Thursday 26-08-2021 - 16:22

Frank Rhodes

Frank Rhodes' Memorial events will take place on 11 and 19 September 2021.

The Rhodes' Family has requested that the following information be circulated to any former NUS members who knew Frank. If you wish to attend either event please notify Jo Rhodes in good time.

Saturday September 11, 10-4  Memorial Woodlands, Bristol    
Father Michael Thomas will conduct a service in the chapel around lunchtime. There will be refreshments, nibbles and a jazz band. At some point during the day, Frank and Carol's ashes will be buried together.

Saturday September 18, 10-4 there will be an all day celebration in the Settle Quaker Meeting House on Kirkgate.  Frank's favourite foods will be served and, given his longstanding enthusiasm for bridge, a few hands of bridge will be available for those that wish (Frank was involved with 5 local bridge clubs during his time in Settle!).

 

Tributes to Frank Rhodes from across the student movement. 

 

Words by David Malcolm

Listening to the many tributes at Frank’s online funeral, one of the clear themes to Frank’s life and career, in the UK and in Africa, was his dedication to supporting others and his desire for education to be available to all. 
His work at NUS showed this was an aspiration he held as a young man: as Deputy President between 1958 and 1960, Frank took on the ‘grants and welfare’ portfolio, in essence making him an earlier version of what in later years became the Vice President Welfare. It was an area of work for which he clearly retained great affection, devoting a significant proportion of his 1967 Masters’ thesis to an account of NUS’s education and welfare campaigns, and later, despite his by then failing health, attending with pleasure the event held to celebrate the historical impact of NUS’s welfare work held in 2015. He was always happy to recall how closely he worked with Stella Greenall, the legendary Grants and Welfare Manager, and how much her intellect and work rate contributed to NUS’s success.

His portfolio was diverse, but Frank’s tenure had a special focus, coinciding as it did with one of the most significant opportunities NUS had hitherto been given to further its policy aims: the Anderson Committee examining student grants. Student finance at the time was largely reliant on discretionary local education authority grants, and often had to undergo two selection procedures: that for the university and that for the LEA. Where LEA grants were unavailable or inadequate, parental contributions were not always forthcoming. The Committee was therefore exactly the opportunity NUS had sought for reform. “It is the responsibility of students to rouse the widest possible public interest in the issues on which the Committee has to report,” stated NUS in its written evidence, produced under Frank’s leadership. “It is essential that students should be selected by the universities and that they should be financed, not by their parents, but by the public authorities.”

Frank was part of the NUS delegation that gave oral evidence to the Committee, and indeed was probably the last living person who did so. It clearly felt like a watershed: the organisation had never had this sort of opportunity before now, and students’ views on education policy had not always been taken seriously, but Frank recalled the Committee treating the NUS delegation with great respect – while still giving them “a good grilling”. Yet it was not only the Committee showing NUS renewed interest; for Frank, it was especially notable that The Times chose to print some of NUS’s written evidence.

He remained hugely proud of the influence NUS exerted on the final report of the Committee, and on the impact that it made once its recommendations were implemented. When I interviewed him as part of some research on the Anderson Report, he told me: “Apart from postgraduate awards, and that we asked for a central grant awarding body, we gained everything we asked for… the fact of gaining mandatory awards was by far the greatest thing the Union has ever done.”

He meant principally the opportunities for students to study that were opened up by the creation of a consistent, universal grants system. Yet the opportunities for NUS were greater, too. The student politicians of Frank’s era had been keen to establish NUS as an organisation whose views the authorities should take seriously. While much work had been undertaken throughout the post-war period, Frank firmly believed the Anderson Report cemented its position, and led to many more opportunities for NUS to be heard, not least when Robbins Committee was formed shortly thereafter. “The Anderson Committee put us on the map as a responsible, creative-thinking body, which I have been very proud to be a part of.”

He wasn’t alone: a senior civil servant from the period has written of the Anderson Report, “Almost overnight the National Union of Students acquired a new, national role to negotiate on [students’] behalf about the boundaries and extensions of the [grants] scheme.” 

For his part in securing grants and the principle of state student finance, and for his part in securing NUS as a force to be reckoned with through the decades, we owe Frank a debt of gratitude. 

