've got linguists like Steve Levinson, who you know, people from philosophy, other anthropologists, sociologists. We're all going to come together in this workshop. And I want to have a psychologist like you. The deal was, she would send you this big stack of readings, like being an undergraduate again, of all the existing animal literature. And I want your view of what happens if you put language into this story. Because this was the time when people were thinking about the anticipatory intelligence, AIP. I can't remember what the P stood for now, but anyway, it doesn't matter. So that got me thinking about things I hadn't thought about for quite some time. But thinking about the ways in which, when it comes to engagement in conversation, how people are very poor at planning the future. That life lived through the windscreen, it's not life lived through the rearview mirror. And that if you start thinking about that, the chess model that seemed to dominate the work from people like, I'm forgetting their names now. The people at St Andrews who's got this whole field going. Anyway, about McIver intelligence and suchlike. I said, I mean, basically it was an argument that there's two fundamental things about humans engaged in this process. One is that there is no clear cut point like making a chess move. If you think about anticipatory interactive planning, then as you say something, as the other party responds to you, what your move meant changes. So you have to think about what you're doing extended in space and time, extended over time. So what you do by way of response to the other party changes what they did. And then they decide if they've lived with that or not. Likewise, what you say. And so in a funny kind of way, there are features of human cognition designed to cope with that problem. So I said there is no, I said there is no anticipation point in a simple way. Conversations are part of relationships. And these, if you look at what we do in conversation, both in the short term and the long term, there's always a thought about what the future might do. In a sense, I was trailing some ideas from John Austin there about how we think about statute law and then case law. Anybody who writes a statute can never fully predict what the future will do by way of changing a context that changes what that original view was. And so I said human intelligence evolved in that environment and therefore it has properties which reflect that extended characteristic. So that was the second thing. If you think simply of...

AM

What date was that?

DG

That would have been '92. Another thing which I did in more recent times, I'm not sure if I'm... I'm very tempted to go for this one because it was consequential. It's not standard past the published literature, but I worked very closely with a colleague. There's lots of publications that came out of it. But together we developed the... When training clinicians get to the end of their clinical education, they get allocated to their what are now called foundation years. Used to be called their junior house officer years and then senior house officer years. Have a selection process and they were concerned that recruiting merely on academic record. Having done that for many years, they decided they being the foundation year programme people and indeed the GMC, they wanted to have a view on essentially how can we actually tap into their other competencies. And so we developed a situational judgment test. Fiona Patterson and I, Fiona did lots of heavy lifting on this I have to say. Situational judgment test is now used nationally. And so it was seen to be of great value because it helps... It's been misinterpreted in various ways. We set it up as a threshold test. So if you can, if you fall below the threshold, you're going to a foundation program, you almost certainly need to have further remedial education, coaching on these not what they want to call non-cognitive skills. Because situational judgment test, you present people with situations, you either get them to choose between options, rank order options, provide an interpretation. And this taps into something that standard examinations don't do. And that kind of built on, well, I was running the program between here and MIT between 2000 and 2008. We put together a book, didn't get much note, but it has a lot of good stuff in it called 'University Collaboration for Innovation'. There's always that was very much an intervention focused program that wasn't very standardly academic, but we did lots of developmental work that was very important for things that people were doing educationally here. And many of the things we started then really took flight and really developed over the years. I've done a lot of things like that. So by chairing committees.

AM

You were on the general board too, weren't you?

DG

Yes, I did... I've done 12 years on the general board, 12 years on the council, 12 years on the audit committee, sat on the council of schools. But I've done, I've led lots of things that have changed things.

AM

And you're running the Silk Roads project and the research project, you're a research project manager.

DG

Yes.

AM

You're a public citizen.

DG

Yes, well, it's funny, I remember just thinking back now, it's funny how these conversations provoke memories. Thinking back to when I was first appointed in the days when you just got a letter that said..., you always said, dear Good. I remember the first time I got one of these, it was signed, Vogon, Gerald Peter Vogon. That was a time of 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxies', or the universe, whatever it was. I remember talking to John Barnes and said, well, I've got this one side of A4 in a letter which says, you've been appointed to this university office. Go sign the book, follow statutes and ordinances. So what's your view on what I do? And it was a very brief conversation and I can truncate it in a certain way, I can make it more concise. After I walked away I said, what has John just said to me? He's basically said, look after your subject, look after your students and look after the university. When you're a university employee, that was basically in those days, the view. Well, you've witnessed this in spades. I mean, much more than I.

AM

I got this letter in 1974, saying you've been appointed as a university lecturer until 2009. And subject to a renewal after three years. And I asked Jack Goody, the head, what I had to do. He said, well, you give 40 lectures a year. When I became a reader, it said nothing. It just said you are appointed as a university ad hominem reader in 1986. When I became a professor, an ad hominem professor, only the second in my discipline after Edmund Leach, in 1991, just said your duties are to be available to students for one hour a week at some appointed hour and place. So I had visions of going to the top of St. Mary's Church at midnight and saying I'm available. Anyway, those were the days. And on that cheery note, I think we better let you get off. I hope we didn't miss anything that you'ld particularly like to talk about. Sometimes people say I should have mentioned my time at...

DG

Well, this will probably provoke all sorts of memories.

AM

My family, for example, or children, wives...

DG

I've probably had a very different career to many people. Partly because when I got tenure, I thought, well, now I just have licence to do what I think is right. As I got involved, I've done a lot of education innovations here. I've worked on lots of external projects. I've currently got one that's beginning, possibly these are two very much in a twinkle in the eye, but helping a big urban development in Belfast on the water side site. And another one with colleagues in Dakar who are looking to develop a bioscience cluster there. And really what happened to my career was because I had such an interest in such interventions, I got very heavily involved in the psychology of design. There's a whole interesting other part of my career that we've not talked about, which is I'm an honorary fellow at the Royal College of Art. I've worked a lot with designers around designing things and delivering on those design ideas, which I've always been.. I'm not somebody who likes just doing academic work that other academics read. I like being involved in things that are about doing things in the world, solving problems, creating new opportunities. Very unfashionably in the academic context and not very kindly looked upon. But I thought when I was given tenure, there was an invitation to make a choice. And I thought that was a valuable thing to do.

AM

Great.