1528 John Beischon and me

A few days ago when talking about aspects of my experience at Oxford, Ruskin College and the Department of Experimental Studies, in the context of Brideshead Revisited, I mentioned the impact on me of having studied Psychology for a term, as part of a post graduate Diploma in Public and Social Administration Course, under Dr John Beishon, then at the Institute of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. I was asked the question what happened to him, and all I could remember is that some years later I heard a radio interview in which he explained why he was taking his team to a University in the United States. I then did an internet search and discovered why he had spent the greater part of tutorials trying to persuade me to abandon social work and sit for a Philosophy and Psychology Degree at the University. We had been similar personalities and our respective lives reflected this.

Although I had left school at sixteen with only five G.C.E and went to work as a clerk in local government I was fortunate to gain a local authority adult education grant to attend Ruskin College and study Politics and Economics. In the early 1960's, if one performed academically well and showed potential the College Principal, a former Minister in a Labour Government, was able to nominate the best students to attend three interviews at a University College, where if selected and passing the Diploma, one was able as a Senior Student to bypass the Preliminary Examination for Philosophy, Politics and Economics, as long as one entered the Honours school rather than for a pass degree, taking three years instead of two. Thus a miner, steel or shipyard worker could find himself with an MA Hons Oxon after five years of study having spent the last three at Balliol, St Johns, or Magdalen.

At the end of the first year each student discussed their future with H D "Billy" Hughes, the Principal, after being told if they were on his A list for an Oxbridge referrals, those who had excelled in Economics went to Cambridge, or should consider other Universities, Teacher Training. Some returned to Trade Union positions while other contemplated Westminster or a Local Council. Only one or two returned to their previous jobs and life. I explained that despite a high rating in Economic Theory I did not understand how theory related to practice and wanted to study Criminology and Psychology, subjects which related to previous experience and interests. After considering the requirements and subject to their acceptance I was offered a place on the Post Graduate Diploma course in Public and Social Administration and at the beginning of Michaelmass 1962 was sent to meet John Beishon at the Institute who was to be my tutor for the year and insisted on receiving my efforts among the experiments. John made it plain at our first meeting that he had no regard for social work and that he would spend the major part of the time trying to persuade me to take a psychology based degree. He did set essay subjects and provide reading lists and he did take away essays and mark them but for the most part we discussed politics, religion, the lessons of history, scientific method, Oxford and the Class system and my experience of going to prison for six months. He also pressed me to read a number of books which he loaned and would talk about these. His approach was very different from my Criminology Tutor who held bi weekly seminars, arranged visits in addition to arranging membership for me of the Crime a Challenge Society. As a short notice additional student I shared tutorials with someone who held a first class Divinity degree and who was combining the Diploma with a professional qualification in child care. We took it turns to read our essays and my efforts which at times embarrassed me when compared to that of the other student were always greeted with praise and support. For the first time in my life I felt that what I had to say was being valued and it reshaped the rest of my life.

Not being attached to a college, the approach of John Beishon was to constantly attack the University and those who ran it, yet he and others in a similar position had formed a small dining club which held a feast a term to which each member brought a guest. I was his guest and late into the night having asked my landlady not to lock me out, I was asked to tell my tale in the Tower of Nuffield College while some played billiards and others drank and drank. The star turn of the evening was a jazz pianist who had run several girls in Soho and it was some of his stories which led the chief guest, a senior academic from a college, to leave the party as soon as the puddings had been consumed. I had been able to join in a little at that time having spent the five years since leaving school and going to Ruskin regularly visiting the Cy Laurie Jazz Club in a cellar opposite the Windmill Theatre in Soho and where during the interval I and my companions would mingle with the ladies over a hot meat sandwich in a nearby café, or in a nearby pub where I learnt to drink brown and mild. By one of those coincidences earlier today I was contacted by a My Space site musician to ask about Cy Laurie and his music, having come across my previous reference in the index.

John Beishon failed in his mission regarding my future and I went into child care social work and social services administration. I have often speculated what would have happened if I had used the Diploma to join the Honour school in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology at the university which was regarded as a new and therefore questionable school, having been established only in 1949. The University Handbook for 1961 describes the course and offering a vigorous and some have argued severe training in psychology which had to be combined with either philosophy or physiology.

