Deciding to become a Child Care Officer an update part of 101 in Black and White

Ruskin College and City of Oxford University

1961-1963

Part of 101 in Black and White 2005

Joseph Grech

Colin Joseph Smart

Introduction

In 2005 the opportunity arose to have a work of words and pictures privately printed by the Daily Mail and I decided to create an autobiographical work focussed on my journey to become Joseph Grech, a creative art worker. The work included two chapters on my experience of attending the adult Education Ruskin College, located on two sites in the City of Oxford, between 1961 to 1963, first to study for the University Diploma in Politics and Economics and then for the second year to undertake a Diploma in Public and Social Administration at the Department of Extra Mural Studies of Oxford University, and which involved three practical social work placements.

Although 101 copies of the book, 101 in Black and White, were printed the contents were not intended to be read, but to form part of a work 9.3.39 (my date of birth, in 24 black and white boxes and 101 black and white framed photographs) which is also a component of the ongoing artwork installation 101.

I have deleted some names and added a few notes. The writing provides a fair and good account of my experience.

How I came to attend Ruskin college is covered in earlier chapters of the work and it was only weeks before the beginning if the first term that I decided to take up the offer of a place from the College and an adult education grant from Surrey County Council.

I left school at sixteen years and went to work as a general division clerk in the large motor vehicle local taxation and registration department of the Finance Department of Middlesex County Council in a seven storey building, now part of the Penguin Random House Publishing company, close to the Vauxhall Bridge, the Tate Gallery and the MI6 building in London.  I was attached to a section of six men who had all experienced military service, one had lost part of his leg during World War I, four had been on active service during World War II and one joined the team later after being on service in Korea. They felt trapped because of a lack of transferrable skills and encouraged me to study for a qualification which would enable a move from the General to the Clerical division of employment in local government.

Over Christmas and New Year in 1957 I was put in charge of a group of temporary employed staff handwriting the annual licence renewals while I continued my daily task of writing the new registration of motor vehicle log books. One of the group was the retired head of the significantly smaller but similar department of Croydon Borough Council and he arranged for me to undertake similar work with the authority of the town where I was born and lived three miles away in Wallington. I successfully studied for the General Division Certificate in evening classes at the Croydon Technical College where one of the required subjects was British Constitution, purchasing the advance level GCE Rapid Results College course on the subject which I also passed in 1957.

At Ruskin in the corner of the top floor of the former stable block at the Rookery there was a student from Malawi, Timon Mangwazu who attended for two terms in 1962, He invited me to his room for tea and revealed that he was a civil servant and I remember commenting on the importance of the civil service in bringing political stability to a country, giving him the course material on the British Constitution and on other subjects after the Easter break. At the end of the year I read a note in the Times Newspaper that the Malawi Embassy had held a reception for Timon who was then the General Secretary of the Malawi Civil Services Union. It is rare that a chance reading of a newspaper provides a second opportunity to re-establish contact.

In 1967, living and working in London, I read that Timon had become the High Commissioner for his country in the UK. I received an invitation to visit him which was arranged but alas I was unable keep the appointment required to attend a juvenile court.

Timon said in his letter that.” I remember very vividly the interesting time we spent together at the ‘Rookery’ (annex) where we had rooms opposite each other. Since I left the ‘Rookery’ I have never been there again, but I am glad to say that I have been to Oxford three times, and also on each occasion, I was able to meet the Principal of Ruskin College and a few other students.”

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Timon later served on behalf of his country in a number of other capital cities and at the United Nations, returning to his homeland for a political career but like many who went to Ruskin and the magical city of Oxford University, their perspective of the experience can change over time as his ‘prabook’ entry via Google demonstrates.

I had attended an independent Catholic school as a day pupil, the John Fisher School, and the Jesuit teacher of modern history had suggested that if we wanted to understand what the second world war was about we should read the published accounts of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal so I had gone to the local reference Library and read those on Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz and together with New Testament Sermon on the Mount, and  my experience as a child of the blitz living in an area where more VI and VII rockets were concentrated than elsewhere, I was immediately sympathetic to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, joining the small branch for Beddington and Wallington, forming a youth CND group whose members included two of the sons of Ritchie Calder (Angus wrote the People’s War).

Just before Christmas 1959 I joined the staff of Houseman’s Bookshop on a temporary basis and a photograph of demonstrating outside a nuclear rocket base in Northamptonshire, in Peace News, describing me as a staff man of the weekly paper was misleading.  In 1960 under the leadership of Pat Arrowsmith of the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War I participated in two civil disobedience demonstrations sitting down in a countryside roadway in front of a line of police officers some distance from the Foulness Defence research establishment in Essex, and with twelve others refused to enter into an oral recognisance to bring our activities to a halt for two years, spending six months in a number of prisons, knowing we could leave at any time.

While in the closed prison at Stafford, Peter Currell Brown, the author of Smallcreeps Day, had the idea of a march from London to Holy Loch to make a protest against the Polaris submarine base which had been announced. My subsequent letter too Pat Arrowsmith proposing the project is referred as a footnote in Gandhi and the West by Sean Scalmar and in the archives of the Direct Action Committee at the J B Priestly Library, University of Bradford.

I also became a member of the Committee 100 headed by Bertrand Russell but resigned in protest after he refused to take action against Ralf Scheonmann who I believed threatened the integrity of the movement. While clearing tables in the coffee bar of the basement of the New Left Review and Books I witnessed him with others asking people to sign up for first Committee 100 demonstration intended for Parliament Square saying they did not need to attend or get arrested. At the end of the 1961 Aldermaston March Ralph with others was responsible for a secret unauthorised sit down outside the USA Embassy. The Russell apologia included at the end of the Ronald W Clark biography is questionable. Christopher Driver, author of the Disarmers, retained the letter from Lady Russell stating her husband had full confidence in Ralph. Sheonmann reappeared on national media during the so called Arab Spring.

I also resigned as Chief Marshal of the march to Holy Loch and from my work for the Direct Action Committee in preparing for the march from Glasgow to Holy Loch and the land and sea demonstrations because of the involvement of the Committee 100 supporters who were to receive no preparation and the principles of Satyagraha were being betrayed which involved advising the authorities in advance precisely what we intended to do and why. At the conclusion of the successful Holy Loch project (successful in terms of international media attention), I had the opportunity to become the full time paid secretary of the London Region CND and which had involved an interview with the formidable chain smoking general secretary, Peggy Duff.

Meanwhile in 1960 a local councillor had called at my home after reading a letter published in the local paper and persuaded me to join the Labour Party. Some months later he called to explain that it was the annual meeting of the Wallington and Beddington Party which matched the local municipal borough council and part of the Mitcham Constituency which was represented by the Conservative Sir Robert Carr, who became a Home Secretary. I was the only member in the ward and the meeting would have to agree to my attendance.

In 1960 the Beddington and Wallington Council comprised Ratepayers and Independents and the Young Socialists planned a coup to take control of the Party executive committee, so after nominating the former Chairman and Secretary, the headmistress and deputy head of Bandon Hill Primary School, they nominated each other, and I was nominated just before nominations closed and agreed upon a vote.

In 1961 we canvassed for the local elections and the chairman and Secretary became members of the Council and in 1963 there were five Labour members who continued until its abolition in 1965 and amalgamation into the London Borough of Sutton. In 2014 Sutton Council comprised 45 Liberal Democrats and 9 Conservatives.

I can only remember attending a handful of executive meetings and that the Chairman and Secretary took a special interest, because my address was the same as the teacher who took the intake class and was one of two Miss Smarts at the same address and in fact, I was her secret child, and where the name and occupation of my father was not disclosed until 1999. Apart from the headmistress of the private catholic preparatory day school I attended, the two women were the only individuals outside the family who took an interest in my future and after meetings we talked about their view of pennyworths of socialism and why I had chosen to go to prison. (The Bandon Hill School hit the headlines in 2014 when it was reported that its head teacher was highest paid primary head in London at £205000).

I cannot remember when I wrote to the General Secretary of Labour party about wanting to work for Labour but I have the letter somewhere which invited me to meet an administrative officer who advised about being a local agent, a councillor or a member of Parliament, recommending further education and Ruskin College. I discussed this with the Chairman and Secretary and they mentioned someone who had been to Ruskin and arranged a meeting.  I contacted the college and submitted an application with the required essay, and with the Chairman and Secretary of the local party providing references.

