John Eldridge made a powerful impact on my teaching and thinking, first as a tutor-organiser for the Workers’ Educational Association in the 1970s, and, later, as a research worker on a project at the University of Glasgow whose remit was to produce teaching materials for all those – imagined – worker representatives on company boards as proposed by the Bullock report of 1977.
John was on the advisory board of what was a difficult project, but one of the few academics involved who appeared to know much about trade unions and, more importantly, to express any empathetic support for what unions were trying to achieve. I valued his views considerably.