" A good psychologist must be in the broadest sense, a humanist; at the same time, he must have a firsthand knowledge of experimental and statistical methods on which modern psychology is built. In accordance with Oxford tradition the work of the school is confined to the study of fundamentals, and the examination of psychology includes two six hour practicals, based on two years laboratory work. No special stress is placed on systems of medical psychology such as psycho-analysis, except in so far as they contribute to general psychological thinking, Nor does the school at present offer opportunities for technical training in applied psychology. The school is of interest and value to those wishing to understand the contribution which modern psychology has made tot eh systematic study of human and animal behaviour. A student will chose his second subject largely in accordance with the direction of his thought and previous training. If the choice is philosophy, he will be held to examine the presumptions of what he is learning in the laboratory and elsewhere, If it is physiology, he will gain more detailed and exact knowledge of the working of the bodily mechanisms. Owing to the lack of laboratory space it has been found desirable to restrict the number of students. Indeed adequate tutorial supervision would not in any case be available for large numbers at present. For these reasons as well as on account of the severity of the course only a certain number of well qualified students made hope to secure admission." a mere general interest in psychology is not sufficient title to be accepted.

In addition to speculating about what had happened if I had yielded to John's ambitions for me I have wondered how his academic life worked out.

The answer first came from the an inaugural lecture by John Naughton at the Open University in June 2006 and I am able to reproduce the relevant opening paragraphs in an unchanged form for non commercial use.

John became the founding Professor of Systems at the Open University and the lecturer's first head of Department. "He was, by turns and sometimes simultaneously a friend, a mentor, a scourge and an inspiration. From him I learned a great deal about innovation and subversion in organisations-especially in this one,- And in his later career- long after he had left the Open University and had been appointed to rescue a failing Polytechnic(see below) from an inferno of ideological intolerance, I saw him display the kind of personal courage that is quite alien to most academics. Intellectuals are good at many things, but in general moral fortitude isn't one of them."

"But then John wasn't your average intellectual. He was ferociously bright and resourceful, but not what you'd call cultivated. Aristotle, Plato, Spinoza had passed him by. He first trained as a metallurgist, and to his dying day displayed an intense interest in defective and carelessness welding. He then switched to Psychology for reasons that I never understood, After a D.Phil in applied psychology at Oxford, he made the transition into that strange oxymoronic subject, "management science" becoming a Reader at Sussex University in the late 1960's. He was therefore already on an interdisciplinary trajectory when he was appointed Professor of Systems here in 1970."

" From the moment of his arrival in the Faculty of Technology, two of his most prominent characteristics become evident. The first was his profound belief that the wrong people were in charge of the Faculty and the University, of the country and indeed the world in general. This was partly the product of his ideological heritage. He had been in his youth, a Communist sympathiser if not actually a Party member. But it was also partly a product of his anarchic temperament. He was by nature a trouble maker in the best sense, though of course those who set in authority above him did not always see it that way."

I then found the Guardian Obituary which confirmed the comments of John Naughton and provided additional information. While he had studied metallurgy at a Polytechnic his interest in the subject developed during National Service with the Royal Engineers in he Canal Zone in Egypt. He then worked for ICI and British Insulated Cables and studied evenings and weekends for a first class honours degree in psychology. Why he did so has puzzled people but not me because although may not have appeared cultured to some John has asked me to read books on philosophy as well as psychology and which was at the root of the Oxford approach in that era. If you are interested in the true nature of the universe and the accept that time and space has no beginning and no end then you are also interested in the nature and significance of human life. He went to Oxford to complete his doctorate and to undertake behavioural science research at Bristol and Sussex.

Alas there is no reference to going with his team to the USA I can only assume that this was a non event and it is the of interest that he went to the Open University fired with an understanding of what was working and what was not in university education and that education had become too narrow so that students needed a more rounded understanding of the world and our knowledge of it.

Although John appeared on the surface to attack the Oxford style and as with Ruskin and other students who did not feel themselves to be part of the middle and ruling classes, the self confidence and certainty of the majority of Oxford undergraduates came as a shock, he also recognised, the brilliance and the drive. It is no accident that in University Challenge individual colleges at Oxford and Cambridge compete with university, because having excellence in the chosen degree course is only the starting point and students are assessed for their all round awareness and knowledge, hence Ruskin students having value beyond their academic potential.

Of course there were silly young men from public schools, drinking too much, not taking academic study seriously and regarding the three years as time for a carefree social life before paid work, marriage and families of their own, but to adapt Kerouac, I saw the best minds of my generation, self confident and free. John felt an outsider and I know this because he told me so but like me he desperately wanted to belong, hence the involvement the dinning club and taking me along. While I felt had always felt an outsider, and continued to do so at Ruskin. I did not in my contact with other undergraduates at the University or College and University staff as I quickly found that no one cared about my social or parental background if I had something valid to contribute. This was not just my own experience. I knew one Ruskin student who was taken up as a rower and rowed for his subsequent college, and several who went on to make a name for themselves in the Union. Ruskin men, including the married ones, if inclined, were very popular among undergraduates at St Hilda's and Lady Margaret Hall. I found myself on a Labour Club committee set up to ensure that the Labour Party opposed the capitalist Common market developing into a political organisation at time when one subsequent chairman of the party was an undergraduate and where when we wrote to leaders we got a reply, I have one from Hugh Gaitskell about the CND and one from Harold Wilson about prisons. The culture was one where anyone with drive and talent could if they wished change the world through their work or lead it. Brideshead Revisited, the book and the TV adaptation the subject of recent Blogs is at one level a book about one student who decided he wanted to live as an aristocrat and was taken up in the first term by the Christchurch set, lived with one at her ancestral home after marrying the sister of another. Oxford in the 1960's was still a huge box of delights where some made themselves very ill from overdosing.

