PERSONAL PROFILE

Married to photographer Leonie Johnsen, with a five year old daughter, Josephine Raven Ward-Johnsen.

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Otherwise read on.... 

Early Years

First of all, I am a man, a husband and a father to my five children, three of whom still live in California. The price paid for my singular dedication to a career devoted to social change and justice has been largely theirs.

I come from a working class home in the North of England where, in the 1940s and 1950s my world extended only as far as the local cricket pitch or the Saturday afternoon football game (with my dad) to watch lowly Burnley FC take on the might of British soccer. It was a world with a history that I only came to know much later. I was born in Rochdale, an industrial cotton town in the Pennines - now part of the Greater Manchester (12 miles South) region.

Mine was a happy childhood, raised by my doting grandparents while my father was at war in Italy (Anzio) and my mother working for the "war effort". When he came home, my father and I engaged in a struggle for recognition that lasted for seventy years. Miraculouusly, we ended uup the best bof friends. My mother worked in the local cotton spinning factory near to my school, and I would go there to wait see her on the way home - deafened by the incessant roar of the spinning-jennys that led most of my family to be able to lip read, and to mouth their words with significant exaggeration - a trait common to many in that area and partly contributing to the broad dialect that exists there.

At the age of 8, my parents moved to the small cotton town of Bacup, eight miles North and half-way to Burnley - high  up in the Pennines in the Valley of the Irwell ("The Hardest Worked River in England") which flowed eventually down to join the Mersey (and Manchester Ship Canal) and out into the Irish Sea. Bacup straddled the Lancashire-Yorkshire border at some point on the bleak moorland about a mile from our house. On the other side of the hill were Todmorden and Littleborough, where my maternal grandfather James Fielden Greenwood was born and raised. This general area and the moorlands and valleys that it encompassed went historically by the name of Elmet.

     Moorland snow

Elmet was  the last independent Celtic kingdom of England, before it shrank into and was absorbed by the various colonising influences that emerged from the South East. Elmet sat at the crossroads of colonisation - the Romans and French from the South, the Vikings from the North, the Saxons and Picts from the East and the Irish Celts from the West, and as such it was an island of resistance to imposition and displacement. The people were and are dogged and stubborn, but passionate and loyal. It was a stronghold of resistance in the Civil War, with the local militia refusing regal demands that lacked parliamentary endorsement, and later, it was the place that gave birth to the Chartist movement and was a hotbed of reformism and early unionism.

The deep glaciated valleys, separated by forbidding expanses of moorland ensured a close-knit community and a significant degree of parochialism. The Quaker John Fox had his life-changing vision on nearby Pendle Hill (also the site of the last of the witch-trials in England) and John Wesley made many fanatical converts in his Methodism preachings here. It was twenty miles North in the village of Haworth, that the Brontés lived - the father a Methodist preacher and his two daughters authors of renown. The Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights captured well the dark, passionate, loyal but tragic genre of the local landed male.

When I was a child, the valleys were forested not by trees, but by innumerable factory chimneys - the remnants of the long-gone King Cotton - which gave the area a very special character/mixture of industrialism and proximate wilderness.

        Bacup     

The chimneys are now sadly gone and with them the visual history and struggles of the people. During the Irish potato famine, millions arrived from the West, to dig the canals and railroads in this "Cradle of the Industrial Revolution" as it has been called. My mother's mother's side of the family hark, I was told, from County Mayo.

My grandfather (James Fielden Greenwood) was more English, I believe, and may have been related biologically to John Fielden, the Todmorden millowner, humanitarian and Quaker who was also the Member of Parliament for Todmorden and who brought in the first Child Labour laws and the 10 hour working day. No authenticated connection has been found. My maternal great-grandmother (Patience Fielden) and great-grandfather (James Greenwood) were both weavers, born in the 1840s.

On my father's side, his biological father Joseph Tetlow came from Oldham and died of heart failure in 1914, the year of my father's birth. The Tetlows are noted in the Doomsday Book in the Oldham/Werneth region, and it is thought that the name refers to the name of an individual (Tetta) and the O.E "Lhaw" meaning "hill". Tetta is a common Saxon name from the 7th Century onwards, and "Tettalhaw" is thought to refer to a minor saxon hill-chieftain. All of the Tetlows in the world are traceable to this very small geographical area.

As for personal history, I grew up in a world of affection, knowing nothing of prejudice or bigotry until my late teens. The moorlands were my playground as well as the source of my social and cultural isolation. This isolation was pierced by occasional heroes - the local cricket professionals in the Lancashire League - all West Indians - our own team professional Everton Weekes, with Clyde Walcott, Frank Worrell and my school coach Gary Sobers - some of the greatest cricketers of all time, and this in a small town of no more than 15,000 population!  The cricket pitch was right opposite our house, and I could watch the matches out of our bedroom window. I also joined the club and still marvel that as a young boy of twelve I was able to rub shoulders daily with some of the world's greatest sportsmen who were almost invariably men of colour. 

The Saturday afternoon game 

It was therefore a great shock to discover, as I moved beyond the safety of my family circle, and the limits of my green horizons, that racism and class prejudice were rife, that the colour of oneʻs skin could be a cause for malicious intent. Even more shocking was the discovery that these same ugly values were applied to myself, "tainted" as I was by my rough Lancashire accent. I was angered to find myself occasionally isolated and marginalised by the slight glance or tonal inflection suggesting disdain or worse because of the way I spoke - the way my father and mother and much-loved grandparents spoke. My sense of injustice reciprocally fuelled my anger and I became dedicated, almost without knowing it, to a mission of social activism.  The choices for someone from my background were not great - the local coal mines, a life in the army fighting against other poor lads from Northern Ireland, or a life of unemployment and/or crime. As I matured I began to notice that my young colleagues who had been less ambitious increasingly filled the latter ranks. Ambition thus became a very important aspect of my early character formation - ambition grounded upon a complete commitment to (uncaring and ruthless) competition.

Youth

We moved toi Bacup when I was eight. I was unprepared for the violence that followed. St, Mary's Catholic Primary School was a rough place. My first day I ran the gauntlet of six (6) fistfights - young, already-hardened boys of my own age lining up for the right to determine my place in the pecking order. Although I held my own, it didn't get easier. My aspirations to "get ahead", to "go to college" was like a red flag to a bull for my young colleagues who saw me as needing to be taken down a peg or two. For the next four years my life was intersected by episodic bouts of violence, culminating at the age of 12 in my passing the 11-Plus exam that would take me to Grammar School. I was in the playground when the news came through and knew nothing of it until I came back into the classroom to find my desk covered in bunting and trimmings. The elderly teacher (a relief teacher) bless her heart, had thought to celebrate my academic success. "Children," she said, "Isn't it wonderful! Tony's passed his exam and is going to go to Grammar School". "Fuck! "I thought, "I'm dead". And sure enough, after school, I turned a corner to find Vinnie Chadwick and two of his buddies waiting to deal to me. As I say, it was a violent place. And the violence was not just that of the children. Most of these boys came from homes where they were beaten  - usually by a drunken father - for the merest infraction.

Life got easier at Grammar School (Thornleigh Salesian Boys' College in Bolton) at least from my fellow students. But only during the week. On the weekends I was thrust back into the ever-vigilant watching of my back. It was 1954. Elvis The Platters, the Everley Brothers, Fats Domino, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry had all burst onto the emerging youth cuulture scene and with it the upsurge of rebellious youth violence that characterised the 1950s. Films like Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, The Girl Can't Help It and Rock Around the Clock provided the cultural ammunition for the release of pent-up frustrations and anger. The first time that Rock Around the Clock played at the cinema in Rawtenstall (4 miles down the valley) the cinema was literally trashed. Seats were torn from their bolts and hurled around the room. It looked like an earthquake had hit. Saturday nights were spent at the local St. John's Ambulance Hall about a hundred yards from my home. There we would bop our way through the night enjoying the music of our Rock and Roll heroes, smooching to the Platters' Only You belted out on an old gramaphone, through our sexual awakenings, pressed up tight against the blossoming local girls until 10.30. At that time, the pubs would close and five minutes later, the doors of the Hall would burst open to admit the youth of nearby urban areas - Bury, Burnley, Salford. There would be a few moments of sizing each other up and then all hell would break loose in a completely out-of-control battle involving open razors, flick knives, knuckle dusters, motor cycle chains, chairs broken bottles and just about anything that would inflict serious injury. It is amazing that nobody died in these meelee. I always ran up onto the stage, along with the girls, out of harm's way.

