My cousin Robin

The connective tissues I had with Robin were enabled and animated both by cousinry and political persuasion and these intertwined in curious but often compelling ways down many decades of our respective lives.

In the mid/late-1970s I became a member of the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) and attended various meetings and conferences. At these Robin seemed to be important, and regularly gave papers and reports. I was much in awe of him: his eloquence, apparent confidence and – most significantly – the tone and manner of his speaking. I was a sociologist by trade – certainly not an economist – and was working initially as a tutor-organiser for the WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) in the West of Scotland and then as a researcher/activist for the Trade Union Studies Information Unit (TUSIU) in Newcastle upon Tyne. For reasons which escape me now, I was persuaded by Robin to co-edit and produce a Socialist book review called Head and Hand with TUSIU colleagues. In newspaper format Head and Hand was a publishing limb of the CSE and, if I remember correctly, only ran to three or four issues. Its title somehow seems now to offer a dispositional signature for the Robin I was to get to know rather better over the next 37 years.

During this time our enthusiasms and experiences overlapped particularly through a separate but shared interest in the activities of the Institute for Workers’ Control (IWC), and the popular planning and social audit movements, epitomised by Mike Cooley and the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards and international trade union combine committees of, for example, Massey Ferguson, Ford Motors, Timex and Rolls Royce. In these movements the interlocking threads of localism (workplace shop stewards committees) and internationalism (combine committees linking workers across the globe) seem to be a quintessential quality of Robin’s political imaginary and practice throughout his life. In her obituary of Robin, Hilary Wainwright astutely identifies his starting point as ‘always the health of the cell in its environment, the dynamics of the particular’.

My contact and exchanges with Robin in these decades from the late ‘70s seem to fit into two episodes with a long ‘fallow’ period in-between. Late in 1980, after Margaret Thatcher’s Government had cut funding for the low paid workers’ research project I had been working on at TUSIU, I found myself in Seychelles working as advisor to the National Youth Service (NYS) which was to open in February 1981. Robin had contacted me in north Cumbria where I was then living – unemployed – at Bluegate, a ramshackle ex linesman’s cottage. He told me of a radical educational project which he and his friend, UNESCO consultant, Olivier LeBrun had been working on in conjunction with the Seychelles Government. I was ‘interviewed’ by the rather mysterious Olivier in a café off London’s Tottenham Court Road – almost an episode from a Graham Greene novel - and two months later joined a gang of people from different parts of the globe to help sow ‘The Seeds of a New Society’ - the title of a report written by Robin and Olivier which formed a kind of blueprint for the soon to be launched NYS. 

My engagement with the NYS and Robin and Olivier’s imaginative thinking, which at least initially framed and drove the project, opened me up to modes of thought and working – a socialist practice – which much later I realised ran through so much of Robin’s performance as thinker and maker for the duration of his life. The NYS was a complex and outrageously ambitious utopian project which was underpinned by heuristic – learning through doing – modes of pedagogy. I was swept up in the thinking behind it, seduced by what I felt (and still do) were its Marxist Humanist aspirations and grounded – sometimes painfully – by my experience of actually working there for almost 15 months. The theory-practice-production relationships embodied in the ‘Seeds of a New Society’ and my relationship with this way of working, of thinking and of being in the world have stayed with me ever since. A perpetual lodestone to prompt critical questioning and self-reflection.

Recently, I traced and re-read all of our email exchanges over a 9-year period up until 2017. Intertwined with family lives our conversations spanned numerous ideas, projects and experiences. I often seemed to bring ‘news from Scotland’ and activities connected to my work as a university teacher of theatre studies, whilst Robin responded or shared and explored thoughts on myriad subjects which were consuming his attention and imagination at that particular time. The following subjects provide a sense of the multiple landscapes we travelled across: the quality of ‘lightness’, the poetry of Alice Oswald, Lone Twin’s performance of the ‘Boat Project’, the commodification of universities, the life of Jimmy Reid and his astonishing address on alienation to students at the University of Glasgow when appointed Rector in 1972, Scottish independence and the role of artist-activists, the life of John Berger who died early in 2017, the Mis-Guides of performance company Wrights and Sites, walking arts practices, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the role of Momentum within the Labour Party, the Glasgow University Glam Rock Dialogues, the Hallbankgate Cooperative ‘Hub’, Jem Cohen’s film Museum Hours, Greece, its economic plight (‘breath-taking’) and the manoeuvrings of Syriza . And so it went on, always conversational, rarely declamatory, sometimes riffing on an idea or association and often moving seamlessly between matters of art, theatre, poetry, politics, people’s lives and cultural matters both local and global.

As an ex actor and theatre maker I was perhaps particularly disposed to enjoy how Robin talked as well as, of course, what he talked about. The theatrical pauses, the eclectic and often hilarious repertoire of facial expressions, and perhaps, above all, a gentle openness of delivery which never marked closure, but rather an implicit invitation to develop and deepen a conversation and to allow space for it to travel in new and unexpected directions. Here was ‘lightness’ personified. Always a sense that he was engaged and invested in what you – anyone - had to say. The singularity of a person’s experience was constantly a matter of interest and curiosity, and always a prompt for making connections and associations with the lives of others, known or unknown. At different moments in our encounters over four decades Robin helped me to frame, focus and direct my political thoughts and sensibilities. His scholarship and theoretical knowledge was profound, but I never saw this paraded with either arrogance or academic disdain. Strangely perhaps, for someone with such erudition, encounters with Robin always left me more grounded. For all his hugely creative and humanist utopianism the question was constantly: what can we do – help to make happen - tomorrow, the next day or next week? How can we behave and create structures now which enable and encourage us all to flourish and extend our potential even within a world which ruthlessly and inexorably tries to prevent this from happening. It was from Robin in the late ‘70s that I first learned the phrase ‘prefigurative forms’ and I have (over-) used the term and the idea ever since.  Raymond Williams articulated the challenge elegantly and strategically when he said, ‘to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing’. My cousin Robin, it seemed to me, lived a life which practiced and celebrated this commitment. A true radical and a generous and lovely man.