Alan Bennett and David Vaisey - The History Boys 2014

[Music] [Music] well now it's a question I suppose of where we start and I supposed to know to start with when we first met or this weather we met or not quite sure but we we were aware of each other and that's in January 1954 60 years ago now when it was extremely cold and we both came up to take the scholarship examination extra college and it sort of worked out since that they obviously arranged us alphabetically around a big table to sit our papers so that they started on one end of the table with the letter A and went down there and came back up the other side to the letters at the end of the alphabet so that V was about opposite B and I remember sitting there and there were two people opposite me one was called Benesch and the other was called Bearpaw and they had marvelous handwriting their handwriting was much better than mine and they seemed to spend a lot of time writing where I was sitting there feeling terrible and not knowing what to write so I think we sort of saw each other across the table then I don't remember much at all actually about that about the scholarship examination itself except as I was saying earlier on for the sort of general essay which I think was a two-hour paper or it might have been a three-hour paper and you turned the paper over and there was a subject and you wrote about it so returned the paper over and it said apathy my heart sort of sank to my boots and then I realized that about a fortnight before at school I'd done a test paper and that was on enthusiasm so I simply turned it inside out and it appeared to work I remember also then being wonderfully impressed by all these young men who you're in the evening they went to the cinema well as I sat in my room was terrified really about what was going to happen the next day all I can remember do he's going to Parker's bookshop which was then on the corner of chell street and buying a copy which was then I think a new book of Ernst Gombrich the story of art so I thought we might get a question on our the next day and I really ought to read up about it we didn't but I've still got the book and as my unformed handwriting DG Vaizey 7 January 1954 in the front those are my members do you have any I couldn't remember I mean exactly this your impression of me is my impression of you in the sensitive you wrote an enormous amount and that you had very grown-up and writing but other than that I just remember being very cold you were sort of toasted on one side and frozen on the other side but my Amenia presume your your route today to the to that point from was fairly straight forward from school one day yes it was yes mine with my ambrus I was going to say I got there by a dog's hind legs like well but I shouldn't say it like that because he it meant that I went to Cambridge first before I came to Oxford what happened was I I in 1951 went to I was at a state school in Leeds Leeds Modern School and normally if it sent anybody university it was to Leeds University down the road but we had a new headmaster who'd been at Cambridge and he decided to to put some of the sixth or in for Oxford and Cambridge I don't think we're any cleverer than they than the average really but anyway he wanted us to go in for it and then left it to us so we had to write off to the college for prospectuses and so on and gave you no idea about about the the hierarchy of the colleges or that there was any difference for instance between modelling and Exeter which you know that there's no idea that there was a social difference between the colleges but so we were left just to to work it out for ourselves and then I've written something about this now in the course of this of the evening album I'll keep going back to stuff that I've written already and it all had to be decided at home the wireless off the kitchen table cleared and wiped no more certain way of being rejected I thought than jam on the entrance form and in the mystifying permutations of choice my parents stood by helpless they scarcely knew what a university was let alone the status of its component for art I opted for Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge which sounded to be a middling sort of college there was Alex plain I ended up protects a text college here another middling sort of college I reckoned I'd stand a better chance at Sydney or Exeter than I would at socially more exalted colleges like Trinity or maudlin the irony was when I finally landed up at Exeter in 1954 I found that in my callow a sessemann of college form I had not been alone others had reasoned in the same way with the result that Exeter was far harder to get into than anywhere else the first hurdle more intimidating to me than than any examination was having to go up to Cambridge and stay in the college for the weekend I had seldom been away from home and was not equipped for trouble I fancy a sponge bag had to be bought but since at 17 I still didn't shave there wasn't much to go in it my mother probably invested in some better pajamas for me but that was it a stock vision of an undergraduate then gleaned from movies like Robert Taylor in a Yank at Oxford was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers a towel round his neck on route for the distant baths I didn't run to a dressing-gown and slippers either no be real mind if he if you just wear your raincoat my mother is my mother reassuringly said