Cold War Culture: Intellectuals, the Media and the Practice of History 9781350985780, 9780857727114

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: How Do You Get from Ireland in the 1790s to Britain in the 1950s? An Explanation
1. Culture and Society in Britain: Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s
2. Lewis Namier and the Historians
3. The Structure of Consensus at the Accession of Elizabeth II
4. Consensus Challenged: Culture and Politics in the Mid-1950s
5. The Practice of History at Mid-Century
6. ‘Out of Apathy’?
7. The New Left
Postscript
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Jim Smy th is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is a specialist in British and Irish history and his publications include The Making of the United Kingdom 1660–1800: State, Religion and Identity in Britain and Ireland and The Men of No Property:  Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century.

COLD WAR CULTURE Intellectuals, the Media and the Practice of History

Jim Smyth

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 by I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. Paperback edition first published 2020 by Bloomsbury Academic Copyright © Jim Smyth, 2016 Jim Smyth has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA) at the University of Notre Dame and their help in making this publication possible. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3112-6 PB: 978-1-3501-5321-9 ePDF: 978-0-8577-2711-4 ePub: 978-0-8577-2916-3 Typeset by Out of House To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

C ONTE NT S

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction: How Do You Get from Ireland in the 1790s to Britain in the 1950s? An Explanation

1

1

Culture and Society in Britain: Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s

4

2

Lewis Namier and the Historians

26

3

The Structure of Consensus at the Accession of Elizabeth II

55

Consensus Challenged: Culture and Politics in the Mid-1950s

80

4 5

The Practice of History at Mid-Century

111

6

‘Out of Apathy’?

135

7

The New Left

154

Postscript

178

Notes

183

Select Bibliography

223

Index

233

v

I L L U S T RAT I ONS

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2

Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 7.1

The consumer society. Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956). © R. Hamilton. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2015. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, 2 June 1953. © Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo. Monarchy merchandized 1950s style. Family gathering 1950s style. © Bert Hardy / Hulton Archive / Getty Images. A.J.P. Taylor (right) in robust exchange with one of his regular sparring partners, the maverick Tory, Bob Boothby (second left). Poking fun at the intellectual pretensions of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (Tribune, 1956). Badge bearing the iconic symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). The Partisan Coffee House (1958–62). Founded by the historian Raphael Samuel, it served as a Soho venue for New Left and CND activists, folksingers, intellectuals and bohemians. Its patrons included the young Rod Stewart.

vii

5 7 10 96

98 142 149

165

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank the Earhart Foundation for the award of a fellowship which enabled me to finish the research for, and begin the writing of, this book (I thank them also for corresponding by ‘snail mail’); and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame, for its support towards publication. Generously, Terry Eagleton, John Kelly, Alasdair MacIntyre, Tony Shaw and (as ever) Jonathan Steinberg read and commented on various chapters: any errors or infelicities which may linger in the text are solely mine. I have benefited immensely from the intellectual enrichment and logistical support of my friends and colleagues in the history department and in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies in the University of Notre Dame  – particularly Chris Fox, Patrick Griffin, and Peter McQuillan. My fellow historians, Tom Bartlett, Ciaran Brady, Vincent Carey, Joe Lee, Ian MacBride, Breandan MacSuibhne, and mo Ghile Mear, the much missed Breandán Ó Buachalla, Margaret O’Callaghan, Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ruan O’Donnell and (honorary historian) Ray Ryan have all supplied the most stimulating of company. Finally I wish to acknowledge the saintly patience of my former and current graduate students – Gavin Foster, Aaron Willis, Keelin Burke and Jess Lumsden – who heard much more about Lewis Namier and Herbert Butterfield than they were prepared for, which was not at all.

ix

A B B R E V I ATI O NS

CCF CPHG CUL BP IRD KCL, LHCMA NR ODNB TLS UCD U&LR

Congress for Cultural Freedom Communist Party Historians Group Cambridge University Library, Butterfield Papers Information Research Department King’s College, London, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives New Reasoner Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Times Literary Supplement University College, Dublin (Archive) Universities and Left Review

xi

Introduction

HOW DO YOU GET FROM IRELAND IN THE 1790S TO BRITAIN IN THE 1950S? AN EXPLANATION This book has its origins in an intended biography of the historian of eighteenth-century British politics, Sir Lewis Namier, in whom I  was interested for mainly negative reasons. My first historical work traced popular politicization in Ireland in the 1790s, or, put another way, it dealt with the content and dissemination of political ideas and their impact upon political mobilization and action.1 That book belongs in the first instance in an Irish historiographical context, but it was inspired and informed also by British Marxist ‘history from below’, especially by the seminal studies of George Rudé on crowds, riots and politicization, by E.J. Hobsbawm on ‘social banditry’ and ‘primitive rebels’ and, most especially, by E.P. Thompson’s magisterial Making of the English Working Class (1963). Such subject matter held no attraction for Lewis Namier, who once asked a student doing research on the sans-culottes, ‘why are you interested in those bandits?’ To him ‘ordinary men’ were members of parliament.2 Clearly the history of parliament and of elites is as valuable as the history of Painite revolutionaries, and the detailed, high-precision and enduring quality of Namierite scholarship cannot be gainsaid. The problem, it seemed to me, lay with its assumptions about how politics actually worked. Namierland is inhabited by politicians who are devoid, except 1

Cold War Culture

at a trivial rhetorical level, of political principle; untouched by public opinion, they are driven rather by the frank pursuit of patronage and preferment. From the standpoint of history from below, or from the streets of west Belfast where I grew up during the Troubles, such discounting of political ideology as a factor in political behaviour appears cavalier, wrong-headed and reductive. Namier burnt his papers shortly before his death and as my doubts as to the viability of writing a full-dress biography mounted, new questions pointing in new directions persisted in presenting themselves. Why did Namier’s reputation reach such heights in the 1950s? As Noel Annan, chronicler in Our Age of the great and the good who ran the country at that time, recalled, ‘Namier obsessed us, even after his death’.3 Why did the orthodoxies of the near-monopolistic ‘Namier Inc.’ (as one journalist dubbed it) give way so rapidly in the 1960s?4 The rise and decline of the Namier School may be in part explained by developments within historiography, the impact of Herbert Butterfield’s dissenting George III and the Historians (1957), for example. Historians, however, contextualize everything, including each other. What were the cultural, intellectual, social and political frameworks within which historians wrote and argued in the 1950s? What did they assume? Attempting to answer these questions thus turned a projected biography of Namier into a study of British intellectuals (including prominently Namier himself) in a Cold War climate. But first, some cautionary tales. Perhaps the best-known advice on the need to contextualize historical writing is E.H. Carr’s injunction, delivered in What is History? (1961): ‘before you study the history, study the historian […] before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment. The historian, being an individual, is also a product of history and of society’.5 At undergraduate level, and despite Geoffrey Elton’s best efforts,6 Carr’s slim, user-friendly, disarmingly self-confident volume long held the field in historiography-for-beginners. As students in Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1980s preparing for the untaught ‘General Paper’ (essentially an historiography, or as Aidan Clarke, who set and marked it, once let slip, a codology paper), we were warned wearily against citing Carr, who stood accused  – rightly  – of determinism. I now see that Clarke’s boredom with annually regurgitated Carr mixed with an annihilating scepticism about the role of ‘impersonal forces’ in 2

Introduction

human affairs. As usual, he had a point. For instance, Butterfield’s The Englishman and his History (1944) has typically been seen as a product of wartime patriotism. The inference seems obvious enough. However, we now know that it is a bit less straightforward than that, and that much of the book drew on recycled lectures written shortly before the war.7 Carr asserts that Namier’s vision of eighteenth-century English politics is that of ‘a continental conservative’. In a delayed-action, rather testy response – Carr’s book, he says, might more accurately be called What History Is  – the American historian J.H. Hexter points out that his colleague Robert Walcott, neither a European nor a conservative, chose to become a Namierite.8 How then is his choice to be explained? In 1948, shortly before taking up a junior lectureship at University College, London, Ian Christie wrote to the chair of the history department, Sir John Neale, that ‘Mr A.J.P. Taylor here [Oxford] has said he will procure me an introduction to Professor Namier in order that I may get advice on my proposed subject of research’. ‘Thus Christie became a Namierite’.9 Such detail signals the pitfalls and seductions of automatic contextualizing, and the importance to the writing of history of personality, individual experience, professional socialization, the inner dynamics of scholarly discourse and, not least, of accident. But Carr, in my view, and on balance, got it right. No historian or other intellectual can ever completely escape the conditions and presuppositions of his time and place. British historians of the 1950s lived in Britain in the 1950s. (A note. Sometimes it may appear in what follows that I use Britain and British interchangeably with England and English. In fact, as a practitioner of the ‘new British history’, I am keenly aware of the distinction, thus when I  write ‘English’ when strictly it should be ‘British’, I  do so deliberately, based on a judgement, in each instance, that ‘English’ better conveys what I mean to say.)

3

1

CULTURE AND SOCIETY IN BRITAIN: HISTORIANS AND OTHER INTELLECTUALS IN THE 1950S The calendar and historical ‘ages’ or ‘periods’ only rarely coincide. And so we have on offer, for example, a ‘long eighteenth century’ (beginning in 1688) and a ‘short twentieth century’ (ending in 1989). One account of Britain in the 1960s starts, for several good reasons, in 1956, whereas from another standpoint the 1950s drew to a close in 1963, Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban And the Beatles’ first LP.1

Did, then, a distinctive ‘Fifties’ ever exist? Many who experienced them directly were in no doubt, held clear views on the period’s political contours and cultural characteristics, and were all too happy saying goodbye to all that. In the summer of 1959 the Marxist historian and polemicist, E.P. Thompson, observed that ‘we have been living through the decade of the Great Apathy’ and, the following year, edited a collection of essays entitled Out of Apathy. Fellow New Left luminary Perry Anderson later recalled an ‘anguished, parched decade’;2 a judgement passed in hindsight, it is nonetheless corroborated over and over again by voices from what J.B. Priestley called in 1953 ‘the wilderness’. From his weekly column in the New Statesman Priestley offered his thoughts 4

Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s

Figure 1.1 The consumer society. Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956).

on the dullness of politics, the exhaustion of economics, and the general boredom of people who ‘spend their evenings watching idiotic parlour games on TV’, and who ‘are aware, if only obscurely, of this central vacuum’.3 Was it really all so grim? Expressions of political and cultural frustration tended to emanate from the left, and Norman MacKenzie (also of the New Statesman) complained of ‘a paralysis of socialist thinking’, albeit in the introduction to a volume of polemic, Conviction (1958), which in itself signalled fresh energies in radical quarters.4 Of course an alternative version of the later 1950s presented itself: a brash new world of consumer goods and advertising, commercial television and espresso bars, captured and eviscerated so brilliantly by Richard Hamilton’s seminal ‘pop art’ collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956) and recorded for posterity in Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s 5

Cold War Culture

claim that most of the British people had ‘never had it so good’. And ‘in real terms consumer expenditure rose by 45 per cent between 1952 and 1964.’5 Had, then, the heralds of a ‘New Elizabethan Age’ at the time of the coronation been right after all?

CORONATION

On 2 June 1953, the historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin, watched from an upper-floor window of the Daily Telegraph offices in Piccadilly as the coronation procession of Queen Elizabeth II passed by on its way to Westminster Abbey. ‘Nobody would quite have thought,’ he wrote a few days after, ‘that this sober, unimaginative and essentially prosy country could rise to such a pitch of national excitement over this dark mystical Byzantine ceremony, which seems in a sense so out of keeping with the reticent, moderate, good taste-seeking undemonstrative English character.’6 If the quasi-religious rhetoric now sounds overblown, it is in fact quite mild by the standards of the day. The periodical Time and Tide carried an article on the Royal Family – ‘a symbol of inestimable importance in the life of the nation and commonwealth’ – entitled, simply, ‘The Cynosure’ (defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘something that attracts attention by its brilliancy or beauty; a centre of attraction, interest, or admiration’). From this the reader learns that the ‘the monarch, the person in whom it is embodied and the family which surrounds that person’ is nothing less than a ‘miracle for which we cannot be sufficiently thankful’. Meanwhile, over at the Spectator they were imagining that ‘there might in some sense come a second Elizabethan greatness’. Not even the inevitable downpour of rain could dampen the palpable sense of national renewal, a sense boosted by Edmund Hillary’s timely ‘conquest’ of Mount Everest, news of which reached London on the morning of 2 June.7 Reverential effusions were, in the circumstances, to be expected:  a people with a strong sense of ‘tradition’, an institution, monarchy, with a flair for ornate, spectacular, ceremonial, and an excuse for national celebration in a time of drab, still-lingering, postwar austerity, combined to whip up ‘coronation fever’. Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman 6

Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s

Figure 1.2 The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, 2 June 1953.

and, in 1937, author of The Magic of Monarchy, took a rather relaxed view of the festivities, noting that in 1953, newspapers find that the public appetite for monarchy is unlimited […] the public is not under any illusions that we can be saved by magic or that the coronation is more than a royal carnival. In that spirit, without silliness or solemnity, we can enjoy ourselves.8

That is not, however, the spirit in which the sociologist, Edward Shils, approached the matter, as he pontificated solemnly on ‘national communion’ and ‘moral sentiments […] at a high pitch of seriousness’.9 But while this less-than-clinical analysis by a seemingly overwrought American Anglophile has little or no value as ‘sociology’, the assumptions and attitudes which it hides and displays are of interest to the historian of British intellectuals in the 1950s, a subject on which Shils himself wrote.10 First there is the issue of ideology, which, Shils announced, had come to an end in the 1950s – come to an end, that is, in the ‘free world’. Turning 7

