Peter Gathercole

Childhood and family background

0:31 PG was born 27 March 1929 in Tilney St Lawrence, in the Norfolk fens, in a family of grocers.

0:03:56 1939-43 St Paul’s Cathedral Choir School, London

0:07:00 St. Paul’s was evacuated during the War to the Cathedral School in Truro, Cornwall. This move began PG’s association with Cornwall.

0:09:18 1943-46 Clifton College, Bristol

0:12:10 Introduction to Communism: in 1946, aged 17, PG fell in love with a communist student at the LSE.

0:18:12 Having written a critical editorial in the school magazine, PG was told by his headmaster at Clifton, “people like you should go to LSE, not Cambridge!”

1946-49 Army years

0:25:21 What was it like being a communist in the army?

PG: We weren’t meant to have any political affiliations as soldiers. But found a way within Army Education Unit of giving fair explanations of situations.

1949-52 Undergraduate years at Cambridge University

0:30:07 Met Jack Golson (see ANU festschrift paper 1996), and Max Cole (both history students and communists, like himself ) through the undergraduate branch of the Communist Party at Cambridge, which had some 33 members.

0:42:12 All party undergraduate members, whatever their subject, were encouraged to go to Eric Hobsbawm’s lectures on labour history from 1850.

1952-54 Institute of Archaeology, University of London

0:44:02 PG was studying full-time for two years at the Institute. He read a lot of Childe, and was fascinated by his Marxism, but couldn’t work it out – archaeological data seemed inherently limited by its focus on material culture – how could you study ideology, social and philosophical context?

1954-56 Department of Archaeology, Ethnology and Local History, Birmingham

0:49:10 Trainee assistant in museum, lectures included the ethnographic collections.

1956-58 Scunthorpe Museum

0:50:33 Curatorship. Advice from the party “be a good curator”.

1958-68 University of Otago, New Zealand

0:54:12 H.D.Skinner
Second Part.

0:00:05 Early experiences in Otago Museum and reminiscences of Skinner

0:03:40 Otago Anthropological Society

0:06:00 1962 Senior Lecturer in University in anthropology

0:08:10 1964-5 sabbatical in Cambridge University. Sat in on Edmund Leach’s lectures, and asked his advice on developing the Otago programme

0:10:31 Reasons for splitting museum from the university department

1968-70 Lecturer in Ethnology, Oxford

0:15:07 lectureship attached to the Pitt Rivers Museum. “You could say I was an ethnologist, in the old-fashioned sense – a specialism that was a non-specialism by then”.

0:18:20 Grahame Clarke visiting Professor at Otago, 1964

0:21:25 Worcester College

1970-81 Curator, University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University

0:22:16 Arrival in Cambridge and difficulties with the museum

0:25:25 British social anthropology wasn’t interested in museum collections – wasn’t interested in history in that sense. “I think the big point was that social anthropologists in the British tradition didn’t see archaeology in the broad sense that we saw it in the Pacific – as part of the overall tradition”.

0:27:40 Assistant curators, Malcolm Mcleod, Mary Cr’aster, then Pat Carter and Debbie Swallow; advice from Edmund Leach on how to reorganise the museum

0:31:20 Reasons for resignation, involvement with Darwin College

0:31:30 Reo Fortune

0:36:57 Meyer Fortes, Raymond Firth, E.E. Evans-Pritchard,

0:43:26 publications; V.Gordon Childe

0:53:25 W.H.R. Rivers

Connecting threads in career

0:54:30 It all goes back to schooldays, when I read Marx and Hill – how do you link a theory of history with contemporary political action? “It’s the conjunction between history, anthropology and archaeology that’s always fascinated me, and, in the Pacific, if you’re working on ethno history, then you’re working in a cross-disciplinary way”.