There is a chapter in Human Resource Management, the bestselling academic textbook, which deals with equal opportunities and diversity in the workplace, and Derek Torrington, the lead author, was well qualified on the subject. In the early 1980s, his co-author and researcher, Laura Hall, encountered a problem on a day she had booked a professional shorthand typist to document the results of a research questionnaire. The nanny due to look after her two young sons, aged two and three, had fallen ill.
“Derek simply said to bring the boys into work and he would look after them,” Hall said. “So I sat at one end of the office working with the typist; he sat at the other end amusing the boys by showing them things on his typewriter. I don’t know how many employers at that time would have done such a thing.”
It would not be the only time that children accompanied Derek to his office at Umist, the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. When one of his own four children was feeling under the weather, or less than enthusiastic about school, Derek would take them into Umist for a day of adventure.
The children are grown up now, but the textbook remains essential reading for students. The first edition was published in 1979; the 12th will be published by Pearson later this year. A prolific academic author, Derek continued to contribute to the book until well into his eighties.
His status as an esteemed academic — initially a lecturer in industrial relations, later professor of human resource management — came in stark contrast to his early academic efforts. His most notable achievement at Manchester Grammar School, in his estimation, was becoming captain of the cricket third XI, while three years studying economics at Manchester University resulted in no undergraduate degree, but a large group of friends and improved proficiency in playing bridge.
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Derek Peter Torrington was born in 1931 in Hornsey, London, the younger of two sons to Reginald, a secretary in the YMCA, and Grace (née Grover), a former contralto soloist with the British National Opera Company, who, according to her son, had “a bit of a diva complex” that would cause acute embarrassment to a teenager. “Partly because of a tendency to behave in a theatrical way,” Derek said, “but also because of the way she used to sing, very loudly, in the most inappropriate situations.”
The garden in Hornsey was tended by Joe Hulme, the captain of Arsenal FC, but the Torrington family would relocate to Manchester due to Reginald’s wartime work. Derek’s brother, Keith, six years older, went to Cambridge University and was working for ICI in Teesside when he was killed in a car crash, aged 34.
At Manchester Grammar School Derek picked up a love of literature, especially Arthur Ransome and PG Wodehouse, but remained frustrated that his cricketing ability fell short of his passion for the game. “I was given one game in the school second XI,” he recalled. “I was caught on the square-leg boundary off the first ball I received.”
His first job was as a management trainee at Oldham & Son Ltd, a company in Denton that manufactured miners’ lamps, where he would work for 15 years. He became a personnel manager before moving on to lecture in industrial relations, first at Manchester Polytechnic, then at Umist, where his job offer was contingent upon completing his research degree for which he was awarded an MPhil at the age of 44.
He began to thrive, he always said, after meeting Barbara (née Clarke), a biology teacher, whom he married in 1965. They had four children, Mark, Helen, Ian and Sally, and nine grandchildren, for whom Grandpa would delight in devising treasure hunts that would inevitably descend into chaos. Derek served as a magistrate and a lay preacher, and was a life member of Lancashire Cricket Club.
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He retired, reluctantly, at the age of 65, but kept working on projects, including the merger of Umist with the University of Manchester and the creation of the highly rated Manchester Business School. When he was appointed emeritus professor of management by the University of Manchester, the same institution where he had fallen short as an undergraduate decades earlier, his professional journey had come full circle. “I leave it to others to judge,” he wrote, “what made the difference to turn a university dropout into a successful academic.”