I wasn't reassured but there was a limit to what my parents could afford it all seems absurd now but not then for all I knew someone who went to the baths in a raincoat in his ordinary shoes might not be the sort of undergraduate the college was looking for and drawl though these misgivings seem then they were more real than any worries about about the examination itself and they persisted long after examinations were over my social and class self-consciousness not entirely shed until long after my education proper was finished December 1951 was sunny but bitterly cold and though there was no snow the cam was frozen and the lawns and quadrangles white with frost and coming to it from the soot and grime of the West Riding I never seen or imagined a place of such beauty and even today the only place that has enchanted me as much as Cambridge did then is Venice all eight of us got into Oxford and came or Cambridge some after one or two tries but some actually winning scholarships I didn't win a scholarship I got a place at Sidney Sussex to read history coming up after my national service in 1954 my basic training in we everybody had to do national service then and my basic training within the infantry in New York and Lancaster regiment at Pontefract and I'd been told by other people by old boys coming back to school that I were to ask to go on the Russian course and nobody would know what the Russian course was but one had to keep asking and eventually they would get through so I did I said I want to go on the Russian course and eventually I was posted to Coulston and there you started to learn Russian and the top 50% of the intae I went to Cambridge and the beauty of this was not many being in Cambridge but you didn't have to wear uniform and you didn't have any drill and your connection with the army was almost nominal and it was wonderful I mean in some ways it was far more eye-opening and enjoyable than than University was but as the months passed and most of the most of the other people learning Russian were like me were going on to university as the months passed I began to feel that since I could hold my own with these boys in Russian maybe I ought to have another shot at getting a scholarship myself besides I was at Cambridge already perhaps rather than come back there after national service I would be better more rounded I fear I thought of it going to Oxford this first occurred to me in October 1953 and having written off for the prospectuses I found I could take the scholarship examination at Exeter College Oxford in the following January there was no practical advantage to getting a scholarship it carried more prestige certainly but no more money in those days and I still think it's the best system that we could ever have had and it's great that we don't have it today in those days if you've got a place in any institution of higher learning then your fees would be paid either by the state or by your local authority and so if if you got a college scholarship then that would be taken off the money that the state would pay there was no practical advantage in getting a scholarship it carried more prestige certainly but no more money at Oxford scholars wore a longer gown than commoners and had an extra year in college rather than in digs but that a part I wanted a scholarship out of sheer vanity if I was to take the examination at Exeter I didn't have much time my history was rusty and studying Russian during the day meant that the only time I had to myself was in the evenings which I generally spent in the Cambridge Public Library in the meantime I reduced everything I knew to a set of notes with answers to possible questions and our die caching quotations all written out honestly honestly at 40 or 50 correspondence cards a handful of which are carried in my pocket wherever I went I learned them in class while ostensibly doing Russian on the bus coming into Cambridge in the morning and in any odd moment that presented itself come the examination everything tumbled out facts quotations all the stuff I'd laborious ly committed to memory over the previous three months my only problem with lack of time when the letter came saying I'd won a scholarship I thought life was never going to be the same again though it quite food was of course well that accounts for all that writing if he was just regurgitating all this anyways you've seen Alan was as it were the Clara brigade he's gone and done Russian English national service and I was still at school which meant that when we actually got to Oxford Alan was two years ahead of me because between school and my coming up I had to fill my national service which was entirely different from Alan's because nobody ever told me about the Russian cause I didn't have that little wheeze I just I was I joined the Gloucestershire regiment was commissioned and went off to fight in in the Momo emergency in Kenya so then after all that where I did I didn't go in Russian they're vegetarians o'healey all of all of which is that vanished I must say that I don't know about your Russian but my Swahili is gone pretty well although actually in the inn where my wife now lives in her care home there are quite a few carers who from Kenya and I've practiced my so Helion them not not letting them know how I learned it's under what circumstances so when we when he when she we got to we got to exaggerate Alan's I said was two years ahead of me and I think