PEOPLE - BEREAVEMENTS

Professor Olive Banks, Sociologist (1923-2006)

It was with deep sadness I learned that my friend and former colleague, Olive Banks (neé Davies), died on 14 September aged 83. She was a highly regarded, very productive and well-liked member of the Leicester Sociology Department during the 1970s and, together with her husband Joe, played an important part in helping to sustain Leicester's reputation for first-rate sociological scholarship which had been established under the regime of Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias during the 1960s.

Olive received her PhD from the University of London in 1953, and was appointed Research Lecturer in the Department of Social Science at the University of Liverpool in 1954, remaining there until 1969/70. In the latter academic year, she was appointed Reader in Sociology at the University of Leicester and took up her post in 1971. She was awarded a Personal Chair in 1973.

At the end of her 1974 Inaugural Lecture, Olive wrote: “Often I am asked how it came about that both husband and wife are professors in one Department”. She attributed this entirely to the wisdom and enlightenment of the University of Leicester. She was referring partly to the progressive culture which prevailed in the University of Leicester at that time, especially in the Faculty of Social Sciences, but mainly to the part played by Ilya Neustadt in helping her to secure her Personal Chair. It is worth noting in this connection that Olive had some of the most prestigious figures in British sociology at that time championing her cause. The three referees for her Chair, for example, were David Lockwood, R.K.Kelsall and Asher Tropp, a formidable trio.

Olive Banks was the first female professor to be appointed at the University of Leicester. It is a mark of what gender relations were like in Britain and British universities at that time that, in writing to inform Olive of her promotion, Harold Martin, the then Registrar, offered her special congratulations because, he informed her, 'you will be the first lady to have been made a Professor at this University'. I remember her saying at the time that she was proud, delighted and, grateful to the University of Leicester for her promotion. However, she did not like being called a 'lady' in this sense. It ran counter to her feminist sentiments!

One of the main extra-sociological duties Olive was asked to perform at Leicester was to serve on the Gardens Committee, which she did from 1971. This is a job of perhaps more importance at Leicester than many other universities because of the fact that the gardens at the Oadby Halls of Residence also serve as the City of Leicester's Botanical Gardens. Olive and Joe's garden in Husbands Bosworth was magnificent and news of this soon spread in the university, leading to her rapid co-optation onto the Gardens Committee.

But, of course, the significance of Olive Banks's contribution to the University of Leicester was far more academic than bureaucratic. Olive's main area of interest and expertise was the sociology of education. Indeed, her influential textbook on that subject sold more than 30,000 copies as early as 1972. She also made important contributions, both alone and in collaboration with Joe, in the fields of industrial relations, population studies and the study of what is now called 'gender relations.' She even prophetically anticipated environmental sociology and possibly even global warming! For example, she wrote: 'We are...now beginning to recognize that a combination of population expansion and economic growth produces a level of environmental pollution which may in the long run prove not only aesthetically unacceptable but an actual, and even acute, danger to all forms of life'. A short digression on the history of the Leicester Department will help me to clarify Olive's contribution even further.

The most distinctive feature of Leicester sociology in the 1960s and 70s was the insistence of Neustadt and Elias that sociology should be a comparative and historical (more properly 'developmental' or 'processual') subject that seeks to build on the contributions of such classical sociologists as Comte, Marx, Durkheim, Spencer and Weber. Partly as a result of the post WWII drive to build a welfare state, the influence of the philosopher, Karl Popper, and sociological trends in the USA, such a view came to be widely challenged at the London School of Economics during the 1950s. However, Olive Banks was one of the few LSE products of that period who managed effectively to synthesize parts of the LSE position with parts of the tradition of what later became known as 'the Leicester School' and which began to challenge the LSE as the chief national producer of sociologists in the 1960s. David Lockwood implicitly recognised Olive's synthesizing abilities when he wrote of her that: 'Her first book, Parity and Prestige in English Secondary Education, was not only an important contribution to the study of education and stratification but it also broke new ground methodologically as a model for the writing of sociological history’.

Olive's elective affinity with what she called the 'Leicester tradition' was shown even more clearly when, referring to Norbert Elias's essay on 'involvement and detachment', she wrote: 'The cultivation of the necessary degree of detachment is...greatly aided by membership of an academic community dedicated to scholarship in the widest of terms. The old-fashioned academic values of intellectual curiosity and the dedication to truth are, it is now fashionable to point out, themselves ideological statements rather than factual descriptions of the academic scene, convenient cloaks...for privilege and self-seeking. I would not wish to dispute that this is sometimes so, but an exclusive attention to the ideological aspects of academic values is to miss their function in maintaining the independence of the universities, an independence which is in my view a necessary condition for the progress of science generally, and the social sciences in particular...' I think that it is best in the context of an obituary to leave these words, penned and spoken by Olive more than thirty years ago, to speak for themselves.

Olive's presence at Leicester was also important for my own development. When she was Director of Postgraduate Studies in the Department and I was her Deputy, I learned how helpful a female touch can be in making academic selections and supervising junior colleagues. I fondly remember, too, the peripatetic sociological and philosophical discussions that she, Joe, other members of the Department and I used to have walking around Victoria Park at lunch-time, as well as the splendid dinner parties that Olive and Joe used to give. The Banks’ and I also shared a love of walking in the mountains of Carinthia and the hospitality and cuisine of the Gasthaus zur Post in Eisentratten.

Olive and Joe are perhaps best remembered in Leicester for taking voluntary early retirement in 1982 when the government imposed 10% staffing cuts on the universities. It was an act which helped to save the jobs of some five of our colleagues and is one more measure of the spirit of selflessness and humanity which was mixed in equal measure with the Banks' sociological nous.

In writing the penultimate paragraph of this obituary, I became acutely aware of the fact that I was repeatedly pairing Olive with Joe in a piece which is supposed to be about her. I think, however, that she would have rather liked this pairing. They were both fiercely independent and individualistic people but lucky enough also to enjoy a happy, secure and mutually supportive marriage

Professor Eric Dunning