Will we ever learn from them?

UNHEEDED?: Poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, left, and Carol Ann Duffy, below, at Keele University in 2004.

- Fred Hughes - Historian and author

THE first time I met Frank Duffy was at an assembly of Staffordshire councillors in May 1993.

The lean and stony-faced Stafford councillor was a Scot raised in the slums of Glasgow's Gorbals who came to work in Stafford when his eldest child, a daughter, was just six.

I was a member of the Stoke-on-Trent division in an authority representing places as diverse as Lichfield, Staffordshire Moorlands, and Kinver bordering on the West Midlands. Getting to know people across the historic council chamber was the order of the day. And I must confess that even after four years I remained barely on nodding terms with most of my colleagues. Among them was Frank Duffy who had spent a lifetime in industry, a trade union man with a passion for fairness and equality. The odd thing was I never heard him speak. He appeared to communicate just by being there.

When Stoke-on-Trent became a unitary authority in 1997, we all went our separate ways. But quite unexpectedly, I met Frank again in 2008. Sitting next to him at a graduation ceremony at Staffordshire University, I discovered he was the father of the prospective honorary doctor, the Poet Laureate, Dame Carol Ann Duffy.