Ian's Co-op instincts and analysis will be missed

Ian was born and raised in Liverpool and often told the story of his childhood memory of the local co-operative society branch above whose premises read the legend: “Liberty, Equality, Boot Repairs.” 

He studied at Loughborough University, where as part of his course he spent a year working for the Foundry Industry Training Board, and joined Co-operative Retail Services (CRS) as a management trainee. 

After a variety of roles in Liverpool, he was appointed as the Member Relations/Pesonnel Officer of CRS’s East Anglia Region, based in Bury St Edmunds. 

He was told by the management that in recent years the only people attending the members’ meetings had been the committee and their spouses and that his role in member relations was to make sure this remained the case! 

To that end he was advised money given to the Woodcraft Folk was good because they were too young to attend, and that sponsoring bands and choirs was also useful because their members were only interested in music.

Having become somewhat disillusioned by the prevailing culture in the retail sector at the time, Ian took the opportunity to return to education as a lecturer at the Co-operative College. During his years at Stanford Hall, he got to know most today’s society officers including Peter Marks, then working for the West Yorkshire Society, and Alan Gill, who later became Chief Executive at Leeds.

His career then led to Northern Ireland where he took up a post lecturing in Business and Mangement at the University of Ulster and for many years had pastoral oversight of first year students living in university accommodation. Several generations of students had reason to be thankful for Ian's good humour and circumspect attitude to being summoned from his bed in the early hours of the morning to respond to one incident or another!

As a co-operative activist, Ian served on the Regional Board of the Co-operative Wholesale Society and the Co-operative Group in Northern Ireland. He was a regular attendee at Congress, half-yearly meetings and other functions and, while his incisive sense of what needed to happen was not always reflected in the agreed action, his colleagues valued his insight and analytical skills as well as his shrewd political instincts.

Having announced his retirement and relocation to Burnley, Ian was elected as Chair of the UK Society for Co-operative Studies last September. One of his legacies to the society and Movement is the developing relationship between the UK SCS and the Irish SCS, and completing the early groundwork for the Irish Co-operative Conference, which took place at the end of July in Dublin. It is hard to believe that Ian is gone, but those of us who knew him are thankful for the time we spent with him. Rest in peace.

• Richard Bickle is Secretary of the UK Society for Co-operative Studies.