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Frank Glendenning
Pioneering student of
our ageing society
Chris Phillipson
Friday December 20, 2002 -The Guardian
Frank Glendenning, who has died aged 81, played a major role in
furthering understanding of the educational and social dimensions of
an ageing society. His contribution started in the mid-1970s, through
pioneering the development of seminars and courses targeted at people
over 60. His subsequent writings and research helped establish
educational gerontology as a discipline in the UK: not only did he
help found the Association for Educational Gerontology (now the
Association for Education and Ageing) in 1985, but he was also joint
editor of its journal from 1986 to 2000.
In addition, Glendenning made influential contributions to other fields within the study of ageing. In the later 1970s, he organised national seminars to explore the problems facing older people from minority ethnic groups. The classic study The Mistreatment Of Elderly People (1993), which he edited with Peter Decalmer, has been translated into Japanese and Spanish. Energetic well into late old age, he completed his last major publication, Teaching And Learning In Later Life, in 2000.
Glendenning was born and brought up in St Helens, Lancashire, where his father was an Anglican priest. After completing a history degree at Liverpool University in 1942, he followed his father's vocation, and was ordained in 1944. After working in parishes in Liverpool and Warrington, in 1947 he was appointed precentor of Sheffield cathedral.
While at university, Glendenning had been active in the Student Christian Movement (SCM), and he played an important role in its work during the 1950s and early 1960s. From 1955 to 1958, he was Church of England chaplain to Hull University, after which he moved to London, where he became senior secretary of the London SCM and warden of Student Movement House in Bloomsbury.
This was a centre for students from diverse ethnic backgrounds and a regular meeting place for overseas student organisations, and it stimulated in Glendenning a lifelong passion for international issues, particularly concerning Africa and Asia.
Elected to positions in the World Student Christian Federation, he was, from 1959 to 1965, part-time research secretary to the World Christian Youth Commission. His international work culminated in his 1964 appointment as associate director of Christian Aid, where he was responsible for setting up the charity's first education programme. While there, he also edited a series of 12 monographs on various aspects of overseas aid and development, and, from 1963 to 1968, was priest-in-ordinary to the Queen.
Along with many others in the 1960s, Glendenning began to feel frustrated with the church and the solutions it offered on issues of poverty and injustice. Thus it was, in his late 40s, that he decided to leave the church and resign his position in the royal household, and move into higher education. From 1967 to 1987, he was senior administrator in the department of adult education at Keele University.
Here, he was responsible for the administration and financial support of a rapidly expanding department. He also took academic responsibility for a range of courses directed at the social and community work professions. These included the highly successful national seminars for detached youth workers run with his second wife, Angela, with whom he shared many enthusiasms and activities, and innovative courses for probation and prison staff in areas such as working with sex offenders and collaborative work on social welfare issues.
Glendenning's own later-life learning included a doctorate, which he undertook between 1970 and 1975, on attitudes to race and imperial development as communicated in French and British history schoolbooks. His subsequent research focused on the social aspects of ageing, and, in the early 1980s, he brought together a number of funders to support a major study on the impact of pre-retirement education. This work helped the development of the study of old age at Keele, which expanded first with a chair in social gerontology and subsequently with a number of lectureships.
Glendenning was involved in a range of organisations at national and local levels. He was influential in developing the work of the Pre-Retirement Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. From 1989 to 1984, he was chair of the Beth Johnson Foundation, where he organised a number of high-profile national conferences highlighting concerns relating to an ageing population. He was also chair of North Staffordshire Mind (1987-90), and chair of Stoke-on-Trent Council for Voluntary Service (1992-2000).
His lifelong passion for the theatre and the arts carried through into his professional work in numerous ways. In the 1960s, he was chair of the Religious Drama Society of Great Britain, and honorary chaplain to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He campaigned against censorship in the arts, and submitted written evidence to the 1960 trial at which Penguin Books was acquitted of an obscenity charge in relation to the DH Lawrence novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Angela survives him.
Frank Glendenning, educational gerontologist, born February 7 1921; died December 13 2002