Roy Shaw was appointed Secretary-General of the Arts Council in 1975. He came from a working class background in the North of England, went to university late, found his career in adult education, became a Roman Catholic in the early fifties and saw the Arts Council as an extension of his wish ‘to help others as I had been helped’. His social origins, his firm religious conviction and his willingness and, worse, his ability to argue a case through make him a sitting duck for today’s fashionable arrows.

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