Robert Hinde interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 7th and 20th November 2007

0:09:07 Born in 1923 in Norwich; father was a GP who had married a nursing sister at Guys where he had trained; youngest of four children; mother was Isabella Taylor from a family in Kirkby Lonsdale, Westmorland; her father had died early and her mother had brought up six children by starting a cake shop; several of the girls had courageously left to work elsewhere; my mother was very loving and I got a great deal of her attention as the youngest; think my security stems from having had a very good relationship with her; father was a  conscientious GP with an intense interest in natural history and also the ancient history of the Middle East where he'd served in World War I; sure that his encouragement of my natural history instincts were important

3:35:20 Went to Oundle school at eleven which was too young and I hated it; I made no real friends there; known from early on as "the professor" as I wore glasses; not myopic but father mistakenly thought I had a squint aged two and had to wear glasses; not very good at games; I was entered for School House as the head of house, Kenneth Fisher, had an acquaintance with Kirkby Lonsdale; first boy to go into a science school certificate form where the form master, Ian Hepburn, to whom I owe an enormous debt; moved to his house where he was a wonderful bachelor housemaster where there were concerts on Sunday nights; he was a keen naturalist and wrote a good book on flowers of the coast for the New Naturalist series; took boys rock climbing and took me bird watching a lot; Fisher was also a keen birdwatcher and also took me out; at the end of my time at Oundle the war was beginning and the wife of his son, James Fisher, the famous ornithologist, came and taught me English and was a great influence; she made me not just a scientist by supplying me with books to read during the war

8:56:07 Hepburn was a chemist; I was not allowed to do biology at school as that was for farmers; no good at Latin but did chemistry, physics and maths; other hobbies included fishing; collected butterflies; another master who was good to me was Capt. Collier M.C. who had retired from the Indian Army and was a butterfly collector; from Oundle got a great deal of encouragement from the staff; made few friends and was bullied a bit by the boys

11:03:00 Attempted a scholarship to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and did reasonably well in chemistry and physics but failed on maths; after I had been in the Air Force for about six months the Headmaster arranged a closed exhibition to St John's; had signed on for air crew at seventeen and a quarter but not called up until the end of 1941; stayed on at Oundle and then worked for the Young Men's Christian Association, driving a van taking tea round to the anti-aircraft sites in Norfolk; also worked with James Fisher who was doing rat control research in the Port of London; while working with him remember going to the telephone in London Zoo and being told that my brother was missing; he was the eldest in the family and an RAMC doctor and his troop ship was torpedoed; parent had no news of him for several months and eventually found a letter in a Liverpool newspaper listing the survivors; father got in touch with one of them and learned that my brother had died a very horrible slow death of wounds and exposure in an open boat in the Atlantic; effect on my parents was exacerbated a couple of years later when they heard that I was missing; the effect of bereavement is not often talked about in the context of war; in my childhood I lived next door to a family with children about the same age and were very close; Graham, my immediate contemporary also died in the war, shot down in 1944, and this influenced own later interest in war

16:24:24 Later interest in religion was not influenced by work with YMCA at that time; called up and sent to Southern Rhodesia to train as a pilot; went on to flying training school and flew tiger moths; group of us were selected for Coastal Command and sent down to George in South Africa to train as a navigator; came home on a troop ship via South America; took months and months despite being on a fairly fast troop ship without an escort, having to keep watch for submarines; I was then a mild sceptical Christian but the man I was on lookout duty with was a passionate atheist; talked for weeks and weeks and when we got to England, he was a Christian and I was an agnostic; eventually joined a  Catalina crew, flying boats, and posted to a squadron operating in the Indian Ocean from Ceylon with an outstation in the Maldive Islands; we were looking for the Japanese fleet and submarines; meant very long trips over the sea of eighteen hours or so; not especially dangerous; glad to say I was never involved in killing anybody; the dangers were either running out of fuel, bad weather, or while in England, flying into a mountain in bad weather; one crew did find the Japanese fleet and just lasted long enough to get the radio message out; came back to England and trained as a Sunderland pilot; did a few operational trips but then the war was over; because I had an exhibition at St John's I persuaded the Air Force to give me early release and came up to Cambridge in January 1946

