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Arthur Duckering, b: St Columb Major Cornwall, m: Joan Elisabeth, ... CLEGG, Norman Conway. b: Wakefield 1932. m: Maureen Patricia Applewhite, ^[1]

Obituary: Arthur Clegg

Arthur Duckering Clegg, political activist, journalist and lecturer: born 28 April 1914; married 1940 Nel Reidel (died 1966; one son, one daughter), 1967 Joan Kirkpatrick; died Ripon, North Yorkshire 8 February 1994.

ARTHUR CLEGG, national organiser of the China Campaign Committee in the 1930s, epitomised to Victor Gollancz, its chairman, both the campaign and "the quiet, unpretentious, devoted middle-class section of the left-wing England I know".

Quiet and unpretentious Clegg was, but also determined, devoted and a first-class organiser, who built up a powerful movement in support of Chinese resistance to Japanese aggression.

Fifty years later he gave his account of it, Aid China (1989), ...

The national organizer was Arthur Clegg, a Communist teacher and poet,

Labour Party theorist and Arthur Clegg, reporter on foreign affairs for the British Communist Party organ, the Daily Worker. ...

Arthur Clegg, Aid China, 1937-49: A Memoir of a Forgotten Campaign, Beijing, 1989

[edit] Hugh Clegg

Clegg, Hugh Armstrong (1920–1995), industrial relations expert, the fourth child and third son of Herbert Hobson Clegg, a Wesleyan minister, and his wife, Mabel Duckering, was born at Parkvedras House in Truro, Cornwall, on 22 May 1920. Educated at Kingswood School, Bath, the renowned Methodist public school, he reacted against his background, becoming an atheist and a member of the Communist Party as a teenager. This independence of mind, and his ability, were demonstrated by his election to the top scholarship (demyship) in classics at Magdalen College, Oxford, while insisting that he be allowed to read philosophy, politics, and economics, in which he took a first class in 1947 after five years of military service. In the army he showed his grasp of practicalities at the shop-floor level in becoming a skilled telephone engineer. On 28 June 1941 he married (Mary) Matilda Shaw (b. 1918/19), the elder daughter of George Shaw, a retired bank manager, and Mary Magowan; they had two sons and two daughters, and Clegg was a devoted and conscientious father.

Demobilized in 1945, Clegg soon found his communist faith undermined, crucially by his philosophy tutor, the redoubtable T. D. Weldon. By 1949, when he was elected a fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, he was essentially a disillusioned empiricist, whose watchword he described, with some exaggeration, as being that ‘an ounce of fact is worth a pound of theory’ (The Guardian). His early books were a mixture of the monographic and wider studies, on nationalization and industrial democracy, which revealed a touch of the surviving theoretician. From 1955 he was in demand as a candid friend of the unions in a series of public inquiries into disputes, and he also presided at Nuffield over convivial gatherings of employers, politicians, and union leaders in a search for the elusive consensus.

In his heyday Clegg was the most persuasive advocate of collective bargaining in the voluntarist tradition as a better answer than legislative interference to the problem of damaging relations between capital and labour. His greatest success came as a member of the Donovan commission on trade unions and employers' associations (1965–8). He was largely responsible for its massive research and, by threatening a minority report, inveigled his colleagues into abandoning legal restraints in favour of trying to improve collective bargaining. The commission's modest proposals reassured the unions and modified the attitude of many employers; but during a turbulent decade they were not welcomed by most politicians, who became committed increasingly to legislative interference. Clegg's public service ended in 1980 as chairman of the committee on pay comparability. His last recommendations were reluctantly accepted by the Thatcher government and the committee was abolished.

In 1967 Clegg was appointed founding professor of industrial relations at Warwick University, which offered him novel scope and enhanced backing. He soon displayed his talents as an academic entrepreneur. Having helped to launch the new business school, he presided over the labours of capable assistants as director of the Industrial Relations Research Unit, who produced work which was, as he said too modestly, ‘of some use to someone’ (The Guardian). But the strain of years had begun to tell, and he resigned his chair in 1979. Long into retirement, however, he kept in touch with his creation, the most respected centre of his favourite studies in the country, cycling in from Kenilworth whenever he could.

Clegg now concentrated on completing a long-delayed project, A History of British Trade Unions since 1889. The first volume, to 1910 (with A. Fox and A. F. Thompson), had been published in 1964; the second (1911–33) followed in 1985, and the third (after 1933) in 1994, when his health was failing. This was a monumental achievement and remains pre-eminent in its detailed coverage of the whole range of trade-union development over a lengthy period. Here and elsewhere, Clegg has sometimes been criticized for failing to deal adequately with the social and political background to his masterly treatment of the institutional, procedural, and legal aspects of the subject. His mastery is also displayed in the other of the most important among his many books, The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain, originally published in 1953 and revised in 1970 and 1979. Regarded for a generation and more as the indispensable textbook, it is voluminous and completely authoritative.

