GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

part in this. My eyes kind of got opened partly through looking at what was

going on with colleagues and getting on to the orchestra committee and getting

to talk to the union steward at that time and develop and then becoming the

steward myself and the chair of the committee, meeting the union officials, but

also partly because I discovered adult education and this is weird, because I

was a tuba player. The joke about that is you sit there either bored to death or

scared to death, because there are whole periods when you do not play

anything and then when you do it is all over in a flash and you have got one

shot at it and one shot at it only, there is no going back, so I used to read a lot.

It was two people, one person in the orchestra and a relation, who said, “Why

don’t you do something useful instead of reading all these novels? Why don’t

you actually study something?” So I did. I enrolled into the Open University

and this is where fate takes a hand, because I enrolled on to an arts course

which was my world and I could not get on to it and then they said to me,

“Social sciences?” I had done history as A level, I have always been interested

in politics, I thought, “Yes, I’ll give it a go” and that was it, so I did my degree

with the Open University, I got a first class honours degree there, mainly in

politics and sociology, and when the light comes on and your eyes are wide

open you know where you want to go with all this. Then again fate took a hand

and a fulltime official’s post came up at the MU and I went to work as a district

organiser, as the post was then. At the same time I had got that learning bug,

that adult education bug, and I enrolled in Keele University (I am sorry that

Steve has had to go) and I did an MA in industrial relations and I did that while I

was working for the MU. I did a dissertation on the closed shop – happy days!

If only we could go back to a closed shop. By that time I had been promoted to

Assistant General Secretary in the union. God knows how I did it, but I did, in

the end I got there. It was fantastic and it was an incredibly good grounding for

what I do, what I have been doing as General Secretary of the Musicians Union

for 15 years and the work I have done at the GFTU and at the TUC and with

our international federation. The confidence that that gives you is wonderful. I

recommend it to everybody and the starting point is, of course, that brochure

that you have got from the GFTU and then that opens this wonderful world for

you.

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