Michael Young

When Michael Young died in January 2002, the obituary in The Guardian described him as ‘educator, author, academic, consumer advocate, policymaker, political activist, rebel … inventor and entrepreneur … the country’s great seedsman of social ideas and institutions.’ A brief biographical essay cannot hope to offer balanced comment on the more than fifty organisations with which he was associated as founder or driving force plus the ten or more books that he wrote or co-wrote; besides, a recent biography by Asa Briggs provides ample material. On the other hand there are no end to the stories that can be told about Michael and his enterprises, and as one who worked with him for over twenty years and who both admired him enormously and at times found him exasperating (particularly when he would ring with some new thought at 10.30 on a Sunday evening, or on Christmas Day) I can perhaps shed a little light on this remarkable man and what drove him.

He had the good fortune to be educated in the late 1920s at the newly created Dartington Hall School, where Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst held sway and where pupils were allowed an extraordinary amount of freedom. He described in ‘The Elmhirsts of Dartington’ how on his first visit he ‘got the smell of something different’ when he found a boy (Whitney, Dorothy’s son, as it happened) on his back under a Model T instead of in school. ‘He gave me a ride in it, reversing at speed up perilously steep fields as though that was what the Ford was made for, and determined me to get to that “school”.’ Once there (his Australian grandfather paid his fees, expecting that he would learn fruit-farming and go to work in Tasmania) he put much of his time into running a business buying and selling secondhand motorbikes and riding them at high speed around the Dartington estate. The grandfather rapidly lost interest, but Michael stayed on with a scholarship ‘or perhaps I should say a motorbikeship.’

He was itching to try out cars on the Dartington estate; when the dance teacher at the school tried to recruit him into some activity, he did a deal that in return she should allow him to drive her Morris Cowley before each rehearsal. There were grander cars to admire too; the Elmhirsts had two chauffeurs to drove their Buick, de Soto and La Salle around the country. As the Elmhirsts took Michael under their wing, recognising his quite extraordinary abilities, he was taken around with them - he recorded one trip to New York at the age of fifteen in which they were met off the ship by Dorothy’s own American chauffeur in her Packard together with a second car in which Michael was seated, a 16-cylinder Cadillac - ‘it enthralled me by being able to start in top gear - a one gear car.’

Whitney, the daredevil in the Model T, went on to become a famous racing car driver, an Air Commodore and Managing Director of British Overseas Airways Corporation, and Michael learnt some racing car techniques from him. Early in my acquaintance with Michael I asked him why he drove round bends in an unconventional and to me frightening way - ‘it’s called taking a line - I learnt it from Whitney.’ After visiting a youth training scheme in Nottingham (in a Vauxhall Cavalier, because Which? Magazine rated it highest), as we passed Derby on our return to the West Country, our companion, the Exeter Professor of Social Work announced - ‘Michael, drop me at the station - I’m in a bit of a hurry to get back.’ This aroused all his competitiveness and the car journey back was done at breakneck speed. We were in Exeter half an hour before the train was due and Michael insisted that we wait at the station so that he could welcome the professor in person and prove his driving prowess.

Michael, however, saw much more to cars than racing. In a compelling lecture he remarked how public clocks had been replaced by watches, ice factories by refrigerators, cinema by television, buses and trains by cars. These twentieth-century things liberated people to make their own choices but the choices needed to be informed ones. One of the great themes of his life was that from his own experience, and by listening carefully to what other people said they wanted, it was possible to put together organisations which responded very directly to people’s needs. And so the Consumers’ Association was created in 1956. But this was not a weak version of consumerism in which a higher authority provided such consumer-related information as it thought the public should have, but consumerism in which individual people, by becoming a member of an organisation and by contributing both money and their own experience, had a sense of ownership. Michael even flirted in the early 1960s with the idea of a Consumers’ Party, remarking in his pamphlet ‘The Chipped White Cups of Dover’ (which the Fabian Society declined to publish) that ‘class based on production is giving way to status based on consumption as the centre for social gravity’ - a very prescient remark.

Consumers did not just acquire things, they used services, so it was inevitable that Michael’s attention should also turn to creating organisations that looked at education (Advisory Centre for Education), community (Institute of Community Studies), health (College of Health), the needs of retirement (University of the Third Age). And as these organisations turned up evidence of unfulfilled needs or unsatisfactory service he was on hand with yet more organisations: the National Extension College to set higher standards in distance learning and a pilot for the Open University; the International Extension College to spread distance learning to Africa and Asia; the Open College of the Arts to extend distance learning into the field of the creative arts; Commuter Study Clubs to enable regular travellers to learn from each other; Language Line to provide a telephone interpretation service for doctors, police and the non-English-speaking people they dealt with; the Family Covenant Association to provide welcoming ceremonies for children; the National Funerals College to improve the conduct of funerals; Healthline to provide telephone information on health matters; the School for Social Entrepreneurs to train community innovators, and even a community garage in Milton Keynes offering professional support for people who wanted to service their own car.