But I didn't always escape. On one particular occasion, one of the young local lads a year or two younger than myself came to ask if he could dance with my girlfiend of two years, Pat Hellawell. I could see his mates huddled by the side of the dance floor and intuited that they had put him up to the job. I told him to "Bugger off!", knowing that there was trouble coming whether I complied or not. He wasn't a bad young man and whispered that they had decided to "do for me" if I refused. "Tell them I'm ready when they are!" I said. Nothing happened. Then. 

A few months later, I must have been about 16 by this time, I was sitting in the "snug" of a pub on Rochdale Rd, drinking with a small grouo of three or four friends. A group of seven or eight young men came in, included among them a young swaddie (soldier/private) who I hadn't seen before. He was accompanied by the usual crowd of my youthful antagonists. We were sitting quietly drinking, and me thinkin that this time it was going to be different when the newcomer, who was sitting next to me picked up a bakalite ashtray in his right hand and snapped it, in the process cutting a nasty gash across his palm. He turned to me and said "What are you laughing at?". Laughter had never been further from my mind. "I'm not laughing" I said, "I think you need to get that taken care of." Ignoring my advice he jumped to his feet and tried to headbut me. I managed to duck out of the way as his companions and mine pitched into each other. The landlord and some other adult customers grabbed the newcomers (who obviously had a "reputation") and threw them out of the front door of the pub. There they stayed, waiting for me and my companions to come out. We stayed for a while wondering what to do. I suggested we go out of the back door, and as we moved that wayI noticed out of the corner of my eye that one of their friends was slipping outside to warn them. We changed tack, and ran out the front, while they made a futile move to cut us off at the rear. Then commenced a running battle through the streets and centre of the town as we fought our way back to our homes up on the hill, dodging the fire bricks that they had managed to find and launch in our direction.

A year or two later, (and now with a new girlfriend, Jean, who was to become my first wife) I had heard from friends that this same group (including the inimitable Vinnie Chadwick) were planning to wait for me after the Saturday dance at the local Astoria Ballroom in Rawtenstall, where I often went (the Ambulance Hall having been closed down due to its riotous reputation). So we stayed home that night, and the next Saturday and the next. Two months must have passed, and I thought it was now probably safe to go to the dance once again. Rawtenstall was a twenty minute train ride away (before the rail line closed), and the station was at the far end of town. My home was on the other end. The dance finished, and we made our way slowly and watchfully to the station. No trouble. Onto the train and out at the other end, onto the darkened streets of the main road. Still nothing. I was with Jean and another young woman friend. We walked alone through the dark streets and into the town centre - still nothing. Our route took us across the town centre to the steep lane that turned off, just past F. W, Woolworths, and up the hill towards the moorland. We were on the last lap, and I began to relax. Then, "Ward!!!". This from the dark recess of the Woolworths doorway. The hairs prickled down the nape of my neck. "Keep walking!" I said to my two companions. And we did, slowly climbing the hill past the Ebenezer Chapel as we were slowly overtaken and surrounded by our five young pursuers who had been hurling abuse and questioning my manhood. Just at that point. the street lights went out. We kept moving, ignoring the taunts and gradually, we reached the point where the road forked and where our female companion had to turn off to go to her own home. She hesitated to leave. "Go!" I said, "Leave now!" I turned to the sneering circle of thugs around us. "Let the girls go", I said, "since it's me you seem to want." Our companion left, but Jean stayed. "Go!" I said to her, "You're endangering both of us!". She stayed, and one of the group approached her with obvious sexual intent - "You want to see what a real man's like?

Things happened very quickly after that. I stepped between Jean and the thug, grabbed him by the lapel and said "Don't touch her!". We started to fight until, surprisingly, one of his mates stepped in to hold his companion back, and said, "Get out of here!" I'll never know why he did that. I grabbed Jean's hand and we ran the last 50 yards to my home. We didn't go dancing much after that. But that experience also brought to an end my experience of youth violence in the Rossendale Valley. Within a year I was married with a baby on the way and living in the "front room" of my parents house.

My home 

I have often wondered what quirk of fate separated me from these angry and sometimes seemingly psychopathic boys. Was it the love I had showered on me by doting parents and grandparents? Was it the fact that we lived in the small council estate up on the hill, cheek by jowl with the middle class, while these other kids lived in  and around the stone-built tenement the slums of Plantation Street down in the valley floor? Was it my aspiration to be "better" - perhaps an implicit gesture that our lives were "not enough", were missing something? I don't know. What I do know is that later, as a young architect, I came back to Bacup and went with my father to the local pub. There, sitting in the public bar was  my nemesis Vinnie Chadwick, now already bent under the yoke of a futureless factory job. Gone was the brash arrogance and defiance of his teenage years. There he was, sitting with his mates when I came in. He stood up, doffed his cap and said, "Hello Mr. Ward!" I confess that I was too embarrassed and shocked to respond. That was the last time I saw him.

Through all of this violence and youthful rebellion, my schooling disintegrated. I would come home from school and light the fire for my mum and dad, switch on the stove and wait for them to come in from work and cook supper. As soon as they arrived the TV would go on and stay on all niight until bedtime. I never got to do my homework because I could never drag myself away from the box. My grades went downhill. In my first term at Thornleigh I had been 3rd in the top stream in the class. Five years later I was bottom of the bottom stream, and just managed to pass enough 'O' Level subjects to save a little dignity. So much for my high ambitions to go to Grammar School!

Early Career. 

It wasn't clear at this point what I wanted to do. I hadn't excelled at much of anything, except Art. I had passed Science, Geography, English and one or two other subjects, but was left with no clear goal. I knew I wasn't good enough at art to cut it as a self-supporting artist. Nor was I good enough at Math and Science to go into science. Perhaps, I though, I could do something in between - like architecture. And that's how I started, by a process of elimination. My dad put the word out through his network at the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic men's society) that I was looking to study architecture. A few weeks later we heard that there was a firm in Blackburn (Walter Stirrup and Son) that was willing to take me on as an Articled Pupil - a kind of indentured slave. What that meant was that I was to be paid 10 shillings a week (about 1/30th of the wage I would have started at in the pit or the shoe factory) and in return they would teach me how to be an architect. I was to go to school four nights and two full days a week (at Blackburn Technical College), close to the office. There I would study draughting, watercolouring, design, building construction techniques etc. The job was not really sustainable. Blackburn was a 40 minute bus ride away and the fares alone (never mind the lunch and dinner monies) amounted to about five or six times my weekly earnings. I was in serious deficit and would not have managed had I not been living at home and being supported by my parents - who themselves were hard-working poor people. But I stuck to it and even enjoyed it. I was learning real skills and gradually was given increasing degrees of responsibility within the office. Weekends, I would go potholing and caving in the Yorkshire Dales, and sometimes would skip Tech to join my old and much loved friend and student-colleague Derek Hindle swimming in the Ribble at Clitheroe where he lived.

I was lucky. Derek had to pay his firm for the privilege of working for them! Parker, Hay and Rushworth were not known for their generosity. All of this was great. I was getting ahead, and slowly submitting work (Testimonies of Study) to the RIBA in London. At this rate I would be able to be an architect in about 12 years. Several of my older colleagues in classes at Tech had been trying for 15 years or more.

It was about this time that I met Harold Walsby. We crossed paths only very briefly between my 17th and 21st years, and then he dropped out of my life completely. At the time of our meeting I was a young trainee architectural assistant, studying at Blackburn Technical College and completing my Testimonies of Study for the RIBA. He was 46 but seemed through the inexperienced eye of youth, to be much older – perhaps in his late 50s. He had just moved with a wife and two adolescent children into a small stone terraced cottage up on the moorland not 300 metres from my house.

I had met him at the local Arts Show – a display of the works of local artists in the Mechanics Institute that housed the town library downstairs and an exhibition space above. The whole building straddled the River Irwell which disappeared underground 20 metres upstream. (and which made me always want to pee every time I went to the library).