In 1960 I met the daughter of a leading City accountant, who had just completed a degree in Art History, taking me to see the Leonardo drawings at Windsor Castle, inviting to a performance of Beyond the Fringe and introducing me to the Alexandrian Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. I consulted her when faced with the choice of the CND job or going to Ruskin College although her belief that it would condense what I had to say failed. The secretary of the Oxford CND was appointed London Region CND organiser in my place.

It was not until 1999 that I discovered that my father had been Monsignor Carmelo Grech OBE, a Vicar General of Gibraltar and the parish priest of St Josephs’ Church.

My birth mother was Mabel Josephine Smart who was four when Fr Grech was appointed assistant parish priest aged 28, and my middle name is Joseph although the birth register has me shown as Josephine crossed out and then Joseph.

I made my first visit to Gibraltar in 2003 taking the ashes of my care mother for masses at the church of St Joseph and the cemetery chapel next to the airport and under the Rock before burial in the tomb of her parents.

It was when alone in 2004, standing at the top of the rock which dominates the small territory with its resident population of 30000 (but with present plans to become the Hong Kong of the Mediterranean) that I reflected on what my life could have been with its Maltese, Spanish, Italian, Gibraltarian and English mixture of a background. In 2003, I felt the name Joseph Grech reflected my creative European soul and it was from that perspective I reflected on my time at Ruskin in 2005.

In June 2016 I returned to Ruskin on the morning of the Referendum decision to exit from the political control of Brussels. The visit to the Ruskin College Fellowship reunion was both a pilgrimage and as part of the preparations to publish autobiographical work on the Internet one aspect of the free artwork 101 project. I am writing separately about the Fellowship Reunion visit. I lived in Oxford between 1964 and 1967, in Summertown and Headington, working as a child care and court officer with Oxfordshire County Council at Witney and at Henley. I returned for a conference of the Local Authority Associations on Social Services, as a Department of Health Inspector of Social Services for the Drug Advisory Services and three times from 2003.

The 2005 Perspective

“My two years at Ruskin College were very different. The first year was based at the Rookery, located at one end of Headington old village, accommodated in a wood cell in the former stable block. The separate University was regarded as a distant great symbol of an aristocratic and militarised empire. 

A more significant division is that over the first year I struggled to find an economic, political, social and general philosophy by which I, in the context of the rest of humanity, could live by, and over the second year I learnt how to change and structure my life in the service of others. 

New Ruskin students were accommodated in a middle class, semi-rural village, up a hill where Robert Maxwell built his publishing empire, separated from the Gown of concentrated colleges, and the Town of the Cowley car works, and the busy market and tourist shopping centre. There are two pubs in Old Headington which summed up Oxford. The first, “The White Heart”, closest to the college buildings at the Rookery, had pleasant gardens where students could mingle with the cultured university staff from nearby homes, and the second whose name says all that needs to be said, was “The Black Boy.” In 2003 and 2004 I sat in the sun lit garden of the White Swan, feeling at home, speculating what my life might have been like, if I had been more open minded when I arrived, and had known of my dyspraxia and dyslexia, and gone on to an honours degree and PhD. I sat only once, uncomfortably, in the other place where it was evident that the division between the two worlds of Oxford remained as strong as they had been. (addition- an appeared so again in 2003). 

Not that in 1961 I spent much time in pubs, and if I went out, other than to lectures, tutorials, or a university meeting, it would be to the grim façade Bodleian.

I went to Ruskin thinking it was a kind of socialist seminary for the working classes. I quickly discovered that Ruskin was not a revolutionary training camp where one became armed with socialist economics and the techniques of mobilising the working classes, but was a university college clone with good educational purpose, and where the same standards of academic objectivity were required, using the same academic process of graded subject tutorial assignments and end of term  examinations, with ongoing lectures and seminar groups covering the six subjects selected from the certificate syllabus.  

In my first tutorial week of the Michaelmas term 1961, I switched from unilateralism and direct action politics, to Hobbs’ Leviathan and Sabine’s History of Political Theory, which I bought from Blackwell’s with a generous book grant for the constituency Labour Party. Although my essay was praised for its awareness of the theory, it was marked down because I evaded answering key questions.

 After comparing issues between Hobbs and Locke in week two, I progressed with Rousseau because what I had to say about totalitarianism was considered interesting, I then struggled with Mill over the question of sin and crime, while my flirtation with Marxism lasted until I was forced to conclude that in answer to the question, “ has the Marxist view of the state any relevance to day,” that it had little, and while the course lectures on Machiavelli were inspirational, the weeks spent with Schumpeter, Capitalism Socialism and Democracy, and the Benn and Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State, were the foundation for the position which I quickly developed.

Sadly I quickly appreciated that I lacked the kind of academic ability which would enable passage via the back door into the university, for another students explained that the Principal had an arrangement which enabled Ruskin students who passed a university diploma course to read at a University college, selected on the basis of recommendation and interview and sit for the second public examination of an honours degree over three years instead of the usual two, thus bypassing the first public examination which then also required  one paper in Latin.

However, my lifelong fascination with the gulf between political ideas, politicians and political practice was given its academic basis. My reading and book acquisition was politically catholic with Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism and the “Out of Apathy” essays by the new lefties of New Left Books. I also bought but struggled with Volume I of Das Capital, The Fundamentals of Marxist Leninism Manual issued by the Moscow based Foreign Languages Publishing House and Lenin’s Materialism and Empiro-Criticicism, and Socialist Utopian and Scientific by Frederich Engels. More readable was the Trotsky “Russian Revolution”, Imre Nagy on Communism, the Isaac Deutscher political biography of Stalin, Crosland's, “The Conservative Enemy, and the memoirs of Hugh Dalton. “Call Back Yesterday,” and Douglas Jay on “Socialism in the New Society,” But the reading was not restricted to the left and extreme left with a reduced price copy of the memoirs of Sir Anthony Eden and on Lloyd George by his son the Earl of Dwyfor.  For those on the right, who wanted to look into their worst nightmare, the Battle for Socialism, by Peter Fryer can be recommended.

I also more than strayed into investigating intellectual anarchism with Professor Woodcocks book, and most editions of the magazine anarchy merit rereading and were instrumental to introducing me to the work of A S Neil at Summerhill, the social and psychiatric work of David Willis in relation to delinquents and disturbed young people, of Dr Alex Comfort on issues of sex and violence and to ideas on workers control and democratic community living.

I was full of prejudices about Oxford and to demonstrate that I was not immediately casting away the revolution I had a red college scarf made by Shepherd and Woodward. 

I also continued to read literature, devouring the rest of the Alexandrian Quartet, after the gift of Balthazar,  as well as Catch 22, and John Updike`s Rabbit Run, through Penguin Pockets- Rupert Brooke, Laurie Lee, Negro verse and the Beat Poets, through Penguin Modern Poets 1-5 included Dom Moraes, Ginsberg and Elizabeth Jennings, and Penguin Poets William Blake and Robert Graves, Penguin New English Dramatists and Plays included, Chekov Arden, Shafer, Willis Hall’s Long Short and Tall which I had seen in London together with Wesker’s Kitchen, also buying all his other work. I could quote Betjeman and chunks of the Four Quartets and return again and again to the Cocktail Party. I did not go to the pictures much but made a special effort to see Two Women, Last Year in Marianbad, Viridiana, Judgement at Nuremberg and Exodus.  A fellow student alerted to the publication of The Adventurers by Margot Heinemann, Seven Seas books, Berlin. (Insert- I also claimed to remember some events but not others, although now I cannot remember at all) Looking back on the year I remember the death of George Formby and Gary Cooper, that Hemmingway committed suicide, the establishment of the Peace Corps, South Africa leaving the Commonwealth, Sputnik 10 carrying a dog into Orbit together with the Eichmann trial, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and Freddie Truman taking five wickets for no runs to destroy Australia. I have no recollection that it was the year that JFK sent his 18000 to Vietnam, when Immigration from the Commonwealth was first limited, that British troops went to Kuwait because of the threat from Iraq, or that the Syrians had a failed coup in the Lebanon and that the first Polaris submarine arrived the evening before my birthday. (insert-  nearly went to prison over Christmas and received an extraordinary telephone call on Boxing day).