it's it's really quite quite a tribute really to to the Oxford College System that I mean in Italy we're reading the same subject and worth was sort of you know I come from the same background of sort of lower middle-class paid for education background that the two people so different really in two years apart can can meet and become firm friends Exeter ISM was a very it was a small college then and it was very good college in that there were no cliques there were no sort of blood ease on the one hand and and east heats on the other we're all one there are very very few graduate students who were all undergraduates and there were very few Don's there were only 14 Dons at Exeter all of them teaching when when we came up there now 44 most of them not teaching at all wouldn't know what end of an undergraduate for another I think and and in particular at Exeter the the junior common room there wasn't a middle common room of course the junior colony was a very important place and it was political in the least it was purely a social club it was the place where one met and played darts and shall hate me and eight tea and talked and set the world to rights and of course we were we were older than than undergraduate so now two years older on the whole because for almost all subjects an issue unless you were a medic I think you could do your national service after you've done your undergraduate work but you know Wayne got your offer of a place it was on condition that you will come up in two years time rather than now and we were not I think probably also the one of the effects of having done national service was that we learned I mean they're they're prop they're all there clearly problems in the college there are problems in all aspects of life but I think it's true being in the army one had learned to obey orders but actually circumvent the problems we didn't you know we didn't raise them it's about as a principle and protest to march about the streets I don't think it was a protesting we were before the protesting inward-looking as well we did I mean though the president the union was fully white it was would later became a Labour MP he was he was at Exeter but somehow you switched off really politically speaking and I think in college he was there was no later on I thinking in this 60s later on I think we was very different but when we were there they were very easygoing and and I my content all the contemporary in other colleges I'm for instance I've been in the army with Michael Frayn the playwright and I used to we used to write to each other and he was at Immanuel at Cambridge which he didn't like at all and he couldn't understand how I was so settled in college really so happy in Corydon and he he immediately took part in the in the life of the university really in Basti and so on whereas I never did that [Music] I think it was most people actually didn't really one or two people got involved in the Union but also the it's it's it's quite interesting I just gotta learn a few things about how life was so different in 1954 than it is now the things that we just take for granted now alone that hadn't happened then no man hadn't gone into space the beatles hadn't yet so the berlin wall hadn't even been built no one had ever heard of rupert murdoch he'd just gone down actually just gone back to australia from being an undergraduate here at worcester college there was no television no color television and no no television at all in in college there were no supermarkets in the town except possibly the coop and Woolworths if you count that it's a supermarket Harold Macmillan hadn't yet become Prime Minister told us so he'd never had it so good and and Margaret Thatcher was still advising Joel ions on how to make his ice cream less hard she invented emulsifiers for his ice cream and did Peres station which is now being blown up hadn't even been built so that the the you know that that great landmark has you've come back from London on the train if you are nearly home there's ticket per station it wasn't there when we came up to what soon what was the landmark who told us women Gerry the old smell of Oxford was different in the sense that they nothing had been restored had the buildings were peeling and scrofulous and the the the Empress heads outside the Sheldonian were almost unrecognizable one day it but then so what most provincial towns they believed was quiet and Cambridge was the same because you could walk through Cambridge on a Saturday afternoon and hear your own footsteps there were so few people about and it was true even a places like York which now is you can't move in York but then it was empty and you say this to people and they think you're romanticizing but but he was so but one of the reasons why I think we got to know each other well was because I had rooms in college or were quite a long period for various reasons I began by having a room on in the front quad at Exeter and not the first no I'll read the had forgotten this I'll read an account of what happened when the first day I arrived at Exeter where and when I found where I'd been put in a room you're from Yorkshire and he's from Yorkshire you're from a state school and he's from a state school you're reading history and he's reading history you seem to me and recta barber gave what I took to be a smile you seem to me to be very well suited so my first disappointment with Oxford was finding I was going