I had entered a couple of my pen and ink drawings and watercolours in the show - the very first time that I had dared to air my works in public, and was standing, pretending to admire a work that hung next to mine, so that I could see what people had to say about them. Along limped an elderly, grey-haired man with soft eyes and jowls displaying a three-day beard. There was a boy of about thirteen with him. They stopped in front of my works and looked at them for a moment. Then Harold (for that is who it was) gestured towards one of the works and said to his son David, “That drawing there has been done by a young man who is training to be an architect.”

My amazement got the better of my shyness, and I blurted out. “How did you know that?”

Harold turned to me with a gentle smile and asked, “Are they yours, then?”  “Yes! But how did you know?”

“I used to be an architectural draughtsman,” he said, and there began a brief but wonderful encounter that was to change my life. Harold, it turned out, had a sculpture in the show – a grotesque life-size plaster human form labelled The Unknown Bureaucrat, an early indication of his lack of respect or tolerance for anything institutional. He mentioned that he met, once a week, with a couple of old friends who shared their ideas on painting, politics and philosophy. He invited me along to their next Thursday night meeting. His friends, it turned out, were retired academics one (Slatterly by name) had been at Manchester University teaching textile technology and had left, I suspect under pressure for having been an avowed communist. The three of them briefly shared this small once-a-week world with my young self and opened up to me a whole universe of literature and critical thought that has shaped everything since.

 

After the first session, Harold invited me up the hill to his cottage to meet his wife, Dod. We strolled up onto the moorland track as he probed my understandings and beliefs with his incredible analytical skills. On arrival I stepped under the low door-head into a tiny space, modest living/kitchen area which was crammed with his paintings. There were two rooms opening off this, two very tiny bedrooms. I was incredulous that someone of his obvious age, maturity and experience could be living with his family in such a modest way. Over a cup of tea, he told me that he had moved there from St. Ives in Cornwall, where he had made a simple living as an artist. It seemed incredulous that he should have chosen Bacup over St. Ives, and never did discover why. What I did find out (in the numerous walks that came later) was that he had studied Hegelian dialectics and Marx (who was to me at that time still akin to Count Dracula), and that he was a man of profound knowledge.

Over tea he began to pull canvases out from the stacks around the walls – landscapes mostly, in oils, with a rough texture to them in varying muted shades of grey, blue, and green. I saw nothing in his artwork to arrest my attention, although I am sure that this was more a result of the lack of attention and perception of an arrogant teenager that of the artworks themselves. But whatever he thought, he was always respectful, always intent on preserving my dignity, always kind and generous in his comments. It was the beginning of an improbable yet for me significant friendship. Harold’s opened up for me a whole world of metaphysics and his recommended reading of the Mentor edition of The Age of Ideology still graces my bookshelf to this day.

As our friendship grew, I began to imagine in my young mind that I could argue against Harold on important issues and win. The opportunity was not long in presenting itself. Harold wrote a long and impassioned letter to the local newspaper the Bacup Times, decrying the arms race, vilifying the Pentagon and Foreign Office as war-mongers and international terrorists, and telling of the likely outcome of a nuclear confrontation. The year was 1959, I think - four years before the Cuba crisis and at a time when fall-out shelters were in growing demand in the States. Harold was adamant that the emotive language of foreign policy was destined to lead us into Armageddon, unless a higher form of rationality prevailed. Steeped as I was in the Tory jingoism of the post-war years, with ever-present memories of Churchillian rhetoric, I wrote a reply, couched in ill-concealed sarcasm, explaining that the cold war was an inevitable result of Soviet expansionism and that the “Free World” needed to stand fast to resist the downfall of civilisation as we know it. I suggested that his own arguments were what one would inevitably expect from a person with such Communist sympathies. I waited eagerly to see if he would respond.

He did, gently but firmly and with no personal animosity, dissected my arguments. demonstrating their contradictions and in the process leaving me with nowhere to go, conceptually. Then he gently, and publicly put me back together.    When I next visited him I was received with undiminished warmth and affection, and no mention was made of my foolish indiscretion. It was yet another lesson in human dignity from this intellectual aristocrat. I began to realise that, through a lifetime of toil and disappointment he had grown increasingly compassionate where others whither and grow increasingly more bitter and petrified. His wrinkled face and his gammy leg were the only marks of hardship that life had made upon his body. Below the surface he was enormous, huge. Where others relent, he had grown, for truly, he saw only the marvellous in life. Its magic, its mystery, were always at the forefront of his mind, always in step with his every action and utterance: complete, humble compassionate, tender, gracious, grand..

Following the public encounter,, we would occasionally walk together across the moors close to his house. As we walked, him shuffling along with his polio-crippled leg, he would utter the most profound critical and analytical analysis on a vast range of subjects – not only Marx and Hegel, but Bertrand Russell (with whom he had been connected in the 1950s), chess (he was taught by a grand master), the balance of power, birth control, Freudian and Jungian analysis, the Nuclear Arms race (he was a founder-member of CND as I was to learn later to my own cost), Algebra, Design, Existentialism, cooking, farming, Botany, Astronomy, Art, Architecture. There was never a subject that I might raise about which he did not have a deep and extensive understanding. He was my first experience of a public intellectual. Yet he was self-taught.

He told me that he left home at the age of 15 and got a job drawing bathroom details in a London architect’s office. Tiring of this almost immediately, he left again to bum his way around London from odd job to odd job. It was during this period that he came into contact with Dylan Thomas, and lived for several years in Soho, drinking wine and living what we would now call a Bohemian existence. It was here that he met Russell also (whose prolific writings he knew almost by heart, and with whom he committed himself to the CND movement. I was later to discover that he was remembered by those who knew him in his Soho days as familiar figure there and in Trafalgar Square a formidable debater in matters of logic and the Dialectic.

Harold and his family moved away from Bacup in 1959 I seem to remember, no doubt because there was little market for works of art in the industrial valleys of the Irwell and Calder. He moved instead to the Lake District, drawn no doubt by the prospect of a better reception for his painterly talents. The family moved into an old barn and outbuildings in Grasmere, opposite the studio of Heaton Cooper the well-known watercolourist and a quarter of a mile or so from Wordsworth’s cottage. We kept in touch and I visited him there several times, hitch-hiking the 100 miles or so from my home.We met occasionally until I moved to London, Portsmouth and then California, when we lost touch. It was only much later that I discovered that Harold was  quite famous and even has a society named after him – the Walsby Society – convened shortly after his death in 1973 by a group of friends and fellow theorists, amongst them his friend and colleague George Walford with whom he had formulated the theory Systematic Ideology (as it was renamed by Walford in 1976) – the study of ideologies – in the 1930s.

The group they formed was a breakaway from the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Like their counterparts in Frankfurt, they were interested in understanding the failure of Marxism to capture the public imagination of the working class. The theory they developed was expressed by Harold Walsby himself in his 1947 book The Domain of Ideologies and those involved in the group set up an organisation to propagate their views called the Social Science Association, which existed from 1944 until 1956. It was later succeeded by the Walsby Society after Harold’s death and the journal which emerged from it called Ideological Commentary.

It was only quite recently that I discovered this "other" side of the man who had been my friend and mentor. He never, in all of our time together, alluded to the fact that he had a national reputation in critical theory. Yet the seeds that he planted in mjy young mind have borne a remarkable fruit, and I wonder if we were to meet today, just what we would have to say to each other, now that I am no longer burdened with the myopia of youth. Harold no doubt saved me from a life of institutionalised mediocrity, for it was just about this time that we discovered that Jean was pregnant. This heralded the end of my time as an articled pupil. I needed a wage to support my new family.  I quickly got a new job at a 1600% pay increase. The princely sum of eight pounds a week.