21:49:08 Did a lot of bird watching and the first academic lecture I gave was to the Oxford Bird Club on the birds of Southern Rhodesia; I had started to take an external London degree by correspondence in zoology and subsidiary chemistry and I took and passed the latter so I only had zoology to take; eventually finished it immediately after my Cambridge degree and got a class lower in London than I got at Cambridge; thought I would get an extra vote but they had abolished university seats in Parliament; at Cambridge I read Natural Sciences, initially physiology, chemistry and zoology, then part 2 zoology; I got a 2:1 in my first year then a first in the two following years; spent a great deal of time on the Cambridge sewage farm watching migrant birds; organized watch at different sewage farms all over the country to see how migrant waders behaved; during that time fortunate to come across a bird on the Cambridge sewage farm that had never bred in Britain before, or so was believed, and that was the moustached warbler; the record was accepted by the British Ornithologists Union committee until last year when it was questioned and has been removed from the British list; was important to me as it got me my first job; talking of Cambridge, I did make a number of friends among the ex-servicemen; what was extraordinary was that we never talked to each other about our war experiences; the man with whom I shared a room had shot down three Junkers 88 in fifty minutes and was a D.F.C. and an Air Force Cross which he got after the war for flying planes through the sound barrier; another chap had no legs and I have a vivid memory of us all going to the pub and his not being able to keep up and calling him peg legs, but never knew how he lost them; I have reflected on this more recently; why? partly not wanting to shoot a line, partly guilt at being a survivor or having killed

27:25:17 I had two supervisors in St John's in zoology, Frank Hollick who was very shy, and each would sit on the edge of our chairs in his room and neither of us say a word for what seemed ten minutes at a time; he was very interested in the aesthetics of animals but not a very good teacher; the other was Colin Bertram who had been in charge of fish cultivation in Cyprus during the war to feed the troops with carp and about that time became secretary of the British Genetical Society and was always talking about people being from good breeding stock; lovely man, Palmer, taught me chemistry; was incredibly old; Benians was the Master at that time, a classicist; Jack Goody was there but we didn't know each other then

30:04:06 David Lack, the ornithologist, had been to see the moustached warbler and offered me a job as a research assistant in Oxford with the possibility of doing a D.Phil.; he wanted me to do a comparative study of the feeding behaviour of rooks and jackdaws; struck me as boring, it was in relation to Gause's hypothesis that no two species with the same ecology could exist together at the same time; David was moving from robins to studying the ecology of great tits at that time; suggested instead doing a behavioural study of the great tit and that is what I did; lovely time, working in Wytham Wood just outside Oxford; I wandered round with a notebook and field glasses writing down what I saw;  so happens that my daughter is now a research fellow at Newnham and is also studying great tits but she has incredibly complicated apparatus; what has been nice for me has been to work as her unpaid assistant counting eggs in nest boxes; Lack was not a good supervisor; he corrected the English but wasn't especially interested in what I was doing; lucky in Oxford because Niko Tinbergen came to Oxford when I was a D.Phil. student and as he had no students of his own I had his undivided attention for a while; he was the person who really influenced me; he was a very charismatic man who did everything himself
 
34:02:13 Lorenz, an Austrian, did some very interesting work in 1930's and in a sense got ethology going; Tinbergen was working independently in Holland and got into contact with Lorenz shortly before the war; Lorenz was taken prisoner of war by the Russians; Tinbergen was taken into a hostage camp by the Germans and had a rough time; I was at the first conference where they met after the war and they tried to have a good relationship with each other, but Niko said to me that the thing he couldn't bear was hearing German voices in the corridor outside his bedroom; although they were both passionately interested in animal behaviour, Lorenz was an ideas man, Tinbergen was an experimenter; there were really two ethologies, Lorenzian and Tinbergian; I was very much influenced by Niko;; Lorenz was very kind to me until I wrote a paper criticising his model of motivation and then he used to speak of Niko and me as the English speaking ethologists as though we were a separate race

36:41:05 At Oxford I was newly married and didn't have much time for college life although I was a member of Balliol; did a D.Phil. in eighteen months; another piece of luck, Bill Thorpe of Jesus College, Cambridge, was wanting to start an ornithological field station to study the relation between instinct and learning and he asked Lorenz to come and be the curator but he had another job; he then asked Reg Moreau who also turned it down, and then he asked me; I came in 1950 to Madingley and worked there until I retired; we spent the first year putting up a perimeter fence and aviaries; we had no building except for a small Nissan hut which had been left by the Home Guard which we used as a food store; the University had just acquired the whole of the Madingley estate and that is why Thorpe had been able to establish it there; I did more work on great tits and finches for the first few years; then did a little work on imprinting; Thorpe was interested in how birds learnt to build nests or whether they did so instinctively; a problem still not fully solved; I got slightly diverted into studying the endocrinological basis of nest building because I wanted to have canaries that would breed all the year round; we could show the interaction between changes in the external world, like daylight, the endocrine changes in the bird, changes in the behaviour of the bird which produced new stimuli to which it responded, which produced new endocrine changes in the bird; I was working at the same time as Danny Lehrman who was an important influence on comparative psychology and ethology was working in Rutgers in US and he became one of my closest friends; he was a very overweight New York Jew, very clever, very verbal, and his work on that topic has been carried on in the Institute of Animal Behaviour in Rutgers to this day; at that time we used to see each other about once a year; remember once arriving at five in the morning and Danny keen to go bird watching and by ten o'clock we'd seen fifty-one species

