Roy Shaw (arts administrator)

Sir Roy Shaw (8 July 1918 – 15 May 2012) was a British educationalist and public servant. Originally employed in adult education, to which he remained dedicated in later life, he was Secretary-General of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1975 to 1983.

Roy Shaw was born on 8 July 1918 in Sheffield, England, the only child of Frederick Shaw, a steelworker, and Elsie Shaw, née Ogden, who had been a 'buffer girl' in the steelworks during the First World War. His father left the family when his son was four and died not long afterwards, and Shaw was brought up for a time by his grandparents (his grandfather was a miner in Shirebrook, Derbyshire), which he revisited in the Central Television programme on his life (1983).

Shaw attended Firth Park Grammar School, Sheffield, but the later part of his schooldays were affected by the onset of Crohn's disease, and he was unable to gain his Higher School Certificate. He worked first in a butcher's shop and then, after two years at the Sheffield Telegraph, Shaw worked for Sheffield Library, having by then declared himself a conscientious objector at the beginning of the Second World War. Shaw gained a place at the Quaker college at Woodbrooke, Birmingham for a pre-university course in 1941 and later read German and Philosophy at Manchester University, from which he graduated in 1946.

While at Manchester University he was an editor of the short-lived journal, Humanitas, along with Herbert McCabe, who later became a Dominican priest. In 1946, Shaw married Gwenyth Baron. They had seven children, including the sociologist Martin Shaw and journalist Phil Shaw.

Also in 1946, Shaw was appointed a tutor for the Workers' Educational Association in the East Riding of Yorkshire, based at Driffield. In 1947, he became a Lecturer in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Leeds, and in 1958 was appointed Director of the Leeds University Adult Education Centre in Bradford.

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