Sir Anthony Laughton interviewed by Paul Merchant

234 Pages·2012·1.13 MB·English

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

NATIONAL LIFE STORIES

AN ORAL HISTORY OF BRITISH SCIENCE

Sir Anthony Laughton

Interviewed by Dr Paul Merchant

C1379/29

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Interview Summary Sheet Title Page

Ref no: C1379/29

Collection title: An Oral History of British Science
Interviewee’s Laughton Title: Sir
surname:

Interviewee’s Anthony Sex: M
forename:

Occupation: Oceanographer Date and place of 1927, Golders Green,
birth: Northwest London

Mother’s occupation: nurse Father’s furniture salesman/
occupation: businessman/antique
dealer

Dates of recording, Compact flash cards used, tracks (from – to):
2/9/10 (track 1-2), 21/9/10 (track 3-4), 21/10/10 (track 5-7), 29/11/10 (track 8-10), 19/1/11
(track 11-14)
Location of interview: Interviewees home, Chiddingfold, Surrey

Name of interviewer: Dr Paul Merchant

Type of recorder: Marantz PMD661

Recording format : 661: WAV 24 bit 48kHz
Total no. of tracks: 14 Mono or stereo: Stereo

Total Duration: 12:07:48

Additional material: 4 scans of 2 newspaper articles from Anthony Laughton’s
scrapbooks. Track 11 relates to archive film footage

Copyright/Clearance: Tracks 12 and 13 are closed for twenty years until February 2032.

Interviewer’s
comments:

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Anthony Laughton Page 1
C1379/29 Track 1

Track/Part 1

Could I start by asking you please when and where you were born?

Well, I was born in Golders Green in London in 1927, April 29th.

Thank you. And could you tell me something of your – of what you know of your
father’s life?

My father was born himself in Rugby and his father was a cabinet maker, and so
initially my father was apprenticed to his father at the bench making furniture. But he
didn’t think very much of this, he didn’t think that it was going to produce his fortune
and so he took off on his own and went to London to try to find a career for himself.
And he joined a furniture company, Gillow’s, now Waring & Gillow’s, where he
became a salesman and I think was a very good salesman probably. He did
sufficiently well in London to actually bring his sister and his brother and his mother
all up to live in London in the area of Golders Green and Hampstead. At that time it
was not so populated as it is now of course. But he later got into independent interior
design, interior decoration, having left the company and set up his own company and
that went well between the war years, but of course when World War Two came that
business completely went out of the window. And so after the war he actually then
got into the antique market, selling antiques, but by this time he was getting quite old.

Did he serve in the First World War?

[2:01]

He did serve in the First World War. He initially was called up as a private to serve in
the infantry. He took exception to his sergeant major who told him to fold his wet
towels at the bottom of his bed when he wanted to hang them out to dry. He then
went up to London on a leave, went to see the War Office, and said I can do better
than being a private, I’ve got languages, and he persuaded the War Office to give him
a commission there and then and he arrived back as a second lieutenant. That
commission took him out during the First World War essentially for ordering fruit
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from Sicily for the British army, bulk orders of oranges, working for the Royal Army
Service Corps, so he didn’t see any action.

And do you remember when he told you this, these stories about his war service? For
example, the story about sort of resisting the discipline in terms of being sensible
about the drying of towels, when did he tell you that?

Well, it was sort of part of the family history that got told, but he did before he died,
in his last few years, write about twenty pages of handwritten memoirs and the story
is in there … and I’ve incorporated his memoirs actually as a chapter in the book of
my own memoirs.

I see. And are there any other stories of his war service that he told or that were sort
of circulating in the family as family memories?

Not really, no, except the enjoyable time he had in Sicily in Taormina, a beautiful
port.

[03:57]

Thank you. And your paternal grandmother? I know that you’ve said a little bit
about your paternal grandfather.

