Michael Gove: ‘I stood as the Labour candidate in the school election'
School Days is a regular series by author Danny Danziger in which acclaimed British names and faces share the childhood stories that shaped them. This week, the former Secretary of State for Education talks about being adopted, his love of books, being a pain at school – and making it to Oxford
My grandfather had set up a fish merchants' business, which involved going into the harbour at dawn, buying fish from the boats that had just landed, and then filleting, salting and selling them to fishmongers, or the Rosses and Finduses of this world. My dad, Ernest, left school at 15 to go into the family business. My mum, Christine, also left school at 15 and worked in a jewellers' shop in Aberdeen called Jamieson & Carry, and then latterly as a lab assistant at Aberdeen University. She met my dad while ice skating, which they were both passionate about, and they very quickly got married. But they couldn't have children.
The person who gave me up for adoption was from Edinburgh, although she was studying in Aberdeen to be a catering demonstration assistant, which is where she became pregnant.
I was born in August 1967 and arrived at the Gove home just before Christmas, so I was four months old when I was adopted. My mother said I was covered in eczema and bathed me in an iron bath in front of the fire. Five years later, my sister, Angela, arrived, and she was also adopted. Several months later, my parents discovered she was profoundly deaf, and so she went to the Aberdeen School for the Deaf.
At my primary school every day I would walk back home for lunch – or dinner, as they call it in Scotland – mince and tatties, delicious, and I can't imagine any children doing that today.
Aged 11, I went to my secondary school, Robert Gordon's College, which was then a fee-paying boys' independent day school. I started in the autumn of 1979, shortly after Margaret Thatcher had become Prime Minister. Right from the beginning, I was upbraided for being cheeky, which was a consistent theme of my secondary education; most of the times I got into trouble was because of being 'cheeky', 'sarcastic', or 'a pain'.
Gordon's was quite trad, teachers in gowns, for instance, not quite a male version of Jean Brodie's school, but that would give you some sense of the vibe.
I didn't have a scholarship at the time so my parents paid the full fees, which was fine – until it became an issue when my dad had to sell his business, essentially because of the overall decline of the fishing sector in Aberdeen. Fortunately I got a scholarship for my final two years at school; if I hadn't secured it, my parents would not have been able to continue to pay the fees.
Our home wasn't a household full of books; my dad would read the newspapers, but only the sports pages, and Reader's Digest condensed books, and my mum would read Catherine Cookson and that sort of thing. I was the cuckoo in the nest: I was a voracious reader, my head was always in a book. As soon as I got my pocket money, I would go down to the local bookshop. Also, there was a magazine called All About Science that I badgered my parents to get every week.
Just a few generations ago, there may have been a slightly antithetical idea to the fact that your son or daughter was attached to book learning; there's a particular phrase in Scotland, ' I knew your father,' i.e. don't get above yourself. But my mum and dad loved the fact that I had this interest in reading, they appreciated that I was bookish and that that was clearly my orientation, and they encouraged me and gave me all the support possible, even though it wasn't their thing.
I enjoyed almost every subject at school. The English teacher, Mike Duncan, nurtured and encouraged my love of books and drama, and introduced me not just to the novels we were studying but also made recommendations: 'I think you'd enjoy Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music Of Time,' he said, which was a series of 12 books. I also had two great history teachers, one of whom for some reason that was not immediately obvious was nicknamed Zoot, in reference to the saxophone player in the Muppets.
They knew I was interested in political ideas and ideology, and most of all debating, which was my principal school activity, and I joined the Labour Party as a 16-year-old, and canvassed for the Aberdeen North MP, which was then a safe Labour seat, and in the 1983 general election I stood as the Labour candidate in the school election.
Everyone had to play rugby in their first two years, and even though I was relatively well built I was just terrible at it. I have terrible hand-eye co-ordination, for one thing, and have never been particularly sporty. In the third year, you were allowed to pick between rugby and hockey, and I opted for hockey because my view was the best athletes would have already chosen rugby, and I became the hockey goalkeeper, being prepared to get hit by the ball, and just take the punishment rather than display any skill.
It was the 1980s and the music was great: BA Robertson, the Boomtown Rats, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and the first party where I kissed a girl, to Heaven 17's Temptation. She was called Kate, although she subsequently, and very quickly thereafter, moved on to a much better prospect: taller, better-looking, way better at sport, and all the rest of it.
Perhaps I was too distracted by life, but I was not a well-behaved schoolboy. In fact, I wrote a letter the other day to my French teacher, Danny Montgomery, to apologise for being such a pain in the neck, a mixture of back-chat, being a smart alec and asking absurd questions. So, for example, in the middle of a translation exercise:
'Sir, sir?'
'Yes Gove.' (Said wearily.)
'What does ' baise-toi ' mean?'
'I think you know, Gove.'
'No, I don't, sir, can you explain?'
It was beyond juvenile, and on a couple of occasions, the tawse was used, which is a piece of leather, split at the end. Hand out, thwack. Very painful.
However, when I was 17, I was made a prefect. Perhaps it was the classic ploy which is if you've got someone who is a little bit wayward but you think has potential then make them a prefect, and hopefully whatever it is about them that is contrary will become channelled in the right direction. In fact, I do think I became a straighter arrow.
For a long time, I thought I was going to be a doctor, but while I remained fascinated by human psychology and every aspect of medicine, I realised that was not my strongest calling. Mike Duncan said, 'You should think about applying to Oxford to read English – that's your best subject, that's the one you enjoy most.'
I still remember my impressions of Oxford when I went up for my interviews. Fairyland! I hadn't been to Oxford before, and immediately thought it would just be amazing to go there.
I had applied to two colleges, Corpus Christi and Lady Margaret Hall (LMH). At Corpus I was interviewed by Valentine Cunningham, the professor of English language and literature, who clearly thought I was an idiot.
When we sat down, his first question was:
'What is Hamlet about?'
'Well, it's about the prince's indecision following the death of his father.'
'NO! What is it about?'
'The tragic flaw of indecision?'
'NO!! (Now frothing at the mouth) What is it about?'
'Is it about politics in the Danish court?'
'No. It's about Protestantism.'
'Bloody hell,' I thought, 'I don't stand a chance here…'
But the conversation at LMH was about Middlemarch and my mini dissertation was about George Eliot. And so we had a conversation about Dorothea and her sister, and what the jewels revealed about Dorothea's vanity, and why she had married the Rev Edward Casaubon, and what a mistake that was. So I was allowed to shine, and on the strength of that I was offered a place at Oxford.
But huge credit to Gordon's. If I hadn't gone there I would have gone to a state secondary school, and I doubt anyone at that time would have thought of recommending any student to apply to Oxford. I was and remain very grateful.
Michael Gove will be speaking at the Chalke History Festival on June 26. His talk is entitled 'Change Maker: A Life in Politics'. For tickets visit: https://www.chalkefestival.com/
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