Interview with Baroness Ruth Deech KC

Baroness Ruth Deech KC, former Principal of St Anne’s College, has had a remarkably interesting and varied career. She studied Law at St Anne’s College as an undergraduate and later returned to teach there and take on the role of Principal from 1991-2004. She has also worked in many other areas, acting as Chairman of The Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority (HFEA) and as Governor for the BBC. She currently sits as a Crossbench peer in the House of Lords. I met with Ruth to find out more about her life and career, discussing everything from the BBC’s reporting of the Middle East to the changing nature of women’s opportunities to the infamous Gilligan affair of 2003.

You have had a highly varied career, working in many different fields throughout your life. Which career path, if any, did you find the most fulfilling?

I never had a career path; I just took what came my way. I seemed to sit behind a desk and suddenly the phone would go and someone would say, you do this. But in terms of my career, I think I always wanted to do the best I could before moving on to the next thing. My father was a refugee from Poland and my mother lost a lot of her family to concentration camps at the hands of the Nazis . And in a way, even from childhood, I felt that their lives and their possibilities had been closed off to a considerable degree. And I think I felt I had to make up for what they lost.

I remember when I was at school, my mother didn’t go back to work. She said, “I’ve got to stay at home for you”. And I remember when I was very small thinking that I wasn’t going to do that. What’s the point of mothers staying at home to support their children if the children promptly stay at home to support their children? I wanted to go out and do something.

Which of your roles did you find the most enjoyable? 

Teaching here at St Anne’s and being principal was the nicest job you could have. The students were absolutely lovely and incredibly bright. There was a period in the 70s when professional barriers were dropping and women could go and be lawyers and so on. And yet Oxford still had only five colleges for women. So the pressure for girls to get into Oxford was enormous. We were taking the brightest girls, and in fact a lot of very clever ones were turned down. There would have been room for them in the men’s colleges, which were taking boys that were not as clever as the girls that we were turning down. So I had wonderful students. Then we went mixed and again it all worked out very well.

You studied law at St Anne’s yourself, but never chose to go to the bar. Why was this? 

I meant to go to the bar – I qualified for it. But in 1965, I thought you needed money and contacts, which I didn’t have. I was probably wrong. If I’d really tried, I would have made it. My best friend Margaret, who didn’t have any money or contacts either, persisted and she made it. But I thought, oh, I don’t know whether I’ll ever manage it. And then by chance, my tutor was going away on sabbatical and she asked me to stand in for her for a term or two. And I loved teaching. 

Besides, I don’t think I would have been a good barrister. I probably would have been all right on my feet but with all the litigation I’ve ever been involved in, I have felt passionately that I was right and the other side was wrong. I think as a barrister, that’s the wrong attitude. 

What did you think you were going to do when you were an undergraduate student?

I thought I was going to be a lawyer, and / or marry and have several children. Neither of which I did. Well, I got married but I didn’t have several children; I only had one.I don’t really believe in future planning. It may be different today, but I just took things as they came along. I was always one to respond to ads and put my hand up. I didn’t wait for things to come to me, though they did subsequently. And having had one child, I thought, that’s enough. I didn’t like staying at home, so one was enough. 

Your role as Chairman of the HFEA is a very different kind of work to your teaching of Law. What interested you about this area of reproductive medicine?

I was sitting at my desk one Friday, I remember it very well. Everyone had gone home. The phone went, and a man rang up, and he said, ‘I’m Mr So and so from the Department of Health. Have you ever heard of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority?’ I said, yes, because I teach family law. ‘Would you like to be chair?’. I thought, yes, I would, because I was always very interested in the family law side, you know, motherhood, abortion, infertility and all those things. I’m no scientist – I’ve never passed a biology exam in my life. In fact, at my school, the chapter in the biology textbooks about the reproductive habits of the frog, never mind anything else, were torn out. We were taught absolutely nothing. But I was very interested in the social side of it, and the Department of Health gave me a cram course on embryology. I didn’t have to get deep into the science of it all because my job was to explain what was going on to the public in terms that they could understand.

