I’m certain there are people who know more about this subject than me, but I felt motivated to a brief post because in the obituaries of John Prescott there is mention that he was at Ruskin College in Oxford but no mention of his tutor Raphael Samuel.
John Prescott had been involved in the 1966 seamen’s strike and wrote (as Jim Prescott) Not Wanted On Voyage. The strikers were denounced as Communists by Harold Wilson but Prescott was a Labour candidate. The right-wing leadership of the National Union of Seamen did not approve of Prescott’s politics but were prepared to sponsor his development.
Hence he went to Ruskin College then an institution where working class activists could broaden their knowledge. Prescott’s tutor was the late Raphael Samuel one of the leading post-1945 UK socialist historians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Samuel
Prescott said that Ruskin ‘opened my mind, opened my eyes’ (Times Obit 22nd November)
I was on nodding terms with Raphael Samuel- he was from an earlier generation of the left- but we never discussed Prescott. As he died too young in 1996 before Prescott became Deputy PM in 1997 it probably didn’t occur, although Samuel had written a piece backing Prescott for the Labour Deputy Leadership in 1992 (he came second to Margaret Beckett).
I was not in touch with Prescott but we met in a BBC TV studio, while waiting to go on an Andrew Neil show (about different issues) and I asked him about Raphael. He told me, in summary, that he had fond memories and that Raphael was quite a presence at Ruskin.
There is a story not evidenced that Samuel had to persuade Prescott to sit his final Ruskin exam. He duly did and went on first to do a degree at Hull, then to become a Labour MP and in 1997 Deputy PM.
An interesting by way of Raphael Samuel’s influence
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