PETER MORRELL, BSc
PGCE MPhil, is a medical historian, who has taught Life and Environmental
Sciences since 1975. A Zoology graduate from University of Leeds, in 1999
he received an MPhil in History and Sociology from Staffordshire
University for a thesis on the history of British homeopathy.
In 1998 he was elected Hon. Research Associate, History
of Medicine by the university. He sees many influences in his work – a
science background urges detached neutrality and an aspiration towards
objectivity; a love of mythology and anthropology makes for a collector of
ideas and observations for no particular purpose; an ecologist’s love of
holism combines with a teacher’s love of clarity and simplicity of
expression with a strong desire to share knowledge and be understood; a
poet’s passion for words; the craft of the journalist and a child-like
enthusiasm for the subject. He learned homeopathy in 1978 from a student
of the late veterinarian, George McLeod, and practised throughout the
1980s.
Of humble origins and simple tastes, Peter is rather
sceptical about qualifications as they say so little about the holder, are
adored by the arrogant, and can intimidate those who have none. He
published a textbook, ‘Environmental Science’, with Roger Johnson in 1982;
has published numerous journal articles on the history of homeopathy since
1982, and is currently compiling a collection of essays on Hahnemann to be
published later this year. He enjoys writing letters to the BMJ. He is
married with four children, and enjoys walking, swimming, painting and
family holidays.
Contact: Dept of Sociology, Staffordshire University,
College Road, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 2DE, UK
Dawn and Peter
FRAGMENT
OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I was born in June 1950 and lived all my childhood in
Farndon (which means Fern Hill), a small and pretty village southwest of
Newark on the River Trent in Nottinghamshire. The landscape is worth
talking about briefly. Lying in the wide Trent valley and thus the ancient
floodplain of that river, the whole area is very flat, like the Fens of
East Anglia, and the vast sky dominates the scenery. In summer the climate
was very hot and dry, but was cold in winter. The pattern of weather was
very regular in my childhood and followed essentially the same pattern
year on year. We mostly got the exact type of weather that it said on the
wall-charts in school, for each month –like ‘february fill dyke’ or
‘march winds’, changeable april, sunny june, etc. The river, of course,
was an endless source of enjoyment.
The dominance by the sky also brought about a love of
clouds and light to which I tend to ascribe my love of art and painting
and which I share with ‘greats’ like Constable and Turner who also came
from the east of England. I was fascinated by clouds and skies as a child
and recall just gazing up at them slowly moving across the sky with such
imperial majesty. They seem like fluffy, white and golden kingdoms and
palaces and always reflect for me great emotion and romantic power. And
they are always changing. Constable too was obsessed with clouds and never
tired of painting ans sketching them. I still find clouds endlessly
fascinating and love studying and painting them.
My family are a fairly big subject in their own right.
My mother, Olive Gwendoline Grand-Scrutton (1917-84), was the youngest of
15 children and thus we had many relatives around. There were also 30 odd
cousins: sons and daughters of the first 15, which included myself.
However, in my time there were only a few who we saw on anything like a
regular basis, because most of them lived away. I had most contact with my
two maiden aunts and my uncle Tom (1906-75). My two aunts (Marjorie
(1904-81) and Dorothy, 1914-95) were very kind and heaped affection upon
me. We had some great times together. Dorothy in particular was devoted to
me. I suppose I do regard them both as my compassionate spiritual
guardians and fierce protectors. My first gurus who tried to tame me. I
can recall with perfect clarity countless happy hours I spent with them as
a 2-7 yr old. My uncle Tom was a very amusing man and had a great
influence on me, mainly as an eccentric carpenter with a cruel sense of
humour.
My mother’s family originated from the east, in Norfolk.
Her father, George Grand- Scrutton (1865-1945) hailed from Norwich and my
grandmother, Susannah Elizabeth Baines (1871-1957) came from Blakeney,
then a thriving little port on the north Norfolk coast. Her family were
fishermen and her mother’s family, the Brightmer’s, were sailmakers in the
next village, Cley-next-the-Sea. Having only two daughters, that family
name is now extinct. George Grand-Scrutton’s father, Henry Scrutton
(1820-1908) came from Great Blakenham in Suffolk, while his wife, Louisa
Grand (c1830-1894), came from a large family in Matlaske in Norfolk. I
have tried to revisit some of these family facts in the naming of my own
children: eg. Holly Louisa Grand Morrell (b.1985) and Rosie Caitlin
Brightmer Morrell (b.1990).