 

Words by Matt Hyde, Fomer CEO of NUS UK

My abiding memory of Frank Rhodes was of someone who was generous and kind. He soon got in touch when I became Chief Executive and was a constant supporter through my time at NUS. That was Frank's style. He simply wanted the organisation to thrive and wanted its leaders to succeed. NUS had made a profound impact on his own life, and he was incredibly proud of being elected Vice-President from a teaching college, rather than what we would now know as Russell Group university. Like so many Friends of NUS, his engagement in the student movement marked a social and political awakening. He was part of the team who won the national system of maintenance grants - decades of impact felt by so many as higher education opened up.

He went on to have an impressive career completing a doctorate, teaching in South Sudan, working in universities and industry. But his love for NUS never waned. He would regularly attend NUS Conferences, laughing or shaking his head, at the more surreal or unusual moments. His stayed connected, remained interested, and was consistently loyal. Always there for officers and staff in the tougher times.
He was a driving force in ensuring Friends of NUS was kept alive and in the production of 90th anniversary book. Always enthusiastic and politely nudging that we should do more. Because he wanted the flame to be kept alive. He knew that for all the randomness of this rather strange organisation at its heart is something very special - political awakening, ensuring student leaders developed a conviction and belief to shape a better world. He never lost that passion.

When I left NUS, he wrote me the most generous of letters. To take the time to do that was indicative of what a lovely man Frank was. Leadership roles are tough. He knew that and he wanted to do what he could to support. Such people are very special and a good model for us all to aspire to. He truly was a Friend of NUS and will be much missed.

Words by John Randall CBE, Former NUS President. 

I knew Frank for over 50 years, from my time on the NUS Executive, and as President, in the early 1970s until his death in 2021. His record of engagement with and support for NUS is unrivalled. From his days as an activist in the 1950s, then as a trusted adviser to successive Executives, Presidents and staff, to his role as historian and archivist his engagement spanned some 65 years. 

Frank was born in 1930. He undertook National Service from 1949 to 1951. After the Army, he worked in sales but became quickly disillusioned as it became apparent that increasing his sales brought no increase in his salary. He decided to go into teaching and enrolled at Borough Road College. He assumed, as did many of his generation, that universities were not intended for those from a modest social background. (His subsequent career, in which he held senior academic and administrative university posts somewhat confounded that assumption!)

Frank’s first NUS Conference as a delegate was in 1955, when he was President of the Borough Road students’ union. It struck him, in his own words, as ‘unfortunate’ that the teacher training colleges represented one-third of the membership of NUS, but NUS itself appeared to do nothing for them. He invited the then NUS President, Frank Copplestone, to visit Borough Road, which he did in 1956. Copplestone suggested he might stand for the NUS Executive. Frank was unable to do so immediately, as in 1956/57 he was the President of the University of London Institute of Education Students Association (ULIESA), the body representing the four male and twenty-six female teacher training colleges under the auspices of the University of London. At the Easter 1957 NUS Conference he did stand and was elected as one of the four Vice Presidents, becoming the first representative of a teacher training college to serve on the Executive. After a year as Vice President he was elected Deputy President, a post he held for two years. In 1960 he stood for the Presidency, losing by the narrow margin of 8 votes to Gwyn Morgan.

After NUS he taught in schools for eight years before moving, with the encouragement of his NUS colleague Alan Hale, to teach in the tertiary sector. But ‘after NUS’ is a bit of a misnomer. There was never an ‘after NUS’ for Frank. I first knew him as one of the two ‘Senior Treasurers’, the grown-ups elected by Conference to serve on the Finance Committee, to stop the Executive going off the financial rails, and to act as a source of wise counsel to the President and other elected full-time officers on such things as staffing matters and the commercial subsidiaries.  Frank served for many years on the Finance Committee which, in his time on the Executive, he had been instrumental in establishing, and which he regarded as one of his major achievements. Later, he was a long-serving trustee.

There have been various academic studies of NUS and its history – I have spoken to a number of researchers over the years – but Frank was almost the first in the field. The founding President Ivison Macadam wrote a Memorandum on the Work and History of the National Union of Students in 1928, and Bill Savage wrote ‘NUS – the First 40 Years’ in 1962, but the first fully researched study, covering the first 40 years of the National Union, was Frank’s Masters thesis in the mid-1960s (for which his external examiner was past President Professor Brian Simon).

His close interest in the history of NUS led naturally to his encouragement of the archiving of significant documents. He held a substantial number of documents personally – I recall passing on to him photocopies of all correspondence between the President and Government Ministers from my time of office. Frank eventually passed his personal collection of documents back to NUS for safekeeping but I understand that, sadly, many of them were lost when the storage facility used by NUS suffered flood damage.

