Paul Rayment's initiative, drive, commitment and political skill produced the folk festival. In his role as a councillor, he suggested the festival site of Cherry Hinton, managed the electrics of the first festival and volunteered to stay the night in the marquee for the first festival; there was no security. The other key figures who developed the festival were Philip Abrams, a professor of sociology who saw it as a social initiative, and George Scurfield, an author, poet, and politician, whose abilities and sense of adventure and were vital to the establishment of the festival. The 1965 festival was the fruit of a Labour-dominant council in a traditionally conservative area and particularly the endeavours of Paul Rayment. The founding of the Cambridge Folk festival reflects its subsequent diversity when a war hero poet and politician worked with an eminent sociologist and a politically-driven electrician (brought up in a children's home) to bring something together representative of the 1960s zeitgeist in Cambridge. This was then handed over and brought to fruition by Ken Woollard, a local firefighter and socialist political activist, to help organise it.