Before I arrived on the scene, the Scruttons practically
ran the whole village. Right through the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s they baked
bread, ran a garage and general store, repaired bicycles and delivered
newspapers and bread — in all weathers. The father, was by all accounts a
pretty vicious and dictatorial tyrant and enterprising gent. A strong
churchgoer and staunch Tory, he beat his children and ruthlessly exploited
them for his own profit. When I arrived, ‘the shop’ as we called it was
mainly run by my two aunts and Reg, one of the uncles who lived in Newark.
My father took it all over in the late 50’s just after my grandmother
died. He mainly ‘pumped gas’ and fixed bicycles. Until I was 3 or 4 I
travelled with him everyday on his bicycle to the shop, to spend the day
with my aunts. I sat on a special little seat near the front of his cycle
and can vividly recall our daily journeys.
After about the age of 8 or 9 I did not enjoy a very
close relationship with my father, mainly I suppose because he was a quiet
man who socialised little outside the family. Unfortunately, he was a
rather closed and insular man, who no-one really got very close to.
However, he was chiefly remarkable for being born on the day the Titanic
sank in 1912, for being an estranged Catholic who married a Protestant
(which severed him from his own family, especially his mother, who never
forgave him), of having an abiding love of opera, especially Verdi, of
being one of the first people to enter Belsen Camp on his birthday, 15
April 1945, and of dying very suddenly and unexpectedly on a warm monday
afternoon in september 1965 of a coronary attack while peddling home from
work on his bicycle. Looking back, I can now see how that pivotal event,
which hit us like a bomb, was a big lesson in impermanence for me and
probably my first realisation of the urgent need to formulate some form of
satisfactory spiritual paradigm to make sense of such tragic events, and
life generally.
The Morrells today tend to be found mainly in north
Nottinghamshire, the most numerous now being in the Mansfield area. A good
example is the Paul Morrel in D H Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’: Lawrence
hailed from Eastwood. Though I was born in Newark, only 15 miles to the
east of Mansfield, my father, Reginald (1912- 65), was born 60 miles
south, in Northampton. His father, Raymond Morrell (c1884-1970), was born
in Derby and his father Samuel Morrell (c1850-c1920) in Scalford, north
Leicestershire, near the pork-pie town of Melton Mowbray, which is where
the family originated.
The Morrells generally are found scattered about in
little pockets in Bedfordshire / Oxford and in Yorkshire, but the most
numerous being in north Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. Morrell means
‘little darkie’ and is a diminutive of Moore and the Scottish Muir,
meaning moorish or dark. Many variations in spelling occur such as
Morrall, Murrell, Morall, Morell, Morrel etc. None of the Morrells I have
nown were especially dark, and my elder brother Nigel, though he is dark,
he is a typical Grand-Scrutton: thick-set, dark, balding early, very hairy
and with bushy black eyebrows. All my many Scrutton uncles were of that
same appearance. And as George Grand, a distant relative in Norfolk, said
to me in 1985: ‘when you see one Grand, you see them all’. And he was
short, thick-set and dark with a round full face, the very image of my
Uncle Tom. But I take after my father, being leaner, not very hairy, fair
and getting gradually darker as a teenager.
Another aspect of my life is that everyone at that time
lived out of doors the whole time. I only went home for meals and to
sleep. Sounds weird now but that is how it was. Everyone in the village
lived like that then. It was the norm. We spent the whole day outside
roaming around the village and in fields and by the river just wandering
around and playing and talking and having fun the whole day long. That is
how I learned most things from just wandering around and lighting fires
and looking in hedge-bottoms. Great fun, very happy and healthy life. And
a love of sunshine and flowers, trees and birdsong dominated my childhood
as I clearly recall. Beautiful mornings, powered by birdsong, with the
bright sun pouring into the house like gold, and into the village and
streets and misty autumns and foggy frosty winters, just like in myths and
legends. That is really just what it was like.
