Michael Young

Early life and childhood
Michael Young was born in Manchester on 9 August 1915, the only son of Gibson Young, an Australian violinist and leader of community singing, and Edith Dunlop, a bohemian painter and actor from Ireland. Michael's early childhood was spent in Melbourne, Australia, marred by loneliness, insecurity and neglect. He returned to England at the age of eight, shortly before his parents' marriage broke down, at which point they considered giving him up for adoption. They did not do so, but according to friends and family this possibility left him with an enduring fear of abandonment. In a documentary made by the historian, Peter Hennessy, he revealed that it was this feeling of acute vulnerability which inspired his life's mission to work on behalf of the powerless and disenfranchised.

As his son Toby Young pointed out following Michael's death in 2002:

‘such chronic insecurity isn't something you'd wish on anyone, but if my father had had a happier childhood it's doubtful that he would have had such a dazzling career. This primordial fear - a fear of being alone in the world, abandoned and unloved - never left him; it was the wellspring of everything he achieved. All the organisations he set up, from the Consumers' Association in 1956 to the National Association of Sick Children in 1993, were designed to provide a home for people otherwise left out in the cold.'

By the time Michael was 14, he had been to four schools where he was ‘hunted and harried by rules and regulations and corporal punishment', and where he first encountered the British class system. In his own words he admitted ‘I was a very lonely child'. In 1929, however, he was sent to Dartington Hall, a new progressive school in Devon for 25 children of the intelligentsia, chosen because it was the only place in the country that taught pupils fruit farming (his Australian grandfather paid his fees, expecting that he would come back to be a fruit farmer in Tasmania). The school was founded by Dorothy Straight, an American heiress, and her husband Leonard Elmhirst, an agricultural economist and social visionary. This was, according to Michael's children, an extraordinary reversal of fortunes.

‘His landing at Dartington and meeting the Elmhirsts there was like his first safe port in what had been a very stormy early childhood...[Dorothy] more or less adopted Michael, from the moment he arrived at Dartington Hall.'

The Elmhirsts provided him with security and introduced him to a completely different world. In an interview some years before his death, Michael described Dorothy as ‘a kind of fairy godmother'. In America, where he spent many holidays, the Elmhirsts introduced him to their friends amongst the American political elite, frequently attending dinners at the White House with President Roosevelt. This was the start of a long association with Dartington, and in 1942 he became a Dartington Trustee.

The war and politics
When the Second World War broke out, Michael was rejected for military service because he suffered from chronic asthma. As a result, he worked for a time as a manager in a munitions factory. By then, he had already got a degree at the LSE and qualified as a barrister at Gray's Inn. By the end of the war he had also worked as the director of Political and Economic Planning, a think tank that brought together policymakers and practitioners, and at the age of 29 he had become director of research for the Labour Party. It was at this point he made one of his most profound contributions to British society. Michael was the principal draftsman of the 1945 Labour Party manifesto, ‘Let Us Face the Future'. As such, he was a key architect of the post-war welfare state. For Denis Healey, ‘he managed to produce a programme for a Labour Government to carry out, if it was elected, which really met the country's needs. Michael's contribution to Attlee's victory was very substantial indeed, and don't forget that the programme which Attlee presented and won on was then carried out, and made the biggest change - I think - in British society, well, since the civil war.'

By contrast, Michael considered it as ‘nothing very visionary, but very detailed because we had so much time to plan'. However, the fact that it was both visionary and radical is revealed by some of the reactions he described in an interview with Peter Hennessy about the 1945 election:

‘I was convinced that the Labour Party would win...but neither Morrison nor Attlee thought they would. Things began to change really from the moment when they started addressing meetings...and Mrs Attlee started driving her eminent husband around the country in their old car and soon they saw the audiences were more enthusiastic than anytime in their lives and there was a surprise, you could almost see it change day by day: "Good God, we might win!" So having started off by not being worried very much about the manifesto, they got a bit more worried as the time went on. "My God, we might have to carry this out."'

The East End
In 1950, Michael left his job at the Labour Party, returning to the LSE to carry out his PhD research in housing conditions in the East End of London under Richard Titmuss, and in 1954 he set up the Institute of Community Studies (ICS), which he was to use as a base for research and action for the next 50 years. According to Hennessy, Michael believed that brotherhood and fellowship should form the core of social policy and that the Labour Party had failed to build on the fraternity that had developed in the war.

‘There had been an extraordinary object lesson in the power of fraternity in the war, and when the war was over it was as though that experience could be wiped out...so it was only relevant to war and not to peace. We could have had it in the peace, and if we could have had it, it would have been extraordinarily different...I was beginning to think this great opportunity had been missed unless, unless...and it was the ‘unless' I became especially interested in.'

The ‘unless' took the form of some 60 organisations which he went on to set up over the next 50 years from the ICS in Bethnal Green, alongside an extensive collection of books, pamphlets and articles such as The Rise of the Meritocracy, Family and Kinship in East London and The Symmetrical Family, the last two written with Peter Willmott. The ICS provided a vehicle for Michael to turn his ideas into reality, thereby helping millions of people both in the UK and abroad.