to have to share but the disappointment turned to consternation when I found I had been put in with someone with whom on the Russian course I'd intermittently shared a barrack room in a bedroom for much of my two years in the army he was amiable enough much more so than I was and far more convivial but he was no more anxious to share with me than I with him it was this depressing prospect the emboldened me to knock on the door of the lodgings the first day I arrived and asked to be moved they were kindly enough man rector Baba had an air of death in life about him that is caught well in the Anna Gonia portrait now hanging in Exeter Hall a classicist from the age of Houseman he made even that austere figure seem jolly and certainly I got no joy that day I came away thinking well I'm here for three years and that put paid to the first year it happened but I have to say that though I ended up staying at Oxford not for three years but for eight the place inspires little nostalgia still it was at Oxford that I first had a room of my own and then I go on to describe the furnishings of the the room some of which I still have I bought an old battered Victorian gilt mirror which was falling apart when I bought it for I think it was three pounds here and and he still falling apart now where he hangs at the top of our kitchen stairs I at Cambridge where there were some good because I think it had a school of architecture there were some good shops for modern furniture and wallpaper and suchlike and thinking of the room I was imagining I was going to have in my first year I bought a roll of wallpaper and it's sad to think of it really but I don't think many undergraduates arrive on their first day with a roll of wallpaper under their arm but I did and then of course I couldn't put it up and so it was only in my second year I got a room the room overlooking extra garden and I know all souls I'm cutting out the boring bits but that's another thing about about Oxford then it was full of well junk shop salon teez I mean there were the posh antique shops down the high street but Walton Street particularly had lots of junk shops and ware which had really good stuff in them and and cheap i I bought a down little Clarendon Street was Kiril bond freely Olli a colorful character now I think revealed is possibly a spy and and certainly an accomplished detective story writer he sold me for a few pounds a little oil sketch of an oriental market that he thought might be by WJ mullah of whom I'd never heard years later I took it into the final Society in Bond Street where a young man glanced briefly at it before saying kindly yes well Miller painted some bad pictures but I'm afraid this is not one of them I stayed on at Oxford after I took my degree in due course got larger rooms which I could even buy furniture this is when I think we knew each other best when I had the room I had a room it's the room with an Oriole window there the end of Exeter's broad street frontage looking over the emperors heads and and the Museum of Science Building I bought over modeling Bridge and just up the London Road on the left I bought a Victorian marble top chiffonnier for six pounds which is still in our kitchen today in 1958 it had to be taken up the high street on a handcart I mean one one has to think twice to think well this is really happened it seems so so Victorian but anyway it was so yes yeah well I've got lots of stories yeah the other thing was to I mean very few people we told by we traveled around Oxford my by cranial wards and very few of us came up by car we all came up by train and carried very little kick with us nowadays you have to have a kind of 4x4 vehicles carrying your children off to university then we just put our stuff in a suitcase sent it passenger luggage in advance and at the beginning of every term railway trucks would deposit vast quantities of suitcases in every college Lodge and you had to sort out yours that's something is completely forgotten now no say you felt you felt it was a class marker that you had a suitcase or not a great big cabin trunk that's right yes with your initials only that's what lots of calves in France went to Trinity College and also it was a funny place to I mean everybody eats out a lot at the time now but very few people who sweet out I mean mr. mrs. average English person did indeed out much except if they were staying in hotels or if they wanted F Indian food really otherwise everybody H at home and there weren't maybe I mean if we if we want to eat out we would have sort of omelettes or mixed grills or something at one of the very few okay there was the stowaway I remember was always known stuffers and the lantern there were sort of classy tea rooms Fuller's and the Kadena but they were where you took your mother I'm going to ask you that what did how were you shelf conscious about asking when your parents gave us this eerie because it would be absolutely strange world for them and it would have been a sort of strange world world for me to have them in the I don't take any pride in that and was ashamed of it no I'd say but but you see when mine came up I mean I think me only came up twice I practically put a sack over their heads and they were the most I mean lovely people and and you know they weren't I learned my lesson then actually when at the time because one of my friends at Exeter was Russell hearty now Russell's parents were green grocers on