Cold War Culture

their hand to political theory the editors of the British Medical Journal believed that just as the Crown transcends politics, so British politics are above ideology. ‘In these days,’ they announced, ‘when various “ideologies” spread their ugly mantles over bewildered populations the Crown shields us within its beneficent circle, securing those who look up to it against the disintegrating forces at work in so many parts of the world.’11 It did not occur to the medics or to Shils either that royalism, including the constitutional variety, is itself an ideology, as if eighteenth-century Jacobites, say, or nineteenth-century French monarchists, had been inspired by a sort of no-nonsense pragmatism. Then there is the matter of royalist sentiment shared by intellectuals, particularly historians. Herbert Butterfield, a nonconformist in religion, and a political contrarian, nonetheless considered the history and evolution of monarchy a function of the English political genius: It is typical of the English that, retaining what was a good in the past, but reconstructing it – reconstructing the past itself if necessary – they have clung to the monarchy, and have maintained it down to the present, while changing its import and robbing it of the power to do harm. It is typical of them that from their 17th-century revolution itself and from the very experiment of an interregnum, they learned that there was still a subtle utility in kingship and they determined to reconstitute their traditions again, lest they should throw away the good with the bad. In all this there is something more profound than a mere sentimental unwillingness to part with a piece of ancient pageantry – a mere disinclination to sacrifice the ornament of a royal court. Here we have a token of the alliance of Englishmen with their history which has prevented the uprooting of things that have been organic to the development of the country; which has enriched our institutions with echoes and undertones; and which has proved – against the presumption and recklessness of blind revolutionary overthrows – the happier form of co-operation with Providence.12

Butterfield’s ‘old enemy’13 Lewis Namier, by reputation the foremost historian at the time, could not (according to J.H. Plumb) conduct a conversation for more than ten minutes without one ‘realizing the depth and strength of his conservatism or his veneration for monarchy, 8

Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s

aristocracy and tradition’.14 In his 1952 Romanes Lecture Namier endorsed Churchill’s view of constitutional monarchy as ‘of all the institutions which have grown up among us over the centuries […] the most deeply founded and dearly cherished’, adding his own opinion that it is ‘anchored both in the thought and affection of the nation’.15 The Crown symbolized and cemented national unity and, he believed, together with a civil service which stood outside party politics, a Crown which stood above them guaranteed political stability and continuity. It may be that Plumb (himself a friend of Princess Margaret) is an unreliable witness on the subject of Namier  – by whom he felt slighted at the beginning of his career, and in whose shadow he long toiled. Having been Plumb’s ally during the 1950s, in 1964 – four years after the great man’s death – he wrote that ‘it is a sad comment on the state of historical writing in England that his reputation should have been so high’.16 It may also be the case that Plumb did not always let facts get in the way of a good story, but, because they are good, some stories bear repeating. At a meeting which he attended in the early 1950s with Namier, Sir John Neale and others at Trinity College, Cambridge, to discuss the nascent History of Parliament project, ‘one famous quarrel lasted a long afternoon’ and was about capitalization – should it be Duke of Bedford or duke of Bedford, Queen of England or queen of England. Neale argued at length for the lower case; with mounting rage Namier would not have it, his eyes glowed, his voice rasped; Neale pressed and Stenton slept. At last, after an hour or two spent on probable savings in costs, difficulties for proof-readers and other red herrings, Namier growled in his strong Polish-English – ‘I will not have my Queen with a small “q”. You can show your lack of respect if you like. I will not. The volumes must differ.’17

There is no question on which side of that debate Namier’s good friend John Wheeler-Bennett would have stood. The official biographer of George VI, Wheeler-Bennett remarked that royal biography, like matrimony, was an enterprise ‘not to be entered into inadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly and in fear of God’.18 John Brooke, Namier’s closest collaborator, and afterwards keeper of his flame, went on to write the official biography of George III.19 9

Cold War Culture

Figure 1.3 Monarchy merchandized 1950s style.

Deference to monarchy is an expression of English nationalism. Namier, by origin a Polish Jew, shed no tears over the fall of the Tsar, the Emperor or the Kaiser. Berlin, by origin a Latvian Jew, pondered what the coronation said about the ‘English’, not the British, character. Butterfield saw the providential survival of monarchy as evidence of ‘the alliance of Englishmen with their history’. Royalism is also intrinsically conservative. Namier described himself as a ‘Tory Radical’. Yet many on the left, like Kingsley Martin, while eschewing Shilsian pieties and excoriating the ‘Establishment’, on the ‘apex’ of which rested the Crown,20 conceded that hereditary monarchy served some useful purpose. In the 1950s Isaiah – soon to be Sir Isaiah – Berlin even considered himself, with his signature and verbose equivocation, a man of the left who is ‘on the extreme right-wing edge of the left-wing movement, both philosophically and politically, and rightly regarded with suspicion by the orthodox members of the left-wing movement’.21 Republicans were presumed not to exist and must indeed have been thin on the ground. However, when Berlin accepted his knighthood (for, it was said, ‘services to conversation’)22 he received a rebuke from his Oxford colleague, the labour historian G.D.H. 10

Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s

Cole, ‘for having “sold out” to some vague establishment’, and for visiting ‘the Palace inhabited by “That Woman” ’.23 Throughout the 1950s the leftist literary theorist Raymond Williams made notes on what would eventually become his Keywords: ‘an inquiry into a vocabulary:  a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society’.24 Included in his compilation are ‘communism’, ‘democracy’, ‘imperialism’, ‘liberal’, ‘nationalist’ and ‘radical’; absent are ‘republican’ and ‘monarchy’. Perhaps the latter institution was so tightly stitched into the fabric of culture and society that Williams’ searching critical eye scarcely noticed it? Giddy talk of a second Elizabethan age soon fizzled out and in the years ahead the monarchy even came under public attack, most trenchantly as ‘a ridiculous anachronism’.25 But back in 1953 the coronation – for all its flummery and transience  – did affirm ‘traditional’ British values:  patriotic, deferential, conformist. Thompson’s age of apathy, Anderson’s ‘parched decade’ and Priestley’s ‘vacuum’ did, after all, register three consecutive Conservative Party general election victories in 1951, 1955 and 1959, while throughout this period Lord Beaverbrook’s right-wing, middle-brow Daily Express continued to enjoy the widest circulation of any British newspaper. Neither intellectual climate nor institutional culture encouraged the radical voice. The Institute of Historicial Research ‘for several years’ refused to subscribe to the Marxisant journal Past and Present, launched in 1952. Eric Hobsbawm, a member of the Communist Party Historians Group, recalled that ‘in the time of the Cold War, we were particularly pressed by the tendency to isolate us and establish strongly anti-Marxist orthodoxies in history  – Namierism, for instance, as then practiced’.26

THE C O L D WAR A N D T HE ‘ E N D O F I D E O LOGY’

In 1987 Sidney Hook, philosopher and unrepentant Cold Warrior (of the New York ex-Trotskyist sub-species), recalled that the ‘End of Ideology’ thesis ‘expressed a hope rather than an actual state of affairs’.27 At one level this is obviously true: in the 1950s ideology did not come to an end. At 11

Cold War Culture

another it smacks of self-serving revisionism: intellectual – or cultural – Cold Warriors did in fact believe that their slogan did, indeed, describe ‘an actual state of affairs’. In Edward Shils’ upbeat report on the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) conference held in Milan in 1955 – entitled ‘The end of ideology?’ and published in the British Cold War house journal, Encounter  – he deprecates ‘doctrinairism, […] ideological possession’ and all ‘comprehensive explicit system[s] of beliefs’ before noting that ‘it seemed to me that the conference had in part the atmosphere of a post-victory ball’.28 Annan’s verdict on the 1950s generation’s unbearable self-satisfaction and effortless confidence sounds an altogether more convincing note than Hook’s ex post facto qualification.29 Had he lived, would George Orwell, who coined the term ‘Cold War’ in October 1945, and who died in 1950, have attended that year’s first (as it later transpired CIA-funded) Congress for Cultural Freedom conference in Berlin? There to strut the platform with those whom the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper branded ‘professional ex-communist boulevardiers’  – Arthur Koestler, Franz Borkenau and James Burnham?30 Orwell after all shared in their inveterate anti-Stalinism, knew Koestler well and had given much thought and notice  – not all of it approving  – to Burnham’s Managerial Revolution (1941). The answer is probably not. Like the lower-case tory, Trevor-Roper, Orwell would surely have recoiled in distaste from such un-English stridency. According to national myth (the term is Orwell’s)31 the English political style, or ‘genius’, successfully navigates ideological extremes, and so in the 1950s an innate moderation spared Britain the excesses of McCarthyite loyalty oaths, blacklists and witch-hunts. Thus a handful of at-risk Americans – the film director Joseph Losey, the classical historian Moses Finley (both of whom had come to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee) and the sociologist Norman Birnbaum  – settled in the less politically fraught Britain of that era. Cold War pressures exerted themselves nonetheless. Initially Losey resorted to pseudonyms in order to get work in the British film and television industries. ‘To the best of my knowledge’, states Hobsbawm, ‘no known communists were appointed to university posts for the ten years or so from 1948, nor, if already in teaching posts, were they promoted’.32 His own obstructed career is, of course, evidence of systematic, politically motivated, institutional discrimination.33 12

Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s

Again Britain, as Hobsbawm himself readily concedes, was not by a long stretch the USA; whereas he had his mail opened, the young Natalie Zemon Davis, future professor of history at Princeton, had her passport confiscated.34 Meanwhile, both Orwell and Trevor-Roper (who despised McCarthyism) supplied British intelligence agencies with information on the politically suspect.35 Orwell’s writings, his late fiction  – especially the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four  – along with his journalism, essays and reviews, resonated powerfully in the literary and political culture of 1950s Britain. ‘Apart from incessantly hearing his name spoken’, remarked (or perhaps ‘complained’ is a better word) the novelist Kingsley Amis in 1957, ‘we can hardly pass a month without reading an article on him’.36 Above all, Nineteen Eighty-Four did more, by far, than any other book, fictional or non-fictional, to popularize the concept, and warn against the consequences, of totalitarianism. According to theories of totalitarianism, totalitarian regimes share certain fundamental features. First, the elimination of all (legal) political opposition – the one-party state. Second, the collapsing of all distinction between state and civil society, as ideological conformity is imposed upon churches, trade unions, youth movements, sporting organizations, schools and universities and, crucially, mass communications. Finally, even the individual private sphere is penetrated and controlled by the state, a function executed in Orwell’s ‘Oceania’ by the ‘Thought Police’. In brief, totalitarianism is the never-sleeping enemy of freedom. First used to describe Mussolini’s Fascist Italy in 1926, the term ‘totalitarian’ was soon applied also to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Viewed in that way, militantly ideological and mutually antagonistic regimes or systems are held to replicate each other. The rhetoric of Herrenvolk, or international proletarian solidarity, merely masks a ruthless and unquenchable exercise of state power. Koestler makes the case deftly in the opening pages of his novel, Darkness at Noon. When the old Bolshevik Rubashov is awakened by the early-morning knock of the Soviet secret police, they interrupt his nightmare about a previous sojourn as a guest of the Gestapo. The supposed structural parallels of authoritarian regimes at mid-twentieth century is supposedly the point of Nineteen Eighty-Four and of totalitarian, and of the sibling End of Ideology, theories, generally. But in the shadow 13

Cold War Culture

of postwar geopolitics few can have mistaken the real targets: the Soviet Union and communism. Ironically, by foregrounding the structures of power and the sociology of power elites, totalitarian theorists undermine by default the political significance of the very ideology which they seek to confront. As noted, a seminal text of such structural-sociological analysis – Burnham’s Managerial Revolution  – caught Orwell’s attention, and held it. Orwell found much to fault in Burnham’s argument, fragile assumptions and facile predictions, but he was clearly influenced by some of his ideas nevertheless. For example, anyone who has read Nineteen Eighty-Four will recognize instantly the shape of future geopolitics as predicted by Burnham and summarized by Orwell: The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres of Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.37

Burnham’s thesis postulates that while capitalism is doomed, it would not be replaced by socialism; rather, in increasingly complex, modernizing, societies, the mere owner will cede power and control of the means of production to the technician, the bureaucrat – the manager. Moreover these inexorable, power-driven, processes transcend ideological divides, and were at the time at an advanced stage in both Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. As Orwell observed correctly, none of this was entirely novel.38 Burnham drew on the theory of elites elaborated by Gaetano Mosca, Robert Michels (who formulated ‘the iron law of oligarchy’) and Vilfredo Pareto; and echoed other, more contemporary, critiques of ‘Red fascism’ 39 – a construct which, unlike the ubiquitous ‘totalitarianism’ in the 1950s, did not catch on. Yet although not new, versions of Burnham’s ‘managerialism’ came to match the Cold War temper of the times and serve the theoretical and polemical needs of the ‘free world’ locked in confrontation with the Soviet bloc. 14

Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s

Totalitarian discourse in this period gained international purchase. Burnham, Hook and Shils were American, Borkenau, Austrian, Koestler, Hungarian, Raymond Aron, French, and Jacob Talmon – author of The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952)  – by way of Poland, Israeli. Orwell, however, was English. Indeed the inspiration for Orwell’s politics is to be found less in his wide reading of political literature – much of it done for the purpose of book reviewing  – than in his celebration of Englishness. To Orwell Englishness, among other things, consisted in undemonstrative patriotism, pluck, endless cups of tea, aversion to abstract thought and to garlic and – its defining characteristic – decency.40 Ever-suspect ‘intellectuals’, on the other hand, ‘took their cookery from Paris and their politics from Moscow’. Similar sentimental and impressionistic (or as the postmodernist would have it, essentialist) reflections on ‘national character’ swamp the related no-nonsense effusions of Priestley, Butterfield, Arthur Bryant, A.L. Rowse and Denis Brogan (a Scot), for all of whom a practical, empirical, that is to say non-theoretical, cast of mind is foundational. From their perspective, ideology could not have ended in England because it never got started. These conceptions of English ‘national character’ had distinguished intellectual pedigrees, stretching back by way of Matthew Arnold to Edmund Burke and before. On the left Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson discerned a cognate lineage in the tradition of cultural criticism represented by William Morris and John Ruskin. Tempting as it is to dismiss such data-free reflections as so much self-regarding romantic guff, Orwell himself makes the telling point that ‘myths which are believed in tend to become true’; they become, as it were, ‘the myths we live by’.41 And those English myths, which he helped so skilfully to cultivate, vaccinated English politics and intellectual culture, he believed, against the seductions of foreign ideology and the claims of overarching political systems. ‘People who had theories,’ in Annan’s dry recollection, ‘needed to be watched’.42 Finally, it is significant that Orwell advanced his critique of totalitarianism from, as he saw it, the position of the democratic left. Williams misread the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four as an ex-socialist. Rather he was a vigilant anti-Stalinist who advocated a democratic socialist revolution grounded in popular English values and traditions. In that respect 15

