Liverpool People

By Darren Guy

Can you tell us a little about yourself Stan?

Well I wasn't born in Liverpool; I was born in Barking near London. My father was unemployed quite a bit so we moved across London, from the eastside to the westside and back, looking for work. Then the war and the blitz came and we all eventually evacuated to Cambridge. A beautiful city, but I never really felt at home there. There is a real 'town and gown' division between the ordinary working folk who didn’t want anything to do with the University, and the University who didn't want anything to with them, apart from using them as cheap labour. So I became actively involved in local politics and became a Labour councillor, but only for one term. After three years I'd really had enough. I just didn't feel comfortable with that type of politics.

Because of the war I never really had a stable education. I went to quite a good school but there wasn't any opportunities for leaving qualifications. So, having packed it in as a councillor I went on to a residential working men’s college for a year called Fircroft in Bournville – a sort of chocolate university. That was a real revelation – mixing with a great crowd of working class students from all over the country and overseas. Many were miners. In the third term the College warden asked me what I had planned to do when I left. Having studied psychology I said I would like to become a psychiatric social worker. In that case, he said, you will need to go to University. I was stunned. Nobody in my family, or extended family, had been to university at that time – it was like asking me if I wanted to go to the moon! Anyway, I got a place at Southampton for two years as a mature student doing social studies, which was halfway into what I wanted to do. I was known to be very anti-Freudian which didn't go down well with the course I was on, but went down OK with a tutor in the Sociology Department. He said, don't worry Stan I've good contacts with Liverpool – you can do the psychiatric social work course there. So that's how I landed in Liverpool. That was in the early sixties– when amazing changes were happening on the music scene.

Having arrived in Liverpool, Stan got involved in the Liverpool folk scene, attending the Spinners club before he set up his own folk group who established the Bothy folk club in Southport – still going strong after 40 years or more. He has co-produced and presented Folkscene, the BBC Radio Merseyside’s folkmusic programme since 1967. He has also guested in as a whistleplayer/singer with the folk band Cream of the Barley over the last 15 years or so. He took up the Celtic Harp a few years after his retirement in 1996 performing in the hugely successful ‘Fall from Grace’ which ran at the Playhouse for three weeks. His most recent adventure is becoming a member of the Liverpool music collective Super Numeri recording an album on Ninja Tune Records – launched at Camden Town's Jazz Cafe and more recently at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

When I retired as senior social worker, I was more than glad to get away from it all. My colleagues were OK but I found so many social workers very judgemental and authoritarian in their approach to the clients – hardly treating them as equals. The funny thing was the radical and more militant social workers were the worst in trying to take over other people’s lives. In contrast I felt my clients had a right to know what I couldn’t offer as much as what I could offer – as if they were actually paying me for my services – which of course they were, ultimately. There is no such thing as a free welfare service. I saw them as experts in their own lives even if their confidence in this had been knocked out of them, and felt it an arrogance to give them advice. In other words it was for them to take back the power that others in the name of welfare had wrested from them. It worked; they soon began to fight their own battles. I took an anarchist approach to my social work – everyone has the right to individual freedom and self direction but always aware that if your freedom circumscribes the freedom of others then it becomes a form of tyranny – which is what I was experiencing among many social workers and their clients.

The future? I am not in the least ambitious. You don’t have to be. Just take a few risks. Take up the challenge. For example: I was rehearsing as a whistle/player in an Irish pub band on stage in ‘Fall from Grace’. The musical director heard I had a harp and asked me to bring it along to rehearsals. I had only acquired it in a matter of a few months. We tried it along with some of the songs and he said ‘We'll have it in the show.’ I agreed, not without some trepidation, thinking I could lose myself at the back of the band without being too noticeable. Oh no, I was put right in front. So my very first public performance of the Celtic harp was three weeks at the Liverpool Playhouse. You get to a point in life when you think – what can I lose?

Stan can be found in the Green Fish Cafe, Newington St, playing his harp most Wednesdays and Saturdays between 1pm – 4pm.