42:15:19 I was extremely fortunate that it was so easy to get money then and I had one grant application turned down because I had not asked for enough money; was in contact with a Colonel in the United States Air Force based in Brussels and he came to see the work that I was doing with canaries; as a result he wrote a grant application for me to the American Air Force and I got support from them for three years; he did a follow up application on sensory deprivation in canaries; he was a cardiac physiologist whose aim in life had been to see what he could put across the generals in Washington and I was his second best; the best had been a study of Indian fakirs on the grounds that they could help American airmen if they came down in the sea

45:38:50 During this time I was existing for several years without a proper job, then I was made a senior assistant in research and eventually made assistant director of research, but I never had a proper lectureship; applied for a demonstratorship in psychology and didn't get it which was all to the good as it would have involved a lot of teaching; much freer to do research of the sort that I wanted to do; had been working  on imprinting in parent-offspring relationship in birds; this came to the ears of John Bowlby who was a psycho-analyst; at that time he was very concerned with the fact that parents were not allowed to visit their children in hospital except in visiting hours; felt this was bad because before the war he'd worked a lot with adolescents who had got into trouble and found that nearly all of them had had a separation experience from their parents; this was only clinical evidence and he wanted experimental evidence to try and confirm his thesis; I used to go to seminars at the Tavistock Clinic in London which he ran; we had nothing theoretically in common but an interest in the parent-offspring relationship; taught me an important lesson that it is not the theory but the problem; after a year or two John helped me get money to set up a rhesus monkey colony in Cambridge; we had six groups of rhesus monkeys each with a male and three or four females and their young; we spent a lot of time working out methods of recording behaviour which were subsequently used by primatologists in the field; we were able to show in the end that ten days separation could produce effects that we could pick up two years later in their inability to cope with stressful situations; this research took about ten years and we were able to contrast what happens with situations comparable with mother goes to hospital-infant stays at home, infant goes to hospital-mother stays at home, both go to hospitals together, both go to different hospitals; symptoms were exactly the same in monkeys as in young children but the details differed because of the different social structure of monkeys; made me realize both the value of comparative studies and their great danger; in humans the child is less affected if mother goes to hospital and he stays at home in a familiar environment; in monkeys it was the other way round because when the mother came back she had to re-establish her relationships with all the other group members and didn't have any time for a demanding infant; the social factor made the difference; however it did help Bowlby to get the hospital regulations changed; my second wife works in attachment theory still; have not personally looked at bringing up children in different cultures; Mary Ainsworth's work on the Buganda; [Macfarlane comment on Western child rearing compared with Japanese]

54:37:18 During that time offered a Royal Society Research Professorship which has allowed me to follow my research interests wherever they have led me; got it in 1963; Louis Leakey had come to the conclusion that the secret of man's origins lay with the great apes and that women were better at studying them than men; he had found Jane Goodall and wanted her to get a Ph.D. and wanted someone to supervise her; Professor Hall at Bristol was the only other person working with monkeys in the United Kingdom and he had died from a monkey bite; I got the opportunity to supervise her and later Dian Fossey on gorillas; spent time in their camps getting all the excitement and pleasure of their research on chimps and gorillas without having to do any of the hard work; subsequently advised many students who worked in their camps; although I never did any fieldwork on non-human primates I have had a considerable number of students, some of whom became distinguished, who worked on their sites; memories of supervising Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, neither of whom liked writing academic papers; they taught me that animals are individuals and not just members of a species

Second part

0:09:07 Memories of Dian Fossey; tracking gorillas; Fossey's phobia of heights; this period of my life was a wonderful time at Madingley with researchers coming in and out all the time, passionately interested in animals and in their research, being able to communicate with each other; Pat Bateson was almost my first student; this period began in 1968 I was 45 and continued for the next ten to fifteen years; personally happy too as I had remarried 

7:37:23 I have always wanted to make the world a better place; when first a fellow of St John's there were five fellows, all historians, who teased me about this; decided it would be better to study children than monkeys; recruited Judy Dunn to the unit and she helped me to get interested in child development; I was interested in mother-child relations but we didn't agree on attachment theory; I started a study with my second wife, Joan Stevenson-Hinde, on four year olds and their mothers; I worked in nursery schools with the four year olds and she worked in the homes; became in effect part of the nursery school; Joan got interested in shyness in children and has gone on to do remarkable work; I tried too hard to use the recording techniques which had done so well with monkeys and they weren't really applicable for children, thus not especially fruitful years