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he, once again, anticipates the rhetoric and politics of the 1950s. After all, he had minted the term ‘Cold War’ in his column in the Labour Party’s Tribune. Likewise, Labour MP R.H.S (Dick) Crossman co-edited and introduced The God that Failed (1950), a period classic of the ‘I married a communist’ genre. As a leading figure between 1945 and 1947 in the ‘Keep Left’, third force group within the Labour movement, Crossman had impeccable socialist credentials. ‘Keep Left’ argued for a third force in international relations; for an Anglo-French-led social democratic European bloc, offering a middle way between Soviet communism and American capitalism. But as Cold War tensions mounted and Marshall Aid dollars flowed into the dilapidated British economy, the movement quickly faded. It proved not possible in the circumstances to keep a principled distance from US foreign policy.43 Crossman resigned himself to hard political realities; those on the revisionist (from 1955, Gaitskellite) Labour right  – Anthony Crosland, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins  – were enthusiastic ‘Atlanticists’. And so, just as Crossman accepted the fact of American military power and economic might, the Americans soon recognized the necessity of working with the British Labour Party, and with the social democratic left in western Europe generally. Indeed on the Cold War’s cultural front, the non-communist left became the CIA-CCF’s unwitting (and not-so-unwitting) ‘asset’ of choice.44 In Britain, Labour right revisionism and the End of Ideology theory rested, as any orthodox Marxist would assume, on the postwar Keynesian consensus on economic policy. Keynesianism repudiated the axiom that by operation of the laws of supply and demand the free market would, in the long run, always correct itself. But even if self-correction could be relied upon, in the long run, as John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, we are all dead. On the contrary, full employment could be created by the ‘pump-priming’ of the economy through planned state investment and sustained thereafter by means of ‘demand-management’. The scope for implementing Keynesian policies expanded exponentially in postwar Britain as Attlee’s Labour government built the mixed economy – nationalizing the steel, coal and railway industries – and founded the welfare state, most crucially the National Health Service. It should be remembered, however, that two of the pillars of the public sector edifi ce, the BBC 16

Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s

and government-funded universities, pre-date Attlee and Bevan’s very British revolution, as does Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act. The alarm occasioned by ‘socialist’ legislation, especially among the medical profession, should not be under-estimated. ‘The country won’t stand for it!’ spluttered a London clubman as the news of Labour’s 1945 electoral landslide sank in. Hence the title of the American journalist Virginia Cowles’ book, No Cause for Alarm  – dedicated to ‘My Tory Father’ and aimed in part at an American audience caught in the grip of the ‘Red Scare’. The Labour reformers were no Bolsheviks, she reassured her state-side readers, reasonably enough. The new dispensation derived not from programmatic world-turned-upside-down zealotry but from the best English traditions  – celebrated in Butterfield’s The Englishman and his History  – of prudent, managed change, eased by the fact that so many men of all parties share a common background [and this] has had a profound effect in narrowing contentions between the various leaders of political thought. And for this reason Oxford must take large credit for the civilized way in which Britain’s social revolution is being carried out.45

At mid-decade, under a Tory administration, Shils argued that The practical conservation by the Conservative government of most of Labour’s innovations has helped to blur the edges of socialist ideology. The extremes of planning or of laissez-faire are not espoused in Britain today by very many intellectuals […] A consensus of matter-offactness has settled over discussions of economic policy. This evaporation of ideology.46

Where Shils in the same article wrote, characteristically, of an ‘extraordinary state of collective self-satisfaction’,47 Anthony Crosland in his The Future of Socialism (1956) was rather more circumspect. The gist, however, is essentially the same: We have grown rather less assured than we used to be in the face both of our limited knowledge of how the economic system works, and the 17

Cold War Culture

number and heterogeneity of the variables to be taken into account. Most of what can usefully be said is ad hoc to specific situations rather than deducible from, or assimilable to, a generalized theory […] [M]ost people have moved to the centre; and the debate is no longer an a priori one, conducted in terms of fundamental first principles, but an empirical one, in terms rather more or rather less of particular situations.48

Again, Annan evokes the mood of the time brilliantly: We recognized that the fifties had looked very different […] in the fifties. We then radiated effortless confidence […] full employment had been achieved, growth assured, life was becoming easier, more interesting and rewarding, and poverty was receding. All that was required was to spread benefits wider still. Keynes stood at the gate of heaven looking down at the satanic Marx tumbling into hell, banished forever. A touch of the brakes now, then charge up and put your foot down. The mastery of the economy had been achieved.49

The London School of Economics reportedly ‘had a machine which demonstrated the economic system electrically by lighting up buttons in different colours so that if, for instance, inflationary pressure was increased other things happened’.50 In 1954 an article in The Economist magazine personified and popularized the notion of a broad economic policy consensus by inventing ‘Mr Butskell’, a composite of the then Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, R.A. Butler, and of his predecessor and Labour Party shadow spokesman, Hugh Gaitskell. ‘Both of us, it is true,’ Butler later affirmed, ‘spoke the language of Keynesianism. But we spoke it with different accents and with differing emphasis.’51 Political conviction survived, it is also true, on both the Tory right and on the Labour left. No one thought of inventing ‘Mr Bevoll’, a too implausible and unstable compound of Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan and Enoch Powell, for example, and, for the time being anyway, the centre held. ‘Butskellism’ quickly became a byword for the dominant technocratic, problem-solving ethos of the age. A comparable empirical spirit prevailed in mainstream philosophy and discourse on political ideas. Macroeconomics addressed (or so the story went) a set of solvable technical problems; Logical Positivism 18

Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s

confined meaningful philosophical enquiry to verifiable statements and consigned the non-verifiable – metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, theology – and ‘system-builders’ to the knackers yard of pseudo-problems and nonsense. Asked shortly after the publication in 1936 of his groundbreaking book on Language, Truth and Logic, ‘what comes next?’, A.J. Ayer replied, ‘there’s no next. Philosophy has come to an end. Finished’.52 His Oxford colleague, Trevor-Roper, noted that with the composure of a scientist proving his experiments, Freddie Ayer first states his solvent principles, and then calmly watches while the whole metaphysical world, its cloud-capp’d towers and gorgeous palaces, slides majestically and obediently away into inevitable and predicted ruin.53

In the 1950s the political implications of the end of philosophy were not lost on the parliamentary Labour Party’s crusading anti-communist, Christopher Mayhew. When an undergraduate two decades before, that ‘small book’ ‘revealed, to my immense satisfaction, that the works of Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant  – indeed all metaphysics, all theology, and all moral philosophy  – were a load of rubbish. I  was enthralled. The scales fell from my eyes.’ And of course, to those eyes, the rigours of Logical Positivism readily dispatched the deadly illusions of Marxist doctrine.54 Exact scientists, or at least those who took notice, likewise viewed metaphysics with disdain. ‘They regard it as a major intellectual virtue, to know what not to think about. They might touch their hats to linguistic analysis, as a relatively honourable way of wasting time; not so existentialism.’55 Ayer’s sense of having finally broken the code of his discipline matches Keynesian confidence that all previous economic theories had been rendered obsolete and, as we shall see, Namierism’s lofty condescension towards pre-Namierite historiography. One commentator linked Logical Positivism with Burnham’s ethics-free managerial revolution, and in terms of tone, methods and claims it enjoyed good neighbourly relations with the End Of (unverifiable, value-charged) Ideology thesis.56 Although acknowledging its Viennese and Wittgensteinian origins, Maurice Cranston – citing Russell, Hume, Berkeley, Locke and others  – argued that Logical Positivism 19

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nonetheless belongs to ‘an essentially English’ empirical tradition, as wholly characteristic of ‘the English mind’ as ‘the recent trend away from comprehensive system-building towards piece-meal study of detail’.57 The articulation, if not the practice of ‘piece-meal social engineering’, he might have added, owed much to another Viennese settled in England: Karl Popper and his The Open Society and its Enemies (1945). ‘Political philosophy,’ Peter Laslett announced in 1956, was ‘for the moment anyway, dead.’58

THE C O N G RESS F O R C U LT U R A L F R E E D OM AN D EN C O U N TE R

The anti-communism of the intellectuals, though authentic, was not, at the level of public engagement, entirely spontaneous or organic. Nor, on the other hand, was it simply paid for from scratch and mobilized by secretly funded CIA surrogates, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), its affiliates and publications. Retrospective Anglo-American accounts of the ‘open secret’ of CIA subvention of the cultural Cold War illustrate the complexity of the situation. During the early 1950s Sidney Hook ‘had heard, like almost everyone else, that in some way the CIA was involved in funding congress’. Everyone mentioned it, even though no one had any hard evidence. During the meetings of the executive committee, I was surprised and somewhat repelled by the incuriosity and indifference of most of its members to the financial reports of the acting treasurer […] in my own mind I had no doubt that the CIA was making some contributions to the financing of the congress […] but one thing I do know. No matter what the source of its funding, it had absolutely nothing to do with any congress decision or policy […] Was it immoral for the congress to have continued its work under the suspicion of a government subsidy [a] suspicion of which everyone was aware? My answer is a flat and unequivocal ‘no’. The intellectual independence of the congress was not affected in the slightest. There is not a single action that this congress took or failed to take that could be attributed to the fact that it was subsidized in part indirectly by United States funds. 20

Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s

‘The morality of the relation between the congress and the CIA was one thing,’ concludes Hook, ‘its political wisdom another. In the perspective of hindsight, there is little doubt about its political unwisdom.’59 ‘I did not in the slightest object to American sources supplying the money,’ attests Isaiah Berlin; ‘I was (and am) pro-American and anti-Soviet, and if the source had been declared I would not have minded in the least […] What I and others like me minded very much was that a periodical [Encounter] which claimed to be independent, over and over again, turned out to be in the pay of American secret Intelligence.’60 Finally, Irving Kristol, between 1953 and 1958 American co-editor, with the English poet Stephen Spender, of Encounter, admits that had he known at the time about CIA subvention of the CCF and of his magazine he would not have taken the job. Not, he hastens to add, because he disapproved of the CIA or of secret subsidies (at certain times, in certain places, under certain conditions, for specific and limited purposes) […] No, I would have refused […] for two reasons. First, because I was (and am) exceedingly jealous of my reputation as an independent writer and thinker. Second because, while in the army during World War II, I had taken an oath to myself that I would never, never again work as a functionary in a large organization, especially not the US government. It is an oath I have so far kept inviolate – except for those five years when I was, unwittingly, on the CIA payroll.

How, Kristol asks himself, could he have been so unwitting? Like Hook and Berlin he too had heard the rumours. Indeed both he and Spender had quizzed their main benefactor, the Farfield Foundation’s president, Julius Fleischmann, about CIA involvement, a charge which he rejected ‘indignantly’. In light of these assurances, the obvious interest of communists and fellow travellers in spreading damaging accusations and, not least, the editorial freedom which he enjoyed, Kristol chose not to credit the (he assumed malicious) gossip. ‘I may have been, technically, a “dupe” of the CIA; Encounter was not.’61 Spender, ‘subsidized with American dollars and full of suppressed conscience’, appears not to have been quite so jaunty.62 Founded in 1950, the American-made, Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom propagated ‘western’ values, tried to counteract 21

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anti-American sentiment in western Europe, and warned against the dangers of Soviet-style totalitarianism. To these ends it bankrolled concerts, art exhibitions and politically front-loaded literature, including Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. CCF-supported magazines were published in Berlin (Der Monat, which serialized The God that Failed),63 Rome (Tempo Presente), Paris (Preuves) and London (Encounter). Der Monat’s early launch in 1948, and the location of the CCF headquarters in Paris, indicate London’s secondary importance among CIA priorities. West Germany stood at the Cold War’s actual front line; both France and Italy had formidable, electorally significant, communist parties – Britain did not. Britain’s comparative political stability, the smallness of its Communist Party and the NATO-subscribing foreign policy of its Labour government help explain the initially low level of British participation in CCF activities and the comparatively late launch of Encounter in 1953. In fact the English contribution to the first CCF international conference, held in Berlin in 1950 at precisely the moment when the Cold War turned hot in Korea, was decidedly ‘off message’. Two English delegates, A.J. Ayer and Hugh Trevor-Roper, successfully obstructed the adoption of a Koestler–Burnham–Borkenau resolution as too shrill, too McCarthyite and, in Trevor-Roper’s observation, too congenial to an ex-Nazi audience. Almost 40  years later Hook expressed still palpable outrage at Trevor-Roper’s ‘flagrantly unfair account of the Berlin congress’. But whereas Hook attended ‘the most exciting [of] conference[s]’, at which Koestler delivered ‘provocative […] speeches, which reflected the fusion of political passions and insight that characterized his writings during that decade’, Trevor-Roper merely sucked some ‘hot air’ out of the Cold War.64 With characteristic zest for controversy – an attribute he shared with his sparring partner on the left, A.J.P. Taylor – Trevor-Roper remained unfazed by party-line disapproval. ‘We were very unpopular,’ he wrote shortly afterwards, ‘especially as we won in the end […] no more aeroplanes, I’m afraid, will be sent to fetch us, in luxury, to international congresses: at least of that kind. But I enjoyed the fight!’65 From the standpoint of the CCF’s ‘mission’, Trevor-Roper’s stance proved prescient. In the political climate of western Europe, and especially that of Britain, ‘professional ex-communist boulevardiers’, though 22