My mother was born of a family by the name of Chamberlain. Her father, my
maternal grandfather, was in shipping and he lived in Southampton. He was – worked
for Cox’s shipping agents who had ships bringing goods of all sorts in, in and out of
Southampton, it later became Cox & Kings, now the travel agency. So my mother
and her two sisters lived in Southampton, one sister died tragically at the age of about
twenty-one, so there were two sisters surviving. They worked during the First World
War very much in Southampton looking after wounded soldiers coming back to the
port, and this was told by my mother and by my aunt. They worked on the camps on
Southampton Common where shiploads of wounded soldiers would come back from
the front, they’d help them to dress their wounds, feed them, encourage them or
enable them to get in touch with their families and so forth. And my mother worked
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at the Netley Hospital near Southampton and it was there that she met the man who
later became my godfather … but they didn’t get married. Quite where she met my
father I’m not sure but when they got married they moved to London where my father
was working at that time.

When did they marry?

1923 I think it was. Their first son was born but tragically died at the age of six
months and then the second son, my brother Dennis, was born in 1924, so the
marriage must have been earlier than ’23, and I was born in ’29 [1927]. So the family
was essentially Dennis, myself and my parents.

[06:28]

And apart from those details that you’ve already told me what did your mother tell
you of her wartime experiences in this capacity, in terms of both things that she did
but also her sort of feelings in response to what she was doing?

Well, I think everyone at that time, when they saw soldiers coming back in the
dreadful state of wounds from the trenches, it was nothing but compassion for these
people and a willingness to try to do something for them. I don’t think she ever talked
about the causes of war or the justification for war, I think that was a taken in those
days after what the Kaiser had done.

[07:15]

Yes, I see, thank you. And could you tell me about your mother’s parents, what you
know of them, or your sort of relations with them possibly?

Well, my grandfather, my maternal grandfather and grandmother, moved from
Southampton, they moved to Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire and lived in a house
called Milton Lodge. My grandfather had retired, he was very keen at the game of
bowls. He couldn’t ride a bicycle but he rode a tricycle and that’s something that
sticks in my memory. During the war they were living there in Gerrards Cross, the
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nearest they got to any damage was that a bomb fell in a house a street or two away
and brought the plaster down in the hall. My grandfather’s reaction was, ‘Wonderful
for the garden’ [laughs]. He was a very keen gardener and grew all sorts of things in
the garden, vegetables and fruit. He died … I think it must have been just at the end
of the war. My grandmother was looked after by her daughter Gertrude, my aunt,
who lived at Milton Lodge with her until she died. I don’t remember a great deal
about my grandmother, by this time of course I was away at school or later on in the
navy.

Do you have memories of your other grandmother, your father’s mother?

No, very few. She died when I was about six or seven I think. She had moved up to
London to be near to my father. My grandfather on my father’s side had died, oh, at
the beginning of the second millennium I think, so I never knew him. But the – my
grandmother I always remember clad in black with big hats on and sitting in a chair in
her garden, you know. I have a photograph of her that’s influenced – is how I
remember her.

[09:46]

Yes. Are there times spent with your mother’s father that you remember clearly, apart
from his reaction to the plaster coming down and so on? Do you remember spending
time with him?

I remember we used to go and have a Christmas dinner with them or we’d generally
drive from London to have a Boxing – not a Boxing Day, a Christmas Eve lunch with
my grandparents at Milton Lodge in Gerrards Cross. She was… My memory of my
grandfather was sitting reading the Financial Times, very often, reading Dickens, he
always liked to read Dickens at Christmas time and he’d sit in a particular chair that
we even now have in our sitting room.

[10:42]

Thank you. Your first home, presumably in London?
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The first home was in London, a house that my father and mother had bought in
Golders Green. Now there was a development of new houses probably in the ‘20s or
maybe before just off the North End Road leading – backing onto Golders Hill Park
and it was a network of fifty houses or so with three or four roads, all of which were
dead ends. So it was a very good place to be brought up, one could bicycle and
tricycle and be pushed around in a pram and … and my brother and I were frequently
taken to Golders Hill Park where there were lovely open spaces, a small zoo with
wallabies. And on the other side of the North End Road was Hampstead Heath. Now
Hampstead Heath was, and is, a huge open space, it was wonderful for young boys to
get on their bicycles and ride over Hampstead Heath. We would sail our boats over
Whitestone Pond which was at the top of the hill near Highgate, and we went to a
Dame School quite close to there before we went off to prep school.

