Allan Brigham

Allan Brigham interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 26th November 2013

0:05:07 Born in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, in 1951; most of my early memories are of grandmother; every Saturday my brother and I would be left with her and she would play with us and tell us stories; we would make a house for the cat in the garden; cat called Toodles, therefore she was called "Toodles Granny"; I never thought anything of it until I was interviewing her when I was thirty and she was in her eighties, and she revealed that the cat never slept in the garden; even at that age I was disappointed that she had lied to me; I don't actually remember my parents until we moved when I was five; my mother was a physiotherapist and my father worked for an insurance company; we moved to Surrey and I remember them telling me it would be very hot as we were nearer to France; it was a nice house and a middle-class upbringing; I went to university in Sheffield; I wanted to go there to study history and politics - history I enjoyed but I was curious about politics; the professor of politics was Bernard Crick and I had seen his articles in the paper and I wanted to go to Sheffield because of him; I do remember our neighbour thinking there must have been something wrong with me to have to go so far away; living in a northern city was one of the best things I ever did; it broadened my mind as much as the course; I remember meeting my first Geordies in the student bar and I couldn't understand what they were saying; I thought Sheffield was nearly in Scotland as I had never been there, and they thought Sheffield was nearly in London; it gave me a sense for the first time of how big and different the country is; if I had not gone to Sheffield I would never have realized this; most of my fellow students were training to be engineers, so it was a completely different environment; the strange thing was that when my brother followed me to Sheffield he found that my grandmother had actually been born in the street next to where we were living; you suddenly realize that within a generation a family can forget where it has come from; even though my grandmother may have told me it had not sunk in because as a child I had always thought of her as living in Harpenden; my dad had been teased at school because of his accent, then my grandmother also revealed she had deliberately changed her accent too; I later went to work in Bradford and discovered that my grandmother's parents had retired there, and her sister had lived and died there; you suddenly discover links that you may have be told but hadn't listened to; I have yet to trace my family history but have looked at the censuses and there are Brighams clustered round Pocklington; my niece is at university in Birmingham and I went to see her last term; I did then trace my family moving from Pocklington to Birmingham in the nineteenth century, and from the 1851 census onwards I could follow the streets where they had lived; my family were devout Methodists, both Ministers and lay preachers; an irony is that the site of one of the houses where they had lived in Birmingham is now a mosque; they had believed Methodism was the future so could never have anticipated such a change

7:39:17 My wife was brought up as a Catholic which is very different from Methodism, but we have in common the fact that we are probably the last generation that went to church every Sunday; both of us rejected it; my parents wanted me to be Confirmed and I had to fight not to be; the church mattered to my parents; my grandmother's three brothers had all been Methodist ministers as were her father and grandfather; my father's family were lay preachers; I disappointed my parents; for my younger brothers there was no need to fight, they just stopped going to church and my parents accepted it; I sometimes wish I had belief but I have not; I remember a film called 'The Ruling Class' where Peter O'Toole as lord of the manor invites all his neighbours to a ball; they arrive but can't find their host; he suddenly calls down to them and he is on a crucifix on the wall, and he tells them he is God because every time he prays he finds he is talking to himself; that was my problem when I prayed; looked at rationally, belief in God is extraordinary; I think I am slightly dyslexic, but what I am good at is called "public engagement" these days, as a tour guide or going into schools and talking to kids - I am quite good at communicating; I never know whether that is a relic of my Methodist minister genes