Getting Ahead 

My new life started with a job as an architectural assistant in the Burnley Borough Architects office. There were about twenty staff there, arrayed down and at right angles to each wall of a long room - ten each side at their drawing boards with a wide aisle down the middle. Most of the qualified staff (ie. architects) had come up through the offices the way I was doing it. The chief architect, Fred Stazicker was an LRIBA - which meant that he had acquired his qualification (a License) without completing all of the required exams but with a sort of allowable credit for previous work experience. He was a short stout man who would stride down the central aisle with his thumbs in his braces (suspenders) making sure that everyone was hard at work. He wasn't an unpleasant person, but he was a stickler for detail and protocol, and rarely smiled. The staff below him treated myself and my other junior colleagues like slaves. We were expected to brew the tea, do the dishes, run errands for the staff. All of the menial and often degrading jobs that needed to be done - in fact almost anything but Architecture. Many of them had been in the army through their National Service (Draft) but I had been lucky enough to escape this. It was terminated the year before I reached the required age. This seemed to put me in a different frame of mind to my "superiors. They often reminisced about their time in the forces, speaking with amusement about the "jankers" that they had had to endure. ("Jankers" are the degrading tasks given by superiors designed to humiliate and break the spirit of new recruits ie, painting the coal black, cutting the lawns with scissors etc.). I began  to develop a deep anger and frustration at being expected to be a slave to these arrogant fools. So one day I refused. Asked to go and buy a packet of cigarettes, I simply said "No! Go and do your own errands." When I was asked to explain myself, I pointed out that I was there to learn a profession and that profession was not to be a pissing post for everybody who saw themselves as my superior.

Complete disbelief and chaos ensued. Everybody turned on me - including even my young colleague-slaves who had been among the loudest in their complaints, suggesting that I should just buckle to and get it over with, that it was better to not "rock the boat". I refused. I pointed out that I had a wife and a child at home who were depending on me making progress in my professional life and I was not going to let them down. Furthermore, I had been working in Architecture for two years and had acquired quite a bit aof usable skill in that time which was now going to waste. Out marched Fred Stazicker, thumbs in braces to see what the turmoil was about. The process was repeated, and the result (what else could it have been?) was that the system changed and we "underlings" were no longer required or expected to serve the personal interests of senior staff. I was not very popular, and didn't stay much longer. I got a position as an Archiitectural Assistant in the Manchester firm of Arthur Fairbrother in Traffford Bar at an increase of 50% on my Burnley pay. It involved a 1 hour train and bus trip to Manchester every day but I was still financially better off, and thrown in at the "deep end" - responsible for the details, working drawings and site supervision on a couple of Primary School Building projects. I was 20 and by now had another child.

Initially, the job was way more than I felt I could easily handle, but within a couple of months I was  on top of it and relishing the feeling of skill, competence and satisfaction of doing a complex job well. Soon I was to move again. Desmond Williams, the junior partner in the firm decided to cut loose and start his own firm, taking the majority of projects with him. He asked me to join him since I was now in sole charge of four of the projects he was taking. I accepted on condition that I got a pay increase of 60% - ie. 20 pounds a week. All of this within the space of 6 months! We moved offices to All Saints, near the Art College and the University, and everything ran smoothly for the next year. By now we had moved out of my parents' house and were able to afford to live by ourselves in a small terraced house in Padiham, near Burnley and close to Jean's family.

The Deep End.  

The work with Desmond Williams was very exciting and offered me a remarkable opportunity to quickly upskill myself. But I had beeen forced to relinquish my theoretical studies at the Tech. I just couldn't earn the kind of money I was now making without a full-time commitment to the job. I had stopped submitting works to the RIBA and was now looking at the prospect of becoming a very well paid draughtsman, but not an architect. To make matters worse, the RIBA had decided to terminate the option for young designers to qualify professionally through practical training. It was now 1961. They decreed that by 1962 - that is, within a year, all professional qualifications would need to be acquired through a full time University programme. I felt simultaneously a strange mixture of accomplishment and loss. Here I was, doing much of the same work as a qualified architect, but denied the opportunity to become one.

Then one day, on the way home on the train, I struck up a conversation with young a woman friend from Bacup who was in teacher-training in Manchester. I confided my frustration to her. She simply asked, "Why don't you go to University?" I explained that sinceI had two children and no savings such a thing was out of the question. "But you can get a Grant", she said, "to support you and your family whole you finish your studies," I had no idea that such things existed, and immediately checked it out. She was right! Within a week I had applied to three Schools of Architecture, Sheffield and Nottingham Universities and Birmingham School of Architecture in the College of Arts and Crafts. I was accepted for the next year at Birmingham, and since this was my first choice, I accepted the offer. I also sent off my application for a Student Grant to the Ministry of Education. I had six months before I was due to start my academic training and aimed to save as much as I could in the meantime. 

Everything appeared to be falling into place. I was on top of the work and my other two colleagues, both older and more experienced were always there to offer support. I thought. Then, within the space of a week, I was left alone. Basil Torkington, the most senior of the two went down with Shingles, and my other colleague just didn't show up one morning. It seemed a bit strange until we read the evening paper to discover that he was now serving a year at Her Majesty's pleasure in Strangeways prison for indecent exposure in a public toilet!!! So I was alone, with an entire architects office to hold together. I was still not 21.

Everything went well for the next three months or so. Shouldering all of the project work in the office - probably six or seven major projects, I revelled in the opportunity, the experience and the sense of skill accomplishment and power that I felt. Writing letters, negotiating with contractors, deciding contract variations, visiting sites, and doing all of the technical drawings and specifications was an extraordinary experience. I would take work home, working on the train both into and out of work. I began to dream about the projects. Then I began to bump into things. Tables, chairs, walls, doors. And I started dropping things. I wasn't sleeping any more, and despite my attempt to prop up my behaviour with instant Nescafé, nothing seemed to get me back on track. This was before the days of amphetemines, but nevertheless I went to my local doctor to ask him for something to keep me going. He politely told me that if I didn't slow down I was looking to have a complete "nervous breakdown" within a matter of weeks if not days. I made it clear that time off was not an option. He prescribed a concoction for me to take - liquid bromide it turned out to be - and slow down I did! I would fall asleep going home on the train, coming in to work in the morning. I would fall asleep at the dinner table, over lunch, and occasionally at my drawing board. But within the space of two or three weeks I started to feel "normal" again and managed to keep the office from collapsing until Basil returned and we hired extra help.

September 1962: Full Time Education 

Somehow I managed to get through the next six months without any major problems. Jean was working at Main and Morley washing machine factory along with her mother and stepfather. She was involved in working a three ton metal press, punching out the body parts for electric washing machines. It was hard, dirty and noisy work and brought on a severe case of dermititis which kept her hands in a constant state of pain. The children, Cheryl (2) and Terence (1) were cared for by a neighbour, the English wife of a Jamaican immigrant, Barry, who also worked at the factory. They were kind and caring people, but after the cost of day care, there wasn't a great deal left to spend on frivolities. By now, we had agreed that the best course of action was for Jean to remain in Padiham while I went down to Birmingham to study, hitch-hiking backwards and forwards on the weekends to spend time with the family, and staying in "digs" with board and lodging provided during the week. We were all set to go ahead when the bombshell letter arrived from the Ministry of Education. We were ineligible to receive a married student allowance to study, because we had not been "self-supporting" for three years, only two. We had spent the first year living in the parlour of my parents' house. We had been honest on the application, thinking that with two children and two full years of independence we would clearly qualify. We had not known about the stipulated requirement. We were both devastated, but made the hard decision to press ahead anyway with the study, determined to eke out some kind of income that would carry us thrrough. So at 5am on a cold Monday moirning in September 1962, I picked up my suitcase and stepped out on the road towards the M6 motorway, about twelve miles to the West.

I arrived in Birmingham in the midst of a cloudburst and got soaked to the skin. I quickly changed into my only dry clothes - a cherry red sweater and a bright blue pair of jeans and sandals and lined up to register. I looked around to discover that every other person in the line was wearing a suit and tie. Because of my office experience, I had been accepted into the third year of a five year programme. All of the other people in my class of 40 had been together for the preceeding two years and knew each other well. It didn't take me too long to discover that I stood out - and not just because of the sweater. After registration we all went to the White Swan ("Dirty Duck") in Edgebaston. There we sat around in what we would now call a "talking circle" and told our respective stories. It soon became clear that almost everyone in the class came from a privileged background. But what was really peculiar was that almost without exception they didn't talk about themselves, their dreams, expectations or ambitions. They spoke about their parents - and usually their fathers.

"My father is the Managing Director of Girling Brakes. He's off to Paris this weekend.

"My father's in the City." 

"My father has a large architectural firm in Coventry." and so on.

Slowly, the circle came around to me.

"And what does your father do, Tony?"

"He's a labourer."

"What kind of labourer?" 