the market in Blackburn and they were absolutely what my mother would have called common I mean Fred looked like a bookie and wore a bold check suit and a Myrtle his wife was things array land and highly painted and and both of them were absolutely sure of themselves there was no there was no putting shacks over their heads but Russell you see wasn't in the least bit embarrassed by them and in fact when they came up to see him he had a cocktail party for them and and asked the rector and asked to the dance too and he was he was reading English though he was taught by Neville Coghill and I never Coghill had a conversation with Fred Russell's father about mrs. T RT and I put this in a play Myrtle said my husband introduced the avocado pear to Blackburn never real and I was genuinely interested he's never come across people like this before and they had a lively conversation and he was so different from from my attitude to my parents yet I could see it was better and morally better than more than me really and I never cease to regret it but but then I think I think also we were we were both historians I got to know him some of the people doing English and they had a much more I mean our futures Eric Kemp who was the chaplain and Greg Barr who was the senior tutor I don't think we were on terms with them certainly we weren't on first-name terms with them whereas the English people on you called Neville Coghill Neville they went out to simple with him they were to also talk by man good teach called Arthur Ashby who and they used to go out to them to the the what was it what's the public Burford the batery no the bakery is the patriot benefit and not a high old time and it was so different from from our rather strained relations with our futures yes they were straight there yes we both had the same futures talking about you know being familiar with ones tutors even when I came back jobs I left for three years then came back again and sorted sort of doing things around the university that for instance one of the be placed have to write two about various things was Roger high field at Merton and I would write to him do dr. high field he write back to me Jim mr. Vaizey and after a bit of his letter said surely we can be a little less formal now which meant that he wrote to me is dear Vaizey and I [Laughter] yes but they you was an education in a sense seeing some of the people who who taught you I've only written one play set in Oxford which was the habit of art which is imagining a meeting between WH Auden who came back here in about 1972 thinking to have a happy retirement in Oxford but finding himself very unhappy here an imaginary meeting between him and Benjamin Britten who with whom he'd worked when they were younger and he was when Benjamin Britten was writing death in Venice and had come to a full stop and the play margins the meeting and seeing where they could work together again but it begins in a rather oblique way a rather French classical way in that Auden is also expecting a call from a rent boy who is or we regularly used to have a rent boy in New York but they always had to arrive absolutely on the dot if they were five minutes late then they were sent away and so he's expecting this this boy but he also somebody from the BBC comes and of course Auden thinks the man from the BBC is the renter there's any way the rent boy is a subsidiary character but towards the end of the play he really gets he gets a speech in which she talks about going to visit Dawn's and it's really an account of what it was like being taught by one of the Dons in in North North Oxford and so I read that back fondly here we are some of the yearning felt in this play by Stuart the rent boy in the houses of his clientele reflects my own wonder as an undergraduate going to tutorials in the vast Victorian houses of North Oxford I was there on a different and more legitimate errand from Stuart but to see a wall covered in books was an education in itself though visual and aesthetic as much as intellectual books do furnish a room and some of these rooms had little else and there in a corner the dawn under a lamp sometimes though there would be paintings and occasionally more pictures than I'd ever seen on one wall together with verses urns pottery and other relics real nests of a scholarly life and they were wonders - drinking soup once from 15th century apostle spoons medieval embroidery thrown over chair backs a plaque in the hall that might be by della Robbia these days I think of such houses when I go to museums like we are slowly another Fitzwilliam where the great masterpieces have plumped out with the fruits of requests from umpteen academic household paintings particularly in the Fitzwilliam antiquities treasures brought back from Egypt in Italy in more franchise days than ours squid all the way up Norum Road in Park Town the components of what Stuart rightly sees as a world from which he will forever be excluded and from which I felt excluded to there with less reason I can't even remember the names of the tutors I went to but there were it was an act instant did you go to CT at either you go to a kid who was practically blind himself but circulations in the 1890s and gave up lecturing in the university when women were allowed to take degrees I mean he was really on reconstruction character yes even I could say that he was a bit beyond a joke really but he just weren't of the most inspiring