12:00:09 Bernard Crick was my tutor and shared tutorials with David Blunkett who was a mature student; he used to sit in the front of the class with his dog; we used to share tutorials with about five people in those days, but I don't suppose they have them any longer; to be truthful I am not that bright; as an eighteen year old politics was a subject I thought I wanted to study but actually Bernard Crick was many steps ahead of me quite often and I didn't grasp what he was talking about; he had a Scottish accent and a stammer; I still remember him stuttering over the Greek P..p..olis, he couldn't get it out, and forty years later I can hear it juddering through my head; he was really into citizenship; I was interesting in governments and why they fall, really more from a historical point of view; the crucial thing that Bernard Crick taught me was about the art of politics itself; his book 'In Defence of Politics' showed how politics can hold a society together, it's a way of dealing with different opinions; I suppose ultimately it is the House of Commons with the width between the Government and Opposition being the length of a sword; it is better that they have ten hours of Prime Minister's question time shouting at each other than they kill each other, and it takes quite a long time to evolve a system where that is accepted; Crick was a great advocate of politics as a process and that has always stuck with me; I have a huge respect for politicians; it seems a real shame that now everybody seems happy to criticise them; I did a tour last week and I was talking about the suffrage; it wasn't until 1928 that women finally got the vote unless they owned property; people fought for this but now two thirds of the electorate don't vote and just sit in front of their television sets blaming somebody else; we live in a country where if I really think the system is bad I can put myself forward for election, and could be in the town hall seeing if I could do better; I think it is an amazing process which we are incredibly lucky to have because most of the world does not; I think that was what I learnt from Bernard Crick; David Blunkett was clever, deliberate, thoughtful; I never spoke to him personally but with him in tutorials; it was interesting that years later he emerged as a Minister; it was under David Blunkett that citizenship was put on the national curriculum and Bernard Crick was the lead on it; it made me aware the the diffusion of ideas; in the past it would have been people educated at Cambridge who would have been the fount of ideas, but now it had come through a provincial university student who thirty years later was making it real through the national curriculum

17:31:10 I did enjoy history but it was kings and queens and chronology, from the Anglo-Saxons to now; it was not really social history and I was always more interested in how people lived; somewhere I got interested in local history; it was the time, late sixties, early seventies when people were starting to do social history; I was not involved in it but was aware that in Sheffield there were W.E.A. adult education classes where you would go out collecting memories or things like that; the sort of history I learnt at university did not tell me anything about how people lived or earned a living; Hoskins had a course at Leicester when I was still at university, an M.A. course which I would love to have done; for a long time after I thought about it; when I came to Cambridge I thought there would be adult education classes but I was disappointed; there were classes on the history of the University but nothing on the history of the town; I did find a class in industrial archaeology and assumed it would be about Manchester or Birmingham, but not Cambridge; however, I went along and the tutor was brilliant; he had worked for Cambridge Instruments, was interested in technology but also in the social implications of it; we talked about industrial archaeology in East Anglia and Cambridge, and one evening he took us outside and we walked round New Square with is surrounded with stubby iron posts; he said they were made in Cambridge; he looked at the base where there was a little eagle; we walked on to Maids Causeway and to Midsummer Common where there are more caste iron railings, the posts in each slightly different, but again made in Cambridge; we did a year's project walking the boundaries, identifying where railings were; it was a great bonding experience with a diverse group of people, a good example of adult education; I interviewed the man who had cut them all down during the Second World War, including the ones in front of King's College; they were supposed to have been used to make equipment but they were the wrong sort of metal so were just scrap; through that course I became more interested in the history of Cambridge not just the colleges; one of the things I learnt from the tutor, Chris Hall, was that the high tech industries in Cambridge which were just starting then, owed as much to the research in the University as they did to the technical skills of the town's people who made the instruments; in the fusion of skills, the scientists are remembered but the technicians are forgotten; Pyes and Cambridge Instruments which gave Cambridge prosperity from the thirties to the sixties had that combination of town skills and academic skills, and they were the basis for for high tech firms we have here now

