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John and Carol Fray,
John is immediate past President of the GFTU, long
serving EC member and former Vice Chair of Ruskin College and Assistant
General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists. He is currently a director
of the trading company that runs the hotel. John was a toolmaker by trade and
an active member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. He went to Ruskin
College and from there worked at the Income Data Services and then BECTU
and then the NUJ.
Dr Stephen French,
completed both his undergraduate degree and MA in
History and Politics at the University of East Anglia and subsequently worked in
the Inland Revenue, where he was lay activist in the IRSF union (now the Public
and Commercial Services Union, PCS). He then moved to Birmingham
University, where he completed his PhD (examining German collective
bargaining after unification) in 1999. Prior to joining the staff at Keele in
September 2000, he worked both as a Research Assistant at the LSE and as a
Lecturer in Industrial Relations at the University of Warwick. He is an Academic
MCIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development). Steve attended the
GFTU Summit in 2015 and gave a presentation at the GFTU union building
conference in 2016 on performance management. He is active in his local Trade
Union Council and will be tutoring on various GFTU Courses in the coming
period.
Prof. Keith Gildart,
Professor of Labour and Social History, Wolverhampton
University. After working as an underground coal miner for seven years he
studied at the universities of Manchester and York.
His research interests are focused on nineteenth/twentieth century British
history, labour movements, working class politics, youth culture and popular
music. Keith has published widely on British labour history, most notably a
monograph on the North Wales Miners and numerous articles and edited
collections on coal mining history.
Keith is an editor of the multi-volume 'Dictionary of Labour Biography', for which
he has contributed entries on British Labour Members of Parliament and
important trade union figures. His most recent book is 'Images of England
through Popular Music: Class, Youth and Rock ‘n’ Roll, 1955-1976' (Palgrave,
2013). He is currently working on a monograph titled 'Keeping the Faith: A
History of Northern Soul' (Manchester University Press) and a project on the
industrial and political culture of mining communities in post-war Britain.
He has appeared on television documentaries for the BBC, commentated on
news items on radio, and for the local and national press.
John Harris
, photographer, John recently put on loan to Quorn Grange Hotel
some of his iconic labour movement photographs. John runs Reportdigital a
company specialising in progressive socialphotography and trade union and
campaigning issues.
John Hendy QC,
without doubt John is best known for his work in industrial
relations and employment law, having appeared in most of the UK's leading
collective labour law cases in the last 36 years. John has taken 9 cases to the