Most of these organisations were tiny but somehow Michael managed to convey the impression that they were much larger and that they had national and even international stature. And almost none of them was well-resourced; they existed from one financial crisis to another, with Michael drawing for their success on a network of fundgiving charities, generous friends and staff whom Michael expertly convinced of the huge importance of what they were doing. He had a disarming and foolproof way of asking for help: ‘I know you’d be the best person to do this, but I suppose there isn’t any hope that I could persuade you to help’. I even saw him do that, after fifteen minutes acquaintance, to my father, thereby convincing him to get a University of the Third Age group going in his home town. Noel Annan put it very well:
‘Michael Young resembled Cadmus. Whatever field he tilled, he sowed dragon’s teeth and armed men seemed to spring from the soil to form an organisation and correct the abuses or stimulate the virtues he had discovered.’

His ability to talk to anyone about anything served him in good stead. We were in Conisbrough proposing the idea of a community trust for the ex-mining town, and we were in the queue at the councillors’ Saturday morning session. Michael quizzed the lady ahead of us on why she was there and elicited that she was complaining that the doctor’s surgery in the High Street had been closed. When we eventually got to see the councillors; one of them said: this trust you’re proposing is quite a good idea, but where could it be based? Well, replied Michael, what about the empty doctor’s surgery in the High Street?

Any of the legion of armed men who worked with him would assert that even though he had an extraordinary ability to pick up ideas and run with them, they had also to find ways to stop certain ideas taking root. ‘I met a Belgian student on a train yesterday and he told me that there was very little provision for Flemish students in art education - do you think we might translate Open College of the Arts course books into Flemish?’ ‘The Austin Metro looks like being the British car industry’s last hope (this was 1980); do you think it would help if I made a statement endorsing the Metro (which was just about to come on the market) as President of the Consumers’ Association and then resigned?’ (I suggested that the general public would not unreasonably assume that British Leyland had given him a free Metro, and no more was heard of this idea.) And this in a letter: ‘What about sponsoring the building of a cathedral … we could recruit a volunteer labour force in their fifties who would undertake to stay with the work into their seventies, learning some of the skills such as masonry by distance learning. Perhaps the original Fountains Abbey or Rievaulx could be built not too far from the present ruins.’ He was the quite willing to recognise that some of his ideas could be just a little impractical - when years later I sent him a copy of his cathedral letter, he wrote back, saying that he couldn’t stop laughing at the absurdity of it.

It is impossible to think of Michael Young’s life and achievements without recognising the contribution made by Sasha, his wife of thirty years, who supported him through difficult and demanding times and through ill-health (he was asthmatic and had a cancer operation in the early 1980s) with a relationship that drew poetry from him as well as from her (‘Your Head in Mine’ by Sasha Moorsom and Michael Young, Carcanet).

One joint venture of theirs, well away from the glare of publicity, has borne fruit in remarkable ways. They had noticed that lots of people, particularly those who had not benefited much from their earlier education, were very keen to have another go, perhaps by learning a new skill or studying a new subject or providing a new facility, but were prevented from doing this by the lack of very modest sums of money - perhaps a few hundred pounds. Sometimes a few thousand pounds is easy to raise in the form of a studentship, a grant or a loan, but a few hundred, perhaps for bus fares, child-care, books or tools of the trade, is out of the question. And many of these people were wanting to do things in education, health and welfare that would benefit the community as a whole, not just themselves - very much a Michael theme. In 1990 Sasha and Michael persuaded fellow trustees of the Elmgrant Trust, a grant-giving trust at Dartington, to allocate a considerable annual sum to enable as many as a hundred applicants in Devon or Cornwall over the age of 30 to receive a few hundred pounds towards furthering their ambitions. Trust is at the centre of the operation - application is by a simple process and recipients do not have to provide detailed evidence of ‘outcomes’. Perhaps the masterstroke has been to call recipients ‘Elmgrant Fellows’ which costs nothing, gives the recipients a sense of pride and looks good on a cv. The idea was also exported by Michael to South Yorkshire and on several occasions efforts were made to find funds to make the idea of a Second Chance Trust a national venture. He regularly attended reunions of Fellows, was visibly moved by some of the extraordinary stories of triumph over adversity that they related, obviously felt this was one of the best things he had done and was delighted that Sasha had had a share in it.

It may seem curious that the motor car features so largely in this sketch, but Michael greatly enjoyed driving and was fascinated all his life by cars and the role they played in society. And a long journey with Michael was a rare opportunity to have an extended discussion free from interruptions.
Indeed sometimes it seemed that the journey was almost wilfully prolonged; after a meeting in Salisbury our next meeting was the following morning in Hornchurch (110 miles away). ‘I’ve booked a hotel in Lavenham - it’s just got a very good rating in the Good Hotel Guide’ (adding 120 miles to the journey).

A couple of years before he died he had an accident on a motorway, running into the rear of the car in front which had braked sharply. He analysed the reason for the accident and concluded that when the brake- lights came on he had misinterpreted them as just a gentle touch on the brakes. So wouldn’t it be a contribution to road safety if the brake-light shone more brightly the harder the brake was pressed? He secured a patent on this good idea; in my last conversation with him he told me that an Australian car-maker was trying it out. Funny, really, that someone who lived all his life at such high speed should invent a new brake-light.