(Pause) "A manual labourer. What other kind is there?" 

"I say! How jolly interesting!" 

I despised them. I despised their ignorance. I despised their smugness. I most of all despised their good manners. It was the beginning of a three year crusade to rub their noses into their own unrecognised and unacknowledged conceit. The fires of my competitive ambition had been ignited and would not be extinguished until I stood at the top and looked (down) on these zombies who appeared to have no life of their own save that stolen by reflection from their fathers. I should have felt sorry for them, and indeed that would come much much later. A lifetime later. But then, sitting there in my bright red sweater, sticking out like tits on a bull, I felt only burning ambition. The next day, in studio, I asked each of my classmates if I might look at their portfolios and at their previous two years work. I went through each portfolio, making a mental note as I went, on how the work I was looking at compared to what I knew to be my own capability. I found only two who I thought excelled. John Townsend and Tony Twiggs. I determined that by the end of year five, I would have beaten them - taking the top prize in my class. Stated so casually now, forty six years later it seems almost funny. Then it felt deadly serious.

And so I set out on a course of action that would involve me in three years of focussed seriously competitive work. I loved it, and for the first few months I worked hard to understand the requirements and expectations of my tutors. I did very well, gaining in confidence with each project, feeling my skill and knowledge coming to the fore. Each Friday I would leave the studio at 4.00, take the bus out to Erdington (where my "digs" were) and hitch to the end of the M6 to go home - usually arriving about 8.00 or 9.00pm. Then Monday morning, up at 4.00 and out to the Motorway for the return journey, arriving in class around 8.30. My grades were good and improving (in everything but Structural Engineering). I was on a roll. Things were sweet. Then I went to the bank.

Crisis Point 

Existentialism and Values 

At the same time that I learned to rage about injustice and directed my ambition towards social and economic escape, I also paradoxically struggled to reconcile my social outrage with my spirituality. Raised from infancy in Catholicism (which I have long since rejected), by the time I was thirteen I felt drawn to the priesthood, and thought seriously for a while of studying at the Seminary. That was not to be. What Dylan Thomas called "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" took precedence. My guiding lights at this time were writers like Henry Miller, Tolstoy, Blaise Cendrars, Vladimir Nabokov, Agnar Mykle, who seemed to have grown beyond the narrow morality of my own guilt-ridden Catholic upbringing. Miller was my liberation! I can still remember the amazement I felt when I first read Tropic of Cancer. Here was a man comppletely unafraid to reveal his most manipulative, banal and letcherous self for all to see, unafraid and yet with what I perceived to be a deep love of human beings, of life in its fullest and most sexual forms. Miller lifted the lid on my repressed Catholic sexuality and made it alright for me to gaze upon it. In spite of my passion for such lusty writers (who said the unspeakable and dared to voyage into the rtegions of the soul where we keep and hide our most precious secrets) I retained my deep sense of the spiritual while at the same time being appalled by the social injustices I saw around me. I also devoured the writings of Krishnamurti, Herman Hesse, Carl Jung, Alan Watts, etc, seeking answers to the spiritual dilemmas that these tensions raised. The tension which developed between my sense of spirituality and my social and political activism has touched every aspect of my adult and professional life - mellowing in later years, but never quite relaxing into easy reconciliation. 

Throughout my life, I have made it a point to meet my "heroes". Laing, I met several times in 1967 and 1968. During that time (during my time at the Ministry of Public Building and Works and working on the Relational Theory material) I had a number of projects involvinng institurional design - Prisons, Mental Hospitals and Sheltered Workshops). The academic advantage of working and theorising is such institutional settings is that one has a "captive" group whose behaviour and responses to the physical environment and space one can study without having to worry about too many other variables. But the empotional and spiritual price paid for this convenience is high. A brief glance at the clickable items highlighted above will give some indication of this price. I started to find my already fragile sense of my own certainty and identity beginning to disintegrate as I increasingly empathised with the prisoners and patients against the psychiatric nurses prison guards. Witnessing first hand the random and arbitrary nature of social (in)justice became became vividly real the day that I walked into an old classmate in Strangeways Prison and saw myself in his shoes, while, at the same time, watching the emotional and psychological violence perpetrated upon such as this by the often illiterate (ex military) custodial and nursing staff. The sensed of panic as I began to drown in rage, impotence and frustration was relieved only by the discovery of Laing's The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. It was the lifeline I needed in what I saw as a woirld gone mad. Laing himself was quiet, gentle, humourous, ironic, but deeply compassionate for these lost souls and for professionals cast adrift like myself, in a sea of madness. I survived by learning to theorise beyond the immediate, by learning to make connections between human experience and social and economic structures. I began tounderstand intellectually, as well as viscerally, the reality of alienation. It was, in a sense, the origin of my interest in Critical Theory.

Since that time I have spent the best part of my life fighting for social justice in what I see as an unjust world, seeking material answers to worldly problems, confronting issues of power. At the same time I have retained a deep connection with the spiritual - working often with indigenous peoples, participating in ritual ceremonies, believing and frequently experiencing the mystical and inexplicable. Over the years, other writers appeared to guide me - Fritz Perls, Erich Fromm - all psychologists who embodied the same struggle as my own as I came to take responsibility for my adult actions and to recognise the pain and harm that they sometimes created for others in the world around me. In these years I confronted my inner demons, undertaking "lots" of therapy, counselling and spiritual "trips". I grew, mellowed, matured, softened, became less brutally ambitious and more accepting. It was not until much later, in my fifties that I really came to grips with Critical Thinking - through the work and writings of Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, Tom Dutton, Paulo Freire, Michael Apple, Stanley Aronowitz, Henry Giroux, Noam Chomsky and the many others who would guide my way through a PhD. Most of the details of this struggle are to be found within this website - in the numerous downloadable DVDs that are available to you, the reader.

Others find it strange that I should "wear my heart on my sleeve" in such a way. I make no apologies. It is who I am. In the course of my life struggle I have become increasinjgly clear that, as the feminists used to say, "the personal is political and the political is personal". I am a man who continually searches for internal consistency, looking always to identify the distance between my thoughts, my words and my actions. I hold the highest regard for those who "walk their talk", who embody in their own lives the principles that they advocate to and for others. Beyond that, I have an even deeper regard for those who refuse to dictate or judge the actions of others, who see others as free and sovereign spirits, and whose spirituality allows them to accept the Other in a non-judgemental way - something I personally find difficult to do. The internal struggle between critical judgement and loving acceptance is not one that I have been able to easily reconcile, though my life has been marked by a dedication to this reconcilliation.

I consider myself to have been very fortunate to have lead the life I have and I have many people to thank. I have already mentioned my children, and beyond them the older men who have appeared in my life at crucial times to guide me to the next step along the path. My maternal grandfather James Fielden Greenwood looms large among them, followed at significant intervals by others who took the time to recognise and foster whatever gifts or talents I may have had. I am deeply grateful to all of them. But guidance always seems to have been available when sought. Material assistance and the support has been plentiful, but it is the spiritual support that has helped me to maintain my path. This spiritual support has often been implicit in writings, exemplar behaviour and so on. But occasionally it has also been simultaneously direct. A case in point is Krishnamurti.

The Spiritual Quest: Krishnamurti. 

I first came across J. Krishnamurti around 1960, while I was reading Henry Miller's Books in My Life. At the time I was devouring anything and everything that Miller had written, and in this books he writes about all of the people who have influenced him. He writes about Krishnamurti with great respect, recounting how the young Indian was "chosen" to be a Messianic figure, and how he was adopted by Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, only to turn his back on the status and spootlight, to seek his own very personal path to knowledge. Then, in spite of himself he became a world figure a great and respected teacher of millions from all walks of life seeking a spiritual path to understanding. Miller enthuses about Krishnamurti's central theme - "Don't follow Jesus, don't follow Buddha, don't follow Mohammed, don't follow Marx. Don't even follow Krishnamurti. Follow only your inner voice!" What appealed to Miller and also appealed to me was the remarkable contradiction in that statement, but how the contradiction contained within it a fundamental spiritual truth. As Miller explains it: "[His] language is naked, revelatory and inspiring. . . Instead of an obstacle race or a rat trap, it makes of daily life a joyous pursuit. There is something about Krishnamurti's utterances which makes the reading of books seem utterly superfluous." Aldous Huxley, too, recognised Krishnamurti's insigntful aweareness of the human condition. Writing in the foreword to The First and Last Freedom, he notes that it is, "A clear contemporary statement of the fundamental human problem, together with an inviotation to solve it the only way in which it can be solved - by and for oneself."  