23:48:11 After university I went back to Surrey and worked in a corn mill; that is where I got sucked into local history; we made cattle fodder and there was a maltings where we used to store stuff; I worked with an old man, Ted Mansfield, who was seventy-five and had worked for the firm all his life, and his pension was the right to go on working for as long as he could; in the middle of the malting were all the business documents for the firm dating from the 1780s; they were a combination of their sales to local farmers, what they were buying, but also the family records; there were documents about building the owner's house and how many bricks were needed, where they sent their children to school, where they got newspapers from, all just stashed and mouldering in the middle of the floor; I loved this and though I couldn't look at it during work time I got permission from the owner to go down on Sundays; I had to go with him because he was conscious that the family were involved with running the Vestry and there were nineteenth century rate books there with names of people who were receiving poor relief whose descendants still lived in Dorking, and were still poor; he was a paternalistic old conservative and he was very worried that people would be humiliated by knowledge getting into the public domain that their families were getting poor relief in the past; he was very controlling but we sorted them out and eventually these documents ended up in the Surrey Record Office; his family were interesting because they had owned two or three mills in Surrey, had risen through the middle classes in the nineteenth century, and in the late nineteenth century one branch had stayed in Dorking running the mills, but through education, one became a clergyman, another a lawyer; the lawyer moved to London and became a professional and moved into a different social strata; the ones who remained in Dorking stayed very conservative but the London lawyer's son was Clement Atlee who was a Labour Party Prime Minister; I interviewed the last Atlee in Dorking; we talked about the business and I asked her about Clement Atlee; I thought she would say something about the National Health Service, but all she was prepared to mention was a boys' club in Stepney, so I learnt something about people; then I went up to Bradford and worked for a housing aid society as part of Shelter; I didn't have anywhere to live in Bradford; if you live in bed-sits, the landlords are constantly changing the lease, and they put the rent up; I thought I would go to Greece for a couple of months and when I came back I got a letter from and old friend in Cambridge with the offer of a spare room; I decided to come to Cambridge to save some money; I thought I was going to train as a teacher; I came in the mid-seventies with no intention of staying here; it was flat and I was used to the Yorkshire hills; I used to walk in the Peak District and Pennines every weekend; I had been brought up in hilly Surrey, and I could not understand how anybody could live in this bit of the world; if you live in the South you have a warped attitude to the North of England, but there is so much space there; Cambridge is not colourful, I thought the city was full of arrogant young students, and I was in my mid-twenties and felt myself beyond that; I was not even impressed by the old buildings as they were reminiscent of stately homes and in those days I was rather dismissive; so I didn't intend to stay, I thought I would get some money but I couldn't get a job because either I was over-qualified with a degree, or my work record was not good enough; I didn't want to go on the dole and I walked round going for interviews all over the place; I was living in Newnham in Eltisley Avenue, it was autumn, and there were some road sweepers at the bottom of the road with a huge pile of leaves; I told them that I couldn't find a job and they asked if I had tried the Council; I went to the Council depot and asked the foreman for a job; he said that if I was there by six o'clock the following morning he could give me one, otherwise he never wanted to see me again; I must have looked unlikely with long hair, jeans and tee-shirt, and I discovered later that the previous three he had employed hadn't turned up, and one before that had started with his broom and barrow and they had picked it up later where he'd just left it and gone; it was a job I thought I'd be doing temporarily; I started at six o'clock the next morning in front of the Corn Exchange in the dark, with an old man in a flat cap called Ernie Hart, and he was lovely

32:23:13 Ernie was my introduction to Cambridge, I suppose, and my introduction to Cambridge, in winter, sweeping the streets; in a way I was out of my comfort zone, with a plummy accent, and I had been to university; Ernie had had other temporary people who worked with him and had been and gone, and he could have been really intolerant; I could have been taking a temporary job to make some money and then gone off to make loads of money elsewhere, and that could have happened to me; but Ernie was wonderful and treated me like a father; he was gentle, and if he had finished sweeping his side of the street he would come and help me do mine; it was developing trust with someone, he would buy tea for me twice a day; he was an older man like my dad so I let him do so; it was not until he came to retire that I realized that he had a wife and son and was earning the same money as me; he'd buy the cakes from Fitzbillies on Friday; Ernie was one of the reasons I stayed in the job; at times I have thought I made a mistake, more so now when I have retired, but what matters is less what you do in a job but how you do it and the people you work with; if you get paid for working forty hours a week, how those hours are spent are really important for your sense of well-being; I have done temporary jobs; I worked in a bacon factory once, cutting sides of pig in half, cutting the bones out, you could do it in three minutes; the clock was above you and all you do was watch that clock and you know roughly how many pigs you are going to get through in a day; I still remember the smell; there was a girl in the tea room and all she did was read romantic novels; at the time I asked why she didn't read newspapers, but I see she needed that fantasy world where a millionaire was going to sweep her off her feet; being bored in a job is awful, and I wasn't bored sweeping the streets; there was variety, I was moving around, I liked working with Ernie and he introduced me to the people he knew; he took huge pride in Cambridge, it was his city where he had been born, and they were his people who walked down the streets, and it mattered that those streets were clean; I had to do it too because it mattered to Ernie and he was my mate; I found myself thinking that I wasn't going to stay in Cambridge very long; I wanted to travel though I didn't want to go round the world as some people did; I had spent three months hitching round Italy; I read a book by John Julius Norwich about the Normans in Sicily which had intrigued me, so I hitched down to Sicily and spent a month with no money travelling round it; I suppose I was captivated by the fusion of the Normans, Arabs and Greeks; the Council let me have two months leave of absence so I went to Israel for a while to see a friend on a Kibbutz, then to Eastern Turkey and up to the Armenian border, and then I wanted to see beyond that; so another year the Council let me go; I had seen a television programme on people in Chitral who were supposed to be descendants of Alexander the Great's soldiers; the romance of history was more prevalent in those days and I was curious to see them; I remember going to a travel agent to ask how one got to Chitral, and they told me to get a plane to Istanbul and then get a bus; I went by bus through Iran to the Afghan border, then got another bus round Afghanistan, and I saw those amazing Buddhas at Bamiyan which were blown up by the Taliban; I did get to Chitral and went to these Kalash valleys, walked round and came home; so one of the reasons I stayed with the Council was that in those days it was possible to get leave of absence and a job to come back to, because they couldn't recruit staff and were happy to have somebody who was reliable; that reflects the change in employment conditions; nowadays you fight for a job on the Council; when you are young you can think of taking or leaving jobs, but as you get older you see that those in jobs stick with them, and now even to get a job as a road sweeper in Cambridge is incredibly difficult, let alone anything higher, because there is less mobility

