Anne Lonsdale interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 1st July 2008

0:09:07 Born in Huddersfield in 1941; family is predominantly Scots; grandfather, Alexander Menzies, spoke only Gaelic until he was twelve; went to Perth which he loved; a poor man's Bernard Shaw, a journalist who wrote curious works of pseudo literature; spent time in London where my father got a scholarship to Christ's Hospital; he became a physicist; he was a Cambridge man, and introduced his first research student, C.P. Snow, to his college, Christ's; his sister, Alice, trained as a music teacher; introduced a strange new system of learning music which I had to follow, but unsuccessful; Aunt Alice believed in second sight; my mother, who had been brought up in Yorkshire, did not; aware of strained relations from early on; I was much closer to my father; my mother was uncertain of life which made her dictatorial; she had come from a simple background and had gone to Leeds University; her older sister had been to Newnham which made her feel inadequate; she then married her professor at Leeds; father went from there to found physics department at Leicester; brought my mother into a social world where she felt out of her depth; she remained so all her life but was always stressing that she knew what was right to me; not the best of relationships; I did not know my father until I was five; he had flown planes in the First World War and was taken back into the Air Ministry where he worked non-stop; my mother had a sort of base in Harrow but I was sent out of London, sometimes with her and sometimes not; made me an observer and acutely aware of body language; my father had links with an organisation which began in Cambridge, attempting to bring German and Austrian academics out when they lost their university jobs; I spent at least one or two years with the Weisenberg family in Manchester; they had got out of Austria with their two aged aunts; some of my earliest memories are from that time as there was such a strong emotional life in that setting; the house was always full of other refugees who had come from internment camps on the Isle of Man; I know that I heard talk of people who had died and what was really happening in Germany; made me aware that there is absolutely nobody in control, you are on your own; am sure that it affected the rest of my life; my father's reaction to that period was that he'd had a lot of collaborations, particularly with Karli Weisenberg, before the war and as soon as the war was over he set out to rebuild those links; my summer holidays were always at pan-European conferences

10:54:24 My first school was a rather remarkable place; when I think back to who was there, Jeremy Greenstock became our ambassador in the U.N. and then in Iraq; Marcus Beresford became head of G.K.N.; this amazing school was known as 'Miss Nich's'; Miss Nicholson was a prim, tough, lady who preferred dealing with small boys; there were about ten of us in three classes; it was a private school in Harrow; we read a Shakespeare play every year from year one, and then went to see in in Harrow School; I was used to reading real things from the age of five; we were taught French from the start and a bit of Latin; the only downside was that the maths teacher was my mother, which didn't work at all; there was a debate as to my next school, either North London Collegiate which was a bit far to travel or to a boarding school; I objected to both so I went to a local school; by the time I had done 'O' levels I really worked on my own, going there during the day but with teachers from Harrow School in the evening;
Heathfield was a private school but I went there on 11+; I became a classicist at that stage so was influenced by the Latin teacher; I really wanted to play the cello but it was deemed too heavy as I was thought of as a delicate child; suggested that I start with the violin though I hated it as did my mother; however, it was good to play in an orchestra; music has been decreasingly important in my life as art has become more important; my father always painted watercolours but I can't, I just like looking at pictures; my favorite picture in College is Maggi Hambling 'Gulf Women Prepare for War', and she has been the person I have had greatest pleasure in meeting

16:26:23 We inherited the art collection in Newhall; began partly in response to Newhall being grey brick with almost nothing on it; my predecessor, Valerie Pearl, and colleagues asked people if they would lend or give works for the walls; the inspiration behind that had been Alan Jones who was married to a Research Fellow of Newhall, and is now a curator at the Hayward; she was aware that quite a lot of women were finding it difficult to be shown and that quite a lot made big works which couldn't be hung or bought; she created the list of people that we wrote to and they overwhelmingly gave; it has now grown to the stage that since we have everything on the web, people actually want to be on that web site; my contribution has been to make sure that we have quality control as we had accepted everything until then; the collection is the biggest outside Washington D.C. but doesn't go back much before 1954 [http://www-art.newhall.cam.ac.uk/gallery/works/]

18:44:04 Being an only child, my mother was in her forties when I was born, I spent quite a lot of time on my own; one of the things I liked was anything to do with athletics where you kept practicing; did junior County hurdling and long-jump; did not continue at university; I applied to Oxford and Royal Holloway in the year prior to taking 'A' levels; I got a scholarship to St Anne's, Oxford, and went in 1958 at seventeen; so nice to be with people who liked the things I did; I was passionate about classics and did Mods and Greats which was a wonderful course then; Iris Murdoch was my Moral Philosophy tutor; she was an extraordinarily realistic and kind person, a marvellous teacher; in Oxford in those days you read your essay aloud so you could hear your mistakes, a wonderful way of learning; learnt to time your essays so you could make your points and get feedback; she said we were far too young to understand moral issues when we started so sent us off to read Rousseau, Augustine, 'The Golden Bowl' etc.; Isabel Henderson was an Ancient Historian, a remarkably able woman at Somerville; she was very interested in political thinking in itself; never did any drama; worked pretty hard and got at 2:1 in Mods, partly because my tutor was anxious that I should do everything and I wasn't good enough at things like verse composition which I had done very little of, most women never did it; she was very keen that I become a proper classicist; Professor Eduard Frankel, very small and tough, and his seminars were a privilege to go to