I decided I needed to read Krishnamurti. And I did. Commentaries on Living was one of my favourites - a series of recorded talks. Then some years later, in 1967, I read in the London Times that the Krishnamurti Foundation was buying an old mansion house, Brockwood Park, overlooking the Solent just outside of Southampton to turn into a place of education for children. I was in Portsmouth by now, and decided (in line with my propensity for meeting my "heroes") that I would call them and try to arrange a meeting with the venerable man. So I did from my office at the Polytechnic. "Brockwood House!" said the voice on the other end of the line.  I introduced myself and explained that I had read about the purchase of the house in the Times, that I had been a great admirer of Krishnamurti for several years and would welcome an opportunity to convey my respect and gratitude the next time he was in residence.

"Would you like to come to lunch tomorrow? asked the female voice on the other end of the line.

"You mean he's there now?"

"Yes!"

"That would be marvellous!" and I hung up, agreeing to be there at 12.00 sharp the next day. 

That night, not unusually, I arrived home late, and smelling of beer, having spent two hours in the pub after work, carousing with my colleagues. My dinner was cold on the table, the children already in bed, and a very angry Jean confronting me. We had a huge fight which left Jean with a bruised face and me with deep gauges down my cheeks. In the cold light of the next day, as I dressed in my usual casual jeans and sweater, it was clear that it would not be possible to disguise or cover up the facial wounds. They looked appalling.

Southampton was thirty miles away, and since I didn't possess a car, I had to set out early in the morning to be sure of getting a lift to Brockwood. I arrived spot on time, courtesy of three or four brave drivers who made obvious attempts to avoid looking me straight in the face. I walked up the tree-lined driveway to the front door and knocked. Mary, a kind, slender grey haired woman opened it. It was she who had spoken to me on the phone. "Mr. Ward? Do come in please!"

She led me into a large bright kitchen/dining area, white, tiled and top-lit with an enormous lantern light over the large oak table that stood in the centre of the room. Around the edges of the room were kitchen bench-tops, covered with platters of delicious-looking vegetarian food. Waiting to greet me were a line of fellow diners, standing casually along two sides of the rectangle made up of the counter tops. The brief introductions began: "This is Tom, the gardener", "This is John, the chef." "This is Alan, the manager." "This is Krishnagee.", "This is Caroline the secretary.", "This is. Henry, the caretaker.", "This is..."

I stopped and looked back in surprise. I had already greeted and shaken hands with the diminutive Indian man without even noticing. Reaching the end of the line, I was asked to take a plate and choose my meal. Mary indicated that I sit at the head of the table with Krishnamurti next to me on my right hand. Everyone elese then sat down. Facing me, at the far end of ther long table was Alan Nordé - a man with a thick South African accent, wearing a dark blue suit and tie. He was the only person wearing a suit in the room - the financial manager of the Krishnamurti Foundation, I later discovered - a man who had once had a career as a promising concert pianist.

I turned to Krishnamurti and told him how much I had enjoyed his writings, how I had come to them through the works of Miller, and that I was very grateful for the opportuunity to meet him and to convey my respect and appreciation. He smiled and asked, "What about you, Tony?"  "What do you do?"

I explained that I was an architect, a Research Fellow at the Polytechnic and that I was interested in how the environment influences human behaviour. "But actually," I said, "I really consider myself to be an Existentialist." I explained my infatuation with Sartre, Camus, Merleau Ponty, Laing etc. "Ahh! Sartre!" he said, and proceeded to engage me in a remarkably insightful dialogue about French Existentialism. The other diners listened respectfully, and when there was a significant pause in the conversation, Alan Nordé asked, from the far end of the table, "Tell me Tony, hopw did you come by those marks on your face?"  

The silence around the table was almost edible. It lasted for perhaps seven seconds. "I had a knock-down drag-out fight with my wife last night and she tried to scratch my eyes out."

Stunning silence as I looked calmly but directly at Nordé, refusing to grasp onto or even acknowledge the fleeting impulse to shame that his words provoke. Then.

Peels of cascading laughter from the little man on my right. Tears rolling down his cheeks. He slaps me on the knee. "Oh!" he gasped between explosions of mirth. "Your wife!". More laughter. Struggling to get the words out. "She's an Existentialist too!!!!"

Bless him! It was a moment of clarity and insight. A remarkable and instantaneous non-judgemental cutting through of the social clichés and morés and re-establishing a dignity from which I might grow and learn.

Mato Paha: A Fork in the Road

Once, at the start of my PhD I took a sabbatical in the United States. I had bought a small motor-home and was travelling from town to town across the States, meeting with the giants of Critical Education and giving the occasional lecture to pay for my journey. I had travelled East from California, crossing the Rockies, staying briefly in Yellowstone, before beginning my real pilgrimage at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. There, on 6th September 1877, the great Oglala Chief Crazy Horse had been murdered by one of his own people in what was the sad end to a remarkable life of bravery, spirituality and honour. Crazy Horse (with Leonard Peltier, Titokowaru and Te Kooti Arikirangi) had been and still is a shining example of resistance to colonisation and oppression for his people. To me, he was simply the greatest warrior of all time. And it was here, at Fort Robinson that, one hundred and twelve years to the day since his assassination, I had come to begin my pilgrimage, tracing his life back, to its start at the sacred mountain of  Mato Paha or Bear Butte just North East of the Black Hills further East. some 32 years earlier.

I stayed for as short while, unable to capture any feeling or sense of the tragedy that had taken place here. Then, I turned East once again and over the next few weeks travelled through “Indian Country”, visiting places of momentous events (the Little Bighorn Battlefield where the 7th Cavalry was wiped out) and Wounded Knee, (where the US took their revenge on defenceless and starving Indians). On the way, I also sidetracked to visit the grave of Red Cloud (who had turned to Catholicism after his surrender) and the Reservation settlements of Pine Ridge and Rosebud. Slowly, I made my way towards the Black Hills and towards the end of my modest spiritual journey, Bear Butte (Mato Paha in Lakota). On my way, I was treated to the grandeur of the Plains in late Autumn, the cottonwoods golden and shimmering along the muddy river courses, the grasses golden and dazzling against a hot and vivid blue sky.

I had ceased to check the time or date, but must have arrived sometime in October. It was a brilliant, if mellow mid-afternoon, as I drove up into the deserted carpark, locked the car and began on foot, to ascend the mountain. As I did so, I reminded myself that one of the reasons for being here was to pray for a friend, back in New Zealand who had been in great pain and had been diagnosed with Lupus.

Bear Butte is a place of great sacredness to indigenous Americans. They have been coming to pray and “vision quest” there for ten thousand years. It is a place of peace, where members of warring tribes would pray side by side in mutual safety and acceptance. It is the Mecca, the Vatican and the Temple on the Mount to the Indian Nations. It is a place of great holiness and history. It was here, more than 4000 years ago that Sweet Medicine, a Holy Man of the Cheyenne (much like Moses) was given the sacred rules of right living by spirit beings in a cave on Bear Butte. These precepts would guide the Cheyenne Nation down to the present.

As I walked up the deserted path towards the summit of the mountain, I began to notice the increasingly numerous prayer ties that festooned the trees –red, white, black and yellow – the sacred colours. The fluttering prayer ties become noticeably more numerous as I moved higher up the mountain path, Occasionally, I would come across a Department of Fish and Game sign (who have technical stewardship of the land), instructing me to be respectful of religious ceremonies and individuals who might be praying.  Below, in a ravine and through the spruce trees to my right, I could just make out the outlines of old and recent Inipi ceremonial lodges (sweat lodges) in which seekers had first purified themselves before embarking upon their vision. I had neglected to follow this tradition.

