Robert Oakeshott

After school at Tonbridge and National Service with the 13th/18th Hussars in Malaya, Oakeshott in 1953 went up as an exhibitioner to Balliol College, Oxford, to read classics. When, in October 1956, the Hungarians rebelled against their Soviet overlords, Oakeshott at once resolved to drop his books and go to their aid. His closest friends, who included Tom Bingham (later to become Lord Bingham of Cornhill, Senior Lord of Appeal in Ordinary), Peter Brooke (Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville), Jack Good (rock’n’roll impresario), Maurice Keen (medieval historian and fellow of Balliol) and Rodney Leach (Lord Leach of Fairford), applauded but did not immediately volunteer to accompany him. Within a day or two, however, so many were eager to go that cards had to be drawn to select a companion to help to deliver medicines and write reports for their sponsor, the News Chronicle.

By this time, Oakeshott had acquired other characteristics, besides an unhesitating willingness to match action to belief, that would stay with him for the rest of his life. One was a weakness for drink. Another was his utter lack of interest in material possessions, or indeed his own appearance. This gave rise to a rhyme of the kind written by Balliol contemporaries about each other and based on one about Benjamin Jowett, the college’s formidable 19th-century Master:

First come I. My name is Jowett.

There’s no knowledge but I know it.

I am the Master of this college, What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.

For Oakeshott, the rhyme went:

I am Oakeshott. It is said That I never go to bed.

That’s the reason, I suppose, Why I never change my clothes.

After Oxford, Oakeshott became a journalist, first at the Sunderland Echo, then at the Financial Times, serving in Paris and later as a roving correspondent. His job took him to Southern Rhodesia and South Africa from time to time (on one occasion a night of revelry caused him to miss a change in the South African bank rate the next day), where he was outraged by the injustices of white minority rule.

Crossed in love in England, he gave up journalism and made his way to Northern Rhodesia to work for Kenneth Kaunda in the Ministry of Finance and the Office of Development Planning, just before it became independent as Zambia in October 1964. One of Oakeshott’s first triumphs there was to devise, with a colleague, Mike Faber, a scheme that allowed the new state to acquire for a song the rights to all its mineral royalties. These had been vested in the British South Africa Company, which was expected to sell them to the new state of Zambia for £35 million. Oakeshott and Faber managed to ensure that all but £2 million was met by Britain.

Oakeshott cut an eccentric, sometimes quixotic figure in Lusaka, the capital. When trade sanctions on Ian Smith’s Rhodesia led to petrol shortages in Zambia, he bought a horse (called Secret Service) which he rode to his office from his house some seven miles away. Despite service in a cavalry regiment, however, he was not an accomplished rider.

Nor was he much good with cars. Not long after he arrived, he and a friend were driving back to Lusaka with the writer Doris Lessing after a trip out of town. On a deserted dirt road, they ran out of petrol. Though 20 miles from home, the men got out to push, leaving Lessing to steer. With Oakeshott constantly shouting: “Come on, we’re nearly there,” they covered some distance, but needed Lessing’s help to get the car over the brow of a hill. As she clambered back into the driver’s seat, the car rolled back and she fell, breaking her pelvis. “Robert seems to be in continuous conflict with the physical world,” she remarked without bitterness.

He never won this conflict, whether it took the form of an attempt to clear up a flooded floor with a garden rake or simply to get the buttons of his cardigan into the right holes. Plates and glasses would be sent flying with cries of “No matter, nobody’s fault”. But Oakeshott was never downcast by his struggles with objects, or indeed by anything else. He took reverses in his inimitable dancing stride.

By 1966 he had come to think his contribution to African independence could best be made by helping to change the not-so-post-colonial education system. An Afrikaner friend, Patrick van Rensburg, exiled from South Africa for his anti-apartheid activities, had set up a school in Botswana which prepared students for the realities of life in a poor country. Oakeshott joined him at Swaneng Hill school, and then became principal of another, at Shashi River, where development studies were taught and the students were formed into builders’ or farmers’ brigades. Ever willing, if often inept, Oakeshott himself did everything that was expected of the other staff and pupils, whether tilling the soil or cleaning the latrines. It was a far cry from Winchester and St Paul’s in London, the schools of which his father had been headmaster.

In Botswana, Oakeshott’s politics had moved some way to the left, but they did not stay there. He had long been an admirer of Jo Grimond, the Liberal leader, and indeed returned to Britain briefly in 1966 to contest Darlington as a Liberal. By the early 1970s, believing an African could do his job as well as he could, he decided to go home to play a small but radical part in a divided and declining Britain. The cause that inspired him was the long-standing Liberal policy of co-operatives and industrial common ownership. Once again acting on his convictions, he set up a building co-op in Sunderland, where he had lived in 1957.

Sunderlandia, founded in 1973 with Pete Smith and Oakeshott’s old Zimbabwean friend, the architect Mick Pearce, was eventually killed by recession and inflexible union rules. Even so, it broke down many old practices (it had a high proportion of apprentices, and some of the bricklayers and joiners were women). It also inspired a highly successful co-op, Little Women, which in turn has created the flourishing Sunderland Home Care Associates, owned by its 300-plus care workers, and sister employee-owned enterprises in Manchester, Newcastle and North Tyneside.

In 1979 Oakeshott founded Job Ownership Ltd (now the Employee Ownership Association), with Grimond as its chairman and backing from the John Lewis Partnership and Scott Bader, a polymers company. Its aim was to promote employee ownership more widely, and this it has done: Britain now has more than 100 co-operative companies — among them Unipart, Arup, Baxi Partnership and Wilkin & Sons — in a sector generating more than £25 billion a year. Oakeshott retired in 2000, the year in which he published Jobs and Fairness, the definitive work on employee ownership, which followed The Case for Workers’ Co-Ops (1978), as well as many articles and contributions to other books.

Although tirelessly championing employee ownership, Oakeshott took up a host of other causes, including girls’ education in Africa, prisoners’ embroidery in Britain, youth unemployment, refugees in Cairo, the facilitation of organ transplants and various acts of private charity. His retirement was eased by a legacy from an uncle, Sir Penderel Moon, who despite his Wodehousian name was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a former member of the Indian Civil Service, once recruited by Oakeshott to help out in Zambia. Oakeshott read voraciously, refused to buy a television and entertained his friends, as he always had done, with fish pie and copious amounts of alcohol, at a table covered with a “cloth” composed of pages from the Financial Times.

His long bachelorhood was interrupted by a brief marriage, to Catherine Shuckburgh.

Robert Oakeshott, teacher and champion of co-operatives, was born on July 26, 1933. He died on June 21, 2011, aged 77