and some of the lectures that when used to go to weren't very inspiring either I think really object lessons in how to make an interesting subject boring it was better I was fine to go and read except some certainly in the one postgraduate year that I did in in the body and I be learning how to be an archivist going to two very contrasting and very very learning people about manuscripts Pierre Chalet who did the diplomatic in New York are who was the most marvelous paleography but a absolutely hopeless lecturer I wish to sit there saying I think paleography is an unteachable subjects whereas fear Shapley was just wonderful it's partly because he had a you had this wonderful French accent when you and you know glide over these lovely lovely fact I remember he lived a tension that I lived in ship in those days and hovering in one day on the bus in winter time I was complaining about the cold and how the snow was Lola and he said he said I you know I never complain now because it could never be as bad as the winter of 1944 so I said oh where were you in 1944 and he said book and Bart I wonder sort of slide under deceased I like some lectures were terrible and I even fell asleep in a JP Taylor's lectures which you know he was he could lecture at nine o'clock and fill their house but he it was the relentless paradox of his lectures that made me go to sleep but the most impressive lecturer I ever went to was by Richard pears and Richard pears was donnatal souls and and it was in my last last words I think over the last two terms that I was an undergraduate where you don't really expect to go to lectures because you're so busy mugging up that we know what you've done but for some reason I went and to find that most of the audience were Don's and and then prayers came in I was brought in and he was in a wheelchair and and he was brought in but I think John Bromley was a lecturer in geography who sat by him and helped him with his papers and it became immediately obvious that he was very ill and he was he was lecturing about the sugar interest in eighteenth-century politics and how it how the the plantations and so on set up families like the laterals and and and how this affected them and it's not an inspiring subject it's not like a topic say from the 17th century which could be ennobling or inspiring it was about about people behaving badly really and the fact that was this man who quite plainly was dying and yet thought this was worth doing and that he was and that history in itself was worth doing made an enormous impression on me and I I kept on going to the lecture and week by week he became visibly weaker so that by by the end John Bromley was having to turn over the pages for him much like a somebody turning over for a pianist and the only thing that was really remained unaffected was his voice and I've never forgotten that but it was nothing - it was it was a human impression it made me really you know rather than the historical one but the otherwise the number of memorable lectures were very few but I mind you i i i take my degree i stayed on and did research and taught a bit and i was a hopeless teacher so i'm no i i was so bad that that i would have been stopped today within a term i'm sure but i could i recommended books to my pupils to rebut and I'd read them but i couldn't remember what was in them and I always used to run out of things to say two-thirds of the way through the tutorial so I took to putting the clock on beforehand so for things they they used to arrive thinking they were on the dot or even early and found it was 10 past the hour I don't know how would they put up with me but anyway it yeah so I sympathized with with with our tutors how to cure that I must have bored them really probably well you know move on from Oxford actually but I do remember being elected something called the Stubbs society I wanted that society still exists it was a History Society and you could only be a member as a dawn if you've been a member as an undergraduate and the undergraduate for elected but there were two caucuses in the Sun Society one based on queens college the other based on Bailey or college and they were always at war so I think I was electric twas I was in neither camp and they all here's a nice chap you can vote for I got but it was my sandwich society they used to have very um very eminent speakers and tear them to pieces he's clever I mean I was not clever at all but I mean they used to chair these speakers to pieces however we're late well I said left off so it worked away for three years they then came back again I thought well I was a member of the sub society when I was an undergraduate I think I'll write to the secretary and said can I have a term card I'd like to come along again please and I got a very very snotty letter back from him from the section no no this is for proper Don's this isn't for people who work in libraries I wish you well I became head of Western manuscripts and the fellow in Exeter they wrote the sub Society wrote to me and asked me to give a paper and I said no give me great pleasure to do that but maybe yes but because he stayed on to do to do research and despite my and I was taught by or my supervised by wonderful teacher Bruce MacFarlane who was a medievalist immortal in and and who was if the first time I'd been taught by anybody who was really inspiring and yet looking back very often I'd go and see him he wouldn't