THOSE SHADOWY RECOLLECTIONS.

Memory is odd and unpredictable. When I was asked, to my great pleasure, to write something for the centenary number of the Magazine I suddenly recalled the Friday afternoons of long ago when the subject of the weekend essay was given out. Invariably I set off for home convinced that I would be unable to think of anything to say about it and incapable, even if I could, of finding the words in which to say it. So it was again. I then remembered that 50 years ago I had written something for the Golden Jubilee number and, by a miracle, I managed to find it. It was an embarrassingly pompous little essay; but it made one or two good points and I wondered whether, with a little touching up, it might serve for the centenary. Alas, this prompted yet another recollection‑of an enterprising but foolish contemporary who, invited to do an essay about travel, submitted a bit of musical prose from Eothen in the confident but mistaken belief that Miss May Andrew, then a gifted and admired English mistress, would not have heard of Kinglake. This taught me to eschew plagiarism‑even from myself.

So what am I to say?

I suppose I found myself in the Harris Academy in 1911, at the age of five, because my father had gone there, at the age of eight, when the school was opened. For a fee of‑if I remember rightly‑no less than five shillings I was enrolled in the third infants' class‑the lowest‑and committed to the care of Miss Duff. My equipment included a slate, a box containing slate pencil, a wet sponge with which to clean the slate and, in a day or two, a `first' reader bought (nothing was free then) at Miss McGregor's book shop in Whitehall Street. I was taught so well that I do not now remember a time when I could not read‑a blessing for which I cannot be sufficiently grateful. I still treasure a prize I was given for reading when that first session ended. It was "My Book about South Africa" by Alice Taiwin Morris; and a chapter headed "Kafirs", after describing how they provided most of the labour on the farm, living in huts like beehives, continued: "The farmer and his wife said the Kafirs were lazy and stupid servants, but Oliver and I liked them, for they were always merry and good‑natured and told us stories of the time .... when the country belonged to the black people." In 1912 there was no Commission on Racial Equality.

In those days, unless you were exceptionally young or thick‑headed, you spent two years in the infants' department, going to school in the mornings only. There were then five years, ending with the Qualifying Certificate, of all‑day education in the harsher environment of the elementary department. The policy there‑and there was much to be said for it‑appeared to be to leave the growing boy (I suppose it was the same for girls, but they were kept in purdah and we knew nothing of their regime) to spend his first two years with one teacher and the following three with another. Mine were Miss Gray (later Mrs Gordon) and W. George Dickie; and between them they saw me into the higher grade. There were few relaxations from their diligent determination to do so ‑ a mid‑morning 'interval' of ten minutes, a drill period, and periods for drawing and singing. Singing was taught by an itinerant singing‑master called Nimmo Christie and was certainly not my forte. I failed only once to secure exclusion from me of the choirs chosen to perform at the annual exhibition; fortunately the rest of it sang 'Tom Bowling' with such panache that my cacophonous contribution passed unnoticed. There was a more agreeable relaxation for some of us in class five when we were allowed a period ‑ involving no examination ‑ in which we learned to say in French that our aunt's pen was ‑ improbably ‑ in the garden.

But I have no regrets about these early years. In spite of having to cope with nearly fifty of us our teachers gave us a grounding in the basics of education, and an encouragement to wink with accuracy and thoroughness, without which we could not have succeeded in the years ahead.

After taking the Qualifying Certificate we went on to do six years in the higher grade. There, of course, we had a separate teacher for each of the subjects in our curriculum. In the first three years‑at the end of which we took examinations for the Intermediate Certificate‑everyone did English, mathematics, history and geography, science and art. To those we could add optional subjects‑I chose French and Latin. Then, in my fourth year, having happily jettisoned art and science, I took up German and Greek. At this stage we settled down to the hard grind which ended with the higher leaving certificate, the bursary competitions and university.

That paragraph reveals a Freudian lapse of memory. My school reports for the years 1918 to 1921 include a mark for 'manual training'; and I regret to say that for one term it was at the leve l‑ 60% ‑below which the reportstated that marks were unsatisfactory. I am sure that my mark of 60 was a compassionate one, for manual training meant woodwork and I was no better at carpentry than at song. My first product was a bird perch‑though we had no bird and no intention of acquiring one. This was lucky, for no bird could have used my perch with comfort ‑ or safety.