After a time, and slightly out of breath, I came to a fork in the path. To the left and slightly ahead, the path was well trodden. To the right, it was less distinct, and edged around a prominent sign requesting that I “Stay on the Path”. I stood there for a moment, contemplating my options. Clearly the sign was a Government one, and not one placed by the First Nations. I chose to ignore it, stepped around it and made my way along the narrowing trail. To my tight, the ravine which I had seen earlier now became more of a cliff, with the trail winding somewhat precariously around it, being careful to stay away from the edge on my right and to keep close to the body of the near-vertical mountain on my immediate left.  The path (and the mountain mass) swung to the left and as I rounded the shoulder, still mindful of the precipice opening below, I was astonished to find, just above my shoulder height, a cave.

You can perhaps imagine the sensations that coursed through my body and the thoughts that accompanied them in my mind. I was well aware of the history of Sweet Medicine and the Cheyenne rules of right living. Tradition had it that the cave in which he had received his vision had been long covered up or disintegrated. Other traditions held that it had not been a cave at all, but that the mountain had “opened up” and allowed him to enter its interior. Notwithstanding all of this, the hair on the back of my neck began to prickle, and I became acutely aware that I was in the midst of a heightened experience. Could this be the cave? I climbed up and sat, facing out over the path and cliff.

The cave was small, perhaps no more than two metres high and three wide. It ran back perhaps four metres into the mountain. As I sat there, looking out over the ravine and towards the Plains, I contemplated what had brought me here, to this place. I thought of all of the tens of thousands of seekers before me who had probably sat in this place or close by, searching for some meaning to their lives, some purpose to their existence. I am not sure how long I sat thus, before I became aware of a breath of wind against the back of my neck. I turned, and for the first time noticed that there was a faint shaft of late afternoon sunlight filtering down through a hole in the roof at the back of the cave. I crawled further in, and discovered a hole, through which it was possible to climb. This brought me to another cave, facing diagonally away from the direction of the first, and looking out over a small grassy meadow.

At the centre of the meadow was a small blue spruce tree, perhaps twelve feet high, its branches literally aching under the weight of the thousands of prayer ties and tobacco offerings. Around its base, and extending out into the meadow, were numerous small questing places formed from garlanded circles of wild flowers and sweet grasses. I was dumb-struck. Here was clearly a place of great power and sanctity.

I sat for a few minutes on the lip of the cave, looking at the tree, before climbing down to examine it. For all of its small size, the tree was covered, every centimetre in coloured ribbons, all of them shimmering in the gentle breeze that was stirring the spruce needles and the meadow grasses. It stood at the very centre of the meadow which ended abruptly in all directions except that of the mountainside and the cave. I walked over to the edge of the meadow to look down into the abyss below.

The meadow curved gently back and away from me right and left. Ahead, and slightly out from the edge of the meadow stood a small needle of rock, with a flat top, perhaps a metre out from the edge. The mountain dropped clear away on all sides of both the meadow and the needle. Irresistibly, my foot moved slowly, tremblingly out towards the small circular flat area at the tip of the needle. I was both horrified and terrified, shaking from head to toe as, I admonished myself, to STOP! My foot reached the platform and stood on it, while the other foot slowly detached itself from the safety of the meadow and moved to join its companion, until I stood, on the needle top itself, terrified that my own fear and trembling would be my own undoing. I had no idea why I was doing what I was doing and seemed powerless to intervene in my own process. It felt like the person doing this was a different person from the one to whom it was being done. I felt like I was literally coming undone.

Slowly, with great effort, I tried to regularise my breathing and to calm down – to still the trembling in my wayward limbs and to focus on some inner place. I decided to pray, facing first to the South, and moving slowly clockwise through the four directions. I extended my arms out, elbows bent, and with the palms of my hands facing outward – much like the Greeks pray. “Aho Mitakuye Oyasin! All my Relations! I come here to ask not for myself, but so the people might live! Turning slowly, towards the East, I repeat the prayer. Moving to the North, I am about to repeat the incantation again when I am suddenly brought up short by the sound of a voice.

“What is it you want here?”

I immediately forget my situation. The trembling has stopped, and a calm settles around me. There is no space for thoughts of astonishment or disbelief. Thinking carefully what to say, I answer:

“I feel like I have come to a crossroads in my life, and I do not know which path to take.”

For some reason, I expect another question, like “What are the choices” or some such move towards dialogue. Instead, I am shattered by what comes next.

“You have always thought of yourself as a warrior. But in order to be a warrior you must first of all know how to love.!”

Disbelief! Where did that come from? I wasnʻt expecting that! But then I was not expecting any of this! And anyway, I have always thought of myself as a loving person. Hadn’t I been through innumerable therapy sessions to get in touch with my feelings? Hadn’t I looked into the darkness of my own heart to learn to love myself?

No point in arguing, or resisting! So, assuming that what I thought was love was not the real thing, what then?

“What do I have to do to learn how to love?”

Comes the answer, “Open up your heart!”

My mind moves immediately to my heart, and I become acutely aware of a band of tension stretching across my chest and around behind my shoulder blades. I realise that I still have my arms akimbo, stretched out in prayer. They are making my chest tense alright, but there is an unmistakable tension there that goes deeper than the moment. I realise I must get some physical therapy, must work on this part of my body to release the deep seated pain that lies there. I must do some Reichian work on myself.

Immediately, I become once again aware of the precariousness of my situation of the fact that I am in serious danger of plummeting to my death. With a mixture of horror and relief, I leap back onto the comparative safety of the meadow., sitting at the foot of the spruce tree, trying to calm myself down and to absorb the drama that has just unfolded. Eventually, I notice that it is cold, and that the sun has set. I make my way back down the mountain to my motorhome. simultaneously elated and numb. I undress and go straight to sleep. When I awake in the morning, my vehicle is covered in snow. Winter is here. I realise that I have forgotten to pray for my friend Jan. I dress, race back up the mountain, and strangely unable to find the same path of the previous afternoon, I climb higher, find a beautiful spot with a beautiful tree say a prayer and tie a prayer tie. By the time I returned to New Zealand six months later, she had committed suicide.

Sequel

Three months later, I am back on the West Coast, engaging a Reichian therapist to help me “unblock” the body-armouring of my heart region. During my third session, I was astonished to remember and relive an experience of abandonment by my mother on the day she first left me, screaming and sobbing, at the age of about three and a half, at school, for the very first time.
 
The immediacy of that memory surprised me. One moment I was in the counselling room, combining deep breathing with strenuous physical movements, pummeling a pillow on the floor, under the supervision of the therapist; the next, I was gazing at the brown to orange shiny ceramic floor tiles of St. Patrick’s Catholic Elementary School, Rochdale, and seeing reflected therein the feet, legs and skirt of my mother and of the then unknown teacher. The odour of old chalk was pervasive, and was accompanied by the sound of my childhood distress echoing around the identically ceramic and shiny dado and on up the plastered walls (institutional green) into the high-arched Gothic ceiling. There I was, once again, lost and abandoned in an experience which I had not remembered consciously for almost 50 years. I have thought about that experience a great deal since that time, and have wondered both why we force our children through such experiences and also why my own mother, an otherwise loving and caring individual would be so inured to my obvious distress.
 
My mother was the eldest daughter in a working class family of seven children, one of whom had died in infancy. My grandfather was prematurely “retired”, the victim of mustard gas poisoning, so I was told, in the First War, and the family was financially supported by my grandmother - a tiny, irrascible woman who worked at cleaning houses for the middle class, and who, though she spent much of her hard life tongue-lashing the world (and mostly my grandfather), hid beneath this apparently hard exterior, a heart which was almost too big for her to contain within her diminutive five foot frame.

The family was poor, and, when each child reached working age they were expected to go out and get a job in one of the many mills left over from the days of King Cotton. My mother was the fourth and, I believe, the “brightest” child. I remember her telling me, at perhaps around the same time that she took me to school for the first time, that she had once been offered a scholarship to continue with her own schooling, but had been expected, instead, to leave school to work to support the family, working inevitably in the nearby cotton mill. It was a disappointment she carried until she died, in 1968, at the age of forty-nine.