Frank’s willingness to act as a sounding board and source of sage advice to elected leaders and senior staff of NUS is perhaps his greatest unsung achievement. Until the end of his life he maintained regular contact with former Presidents, staff and others involved in NUS. Reminiscing with Frank over a drink was an unfailing pleasure.

The NUS owes a great deal to Frank Rhodes, and it is a privilege to pay tribute to his years of service.

 

Words by Peter Anwyl

I met Frank when I was elected to the NUS Finance Committee in 1972. I attended my first meeting, held at International Students House (ISH), which he was chairing.  Also at the same meeting was Frank’s close friend, Bill Murray, the then Deputy Director of ISH. Thereafter, Frank and Bill became my mentors and gave me great encouragement throughout my career which took me through NUS, ULU, Colorado State University Student Centre and finally as Executive Director at ISH. I have no doubt without them, my career would have gone off in a different and certainly not so fulfilling a direction. 

Frank attended a school in North London where he later became the chair of the alumni association. He was conscripted to the army, good at sport and then graduated from Borough Road College (which became London South Bank University). He went on to being elected as NUS Deputy President. I believe he was the first person from a teacher training college to be elected to that position and later, when he stood for President, Frank only narrowly missed being elected.  He later managed the NUS Farm Camps programme based in Wisbech, again, with his life-long friend, Bill Murray, who was Frank’s best man when he married Carol. 

Frank remained involved with NUS all his life, as a Senior Treasurer, Trustee (again, alongside Bill Murray) and was very involved in the Friends of NUS. Education and public service were his interest and priority. He relished serving on committees associated with every place where had created links and remained in touch with people from all walks of his life.

Frank and Carol had two children, Kit and Jo and they were a very close family and spent some years abroad including a spell when Frank was a Professor at Juba University in the South Sudan. Prior to that Frank had been the Deputy Director at Middlesex Polytechnic (later Middlesex University). 

Frank was a much loved friend to many people. He was also a great lover of fine and not so fine wines and was a brilliant raconteur after a glass or two. I spent many a happy evening with him in the bar at ISH listening to his stories stored in his wonderful memory.

Frank was not well enough to travel down for my retirement party from ISH, some four years ago, but he wrote a wonderful letter to me, which was read out to everyone by Ellenor, my wife, and which I still treasure and have in front of me as I write this.

The last time I saw Frank was around two years ago when Ellenor and I went to stay in Settle for a couple of nights. He moved there from Bristol to be close to his daughter, Jo, after the sad and early death of his dear Carol. We had dinner with him in the local hotel where he attended Rotary meetings, played and taught bridge on a regular basis and was obviously known by everyone. We had a full day trip together on the Settle –Carlisle Railway in wonderful sunshine and it is a day we will always remember.

Frank was a true friend and mentor to many and he will not be forgotten by all who had the good fortune to know him. He is sorely missed.

 

Words by Mike Day, Friends of NUS

Frank’s significant contributions to NUS and to making student lives better are ably recorded by others in this edition of the newsletter, but I would like to add a personal note on his support for the NUS History Project. My interest in NUS history came about when I started in 1985 as a Development Officer, where I found myself replying to 6th Former enquiries who had chosen NUS as the trade union they had to study, rather than write back and say we were not a trade union and didn’t really have anything, I put together a pack, that included sections from Digby Jack’s book “Student Politics and Higher Education”, it was, I thought all we had, until the day when Doug Taylor (then National Organiser) lent me a copy of Frank’s M.Ed. thesis on the history of NUS from 1922 – 1968, it was one of the originals that Frank had donated to NUS. I spent the rest of the day reading it.

As we know now a significant section of NUS’s records were destroyed in a flood, many of documents would have been ones that Frank consulted, and we have to thank him for his attention to detail  that we have so much information that would have been lost otherwise. Doug introduced me to Frank on one of his many visits to NUS Conference, where he observed from the balcony, sometimes alongside Fred Jarvis who also served as an NUS Trustee. This was the first a series of conversations which in turn inspired me to write a narrative history of the organisation. Frank was incredibly generous in his support for the project “use what you like” he said, he took the time to introduce me to many former officers and staff as well as reviewing each chapter and providing comments, insights and corrections. I would often ask him for interviews with students completing theses, he never refused and always made sure they had the information and contacts they needed.

Next year the NUS history group are hoping to promote the study of the student movement through research, archive access, symposia, exhibitions and social media, that we can do so is in many ways down to him and we hope to honour his legacy.