In the twenties there was evidently some prestige or other value to be gained from the number of passes the school had in the two certificate examinations; I recall being put in for intermediate mathematics in my second year and having to sit the higher examination in both my fifth and sixth years. I am astonished, on reflection, to recall how much information we must have accumulated by the time we left school. The wonder grows that one small head was able to carry it. Much of it, of course, has long since gone‑my leaving certificate includes something called analytical geometry, for example, of which I entertain no recollection whatsoever ‑ but a surprising amount survives and I have never considered the time wasted in which I mastered even that which has been long forgotten.

To write about my last six years at school at any length is obviously out of the question. We worked hard and conscientiously, almost without realising that we were doing so. We were superbly taught by dedicated teachers with a real enthusiasm for their various subjects and an ability to communicate it to their pupils. And almost without exception they were men and women (not many women then, however) of strong personality and wide interests. Their high academic standards inspired us; and though there was no attempt to teach us current affairs we somehow came to have the same lively interest in the world around us as they did. Here the Saturday evening meetings of the Literary Society, with their lectures and discussions, were of help. Looking back, I can see much for which to be grateful and little to regret. Perhaps it would have been good for me if we had had a playing field and if I had been made to play games ‑ though I was always hopeless at any physical activity involving a moving ball.

Presiding over the whole school for all the time I spent there was J. Barry Robb, the Rector. He did not teach‑except for a short scripture period in the early morning in the upper school‑but he was an all‑pervading presence, in black‑frock coat in winter and in a well‑tailored grey morning‑coat in summer. He lived in Wormit and walked to the school ‑or vice versa‑ normally from the Tay Bridge station but sometimes, on sunny summer days, from Magdalen Green. He had a keen eye, both inside the school and out; and the knowledge of this, together with the unpredictability of his itineraries, had a notable influence on the degree of public decorum exhibited by his flock. He shared with a secretary a tiny room on the ground floor of the main school and there he must have done a monumental amount of organisational and administrative work without in any way neglecting his contacts with both staff and pupils. We made fun of him, of course, as the young will do‑for example, of his solemn statement at each annual exhibition that no progress had been made with the plans for a new school and that accordingly, like Moses, he was unlikely to enter the promised land (and he didn't). But his dedication to the school's interests and the tireless energy he brought to their advancement were an impressive lesson to us all.

I sometimes toy with the idea of trying to analyse how many of my habits of mind, my interests, my few good qualities and my many bad ones could be traced back to my years at the Harris and to those who taught there. Only, I think, the creditable ones. And if some of these are rather complex I suspect it may be the result of the variety of personality which was to be found in each department of the school. In classics Taylor and Steele‑splendid teachers both‑were as different as chalk and cheese. In mathematics, Holburn and Doig had quite dissimilar outlooks and approaches. In English, the moulds in which McHardy, Duncan and Miss Andrew were cast had nothing in common. Munro, in modern languages, was in a class apart. I can see now how this variety of personality, combined with a common quality of intellect and ability to teach, helped to equip us for the wider world of academic and professional life.

I need say very little about the old school itself; so much has been written about it already. It fell, like Gaul, into three parts. There was the new school in Park Place‑a handsome building for its time. There was the old school (with additions) in Tay Square. And there were the two doctors' houses‑one; which fell into disuse, in Tay Square and Doctor Don's‑a more friendly place‑in the Nethergate. In the infants' department my class was at one time in the new school and at another in the old. In the elementary department‑except for science‑we were in the new school and Dr Don's. If the object of those who allocated classrooms was to ensure that we know all the buildings intimately and had experience of both good and bad it could not have been more comprehensively achieved. It was a good training for the future; my working and domestic quarters over the last sixty years have been hardly less varied.

I have been writing about the years 1911 to 1924. How different in many ways the Harris Academy must be today. New subjects‑Spanish and Italian, I notice (but what about Greek?), business studies, food and nutrition, "modern studies", Technical studies, "fabric and fashion"; prizes for "effort"‑how happy I am to be above school age! And of course good buildings and equipment‑an assembly hall, a library and a museum (we had, if memory serves, a bookcase and a roomful of stuffed birds kept under lock and key) and a proper dining hall. In our day we had only a gloomy lunch room (which hardy anyone used) where it was possible to buy snacks of sorts. It fell, in popular esteem, well below the excellent Tommy Shepherd's shop in the Nethergate. In theory, the lunch room was open only during the morning break and at lunch time. But it was not impossible, with the co‑operation of a blind eye, to make a purchase at other times. I recall one dreadful day on which everything had gone wrong and which was moving restlessly towards its close when one daring boy, meaning to ask the formidable George Dickie to let him leave the room for another purpose, raised his hand and then, asked to state his requirement, replied "two apple tarts."

