Early life and going to see

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COLIN RENFREW

1 - Early life and going to see The Agamemnon

Well, to start at the beginning, I was born in 1937 and both my parents were Scottish. My mother was from Ardrossan and my father from Glasgow, from Giffnock, and he went to Glasgow University and did a degree in chemistry and then his first job and from then on he was with ICI Plastics, first of all as a chemist and then more and more into organisation and sales. So they moved south with ICI and so I was born in Stockton-upon-Tees, a place with which I've no other close connection, I may say, and then we lived at Barnard Castle for a few years, which I don't really remember and then we moved south when I was three or four to Welwyn Garden City, which is where I do remember, where I really spent my childhood and so I went to a private school there to start with, Sherrardswood School. And my mother felt that really it wasn't all that she thought it ought to be and so they put me in for a scholarship to St Albans School, which would be described strictly as a public school but it wasn't in the main a boarding school though there were a few boarders there. And so I went in by bus daily with my bus pass and so on, having passed the 11 Plus, which is really what we're talking about, to St Albans. And St Albans School is really an excellent school. It's one of the oldest schools in the country, it was founded in 948, or so it claims, and it occupies the Abbey Gateway, which was the gateway to St Albans Abbey when that was a large complex, and then it has a whole series of other buildings there. And it was run by a very enterprising headmaster who was very keen on the classics and I - one of my early recollections of the school is being taken to see the Greek play in Cambridge. He just asked who wanted to see it and, of course, the Greek play is done in Greek. I wasn't doing Greek at school nor were very many of the other people who went, but it was a good experience. It was “Agamemnon”, it was "The Agamemnon" by Aeschylus, and that was sort of my first experience of things Greek in a very profitable way.