ABSTRACT
Professionally, the years at Hull, the Fifties, were years of teaching-and-writing. The hyphenated form is meant to indicate that the two activities were almost entirely enmeshed. This is one of the great advantages and pleasures of university external teaching. But most of us should think about the nature of teaching our particular subject to our particular kinds of students from our first days at work. ‘ To have a head of department who had both kept up his subject and thought deeply about teaching it was an advantage few external lecturers enjoyed; most of their heads of department were administrators or, if they wrote, wrote as ‘educationists’ not as scholars in particular fields. ‘Objectivity’ in teaching is always an ideal, but it was an ideal the best tutors put central to their work. Roy Shaw had considerable personal struggles as to whether he should remain in or, once out, return to the Roman Catholic Church.