[12:21]

Thank you. I’m going to come back to those sort of outdoor experiences in a moment.

Yes.

But I wonder whether, for this house, you would remember it in enough detail to
imagine standing at the sort of front door and to take the listener on a kind of tour
around that house?

I think I can remember that, partly because I have been back there since to see who
was living there. But it was a – one of a row of houses, privet hedge in front with a
white painted gate and a little front garden, with the dining room with a bow window
looking out over that. And then at the back there was a longish garden that went
downhill with a bit of a terrace and a rotten old stump of a tree where my brother and
I played at the bottom of the garden. The house was – I suppose it had probably three
to four bedrooms, there were four or us living there obviously plus a nanny because a
sort of middle class family would have nannies in those days. And we had a living in
maid, and she lived in an attic room. But, nowadays the houses in Golders Green are
very well sought after and probably immensely expensive.
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Do you remember, you may not, but do you remember how the house was sort of
decorated and laid out and the kind of objects in it? Particularly if there were any
objects that you thought of then as being sort of modern although you might not use
the word.

I think that the furnishings were more classical than modern because my father had
been in the furniture trade and designed and built furniture, having worked for Waring
& Gillow’s, had got some very fine, very good furniture, much of which I still have
here, and … so it’s of the mahogany era. My parents would like to entertain, they had
bridge parties … he was a great conversationalist and he was a keen cricketer in the
local cricketing club at Hampstead.

[14:52]

And one of the things that sticks in my memory very much is that he would take my
brother and I up, extremely early in the morning, up to Covent Garden and we’d see
these exotic fruits arriving, barrows of Cape gooseberries and all sorts of exotic things
that we’d never had before and we’d come home chewing on sugar cane and that sort
of thing; very exciting. And he’d take us up to the meat market at Smithfield or
Billingsgate, the fish market, so that gave us an insight into the outer world beyond
the shores of England.

Did you have any sense then of why he was taking you there? For example, was this
an interest of his or was he sort of self-consciously showing you something that he
thought you –?

I think both, I think that he very much enjoyed doing that. He loved to talk to the
people working there about the places the food had come from … he was a great
conversationalist, a great individualist. In fact he joined the Society of Individualists
later on.

What is – I’m afraid I don’t know anything about that society. What was that society
and what was his involvement?
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I don’t know whether it exists still [laughs], I know that it was something he belonged
to. He was also a Mason, he was quite keen on the Masonic movement but couldn’t
persuade either my brother or I to become Masons. One of the decorating interior
design jobs that he did was the Masonic hall with all the elaborate curtains and
furnishings and chairs and carpets and that was the kind of work that he did.

[16:42]

To what extent did he travel? I notice you said that he enjoyed his time in Sicily in the
war and then he’s taking you to this market and looking at these sort of, I don’t know,
the fruits of empire really.

Yes.

But to what extent did he travel, was involved in foreign travel?

He was involved a lot when he was working for Gillow’s, because Gillow’s was an
internationally known company that supplied high quality furniture all over the world.
He was sent out to Russia at one time to try to get a contract to furnish the Tsarina’s
palace, and so he travelled a lot in Russia, he learnt a certain amount of Russian for
that. He spent time in Italy, he spent time in France, and in particular he went to
South America and so he learnt Spanish, and these languages all gave him an entrée
into various countries.

What do you remember of what he would tell you about his travels or show you on his
return?

I don’t remember him showing me things because these travels were before I was
born. He would talk about them and he wrote about them in his memoirs.

Do you remember things that he told you about them?

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