John Prescott, Genuine Love for Others

From The Guardian, 11 December 1996

Raphael Samuel opened my mind when I was a student in the 1960s. Until I went to Ruskin and met him, my education had come from correspondence courses, which I used to complete in a 14-bunk cabin after 20 hours' duty as a seaman on a liner. To move from that to two of you in a college room with a tutor was an experience, but Raph was never my image of a tutor.

He would turn up with his hair all over the place, in a style of dressing that was all his own and that was brilliant captured in the photograph of him which the Guardian published yesterday. He arrived with bags full of poems and bits of papers and references and he would pull one out when he wanted to make a point.

He made me do something I thought I'd never do. Not just write an essay - that was difficult enough for me - but use the experience of poetry to illustrate a point. Until then I had thought poetry was about them and not us.

He had this tremendous understanding of the inner inferiority that mature students have in a society that tells them they've missed out. He not only understood what was inside the student, he unlocked it and channelled it into written and verbal debate. There wasn't an ounce of superiority in him. In those tutorials he was often as much the student as the lecturer. He learned from you and you learned from him. He was fascinated by other people's experience.

I remember once that I did a mock exam while I was at Ruskin. I had a terrible time. I was so frustrated that I couldn't say what I wanted that I stormed out. Raph chased me down Walton Street, but he couldn't catch me. When I got back there was a note on my desk in that big hand writing of his telling me not to worry and to come and have a talk and a cup of coffee. He was always supportive like that.

For me, Raph was the Ruskin experience. He arrived during my time there. I think he only intended to be there for one or two years, but he stayed the rest of his life. Ruskin was phenomenal. It wasn't Oxford, but it was in Oxford. For people like me it was hard. Having been big fish in small pools we were suddenly turned into small fish in big ones. Ruskin's founders said that they wanted "to take the windbags out of the trade union movement and fill them with sand so that they are the sandbags for stability not windbags for the revolution". Raphael never saw it that way. He made revolution sound warm and not painful. He spoke for the heart and the soul of the labour movement, real people, real workers.

He never forgot you. When I was standing for the deputy leadership of the party in 1992 after Roy Hattersley resigned, I came under a lot of attack from people who said I could never hold the job because I might stumble over my words and say the wrong things. Completely out of the blue, Raph wrote this wonderful piece for the Guardian about me, recalling some very strong memories of those Ruskin years and urging support for me. It moved me to tears.

He knew what was in the heart and he knew what was in the head. He wasn't taken in by an establishment that just judges by the mouth and the glamour. I felt really proud that he felt that way about me and that he was still there after 30 years.

I was devastated to hear of his death. He had such a genuine love for people. He had the loveliest warm smile, a warm knowing smile. It was truly comradely. Everything was lovely about that man.