Historians and Other Intellectuals in the 1950s

the most witting, were not the most useful of ‘assets’. Full-blown McCarthyism offended English sensibilities. Koestler-types did not inspire confidence, or not at any rate Trevor-Roper’s, who took the view that the struggle against totalitarianism should be conducted ‘by those who have never swallowed, and therefore never needed to re-vomit, that obscurantist doctrinal rubbish whose residue can never be fully discharged from the system’.66 The British affiliate of the CCF, the British Society for Cultural Freedom (BSCF), founded in 1951, with Foreign Office, Information Research Department (IRD) as well as CIA funding, avoided McCarthyite vulgarities. Members included the historian Max Beloff; the conservative philosopher, Michael Oakeshott; the journalist and British Intelligence old hand, Malcolm Muggeridge; the publisher and author Victor Gollancz; and the front ranks of the revisionist, Atlanticist, Labour right, among them Denis Healey. Healey later contributed to the New York-based New Leader  – a periodical hostile to Bevanite Labour  – and acted as point of contact between the Labour right and Adam Watson at the IRD. It was Watson, a committed, well-connected Atlanticist, who ‘commissioned’ Orwell’s now notorious list of suspected communists and fellow travellers active in British public and cultural life.67 In contrast to British under-representation at Berlin in 1950, British Labour Party delegates – Healey, Roy Jenkins, Crossman and, especially, Crosland  – played a prominent role at the CCF conference in Milan in 1955. There Crosland met the American sociologist Daniel Bell, usually, though erroneously, credited with coining the phrase ‘The End of Ideology’.68 The BSCF silently wound down upon the appearance in October 1953 of the first issue of the CCF-sponsored monthly magazine, Encounter. One historian describes Encounter as ‘the house magazine of conservative intellectual orthodoxy’, while another argues that it ‘adopted a cool left-of-centre profile, promoting the emerging post-war consensus in the West on the virtue of welfare capitalism’.69 The first reading mistakenly conflates conservatism with ‘the convinced anti-communism’ of the editors:  by that point professional ex-communists were too politically nimble to back themselves onto the ideologically narrow ground of conservatism. Kristol is explicit on the right-wing social democratic colouration of Encounter, recognizing the ‘clear strategic desirability (perhaps 23

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even necessity) of such an orientation:  but I  was less than enthusiastic about it and took some satisfaction in publishing a few articles by some of the younger, more gifted British tories’.70 The first Encounter editorial avowed the absence of any dogmatic ‘line’, though not of editorial point of view. The magazine would explore, not slur over, differences of opinion. But if these professed editorial principles appeared to promise a sort of political free-for-all, the reader had only to note the welcome extended on the same page to ‘the destruction of the Marxist–Leninist creed’.71 The first issue also carried a pro-American ‘Postscript to the Rosenberg case’ and a hostile review of Isaac Deutscher’s Russia after Stalin, entitled ‘Counterfeit freedom’. The second issue offered an irony-free ‘Guide to political neuroses’ provided, aptly enough, by Arthur Koestler; and Bertrand Russell on ‘Technics and totalitarianism’. Encounter did not, however, bludgeon the reader with monotone propaganda or, at the same time, try to hide its anti-communist agenda. Rather it sought to make that agenda less obvious and more palatable by bundling it with varieties of opinion, genre and subject matter. Hard political analyses (or polemic) rubbed shoulders with short fictions, poetry, cultural commentary, historical controversy, travelogue and literary criticism. Indeed today Encounter is perhaps best remembered for Nancy Mitford’s essay on the refinements of U (for upper-class) and Non-U language. The roster of contributors – as commentators, book or film reviewers, cultural critics and essayists  – reads like a (somewhat skewed) A-list of 1950s mainly Anglo-American public intellectuals, and underscores the vitality of the magazine and its eclecticism. The roster includes American literary critics Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Dwight Macdonald, and British critics I.A. Richards (but not F.R. Leavis) and Kenneth Tynan; Borkenau, Spender, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone and the inevitable Koestler, the last five of whom had publicly recanted their Communist Party pasts (and Claud Cockburn, journalist, novelist, troublemaker, and former editor of the Daily Worker, who most certainly had not); Kristol’s ‘younger, more gifted’ tories, most prominently Peregrine Worsthorne; Gaitskellites such as Healey, Crosland  – whose Future of Socialism it excerpted  – and Gaitskell himself; Aron and Camus from France; and, indicative of a 24

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Cold War thaw towards the end of the decade, left-wing social critics Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, Marxist refugee from McCarthy’s America Norman Birnbaum, and the young maverick film-maker, Lindsay Anderson. It is a list which is diverse, impressive and might readily be expanded. It is one which testifies also to considerable editorial freedom. That freedom had limits, however. As Kristol later points out, the political reliability of the editors would have rendered CIA-CCF censorship superfluous.72 It was one thing to grant an occasional platform for the home-spun radical voices of an A.J.P. Taylor or a J.B. Priestley, but quite another to let a loose cannon like Dwight Macdonald take aim at crass American materialism. That editorial policy would not allow.73 And that, presumably, is what E.P. Thompson meant by ‘Encounterism’.74 Among the historians who wrote for Encounter were card-carrying Cold Warriors such as Hugh Seton-Watson, though most were less politically engaged. The Marxists  – Thompson, Hobsbawm, George Rudé, Christopher Hill – stayed away. All, like every other intellectual, lived in a Cold War climate, one which shaped assumptions, disrupted careers, boosted book sales, and effected research agendas, interpretation and debate. This could be stultifying to be sure, but it could also be invigorating. ‘The late 50s and 60s,’ recalls Blair Worden, was ‘a very exciting time in 17th-century studies. History had become a weapon in the Cold War battle of ideologies – how the past was interpreted had a palpable political importance.’75 History mattered.

25

2

LEWIS NAMIER AND THE HISTORIANS It is often a simple enough matter to place an historian in the contexts of his time and place. When A.J.P. Taylor remarked that ‘it passes belief that in 1952, after the years of the New Deal and years of Keynesian economics anyone can still regard deflation and a cut in unemployment benefit as the right answer to a slump’, he did so in the self-assured register of postwar welfare state consensus.1 Herbert Butterfield’s views on totalitarianism are hardly original: ‘even the blindest among us can hardly fail any longer to see that Communism and Fascism are not authentic antitheses but are twin forms of the same revolutionary and totalitarian menace’. In private he is more damning still. ‘I think that Communism,’ he wrote to his friend and former pupil, the IRD’s Adam Watson, ‘incorporates the Anti-Christ of our time, and also I  think that Communism is the prior evil that provoked Nazism and Fascism.’2 The question is, to what extent, if any, did such present tense beliefs filter understandings of the past? We already know E.H. Carr’s answer. Not surprisingly, as a Marxist, Christopher Hill’s judgements could be equally brisk. Noting (in 1980) the interest of some historians during the 1950s in the de facto theorists of the 1650s, those who abandoned royalist allegiance and embraced the new republican realities not because they were republican converts but because they were ‘realist’, Hill comments that historians had exaggerated the importance of their subjects and that 26

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their brief vogue owed less to the intrinsic intellectual merits of the theorists than to the fashion which prevailed twenty years ago for proclaiming the end of ideology. The main interest of Ascham and his like, as of the end of ideology school, lies in what both groups tell us about the world in which they wrote.3

Or again, proximate to studies of the de facto theorists is the betterknown ‘Storm over the gentry’ debate between Trevor-Roper and Lawrence Stone, described in an essay of that title by J.H. Hexter, and published  – where else?  – in Encounter in 1958. Trevor-Roper’s biographer argues (echoing Worden) that Hexter’s original essay and the correspondence that it provoked ‘shows how topical the events of the 1640s and 1650s seemed in the 1950s, when the interpretation of the causes of the English revolution seemed central to the ideological struggle between East and West’.4 Nor is it too much of a stretch to relate Thomas Cromwell, uber-bureaucrat in Geoffrey Elton’s Tudor Revolution in Government (1953), to C.P. Snow’s administrative ‘new men’. These arguments have force, but what, on the other hand, does Taylor’s off-the-peg Keynesianism tell us, if anything, about his perspectives on the nineteenth-century Struggle for Mastery in Europe? The present, of course, changes, or reinterprets, the past perpetually. The question remains, how?

L EW IS  N AM IER

At the beginning of the 1960s the writer Ved Mehta interviewed a number of prominent British historians and philosophers about recent academic controversies. These were later written up as a series of articles in The New  Yorker and published subsequently as a book, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (1961). In his final chapter Mehta advances the whopping claim that in the minds of the professional academic, he [Lewis Namier] seemed to occupy the position of God, and if they criticized him, it was often more in the spirit of theologians than in the spirit of atheists. Everywhere one turned, whether to literary, diplomatic, philosophical, 27

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or psychological historians, whether Marxist or Conservative, Namier’s name was magic.5

In his 1961 Trevelyan Lectures Carr referred to ‘one whom most of us would regard as the greatest British historian to emerge on the academic scene since World War I: Sir Lewis Namier’.6 In respect of Namier’s reputation, both Carr and Mehta, rightly, use the word ‘academic’. He never reached, nor wished to reach, a popular audience. According to his wife Julia’s biography – a sort of ghost-written memoir, based on long interviews with Namier before he died in 1960 – in 1919 the Clarendon Press asked him to write a short history of Poland, ‘Lewis’s only project for popularizing history and nothing came of it’.7 Ironically Namier – never celebrated for his sense of humour  – chose the popularizing magazine, History Today, to pronounce that ‘to popularize usually means to over-simplify. Fine shades and distinctions disappear’.8 Ian Gilmour considered him ‘the greatest British historian that the twentieth century has yet produced’, noting that the fact that he was not recognized as such by the public was his own fault. He never shared Macaulay’s ambition to displace the latest novel on the tables of young ladies with a book of his own, and he never produced a work of easy narrative that would appeal to the book-buying and library-borrowing public.9

The sales figures underline Gilmour’s view. In the 20  years after the publication of Namier’s masterwork The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III in 1929, the Macmillan Press sold only 2,000 copies.10 Butterfield’s Christianity and History (1949) sold 30,000 copies over four years; Harold Nicolson’s King George V: His Life and Reign (1952) sold 10,000 within two weeks; the buyers of the former were probably more interested in Christianity than in history though, while the sales of the latter no doubt owed more to the public appetite for royalty than to the size of the history-reading public.11 Arthur Bryant’s Age of Elegance, 1812–1822 (1950), reissued in 1954 by the Reprint Society and adopted by book clubs, achieved ‘instant sales of 227,000’. The best-selling historian of the era, however, was G.M. Trevelyan, and by the 1950s sales of his best-selling title, English Social History (1944), ‘exceeded half a million’.12 28

Lewis Namier and the Historians

Trevor-Roper considered purchasing a Rolls-Royce from the royalties earned by The Last Days of Hitler (1947) before opting for a grey Bentley.13 The feeble sales of The Structure of Politics notwithstanding, in 1950 Namier pronounced himself ‘on the best terms with my publishers, Messr’s Macmillan and co.’.14 This is not to say that he had a high-minded disregard for the rewards of the market; after all in the 1920s he had part-financed his work as an ‘independent scholar’ by moonlighting as a successful businessman, currency speculator and occasional journalist.15 Some decades later he stressed to Balliol undergraduates, Keith Thomas among them, ‘the importance of recycling anything we might one day write: one of his essays on George III had, he said, been published in five different places; and he had been paid for it on each occasion’.16 Nevertheless, Namier did write with a sense of high seriousness, and had an aversion to popular journalism. In 1957, as advisor to the prime minister – and his publisher – Harold Macmillan on the appointment of the Regius Professor of History in the University of Oxford, he offered to recommend his long-time friend A.J.P. Taylor, on condition (allegedly) that Taylor give up his television appearances and newspaper columns – activities, in Namier’s view, that were beneath the dignity of that most distinguished of chairs. Taylor refused to submit to the dictates of, as he saw it, mere snobbery. Nor, at a time when his media earnings far outstripped his academic salary, and with expensive tastes in good wine and fast cars, not to mention two families to support, could he afford to.17 Their friendship came to an end.18 A man who took great care with his writing, Namier was also attentive to the prose style of others: Taylor was ‘impatient of the careful labour of perfecting and polishing […] discovers precious stones by the handful, and puts them half-cut into circulation’; Trevor-Roper ‘combined very thorough scholarship with lightness of touch and a style which I am glad to see is not yet extinct in Oxford’;19 eschewing public engagement, in private he mocked Butterfield’s clotted prose.20 Namier’s own style was ‘polished’, exact, jargon-free. One reviewer, invoking another Pole who wrote in English, considered him ‘an historiographical Joseph Conrad’.21 Yet for all its clarity and precision Namier’s writing could be too austere (or ‘constipated’ as a hostile critic later put it).22 ‘Strip[ing] history of decoration and ornament to reveal its bare bones’23 does not perhaps present 29

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the most appetizing prospect to the lay reader. Most important, however, in suppressing the relative retail value of the ‘Namier Inc.’ product were the related deterrents of subject, specialization and technique. Namier’s core subject matter – parliamentary politics in the first years of the reign of George III – lacks the inherent drama, eventfulness and historical significance of reformations, wars and revolutions. Looking back, a perplexed Frank O’Gorman wonders ‘why did it seem so exciting, important and controversial in the 1950s and ’60s to work out whether George III was a tyrant or not?’24 At the time, the ever-mischievous Taylor likewise wondered ‘if the political maneuvers of 1760 to 1765 are worth all this pother’.25 The point is not that parliamentary politics in the early reign of George III are not worth studying, and in detail, but that it is a specialized pursuit, of interest mainly to other specialists. In retrospect Hobsbawm viewed the Namier enterprise as ‘insular’ and ‘esoteric’.26 At the time, the Namierite historian John B. Owen began to worry about overspecialization squeezing the life out of the teaching of eighteenth-century history.27 Others, even later, were less concerned. ‘In the early 1960s,’ recalls Keith Thomas, history still meant politics, the constitution, war and diplomacy, with economic history a poor relation, often in a separate department. (When I examined in the Oxford History School in 1961, one of my co-examiners, Dame Lucy Sutherland, set a paper on modern British history which was almost entirely political. I pointed out that there was nothing on the Industrial Revolution. ‘No,’ she said, ‘that came up last year.’)28