39:40:03 Cambridge is quite a tolerant place and I was making presumptions about the students being arrogant when I first came here, without knowing any; that frames my experience of Cambridge really until quite recently; I make part of my living showing people round colleges, but I have never been inside a college room before, and I have lived most of my life in Cambridge without meeting people from the University, so I made a value judgement about them without really knowing them; in terms of how people judge you as a road sweeper, I do remember a lady who used to park her bike in St Edward's Passage, and she never said "good morning" even though I always did; when I became a tour guide I went to a reception at the Guildhall and everybody was introduced to the Mayor; this woman wasn't a tour guide but was there for some reason, and was waiting behind me in the queue to see the Mayor; she asked me what I did for a living and I told her that I saw her every day; the lesson that I learnt was that uniform makes you invisible; as a road sweeper I wore bright orange overalls and yet all people see is a council worker, and don't see beyond that; I always used to call it my invisible jacket although it was worn to make me more visible, and to stop me getting run over; when I became a tour guide, after doing a year's course with exams at the end of it, I was very nervous about how to interact with people; my first group were Americans for whom I had to shape the information into a particular story that would appeal to them; I had been sweeping earlier in the day and had taken my jacket and tie and white shirt to work with me; I was tired as I had already done nine hours of work, and went off to do this tour; I thought they were just going to see a road sweeper, and I couldn't believe that within three minutes they were listening to everything that I said; what they saw was somebody from Cambridge with a jacket and tie, and they assumed that I was a university professor; it taught me the power of clothes - you see what you are looking for, don't you