Right throughout my childhood I had a strong love of
trees. I used to climb them a lot and regarded that there was no tree I
could not climb. This was not entirely true. I specialised in tree
climbing to an unusual degree and was never happier than at the top of
some huge horsechestnut or ash tree swaying in the breeze. This dominated
my life between the ages of 8 and 17 I suppose. There were certain trees I
climbed on a very regular basis and which I came to regard as great
friends. There is something very warm and friendly about trees, which I
cannot quite define.
The most difficult trees to climb, usually Ash trees, I
came to regard as unfriendly and hostile, even bad in some profound sense
and I used to avoid them. Their branches are brittle and snap just when
you need to place your weight on them or they have bark which is too
smooth to be of much use and far too few branches to help the climber.
Horsechestnuts are the best as they have such rough bark and numerous
strong branches to help the climber gain swift ascent. I had two very
large favourite specimens by the river I used to climb often. Each time, I
climbed them using a different route to the top and perversely delighted
in that secret game, just as mountain climbers do. Treeclimbing is best on
wild and windy days when the trees sway sideways and the branches rattle
in a frenzy of thrashing about. The intimate closeness of the air element
then becomes correspondingly intensified and one feels almost one with the
very wind itself. So very exhilerating. Much I imagine like being in the
‘crow’s nest’ on board the old sailing ships in a storm at sea under full
sail. Just like the picture my grandmother had on her wall.
I was also very given to birdnesting and just prowling
around the fields and ditches looking for things of interest. I was a
curiously observant child. With friends I used to prowl around the village
looking for fun and adventure, making fires, fishing, skating on frozen
ponds or swimming in the river. It was a very outdoors kind of life and a
lot of weird things happened which were interesting at the time and which
are great to look back on.
The first 20 years of my life were hugely dominated by
science, especially chemistry and biology. I suppose this derives from my
having chemistry sets and microscopes as a child. I also liked telescopes
and cameras and delighted in all these optical devices from an early age.
What I liked about science was the experimental side, that you can
discover anything for yourself. You do not need anyone or any book to tell
you the way things are. It is there for the taking, all you have to do is
look and play around. You can discover anything in that way. This appealed
to me very deeply. I never read books as a child very much at all. Apart
from school work I just went outdoors all the time and never sat around
reading books or anything like that. Yet in a curious sort of way I was
intellectual, in the sense that I thought deeply about things and was a
very good observer. So I developed a natural yen for experimentation and
observation of all types. I thus became ideal science material. I
delighted in making gunpowder and carbide bombs from ingredients bought at
chemists shops.
I also liked about science the fact that it was certain
and repeatable. That seemed to make it ‘real knowledge’ which could be put
on the shelf for 30 years and then taken down by someone else and would be
just the same as the day it was put up there. This made it enormously
powerful and fascinating. That was what the Encyclopedists liked about it
and I can still see its big attraction. Yet I was never gifted
mathematically and had no interest in the subject. I regret this now as I
would love to have been trained in data analysis and statistics. That
would have greatly benefitted my later interests.
In biology itself I excelled in microscopy and
dissection work, which I loved enormously and still do on the few
occasions when I teach those aspects. At advanced level in college we had
an amazing and unconventional teacher, the Director’s wife, Mrs Bishop,
who was so brilliant in so many ways. A loveable eccentric, she encouraged
my enthusiasm for biology enormously and also followed the same basic
approach as me, of learning through direct experience and self-motivated
discovery — mainly dissection and microscopy.
She rarely gave lectures, notes or handouts, but taught
entirely through practical work and personal guidance. She was enormously
interesting and enthusiastic about all living things. She constantly
brought specimens into class and exuded great inspiration on all of us.
Like a dead fox she waltzed in with one day, which she had found by the
roadside hit by a car. We dissected it avidly and pickled fleas from its
hair. It was a vixen which had died from burst kidneys from the impact,
though it was not pregnant. Every part of it was dissected and made into
microscopic slides. It was in the formalin for weeks. She encouraged me to
have greater confidence in the self-discovery approach and her approach
has remained a very big influence upon me. We were so lucky to have her.
We dissected everything. She formed a magical presence for me.