A decade or so on at University College London ‘a short course on the main themes of modern British history was proposed’. One lecturer offered to teach on class and gender, another on economic growth; Ian Christie ‘said he would talk about Lord Bute and about Lord North’.29 Finally, narrowness (Namierites would say sharpness) of focus resulted from the technique of ‘structural analysis’  – finely tuned prosopographical and sociological investigations of how parliamentary politics actually worked at a given historical moment. Namier didn’t do narrative. Between them the authors of The Structure of Politics, England in the Age of the 30

Lewis Namier and the Historians

American Revolution and (Brooke) The Chatham Administration devoted just over 1,300 pages to cover all of four years. And Hobsbawm finds the chronological span (c.1790–1832) of Thompson’s 900-plus page Making of the English Working Class ‘almost aggressively brief ’!30 Mindful of charges of overspecialization and meeting the challenge ‘of an erstwhile colleague in an Oxford common-room that no “Namierite” would ever dare to write a text-book’, Owen eventually wrote one: The Eighteenth Century, 1714–1815 (1974).31 Once the various impediments retarding a wider readership are entered into the ledger, the question still stands: why did Namier’s reputation reach such heights in the 1950s? Part of an answer is the quality of his scholarship: his unrivalled command of the archive, historical insight and clarity of exposition. Namier was the historians’ historian. Another part of the answer is to be found, surely, in the particular receptivity of 1950s British intellectual fashions to his approaches and ideas. Upon first, and perhaps second, inspection, Namier, a child of the late nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian Empire, who published his big book in 1929, venerated ‘monarchy, aristocracy and tradition’, and who ‘would have nothing to do with television’, cuts a queer figure as a symbol of the 1950s Zeitgeist.32 But then one of the things about which that decade’s so-called ‘Angry Young Men’ were angry was the preponderance of ‘Edwardian’ gentlemen in the national culture. Ludwik Bernstein vel Niemirowski was born in 1888 to Jewish parents in eastern Galicia, a region of Austrian Poland near the Russian–Poland border. His father, a well-off landowner, eventually converted to Catholicism, and the young Namier only discovered that he was Jewish at the age of nine. That discovery would shape his sense of identity, Zionist politics and anti-German, Anglophile worldview. But those who later connected the microscopic scrutiny of his historical method with ‘an hereditary rabbinical eye for minutiae’ were mistaken.33 Unlike that other Polish Jew, Isaac Deutscher, who in his youth had been a Talmudic scholar and whose father had wished for him to become a rabbi, Namier’s parents ‘had no use at all for Jewish observances’. Always a non-religious Jew, according to his wife he ‘didn’t basically like Jews’, and by Isaiah Berlin’s account harboured a ‘fist-clenching antipathy towards rabbis’.34 His Zionism sprang from political conviction, and from his experience of anti-Semitism; as did his frank hostility towards all things German and ‘the impervious Teutonic skull’.35 31

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One of Namier’s earliest close encounters with anti-Semitism occurred at the University of Lvov, in 1906, in the formation of student followers of the Jew-baiting Polish nationalist, Roman Dmowski. He soon left for the more salubrious environs of Switzerland and the University of Lausanne, there to sit in on the lectures of Vilfredo Pareto, whose theory of ‘the circulation of elites’ so influenced the totalitarian theorists Burnham and Borkenau, and perhaps pointed Namier in the direction of his own studies of one of history’s more successful, and adaptive, elites:  the eighteenth-century British aristocracy. Finally, and fatefully, in 1907 he landed in England to attend the London School of Economics (LSE), where he joined the Fabian Society, promoter of the non-revolutionary, and very English, brand of gradualist socialism. The mature historian is conservative, but his youthful attachments to socialism, which began in Poland, were never entirely erased, and he later described himself, not without some cause, as a ‘Tory Radical’.36 Namier’s unusual university-hopping education came to rest in 1908 at Balliol College, Oxford. Balliol  – it ‘taught me to think,’ he said  – changed his life as much as did England itself. In 1910 he changed his name by deed poll to Lewis Bernstein Naymier, ‘immediately regretted the redundant “y” ’ and, upon becoming a British citizen in 1913, excised it.37 But as his Balliol student contemporary, Arnold Toynbee, shrewdly noted, though a fully naturalized Englishman at heart [he] […] never quite naturalized intellectually – and thank goodness for that. If he had succeeded in becoming one hundred per cent English in mind, he could never have done the great things he has done for English historical scholarship.38

He was, and ultimately he remained, an outsider. Oxford did not return Namier’s devotion. In 1911 he failed to win a fellowship to All Souls; in 1947 he was passed over for the Regius chair. These rejections were routinely attributed to clubbable dons in flight from a notorious bore:  ‘In fact’, remarked John Brooke, ‘Sir Lewis talked himself out of a chair at Oxford. The dons were afraid that he would not be good company in the common room.’ Taylor, who lobbied for Namier’s appointment in 1947, saw that too, and a bit more besides: 32

Lewis Namier and the Historians

Lewis’s opponents did not dispute his merits. But they resented his outspoken criticism of other historians, however justified they might be. They did not want a Jew. They thought Namier a bore. In short he was socially unacceptable. As had been said at All Souls long ago when he had not been elected to a Fellowship. “What would he be like at dinner?”39

Something else had also been said at All Souls back then. The historian A.F. Pollard at the time wrote that the meeting on Friday morning for the election of Fellows was lively, for history. The best man by far in sheer intellect was a Balliol man of Polish-Jewish origin and I  did my best for him, but the warden and majority of fellows shied at his race, and eventually we elected the two next best.40

In 1913 Namier sailed for New York to work for Louis N. Hammerling, a fellow Galician Jew, and president of the Foreign Languages Press. America impressed him. His first collection of articles is entitled Skyscrapers, and Other Essays (1931). His undergraduate prize essay concerned imperial unity with special reference to the American problem. He continued research on this while state-side, and only switched to British political history upon the advice of Professor Charles MacAndrew whom he met at Yale.41 The companion volume to The Structure of Politics is England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930), even though it does not get beyond the end of 1762! Although capable of inspiring in others great loyalty and affection, Namier’s intense personality and social awkwardness did not make him the easiest of colleagues to get along with. He duly ran into conflict with Hammerling and was back in England within the year. Possibly he might have returned to America, as he planned, to study law at the University of St Louis, had not war intervened.42 Toynbee remembered Namier on a visit back to Oxford ‘during the Christmas 1912 or Easter 1913 break’: ‘The international situation is very serious,’ he reported to us. ‘The Austrian Army is mobilized on my father’s estate, and the Russian Army is mobilized just across the frontier, only twenty minutes’ walk away. 33

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A  European war is just around the corner now.’ Bernstein was given no chance of enlarging on his grave theme. At the words ‘European war’, most of the young Englishmen whom Bernstein was addressing in Balliol front quad burst out laughing […] within three years of this fantastic conversation in the quad, half of those unfortunate laughers were dead.43

A month or so before the guns of August, Namier foresaw that ‘Europe is proceeding with its preparations for the storm of our age’.44 When the storm broke, ‘as a British citizen’45 he immediately volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps. A tall, heavy-set man, he was rejected for his poor eyesight; soon after accepted by the Royal Fusiliers, he was then seconded, for the duration of the war and the making of the ‘peace’, to the Foreign Office as an expert advisor on east-central Europe. More expert advice, or trenchant policy recommendation, is hard to imagine. Before the war Mrs Toynbee had been cornered in her home by Namier reciting to her ‘the original Slav names of the cities of Germany east of the Elbe’.46 During his time at the Foreign Office he wrote a series of sharp, assured pamphlets supporting the cause of the ‘subject nations’ within the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Germany and Eastern Europe (1915), The Case of Bohemia (1917) and The Czecho-Slovaks: An Oppressed Nationality (1917). Namier had reservations about one subject nation, however: Poland. A Polish successor state, he feared, would ride roughshod over the rights of its Ukrainian minority. Counted as an enemy of Polish nationalism by Roman Dmowski – whose anti-Semitic student supporters he had fled in 1906 – in 1917 ‘a certain Namier’ stood accused in a Moscow newspaper of spreading rumours that Dmowski was an Austrian agent. In 1918 Dmowski himself attempted to discredit his adversary in Whitehall, claiming that in fact it was Namier who worked secretly for the Austrians.47 By that point Namier had been transferred, along with some other future historians, including E.H. Carr, to the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office. In April 1919, during the Versailles Treaty negotiations, he travelled to Paris for ten days, supplying advice on east-central Europe to his immediate superior, Sir James Headlam-Morley. Namier later claimed to have been instrumental, no less, in drawing the 34

Lewis Namier and the Historians

‘Curzon Line’ – Poland’s eastern frontier. In any event he strongly supported the creation of the new state of Czechoslovakia. An admirer of Dr Edvard Beneš, a few years later he described Czech president Tomáš Masaryk as ‘morally and mentally […] one of the outstanding figures in the public life of Europe […] the uncontested leader of the nation and the keeper of its conscience’.48 Profoundly alert to the tidal force of nationalism in modern European history, and equally aware of its – especially its German variants’  – capacity for destruction, those ‘nations’ such as Czechoslovakia, and subsequently, Israel, which met with his approval were spared his stricture. Dismissive of the function of political ideologies in driving political outcomes, he contrived nonetheless to celebrate Czechoslovakia as ‘The Victory of an Idea’, and spent many years of his life in the service of the nationalist ideology of Zionism.49 In Paris Namier met the president of the World Zionist Organization, Dr Chaim Weizmann, who inspired in him a commitment to the Zionist cause, a commitment cemented by his close friendship with Blanche ‘Baffy’ Dugdale, niece of the author of the ‘Balfour Declaration’ (1917), which viewed ‘with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. Namier’s dedication to the cause never faltered but it would not supersede his vocation as historian until the 1930s. In 1920 Namier returned briefly to history full-time as tutor in Balliol. The contract was not renewed, however, and he made his living for a time representing a Lancashire cotton company in Prague and Vienna. This period also marked the emergence of another major component in his intellectual toolkit – psychoanalysis. In Vienna he met Freud’s pupil Theodor Reik. Insomniac, insecure in his ‘identity’, recently deserted by his troubled wife, Clara  – whom he had married in 1917  – and disinherited by his father, perhaps not surprisingly Namier took to the psychoanalyst’s couch; and although, at least in hindsight, he dismissed his doctor as a ‘trick cyclist’, he would return to that couch for the rest of his life.50 Namier concluded that psychoanalysis had diagnostic, but little therapeutic, value. However, historians are in the business of diagnosis – or explanation – not therapy, and in his hands psychoanalysis became a method of historical interpretation. In Prague and Vienna Namier made money as a commercial agent, currency speculator, and journalist, though not enough to both pay the bills 35

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and finance independent historical research. But from the mid-1920s, by a combination of a personal loan from Wheeler-Bennett, grants  – leveraged by Baffy, from American foundations – and income from journalism, he managed, heroically, to keep going. Baffy introduced him to fellow Balliol man, Harold Macmillan, and in 1929 the Macmillan Press published his paradigm-busting master-work, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III.51

THE STRU CTU RE O F P O LI T I C S A N D T HE W HI G IN T ERPRETATIO N O F HI STO RY

According to its critics, the Whig interpretation of history compounds the fallacies of present-mindedness, anachronism and teleology. Present-mindedness emphasizes continuities with the past. Concerned with the ‘origins’ of things, this perspective occludes ‘false starts’, the marginalized and the loser in past politics and society:  eighteenth-century Jacobites, or colonial American loyalists, for example. In a famous phrase E.P. Thompson called this ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. Present-mindedness nourishes anachronism by ascribing, say, nationalist, or democratic, sentiments to historical actors before, supposedly, nationalism or, certainly, democracy, existed; or, again, by applying labels and concepts – ‘radical’, for instance – in a sense unknown to people at the time. Teleology – in the English case the story of constitutional development, of the triumph of parliament over the forces of arbitrary power and would-be royal absolutism, and of the incremental, linear, accumulation of liberty  – gives short shrift to sixteenth-century recusants, seventeenth-century royalists or eighteenth-century opponents of parliamentary reform. The results are unhistorical. A  lopsided celebratory focus on the ‘winners’  – sixteenth-century Protestants, seventeenth-century parliamentarians and eighteenth-century Whig politicians – robs the past of its complexity and blurs the differences between past and present. The high road to the high Victorian constitution is marked by a sequence of majestic milestones: Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, the Great Reform Act. Another is the struggle in the 1760s of the Rockingham 36

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Whigs against the alleged constitutional encroachments of the young George III and his ministers  – a conflict in which, the Whig historian George Otto Trevelyan argued, modern political parties were first forged. Thus, in Trevelyan’s view, the Liberal Party of the 1880s descended directly from the Rockingham Whigs.52 The Whig myth of George III, handed on from the contemporary partisan accounts of Horace Walpole and Edmund Burke, is, as Namier demonstrated conclusively, bad history. It did not go unquestioned, however, even in its Victorian heyday or even among Whig historians.53 Cracks began to appear in the Whig edifice long before Namier took a sledgehammer to the entire ‘imaginary superstructure’, as he termed it.54 Still, in 1929 the myth remained a textbook orthodoxy. W.E.H. Lecky (1902) wrote of George III’s ‘determination to restore the royal power to a position wholly different from that which it occupied in the reign of his predecessor’; ‘it is possible’, reflected D.A. Winstanley (1912), ‘that few would deny that the establishment of the personal influence of the Crown by George III had vital consequences in English history’; G.M. Trevelyan (1926) simply summarized the common-sense understanding of the time: [the] break in the smooth development of our constitutional history was caused by the able attempt of George III to recover the powers of the Crown as they had been left by the Revolution Settlement of 1689, to make the prime minister a mere instrument of the royal will, and to reduce the cabinet to a group of ‘king’s servants’ in fact as well as in name […] he resumed into his royal hands the patronage of the state, wherewith he bribed the House of Commons himself, instead of leaving patronage and corruption to the prerequisite of the Whigs.55

The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III is a revisionist, but rarely an explicitly polemical work. It is a signature technique of Namierite scholarship not to engage the delinquent Whigs, or historiography, directly – not even in the footnotes. Bibliographies of secondary sources are dispensed with. In The Structure of Politics Namier supplies only a list of ‘Manuscripts Quoted’, and, aside from two well-aimed sniper-shots at Lecky, ostensibly ignores his Whig-historical target.56 37