43:33:18 I spent ten years here thinking I was going back to Yorkshire; I spent fifteen years thinking I was going to do another job; at one point in the seventies I did ask about teacher training, and was told they didn't want secondary school history teachers any more; Cambridge became home; I had had a bed-sit in Newnham which lasted for about a year, and I had ended up sleeping on someone's floor for four months, which was awful; a friend offered me a room in a house in Eden Street which had been bought by the Council for the redevelopment of the Kite area; it was the nearest thing to a squat; there was electricity upstairs and hot water, but the room was downstairs with a mattress on the floor; however, after sleeping in a sleeping bag on floorboards, a mattress was paradise; the house was sublet from the Council by a guy called Chris Curry; he had been a poor engineer in Cambridge who was a mate of Clive Sinclair's; during this period he had gone from that to being the first Cambridge entrepreneur when Herman Hauser and he set up Acorn Computers; Chris Curry had gone from living in this virtual squat himself to buying a country mansion at Croxton, and he still continued to sublet this; the basement was barricaded with a grand piano because Gus lived in the basement and had a Derek Jarman sort of garden in the back; there were a couple of art students upstairs; eventually I got a room upstairs with some daylight and electricity; I moved somewhere else and then ended up with a friend in Little St Mary's Lane; I got fed up with just going from year to year losing where I lived, and I wanted my own physical home; I had a choice at that point; maybe I could have got a professional training that would have given me more money; I think people have forgotten the unemployment in the seventies and eighties; my job started early and finished early, so I could have used the time to do another job and save some money that way; I ended up road sweeping with one day off a fortnight, and would do overtime, and I got a job in the afternoons at the Examinations Syndicate packing examination papers, and I worked in the Eagle pub in Benet Street four nights a week; I became obsessive about saving money; I still have the little notebook where I recorded how much I had saved each week; I would cook a big bowl of food every Sunday to live on for the rest of the week; I went down to see my mother last year when she was in hospital with dementia; the guy in the next bed turned out to be someone who had gone out with the friend I had shared the house with in Little St Mary's Lane; this was thirty-five years later and I had only known him for six months, but his whole memory of me was coming in, eating, and going from one job to another; he said he was always telling his son about me because I worked so hard; actually what I really wanted was not to have work so hard, but for two or three years I did that and was able to get a deposit for a house off Mill Road, in Cockburn Street; it was a street of small terraces with an outside toilet, I got an improvement grant to do it up; people have forgotten that the State played a big hand in those days with income tax relief as well as improvement grants; it was the only way to do up such houses as nobody wanted to live near the railway line or in Romsey Town; most of the people in the street had lived there all their lives; now, Cambridge doesn't seem very big but when you are new to a place, each little area is different and you feel your way around it; even though I had lived in Cambridge for a while I had not gone over the bridge into Romsey Town so it was new territory; it took me five years to modernize the house; I met my wife and nearly moved to London; she was working in a Job Centre in Hackney although we had met in Cambridge; I was a bit stubborn and she always blamed me for ending her career although she ended up being the manager of the Job Centre in Cambridge; we bought another house and did it up, and suddenly you are in your forties and Cambridge has become home; that process was never conscious but now I show people round these buildings and think they are fantastic; I think we are so lucky to live in a town surrounded by this architecture and these green spaces, in place where part of the elite are academic, I like that; I like it because it is flat; I like hills but it is nice as you get older not to have to go up them regularly; I like the young people; I went to see my brother who does live in Surrey in a lovely green belt town, and very pretty; what is missing is that there is nobody between the age of eighteen and thirty; in a place where families live, kids leave; I like living in a town that is buzzing with mostly nice middle-class kids; there may be too many kebab shops and sometimes people get drunk, but it is actually a nice environment; then the surrounding area - I used to think the Fens boring and flat but I trained as a tour guide for all of East Anglia, and began to appreciate the whole region; I now love going from here to Ely and the flatness and vistas; in East Anglia you don't need to climb to the top of a hill to see vast space and light; I love the Norfolk and Suffolk coast; whereas in my childhood I loved the cliffs and coves of Cornwall but now find them enclosing; I think what I am conscious of is a sense of place; I don't know whether you just make a place your own but I think place is important to your sense of well-being

53:43:13 What I am curious about is landscape and society and how both have been shaped by people, and didn't just appear as they are; I wanted to teach, never became a teacher, but maybe I have found another way in; in my job as a road sweeper I ended up going around primary schools talking about rubbish and recycling, but really that was just about getting kids to look at their surroundings, to appreciate them, and realize that the rubbish didn't just disappear on its own, and wouldn't it be nice if it wasn't there in the first place; as a tour guide going around East Anglia I have been able to do the same thing really, getting them to look at it and appreciate it, to realize that what they like is only there because people fight to keep it like that; maybe sometimes to encourage people to think about the bigger political picture which goes back to Bernard Crick, where I started

54:59:08 I couldn't believe it when I got a letter from the University asking if I would accept an Honorary M.A.; I thought somebody had faked it; it was very flattering and undeserved; for thirty years I have swept in front of the Senate House when the parents have come to see their children get their degrees; I have probably been invisible to them; then I am there in a gown, with my mother in her best clothes with my family; I had got a degree from Sheffield but never went to get it because I was working at the time and was dismissive of the formality; I am old enough now to appreciate that if you are getting a degree and having a bit of ceremony, the Senate House in Cambridge is the best place to do it; it was really nice and you did feel special for a day; it was in the national press; one person who had walked past me for years and never spoken said he had seen me in The Times; another lady, a cleaner in one of the colleges, had never spoken to me before said that she had seen me in The Mirror; my hospital consultant said that he had picked up a copy of The Metro on the underground in London and that my picture was in it; a Chinese gentleman stopped me as I was sweeping down the Backs and wanted to take my photograph as he had seen my picture in a newspaper in China; they had put in a picture of a Chinese road sweeper and replaced his head with mine; so you a special for a day and then life returns to normal; it makes me think that everybody deserves a pat on the back, but it was for services to Cambridge which made it really nice; it made me feel I had done something useful with my life; it would have been nice to have more money, but now at the age of sixty-two we had got through; we have got our house and are incredibly lucky to live in a place like Cambridge; a place that is beautiful, where you don't have to get into a car to go everywhere, I think that's a huge plus, it's not too big, it's flat, that's good