The other respect in which the new school differs most sharply from the old school is in the variety of its nonacademic activities. I have already mentioned games and athletics. But, these apart, we had nothing like the opportunities available today to cultivate leisure interest‑chess, music, public speaking, the Duke of Edinburgh award, travel at home and abroad. We were not organised in houses. We had no prefects. Our loyalties were strong and our friends and acquaintances were many. But we lacked the support of the corporate structures and the many recognised organisations which must be of so much value to the pupils of 1985.

What does it all add up to? The Harris Academy today is, I am sure, in many respects to be preferred to the school which I attended. It is certainly better housed and equipped and probably better geared to the needs of the modern world than the Academy of the early century was to those of that time. But I am always worried about the anxiety, which seems now to be so common, to relate school and university education still more closely to the specific requirements of particular professions and of particular industries‑with a special emphasis on those of the area in which the school or college happens to be situated. This is not the traditional and well tried concept of basic education as we have known it over the centuries. It may be all very well if the pupil knows what he wants to do in life and can be relied upon not to change his mind and if we can be sure that the needs we identify today will be there for the length of a working life. But I don't think we can be sure of either of these things. As we are seeing today, professional, commercial and industrial requirements can change dramatically. And there are still many pupils who cannot‑as I could not‑decide definitely on a career either at school or at university. Nor do I think it right that we should constrain them to do so.

So there is, I believe, still much to be said for the sort of general, mainly academic, education which I enjoyed and which certainly did me no harm. Even in retirement, and we are all going to have more leisure and retire earlier in future, the interests it led me to develop are a great comfort. The content of the curriculum will, of course, be adjusted as it always has been to take account of new scholarship, new scientific developments and continuing technological change. But, so adjusted, I believe it still offers a solid and satisfying base on which to build special skills when we know which of them we want to acquire. And there is still much to be done in the world for which the base itself will be a sufficient starting point.

It certainly was so in my own case which may serve as an illustration. I concluded, when I was at the stage of graduation, that I would find satisfaction in a career in the public service. So I got myself a job as an administrative civil servant by sitting (and paying for the privilege!) a stiff academic examination in no way related to what I subsequently had to do. Now I would have to offer a good honours degree and go through all sorts of tests and interviews (my expenses being paid!) to demonstrate that I had the right intellectual and personal qualities for administrative work. But I still would not need to have a specific qualification in any particular skill. If I was judged to be the right sort of material I would be posted (in my case it was to the Scottish Office) to a particular department where I would learn on the job‑with a bit more in‑service training than I in fact was given.

In the Scottish Office ‑ and subsequently in the Home Office and as a member of the Atomic Energy Authority‑I had to try continuously to analyse problems and come to an impartial judgment about how they should be tackled. To do this I had to get the facts right and identify the arguments on both sides of the case. And I had then to present the facts and arguments and set out my own conclusions as lucidly and competently as I could. For these tasks, what better preparation could I have had than in the years I spent at school and university? The skills and aptitudes you use in studying languages and mathematics, English and history, are highly relevant to what I have tried to do in a lengthy working life and have stood one in good stead. It isn't so much what you learn that matters; it is the art of learning‑accuracy, orderly and impartial thinking, the ability to marshall and set out an argument‑that makes the differences between success and failure, between job satisfaction and boredom or frustration. I was lucky in the school I went to because of the way in which I was taught, the way in which I became used to approaching new problems without undue apprehension, the way in which interest was excited and curiosity aroused, the environment in which accepted standards of intellectual and personal integrity prevailed without argument or question.

So as the Harris Academy enters its second century I realise that like so many others I owe it so much; and I am indeed grateful to it...for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day Are yet a master light of all our seeing.

Sir Charles Cunningham (1911‑24) Dux of the school 1924, Permanent Under Secretary of State at the Scottish Office 1957‑66.