even talk about the thing I was supposed to be researching he would just chat and and and yet I came away thinking reached the second which was my subject was the only thing I wanted to do and he was a wonderful teacher and a wonderful historian he and so that and that was the best thing about doing postgraduate but I I was made I simply simply because I taught that their pupils I was made junior lecturer at Morley and this was a mixed blessing really I because modeling was was full of stars I mean AJP Taylor Jeffrey Warnock Gilbert Ryle fearsome people really and of course one joined in you see as and I I found the the meals at high table were absolutely terrifying and their and they will see was a large common room and on three nights in succession I sat next to the same person and he turned to me and said and who are you know who you we said question you really count out if you say what do you do we do you couldn't answer that but who are you you know it's quite difficult anyway I've watched together some answer the next night the same person was sitting next to me and he said the same thing and the third night the same thing and they was it would be I didn't I didn't know wanted I was just so out of my depth and the food I've always found eating food in public quite difficult but anyway modeling it was a nightmare and the worst time was getting towards Christmas when they had mince pies and you didn't get an individual mince pie a scout would appear with a large general mince pie and a silver slice and he were to culture slice from the mince pie and transfer it to your plate which is logistical quite difficult anyway and then behind him was another scout with the silver spoon and a flagon of brandy and he poured the flagon of brandy and filled the spoon and gave me the spoon then there was another sky right behind him with the silver Bunsen burner and you were meant to nobody explained this to you you have to deduce it you you were then meant to heat the spoon over the Bunsen burner and then pour it over your mince pie wait upon yet another scout where I was behind with the flagon of cream and you took the cream and doused the mince pie I mean you're a nervous wreck by the time you go but what made it worse was being the junior everybody long since I was the last to be served I was you know I was still doing this with everybody long since finished and it wouldn't have been so bad if it had been in as it were laboratory conditions but you know them that when everybody was watching and there were people you know there were people like AJP Taylor there and and I was sitting opposite Gilbert rau it's like sitting opposite Mount Rushmore it was terrifying and I I was eventually I was i deserted academic life with the theater and no I never had stage fright in a theater like I did going to high table at morning and there was a fellow I said you remember another occasion I said you remember you coming back one night from motley where you're the sleeves I I wasn't used to wearing a BA a gown with his long sleeves and and as I pushed my chair in my sleeve got caught under the legs of my chair severely restricting with you and there and they were bringing around these tissues and because I because that was too shy to stand up and move the chair back I had to sort of wave them away and you know and the food was delicious I must say but I had to wave it all away and and then they're done next to me said if you're vegetarian they'll do something special it was Oh everything seems it is funny now but then I'll go I won't forget side you know after not you being on the high table from it you forget when you first starts going yeah well the same thing about the the tools coming over one shoulder yeah I had the same things I was sitting on the the right hand side of the of the province of Oriole and so was the first person visa and this huge fish came over with a fish slice no indication when I was rich or decluttr off funny but I think I did pluck up courage there and say I don't know what to do with this yes but then those first here we all saw it before we just been giving the signal what we also stops okay I mean I came back again but I certainly have I went off and did three years in Stafford which was very I mean it was up to that point I realized now I'd always been a member of a kind of ready-made society you know family school army college and then suddenly you were chopped off the top of his ivory tower had to make your own way in the Midlands time where I'd never been before in my life and I was very very sort of socially and I'm happy for a while I'm sure but there were some some marvelous people there and I remember for instance I worked for the County Council and in the in the the canteen where we shouldn't have lunch there's always an old man sitting having his lunch all by himself and he was a chap who wrote thee in those days there was still a calligrapher who wrote the county councils deeds and wrote the all the county councils documents and this was a chap called Sidney Barnes who probably been the great she's fast burro the Lincoln ever had who was a man who was too old to be in the First World War and yet there was in nineteen wherever it was I mean sixty he was there and absolutely in all of this charm with beautiful handwriting it's a really advanced age oh yeah the poem that Paula the poisonous yes ever somebody who but I just remember you were acting to me about