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Late in 1945 I was in an army unit in Sussex as a clerk in the Orderly Room, doing copy typing. In that capacity I came across an item in Orders about the possibility of taking correspondence courses, free of charge. I took this up and found myself taking a course on ‘Early Man’. I think it lasted for about six lessons (but I may be wrong). I was regularly sent a small package of material and a question to be answered by an essay. The questions were quite simple and my essays were based entirely on the stuff I’d been sent to study. At the end I received a certificate which certified that I had taken the course ‘and that the quality of his work was Very Good Plus’. Since I had more or less copied what I had been sent my opinion of this correspondence course was not very high. But I mustn’t generalise about the worth of correspondence courses from this experience. Soon after I got my degree I was asked by a fellow-student who was doing a bit of entrepreneurial activity to write a correspondence course; and many years later I wrote one for the Trades Union Congress Education Department.
The course I was taking in the army was run by the National Council of Labour Colleges. I’m not sure if I knew then that this was an offshoot of the Marxist college run in opposition to Ruskin College, Oxford, to which twenty years later I was appointed to teach. In 1909 the students at Ruskin had gone on strike and the dissident students set up the Central Labour College from which the NCLC developed. The Central Labour College closed in 1929.
The NCLC always stated with great pride that during its existence (it lasted until 1964) it had never taken any money from public sources. Certainly it relied very much on certain trade unions for support. In fact accompanying my final certificate was a circular letter which included a statement: ’As you are aware, the number of scholarships provided by you Union is limited …‘ and it suggested ways of contacting the union to ask for arrangements to be made to take another course. This obviously did not apply to me. I think I caused something of a furore a few years ago when I wrote to the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History about my taking this NCLC course in the army. I stated that it was free and that the NCLC must have been paid for it, by the army. I know that Ruskin College, which also ran correspondence courses which were available to soldiers, was paid by the government. The take up was such that for the first time the college’s financial accounts were in the black. There were some replies to my letter in the Labour History journal, but I think I won that one.

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