It was at Warwick that I first met David. I was an MA student in Comparative British and American Labour and Social History during the academic year 1968–1969. David's genuinely honest, open, and down-to-earth approach to his students and teaching and learning in general appealed to many like myself who had been raised in solid, respectable, independent, and self-respecting working-class households. He treated me fairly and squarely, without any hint of those patronizing and condescending attitudes, which sometimes characterize middle-class academics in their treatment of working-class students. Montgomery, like Edward Thompson, expected us to work hard and would have no truck with those self-indulgent students who regarded political activism as a valid substitute for academic study. True to his 1950s past, David kept regular “factory” hours. He strongly disapproved of lateness or absence in the submission of work and attendance at lectures and seminars. As “apprentices,” we, the MA postgraduates, were to be rigorously instructed in the rules and methods of the trade by Montgomery and the other “master craftsmen” at Warwick. As part of our training, we were subjected to full critical gaze of these masters when we presented our papers and research findings to them at three-hour combined postgraduate and staff seminars on Friday afternoons. Escape and a mixture of relief and reward were found immediately afterward in the student bar.
Both Thompson and Montgomery welcomed student initiative and enterprise. But they disliked too much student independence, “spontaneity,” “adventurism,” and “narcissism.” This was seen in their mixed responses to the student revolts of 1968. It was also reflected more particularly and personally in the disappointment and anger with which they reacted to the MA labor history postgraduates' unauthorized and unilateral decision to substitute collective essays for the formal examination requirements of the industrial relations component of the course. In presenting the essays to Hugh Clegg and his colleagues during the examination, rather than individually answering the set exam questions, we sought to demonstrate that we were perfectly capable of producing good-quality work, which was more substantial and deeply researched than the thin product of formal examinations. In truth we also took exception to having to study the “bourgeois” subject of industrial relations, complete with its attempt to “reconcile” workers to, rather than “liberate” them from, “wage slavery.” Our arguments cut little or no ice. Montgomery, Thompson, and the rest thought that we had acted irresponsibly in not discussing our views with them and in acting hastily. We were instructed to re-sit, or more strictly sit, the exam in accordance with the regulations of the university.
Suitably chastened, we were welcomed back to the “apprenticeship program” in order to complete our essays and dissertations. Montgomery's earlier action, in ordering a very useful body of primary sources in US labor history for the university library, enabled me successfully to complete my work on shoemakers and the Knights of Labor. This body of sources has served scholars well ever since. I also benefited from the fact that David provided regular, detailed, and constructive oral and written comments on my work and boosted my confidence by invariably extracting something positive from it, even in its very early and crude state. (Current teachers and learners may wish to take due note of this.) Equally important was his practice of developing myself and other students into what we would now call in Britain “critical independent learners.” This involved encouraging the student to reach his or her own conclusions rooted in logical thinking and the fullest possible investigation and balanced assessment of the available evidence in all its complexity and contradictions. This, of course, is a demanding but essential skill to develop in order to become a critical thinker, whether in history or elsewhere. As a corollary, at no point did Montgomery expect or encourage students to follow a particular party-political or ideological line. Contrary to the myth of some academics and politicians, both Montgomery and other Marxist historians of my acquaintance have generally been far more open, democratic, and tolerant of a range of viewpoints than many of either their pragmatically empirical or more theoretically-inclined academic and political opponents. In sum, David and the other master craftsmen at Warwick provided their graduate students with a demanding and rigorous but very rewarding program of study. The lessons learned at Warwick have remained with me throughout my academic career in terms of both teaching and research.
Much the same conclusion may be drawn from my experience as one of David's early labor history PhD students at Pittsburgh between 1970 and 1974. Early in 1970, I left my job as a laborer and apprentice turf cutter in the freezing Derbyshire and Cheshire countryside—cutting and laying turf on Glossop golf course in the depths of a snowy winter was no joke—to take up a teaching assistantship at Pitt. I had been kindly invited to do so by David and his colleagues. David had earlier left Warwick and returned to the United States. Yet he could not escape his Warwick legacy. When protesting students at Warwick “liberated” the university's files in 1969 they found that Montgomery's criticisms of measured day work, delivered to car workers in Coventry, had excited the keen interest of the university and the authorities. Yet Montgomery's “subversive” views only served to enhance, rather than diminish, his reputation among student radicals internationally and to add to his appeal among potential labor history graduate students in North America. At Pittsburgh, he not only taught and supervised very fine cohorts of these graduate students, but also brought Edward and Dorothy Thompson to the history department as visiting scholars in 1975–1976.
Montgomery was a model PhD supervisor. In those pre-email days, he communicated with me regularly and in great depth about my own PhD—on post-Chartist workers and labor movements in Lancashire and Cheshire—and also enlisted the support of Joe White and Dorothy Thompson to my cause. When I returned to England to complete and write up my research, Dorothy continued David's admirable and most generous practice of inviting me to spend time at her home to discuss the thesis and related research with her own graduate students. Edward, of course, also offered perceptive and helpful comments and advice. The history department at Pitt, largely through the good graces of David, also displayed great generosity of spirit and financial flexibility in permitting me to alternate periods of research in England with my teaching duties in the US. I was awarded my Pittsburgh PhD in 1974. But thanks mainly to David's influence, at both Warwick and Pittsburgh, my interests now extended well beyond the particular focus of my PhD. Above all, David had awakened in me lasting interests in comparative and transnational as well as national labor and social history.