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Riding confidently on the crest of Namierism’s 1950s wave, one practitioner, Romney Sedgwick, did not equivocate: It is sometimes difficult not to feel that, to adapt Gibbon’s famous phrase, historiography is little more than a register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of historians. Such is the impression conveyed by the history of one legend – that George III set out to destroy the system of responsible parliamentary government established under the first two Hanoverians, and to introduce absolute government.57

The title of the article which begins with that sweeping judgement is ‘Putting history in touch with the facts’. Namier’s findings, his overturning of long-standing assumptions about George III’s intentions, or about the alleged role of political parties in the 1760s – ‘though party names and cant were current […] the political life of the period could be fully described without ever using a party denomination’  – or the extent of parliamentary corruption  – ‘the utter unimportance’ and ‘charitable character of that very humane institution’, the secret service pension  – amount to a lasting contribution to historical knowledge.58 But the narrowness of his range, both chronologically and in terms of subject matter, makes this of interest primarily to the specialist. Rather, the wider significance of The Structure of Politics lies in its methodologies  – in the hard empiricism, precision, prosopography (or collective biography) and the primacy of ‘analysis’ over narrative, that later attuned so finely with the intellectual austerities and illusions of the 1950s. The epistemological presuppositions of his method also account for Namier’s disdain for historiography. Whereas Butterfield subscribed, in pronouncement if not so often in practice, to ‘technical history’, he simultaneously developed a sophisticated theory of the uses of historiography: if historians pay attention to the perspectives of previous generations, he reasoned, then they cannot be accused of creating a past that simply reflects their own present. An historian working on, say, Martin Luther, ‘inherits a long tradition of scholarship’ – his perspective, inevitably, is not limited to his present (1961), but ‘holds some sort of deposition from the views of 1561, 1661, 1761 and 1861’.59 Namier, on the other hand, saw only the recycled distortions 38

Lewis Namier and the Historians

of soi-disant ‘classic texts’; or, as pointed out as early as 1930, of the unreliable ephemera of ‘public opinion’ – contemporary newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets (constituting thereby a purposeful discounting of whole categories of historical evidence upon which Butterfield would amplify in his 1957 critique).60 The chief peddler of misinformation identified in The Structure of Politics (the shade of the despised Burke hovering always in the background) is Horace Walpole. ‘So much history is fancy weaving on the warp of a few common “texts”,’ comments Namier, ‘that Walpole’s casual remarks and illustrations have gone the round of the text-books (rightly so called) on English history.’61 ‘The writing of history from dated pronouncements,’ he reflects elsewhere, is a funny job. I once told a class of mine, when a student argued from some well authenticated statements made by the people themselves, that I would undertake to write a most thoroughly documented history in which every single statement would be wrong. People will say, or even write, the most fantastic nonsense about their own thoughts or intentions, to say nothing of deliberate lies about their actions.62

Reliance upon the ‘facts’ offered the only antidote to such self-perpetuating error, and ‘facts’, insofar as he understood them, were recorded in manuscript and resided in archives. Namier, then, deconstructed Whig myth-history by closely argued, primary sourced example. Two years after the appearance of The Structure of Politics, Butterfield took aim at the same target in a slim, reputation-making polemic:  The Whig Interpretation of History (1931).63 Born in 1900, Herbert Butterfield was 12  years younger than Namier. From a Yorkshire working-class, Methodist background, in 1919 he won a scholarship to attend Peterhouse, Cambridge. A prize-winning student, after graduation and a short stint teaching at Princeton, Butterfield succeeded to a college fellowship in 1928. He would spend the rest of his working life in Peterhouse, finishing his career in 1969 as Regius Chair of History in Cambridge. Whereas The Structure of Politics focused, in great detail, on a single historical moment, Butterfield swept, with scant attention to specifics, over English history from the Reformation, dissecting en route the smug Whig fallacies of value-judgement, anachronism 39

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and teleology. And if The Whig Interpretation has been justly faulted for vagueness of reference – for not naming the culprits – its message is still transparently clear.64 Butterfield sets about the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.

These were cardinal errors, he believed, because ‘the condition of historical enquiry […] is to recognize how much other ages differed from our own’. It is no business of the historian therefore, ‘to stress and magnify the similarities between our age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past’.65 Interestingly in light of his later criticism of Namierian structural analysis for its inability to incorporate narrative, the Butterfield of 1931 observes that ‘all history must tend to become more Whig in proportion as it becomes more abridged’ – a proposition with which Namier would undoubtedly have agreed.66 Namier and Butterfield were very different historians who wrote very different sorts of books, which nevertheless shared a very similar agenda – the discrediting of Whig history – and which were published the one on the heels of the other. How is this coincidence to be explained? P.B.M. Blaas seeks the answer in historiography, in conceptual developments in the writing of history between 1890 and 1930. According to his thesis Whig presuppositions were challenged long before Namier and Butterfield. From that perspective the technical precision of the legal historian F.W. Maitland (1850–1906), for instance, or J.B. Bury’s (1861–1927) proclamation of history as a ‘science, no more no less’, represent methodological trends which, alongside others, culminate in a Kuhnian-style paradigm shift in 1929–31.67 Broader cultural and sociological currents were also at play. Michael Bentley characterizes ‘English Historiography in the Age of Butterfield and Namier’ as modernist – a term likewise applied to the predominant literary movement of the post-Great War period. Modernism is read as a reaction against high Victorian and Edwardian certainties and 40

Lewis Namier and the Historians

illusions; that liberal optimism and faith in progress which perished with the flower of a generation in the trenches of the Western Front. In Eminent Victorians (1918) Lytton Strachey eviscerates the self-regarding world which the great Whig historians had sought to ratify. Namier admired the artistry and psychological acuity of Strachey’s biographical ‘gems’.68 In place of the traditional Whig understanding of grand politics as a Manichean conflict between the forces of liberty and progress, on the one side, and the forces of popery and arbitrary power on the other, the dynamics of politics in Namierland were psychological, and ideology- or ‘principle’-free. He applied the insights of psychoanalytic theory deftly and sparingly, but without speculation or caveat: for example, the Duke of Newcastle, we are told, suffered from ‘unconscious self-mortification’.69 In retrospect the assured tone appears misjudged and, for so otherwise careful a scholar, laced with unintended irony. In the 1960s one sceptic derided psychoanalysis as a ‘theory that is certainly no better confirmed – and perhaps not as well confirmed – as witchcraft or astrology’; some 30 years on, another unbeliever assumes that even Namier’s admirers were embarrassed by his Freudian foibles.70 But that is to indulge hindsight. Never without its detractors, during the 1930s psychoanalysis enjoyed serious intellectual credibility. Butterfield was for a time ‘smitten’ by it. Trevor-Roper, inspired by ‘the great Sigmund Freud’, began to record his dreams. However, like his earlier brief flirtation with Freemasonry, that too would pass.71 In the decade-and-a-half or so after the war the influence and authority of psychoanalysis in Britain reached its height. The parallel trajectory of Namier’s career and reputation is striking. Political parties imply organization based on political principles. Namier dismissed the function of both in the political transactions of the 1760s: ‘men went [into parliament] “to make a figure”, and no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others might eat it’.72 Patronage, preferment, personality, pensions and places, not ideological conviction, he contended, oiled the political machine. The critical reception of The Structure of Politics in the professional journals was generally, though not uniformly, positive. Who would dispute the depth of research, clarity of exposition, and originality of 41

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argument on display? The most generous review by far came from the ‘last Whig historian’, G.M. Trevelyan: There are so many different ways in which things happen, or can truly be described as happening. Gibbon’s is one, Carlyle’s another, Macaulay’s a third. Each is true, yet taken by itself each is false, for no one of them is the whole truth. In Mr Namier’s narrative things ‘happen’ in yet another new way  – the Namier way, and it is one of the truths.73

On the strength of that commendation the medievalist E.F. Jacob telegrammed Namier offering him the chair in modern history at the University of Manchester. After ‘he interviewed the [appointment] committee’ about time allowed for research, Namier accepted.74 Professionally established and critically acclaimed, Namier seemed set to stake his claim in the field of historical studies; instead, in the years ahead he semi-retired from the field. His main historical work during the 1930s consisted of the Ford Lectures ‘King, cabinet and parliament in the early years of George III,’ delivered at the University of Oxford in 1934, and the publication of a slim volume, Additions and Corrections to Sir John Fortescue’s Edition of the Correspondence of King George III (1937). Moreover – by the same logic whereby the decade which trumpeted the end of ideology proved so hospitable to Namier’s ideology-averse interpretation of past politics  – the 1930s, perhaps the most ideologically charged decade of the twentieth century, proved most unreceptive.75 The main reason, at this juncture, for Namier’s low profile and meagre productivity as an historian was his immersion in Zionist committee-room politicking. The year 1929 marks the date not only of publication of The Structure of Politics, but of its author’s recruitment by Chaim Weizmann as political secretary to the British Jewish Agency. He never moved to Manchester, opting instead to commute weekly from London. His time was consumed by infighting – in what may be his first recorded reference to him, Isaiah Berlin describes Namier-the-Zionist-activist as ‘a frightful man’76 – and drafting endless resolutions and, more profitably, working on behalf of Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany.77 When World War II broke out 42

Lewis Namier and the Historians

the university released its semi-detached professor for the duration, to serve as unofficial liaison between the British government and the Polish government-in-exile in London.

‘THE IM PERV IO U S T E U TO N I C S KU LL’ : N A M IER’S EU ROPE

For a time during the 1930s the cramp in Namier’s right arm turned to paralysis. The cause, apparently, was not physiological but psychosomatic, a symptom of his anguish over the plight of European Jewry. When war came he procured poison in order to kill himself in the event of German occupation.78 Later in the decade, along with Baffy, Wheeler-Bennett, and others, he formed a ‘ginger-group’ which met in clubs and Soho restaurants, conferred with Churchill and Harold Macmillan, and tried, obviously without success, to backchannel influence among old contacts in the Foreign Office against the Chamberlain government’s policy of appeasing Germany’s expansionist ambitions.79 The antipathy between Namier and Butterfield may well date to the latter’s support of appeasement and his notorious post-Munich Agreement visit to German universities. A.L. Rowse later dedicated his All Souls and Appeasement (1961) to Namier. When he arrived at Manchester in 1931 Namier, a convinced and thoughtful conservative – a sort of unwitting Burkean – made a close friend of his junior colleague, A.J.P. Taylor, who in 1938 returned to Oxford. Taylor named a son in his honour, more or less ‘inherited’ his connection to the Manchester Guardian, and greatly esteemed the older man’s scholarly and intellectual prowess. Of Namier’s In the Margin of History he wrote: ‘no readers of these hard gems of wisdom will ever ask again what is the use of history – or historians’.80 A freelance, non-doctrinaire man of the left, Taylor nonetheless shared many of his senior colleague’s opinions on recent European history. Both found Trotsky – ‘the greatest Jew since Jesus Christ’ – and Masaryk impressive.81 Both were anti-appeasement, pro-Russian (as distinct from pro-Soviet) and anti-German. From the late 1930s down to the early 1950s in journals, periodicals and newspapers, Namier published a stream of splenetic articles digging, as he saw it, to the roots of the ‘German Problem’. Allowing him, spliced with slivers 43

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of Taylor (for their opinions on the matter were then indistinguishable) to speak for himself, renders comment redundant: ‘There has been a German “national character” for more than a thousand years’, ‘they are the only European nation which glories in the barbaric period of its history’; [no man other than Martin Luther] ‘has ever been so representative of the German spirit, and no man had such a deep and lasting effect on German history […] He owed his breach with Catholicism to a visit to Rome, when he had seen, and rejected, the greatest glories of the Renaissance. He hated art, culture, intellect, and sought an escape into an imaginary Germany of the past, romantic, irrational, non-European […] even the technical occasion of his breach with Rome was symbolic: he objected to the sale of indulgences in order to raise money for the building of St. Peter’s – if it had been for the purpose of massacring German peasants, Luther might never have become a Protestant.’ ‘The typical Prussian, however highly placed, looks upon himself as a servant of the State. When he commands, he does so on behalf of some entity superior to himself – which enhances his inborn brutality and ruthlessness.’ ‘Most of the extravagant German claims of the two World Wars were raised and applauded by the “freedom-loving” ideologues of the Frankfurt parliament of 1848’, [and] ‘the essentials of Hitlerism were being developed by the pre-1914 generation.’ ‘Characteristic of the German social groups is the utter, conscious, subordination of the individual, the iron discipline which they enforce, the high degree of organization and efficiency which they attain, and their resultant inhumanity.’ ‘German faces are marvelously symmetrical’, [German people are] ‘efficient, hard-working, unimaginative, obedient robots.’ [Not surprisingly then] ‘it was no more a mistake for the German people to end up with Hitler – “one of the most representative Germans that ever lived” – than it is an accident when a river flows into the sea.’ ‘Hitler understood the German people, which has found its full self-expression under his leadership. In this sense it is right to identify Hitler, the Nazis, and the German nation’; [thus] ‘there is nothing mysterious in Hitler’s victory; the mystery is rather that it had been so long delayed.’ ‘There is such a thing as a Belsen of the mind and spirit.’82

Summoned up by Namier and Taylor, the bestial Teutonic doppelgänger of Orwell’s and Priestley’s phlegmatic, tea-drinking, pigeon-fancying, 44

Lewis Namier and the Historians

Englishman stalked – for understandable reasons – the imagination of postwar historians. Belsen did happen. In Trevor-Roper’s telling, the ‘German Mind’ is befogged by ‘Nordic mysticism’, penetrated only by Goebbels’ ‘Latin lucidity’ (whatever that might be).83 It did not necessarily have to be always so, however. Alan Bullock – who publicly opposed German rearmament in 1952, the year in which his Hitler: A  Study in Tyranny appeared – managed to be more judicious. ‘The view has often been expressed,’ he observed, that Hitler could only have come to power in Germany, and it is true – without falling into the same error of racialism as the Nazis – that there were certain features of German historical development, quite apart from the effects of the Defeat and the Depression, which favoured the rise of such a movement. This is not to accuse the Germans of Original Sin. Or to ignore the other sides of German life which were only grossly caricatured by the Nazis. But Nazism was not some terrible accident which fell upon the German people. It was rooted in their history.