Unable to fulfil her own intellectual potential directly, my mother decided, consciously or unconsciously, that her own longings and unfulfilled ambitions were to be carried out through me. I know this not just from the therapy which has revealed a great deal I had forgotten about these events of so long ago, but also from the occasional allusions which were made to the matter as I “progressed” through school in my formative years. Her “way out” from that twice-oppressed, classed and gendered prison was to be, vicariously, through me, and this with the support and encouragement of the whole family, including her mother and father, my doting grandparents. So she took me to school and made sure I stayed there, scream as I might. And eventually, of course, (what choice does one have at that age?) I accepted the mantle placed around my young shoulders, to the extent that I remember, somewhere around the age of seven, being paraded in front of a visiting great aunt to proclaim, in answer to the inevitable “And what are you going to be when you grow up?” (and to my own astonishment as well as hers), “I’m going to go to University!” It is with no small irony that I found myself, approaching retirement, still going to school, trying to please my mother, except that now I was doing a PhD!

Life's Landscapes

If there is any meaning in all of this, it is that we each express, in our lives and in every moment of our work the longings and habits of our unresolved selves. Some of us are lucky enough to have time to devote to the luxury of self-reflection into these mysteries, but none of us can ever avoid the process of self-searching imposed upon us by our personal and family experiences. It is akin to what the Hindu call Karma, and what the more esoteric members of the “Western Tradition” call Fate. Some, if they are particularly fortunate, may even be paid to self-reflect upon this Fate, this Karma. For those people we reserve the names “academic”, “cleric”, “artist”, “tohunga”, “shaman” or “intellectual”. These privileged ones could not engage in their journeys, could not indulge in their reflections were it not for the support of others, who carry the real economic and spiritual burden. These are the real heroes, and it is to them that credit must really be paid and acknowledgement made, the parents and the children who make the sacrifice. I am always deeply mindful of the price paid by others for my success and for my journey.

My life and my career down to the present has been a journey of self discovery, assisted by people like this bank manager. His is one of many stories of suppport and help on my journey. That journey has taken me through many landscapes, all different and all exceedingly wonderful. During all of this time and this journey, I have been mindful of the need to "pay back" the help and kindness that I myself received in my life and work. This is one of the reasons that my work has taken the turn it has - engaging with social injustice, discrimimation and class, race and gender prejudice. That work has taken me into prisons, mental hospitals, Intitutes for the deaf and blind, and engagements with minority groups - African Americans, Chicanas and Chicanos, Native Americans

In more recent times, and since my arrival in Aotearoa-New Zealand in 1982, I have been significantly engaged with Maori friends and colleagues in work in the Maori community. This has opened up to me the responsibilities I carry as a tauiwi or immigrant. In pareticular, these responsibilities extend to helping, assisting and supporting those who have been the victims of the colonisation process of which I am a beneficiary. I am keenly aware that my success, my status and my opportunities are founded upon the repression and curtailment of the opportunities of others. My well-being has been at the expense of theirs, not because of my own personal actions, but because of the system of colonisation which privileges white professional men like myself. Because of this understanding, my work has extended into advocacy and capacity building for the Maori community. This work has taught me much about myself - my preconceptions, my prejudice and my privilege. Extending this understanding to embrace the needs of other indigenous peoples has been automatic. In return, I have been given access and insights into other cultures that leave me feeling humbled. The cultural landscapes through which my journey has taken me have been beautiful, challenging and rewarding, and the struggle to uncover my own broader cultural identity in the context of these experiences has been ongoing. I am not Maori, but I no longer feel "English", and find it difficult to identify fully with my non-Maori compatriots who more or less generally, have little time for or awareness of cultures other than their own.  Having commttied what Paulo freire calls "cultural suicide", I suppose I am what Henry Giroux calls a "boundary-rider" - a person who enjoys the boundary conditions that exist where cultures meet.

Work 

This joy in "boundary-riding" extends beyond the obvious cultural and racial context. It influences my work also. I have refused to be a specialist in my life - rejecting the confinement offered by the silo of a chosen discipline. Instead, I have spent my professional life exploring the boundaries between many disciplines - Architecture, Psychology, Philosophy, Politics, Education, Project Management to name but a few. Rather than accepting received notions of appropriate or legitimate knowledge,  I have sought to follow my intuition wherever it led. Some see this as “undisciplined”. I prefer to see it as part of a larger adventure, providing a store of memories and experiences that bring meaning to my life and allowing me insights into my own identity. The usual distinctions between intellectual and manual labour are meaningless to me. I am a designer and a builder, a theorist and a practitioner. I do my best thinking when I am “working”. Whatever “work” I have been involved in, I have always been aware of directing my energies towards the issues that I have already noted – issues of justice, equity and social harmony. I want this world to be a place where my children and my childrens' children can live in peace and harmony with others, where they are accepted and accepting of others’ realities.

In these later years of my life, my great teacher has been my youngest child, Josephine Raven Ward-Johnsen (pictured above). She has taught me patience, honesty, simplicity, heart-communication and a deep appreciation for the extraordinary miracle of life. She has brought my own life full circle and back to being a loving parent. Looking backwards from this vantage point late in my life I am able to review with greater clarity the disciplinary landscapes that I have crossed, the path I have taken. They tell the story not only of "who" but of "what" I have been and remain.

An academic and critical educational theorist
at Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, the University of Auckland, the University of California, Berkeley (USA) and several British Universities. I have lectured throughout Europe, the USA and Australasia on transformative teaching theory and practice. I have specialised in  student-centred, cost-recovery education programmes in community and urban design and am the recipient of both New Zealand and International teaching awards.

A professional architect ,
I have worked across three continents, on both domestic, institutional and corporate projects, with specific expertise in facilitating strategic planning of large-scale sustainable developments and urban revitalisation projects. I specialise in working in a Maori olr trans-cultural context.

An institutional facilities analyst
I have been responsible for matching and co-ordinating the provision of teaching and related administrative facilities with institutional needs at Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi and have been a space programmer and brief-writer in New Zealand, the USA and Britain.

A facilitator and communicator,
I have specialised in inclusive processes, consensus-building and creative group decision-making, trained in Humanistic Psychology, Gestalt Therapy and Psycho-drama.
 
A project manager.
As Acting Director, I have designed and written the multi-strand Art and Visual Culture programme at Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi. I have managed the NZQA accreditation process, established technical resources, and project-managed the building acquisition, fit-out and building modifications of the delivery site. I have also completed architectural drawings and specifications, acquired permits and resource consents, equipped the workshops and departments, recruited staff, enrolled students, delivered the programme, managed the NZQA Audit process, recruited the permanent Director and facilitated the management transition.

A programme co-ordinator ;
As Director of Programme Development for all Undergraduate and Bridging programmes at Te Whare Wånanga o Awanuiarangi my responsibilities included– inspiring, facilitating and guiding its academic direction through a period of significant growth, and managing the programme development process and budget.


I am a bicultural worker with 25 years experience working among minority and indigenous peoples in the area of educational and academic development and programming. My actual Resumé is outlined below:

EDUCATION

• PhD in Architecture and Critical Education Theory
• (Thesis) The Social Construction of an Architectural Reality in Design Education.”
• Royal Institiute of British Architects Registration
• Dip. Arch (Birm)
• Training in Gestalt Therapy and Psychodrama (Berkeley Psychodrama Institute.)
• Treaty of Waitangi Workshops
• Beginners Te Reo Maori (Te Aatarangi)

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

• Founder Member of the Design Research Society. (UK)
• Founder Member of the Environmental Design Research Association. (USA)
• Architects Registration Council (ARCUK) of UK (lapsed 2004)

AWARDS

• University of Auckland Distinguished Teaching Award
• Architects, Designers, Planners for Social Responsibility (USA) Award
• American Collegiate Schools of Architecture Award

CAREER HISTORY

1967-Present

Self-Employed architect / Design Consultant

20 years maintaining a design consultancy which included several large urban projects:

• Design Consulting for MACE Corporation Princes Wharf, Auckland. ($350M) (1986-7)
• Design Consulting for Wilkins & Davies - Devonport Pier Project ($1OM) (1986-7)
• The Ponsonby Plan – Facilitation of and publication of 300 page Report for Ponsonby Urban Design Working Party (1988)
• Tauranga City Community Development Plan (BOMA and Tauranga City Council 1995)
• Strategic Development Plan, Moerewa (2001)
• Numerous residential design projects.

2001-2006

Employer: Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi
Position: Director of Programme Development

Key responsibilities
As Director of Programme Development I was directly answerable to the CEO. My responsibilities included:
   
Management Role:

• Chair of the Programme Development Committee
• Advising CEO on Programme Development issues   
• Member of the Academic Board