A journey through education 3

The heat and dust of the Suez Canal Zone had to be endured. It could hardly be enjoyed. We were serving a sentence for a crime we had not committed. I have two diaries, one for each of the two years I was incarcerated there. They are empty except for the counting down of the days until my release. We all had an interview with some officer or other. Mine asked me if I would like to sign on as a regular soldier. I looked at him with a combination of pity and incredulity. Sometimes I encounter young people who are planning to become career soldiers. I wish them good luck and then give them the very short talk I have prepared for such situations.

Soldiers not infrequently have adjustment problems when they return home after overseas service and so it was with me. I went back to my old job in the East End, employers were obliged to take us back, but I could not settle. I got a job nearer home, and had what was then known as a 'nervous breakdown'. I was referred to a hospital doctor who, under intensive interrogation from me, admitted, shamefacedly, that he was a psychiatrist.

Contact with the local Labour Party led me to contact with the local Labour Party Young Socialists, as they were known by then, and they pointed our that, despite my veteran status, I was still well within their age range. I shouldn't worry too much about politics they told me, they were mainly about having fun. And they were and plenty of fun was had in their company over the next few years. However, politics was in my blood and even the Labour Party could not contain it. My part-time political education resumed, whilst I earned a living as an insurance agent, first with the Pru and then with the Co-op. The stories I could tell.

I remember an NCLC tutor name Karl Westwood. He taught public speaking at Mitcham Labour Hall.. Those were the days when public election meetings were not rigidly controlled. It was possible to go into a Tory meeting wearing a Labour rosette and heckle from the back of the hall. Karl was a marvellous public performer and motivator. I also took a course simply called 'Socialism' with the NCLC. I had imagined that I already knew all about it, but was quickly disabused of that idea. I told the Chair of the local Labour Party that I was doing this course and he told me that I was wasting my time. I ought to concentrate on advancing my career. New Labour already in the 1950s ! What a loss to the Labour Movement the demise of the NCLC has been.

I had met people in the Labour Party and elsewhere, over the years, who had studied at the long-term full-time adult education residential college, which had strong historic associations with the trade unions. Ruskin College was based in Oxford and its qualifications were, for the most part, validated by Oxford University. Admission was on the basis of a record of social and political activity, a long essay and an interview. Many of the students who went there, some significantly older than me, had been active in politics for years. Some had no academic qualifications at all, unlike me. I was able to flourish my Army Certificate of Education-Third Class when I decided, five years after the completion of National Service, to apply for a place.

At the beginning of the first term a wide range of working class people arrived at Ruskin to commence their academic studies. There were miners and engineers, postmen and milkmen and even the odd insurance agent. At the beginning of the second term they had transmogrified into students complete with scarves and attachments, like beards.

John Prescott had not been heard of at that time. He was to arrive at Ruskin some years later. However, I do believe that my influence on the place had a delayed effect on him. I initiated a particular style of talking, which became endemic in the college. I still consider it to be my greatest achievement.