Second Interview with Sir Eli Lauterpacht - 7 March 2008 (original) (raw)

Between January and May 2008, Sir Elihu was interviewed seven times at his home in Herschel Road Cambridge to record his reminiscences of seventy years of his own, and his father's associations with the Faculty. The interviews were recorded, and the audio version is available on this website with this transcript of those recordings. The questions and topics are sequentially numbered in the six interviews for use in a database of citations made across the Eminent Scholars Archive to personalities mentioned therein. Interviewer: Lesley Dingle (questions and topics are in bold type) Sir Elihu"s answers are in normal type. Comments added by LD, in italics. All footnotes added by LD. 16. Sir Eli, in the first interview we covered your early life and your memories of your parents. This takes us up to the early years of the war, and we come now to your time in the United States from 1940 to 1944. Your father went there as a Carnegie Visiting Professor and took your mother and yourself with him. Do you recall the journey by sea? Well, let me just go back a few months in that narrative and recall that, in fact, my father was invited by the Carnegie Endowment to go to the United States to give a number of lectures at a series of universities, mainly in the east and middle west of the United States. And this he did not wish to do without the approval and indeed the encouragement of the British Foreign Office. They were very keen that he should do it because they wanted some antidote to the isolationism that was prevailing in quite a number of universities in the United States. They encouraged him to go and at the same time, arrangements were made, with the help of a committee at Yale, for the reception of children of academics from England who were evacuated to the United States. So, I went with my father, and my mother came with us. This was in October 1940. We left Cambridge in October 1940 and took a train to Liverpool. There we got on board a ship called the Scythia and we set sail to the United States, not in very enticing circumstances because the sister ship of the Scythia had been torpedoed the night before and we were not told about it, so that we couldn"t get off even if we had wanted to. We had an interesting journey across the ocean. My father, most unusually for him, kept a kind of diary, not really a proper narrative of the voyage but just a few jottings of things that struck him as memorable or amusing, and I have the text of that and will, in due course, be including it in the biography of my father that I am meant to be writing at the present time, but seem never to get round to, but it"s all there.