My friend and ex-colleague from the Industrial Studies Unit at Hull University, Daniel Vulliamy, has kindly offered his thoughts and comments on my blog.
“Wonderful to be discovered by John and able to read his recollections of moving into trade union education. I was a few years ahead of John, having spent a year on short trade union courses for the Workers Education Association in East Anglia.
I totally recognise John’s account of being the tutor knowing far less than the students. There were 3 Hull docker shop stewards on my first course (as well as a shop worker needing to recruit a third of her membership each year to retain the same branch numbers, a nurse with more ideas how to recruit members than I met in the next 40 years and others with fantastic skills and knowledge to share) and these supposedly ‘hard men’ gently took ownership of the programme and probably taught me far more than I ever taught them.
John’s short description of the dockers’ struggle against the evils of casualization also jogs memories of the erosion of gains after Thatcher’s defeat of the 1989 docks strike. After that defeat, Big Walt (Cunningham) became a Hull Labour Councillor but was never really comfortable with the role. Walt Greendale, the President of the Transport and General Workers Union, the most senior lay trade unionist in the country, ended his life with dementia.
John gives a fine account of student centred learning and the extraordinary research capacities developed. I recall one of his students talking much later (reduced to driving a taxi in Hull) with wonder about the employers’ attempts to introduce a system called ‘back-up’ whereby large barges would sail up the Humber, dropping off sections of barges at each port; ‘It was brilliant, so clever….. of course, we had to stop it’. I particularly value similar work I did with National Union of Seaman reps (now part of RMT union) as they reviewed health and safety in their industry, eventually leading to a radical change of union policy to abandon Merchant Shipping Act machinery in favour of mainstream Health and Safety at Work legislation. Paralleling John’s barge trip up the Humber, I did a ferry trip to look at the work of catering, deck and engine staff, ruined by gale force winds lockdown.
And John might not like to be reminded of a course we shared for the National Union of Mineworkers in Blackpool. We used Robert Tressell’s ‘Great Money Trick’ from the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, and set up British and German workers employers and trade unions to draw out the inevitable tendency towards crisis of over-production under capitalism. Unfortunately, the ‘British’ workers did dirty deals with the ‘German’ employers to totally undermine the intended learning outcomes. Just like real life, really!
A distinctive feature of adult learning, perhaps, as the ‘teachers’ learns at least as much as the ‘learners’ teaching them.”
Daniel Vulliamy, 30/10/2020