Among the first institutions Michael set up was the Consumers' Association. In 1956, with a £3,000 grant from The Elmhirst Trust, he launched the publication Which? He saw it as a small way of empowering people to work to put resources together and hold their own against large corporations and the giant state, because, in his words ‘the state, even in the great enthusiasm after the war, I was already afraid of.' He came to believe he could achieve more outside government by inventing new institutions and organisations, able to mediate between ordinary people and bureaucratic structures.

Other important institutions established by Michael, sometimes in collaboration with others, included the Open University, the College of Health, the University of the Third Age, International Alert, the Economic and Social Research Council and Education Extra. He also established the National Consumer Council, the Open College of the Arts, Language Line, National Funerals College, Healthline, the School for Social Entrepreneurs and Grandparents Plus.

So how did he do it?
Tony Flower, in the book Young at Eighty, sums up Michael's approach:

‘Here's what you do; spot a problem, imagine a solution and give it a working title. Then you write to everyone who might conceivably have an interest in it, and many who don't; produce a paper taking in the resulting comments without once losing sight of the original notion; form a steering committee; set up a charitable trust or a company limited by guarantee (preferably both); meet someone by chance on a train outside Basingstoke and invite him or her to become the unpaid director of the new organisation; launch the body at a press conference; couple this with an article in the Guardian; carpet bomb the charitable foundations with grant applications; stick with the fledgling organisation for precisely as long as is necessary - and then push it out of the crow's nest to make room for six institutions which you are waiting to hatch that week.'

Flower attributes Michael's success to ‘sheer persistence, a kind of benign ruthlessness even, clutching onto an idea sometimes beyond the bitter end, always taking "no" as a question.' This was combined with the idea itself having to have real substance. ‘The trick was to look for small changes that have potentially big leverage; to look out for ideas which individuals or small groups can get moving, but which have a built-in potential for growth'.

For every successful idea, there were of course some unsuccessful ones, not least because there was a tendency for ‘an idea to come out of his head every 30 seconds', according to Toby Young. One of those ideas was about sponsoring the building of a cathedral. Michael suggested to a colleague, ‘we could recruit a volunteer labour force in their fifties who would undertake to stay with the work into their seventies, learning some of the skills such as masonry by distance learning. Perhaps the original Fountains Abbey or Rievaulx could be built not too far from the present ruins.'

The same colleague, David Davies wrote in an article about Michael's willingness to recognise that some of his ideas could be just a bit impractical:

‘When years later I sent him a copy of his cathedral letter, he wrote back, saying that he couldn't stop laughing at the absurdity of it.'

Another surprising idea of the mid-1980s involved, in Tony Flower's words, ‘intergalactic colonisation'. This was the Argo Venture. At the height of Reagan's Star Wars reverie, Michael gave a speech to the British Association for the Advancement of Science about promoting the counter-argument for the peaceful, possibly even commercial, use of space.

‘Michael sought to pit a whole new group of collaborators, captains of science, (including the Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge and the now legendary James Lovelock), former astronauts, a rich assortment of nutters and about a thousand members of the public, who wrote in to offer themselves as volunteers in a simulated space station that was to be built either on an island in the Severn estuary or in a converted warehouse in London's Dockland.' Always the consummate forward thinker, Michael also had a knack for combining this with opportunism and a down to earth ability - demonstrated by the choice of location for the space station two decades before the advent of the Big Brother house.

This, among a number of failed ideas - sometimes precisely because they were too far ahead of their time - highlighted an ability to take risks, albeit sometimes to the frustration of colleagues. But it meant Michael created an environment which epitomised hope, enthusiasm, commitment from virtually anybody he came into contact with - and a sense that anything was possible. In the words of Noel Annan:

‘Michael Young resembled Cadmus. Whatever field he tilled, he sowed dragon's teeth and armed men seemed to spring from the soil to form an organisation and correct the abuses or stimulate the virtues he had discovered.'

Perhaps the best way to sum up what Michael was about, and his continued significance for the twenty-first century is to reflect on his words to students of the School for Social Entrepreneurs, shortly before the beginning of the new millennium:

‘There is a great "wall" coming up in a few weeks time and only a few messages will get over the wall, or a few whispers through the chinks. So, looked at it in this way, my function here is to whisper a few things to you, from one century to another. You are going to spend a longer time in the next century than I am, but I think no-one here has spent as much time in this century as I have. So I had to decide, overnight, what I was going to say, as an old man of the twentieth century, to you people of the twentyfirst century. And I think what I would say is "Go for it"...that is my message to you of the next century, from me in this century. And I don't think the next century will be any different. The resistance to new ideas will be much the same - and the means to overcoming it will be the same. You will need all the guile you can muster and all the persistence. Don't dismiss all your good ideas if they don't seem good ideas to your friends and other people. Believe in yourself. Go for it. That's what I'm shouting from the dockside.'