12:12:05 Had thought that if we understood how people behaved then could help to make the world a better place; [Macfarlane on own work on children in different cultures]; during that period started the Cambridge Association against Nuclear Warfare; Pat Bateson was partly involved; then got involved in ex-servicemen's C.N.D. to alter the perception that C.N.D. was just peopled by long-haired hippies; from that graduated into Pugwash, an organization that grew out of the Russell-Einstein manifesto in 1955 against nuclear weapons; it gave rise to conferences on science and world affairs, the first meeting of which was held in 1957 and involved scientists from both sides of the iron curtain; has had many subsequent meetings and workshops, mostly on nuclear weapons but on other subjects too; the movement got the Nobel Peace prize with Sir Joseph Rotblat in 1995; when I joined in the 1980's it worked primarily at the political level, trying to get the right scientific insights across to politicians; politicians have listened because of its impeccable scientific integrity; this has taken up a lot of my time in retirement

19:31:12 In 1989 I was elected Master of St John's which cut down research for five years; I really enjoyed being Master because at the centre of things; spent a lot of time raising money for a new undergraduate library; did about sixty meetings all over the world; although I resented the time spent, these meetings could be fun because the people who came were the loyal Johnians; their questions reflected the nostalgia they felt for the college; successful in raising the money; debates on whether the library should be open all night and later noted students working there at 4am; John's is a lovely college and very cooperative at that time; did write some papers at that time but began to feel itchy for research; did lecture a little each year and from the mid-nineties have been lecturing on personal relationships to SPS; gave that up when I was eighty as I thought it was improper to be lecturing on love to young students; Joan and I are still involved in a course of lectures in psychology; quite enjoy lecturing; in the 1950's when I was very insecure without a proper job, St John's made me steward and I was in charge of food in the hall and the undergraduates' wine cellar; they did not realize I had no interest in either; two or three years later they made me a tutor instead which I enjoyed as I had contact with undergraduates; gave it up when I got the Royal Society research professorship in 1963

27:51:22 Reflections on the causes of war; two things essential with institutionalised war, supply of weapons and young people willing to carry them; my view is that although aggressiveness plays a part, the real issue is duty; [further reflections on war including Macfarlane's]

34:19:12 Interest in religion stemmed from my upbringing; as mentioned before I became an agnostic on the wartime voyage but put off further thought on it until retirement; when I was Master I wrote a book on relationships and another on war, and also wrote a book called 'Why Gods Persist' which is trying to use all the biology, psychology and social science that I have learnt to bear on the question why people believe in gods and why religion is so powerful; not keen on Richard Dawkins denigration of religion as a lot of people get a lot out of it; he treats religion as a unitary entity whereas  following Malinowski I would want to divide it into structural beliefs, narratives, ritual, moral code, social aspects and religious experience; each of these are mutually supportive but can be to the advantage of individuals, although less clear about religious experience; language people use to describe it is very like describing an aesthetic experience except for the interpretation; don't get Christians who have had visions of Buddha; began to feel that morality is the most important thing in the world today; wrote a book 'Why Good is Good' trying to show that what is basic in society is something like do as you would be done by; that is compatible with the importance of exchange and how moral precepts are passed on by interaction between what people do and what people are supposed to do; why are people nice? Recent thought is because early humans lived in competing groups that had to be cooperative with each other but not with another group; groups devised their own precepts and the ten commandments are not universally applicable; passed down through a dialectic about what people do and what they are supposed to do; in my lifetime that dialectic has led to divorce becoming more acceptable

42:55:00 Have just finished another book which goes a bit further and is trying to use an objective approach about how morality actually works in the real world; we have rules  but in nearly every case we have a means of excusing yourself from them; in many institutions in our society behaviour that is incompatible is either condoned or encouraged; in business ethics you no longer do as you would be done by but do the best for yourself; this is justified by the economists saying it is good for the consumer; in war soldiers are encouraged to kill; politicians by political necessity have to lie; in law you can't have a legal system without barristers who defend people whom they may suspect are guilty

45:44:23 Memory of J.B.S. Haldane at a disastrous early lecture I gave at University College; John Maynard Smith and G.P. Wells let a bat go in the auditorium and it flitted in and out of the projector beam and the audience was in hysterics; Haldane kindly took me off for a drink afterwards; brief reference to incest avoidance 