this yes no but there were some real characters there were like well I really got got in there and realized what an exciting life this was because you could still make really major historical discoveries in country houses and coal mine offices and all that sort of thing and we used to have to go and visit all the country clergymen to see what they were doing with their records and there was a wonderful completely mad clergyman in a little little village called flash which was up on the top of the sort of Staffordshire Derbyshire and Moreland who lived a life completely sort of cut off from the world and very much objected to their bishop the way the Bishop of Litchfield wrote to him was James Litchfield this chaps name was Tom something I always wrote back to the bishop tommy flash stop now I would I'm going to finish off with something totally different not funny at all and it's about a year ago that was asked to if I would preach a sermon before the University at Cambridge and my instinct was to say no and then I thought well I I would try and think of something I really wanted to say and something which is quite close to my heart and and I preached on the subject of education and on the subject of private education and that it was time well overdue really for an amalgamation between state education and private education if only to begin with a sixth form level and I preached this sermon at the beginning of June this year in King's College Chapel and I'm not normally nervous if I've got my text in front of me but I was very nervous then simply because of the architecture I mean I suppose one of the finest buildings in Europe and to find yourself speaking in it then having to speak quite slowly because of the echo was quite daunting but anyway this is this is what the end of the of the what I said unlike today's I'd the ideologues I have no fear of the state I was educated at the expense of the state both at school and university my father's life was saved by the state as on one occasion was my own this would be the nanny state a sneering appellation that gets short shrift with me without the state I would not be standing here today I have no time for the ideology masquerading as pragmatism that would strip the state of its benevolent functions and make them occasions for profit and why roll back restate only to be rolled over by the corporate entities that have been allowed they encouraged to take its place I am uneasy when prisons are run for profit or health services either the rewards of probation and the levy and the alleviation of suffering a human profits and nothing to do with balance sheets these days no institution is immune in my last play the Church of England is planning to sell off Winchester Cathedral why not says a character the school is private why shouldn't the cathedral be also and it's a joke but it's no longer far-fetched with ideology masquerading as pragmatism profit is now the sole yardstick against which all our institutions must be measured the policy that comes not from experience but from assumptions false assumptions about human nature with greed and self-interest thing to be it's only reliable attributes in pursuit of profit the state and all that goes with it is sold from under us who are its rightful owners and with the frenzy and dedication that call up memories of an earlier iconoclasm one past time I had as a boy which thanks to my partner Rupert Thomas I resumed in middle age was looking at the old church his church bibbing larkin dismissively called it that we perhaps have a little more expertise than Larkin disingenuously claimed he had I do know what Rudolph's were for instance they like Larkin I'm not always able to date a roof the charm of most medieval churches often consists in what history is left and one learns to delight in little the dregs of history a few fifteen century Ben Chen's and alabaster tomb chests or where the glass is concerned just the leavings of bigotry ideology weakening when it came to out of the reach tracery the hammer too heavy the ladder too short so that only fragments of the glass survived a cluster of Crockett's and towers maybe the glimpse of a Golden City with a devil leering down in my Bleeker moments these shards of history seemed to me emblematic obviously of what has happened to England in the past but a reminder and a warning of what in other respects is continuing to happen in the present with the fabric of the state and the welfare state in particular stealthily dismantled as once the fabric of churches more rudely was sold off farmed out another dissolution with profit taking precedence over any other consideration and the perpetrators today is locked into their ideology and convinced of their rightness as any of the devout louts who fall and 500 years ago still been the windows and scratched out the faces of the Saints as a passport to heaven and they end with the last lines of my first play 40 years on to let a valuable sight at the crossroads of the world at present on offer to corporate clowns outlying portions of the estate already disposed after sitting tenants of some historical and period interest some alterations and improvements necessary [Music] you

Channel: Bodleian Libraries

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Keywords: alan benet, alan bennet, alan benett

Id: OLjvpSxhmh4

Length: 58min 18sec (3498 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020