No Discouragement: An Autobiography

‘ The best autobiographies describe an age as well as an author, a place as well as a personality, an idea as well as an individual. No Discouragement is far more than the story of A.H. 'Chelly’ Halsey - sanitary inspector’s apprentice, wartime airman, sociology student, academic-at-large, Oxford professor and, above all, Christian Socialist. It describes the life and times of a man who typifies an almost extinct species. There are still working-class boys, reared in ‘the culture of respectability’, who go on to achieve great academic distinction. But the pressures of modern society make it hard for them to preserve their tribal loyalties. Halsey retains the values of his childhood and expresses them without embarrassment.‘ - Roy Hattersley;This is the autobiography of a working-class boy who became an Oxford professor. A.H. Halsey was born in Kentish Town, London, in 1923 - a railway child in a large clan. The family moved in 1926 to Rutland and then to Northamptonshire because the father had been wounded in the Great War. Halsey 'won the scholarship’ to Kettering Grammar School in 1933, left school at 16, went into the RAF as a pilot cadet. The metaphor of travel through time and