In memoriam James D. Halloran (1927-2007)

James, or Jim as everybody knew him, was born into a strongly Catholic working class family in 1927 in Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. His father was a trade union official, and all his relatives worked, when they were in employment that is, in the mines and factories. To be brought up in such circumstances, and at such a time, was to breathe the air of trade unionism and the politics of organised labour.

Debate with his father over socialist issues was common; indeed, often heated. He informed me that in youthful righteousness he had once called his father, ‘a bosses’ man’. What is for sure is that the poverty that he witnessed in the recession years of the thirties was formative on the critical stance that he took to social and communicative questions. Although poor he was always quick to point out that everyone in his area was, and that his family was never desperately poor as in the case of some of his school friends. He mentioned, and it clearly affected him, visiting some friends’ houses who had no linoleum covering the floors as in his house, but had bare mud floors.

To understand the social and political circumstances of his early life is to understand much about Jim’s no-nonsense approach to social questions and modes of methodological address. He was often scathing of cultural and media studies scholars with what he saw as their involvement with the trivia of social arrangements, and their often glorification of working class life. Had he not been an academic, Jim could have been a hard bitten union official, wheeling and dealing to achieve social and economic improvement. Indeed, he was a ‘fixer’, or to put it somewhat more politely, a good political operator.

He often said that he could not have achieved what he did within today’s university with its formal bureaucratic procedural structures. He is undoubtedly right on that score. There was something of the buccaneer about Jim, but if one wants to be sociological at this point, the social structure allowed ‘unsupervised’ approaches to management. Even so, the Registrar at the University of Leicester was once alarmed following some research fund-raising trip abroad by Jim, to have him hand over a bag containing thousands of pounds in hard currency.

The Centre for Mass Communications Research which institutionalised mass communications research in Britain, and at the same time gained world wide recognition, was the outcome of social fears concerning the impact of television, a lack of existing media research expertise, and Jim’s own ability to recognise and exploit opportunities for the development of a new field of research. The Home Office, responding to popular fears about the effect of television, established the Television Research Committee in 1963.

Jim had gained a BSC in Sociology and Economics from the University of Hull in 1951, and had briefly been a school teacher and a prison tutor when he joined the University of Leicester in 1958 as Senior Tutor in the Department of Adult Education. This involved him teaching extra-mural classes in the evening to adults. After two years, having exhausted all his existing teaching material, he offered a course on the sociology of mass communications for which he had to work hard to prepare as he knew little or nothing about the area.

He was persuaded to write up his lecture notes by the editor of a radical Catholic Journal, Doctrine and Life, whom he had met by chance. Published in Dublin, he wrote around eight articles, which were then taken up by a left wing radical publisher in England, Sheed and Ward, and produced as Control or Consent: A Study of the Challenge of Mass Communications in 1963. Although not exactly an authority at that time on mass communications research, he was an obvious choice to be appointed Secretary to the Television Committee, even more obvious in light of the fact that the Chairman of the Committee was Fraser Noble, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Leicester.

The idea of the Committee was to establish several institutions that would represent different approaches to the study of the media. Half the money of the Committee went to establish the Leicester Centre, which then allocated money to other institutions – some was given to the Sociology Department at Aberdeen University, some to Richard Hoggart at the University of Birmingham, and some to Hilde Himmelweit at the LSE. Surprisingly Himmelweit failed to spend the grant, so it was transferred to Jay Blumler at the University of Leeds.

The research performance of the various recipients was uneven, sufficiently so as not to impress the Committee and thus reinforcing its original suspicion that Britain had neither the researchers nor the structure to enable the Committee to fulfil its remit. This was Jim’s opportunity, and he saw to it that an appropriate institutional structure for the study of mass communications was created, namely, by developing the Leicester Centre for Mass Communications Research.

Jim collected to him a young and talented set of individuals from a variety of different disciplines that would publish and spread the influence of the Centre. It was not that Jim had a fixed idea about communications research being multidisciplinary that resulted in such a disparate set of individuals, but rather that staff had to be collected from anywhere he could given the newness of the field. Most of the staff went on in future years to high distinction, but one might consider that the newness of the venture attracted a certain type of individual ready to commit to this emerging academic field – it was many years before there were any university posts in mass communications, and hence somewhat of a risk for those who, so to speak, signed up with Jim.

After Jim’s retirement in 1991 the Centre began to decline, but he was sanguine about this. He realised that it was born at a particular historical juncture, and that, like all research institutes, others would emerge and begin to challenge its dominance. But also, he was aware that with the whole development of the field no Institute would ever again have the primacy that the Centre had once possessed. Indeed, it was the very success of the Centre in legitimising the field in Britain that had helped to ensure that this was the case. On the International scene his legacy lives on in the thriving and important International Association of Mass Communications Research (IAMCR), of which he was president for so many years that he was made Honorary Life President in 1990.

Jim died in hospital surrounded by his family. He had been in failing health for some time, but the end came sooner than expected. He was comfortable, but that would not have been the case for much longer. It is right that we remember him as a great figure in mass communications research, and as a man who had an enormous zest for life, and not just for academic life.

On my last visit to him in hospital he recounted how as a schoolboy in Leeds he had at the cricket nets faced up to one of the all time great English fast bowlers, Fred Trueman. Jim was no match. One of Trueman’s hurled balls hit him and broke his toe. It was with massive pride that Jim said: ‘Freddie Trueman broke my toe’. Any self-respecting Yorkshireman would think himself lucky to reflect on his life and be able to include such a memory.

David E. Morrison, Professor of Communications Research, University of Leeds.

Editor’s note: Jim Halloran was a colleague of WACC in the 1970s and 1980s. In particular he advised on two research projects - an exploratory survey of media and its developmental role in Indonesia and Zambia, and later a study of mass media and village life in India. Ever sharply critical, he could always be relied upon to separate the wheat from the chaff. But his apparently blunt exterior concealed a warmth, generosity and conviviality that readily emerged under the influence of a good malt whiskey.