I returned to Ruskin deciding that I would take advantage of some of the privileges arranged with the university, attending the meetings of the Labour Club, and the inner Labour Party group for Members of the Party, as well as those of COUND, the Campaign in Oxford University for Nuclear Disarmament becoming the college rep. I had also been recruited to the Clerical Workers union by the college secretary who was the brother a Secretary of State for Social Services. In Trinity Term there were four public lectures, including Professor Bernal and Sir Issiah Berlin, who also gave a separate lecture at Ruskin on Science and Marxism and Libertarians, Determinists and the Russian Revolution; there were five study groups on Socialism at Somerville, and I celebrated my birthday by going to one led by the student Lydia Howard, a relative of Harold Laski, on Fabianism. Jack Jones was the main event at meetings of the Party group at Balliol, and I also visited the Oscar Wilde Room at Magdalene for a discussion on Pacifism and Revolution. The biggest occasion of big occasions were the visits of Michael Foot on Aneurin Bevan at the Union debating Hall and Hugh Gaitskell at the Taylorian, Shirley Williams, Douglas Jay and JB Priestley also had good followings. Peggy Duff came to COUND so I was able to say hullo, as did Gene Sharp from the Direct Action Committee, together with Tony Greenwood MP and Philip Noel Baker. 

In Trinity term, a time to picnic in the parks and punt on the river, and take excursions further afield. Among speakers were Barbara Castle and John Freeman, with Len Williams, Tom Driberg, Robert McKenzie, Wayland Young, Judith Hart, and Richard Marsh, who had been to Ruskin, and with Sydney Silverman, who supported the Direct Action Committee, all getting support. Study groups on Pacifism in the 30’s and The General Strike and Direct Action were attended, as did a meeting on Sartre. Bridget Brophy came to COUND and senior member Iris Murdoch attended. You felt at the centre of the political universe, especially when Harold Wilson and Hugh Gaitskell wrote back personal letters.  

But most of my time was concentrated on Economic History which required more somersaults in beliefs and understanding than political theory had required. There was little time to respond to the enthusiasm of English Literature students, who had read their DH Lawrence and felt that Ruskin working men offered relaxing diversion to the academic pressure. 

In fact, during my two years I took two young women out to lunch, and one of these I had met on the Liverpool to Hull Youth CND march having stayed at Wallington for a week, before travelling around India on her own, as a gap year student, before going up to Oxford.  Alas, she was involved with a very bright and interesting young man also a CND supporter and college rep who she married. I also had a mini adventure of a kind when a young lady notorious for the brevity of her skirt and stiletto heels, called at my lodgings for tea and to discuss how we were to persuade the Labour Party to say no to Europe and well as to the bomb. My landlady was out visiting university chums, but I was summoned for censure later after she eagle eyed spotted heel marks on the polished stairway lino, but I enjoyed her disapproval which I hoped she would broadcast. 

It was not until the summer term at the Rookery that I managed some genuine notoriety when I smuggled in a pen friend* and a companion into college for Saturday night and Sunday morning. The friend of a friend turned out to be one of the most beautiful and well-proportioned young women in the land, setting the whole college alight, causing an instant party. While several students had regular lady friends in and outside college without cause for official comment, the combination of my noted celibacy and the stir caused by the friend of a friend meant a little official telling off, although I had arranged for them to stay in the twin bedroom of students in separate premises and who were away for the weekend. It was good to be so popular for the first and only occasion.

(*I had placed a creative advert in the New Statesman personal columns. This resulted in a well-known columnist of the Evening standard suggesting it was a clever advert from a wine merchant and claimed six free bottles. There were four female replies, one a journalist who never returned the typed play I had sent to the Royal Court Theatre who had written back saying their Readers wanted to see anything else which I had written, but I had not).

There was one other adventure. A notice appeared advising that some ladies would like the company of some worldly men and being good souls a number of students volunteered to go on the trip to what we believed was a residential home for the elderly. Given that I had reviewed Professor Peter Townsend’s book, The Last Refuge, for Isis, my name was put at the top of those making the visit, but not by me. It was only on arrival that we discovered that the visit was to a well- known Ladies Finishing School and that each of their working class guests was looked after by three daughters of the rich and some famous. (One of those allocated to me said she was going to become the secretary to the Editor of the Times. There was at least one student less on the return trip).

The DH Lawrence thing was a challenge for some students, affecting their academic potential. Ruskin in Oxford was that of a child who spent their whole life looking wistfully through window at all the chocolate cream cakes inside and then told you had five minutes to go in and consume what you wanted.  Some selected something fine which they savoured, perhaps treating themselves to a second éclair as they departed. Those who tried something of everything became rather sick.

For those who studied hard, there was a different order of intoxication available, if the Principal selected you for interview at Colleges to read for an honours degree. One close friend returning from such a successful interview, after tea on the lawn listening to the organ playing in the chapel, behaved like someone who had always played in the fourth division and had then scored the winning goal in the FA Cup.

There were never any guarantees that going to Oxford ensured a better rest of life, but from what I have seen of other universities since, Oxford and Cambridge provided, a superior experience while you were there. It is disingenuous to suggest otherwise. A couple of years later I was dined at the Union before speaking to the Crime a challenge society and Sir Edward Health was being similarly dined by the Conservative Club at adjacent tables. The aspect which struck me was the extent to which he listened to what was being said to him. It was no different from the attention given by tutors to your essay work. 

It was in my second tutorial term that I learnt to accept the difference between what I had thought and what the available evidence indicated. The first challenge was to answer if the industrial revolution had been a triumph, or a disaster, and I immersed myself in the works of the Hammonds, Hobsbawn and Hartwell, an article by A P Taylor and Raymond Williams, Culture and Society. I did my best to give one answer when the facts point to the other. 

Similar challenges followed with the issue of free trade 1842-1914 and the work of Chambers, Clapham, Ashworth, Hahbakuk and Cairncross, but I was happier with the development of trade unions as I was already familiar with the work of Cole and the Webbs, and Postgate on the history of the Common People. Arguing why the UK depression between the Two World Wars was so mild became a great challenge and my tutor disliked much of my approach, including my response to arguments that the development of the Empire was primarily economic imperialism.  After a promising start with political theory, my tutorial and examination marks for Economic History dropped although in part this was the consequence of interaction with the tutor. 

What happened with Economic Theory is less of a paradox than appeared to others at the time. My impression, after almost half a century, is that the college was  divided between the academic concept economist, someone like me in another life, from humble beginnings who had been embraced by academia and who responded with one significant work which had attracted important attention at the time, but not since, and the then contemporary professional economist who was determined to use the growing knowledge base to provide economic tools to effectively manage the general economy and address its component problems. It was the difference between PPE economics which could result in a government Minister and Cambridge Economics which could make a Chief Economic Adviser at the Treasury.

I went to Ruskin taking with me several obstacles which I only understood afterwards. It was only when a daughter in her first term at university was assessed as dyslexic, that I was able to separate the emotional trauma and deprivation of my childhood from the increasing knowledge of the brain and of motor control which is also an aspect of dyspraxia.

At Ruskin the problem was that as soon as a concept attracted my attention, or an argument made which I instinctively disagreed, I concentrated on that and missed the rest. My handwriting remained indecipherable to me, so hand written note taking continued to pose a challenge, as it does today.

I continued to be unable to remember detail unless it had been digitally registered in the brain which meant that I had to understand and consider that it was something I should retain because it interested me, or I considered that it would be useful in the future. It has always been a struggle to retain knowledge for the purpose of only passing an examination. This applied to the tutorial essays in that I did not see the task as completing the assignment in such a way to obtain a pass mark or a good mark, but I wanted to give the answer, using all the available facts and arguments, which in turn meant not just trying to assimilate the relevant part of recommending reading but the whole text of Keynes, Hicks on Public Finance, or Dobbs on Wages before I had grasped the basics. I did try hard with Samuelson, Cairncross, Stonier and Hague, and with statistics where I encountered a wall against comprehension. I have always tended to listen to people who impress me, and not hear what they are saying if they do not. I always respond badly to criticism, even if it is justified, and I thrive on praise if I believe it is accurate.

