Thanks Brimbacombe I go along with all that (Except Brian Robson - surely you meant Alf Ramsey)
Yes yes yes - I think it vital to discuss his faults - with trepidation I covered a few when I spoke at his 70th Birthday knees-up at County Hall.
I wasn't worried at Ewan's reception of what I said, I always found him a bit of a pussy-cat when I didn't agree with something - it was a question of whether that was the right place, but as my subject was the work of The Critics Group I bit the bullet and pushed on - no problem
Ewan was quite a strong self-critic; when I first stayed with them he told me he couldn't bear to listen to his early recordings - I'd only met him a month before
I recently indexed one of the last Critics Group meetings where he spent most of the evening explaining to the group that he believed he'd been too heavy handed and unapproachable at times, and all the other balls-ups he beleivd he'd made - I hadn't been a member to long enough to have experienced that, but I know it to be a fact having worked on the recordings at length now
With me he was ok - I argued with him a lot over his antediluvian politics - no problem
His tendency was to 'agree to disagree' but if he subject came up again, he'd obviously taken in some of what I'd said (my father was the same - same generation of political activists)
I believe Ewan to be sometimes insecure of his ability and a little nervous of academics - when you got to now him you saw a lot of the Salford lad still there - but he was one of the best listeners I ever new

My real problem is with the superficiality of the attacks on him, especially when it didn't reflect the Ewan I knew (war record and name change tend to rile me the most)

The Critics Group was a pioneering body - an experiment
It worked on a suck-it-and- see basis and made mistakes as all pioneers, but it was structured to revisit those mistakes so they didn't happen again - hopefully
I thought that, all in all it did a bloody good job
Thanks for your input
Jim