Thus I came to utterly despise book knowledge and people
who know much but understand little. ‘Find out for yourself’ was her
motto, and pretty soon it became mine too. She was a wonderful exemplar of
the superiority of a person with profound and extensive practical
knowledge and natural wisdom, who could work anything out from first
principles and just straight thinking.
I read Zoology at Leeds University and since 1975 have
been involved in teaching, mostly as a College lecturer in sciences. My
main other interests have been in art, poetry, astrology, Buddhism and homeopathy.
I suppose my life as an ‘intellectual’ or artist, really
began when I was a teenager, at which time I started, quite spontaneously,
to write poetry. But to call it poetry is in fact misleading, as it was
rhyming verse about all sorts of weird subjects. Most of it was junk that
I threw away happily, but then began to write more interesting and
profound stuff once I had dispensed completely with the cramping
strictures of rhyme. So my writing and my painting both stem from 1967-8
and the peace and love hippy thing, which was happening at the same time.
Few days passed without my writing and drawing something, even if it was
rubbish. Both tended to fade a little in the early 70’s, but then
resurfaced with renewed vigour from 1975 onwards. I have painted and
written almost continuously ever since. Almost all of it I have kept and
the best of it will emerge.
Since that same late sixties period I also became firmly
engaged with all things oriental, including Haiku, Buddhism, Sitar music,
meditation, I Ching, philosophy, etc. Those interests have also remained
strong until modern times.
On Arrogance or Being Close to People
Arrogance is the very worst quality you can possess, as
it places a barrier between yourself and everyone else, the rest of
humanity, and the whole world. Thus to be an arrogant scientist or an
arrogant historian is a joke: you cannot be both. To be a good scientist
or a good historian you must get close to your subject — intimate and
close provides the neutral dialogue which is a precondition of good clear
observation.
I have always disliked arrogance and the elite and the
rich without really knowing why. It is useful to state clearly the
background reasons. My ideas are quite simple really. I believe in and
like being close to people, I do not wish to be cut off from the human
family by being wealthy or being terribly snotty and arrogant. Such people
are very lonely and sad because they have tried to place themselves above
everyone else and in doing so have become cut off and lonely in a strange
prison of their own making. It is far better to stress what we have in
common as human beings, rather than stress our differences.
These days I take a more tolerant and compassionate view
of the rich. They are sad and lonely figures, and deserve our pity. I pity
them for their miserliness, their materialism and greed, for their petty
squabbling about something of little real consequence — money — and for
their self-imposed exile from the rest of the human family.
Some time back my wife and I often used to discuss
winning a lot of money and what we would do with it. After much discussion
and careful thinking I have decided that I do not want money and would
happily give away my last penny to help the poor. If I won millions I
would provide for family and friends and spend all the rest on charitable
works, mainly on Tibetan monasteries in India, and the Tibet cause
generally, and also historical or Buddhist research scholarships.
I am basically a ‘working-class bloke’ and always have
been. It dominates my aproach to everything. Wealth beyond a certain point
of comfort becomes, for me, a very ugly and repugnant thing. I much prefer
a modest and frugal life, even of hardship than to the indulgence of
wealth. I am comfortable with ordinary people doing ordinary things. I am
uncomfortable with arrogance, wealth, pomp and formality. I would like to
travel more and have more time to paint and think, but apart from that
money is a burden I am happy not to have.
Nor do I buy the argument, which is sometimes presented,
that the rich are very special and ‘marked out’ in some way. That seems a
form of pure elitism and vanity. Over 80% of the good people on this earth
are poor, mostly very poor. I do not believe that they are any less
special than those who strut around in big ships, big cars and big
aeroplanes. In fact, quite the reverse. I would much rather spend a day, a
month or a lifetime with the poor than with any single rich person on
earth. To me, they seem to have a dignity, an openness and a wisdom which
the rich can never attain or even come to know. That is the price they pay
for their arrogance. They choose to lock themselves away from the rest of
us.
I do not regard myself as an authority on anything,
perhaps I should say. And very much prefer people to make their own minds
up about things. In the sense that I am just an ordinary bloke telling
things the way I see them. While I do not have a high opinion of myself
nor do I have a low opinion of myself or my work.
Dawn and Peter