I had wanted to learn socialist economics while the college taught the certificate syllabus and did not believe there was a viable alternative to capitalism, which created an immediate resistance on my part to what was being taught.  

By good fortune for me, my economics tutor was the Vice Principal and I took the trouble to buy his, “Introduction to the Study of Economics”, an intense slim volume which I also struggled with, and I also looked at his main work.  I wrote some good essays, given my basic lack of understanding and failure to grasp fundamentals, and in the tutorial examination, I realised that I not only knew the answer, but was able to express it with a clarity and accuracy which bordered on the genius. I thought this, and amazingly Henry Smith did too, and marked accordingly. It was my only moment of justified academic glory but everyone else knew, and I knew, that it was all that it was. 

It confirmed the decision which I knew in my heart of hearts I had to make. I saw the college Principal and said that I had been studying the wrong subjects for the wrong reasons, and what I really wanted to do was to study Psychology, Sociology and Criminology. The Principal, Billy Hughes was amazing.  (an addition with changes-A graduate of Balliol and chair of the Labour Club, he had served as a Member of Parliament 1945-1950 after Second World War Service. He said nothing but looked at the syllabus for the Diploma in Public Administration where the college had six places with one vacancy because of a premature departure after checking the subjects I had studied. He made a phone call and said I had to see the admissions officer at Barnett House that afternoon and I should say I wanted to be a social worker.)

Speaking Martyrs Memorial Cuban Blockade photo Oxford Mail.

(Further addition and changes) It was just as well the Ruskin College annual magazine New Epoch had not been published as it included my diatribe on social workers as Reactionaries or Revolutionaries. Over lunch I decided to say Probation and went to the appointment with no idea what the course involved or that its Director of Studies liked to work with first class or second class students with degrees in other subjects capable of taking two academic courses with practical work placements during the vacations and then combined with academic work in the latter stages.

Ruskin students only sat the Diploma in Pubic and Social Administration over two years with a long practical work placement between the two years and at least two practical social work placements during other vacations. I suspected Billy Hughes had made a second phone call because when I arrived at Barnett House, the Department of Extra Mural Studies, it was evident the only issues were to find tutors for the subjects required, Criminology, Psychology, Public and Social Administration, and practical work placements including a crash course on social work before going on my first practical placement. It was suggested that taking sociology would be too much but I should do some reading all of which I did.

Everyone appeared anxious to help, including Surrey County Council which agreed the grants could continue. To get around the problem of the additional maintenance costs the first inspirational placement was two months with the Manchester and Salford Family Service Unit, created by conscientious objectors in the Second World War in Liverpool and which provided accommodation and food for staff with a resident motherly housekeeper. I made contact with Frank Allaun, the Member of Parliament for Salford where I was to work. I had met Frank on a bus to Aldermaston and had taken a party of Ruskin students to meet him at the Houser of Commons.

The F.S.U provided support and company outside of work. Towards the end of the stay a weekend camp was arranged for a party of boys and girls from families known to the unit at a centre in Derbyshire and where the majority had no experience of countryside walking or views from a hillside. I discovered that I could communicate with children and first seeds of working in child care were sown. 

The unit manager, together with the worker with whom I had been attached also had the brilliant idea, an idea which had been used before, for me to meet a family who had achieved fame by an appearance on TV, as being the problem family of all problem families.  Such had been the size of the family that the local authority had knocked two council houses into to one to accommodate everyone, although when I visited most the children had left home to commence their own situations. I was there for the greater part of an afternoon, and for a couple of hours, I listened while the mother described with considerable perception the dozens of officials, social workers and social work students who had previously called, including those who had spent their time talking about themselves and their problems. Before going I had read the file and knew from the record of the links with other families and that the father, who was also present, had like me, been to prison, something which he disclosed and which had also become public knowledge. It was my first test because without any grounding in social work practice, I instinctively knew that it would be wrong for me to disclose my own experience as a child and as a protestor, and I did not, something which I also found to be essential casework practice later. 

I also learnt from the family lessons more valuable than anything else I was to study and experience, although much was also to be important and indispensable. It does not matter how poor, how uneducated, how disturbed, or complicated a client is, they are people in their own right, meriting respect and capable of assessing you, how much you care, how much you are interested, and if you have the capacity to help. This ability varies with the depth of understanding but is always there.

This was also to be the fundamental lesson of the Casework Relationship by the, Jesuit Felix Biestek, a book given priority by the Director of the Birmingham Child Care course, Pauline Shapiro, I was able to take immediately after Ruskin, arranged by and financially supported by the Home office.

The ability to look into the soul of another is an enormous power and responsibility, but it is important to always understand that the other soul is usually capable of looking back into you.

Politicians, mass media personalities, and managers of large organisations frequently fail to pass this test. It is why despite some progress and achievements I always regarded each day as a bonus, and recognised that circumstances could change suddenly and that whatever I did could be done by others better. This provided the strength to know what to do when challenges came, without fearing personal consequences, although the undertaking of responsibility for one’s own family, creates a different level of consideration.

I returned to Ruskin confident that I had made the right decision but anxious about the new challenges I faced. Arrangements had been made for me to have shared Criminology tutorials with the Reader in Criminology who was based at Nuffield College, a post graduate college. My tutorial partner had a first class honours degree and his essays were everything I hoped mine would be. The kindness and understanding which the tutor and he showed enabled me to get rid of my educational and academic anxieties and had a profound significance on the rest of my life. My tutorial partner for the term and I were to work together later. He became the first full time secretary to the Association of Child Care Officers, when I became its last Vice Chairman, and then he became the first Family and Child Care secretary to the new British Association of Social Workers and I became the first chairman of the section, and Sir Keith Joseph, was the chief guest at the conference dinner. 

In addition to the tutorials there were two important components to the study of criminology which contributed to my rapid development.  Dr Walker held two series of eight seminars with guest speakers over the Michaelmas and Hilary terms. The first series was on the English Penal system. I never enquired if I was the first student who had been to prison, and although my own experience had inevitability caused questions and concerns, my experience was used constructively and paradoxically helped me to feel an equal member of the group.

After the first introductory week which covered the relationship between criminal law and other means of enforcement and the machinery of justice, we met for the second time at noon on the second Wednesday of the term to consider the law on imprisonment and the classification of prisoners and their after-care. We then looked at alternatives to imprisonment, juveniles, institutions for juveniles, the mentally abnormal offender, the underlying assumptions and finally, the effectiveness of the system.

The second series covered Theorising about Crime and drew heavily on the work of Lady Wootten and the work of Gordon Trasler on the Explanation of Criminality. Every aspect was explored from fact finding to heredity and individual propensities, the psychopathological and psychological issues together with ecological and sociological aspects, the implications for prevention and treatment and issues of prediction.  In order for these sessions to be of value it was necessary to undertake appropriate reading and thinking of the issues which might be raised.

It had also been arranged for me to become a full member of the University Crime a Challenge Society as Ruskin representative, and during the three terms, I heard many of the leading exponents, opinion shapers and researchers in the field of Criminology. 

The range of speakers and visits at Crime a Challenge in just one year, which the undergraduate could experience three times, together with the seminars and tutorials, equipped students in a way not achieved in the other subjects. The others members were able to make visits to Oxford Prison and one to the Scrubs (Wormwood), one Open prison and one psychiatric prison and one to Broadmoor Hospital, two visits were made to Reading Borstal and one to Huntercombe and there were visits to Approved School and Remand Home, and to special school, and the Society had developed a special relationship with the Wallingford Farm Training School.

Among the most memorable speakers was Rupert Cross on “How many crimes too far?” and Dr Winifred Cavenagh, Author of the Child and the Court and who as Senior Lecturer in Social Study at Birmingham University was to have a further role in my development a year after her visit; there was Gerald Gardiner QC Joint Chairman of the Campaign for the Abolition of capital punishment and  on a more personal  interest note, the Principal Psychologist at Brixton Prison, there was also Dr West from the Cambridge Institute, Howard Jones and Terence Morris, Michael Argyle then the Social Psychology lecturer at Oxford and  DL Howard, the author of The English Prisons, but for me it was Lady Wootton of Abinger, former Professor of Social Science at the University of London and whose work Social Science and Social Pathology was rightfully considered a bible of its kind (and which I re-read recently).

