Christopher Massey

Dr. Christopher Massey has longstanding links to Teesside University. He graduated from the University in 2007 with first-class BA degree in history, and completed an MA the following year, graduating with distinction. In 2012, Christopher submitted his PhD thesis, ‘Public Ownership and the Labour Governments of 1945-51: The Case of Steel Nationalisation’ and graduated as a Doctor of Philosophy.

Christopher has always been fascinated by British labour and trade union history. His doctoral work explored the 1945-51 Labour Governments’ attitude to steel nationalisation by assessing, for the first time, this controversial policy through five key case studies of: the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, the British Iron and Steel Federation, the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation and the campaigns of Alfred Edwards (MP for Middlesbrough East 1935-50).

In 2015, Christopher returned to the University to take up the position of post-doctoral researcher in history. His new research project concentrates on the life and career of Lord Tom Sawyer, Teesside University’s former Chancellor and a key figure in the Labour Party and trade union movement. Lord Sawyer played a crucial, but often unseen and uncredited role in Labour's modernisation in the 1979-97 period. As a prominent NEC member (1983-97), the Chair of Labour's Policy Review (1987-92), and the Party's General Secretary (1994-98), Sawyer played the greatest individual part in the birth of New Labour outside of Kinnock, Blair and Brown.

Dr. Massey published the official biography of Lord Sawyer, The Man at the Back: The Life and Journals of Lord Tom Sawyer in 2017 and is a custodian of Lord Sawyer's personal archive, held at the University. Christopher is currently working on an academic monograph on Labour's modernisation in the period between 1979 and 1997.

Christopher is the Module Leader for the Level 5 BA History Module entitled Labour Pains: The Rise (and Fall?) of the Labour Party and supervises dissertation projects on modern British politics, and also on the history of Middlesbrough, at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Outside of academia Christopher has extensive experience in local government and is the current Deputy Leader of Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council. Christopher was first elected as a Councillor in 2011, has served on the Authority's Cabinet since 2012 and has been Deputy Leader since 2017. In addition, Dr. Massey also sits on the North York Moors National Park Authority and has worked for the Local Government Association at a national level. He also retains an interest in education as a recent PGCLTHE graduate, former secondary school teacher and school governor.