Obituaries: Arthur Marsh

ARTHUR MARSH was an archetypical practitioner of the art of British industrial relations of the pre-Thatcher era, a strong believer that the law had no role to play, and that they were rather the product of history and the detailed procedures, relationships, and understandings to which this had given rise.

Within this context, Marsh was active at all levels: he was a prolific writer both on trades union history - four published volumes of the Historical Directory of Trades Unions and individual histories like The Seamen (1989) and on trends in labour organisation - e.g. Managers and Shop Stewards: shopfloor revolution? (1971); he also conducted numerous studies of contemporary practice extending from the motor industry (with Sir Jack Scamp) and disputes procedures and check-off agreements (for the Donovan Commission) in the 1960s, through a 1980 survey with the CBI on "Employee Relations Policy and Decision Making" to the London Underground and Peugeot (Coventry) in 1989.

Marsh served on the Restaurant and the Dressmaking Wages Councils, and was, from 1965, a Ministry of Labour/Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) Arbitrator - very conscious that what would stick was what the parties would accept at any given time, but exerting his formidable knowledge, charm and network of personal relationships to bridge gaps and secure highest common factor settlements. Thirdly, Marsh was among the group of people (which included figures like Sir Hugh Clegg and Lord McCarthy) who established industrial relations as a discipline, at once academic and practical.

He began as a Staff Tutor at the Oxford Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies, and continued as Senior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford (from 1964), from which position he ran an Industrial Relations Research Unit and an annual Industrial Relations Conference. His Employee Relations Bibliography and Abstracts won the Library Association's 1985 Besterman Medal, and has since been regularly updated. Of this side of his achievement, it has been written that his documentation and method "provided the basis for trade union and other industrial education in this country and world- wide . . . It was [Marsh] who brought the Socratic method of teaching to trade unions, at a time when their leaders were a powerful force in the land."

He was still in demand, in his seventies, in helping to establish a new management and industrial relations faculty in Prague from 1995. However his joint study, in the mid-1970s, for the Anglo-German Foundation of Workplace Relations in Britain and Germany produced a complete non-meeting of minds with his more legalistic German colleagues. And the Thatcher legislation of the 1980s progressively transformed the industrial relations atmosphere Marsh breathed. He was unhappy with many legacies of Thatcherism, not least with what he saw as the decline of decency in the workplace, and to some extent he took refuge in the more historical side of his research.

Born in 1922, Arthur Marsh came from the Nottinghamshire coalfields, where his family ran a tailor's shop and one of his uncles was a builder. His loyalty to the Nottinghamshire miners was clearly in evidence during the great Scargill strike. He came up to Hertford College on a State and County Scholarship in 1940, initially to read Modern History. This was interrupted by four years in the Royal Artillery and the Intelligence Corps, largely in Iran and Iraq. Then, after a brief spell as a researcher, he became a tutor with the Extra-Mural Delegacy, where he initially had much to do with the WEA (Workers' Educational Association) and Communist attempts to penetrate it.

From 1954 he lived in Oxford, where he was a Labour Councillor from 1957 to 1960. In 1964 he came to St Edmund Hall as Senior Research Fellow, funded by the British Motor Corporation which, shocked that the college did not possess a photocopier, promptly contributed one; later he procured for the college a more substantial donation from the Hoover Foundation. St Edmund Hall was not at the centre of Marsh's work; but he pulled his weight in its running, serving as Treasurer of its leisure (sports and drama) fund - in which capacity he ended the eating of steaks as an athletic training prerequisite - and also overseeing the Special Diploma course in Social and Administrative Studies.

Marsh also took great pleasure, especially as he got older, in lunchtime conversation, exuding anecdotes, friendship and a broad smile. He also brought in a string of guests from the wider world, ranging from employers and union leaders to representatives of the Gibraltar Government (for which he was, from 1967 to 1972, a commissioner on pay structure) and, more recently, Korean businessmen. And, through his work for the Oxford AUT (Association of University Teachers), Marsh had a wide knowledge of the more peripheral - and, in industrial relations terms, worse - parts of the university. This issued in some splendid stories, but he always resisted suggestions that he publish his memoirs.

Marsh had unexpected sides, like his extensive collection on the early history of English sea bathing. Always interested in woodworking, he built a boat in a basement; the windows had to be removed to get it out, and it then had to be carried over four garden walls. To the end of his life, he kept a house and boat in Salcombe. Surprisingly, given his background, family connections made him fluent in French, even before this was reinforced by his daughter's marriage and his visits to her in Grenoble.

Arthur Marsh's services to industrial relations were recognised by his appointment as OBE in 1984; a photograph of him and his wife collecting his award at Buckingham Palace reposed proudly on his piano. He had married Jess Mersh in 1950, and is survived by her, by his children Alison, Jennifer, Edward and Richard, and by Greta Bailey, the secretary who had firmly organised his work for 28 years.

J. P. D. Dunbabin

Arthur Ivor Marsh, student and practitioner of industrial relations: born 27 March 1922; Staff Tutor, Oxford University Delegacy for Extra- Mural Studies, 1948-64; Senior Research Fellow, St Edmund Hall, Oxford 1964-89 (Emeritus); married 1950 Jess Mersh (two sons, two daughters); died Oxford 2 August 1999.