A couple of years later as a child care officer,  I attended one of a handful of white tie and black coat dinners during my life, the occasion was held at the House of Lords and the theme of the main speaker which concerned the protection of society from criminal activity, an aim which we all shared, was based on his convictions and beliefs about the right of everyone to be “free from”, whereas I had already learnt from the writings of Erich Fromm, and an essay in Philosophy, Politics and Society edited by Laslett and Runciman, and the Mikes book on prison, of the significance of “freedom to”, as the stage beyond “freedom from”. The failure of the speaker to make this distinction undermined his thesis and I drew his attention to this because I believed the conclusions he was making as a consequence were wrong and harmful. I was a bundle of nerves before speaking in such a distinguished company which included Lady Wootton, but I did so because I felt someone needed to speak out. Afterwards she came up and congratulated and I began to believe that I had something to contribute more than my individual work. 

It was just before the start of term that the report of the Prison Reform Council group which I had chaired of CND actionists was published and attracted some good media attention. There was a spectrum of media response, with the understandable snipes that we had chosen to go to prison at public expense for a dangerous cause, but because we did not attack the system, or those who ran it, it was suggested that the authorities should give attention to our suggestions. 

Our suggestions covered Medical, Social and Mental Welfare matters, Hygiene, Clothing, Food, Exercise, Letters, Visits, Libraries, Discipline, Education, Work and Pay, information to prisoners and other matters. Our President was Lord Stonham, then Shadow Home Office Minister the Lords, and he arranged for us to meet Lord Jellicoe, the Conservative Government Minister. Lord Stonham introduced us, and the report and Lord Jellicoe responded positively, saying that he had asked his officials to consider all our recommendations.  

We were given the opportunity to add or emphasise points and I raised the issue of visits from families and friends. A senior official then made a crucial error about visit policy and I stepped in and drew the Minister’s attention to the paragraph in the Home Office published policy statement and guide which confirmed that our complaint on the discrepancy between policy and practice was right and his statement was blatantly wrong.  From that moment I felt I was being seriously listened to and after the debate in the House of Lords a large number of our recommendations were implemented.  

However, this did not prove as good a thing as we expected. In addition to recommending that everyone should have an individual chamber pot, instead of sharing which was becoming practice with the overcrowding, we proposed polythene pots with handles and lids, and that cleaning and disinfecting should be taken seriously, and adequate material provided.  The Home Office purchased tens of thousands of the recommended replacements, only to find that there had been no research on corrosive damage, and consequential ineffectiveness of their use, became a good example of being cautious about quick fix solutions however well motivated and well-intended.

The experience revealed the openness of the democratic system if pressure groups approach matters in an appropriate way and make constructive proposals. The publication and meeting also had positive consequences on my future career. Lord Stonham, on behalf of the opposition, initiated a debate in the House of Lords to which we were invited together with other interests, and during the proceedings were taken for tea and introduced to a Bishop. The Bishop was impressed with Jane and Margaret because of their book and Jane’s family connections. Another in the group, I believe from a Civil Service union, was concerned about the position of a member, whereas my only justification for being there was having been to prison and being a student.  

The Bishop was distinctly cool in his response to me. Several months later I shared this experience with some of the students at Barnett House, and one commented that her father could appear diffident with strangers. Given my own problems with polite company, and what I believed about not rushing to judgements, I regretted telling the tale.

During the fifteen months from arriving at Ruskin and undertaking my first term at Barnett House I made an amazing leap from being a non-violent revolutionary in relation to a specific cause, and going to prison for six months, to participating in cultured academic discussions at one of the post graduate colleges of excellence in Great Britain. I had commenced to appreciate the academic methods and standards implicit in an honours and a post graduate standard of education. I had also learnt something of the political and social life at what I had come to recognise as one of the great universities of the world, and I had come to recognise my limitations, and how much more I needed to learn. 

Most of the credit for this transition must go to those who accepted me, as I was at the time, and took the risk of offering me a place to read Economics and Politics, and then Public and Social Administration, the Principal and Vice Principals of Ruskin, the Course Director and the admissions and social casework tutor at Barnett and House, together with Dr Walker at Nuffield College. There was also something fundamentally English about this transition, from trying to sit down at the gates of Parliament and having every word and action monitored as a threat to national security, and then invited to discuss issues with Ministers at the Home Office and attend a debate in the House of Lords as the guest of the initiator of the debate.  It says something about the core nature of British Society which I had attempted to overthrow and then learnt to respect and to defend. 

I have mentioned the dinner involving Sir Keith Joseph during which I was frank about my background and political perspective. His first reaction was to comment about my being more at home in Russia, but later he shared my belief that come such a revolution we would both have been among those imprisoned and executed. That is also part of the British soul. 

in the Autumn of 1962 I commenced to find what I believed was the real me, and learnt to fit in with others, and to enjoy the success of personal achievement. There was no sudden revelation, or dramatic change from one life into the other, although with the hindsight of experience, the changes which occurred were dramatic, and of lasting implication. Instead of wanting to change the world, I became more focused on changing me, and on the problems of learning and remembering, and then on the value of being able to help others on an individual or family basis.  

During 1962 Snow fell in San Francisco, Lucky Luciano died, Kim Philby defected, and the Cuba Blockade commenced.  Wesker’s Chips with Everything had opened, Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday Mr President” and the Isley brothers released Twist and Shout while Benjamin Brittain released his War Requiem.

Over that first academic year at Ruskin, based out at Old Headington, I had discovered the wide range in political thinking among Ruskin students, with a couple of African students launching a Moral Rearmament group which marched up and down to annoy the Trotskyites Marxists who tended to be left of the left. Half the college led the protests against the Cuban blockade and the Principal spoke at the demonstration at the Martyr’s Memorial. I kept clear being bound over.

   

Photo Oxford Mail

There was also a college protest when the Ambassador to Spain addressed the Spanish society and where among a number of students we joined the Spanish Society beforehand.

Photo Oxford Mail

Although the political views of Ruskin students varied, we were all restless spirits, concerned about the lives of others, and united in the quest to improve our own. While we lacked the confidence of the ambitious young politicians of the Labour Club, or the gloss of the public school, we were all desperate to succeed and to contribute. It was only as the year progressed that I learnt that there were greater similarities than differences. I also began to see that while there were gulfs in educational attainment between us and the undergrads and post grads, we all shared in the problems of childhood, family and relationships, and that majority of Ruskin students had achievements through experience to offer. I went home at Christmas in a condition of euphoria.

It was good to have the Ruskin Oxford experience, but I did not expect the feeling would last. (addition- The modern history tutor at the John Fisher School recommended I read the War Crimes Tribunal reports to understand what the second world war was about. I went to the local reference library and read those on Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz).

(I did not buy newspaper when at Ruskin, listen to the radio or watch TV) but I did know that Marilyn Monroe was found dead and Nelson Mandela was arrested (but) no one knew that President Kennedy had installed the taping system which led to the Nixon downfall. I may have known that the second Vatican Council was convened by Pope John but unlikely to have known that Saudi Arabia abolished slavery.

I spent Christmas 1962 and the New Year 1963 undertaking practical work with the Surrey Probation Department arranged with the help of a course member whose father was the Chief Probation officer. The hurriedly arranged placement was something of a disaster, except that for a few days I was able to sit in with someone who demonstrated the highest standards of professional practice, and who went on to become distinguished in his field. I returned to Ruskin ad advised my link tutor at Barnett House that I wanted to try and become a child care officer and a placement was arranged with Manchester Children’s department over the Easter vacation.

I cannot remember when I was invited to take tea with two dear ladies who took a maternal interest in Ruskin students, the daughter of the legendary Oxford Professor noted for his misuse of words and her cousin who we knew as the Spooner sisters. (additions-Their grand piano was donated to Ruskin and is now at the Rookery) and the tutor in political Theory from the United Stated States former a choir which recorded an EP record which was titled Jay and the Rooks).

