Fred Jarvis, the 93-year-old education campaigner and former NUT teaching union general secretary, was, in his day, almost as well known as a celebrated amateur photographer as a wily political operator.

As such, it was a real pleasure to attend the private view of Fred’s latest exhibition - aptly enough, at the TUC’s Congress House HQ - last Tuesday. The retrospective of a life’s work in photographs, Before Selfies, spans post-War Germany, 1950s Moscow, 1970s London school-life and modern politics. The most recent photograph was of House of Commons speaker John Berkow: politics, education and photography all intertwined.

The guest list was a veritable “who’s who” of moderate Labour faces - including David Lammy, David Puttnam, Neil Kinnock and journalist Robert Peston, whose father was an education adviser to the Labour government in the 1970s. Each took it in turn to auction off some of Fred’s greatest hits.

Perhaps inevitably, given that some of Fred’s earliest writing appeared in Tes at the end of World War Two, his first published photographs also appeared in this organ: they were taken on a trip to May Day in Soviet Moscow in 1954, when Fred was an activist in the NUS students’ union.

When Fred told me about this debut, well, I felt obliged to dig into our archives to have a look:

Before Selfies runs at Congress House on Great Russell Street, London, until Friday 9 February

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