Here you will find a link to Tony Taylor's memory of Malcolm, who he first met in 1983. They have been the closest of friends and comrades ever since.
Our journey together began one evening on the Scraptoft campus of the Leicester Polytechnic sometime in 1983. Since that chance moment, our odyssey has been inextricably intertwined. Malcolm was a fresh-faced student on the Youth and Community course. I had been invited to speak to an article I had written, ‘Anti-sexist youth work with young men’, a fumbling effort to respond to the vital issues raised by increasingly confident feminist youth workers. At the end, Malcolm approached me, inquisitive and challenging in exploring what I’d been trying to say. Above all, he stressed his admiration and support for the provisional nature of my thoughts. He ventured that my self-effacing claim, ‘this is my best understanding for now’ was, as he put it, ‘blindin’. Within a few weeks as our friendship blossomed I realised that Malcolm’s version of my cautionary caveat was the succinct preface, ‘it seems to me’. This turn of phrase delivered in his soft, sometimes hardly audible Deptford accent echoes across the four decades of our comradeship.