All my life, up until then, the issue for women of my generation had been how not to have babies. Contraception was a big thing as well as the very limited access to abortion. And I’d never thought of the other side, of people who were infertile. That was new to me, and it suddenly dawned on me that there’s a whole world out there of women who couldn’t have babies and were really suffering and very upset. So it was nice to be able to get into that and try and help them. 

You were also the Governor of the BBC for a couple of years. Could you tell me more about what you did in this role?

As a governor – they’re now called trustees, but it’s the same job – you don’t interfere with programme making. You don’t see things in advance and censor or anything like that. You face the difficulties afterwards, if there are any. The meetings were largely about new ventures in IT and digital stuff, in which the BBC was well ahead. New programmes, new channels, making money as part of BBC World, correcting mistakes and resisting government pressure.

I was there during an episode which involved the journalist Andrew Gilligan. It was roundabout in the early 2000s, and he had broadcast at five past six in the morning. During this broadcast, he said that the government dossier on Iraq and Saddam Hussein had been, and I quote, “sexed up”, because the government had said that Iraq had to be stopped as Saddam Hussein could bomb Britain at 45 minutes’ notice. We said that the government was over-egging this in order to provide support for going to war in Iraq. And it turned out that Andrew Gilligan was right, but the government didn’t like it, and we were bullied like nobody’s business by Alastair Campbell, and there were enquiries into leaks, and a doctor called David Kelly took his own life as a result of the inquisition that he was put through. There was a whole bunch of scandal there. 

You have written a lot about various issues in the world of journalism, regarding the way in which journalists have been reporting on the Middle East. Have you seen any progress from the time you were at the BBC to now?

It’s gone backwards, if anything. There were a couple of reports into the BBC coverage of the Middle East in my time, and they didn’t say anything very much other than that there should be more historical context. And I think that’s still true today. The BBC tends to report things about the Middle East without context. They start from now. They never go back in history in relation to the Middle East. And you’ve got to go back in history. You absolutely have to. So I don’t think things have improved.

Trying to get the BBC to accept complaints through their complaint system is like trying to get a camel through the eye of a needle; less than 1% ever succeed. They’re very defensive on this. And I think that’s become  worse, if anything. The BBC should acknowledge when it’s done something wrong. It should give its journalists more training in history, because lots of very bright young people join the BBC, but unless at university they’ve specialised in, for example, Middle Eastern history, what do they know? They don’t know anything. They’ve got no concept of the history of the Middle East and although this is unpalatable, you need to start thousands of years ago to understand what’s going on today. 

Do you have any particularly memorable moments from your undergraduate days?

Oh, yes. I had a wonderful time. I had to do nine sets of exams over three years because I didn’t get in the first time round. I got in eventually and had a fantastic time. I mean, you just couldn’t go wrong. There were parties and exciting things happening all the time. I met my husband, or rather he met me, on my first day here, though we didn’t really start going out for quite a while. I was president of the Oxford Jewish Society. And some of our best friends even today were people that we met there. 

What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received and what piece of advice would you give to current students?

The best piece of advice I got was at school. It wasn’t a very good school, but they always encouraged us to pursue a career. They never said to us, you know, just sort of sit around and do a secretarial course and wait to get married. And indeed, when I was 14 my mother looked at me in the mirror and said, “your face is not your fortune. No man is going to want to marry you and keep you. You’ve got to go and earn a living.” So, I think earning a living was the best advice I got. 

And then I would kind of turn it around for the modern generation. Alright, earn a living, but one of the greatest joys in life also is, of course, getting married and having a family. So don’t neglect that while you’re pursuing your career. You can do both. You shouldn’t pursue one at the cost of the other. Even if it means taking a break here and taking a break there. I would hate to think of people just pursuing their careers and then finding they’re lonely at 50 or 60. Or getting married and abandoning everything they’ve done by way of their degrees and careers. So finding a nice balance is very important.

Lastly, if you were going to a desert island, what would be the three items you would take? 

Sudoku. Can I take a rechargeable iPad with me? To download books on Kindle and play music on. And I would take a little cooking kit and a supply of seeds and so on, so I could do some cooking.