It is interesting to me that John not just leapt at the opportunity to set up a new professorship at the Open University but within a short time was attacking everyone who had employed him and set about changing things the way he believed was better and more effective. That is the key to understanding John from my brief experience with him and from my own. His concerns about social work was both from the methods used and its effectiveness, There was no point in repeating the same if it did not work or if more could be achieved through change.

I was full of enthusiasm for child care social work when I first met John having spent three months with the Manchester Family Service Unit, working in Salford, through a hastily arranged practical work placement over the summer, before undertaking social case work lectures, let alone working in the public sector and found myself within a few months writing articles about the gulf between training, theory and the reality of practice. By the time I had become a local authority chief officer I had experienced the consequence for staff and for services of rapid revolutionary changes in management structures, and in the training and deployment of qualified staff and concluded that change was only ever effective if those involved believed in it, monitored carefully the effectiveness of what they were doing and prepared to change and change again until the situation was better than it had been before. The reorganisations of local government, the social services and the health services that took place between 1970 and 1974 had destroyed good people and good services and I understood for the first time law of unintended consequences and how most Ministers and senior public servants had little idea of how policies and legislation worked out in practice. I am able to say with confidence having become involved in the national affairs of social services and being credited by others with being partly responsible for the establishment of the national pattern of social services after suggesting and leading a Social worker Lobby of Parliament, in opposition to the situation developed of nine forms of local reorganisations but usually placing Medical Officers of Health in Charge and as Chairman of an action committee following an unopposed election as Vice President of the Association of Child Care officers. As a consequence of stopping changes by blacklisting individual local authority child care departments acting on the advice of Jim Callaghan it was possible for the Government to pass the 1971 Social Services Act and as a consequence this directly led to the abolition of local authority Medical Officers of Health. While my actions were instrumental in this happening it was not my objective and the abolition has proved disastrous for democratic involvement in the NHS. Similarly I never anticipated that the new service would be dominated by former Chief Welfare officers who had no training or experience of providing effective social case work or understanding of the complexity of child care and the need for a sound knowledge of its law. While children were harmed by residential staff and by foster parents before 1971 the escalation in abuse after that date is attributable to the development of generic training and generic practice. It was not until I left the service in 1992 that I felt brave enough to explain what had happened and what was needed, the creation of a new form of child service as part of the Education service and as close possible an amalgamation of community health and welfare service for adults with personal and social problems. It was another decade before the government suggested to local authorities this same approach and it was generally taken up.

People like John and me can flourish at a time of crisis and John is credited in sorting out fundamental problems at the North London Poly before he moved onto become the Chief Executive of the Consumer Association and the publication Which. He had a position where he could speak on everything and anything which the general public bought or used and was able to do this at an international level. I was able to take on the Militant tendency when supporters caused a strike in residential child care and individuals with the union leadership behaved irresponsibility, terrorised other staff and endangered the welfare of children in public care and then attempted to discipline staff who had put the welfare of children first in a closed shop situation. But as a consequence of this and other similar battles one makes dangerous enemies, not because they make it their mission to damage and if possible end your influence, but because they usually then reengage in practices which harm people in general and stop good progress.

I liked the Obituary comment that John liked to live dangerously, trampling upon vested interests, shedding long established staff, promoting others and generally provoking the wrath of the establishment. I suspect John actually did not like this at all and would have preferred to have had a different and quieter life. That is not to say he did not thrive on challenges and on getting results but there would have been aspects of what happened as a consequence of taking tough decisions in the interests of others that he would have regretted.

As Director of the North London Poly the Daily Mail wrote about his SAS Management style. When he tried the same approach to changing the focus of the Consumers Association from washing machines to the delivery of public services he upset too many interests to survive for too long. He became Chief Executive of the accrediting bureau of Fund Raising. At one point he established a specialist magazine business with two of his five children from the family home in Brighton. That business exists to day. More significantly his spirit lives on in those of us who encountered him even if at the time we looked at the same situation from different perspectives and experiences.