I treated myself to a hard back edition of Doris Lessing’s new book, because she was one of us, but I did not grasp the significance of the Golden Notebook until years later. I was oblivious to the launching of the Incredible Hulk and Spider man comics. I did go to the West End to see Lawrence of Arabia, and I took the Aunties to see How the West Was Won in Cinerama.

Most of the other films released during 1962 I only experienced on TV, later, including the Longest Day, The Man who shot Liberty Valance, Tokill a Mockingbird, Dr No, Taras Bulba, State Fair, Kid Galahad, Lolita, Cape Fear, the Manchurian Candidate, Ride the High Country, Birdman of Alcatraz, The Miracle Worker, A Kind of Loving, Mutiny on the Bounty and Divorce Italian Style. I also understood Neil Sedaka’s, “Breaking up is hard to do,” without ever being in a relationship of that nature! 

I had kept up my membership of JACARI, Oxford University Committee Against Racial Intolerance but I cannot remember which meetings I intended. I hope I went to the meeting on the Oxford Colour Bar with Fr Michael from the Catholic Chaplaincy and on Radicalism and Fascism in Britain, but I do remember Denis Healy on Central Africa, jointly held with the Labour Club. The main event of the JACARI year was the visit of the Bishop of Massai, Trevor Huddleston. 

I was full of enthusiasm for the second tutorial subject, Psychology, only to be confronted by a brilliant young man who led the Institute of Experimental Psychology, his first student from Barnett House and from Ruskin so I was also an experiment.

He had no regard for social workers, and even less for Freudian based psychology upon which much of social work theory was then based. So his first mission was knocking out any idea of my becoming a social worker and preventing my interest in Freudian “psycho-babble” taking root. The first essay assignment was to compare and contrast Classical and Operant Conditioning. 

I described the sequence of the human hand touching hot metal as follows, “the hand will have been subjected to a stimulus (the hot metal) and this will have elicited a response (the withdrawal of the hand); the sequence of stimulus and withdrawal being described as a reflex. Depending on the intensity of the stimulus (the temperature of the metal (tutorial note insert was within limits) will be the magnitude of the response; the period between subjection to stimulus and the response elicited is described as the latency. The latency of any reflex will therefore depend upon the intensity of the stimulus.” This was not what I had expected to be doing. 

The second mission of the tutor was to develop my academic potential and encourage me to thinking in terms of a philosophy, psychology and physiology degree. The idea of doing a degree still had appeal, and the possibility of joining an Oxford college, even more so, especially after the debacle of the probation placement.  

The third mission, and which brought one of life’s memorable experiences, was that I should learn to participate and enjoy the good life. Because he and some friends were not college based and therefore outside the social life of colleges, they had formed a dining club which met in a hired room and served the equivalent of a college top table feast of many courses and wines, and with guests who were expected to entertain by their wit. On the occasion of my baptism, the chief guest a college master, was clearly uncomfortable and retreated immediately the meal was over. I do not think he stayed for the liqueurs and cigars. He might have been put off by one of our company who was a musician and who said he had run girls in Soho, although this may have been a boast. That I had been to prison added to the misery of the chief guest who must have wondered what further revelations he was to endure. After the meal we staggered to Nuffield College Tower as guest of one of the number, and the others played snooker until the early hours while I tried to amuse with tales of prison life, after which I returned to my lodgings even later than I had advised my landlady, but who had not locked up. I was violently sick bringing up most of the food which I had then spent time disposing of slowly down basin plughole.

My landlady was most understanding and appeared amused which suggested that getting drunk without being disorderly was considered preferable to having a girl in the room. I did however commit one act of stupidity which led me to decide to move into college for the final term. I had tried to dry something with an electric fire over a polished table, and then had to seek financial help in order for a French polisher to redeem the damage. 

The period when I debated using the Diploma, for entry to a philosophy and psychology degree, lasted only for part of the term. I read some philosophy. I had a serious stab at digesting the Stebbings’s Introduction to Logic, and Russell’s Outline and his History, and a four volume collection on Philosophy in the twentieth Century, and these later equipped me to tackle the Sartre, Being and Nothingness, as a move from Nihilism and Anarchism to Existentialism seemed rational to me.  

The Clifford Morgan, Introduction to Psychology, and the Kimball Young handbook of Social Psychology were my basic readers, but I never took to the study of rats in the same way as the Hall and Lindzey.

The opening week’s salvos from the tutor, who bombarded me with scientific papers and theoretical treatise, came to a head when we tackled Freud and the sub conscious. He was not pleased with my enthusiasm. I jumped into the deep end with Franz Alexander’s Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis and his Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Sandor Lorand’s, Psycho Analysis Today which led to the work of Melanie Klein, and a five volume edition of the collected papers of Sigmund Freud.  I also looked for solutions to my condition in the Jacobson, “The Self and the Object World” the Hartman, “Ego Psychology and the problem of Adaptation,” and the Arlow and Brenner, “Psychoanalytical Concepts and Structural Theory”.  

The effectiveness of the approach of the tutor was that again I quickly appreciated my academic and intellectual limitations, and that before one adopted positions to last a life time, it was essential to understand the wide range of theories about the normal, or average growth of personalities through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and sexual relationship, into the roles of middle age and the adjustments required to cope with physical frailty and  death, and then the varied explanations about the formation of abnormalities and deviancies, and then the various approaches and methods to containment and effective treatments.

(an addition -My tutor also commenced a series of metamorphoses. He returned England after taking his team to the USA to become head of a Polytechnic in London, to move to Which magazine and then to the Open University. His Obituary in the Guardian aged 70 commenced, “John Beichon, who has died, achieved national prominence in 1984 as the troubleshooter who calmed the student rebellion at the North London Polytechnic - a situation that provoked court orders and a threat by the then education secretary, Sir Keith Joseph, to close the institution down. An innovative manager of public services, Beichon later turned his attention to the Consumers' Association, though he was probably less successful in shifting the culture there than at the polytechnic. His management methods reflected his pedigree. The son of an entrepreneurial communist engineer in London's East End, with whom he had a stormy, but, in the end, affectionate relationship, he blended the academic disciplines of engineering and psychology with communist convictions and a belief in blunt speaking.

The precision of engineering cannot be said to apply to the marking system which operated at Ruskin and mirrored that in the University. The system comprised the allocation of Alphas, and Betas, and C’s and D’s with a margin range between grades of B- -, B-, B, B+ and B+ +. My educational performance at school had fluctuated between the equivalent of failures of Cs and D’s. The performance during the first Ruskin year had been one of B range marks although I achieved one Alpha minus. I cannot remember what happened in psychology, in part because it was not good, but also because my tutor has his missions. It was when I studied Public and Social Administration that academic work clicked and I began to function closer to my potential. It also involved undertaking two tutorial assignments a week and preparing for the examination with would involve all seven subjects.

My academic breakthrough occurred with my work on Public Administration which was marked never less than B + with two “B + Good” comments for work on the organisational structure of local government, and on the duties and functions of local authorities; I also obtained B+ on the areas covered by local authorities, and on the financial system, together with the structure of the Civil Service and on the accountability of the nationalised industries. But I also achieved three B + + with essays in Government Departments and Local Authority Chief Officers, and   on Treasury Control in relation to Local Authorities. The real value of this work was not the grades, but the understanding of the systems then in operation which although it all became buried under the volume of further work and experience, I was able to draw upon when I became an Assistant Director and then a local authority chief officer.

Professor Richard Titmus had come to the Labour Club before Christmas on the Changing Face of Welfare, but 1963 was marked by Earl Atlee speaking on the achievements of the 1945 Government. 

It was Tony Benn who commanded attention with his clarity of purpose and vision, and everyone enjoyed Malcolm Muggeridge on the Satire Industry. A second visit from Hugh Gaitskell reminds of his response to a letter in 1962 when I had commented on the loss of the Orpington by-election, Opinion Polls, Unilateralism and the Common Market.

Over Easter in 1963 I had my first experience of working in a local authority Children’s Department. My supervisor in Manchester was an Area Children Officer and in addition to providing a comprehensive introduction to the actual work of child care officer, she arranged for me to undertake work on my own, and then tried to persuade me to take a job in the department. In addition to a glowing practical work placement report, she provided a heartfelt reference which is treasured.  

