OU Memories
My visit to the OU yesterday has stirred up a lot of memories, mostly with connections with current events, curiously enough. Nelson Mandela's death, for example, had a number of people giving their personal recollections of the man, including one in the Guardian from writer and playwright Gillian Slovo. When I first joined the Science Faculty at the OU, back in the mid 1970s, Gill Slovo was a research assistant to the Dean of the faculty, Professor Mike Pentz. I knew both Mike and Gill were South African, and that Gill's main role was helping Mike with his work for the Pugwash Conferences, which were basically scientists working for nuclear disarmament. What I didn't realise at the time was that Gill was the daughter of Joe Slovo, an ally of Nelson Mandela in the fifties and sixties, who eventually was exiled to Britain, but who returned to South Africa in the early 1990s and helped negotiate the agreements which led to Mandela's release and the dismantling of apartheid.
The other connection came with the death of Doris Lessing, which I was reminded about while watching the 'Imagine' documentary on Lessing broadcast last night on the Beeb. The first Senior Editor in the Science faculty was Francis Aprahamian, a long time associate of Mike Pentz, and an editor who previously worked for J.D.Bernal. Like Mike Pentz, Francis was a left-wing activist, and amongst his acquaintances was Doris Lessing, who Francis once memorably described to me (I'd been reading one of her SF books and was curious about her) as being both "brilliant and terrifying", which coming from Francis was high praise indeed.
The OU attracted people like that, though. One person I crossed swords with a number of times was the Head of Publishing, an old battle-axe called Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, a very tweedy old bird, with numerous eccentricities. In the early days it was LLC who we had to do battle with to ensure we had enough editors in place to do the courses we were planning. We had two secret weapons against her. The first was Mike Pentz, who was loud, aggressive and persistent. Once he'd been persuaded about our needs, he went into battle and wouldn't take no for an answer. The other was the fact that LLC was essentially innumerate, so my task was to produce voluminous spreadsheets (by hand, this was long before Excel was a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye) proving our case, which Mike would brandish under LLC's uncomprehending nose until she gave in. But, as Francis Aprahamian told me, LLC wasn't by any means an idiot. She had several foreign languages, and had been an interpreter at the Nuremberg Nazi trials after WW2. More interestingly, she was also the co-translator, with Michael Turner, of the Tintin books when they were first printed in Britain, a collaboration that continued for some twenty-four volumes.
The other connection came with the death of Doris Lessing, which I was reminded about while watching the 'Imagine' documentary on Lessing broadcast last night on the Beeb. The first Senior Editor in the Science faculty was Francis Aprahamian, a long time associate of Mike Pentz, and an editor who previously worked for J.D.Bernal. Like Mike Pentz, Francis was a left-wing activist, and amongst his acquaintances was Doris Lessing, who Francis once memorably described to me (I'd been reading one of her SF books and was curious about her) as being both "brilliant and terrifying", which coming from Francis was high praise indeed.
The OU attracted people like that, though. One person I crossed swords with a number of times was the Head of Publishing, an old battle-axe called Leslie Lonsdale-Cooper, a very tweedy old bird, with numerous eccentricities. In the early days it was LLC who we had to do battle with to ensure we had enough editors in place to do the courses we were planning. We had two secret weapons against her. The first was Mike Pentz, who was loud, aggressive and persistent. Once he'd been persuaded about our needs, he went into battle and wouldn't take no for an answer. The other was the fact that LLC was essentially innumerate, so my task was to produce voluminous spreadsheets (by hand, this was long before Excel was a twinkle in Bill Gates' eye) proving our case, which Mike would brandish under LLC's uncomprehending nose until she gave in. But, as Francis Aprahamian told me, LLC wasn't by any means an idiot. She had several foreign languages, and had been an interpreter at the Nuremberg Nazi trials after WW2. More interestingly, she was also the co-translator, with Michael Turner, of the Tintin books when they were first printed in Britain, a collaboration that continued for some twenty-four volumes.