During World War II he served with the Royal Artillery, and at the 1945 general election he was as Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton West, holding the seat until the constituency was abolished in 1950.
At the 1950 general election, he stood in the new Wolverhampton South West constituency, but was defeated by the Conservative Party candidate Enoch Powell.
[3] As principal of Ruskin until his retirement in 1979, he presided over an expansion of the college's facilities and student numbers, and securing increased funding and eventually persuading the government to make it mandatory (rather than discretionary) for Local Education Authorities to provide grants to the college's students.
It was while laying the foundation stone of the college's Steve Biko building in October 1976 that the prime minister, James Callaghan, launched what became known as a "great debate"[4] on educational standards.
Callaghan questioned "the new informal methods of teaching which seem to produce excellent results when they are in well-qualified hands but are much more dubious when they are not".