MURRAY, John

John Murray was a scholar and Liberal MP, who spent the latter part of his career as principal of the University College of the South West of England in Exeter. 

Murray was born at Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, on 28 February 1879, the son of a fish curer. He was educated at Robert Gordon’s College, Aberdeen, and the University of Aberdeen, graduating from the latter in 1900 with honours in Greek and Latin. In 1901 he won a Fullerton scholarship to Christ Church College, Oxford, where he won first-class honours in literae humaniores in 1905. In the same year he was elected a fellow of Merton College, and in 1908 became a tutor at Christ Church, where he remained until the First World War. 

In 1915 Murray joined the labour department at the Ministry of Munitions, where he first came into contact with Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree. Despite having had no previous training or experience in industrial relations, Murray seems to have been a success in the role. He became assistant commissioner in the labour advisor’s department, and worked on labour relations problems until the end of the war. In 1918 he joined the Board of Education with responsibility for university grants to former soldiers, and from 1919-20 was chairman of the commission on trusts, investigating allegations of wartime profiteering. In 1921 he married Ellen Harwood, the widow of a Liberal MP. 

In the 1918 parliamentary elections, Murray stood for the Liberal Party in Leeds West, winning the seat with a large majority. He held the seat until 1923 when he lost the seat to the Labour Party. Murray stood twice more for parliament, in Kirkcaldy in the 1924 general election and in Ripon during a by-election in 1925, both times unsuccessfully. 

Abandoning politics, Murray returned to academia and in 1926 accepted the post of principal of the University College of the South West of England. He held the post for a quarter of a century until his retirement in 1951. During his tenure, Murray oversaw and indeed was the driving force behind the college’s growth in size and prestige, and paved the way for its incorporation as the University of Exeter in 1955. He received honorary degrees from the University of Exeter, and also Columbia University and the University of Aberdeen. 

Murray wrote very little beyond a few articles for periodicals. His political views in his early days were strongly liberal; during his political career he spoke in favour of unemployment insurance and family allowance. He was, however, an opponent of state ownership, and his disagreement with David Lloyd George on this issue may have been one of the reasons why his political career declined. In later years his views drifted towards the right. 

Murray’s first lecture at the Rowntree conferences, ‘Industrial peace: minds and methods’, was given in 1922 while he was still an MP. He begins by telling us that he became interested in the subject of industrial peace during his wartime work with the Ministry of Munitions. The first step on the road to industrial peace, he says, is to understand the minds of those involved; if we fail to do so, then whatever the methods we may employ, they will be to no avail. 

There is, Murray says, a great deal of misunderstanding on both sides of the divide in the workplace. To the average workman, the employer is ‘a heartless, callous person, with no romance or emotion, but with a good deal of degraded intelligence, and a tenacious bull-dog grip of his one aim in life – self-aggrandisement.’ On the other hand,  

The workman appears to the employer to be a decent enough chap – unless he happens to be ‘one of those slackers’ – rather uncertain in his moods, rather unstable, friendly upon the whole, but quick to take offence, living from hand to mouth, and day to day; never looking far forward, with no very definite purpose in his life, and not very capable of resisting the promptings of the moment. He needs a good deal of management on the part of that superior being, the employer, and since he is suspicious and lonely, he does not take it too well. 

Murray goes on to try to set some of these misconceptions right. Like many other Rowntree conference speakers, he reminds his audience that the lot of most working people is poverty and uncertainty, a life of toil and hardship, and this necessarily colours their outlook on life. Lack of knowledge and understanding of the world, he says, tends to further narrow their view. He speaks of a ‘kind of chronic disappointment, and a pervading sense of loss and estrangement’, a yearning for a better world even if the working people do not fully grasp what that world might be. Most working people, Murray concludes, are lonely, isolated in small groups in the midst of their communities.  

Employers, on the other hand, have all the advantages workers lack: wealth, comfort, security, education and a much wider social group. It is this different mindset, occasioned by background, that makes it so hard for employers and workers to sit down and talk to each other. ‘Tea and cigarettes’, said Murray, will not do the job. Murray’s solution is twofold: better education, for both workers and employers, and the creation of forums where the two sides can get to know each other. Somewhat surprisingly, given the time of the lecture, Murray gives an approving nod to the Board of Trade set up in Germany during the First World War with a view to ‘socialising’ Germany industry. The attempt failed – as Murray alludes, a communist revolution came very close to sweeping away German capitalism altogether – but the result under the Weimar republic has a been a parliament of industry which Murray believes Britain should examine and copy. 

The second lecture, ‘Morals and mechanics of industrial peace’, was given in October 1925 during the swansong of Murray’s political career; his final defeat in the Ripon by-election took place just two months later. Murray begins by contending that work is a positive force and most people welcome having work to do. Work, he says, ‘is a social thing: in the ends it serves, in the motives it uses, and in its methods. Work is, or should be, a beatitude.’ Ideally, work is a fellowship of like-minded people setting out towards the same ends. 

Ideally, but not in real life: ‘the fellowship of work is rent and poisoned at the centre, and men and masters face each other in hostile array.’ But although Murray laments the situation, he has little in the way of solutions. He rejects nationalisation of industry, but the best he can offer is a return to the failed experiment of the Whitley Councils. As in the previous lecture, he points to the example of Germany, where similar institutions have been successful, but he gives no indication of how the problems that led to the previous failure in Britain would be overcome. He ends on an ominous note, seeing a precipice towards which capital and labour are both sliding; the 1926 General Strike is at this point a little over six months away. 

Clapp, B.W., ‘Murray, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 

Clapp, B.W., The University of Exeter: A History, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1982. 

Obituary notice, The Times, 30 December 1964. 

Lectures:  

‘Industrial peace: minds and methods’, 22 September 1922, Balliol College  

‘Morals and mechanics of industrial peace’, 4 October 1925, Balliol College