Clegg had an incisive, retentive mind, apparent in everything he attempted, on paper and in person. Once sure of his views, after weighing the evidence and the opinions of those he respected, he worked quickly, preferably alone, and wrote with a straightforward clarity in a field not noted for stylistic niceties. He could seem dour, even forbidding, but was essentially considerate and warm-hearted—as became evident when he proved an excellent Oxford tutor and a fine supervisor of graduate students. Immensely loyal himself, he attracted loyalty from others, and was an engaging and often convivial colleague. (Who's Who recorded his recreations as ‘walking and beer’.) Impressively agile in committee, he was an outstanding manager of seminars but curiously pedestrian as a lecturer. Growing infirmity meant shorter walks and less of his cycling into Warwick. He never learned to drive and his lifestyle was remarkably simple. Mourned by everyone who knew him, he died in Warwick Hospital on 8 December 1995 of a cerebrovascular infarction.

PROFESSOR Hugh Clegg (1929 - 1995)was a British Professor of Industrial Relations at Warwick University, 1967-79, died on December 9 1995 aged 75. He was born on May 22, 1920.

The Times, UK, 13 Dec 95: A PIONEER in the academic study of industrial relations, Hugh Clegg was also, for a dozen years before 1979, a dominant contributor to government wages policy. In the second sphere he is particularly remembered for his chairmanship of two bodies, the Civil Service Arbitration Tribunal in 1968-71, and the Standing Commission on Pay Comparability (known as the Clegg Commission) in 1979-80; in both cases he was appointed by a Labour Government and given his marching orders (in the second case along with the whole commission, but only after its recommendations had been accepted) by a succeeding Conservative administration.

Clegg will also be remembered for the remarkable minority report he prepared as a member of the Donovan Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations, which sat from 1965 to 1968. His input was so influential that in the end it swung the whole thrust of the Donovan Commission's massive report away from the much-favoured notion of legal regulation in the direction of reform by agreement of the system of collective bargaining much to the later chagrin of Barbara Castle when she came the following year to produce her famous White Paper In Place of Strife.

In the academic sphere, amid numerous contributions to the literature of labour relations, his A History of British Trade Unions (Vol I with A.Fox and A.F.Thompson, 1964; Vol II, 1985; Vol III, 1994) is pre-eminent in its field. As a scholar, Clegg was essentially pragmatic, a methodical accumulator of detail, and he made the generalisations of an historian rather than the conceptual leaps of a theoretician. He had a talent for deflating pomposities from either Left or Right a quality which earned him the trust of many managers and most trade unionists and was wholly without pretension in his own work.

Any tendency to the cautious and prosaic was balanced by a devastating clarity when he had made up his mind about the facts of a situation. A typical example, which brought him to early notice, was the little book he wrote with R. Adams about the shipbuilding and engineering dispute of 1957 under the title The Employers' Challenge. As a lecturer he tended to plod, but he was an excellent tutor and an infinitely patient and amusing chairman. Some of his best seminars were after hours over a pint of beer. When he eventually gave up table tennis for long walks, his total recall and uncompromising judgments took his guests' breath away almost as much as his brisk stride.

The son of a clergyman, Hugh Armstrong Clegg was educated as [[Kingswood School, Bath]], and Magdalen College, Oxford, a career punctuated by five years in the Army during the Second World War. He once commented that the most important thing he learnt in the Army, and one that helped to illuminate his later work in industrial relations, was "the effective pattern of activity that officially did not exist". He was naturally attracted to the study of such large and relatively unrecorded bodies as trade unions.

He became a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1949, and a year later published Labour Relations in London Transport, which remains a highly readable account of the interplay of employment and politics. In 1964 there appeared the first volume of A History of British Trade Unionism, and in 1967 he was appointed first Professor of Industrial Relations at the new University of Warwick.

Between Nuffield and Warwick Clegg served a year as a full-time member of the Prices and Incomes Board, established by the Wilson Government, and a couple of years later was appointed chairman of the Civil Service Arbitration Tribunal. In 1970, after the Conservatives returned to power, he was the trade union nominee on the inquiry into council workers' pay under Sir Jack Scamp, who settled the "dirty jobs strike" with an award that infuriated the Prime Minister, Edward Heath; he was accused by Harold Wilson of "government by vendetta" when he refused to re-appoint Clegg to the tribunal on the ground that he was not impartial.

Clegg was unperturbed, and with the return of the Labour Government served on the council of the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service and was appointed chairman of the Standing Commission on Pay Comparability in the last days of the Labour Government, in 1979. It was in the course of his work on comparability that there occurred what was unfairly called "the Clegg mistake", when an error originating in the Civil Service led to excessive pay awards to teachers. The incident led to an investigation by Sir Alan Marre, who refused to apportion blame at which Clegg commented: "No shop steward would get away with that one." The incoming Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher, which had pledged itself during the election campaign to accept the awards, felt obliged to honour them, but ensured that the commission was abolished not long afterwards.

During his period out of official favour, Clegg had built up the SSRC research unit at Warwick. He gave up its direction in 1974, and in 1979 retired from his chair to give time particularly to complete the History, the second volume of which was published in 1985 and the third, finally, last year. The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain (1970) was succeeded by The Changing System in 1979. Colleagues wedded to their preconceptions were, sometimes understandably, apt to consider his analyses over-flexible.

He married Mary Matilda Shaw in 1941 and is survived by her and their two sons and two daughters.