In face as we return to school this post has two obituaries in it for two reformers who passed this summer.
Roy Hackett and Mikhail Gorbachev
If you click here you will get to get to The Guardian’s obituary for Roy Hackett MBE – a leader of the Bristol Bus Boycott. It is perhaps a bit of British Civil Rights history that does not get the attention that it deserves outside Bristol.
In April 1963 Roy Hackett, who has died aged 93, stood in the middle of Fishponds Road in Bristol to block the entrance to the city’s main bus station. His mission, as one of the organisers of the Bristol bus boycott, was to draw attention to the Bristol Omnibus Company’s refusal to employ black and Asian people as conductors and drivers. The boycott, which Hackett planned with three fellow campaigners, Paul Stephenson, Owen Henry and Guy Reid-Bailey, lasted for four months until the company caved in. The rigidly enforced colour bar – which had been encouraged and supported by the Transport and General Workers’ Union – was perfectly legal. Hackett’s mobilisation is credited with helping to persuade Harold Wilson’s Labour government to introduce the first piece of anti-racist legislation in Britain: the Race Relations Act of 1965.
If you click here you will get to the BBC obituary for Mikhail Gorbachev: the leader who perhaps more than anyone else should be credited with the peaceful end of the Cold War.
Mikhail Gorbachev was one of the most influential political figures of the 20th Century. He presided over the dissolution of a Soviet Union that had existed for nearly 70 years and had dominated huge swathes of Asia and Eastern Europe.
Yet, when he set out his programme of reforms in 1985, his sole intention had been to revive his country’s stagnant economy and overhaul its political processes. His efforts became the catalyst for a series of events that brought an end to communist rule, not just within the USSR, but also across its former satellite states.
All the very best for your new term and new courses.
Mr Kydd
