What a thrill to be invited to talk about my life and career after Hymers! Hymers College was a very important launching pad for my career to becoming a psychologist in California. I use the word “career” pointedly: for me, it implies a wandering search (as in “careering about”) which is what my life has been. Hymers taught me how to discipline myself, do my best and focus on goals.

Angus on his first day of Senior School, aged 11

I attended Hymers College, both junior and senior years, from 1957 to 1967. In those days, Hymers College was a Direct Grant boys’ school: 2/3 of the boys in the Senior School were on scholarships from the Hull and East Riding local authority. I gained a scholarship for Senior School, helped by massive cramming for the ‘11+’ test in Junior School.

I have had a marvelous career in the UK and the US as a psychologist, working sometimes in academic research, sometimes in management team development, organisational development and change, and more lately with high conflict separating families.

I currently have two major work roles: I am Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and see clients in my private practice in Santa Monica.  At UCLA, I teach and train young psychiatrists and psychologists to do family therapy in a mood disorder clinic; in my private practice, I resolve family conflicts with separating parents, as a mediator and as a neutral court-appointed evaluator of custody disputes.  And, yes, I have met a lot of film and music people! If you have ever read Ian McEwan's book, The Children Act, you'll get an idea of the kind of gut-wrenching dilemmas I have had to solve.

Angus at the Pacific Ocean

I live in Los Angeles, about two miles from the beach with my wife, Mary Lund, who is also a clinical psychologist. We love the mild weather and sunshine (although it has been 'chucking it down' here for months this winter, which is very unusual but is bringing us out of drought conditions!). We love to do things outside and play a lot of tennis, swim in the ocean, hike in the mountains, and sometimes even play croquet down at the beach! We have two grown boys, one in LA and one in New York. I was previously married in England and have a daughter from that marriage who lives in Market Harborough and has two children herself. We go back and forth between California and the UK often. 

Pandemic croquet with wife, Mary, son Maxwell and his wife, Jessica at Venice Beach, California

I remember my time at Hymers fondly. As I sit here, a flood of memories come to me. Trudging across the muddy field to the squash courts; singing in choirs and musical operas with the music teacher, Mr. Watson; getting into trouble with the ‘prefects’ and writing ‘lines’; having the sixth form revue canceled by the headmaster, Harry Roach because it was too ‘lavatorial’; playing bridge at rainy lunchtimes with my friends Chris Barker and Geoff Crabbe; singing madrigals and motets with our Greek teacher, Gerald Thompson; getting my suit filthy at lunchtime from playing touch rugby with Michael Roberts, Ed Nakielny, John Matthews and Neil McNaughton (with whom I have remained close; he is a geophysicist living in Paris); playing hitting the bar with a tennis ball for hours before and after school; cycling around Hessle and Willerby to go to parties with my friends Martin Moser, David Dodgson and David Pethick.

I also started the Hymers sailing club with “Tigger” Taylor, the woodwork teacher, and WG Watton, the physics teacher. I put on a dance for the students; they for the parents. With the proceeds, we bought two small sailing dinghies which we would sail off the East Yorkshire coast. It could get rough though. I’ll never forget seeing a catamaran smashed to pieces on the giant concrete anti-landing-craft monoliths designed to repel Hitler’s potential invasion.

I did have a gap year, after I finished my Cambridge entrance exams in December, and was absolutely ready to do things other than study! I worked for three months in a market garden in Melton, cutting cucumber (backbreaking!) and packing live chicken for transport, then went to the University of Geneva to study French (somehow, I wangled a scholarship from a Hull Trust) and then to work in Greece with the Aegina Club for three months as a travel guide, sponsored by Gerald Thompson, the Greek teacher and singing enthusiast.

A psychology degree is a very useful degree and can lead to success in many occupations: teaching, management, advertising and marketing, the law, human resources, research, and management, as well as providing mental health treatment diagnosis and treatment. I didn't come to it in a straightforward way.

At Hymers, I was good at Maths, Science, and English, did well in my ‘A’ and ‘S’ level exams, and entered Cambridge University (Corpus Christi College) to study engineering. In my last year, I took management courses which were to change the course of my life. I was exposed to subjects of which I had been completely unaware in Hull. A course in social psychology opened up my mind to exciting new ideas: I realised I could be both a scientist and interested in people! So, “careering along”, I decided to be a teacher and took a postgraduate certificate of education at Goldsmiths College, London, and then taught for four years at Wanstead High School, which was in the process of merging a grammar school and a secondary modern school into a “comprehensive” school.  We were a young and enthusiastic bunch of teachers, and we redesigned the curriculum to cover a broad range of abilities with both common core content and streaming. I was involved in introducing the Nuffield Science program across all the sciences and leading one of the Humanities teams, composed of ten teachers and a year group of 120. Two colleagues and I also started what was then an experimental new ‘A’ level in psychology which was piloted in six schools.

I got married and had a daughter during this time. I also took another undergraduate degree in psychology in the evenings at a wonderful college, Birkbeck College, University of London, which accepted only students who were simultaneously working. My success there led me to beimg offered a prestigious scholarship to study for a PhD in clinical psychology at UCLA.

Angus with Daughter, Fiona and their family

I became fascinated by interpersonal dynamics and studied individual, family and group psychotherapy as well as clinical and social psychology. I became steeped in research methods. I conducted postdoctoral research there and then back in the United Kingdom at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, while my wife did postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge. For 10 years, I was an academic psychologist and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London and then at UCLA, studying schizophrenia and family treatment interventions.

At the same time, I was developing my consulting business. At first, I worked with Meredith Belbin in Cambridge, an industrial psychologist who had just developed a model of management team roles, which has been widely adopted. I helped him disseminate the model through training in both the public and private sectors. After returning to the US, I worked with companies and organisations, making management teams more effective, creating systematic selection programs, and managing organisational change. Little did I know, for example, while studying for my 11+, that years later I would have designed and implemented a comprehensive selection program for the Directors Guild of America to select a small number of trainee Assistant Directors from an annual pool of about 1000 candidates. Little did I know, while studying Physics and Maths at Hymers, that I would one day be analysing data from large datasets on treatment efficacy.

We are taking a sabbatical in the second half of 2023 and will divide our time between Cambridge and London. I will visit Hull at sometime to visit family and look forward to seeing some old friends and meeting new!

Angus is now part of the "Alumni in USA" club on our Old Hymerian website.  If you are an Old Hymerian and live abroad, please check out the Old Hymerians Club Page to see if there is a club in the country that you reside in.  If there isn't a club, please feel free to contact us to suggest one.