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Speaking of Stories transforming
short stories from the page to the stage
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WILLIAM WOODRUFF William Woodruff was born into a family of cotton weavers on September 12, 1916, in Blackburn, Lancashire. From then on, until he ran away to London in 1933, his fate, and that of his family was tied to the ever-dwindling fortunes of the Lancashire cotton industry. He was four when Lancashire's world supremacy in textiles ended with the financial crash of 1920. When Woodruff left school in 1930, his family and half the cotton workers of Blackburn were unemployed. The only job he could find was to be a grocer's errand boy. The life of poverty to which he and his family were eventually reduced is told in his autobiography. When he was 16, Woodruff left Lancashire for London. For two years he worked as a labourer in the Bow Bridge Iron Foundry, in the East End. His political ambitions were aroused and he joined the Labour Party. He became a follower of George Lansbury M.P., who was Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1931 to 1935. It was at a London County Council (LCC) night school that Woodruff first discovered his love of learning. In 1936 he was admitted to a worker's education course (which later developed into Plater College) at Oxford, where he distinguished himself in the University's examinations for the Diploma in Economics and Political Science. In 1938 an LCC Senior Adult Scholarship (the first of its kind) allowed him to become a fully accredited member of the University. In a unique gesture, Oxford waived its entrance examination for him. On the outbreak of the Second World War, Woodruff abandoned his pacificism and joined the Army. After a year and a half in the ranks as a private, he was commissioned in the Royal Corps of Signals. He fought with the 24th Infantry Brigade in North Africa, Italy and in the Mediterranean theatre. The original 24th Infantry Brigade was destroyed in the Battle of Anzio. Woodruff was demobilized with the rank of Major - A/Col. He was mentioned in dispatches and he modestly told us that he was awarded "two rows of gongs". His wartime experiences are the basis of his novel, Vessel of sadness. In 1946 he renewed his academic career. A research fellowship, given by the Houblon-Norman Committee of the Bank of England in 1950, allowed him to write his first book The rise of the British rubber industry. In 1952 he was sent as a Fulbright Scholar to Harvard University in the USA. From 1953 to 1956 he was a professor at the University of Illinois. From 1956 to 1966 he headed the Department of Economic History at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and was dean of the faculty of Commerce. A Senior Award from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1964 allowed him to finish his Impact of Western man. In 1965 he became a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA. In 1966 he was appointed a Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida at Gainesville, USA. In 1974 he was a guest professor at the Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. With a grant from the Japan Society for the Advancement of Science in 1975, he became a Visiting Professor at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. In 1978 he was a Visiting Professor at St. Antony's College, Oxford, England. He retired in 1996, after fifty years in the classroom. He tells us that "there are few days when I do not write". Since retirement he has published four revised editions of his Concise history of the modern world. His latest work is a novel, Shadows of glory. William Woodruff has seven children: two sons, David and Roger, by his marriage to Katherine (1941) and, following the death of his first wife, five by his second marriage to Helga (July 1960): Kirsten (daughter) and Mark, Peter, Andrew and Thomas.
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