27:02:10 In my third year I got engaged to a fellow classicist who had taken up Chinese; I got interested and really wanted to change but I was encouraged to finish Mods and Greats; in the February of my final year he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer; I went on with my degree until his leg broke and had to be amputated; he was in hospital and we married as in those days it was a way of having access; St Anne's took care of me knowing that after every exam I would be at the hospital, leaving food in my room; after the last exam I took him out of hospital and things went on until December 1962, when he died at home; I had begun doing Chinese as a second first degree while he was dying and I went on with it after that; I went on to teach Chinese, by which time I had married again; remarried in 1964, took Schools in 1965 and my son was born ten days later; I went on working in Chinese, trying to do a Ph.D. with children; didn't work terribly well as I had got into a difficult subject, Yuan drama; a wonderful period of literature as the Chinese couldn't get political jobs; turned their talent to dissenting drama, full of anti-Mongol messages; it was not a good topic as I had been trained in Classics to need to understand everything and this required too much research and my Chinese wasn't good enough; I had a great supervisor, David Hawkes, the Professor of Chinese

34:21:24 I went on until the point where David, who had been translating the great Chinese novel 'Dream of the Red Chamber' and was completely exhausted, moved to Wales to breed goats for a bit; this left his teaching to be done, which I did; this meant that there was no time for children, husband, doctorate; also had a year when we all had chicken-pox, mumps and measles, one after the other; as a result, gave up teaching in 1973; I first went to China in 1964 as a phony secretary on a Board of Trade mission to sell scientific instruments; they rumbled me fairly early on as in the evenings I was going to see people I knew; my own Chinese teacher at Oxford had gone back to China with his wife, thinking it was their patriotic duty; suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution; also had contact with Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang who were the editors of Chinese literature; she had been at St Anne's and he at Merton; I met my first red guard in their house, their twelve year old daughter; we were running a trade exhibition and one of my jobs was to go with a driver to the post office to send a telegram, which was the way we communicated then; the driver stopped and asked who I really was; told him I was a student doing a vacation job; had to prove my story by translating from a book of Tang poetry; the interrogator was not impressed by my language skill but accepted that I was probably telling the truth and I was not deported

39:49:09 In 1964 it was wonderful for people in Beijing as it was just after the Great Leap Forward when 30,000,000 had died of starvation, and at last there was food in the shops; at that stage it felt that things might start to improve; I did speak to people about the starvation and Joseph Needham must have known about it too; then the walls were still around Beijing and it was a mediaeval city; there were still story-tellers, and children everywhere; everybody was uniformly dressed with the same 'five treasures' - alarm clock, bicycle, radio, watch and sewing machine; a lot of people lived in Hutongs; on my first night in China we were invited to dinner with the Third Secretary of the British Embassy who was living in a Hutong, David Wilson, ex-Master of Peterhouse; he was a very good diplomat at the time as his Chinese was immaculate; he had also worked out the best way to get to know the populace was  to buy a beautiful small red sports car and drive out to the villages around Beijing; no Chinese could resist and inevitably they would talk

43:03:13 Went to China again in 1966 at the height of the Cultural Revolution and we were deported after one week; we were running round reading character posters and evidently knew too much; what was striking at that period was the white notices of sentence and execution which followed within an hour; no sense that there might be an appeal; still happening like that in 1978 when I was taking tourists; saw processions of people being taken to execution in Shandong Province; there was still trouble with the Gang of Four and things didn't improve until Deng Xiao-Ping; I did not feel guilty about going to China then as  I could report on what I had seen and also believed that the Government might be evil but the people were good; have always felt that one should stand by people in bad regimes; think that some understanding of what a country is really  like is better than nothing; however, I would not go to Zimbabwe at present, nor Burma; knew Aung San Suu Kyi at Oxford and she always said don't come; when she got her honorary degree here and there was an empty chair, Michael Aris stood behind it; he had stayed with me the night before and managed to 'phone her that morning to tell her; she was funny and sharp, hard as steel but loyal and kind; she was beautiful to watch in everything she did, a wonderful person

47:57:20 Married Roger Lonsdale in 1964; at that point he had just got a University lectureship in English Literature at Balliol; came from Hornsea in Yorkshire; son Charles was born in 1964 and Katy in late 1966; in 1973 I took a job as a University administrator running the Oriental Institute which was tantalising, but a good introduction to administration; we had a wonderful Registrar who made us move round against our better judgement, but made sure that we knew about money, buildings, the whole way in which the University works; became very interested in university systems and got involved in training administrators in Africa, also becoming a representative on European university networks, and seeing what a curious institution this is; in 1984 the University information officer was retiring; there was talk of saving money by not reappointing but I objected; was given the job for a year or two and ended up with an Information Office, Press Office, Publications Office, Events Office, and International Office by 1993, and ended up as Director of External Relations; it was needed for a campaign that was started in 1986