My study and essay assignments on Social Administration were to have a significance which my tutor and I did not appreciate at the time.  Every one of the assignments were to lay the foundation for my future working and thinking. The young tutor balanced her academic excellence with a common sense which kept my feet firmly rooted in the reality of practice.

The first task was to consider if local authorities had adequate powers to prevent the neglect and ill treatment of children living in their homes. My paper began with a review of developments over the previous one hundred and fifty years, based on the historical work of Jean Heywood, in “Children in Care”, and who argued that it was only with the rise of Protestantism had responsibility for children become concentrated on the parental family and the welfare of children had only become an issue for humanitarians, philanthropists and evangelicals when children became an economic unit after the industrial revolution.

Over the first half of the twentieth century there was an increasing involvement of the state, with a number of legislation measures after 1930 to protect children in their own home. I then wrote that the driving force was recognition that the child was father to the man, (which today I would have added as part of a heredity chain), and that the skill, vigour and morality of a people may well be said to be a reflection of the education, training and care which they received in childhood. Someone else’s words I think. I then tackled the problem of reaching an acceptable definition of ill treatment, arguing that a consensus over physical ill treatment was possible, (and would have assumed that this included sexual ill treatment), but that the problem was with psychological and emotion ill treatment, raising the controversial issue of whether a child brought up in one faith, believing it was the only true faith and that all other faiths were damned, could be regarded as suffering from psychological ill treatment. Few would disagree today that to bring up a child hating other children because of their religious faith, family political beliefs, their skin colour or their race is wrong, but when does this become grounds for state intervention? The main issues about the nature of the problem, and the role of the state, had been explored by the Ingleby Committee and which led to the 1963 Children and Young Persons Act which required local authorities to undertake work to prevent the ill treatment of children, the admission of children into care and the appearance of children before court within a functioning family environment. Twenty years later I was to sit on a panel of inquiry into the death of a child at its home, where some lawyers defended the action of the local authority to keep the child in an evidently unsatisfactory parental situation because of this duty to prevent the admission into care. However, when I challenged the lawyers to say that this duty over rode the duty to protect a child, it was admitted that the responsibility was to argue the best case and the panel to make the judgement. 

I was then asked to discuss the powers and procedures of the juvenile court and the paper covered the issue of the age of criminal responsibility and differential treatment for children involved in the committal of the same offence. I came strongly down on the side of those who wished to see the age of criminal responsibility lowered and for children to be treated according to need, irrespective of whether they were delinquent, disturbed or in care on a voluntary basis, or because of the need to protect them 

What became extraordinary is that within a year I had written to the leading Children’s Officer advocate of this approach for a job, and she gave me one, and set me on the fast track which led to my becoming the Vice President of the Association of Child Care Officers, with a responsibility for overseeing the lobbying of Parliament to try and ensure that this approach was the basis of the 1969 Children’s and Young Persons Act

It is one of the more ludicrous of human notions that leaders in whatever field, Monarchs, Presidents, Spiritual Guides and church managers, Prime Ministers and Governors, Judges and Professors Company chairmen and media barons are good and effective in what they do because they have got into the positions by birth, election or circumstance. All who have a comprehensive education know that good and effective leaders are bred. The balance between interlocking chains of genes and subsequent training and social preparation will vary according to needs and opportunities. The essential rule is that every kind of leader needs appropriate preparation and training, and the better this is the less the leader is likely to learn at the expense of all and any of us. 

The same view applies to those who advise and organise for the leaders. When I went to Ruskin I would have liked to have become a leader, a principal adviser and organiser, but I never saw myself as becoming one. However, the experiences of being treated as one by staff at Ruskin and in the University and by the university process led me to believe that anything was possible. This was to become translated into a national leadership situation during 1969 and 1970, and the roots for my actions and position were formed during the social administration assignment on the Younghusband Report on the training and recruitment of social workers. 

Penelope Hall, in her study of the Social Services in Modern England had described the piecemeal development of social welfare which had led voluntary and then statutory services developing in relation to specific needs without coordination, and frequently without reference to each other. There were a number of separate training disciplines, child care, probation, hospital, psychiatric and family and an even greater number of professional organisations representing practitioners, and separately of managers, and in addition to hundreds of specialist based charitable and voluntary work organisations, statutory functions were divided between children’s departments, hospital social work departments, the probation service and a variety of local authority organisational, committee and departmental structures covering the work of Medical Officers of Health, of Welfare Officers primarily concerned with the elderly and Mental Health Work, with responsibility for people with severe learning difficulties (Mental handicap) divided according to age between Education and Health and with responsibility for disabled people or people with a disability) pending upon viewpoint, vague. 

The idea, discussed in the Younghusband Committee was for a one basic general social work qualification, on the same lines as a general teaching certificate and medical degree and which in fact came shortly into being as the Certificate of Qualification in Social Work. It never occurred to existing professional practitioners that such qualification would replace specialist practice. However, the issue was how far should changes in training be reflected in changes in organisational structure within the social work activities into one social services department or agency and between the functions of Health, divided between Hospital and Local Authority Medical officer and the social services. 

There were also adjacent debates over the boundaries between children’s departments and education departments, and between social service and social security functions, and there remains confusion about responsibilities and boundaries not only in the public mind and in the media, but between and within health, social services and social security, and education, to this day. 

Because in 1960 our knowledge of the relationships, the links, between poverty, crime, poor education, mental ill health had advanced, together with our awareness of the issues facing children in single parent households or substitute environments such as fostering, residential care and residential school and changes in the structure and functioning of families, the concept of  comprehensive social work and social service departments had gained strong support among social work teachers, professional and managerial bodies and to a lesser extent among practitioners, who justifiably feared the implications of organisational change. 

My views in 1963 reflected the contemporary swing towards the comprehensive social services department. It was my tutor, Juliet Cheetham who questioned the potential consequences of this for professional social work in becoming part of a major local authority bureaucracy. I am not stating what her actual views were at the time, but my having come down firmly on one position, she, as all the tutors had each done in their individual ways, had ensured that I was aware that there were just as strong and valid options. In this instance she made me think about the issues long after I moved on to other assignments and as I will come to explain, my rethinking had national consequences. 

Another assignment had been to review the administrative structure of the National Health Service, although it was three years later before the husband of the Children’s Officer of Oxfordshire, explained and tried to convince why the only justification for health functions being retained by local government was the public health requirements. For a time, because I believed it was important for the rapid development and strengthening of social work management and practice separately from health, I supported this view as Medical Officers of Health justifiably fearing for their personal futures, attempted to take control over all local authority social services functions, including children’s department services and staff. My then lack of interest in social security provision can been found in the weakest of my essays, on the relevance of Beveridge principles on the social security system of the early sixties. Over twenty years later the then Director of Studies at Barnett House, Olive Stevenson, had become a Professor of Social Work and a member of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, and she and my former tutor in social administration, Juliet Cheetham, who had also become a Professor of Social Work, came to South Tyneside to see me about matters they were investigating for a report.

During 1963 the Editor of Isis had invited me to review the Peter Townsend study of residential care institutions for the elderly, and the review had been given prominence and he wrote saying how much he appreciated the way I had presented his work. It was his book and the description of attitudes towards elders which influenced what given my present circumstances and interests I regard as one of my best pieces of work from 1963.  The task was to consider if the services available for old people were in urgent need for revision, with a steer that I should look at the balance between residential and community care. I had taken the proverbial horns of the bull and condemned the use of the term old people because it was then used to describe old people as an inferior section of the population when “in fact we are being concerned with our social parents-the men and the women who have provided the material and cultural wealth which we now inherit.”  I went on to argue that we should be concerned about “all individual human beings- people with the capacity to feel pain and affection, who possess memory and imagination and who want to communicate their own experience and share in the experience of others. Any discussion about the services available for the old should commence with the question, how would I want to be treated, and would I want to be treated like this? Far too often underlying our approach to social questions is the attitude, `its good enough for em, and what else can they expect` with the emphasis being on them rather than ourselves.” 

I then went into the information about population percentages and changes, the existing service structure and the changes then under discussion, but I also made a point which governed my approach when I became responsible for the development of services in Cheshire in 1971 and for the management and development of services in 1974. I wrote in 1962. “For this reason it should be considered essential that before any revision of services is undertaken that we make ourselves aware of the needs of old people.” 

