OBITUARY
Royden Harrison (03.03.1927-30.06.2002)

Jim Hagan

Labour history lost a great teacher, researcher and organiser on 30 June 2002, when Royden Harrison died.	1
Australians who knew him had met him chiefly as Director of the Centre for the Study of Social History at Warwick University. In his ten years as Director, the Centre was host to scores of scholars from Australia, North America and Europe. They met in workshops, supervised theses, taught in courses, enrolled in some themselves, and helped collect archives for the Modern Records Centre, which Royden was largely responsible for founding. The Centre became the principal repository for some of Britain’s most important labour history archives. In the 1970s, it collected (with help from an Australian visitor) the records of the British Trade Union Congress, and, later, the records of the Confederation of British Industry.	2
The visitors also wrote, putting to good scholarly use the records the Centre collected. Much of the writing was co-operative. Royden organised a team of British and overseas scholars to produce The Independent Collier, a collection of thematic essays which took the understanding of the mentality and action of British miners well beyond what had been published to that time. Divisions of Labour was built on the same pattern with similar success.	3
The two books were co-operative works in which the authors wrote their own essays. But the books in their entirety, and the individual authors themselves, owed much to their editor and organiser. Out of his profound knowledge of historical sources and his mastery of social theory, Royden was able to provoke his authors into asking new, hard questions, and fuel imaginative answers. As with writing, so with teaching. His lecturing was lively, full of allusion and illustration, expressed in simple, vigorous sentences, sometimes spiked with an ironic humour. But he was probably at his best in tutorials, where, by persistent question and answer, he could lead a group of students to discover ideas they never knew they had.	4
When Royden took up the post of Director of the Centre, he was already a seasoned academic. At the end of the War, he had won a scholarship for ex-servicemen which took him to St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and after graduation, began a study of the Positivists under the supervision of G.D.H. Cole. At Oxford he met Pauline Cowan, a molecular biologist. They married, and after they had completed their doctoral studies, both began work at the University of Sheffield, Royden in the Department of Extramural Studies. With others, he founded the system of day-release schools for Yorkshire and Derbyshire mine workers. Away from the University, he represented public service workers on the Executive of the Sheffield Trades and Labour Council, and his local constituency at National Conferences of the Labour Party.	5
Meanwhile he was writing. He contributed a chapter to the first volume of Essays in Labour History, edited by Asa Briggs and John Saville. The book was dedicated to his former supervisor G.D.H. Cole, and led on to the formation of the Society for the Study of Labour History, which in many ways inspired the foundation of its Australian equivalent. Royden played a leading part in the establishment of the British Society, and became Joint Editor (with Sidney Pollard) of its Bulletin.	6
He found time as well to publish his own Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics 1861-1881, which applied the novel doctrine of ‘history from below’ before his friend E.P. Thompson popularised it in The Making of the English Working Class. About the same time he accepted a commission from the Passfield Trustees to write the official double biography of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. This was a task that stayed with him for the rest of his life. The first volume, The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb 1858-1905: the Formative Years finally appeared in January 2000. By this time, Royden was almost crippled by arthritis, and in failing general health. He was working with friends on the second volume at the time of his death, aged 75. His wife Pauline and his daughters Fiona and Sheila survive him.	7
Those who have read his work will remember him as a great scholar; those who studied under him will remember him as a great teacher. Those who worked with him will remember him as both, but they will also honour him as a man of great humanity and generosity of spirit.	8

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