Postscript 20th November 2007

0:09:07 Luck at being an early entrant to subject of ethology; it insisted you always start with description, that you must study the behaviour of animals in their natural environment, that you must ask four questions: causal, developmental, functional, evolutionary (demonstrated with thumb); this came into collision with a group in the American Natural History Museum led by Schneirla who had a pupil, Daniel Lehrman, who wrote a vicious attack on ethology; we tended to picture Danny Lehrman as an ogre until he came across to Europe and talked with us; turned out to be an absolutely charming man; eventually led to a rapprochement between comparative psychology studied in the US and ethology as studied here; regret that I paid too little attention to the functional question which has become the centre of behaviour studies in recent years largely due to the work of W.D. Hamilton; very exciting to study the courtship of finches, for example, and argue from that how the displays evolved and what the relations between the different species were

4:27:10 Then moving into mother-child relations was a very exciting time as I felt I was doing something that might make a real difference in the world; also gave me a chance to get into the primate fieldwork; I was the only person who knew about non-human primates in this country at the time; role in teaching Jane Goodall was how to make precise recordings in the field which I had learnt by studying captive monkeys; then got involved in pre-school behaviour reflecting work of John Bowlby; led on to studying human relationships; at that time no science of human relationships only of human interactions; now a flourishing branch of psychology; tried to set up a scientific framework based on observation and analysis for studying all the complexities of human relations; thoughts on Desmond Morris; after this worked on religion and morality

9:13:04 I have never had to take any decisions in my life; had the choice of being a B.O.A.C. pilot or an undergraduate but fear of tutor [dislike of living out of suitcases RH] decided the latter; failed to get a demonstratorship in psychology; only other decision I have had to take was whether to let my name go forward as biological secretary of the Royal Society; decided against getting involved in administration to allow me to continue with research; wonderful to have had a Royal Society Professorship as it gave room to follow my interests; also lucky with my mentors like David Lack, Niko Tinbergen, Bill Thorpe; in the 1950's met Gabriel Horn and we edited a book together called 'Short Term Changes in Neural Activity and Behaviour'; think we met through a seminar run by Thorpe and Zangwill, Professor of Psychology, which was an effort to break disciplinary boundaries; Gabriel and I ran a conference and one of the Dutch participants gave us a bottle of geneva which we drank as we edited the manuscripts; Gabriel, Danny Lehrman and Jay Rosenblatt, also from the American Museum of Natural History, have been my three closest male friends; lucky in my second marriage to Joan Stevenson as she is also a psychologist and brought a new perspective to my work; Frank Beach, Professor of Psychology at Newhaven, wonderful man and very kind to me; Ernst Mayr, the biologist, with whom I did a paper; Danny Lehrman and Jay Rosenblatt, the latter became a psychoanalyst who continued also as an animal behaviourist

16:42:05 Have had some wonderful students; started with Pat Bateson who took up the study of imprinting; for some time he was director of the sub-department of animal behaviour at Madingley and I was director of the Medical Research Council Unit for the Development and Integration of Behaviour within that sub-department; Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, two very remarkable women; Peter Marler and John Crook were both students of Bill Thorpes at Madingley though I supervised Peter Marler for a while; John Crook underrated as he really made a breakthrough in behavioural ecology through a comparative study of weaver birds showing the relation between their life history and their nesting habits; he went to Bristol as a lecturer and then got more interested in Zen; later students include Richard Wrangham, now professor at Harvard; Dorothy and Robert Seyfarth, now at Pennsylvania; Sandy Harcourt and Kelly Stewart who studied gorilla, in Dian Fossey's camp

20:47:11 A question I sometimes ask myself is do I have any regrets about my academic career; I spent a lot of time doing things that were tremendous fun but were they really doing any good to the human race; studying canary and finch courtship don't see that the human race is much better for it though I sometimes kid myself that any advance in science is worthwhile; it is for that reason that I have turned more and more in the last thirty years towards studies of aggression and war and how to stop it, and religion and ethics; I sometimes kid myself that it is some use; I am very lucky to have got involved in Pugwash, an organization primarily of scientists which by maintaining an impeccable reputation is able to influence governments; that sort of meets everything I want to do

22:28:07 Advice to student to always do something you passionately want to find out about; no good being set a particular problem; own experience with David Lack wanting me  to work on the comparative behaviour of corvids but allowing me to follow my own interest instead; have always tried to do the same with students although Pat Bateson was a bit of an exception in following my work on imprinting; there is nothing more dreary than the mechanics of research; I spent five or six winters on my knees in a cold , draughty wooden bird room recording how often a chaffinch chinked when I put an owl in front of it; did try to give fieldworkers good preparation before they went out to the field and most practised recording techniques with our captive monkeys