Ray Carter
Labour MP and minister who was a serious collector of the writings of Betjeman, Larkin and others
RAY CARTER, who has died aged 84, was Labour MP for Birmingham Northfield from 1970 to 1979, a Northern Ireland minister in James Callaghan’s government, and later a director of Marathon Oil; he was also a bibliophile who assembled a definitive collection of John Betjeman first editions and unpublished works.
Carter was among those talented Labour MPS who could have expected longer ministerial careers, but lost their seats as Margaret Thatcher came to power. His legacy was the Congenital Disabilities (Civil Liability) Act of 1976 – a private member’s measure enabling compensation to be claimed for children disabled, or born disabled, as a result of negligence. It applied particularly to the nuclear industry.
Carter performed soundly as a minister at Stormont under Merlyn Rees and Roy Mason, handling the running of the province in the absence of devolved government rather than the higher-profile political and security side.
His interest in Betjeman, exhibiting his own collection of the poet’s works, including unpublished poems and letters, at St Paul’s School in 1983, led Carter to conduct a six-year correspondence with Philip Larkin, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue.
Carter recalled that the one time he and Larkin met, at All Souls, Oxford, “the conversation moved off into a surprising direction. It wasn’t about the books nor poetry. What interested him was politics, why I had got involved, what did I make of Northern Ireland?
“My abiding memory of Larkin is of an extremely tall man, priestly looking and self-conscious about his height. After we had introduced ourselves to one another, he rested against a bookcase and proceeded to slide down to roughly my level.”
Carter’s study of Larkin became as intense as his interest in Betjeman; poignantly, his collection ended with the order of service from Larkin’s funeral in Hull in December 1985.
Another writer he came to know was Seamus Heaney, with whom he engaged in a long correspondence. The poet’s first editions were often difficult to collect because some were slender limited pamphlets, but Carter tracked down virtually all of them. He also came to know J L Carr, the quintessential English novelist, and he published a limited and beautifully produced edition of Carr’s best-known novel, A Month in the Country.
His parliamentary “pair” was Kenneth Baker, now Lord Baker of Dorking, who shared his passion for collecting books and became a friend. Later on, Carter took courses in writing prose and poetry. “The work Ray sent to me revealed that he could have had a successful career as a writer,” Baker recalled.
Raymond John Carter was born on September 17 1935; since his parents, John Carter and the former Nellie Woodcock, were in service, they moved about a lot, so he went to several different schools and never took the 11-plus.
On leaving Mortlake Secondary School, he trained at Reading
Technical College and the Stafford College of Technology and became an electrical engineer.
He did his National Service in the Royal Engineers, reaching the rank of sergeant. He was pressed to stay on, but it was not for him, and in 1955 he joined the Sperry Gyroscope Company’s computer R&D section in 1955. He moved on in 1965 to the Central Electricity Generating Board.
Carter had taken an interest in politics from his teenage years. Having joined the Labour Party at Bracknell, Berkshire, where he had moved after his marriage to Jeanette Hills in 1959, he served from 1963 to 1968 on Easthampstead Rural District Council.
He fought his home seat of Wokingham at the 1966 election, then in March 1968 a by-election at the equally unwinnable Warwick and
Leamington. When Donald Chapman, Labour MP for Northfield since 1951, decided to retire, Carter – a member of the Transport & General Workers’ Union – was selected to take his place.
Northfield included British Leyland’s giant Longbridge plant, and Chapman’s majority in 1966 had been 11,902. But the mood was changing, not least because of the crippling strikes affecting the motor industry as Harold Wilson’s government held back from reforming the unions.
As Edward Heath led the Conservatives to power in June 1970, the swing against Labour at Northfield of 8.6 per cent was one of the largest in the country. Carter scrambled home by 1,216 votes, the militant shop steward Derek “Red Robbo” Robinson polling 605 as a Communist.
Carter took up the ongoing strife in the motor industry with BL’S chairman Lord Stokes, who invited him to spend a week working on the shop floor at Longbridge, like thousands of his constituents.
In September 1970 he clocked on for his first (unpaid) shift, a late start having been arranged to accommodate his drive from Bracknell. “I really want to get down to what the men think about this company, their jobs, and the sort of problems they face,” Carter said. At Westminster he campaigned for action to prosecute more Continental lorry drivers for road traffic offences or overladen vehicles. He complained in 1973 that the authorities seemed “virtually powerless”.
The transport minister Keith Speed agreed that “the ability to prosecute foreign lorry drivers for road traffic offences is in practice very limited”. But a change in the law had led to 1,000 prohibition orders on overweight lorries, with the proportion of overloaded vehicles falling from 80 to 15 per cent.
Carter served on the Public Accounts Committee in 1973-74, and after Labour’s return to power that February on the Science & Technology Committee and the Council of Europe. He increased his majority to 8,529 in the February 1974 election, and 10,597 in October.
When Callaghan succeeded Wilson as prime minister in April 1976, he brought Carter into his government as Parliamentary Under-secretary of State at the Northern Ireland Office.
The May 1979 election was fought against a background of the “Winter of Discontent”, the popularity among council tenants of Margaret Thatcher’s “Right to Buy”, and chaos at Longbridge that would shortly culminate in Red Robbo’s sacking.
These factors combined to produce a 10.2 per cent swing against Labour in Northfield, Carter unexpectedly losing his seat to the Conservative Jocelyn Cadbury by 204 votes. Cadbury, one of the chocolate dynasty, would commit suicide three years later out of depression at the impact of Thatcherism on his constituents.
Carter went back to a management role at the CEGB, then in 1980 was recruited as an executive by Marathon Oil GB. Three years later he was appointed a director of the company, serving until 2003.
Under the Conservative administrations Carter was twice appointed to committees reviewing teachers’ pay and conditions. Kenneth Baker, Secretary of State for Education 1986-89, recalled: “In 1986, when I was setting up the Interim Advisory Committee to determine teachers’ pay to replace the failed Burnham Committee, I wanted someone with a Labour and trade union background. Ray served for five years and believed that it made some of the best settlements for teachers’ pay and conditions, before going on to serve as the Deputy Chairman of the Schools Teachers’ Review Body.”
A kind and likeable man, Carter was also at various times a trustee of the Natural History Museum; patron of the Guild of Handicraft Trust; a governor of the Wexham and Heatherwood NHS Trust; and a committee member of the Arvon Foundation, which promotes creative writing.
He became friends with Neil Armstrong, and on a visit to the US he got the astronaut to sign a first edition of HG Wells’s The First Men in the Moon which had also been signed by Wells.
Ray Carter was appointed CBE in 1991. He is survived by his devoted wife Jeanette, along with their son and two daughters.
Ray Carter, born September 17 1935, died July 2 2020