Repudiating blanket exceptionalism, Bullock notes that ‘the Germans were not the only ones in the 1930s not to know what was happening and refused to call evil things by their true names […] Hitler, indeed was a European, no less than a German phenomenon’.84 That sort of even-handed approach is presumably what the military historian, Basil Liddell Hart, who himself took a rather relaxed view of German militarism, had in mind when he wrote to Namier that you seem to me the greatest living example of how real historianship can triumph over extraordinarily violent prejudices! But if you could free yourself from such prejudices, you would be a still greater historian. I know no other with the mental equipment to equal yours.85

This is typically generous of Liddell Hart, but in the end it is hard to dispute D.C. Watt’s verdict that Namier’s ‘bitterness makes him so unfair in his comments, and is so vividly expressed that a great deal of the effect aimed at is spoiled’.86 It required considerable professional courage for that young David to take up his sling against the Goliath of the postwar consensus on ‘the 45

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second German war’. Keith Thomas remembers ‘the horror in Oxford when Watt’s article appeared. It was shown to me furtively and passed around in Balliol, as if it were a piece of academic pornography’.87 Namier stood accused of war-guilt mongering and of acting more like prosecuting council, judge and jury than as an historian. That was in 1954. In 1953 as a member of the Historical Advisory Committee to the Foreign Office, Namier wrote a minute (unearthed decades later by Watt) on the issue of returning seized archives to the German Federal Government. ‘For our part,’ he states, ‘we are determined to do this work on their archives with the utmost impartiality and with impeccable scholarship. But we did not doubt that it would turn out a formidable indictment.’88 In 1957 Butterfield identified Namier as ‘an old enemy of mine in the academic field’. The enmities were, as his letter makes clear, also personal and, to which the letter does not allude, political.89 Where Namier took his cue on German culture from Tacitus, Butterfield took his from Bishop Stubbs. ‘Perhaps because I read historians who were out of date,’ he reflected, perhaps because one tends to be fed at school with the historical teaching of an earlier generation, I was brought up on the view that Germany was the home of liberty & that the freedom of Englishmen was the effect of the German side of our heritage. All our liberty and democracy went back to primitive Teutonic freedom. Our very parliament was the product of the Germanic elements in our history.90

Butterfield did not simply support appeasement:  he travelled to lecture in Germany after the Munich Agreement. In 1942 he popped up at a German embassy party in Dublin and in the course of his 1944 inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History in Cambridge cautioned against anti-German sentiment. The English in victory seemed to him less admirable than the English in adversity. After the war he maintained friendly relations with German historians, visiting Heidelberg and other German universities in 1951 and 1956.91 After the war, even the lure of archives could not bring Namier to ever set foot again in the German-speaking lands.92 In 1956 he regretted that that there was no English word for Festschrift.93 46

Lewis Namier and the Historians

Butterfield’s cross-grained position on the German problem did not arise from mere perversity, though it is true that the outlook and personality of this sometime Methodist lay preacher were stamped by the contrarianism of Protestant dissent. More importantly, the author of Christianity and History’s approaches to Germany were guided by the precept ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’. Posted by the Foreign Office to Germany in 1948, the Anglo-Irish, Catholic convert Frank Pakenham (later Lord Longford) – whose motto was ‘hate the sin but forgive the sinner’  – was ‘upset by Taylor, of course’ and shared Butterfield’s disquiet about ‘the anti-German bias of modern English historiography’, a topic which the two men were to discuss over a lunch that was broached  – in-between soliciting lists of communist fellow travellers from Orwell and cultivating the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ – by the Foreign Office advisor on German reconstruction, the ubiquitous Adam Watson.94 Butterfield’s magnanimous attitudes towards defeated Germany were also shaped by his ‘tragic’ sense of the human ‘predicament’: where Namier, according to Butterfield’s wing man T.D. (Desmond) Williams, started from a presumption ‘that one side was wrong and bad’, Butterfield discerned in most conflict ‘one half-right that was perhaps too willful, and another half-right that was perhaps too proud’.95 But if forgiving sinners and distributing blame faithfully reflects the human condition and the complexities of history, it also risks slipping into moral equivalence  – a charge which Butterfield rejected and to which he remained sensitive.96 And if Butterfield’s prose and style of reasoning  – described variously as Delphic, obscure, foggy, tortuous, opaque, distinguished, barely readable, incomprehensible and reminiscent of Erasmus  – was intended to catch the nuance and convey the ambiguities inherent in the historical process, sometimes the results are just plain muddle.97 In particular his fondness for luxuriant metaphor handed free gifts to his detractors. Sir Boyle Roche could scarcely have bettered this description of revolution: having struck its roots into the earth in this way, it began to sprout and burgeon up above, the hot sap tingling in the twigs till it cracked the bark and then foamed and frolicked into foliage; issuing in conspiracy, 47

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assassination, insurrection, bomb-throwing – all the things that are the reverse of the spirit of politics.98

That Burkean hostility to the French Revolution intensified when it came to its Russian successor: ‘communism incorporates the Anti-Christ of our time […] the prior evil that provoked Nazism and Fascism’.99 Cold War anti-communism reinforced the traditional ‘balance of power’ interpretation of European geopolitics espoused by the future doyen of the ‘English realist’ school of International Relations (to which Adam Watson and Desmond Williams also belonged).100 In short, he believed that Britain and ‘the West’ needed a strong Germany as a continental counterweight to an expansionist Soviet Union. Namier, Taylor and Carr believed precisely the opposite. Namier was pro-Russian, Carr pro-Soviet, and Taylor somewhere in-between. ‘Great Britain and Russia were in Europe but not of Europe’ and ‘without Russia’, Namier argued in 1940, ‘no stable system can be established on the European continent to keep Germany in check’ – a stability which could only be secured by ‘co-operation between the English-speaking nations and Russia.’101 In his bones he knew whereof he spoke. ‘Go into the endless sad plains of Russia, among her infinitely patient peasant folk’, he wrote not in 1942 but in 1916, what can you Germans do with them? For you always wish to do something. You and your work and your thoughts will pass over Russia as the wind that struggles across the plains […] What do you fear, you clever, efficient, victorious people? You have been insulted; Russian life itself is an insult to you […] you called the Russians barbarians. Then why do you fear them? And, by God, you do fear them.102

‘The power of Russia,’ he observed in 1918, ‘may be eclipsed for years, but can never be broken.’103 A Tory, celebrant-in-chief of the English parliament, and scourge of ideology, Namier could, at the same time, both applaud Trotsky’s élan, and acknowledge the advances of Stalin’s Soviet Union: praising, albeit at the height of the wartime alliance, the 48

Lewis Namier and the Historians

remarkable results [that] have been achieved in industrial and city planning. True it was done at a terrible sacrifice; but the readiness of the peoples of the U.S.S.R.  to make yet greater sacrifices in this war shows that they have found themselves in their new Fatherland and that moral and educational progress has been achieved since 1917.104

‘Lewis agreed with me,’ recalled Taylor, ‘that Soviet Russia was likely to prove a more valuable ally than tsarist Russia had been.’105 Carr’s ‘realist’ analysis of the international situation in the late 1930s led him to support appeasement; Butterfield laid claim to the same tough-minded analysis and conclusion. If ‘realism’ consists in the pursuit of national self-interest and the proper recognition of political power then Carr was consistent in supporting – not least in his wartime and postwar leaders in The Times  – the Soviet  alliance. Somehow Butterfield’s ‘realism’ proved less elastic. ‘Lord Morley, when he opposed war in 1914, asked what this country would do with a victorious Russia if German power was destroyed.’ From Namier’s standpoint, Russia functioned as a ‘check’ on Germany; from Butterfield’s Germany stood as a ‘guardian and bulwark’ of ‘Western Civilization […] against the less civilized east’. In his view Britain’s ‘avowed political object’ in two world wars – ‘to destroy one of the giants that half of a continent was left at the good or bad intentions of the other’ – flew in the face of the finest traditions of British foreign policy.106 These arguments among historians about foreign policy and recent European history are infused with Cold War politics. In 1952 Alan Bullock contributed to a pamphlet which depicted the USA as ‘best “top nation” since Rome’, but worried over the Cold War-generated decision to permit German rearmament:  ‘probably old-fashioned German nationalism is a greater danger than neo-Nazism […] the roots of democracy in Western Germany are promising but weak: remilitarization may kill the plant.’107 The following year Wheeler-Bennett voiced similar concerns in the preface to his classic The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918–1945. From a diametrically opposed position Butterfield, who denounced the doctrine of unconditional surrender in principle – ‘never drive the enemy into a corner from which he cannot easily retreat’ – and as bad Allied policy in two world wars, now added the charge that it had cleared the way for Soviet expansion: 49

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And supposing there must be war we may ask whether at least for the sake of our children, we ought not to beware of those who preach ‘no negotiation’ and ‘total surrender’, so producing conditions which at one stage bring forth a Hitler to replace a Kaiser Wilhelm and at a further stage put Russia in place of Germany as the danger to our peace.108

Liddell Hart likewise argued that by demanding unconditional surrender the Allies had prolonged the war needlessly and at tremendous cost in life and resources; inhibited the possibility of an anti-Hitler coup by the generals; stiffened the resistance of ordinary Germans; and, by eliminating any approximation to the traditional European balance of power, facilitated the Soviet domination of eastern Europe.109 Taylor and Namier would have none of this. ‘What was the alternative?’ asked Taylor. ‘Hitler aimed at total victory. Unconditional surrender was the only possible answer to him, and any idea of negotiated peace is too nonsensical to merit serious discussion.’ ‘I shall never accept the thesis that unconditional surrender was a mistake,’ declared Namier, ‘just as now I am dead against any re-arming of the Germans.’110 Finally, and inevitably, Butterfield’s views on the pernicious effects of widespread anti-German bias brought him into collision with the British government-published History of the Second World War. In early 1949 the Foreign Office denied access to certain documents to Butterfield’s former student, Desmond Williams, then working at Bletchley Park on a projected volume on German diplomatic history. Butterfield was incandescent with rage at what he considered a scandalous breach of academic standards  – a flagrant suppression of evidence, for political purposes, which violated professional ethics and hamstrung the historians’ responsibility to the public. It also offended the sensibilities of the dissenter:  ‘ “I value every one of the fifty-two miles that separate Cambridge from Westminster”, he used to say’,111 and on this occasion he could not ‘think any possible consequences to myself would deter me from airing a matter so important to the public and to historical science’. He virtually instructed Williams on his ‘duty to resign in a signal manner, making the reason as public as possible’.112 By then indeed, Butterfield’s mind had already turned to a more reflective critique of Official History in general. 50

Lewis Namier and the Historians

In 1949 Williams, aged 28, was appointed, with Butterfield’s fulsome support – ‘if you want him back in Dublin for heaven’s sake offer him something big and really distinguished’ – to the chair of modern history in University College, Dublin, cementing for life Butterfield’s already close associations with Ireland and UCD.113 Appropriately, then, Butterfield first read his lecture on ‘Official History’ to a seminar in Dublin, and first published it in the Dublin-based Jesuit journal Studies. Studies, a serious, interdisciplinary quarterly review, did not, as Butterfield noted, have a wide readership among British historians. He therefore arranged, and paid for, a run of 50 off-prints for distribution to that select audience, no small or inexpensive feat in cash-stapped, print and paper-rationed 1949, and a token of the importance which he attached to his jeremiad.114 ‘Official History: its pitfalls and criteria’ reached a broader audience still when included in Butterfield’s volume of essays, History and Human Relations (1951). Butterfield fired off his broadside in 1949, the year in which appeared the first volume of the vast History of the Second World War. Published by His Majesty’s Stationary Office (HMSO), the History chronicled Britain’s war effort in every aspect, from the Far East to the North Atlantic, from intelligence operations to coal, oil and agriculture, to the provision of medical services to the armed forces and the civilian population. For example, the economic and medieval historian, M.M. (Munia) Postan, authored the volumes on British War Production (1952) and Design and Development of Weapons (1964). The contributors were bound by certain official conventions. Thus they had to adhere to the principle of cabinet responsibility. Government ministers and senior civil servants remained anonymous. Nor were they allowed to cite unpublished sources. Such restrictions, along with government funding, presented a red rag to Butterfield’s bull. His essay, ‘Official History’, is written at a level of generalization which ranges well beyond the History of the Second World War; there is, however, no mistaking his primary target. In May 1948 Butterfield ‘had it in mind that the psychological moment had come for calling into question the whole general framework of our current thinking’ about Britain and Germany.115 By the light of his own thinking at this time, that sounds unduly optimistic. For in 1948, with rubble still piled in the streets of Europe’s devastated cities and images of unspeakable horror still fresh in people’s minds, the historiography of 51

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World War II was still, surely, in its ‘heroic age’ – that ‘early period when the victors write their own chronicles, gloat over the defeated, count their trophies, commemorate their achievements, and show how righteousness has triumphed’. The period when the victors ‘lack perspective’ and refuse ‘to exercise imaginative sympathy over the defeated enemy’.116 The victors include governments, of course, and in Butterfield’s opinion ‘in certain circles near to [the British] government a kind of contagious unanimity seems to exist at a certain level’. Moreover, there was not, he thought, a ‘government in Europe which wants the public to know all the truth’.117 The government-sponsored Official History of the Second World War, argued Butterfield, inhibits getting out the whole truth and the development of ‘an independent science of history, not hostile to the government but standing over against it’.118 Trust counts, and dissenters don’t trust authority. ‘I am as a historian against all government,’ he told an unlikely ally in this academic spat, ‘or rather I believe that something oblique is going on behind all governments, giving them a seamy side.’119 So congenital and ingrained was that attitude that back in 1931 he wrote of the modern inheritance of liberty ‘by all means let us be grateful for the Puritans of 17th century England, but let us be grateful that they were so long in a minority against the government; for this was the very condition of their utility’.120 The reaction from fellow historians to Butterfield’s charges are most revealing. Taylor, an occasional antagonist, mainly agreed with him, claiming that he had let himself in for terrible trouble and have been subjected to a campaign of persecution ever since (including a letter to the editor of The Times from the permanent under-secretary at the F.O., asking them never to employ me again!), simply, because I criticised, perhaps unjustly on a point or two, the whole Woodward approach.