55:37:04 Got involved in the Central European University when it was becoming clear that things were loosening in Central and Eastern Europe; Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were becoming open; George Soros turned up one day saying that he wanted to put money into scholarship schemes for Eastern Europe which should be matched by money from the University which would administer the scheme; Neill, the Vice-Chancellor, asked me to take this on; aready I had been in talks with people in the Foreign Office who wanted to make a breakthough into this area; I went back to them and told them of the offer and they agreed to make the funding available; within a week we could tell Soros; we were to be allowed to select the students rather than taking the nomenclaturer offered us; that was how I got to know Soros; when he set up the Central European University he invited me to come and run it, so I did; George Soros is a remarkable man, whom I like and admire; however, you had to be able to stand up to him; he is a reasonable man but likes things to happen fast; there were faculties of the University in Prague, Budapest and Warsaw; we also set up something which we hoped would be part of it in Moscow but which became the independent Moscow School for Social and Economic Sciences of which I am still a trustee; the thing died in Prague because Václav Klaus couldn't stand Soros and Czechs really did not want to be reminded of the past; if flourished in Warsaw in sociology; the early days in Budapest were tough, difficult to keep the balance between subjects and students, but it was fantastic; in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell one believed it had changed until the shadows of Yugoslavia; the language used was English; I tried to learn Hungarian, but very hard

1:01:10:16 Came to Cambridge in 1996 as President of New Hall; I was astonished at how well they spoke English; found people incredibly nice; seemed much more peaceable and less political; can only assume that this comes from the scientific ethos of the place; not sure that it has anything to do with the greater autonomy of Oxford colleges; one of the things that should be remembered about Alec Broers is that he did so much for the Colleges by fighting for the college fee; think the Colleges Committee turned into a really useful body from then; were very close to losing the college fee under Margaret Thatcher and also again in the 1990's; it is a contant fight; from 1973 the amount of money per student has gone down and Government pressure has gone up; think both Oxford and Cambridge are absolutely right that they must diversify the sources of their funding; when I was first at Oxford it was 65% dependent on the State, now it is about 27%; Cambridge is the same; I would like to get it down below 10% but not get rid of it; Harvard takes Government money; I am all for diversity, for women's colleges, a range of institutions, all of which would bring something different; would deeply deplore losing the self-government of Oxford and Cambridge completely; think we have done well here with Alison Richard walking a delicate path; this is not just an educational institution. people here are stars and could all go elsewhere; the only reason that they don't is because they have got a stake in this place

1:08:17:12 New Hall is not to be called Murray-Edwards College; goes back to Dame Rosemary Murray as when the College was set up they couldn't agree on a name so was called the New Hall; she always said it was a dreadful name but when a benefactor comes and gives us a foundation endowment we will change the name and the benefactor will have the choice; I told this story everywhere because I knew when I arrived that the College was in pretty bad trouble, buildings were falling down and morale was at rock-bottom; first thing to do was to get a burser, sort out what needed to be done with the buildings, and to try to raise money; went to look for a big name; at that point Ros Edwards nee Smith, an ex-student, had emerged with £1,000,000 for building repair; told Ros and her husband, Steve, about our need for money but never thought more about it until I got a phone call from them offering help; they are enormously thoughtful people believing that the best thing to support is higher education which will produce the people who will change the world for the better; they also believe that we must encourage philanthropy; the agreement was finally made in 2005 but we were able to tell Rosemary in 2004 before she died, when she agreed that her name could be used; the Edwards donation is a family gift

1:13:01:05 We do not have a chapel, it is a secular College; if I have any belief it is Daoism as I believe in permanent change; I can see that it was necessary to invent religion but can't see it in terms of human relations; my father was a straight-forward Christian for whom the mysteries of complex physics merged into the mysteries of creation, but not me; my politics is old-fashioned Labour, but not New Labour; totally against the Iraq war which was so destructive, run by people who did not know what they were doing; I think we were lied to; six months before, when I was trying to arrange an event, I was told by a large corporation that we would be at war then; this was before we had declared war or had gone through the process but certain people already knew; I tried to do my best ever since; we started having Iraqi academic visitors the first year after; will do anything to encourage rebuilding of academia in Iraq, something I hope to do later; do not get any time for academic work; I am working for the organisation my father was involved in for academic refugees, for projects connected with George Soros in Central Asia, but not Yuan drama; I retire in September and am already the Chair of Camfed which was started by Ann Cotton, and concerns itself with girls education in Africa; an organization that has grown in ten years from Ann Cotton raising money by baking cakes and selling them in Cambridge Market to the latest donation of 1.8 million from Goldman Sachs; I am very proud that everything on the ground is done by the local people; will also continue with CARA [Council for  Assisting Refugee Academics], particularly working for Iraqi academics; am trustee for the European Humanities University which was kicked out of Minsk and is now in Vilnius; we left the library in Minsk and three weeks ago the women working in the library were threatened by gunmen; so plenty to do; I shall continue to live in Cambridge; my daughter and grandchildren, who are very important, live in Oxford, so I have two great places to be