Shortly after I became a Director of Social Services at South Tyneside the local authority agreed to the proposal that we should use some special government funds to reduce unemployment to hire people to knock on every door in the borough, over sixty thousand households and ask them what they thought of socials services provision and what was their priority for service expansion. The overwhelming response was the extension of a limited visiting warden scheme, in which local people were paid coppers to call on a number of household each month to check on the elderly occupant or couple, to establish if they were alright and if their needs had changed. To meet the expressed need, the local authority would be required to increase the number of Visiting Wardens from around thirty to over one hundred and fifty and the department worked out how to achieve this over a three-year period, and with political blessing it was put into the system. The development had the additional advantage because the extension would enable free television licences for those visited under the regulations which with legal advice the Director of Housing and I understood to be the position.

For any new measure or change in service which involves staffing and funding in local government it was necessary to go through a complex system for consultations between officers and officers and politicians and a formal committee structure with separate sub-committee covering aspects of social services, the personnel  and financial functions of the local authority, and then through the main committee structure, leading the Policy and Resources Committee and a full Council, before which all the political party interests hold meetings to consider their approach before a final decision is taken. Even then it is usually only a decision of intention to provide funding and staffing in a future budget yet to be agreed.  

In this instance Councillors of the majority and controlling political party said I was being negative and short sighted and moved that the development should be implemented with immediate effect and that the Financial Director should advise his committee how the funds could be provided. Inwardly I was thrilled at the working of a democracy in which you asked people what was needed, that the people said the welfare of the elders was the most important, and the local authority put it into immediate effect. 

Sometime after that, independent research was undertaken into the warden and home helps service in South Tyneside and the investigators did not understand at first why the officers returned to help their clients outside of their paid time. They did not understand until it was explained that we recruited local people from the same estates and neighbourhoods who were visiting their elders, who if not part of an extended family network, were known to their extended family network. 

I do not believe it was chance, or some product of chaos or random theory which led me to write what I did in 1963, to decide to stay in local authority social services when children’s services were merged in 1971, rather than move into a non-statutory child care agency, or when I was interviewed for the position of Director, aware that the sitting tenant had applied and was almost certain to be appointed, that I got up and said what I thought, to a group of ordinary people councillors who cared about their community, in  a way which I found extraordinary at the time, and continue to marvel at since.

When the Conservative government, aided by many in the Social Services field, attempted to introduce Community Care and Children Act reforms in a big bang approach in the early 1990’s I warned that the proposals would be disastrous for the provision of basic services such as home helps and visiting wardens in South Tyneside in three papers which I submitted to the House of Commons Social Services Committee. This led to an invitation to appear before the Committee, which caused great embarrassment for the Association of Directors of Social Services who had not bothered to submit papers as an organisation. Not for the first or last occasion was I find myself in a situation where the Association defended the indefensible while I tried to present an alternative viewpoint.

When I wrote that academic essay on community care services for the elderly I did not know if I would pass the certificate, or become a professionally qualified child care officer, which in turn would lead to development and managerial responsibilities for the elders.  At the time I was experiencing difficulties in getting a grant and a place on a university professional training course, and I was still unsure if I was going to be any good as a child care officer, or wanted to spend the rest of my working life in social work. 

Given my previous problems with learning and examinations, I am amazed now that I managed to survive the five term examinations before sitting the papers for the seven subjects which I had studied. While my mind was full of Psychology, Criminology and Public and Social Administration, and Social Casework during the last year, I still had to face three hour examinations on Economic Theory, Economic History and Political Theory. Ruskin provided a series of sessions and briefing guides to assist students and although I attended some they only reminded of how little I had known and then remembered.  

There was also one event which Ruskin arranged which was also to have the most profound effect on my view of the universe, the extent of human knowledge, and the great unanswered questions. I wrote this before seeing the film version of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy! The college had a special fund which enabled an eminent generalist to give a series of lectures which were mind blowing in their breadth and depth. In 1956 Victor Gollancz published a collection of essays, The New Outline of Modern Knowledge, on philosophy and metaphysics, the sciences, the arts, politics and economics and the law. The work is comprehensive but what the Ruskin lectures achieved was to enable an understanding of concepts such as time and number as well as of space. The memorable example is the concept of 1. Divide 1 by 3 and the result is .333333 recurring, so what has happened to the missing .1? A not insignificant question given the digital world has been built around combinations of 0 and 1. For me, it was the issue of time which fired my imagination. 

Today it is possible for anyone in the world to communicate with anyone else in the world with only the briefest of time lapses, yet in terms of time, the awareness of time in terms of day and night, and hour, minute and second will vary. It is also possible for communication between this world and man and machine in space at considerable distance and therefore there is no reason why such communication is not possible across the vast expanse of space. Simply because we are presently limited in our capacity to listen in or transmit pictures between our known technologies at a distance does not mean that others are not more advanced, and have been able to listen and see throughout our recorded knowledge of self-aware consciousness.

It is also possible through satellite, telephone and computer to observe and change the records of, who we are, and what we are and have been doing, and indeed our actual recorded existence can be erased or changed to enable others to see us differently from who we have been and what we have accomplished. At the same some entity somewhere can be viewing this happening and recorded the evidence of who we were and have become. 

Although I spent night after night in preparation for the final examinations I found myself unexpectedly relaxed from the sense of special occasion. The Oxford Examinations are an event when you are required to dress in sub fusc, a dark suit, a white bow tie, and if a university member a gown and mortar board. I became quietly confident because at one level the result did not matter, the experience had. 

The aunties had been able to fund my going abroad for the first time, a college trip to Sweden. The party travelled by train through Belgium and Germany and Denmark, through Southern Sweden to Stockholm and from where three of us paid a visit to the Swedish Oxford at Upsala as guest of a student we had met, and who was studying psychiatry, before spending several days at a Folkhighschool at Forsa on the eastern coast.   

The endless miles of forest and waterway explained the thoughtful character for the Nordic, enabling me to listen and see again differently, the music of Grieg and Sibelius, the films of Igmar Bergman and plays of Ibsen.

We were on a hillside, were we, when news reached us, did it, that President Kennedy had said “Eich bin ein Berliner, and was given added significance because a visitor from the United States, staying at the high school, was a member of the outing. My first memory was that news of the assassination had reach us, but this did not happen until I was at Birmingham, so the whole situation is in doubt except that I have photos of hillside, the group and the views, and there was an American and we said it was a moment we would always remember where we were and with whom.

I returned to Oxford to stay with some Ruskin students who had taken rooms for the rest of the summer before going on to colleges and the PPE. We picnicked in the grounds of Blenheim Palace and we punted on the river in an effort to capture our own little bit of Brideshead.  Then we went see if our names were posted at the Examination schools, and ordered our copies of the Oxford University Gazette of Friday 30th August 1963. Thirty-two Ruskin students obtained the Economics and Political Science Diploma, one with distinction, thirteen from the Catholic Workers College, three from university colleges and one from St Peters. All six Ruskin students succeeded in the Public and Social Administration Diploma, plus one re-sitting. 

I was very impressed with myself, even more so when I discovered that in addition to those from Barnett House nineteen students from university colleges had also taken the diploma including someone from Balliol, Trinity and Corpus Christi. This gave added value to the Diploma, well I thought so and that is what mattered. “

 Since rereading I have started to go through boxes of unprocessed information and one item rediscovered is the Labour Party Group card for Michaelmas 1962 with meetings on Sunday mornings in Somerville West JCR at 11am with coffee. Billy Hughes listed as College President spoke on the Fabians Today, John Ennals as College Vice President spoke on the Labour Party Conference 1962 and John Hughes on Unions in the sixties. Walter Kendall who was at the college 1962/1963 then Vice Chairman of Wimbledon CLP and spoke on European Socialism. Bob Skidelsky then at Nuffield spoke on Education.

Jeremy Beecham, now Lord Beecham and a Labour Front Bench spokesman and appointed my solicitor in 1993 was then at University College and a Labour Party Assistant Secretary of the Labour Club in 1963 concerned with Internal coordination and organiser for the A group of College within the club.