E.L. Woodward’s (the historian most prominently identified with the Official History) own response to Butterfield is more representative. ‘The difficulty I am up against,’ he confessed, ‘is not really the question of hiding unpleasant things, but of revealing Cabinet discussions and

52

Lewis Namier and the Historians

differences of opinion, while the people concerned are alive and active. It is, I think, a sound principle that Cabinet responsibility should be maintained.’121 Two other official historians, W.N. Medlicott and R.F. Trehane, insisted that they had a free ‘run’ of the archives – ‘everything, including Cabinet minutes’. Trehane argued that granted the Foreign Office material in the PRO was incomplete ‘this is a very different thing from having the run of the actual archives, as I am doing, for example. This is one reason I stick to the strange view that concealment in the secret drawer sense is not the real issue’.122 For his part Butterfield did not question the integrity of the official historians: the work was being done by honest men, though I think there are pitfalls in it, and here and there it seems to me that half-conscious slips have been made which just show that it is not the cause of academic history that is always defended, so that there would be danger if we did not keep on the alert.123

And yet, due diligence and open access to (incomplete) archives did not guarantee full scholarly independence. Decades later Williams learned that ‘on the advice of the Foreign Office’, ‘a draft text, submitted by Woodward, was altered significantly in its published form – particularly in its interpretation. Some documents were omitted’.124 Butterfield, it appears, had a point. Butterfield’s instinctive opposition to Official History of any sort also had an intellectual rationale. Turning down invitations to participate in an international project on the history of science he explained: I have been asked from various quarters to take part in the scheme, but there is something in the very nature of history which makes it undesirable to have a quasi-official UNESCO version, and in any case this way of organizing co-operative history seems to me to be wrong […] history does have a structure, but one that is sui generis. History needs a fluid world with many interpretations jostling against one another, and that fluidity is greatly reduced if anything like a quasi-official version is imposed so that novel contributions have to fight from a weaker strategic position as heretically against an established orthodoxy.125

53

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The references to ‘quasi-official’ and ‘co-operative’ history bear striking resemblance to Butterfield’s subsequent critique of the Namier School. His description of the cohort of contemporary historians as a ‘great gang’ likewise anticipates his styling Namierites a ‘powerfully organized squadron’.126 Both labels illustrate a tendency to exaggerate. Bullock, it is true, read Wheeler-Bennett’s Nemesis in manuscript as he finished writing up his Hitler: A Study in Tyranny; Taylor reviewed Namier, who reviewed Taylor and so on. But that is hardly surprising in the small, face-to-face, academic and literary world of the 1950s. The largely metropolitan coterie culture about which the literary critic F.R. Leavis complained sprouted from narrow ground. And yet, again Butterfield had a point. Namier did have a taste for history-bycommittee, especially if he chaired the committee, as well as a strong streak of intellectual authoritarianism. When Plumb told him that he planned to apply his techniques to parliament in the reign of William III, Namier, turning on his heels, replied: ‘how else could you do it?’127 So much for ‘many interpretations jostling against one another’. In the first of two challenges to the perceived hegemony exercised over contemporary history by Namier, Williams rebukes the great man for his sneering way with the deluded and the reprobate and  – echoing Watt – accuses him of seeking to ‘provide justifications for the judicial and the political verdicts passed at Nuremberg in September 1946’. In the second, a review, he objects to an essay in which ‘Sir Lewis is a politician writing history rather than an historian writing on politics’.128 Namier flew into ‘a rage’, telephoning the Spectator to demand an editorial disavowal. ‘He must be very angry with me,’ commented Butterfield.129 Twentieth-century history, then, served as a second front in the war over eighteenth-century Britain; ‘Hitler Studies’ stood in for the storm over George III.

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3

THE STRUCTURE OF CONSENSUS AT THE ACCESSION OF ELIZABETH II Keynesian economic theory underpinned the broad consensus in British politics during the 1950s. The ‘Tory Radical’ MP Robert (Bob) Boothby endorsed economic planning; the ‘democratic socialist’ and Labour MP Anthony Crosland insisted on the preservation of individual freedom. Politics – as always – ranged over a number of issues, German rearmament, decolonization, or independent television broadcasting, for example; but, with the exceptions of the Suez crisis in 1956 and the launch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958, the master political narrative of the decade turned on the macro-management of the economy. Because, so it was fondly believed, it was now understood how the economy actually functioned, economic theory paid less attention to first principles, focusing instead on how to strike the right balance between the private and public sectors in a welfare state. This presented technical, not ideological, problems. Enter Mr Butskell with his toolkit of tax, interest and exchange rates, price controls, incomes policies and public investment. The postwar consensus was a western European not just a British phenomenon. The British nevertheless contrived to give their version of it a peculiarly English twist. Like the Church of England, which so creatively negotiated a middle way between the extremes of Rome and Geneva, ‘the practical conservation by the Conservative Government of most of 55

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Labour’s innovations has helped to blur the edges of socialist ideology’. Raymond Aron, French exponent of the ‘End of Ideology’ thesis, observed that the underpinnings of the great ideological conflicts of this century had largely been pulled out. The once unequivocal distinction between ‘right’ and ‘left’ had been damaged by the knowledge that combinations once alleged by extremist doctrines to be impossible […] are actually possible. The full awareness that nationalization is no universal solution to economic problems and that British socialism has not resulted in tyranny have materially weakened the ideologies of thorough-going socialism and thorough-going neo-liberalism.1

Namier knew that his moment had finally arrived. ‘Some political philosophers’ he noted, complain of a ‘tired lull’ and the absence at present of argument on general politics in this country: practical solutions are sought for concrete problems, while programmes and ideals are forgotten by both parties. But to me this attitude seems to betoken a greater national maturity, and I can only wish that it may long continue undisturbed by the workings of political philosophy.2

Edward Shils welcomed ‘the extraordinary state of self-satisfaction’ among British intellectuals in 1955, attributing it to their ratification of the political status quo, the eclipse of 1930s-style disaffection and the ‘evaporation of ideology’.3 Consensus also had a social structure. In 1946 Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin told his ambassador to France, Duff Cooper, that Herbert Morrison ‘was not straight and not to be trusted’. ‘I have never,’ Cooper recorded in his diary, ‘heard a British Cabinet minister use such language about a colleague to one who is not an intimate. The lack of the Old School Tie may prove the undoing of the Labour Party and so finally of our governmental system.’4 He worried too much. Neither Bevin nor Morrison owned an Old School Tie, but plenty of their comrades in the upper echelons of the Labour Party did. As Virginia Cowles argued, the fact that so many men of all parties share a common background has had a profound effect in narrowing contentions between the 56

Consensus at the Accession of Elizabeth II

various leaders of political thought. And for this reason Oxford must take large credit for the civilized way in which Britain’s social revolution is being carried out.

Duff Cooper’s Old School Tie is a metaphor for entrenched, class-based and intimate networks of appointment, preferment and influence in public life; for the inconspicuous exercise of power by the well-born, and by the public school and Oxbridge-educated. In the 1950s that old nexus of ‘the great and the good’ received a new name: the Establishment.

THE ESTABL IS H ME N T

Actually, the term ‘the Establishment’ – defined as ‘a social group exercising power generally, or within a given field or institution, by virtue of its traditional superiority, and by the use esp. of tacit understandings and often a common mode of speech, and having as a general interest the maintenance of the status quo’5  – was not so much coined in the early 1950s, as elaborated, anatomized and circulated by pundits and journalists. The origin of the term is often attributed to a column written by the conservative commentator Henry Fairlie, which appeared in the Spectator in September 1955 – although an A.J.P. Taylor book review in the New Statesman two years earlier is also credited as the original source.6 Once it became fashionable, however, Taylor, reflexively getting out of step, ‘regret[ted] the idea, whoever had it. The very word [is] so plummy, so ponderous, so respectable’.7 But it was not, even in 1953, a new idea. In fact in 1952 Taylor himself observed that Harold Nicolson ‘belongs to the Establishment’ without feeling any need to explain what he meant.8 The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first use of the word in this ‘inner circle’ sense in 1923.9 The theory behind ‘the Establishment’ shares similarities with sociological theories of elites and classical typologies of oligarchy; it also bears resemblance to Marxist conceptions of an interlocking ruling class and to various conspiracy theories, ancient and modern – which imagine the concealed power of secret cabals in high places. In his novel Untouchable, which is based in part on the career of the Cambridge spy, Anthony 57

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Blunt, John Banville playfully mixes the Marxist with the conspiratorial, when ‘Blunt’s’ NKVD handler informs him that Moscow desired to procure a transcript of the deliberations of the Cambridge Syndics, under the illusion that this venerable body was some sort of clandestine union of the great and powerful of our powerful and great university, a cross between the Freemasons and the Elders of Zion.10

Brushing aside explanations, the handler refuses to believe otherwise. ‘He knew what he knew. Oxbridge was running the country, and the Syndics were running half of Oxbridge; how could an account of their doings be anything less than fascinating to our masters in Moscow?’11 Although drawn from a 1997 work of fi ction, this vignette does suggest how the idea of ‘the Establishment’ existed long before Fairlie put a name on it. Indeed one of the best examples of that idea is to be found in another work of fiction:  Evelyn Waugh’s 1937 novel, Scoop. When we first encounter the celebrated and intrepid American journalist, Wenlock Jakes, he is ‘spending the afternoon at work on his forthcoming book Under the Ermine’. It was to be a survey of the undercurrents of English political and social life. I shall never forget, he typed, the evening of King Edward’s abdication. I was dining at the Savoy Grill as the guest of Silas Shock of the New York Guardian. His guests were well chosen, six of the most influential men and women in England; men and women such as only exist in England, who are seldom in the news but who control the strings of the national pulse. On my left was Mrs. Hogbaum the wife of the famous publisher; on the other side was Prudence Blank, who has been described to me as ‘the Mary Selena Wilmark of Britain’; opposite was John Titmuss whose desk at the News Chronicle holds more secrets of state than any ambassador’s […] big business was represented by John Nought, agent of the Credential Assurance Co. … I at once raised the question of the hour. Not one of that brilliant company expressed any opinion. There, in a nutshell, you have England, her greatness – and her littleness. 58

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Later on we catch another glimpse of the work in progress:  ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury who, it is well known, is behind Imperial Chemicals […] wrote Jakes.’12 Waugh may have been satirizing common credulities, or he may have had a more precise target in view: the contemporaneous ‘concoction’, ‘invention’ or ‘discovery’ of the so-called ‘Cliveden Set’, by his cousin and Oxford drinking companion, the brilliant, muck-raking, communist journalist Claud Cockburn. The Set allegedly comprised the appeasement party in the upper reaches of British society and politics: Lord Lothian, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the quasi-official The Times and the Astor family, ‘which in these 1930s shares, and disputes, with the Cecils, an extraordinary position of concentrated political power’ (and who owned The Times).13 In 1961 A.L. Rowse made similar charges, moving the key location from the Astor’s country house to All Souls: Oxford, it seems, is always news. And the very successful propagators of the idea of the Establishment  – a concept which has now spread around the world – have assiduously drawn attention to the peculiar position they consider All Souls College to occupy in it. As usual in such matters, the public is twenty or thirty years behind the times.14

Fellows included Lords Halifax and Simon ‘and of course Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times during the whole period and the most powerful figure of the lot […] one of the half-dozen most influential men in Britain’, as well as the headmasters of Eton and Winchester and the inevitable Archbishop of Canterbury.15 Always discreet, the Establishment knew both how to co-opt outsiders and when to close ranks. ‘It has never been exclusive – drawing in recruits from outside, as soon as they are ready to conform to its standards and become respectable. There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the establishment – and nothing more corrupting.’16 The occasion of Fairlie’s original indictment is instructive  – an alleged cover-up of the Cambridge (and Foreign Office) spies, Burgess and Maclean. When Goronwy Rees further exposed his former friend and colleague Guy Burgess in The People newspaper, ‘the explosion detonated by these articles was atomic. But the blast walls of the Establishment are 59

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so cunningly constructed that the person most hideously wounded was Goronwy Rees himself.’ He resigned as principal of University College, Wales, Aberystwyth, but not before the Oxford don Maurice Bowra ‘wrote to suggest he plant a Judas tree in the college grounds’.17 Beginning with Taylor, commentators focused on the social as well as the institutional character of the Establishment, which, Taylor argued, talks with its own branded accent; eats different meals at different times; has its privileged system of education; its own religion, even to a large extent, its own form of football. Nowhere else in Europe do you discover a man’s social position by exchanging a few words or breaking bread with him.18

Fairlie’s definition proved seminal: By the ‘Establishment’ I do not mean only the centres of official power – though they are certainly part of it – but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognized that it is exercised socially. Anyone who has at any point been close to the exercise of power will know what I mean when I say that the ‘Establishment’ can be seen at work in the activities of, not only the prime minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl Marshal, but of such lesser mortals as the chairman of the Arts Council, the director-general of the BBC, and even the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, not to mention divinities like Lady Violet Bonham Carter.19

To Butterfield ‘it comprise[d] governing circles, newspapers like The Times, “all the best people”, and the Church of England, at least on its official side’.20 To Trevor-Roper it consisted ‘not of known men but of the anonymous (generally Wykehamist) heads of government departments, presidents of companies, editors of “national” papers, chairmen of banks, etc.’.21 All were agreed too on the role of the public schools and Oxbridge as the principal conduits for Establishment recruitment. The ancient institutions promoted an ethos of disinterested public service and a lingua franca for the unobtrusive exercise of influence. Indeed in 60

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one agreeably baroque version England is a country ‘governed by Old Etonians led by the nose to disaster by a Wykehamist Underground’.22 Sir David (later Viscount) Eccles, BA (Oxon), KCVO, CH, one of ‘the most charming men in the world’, ‘stage-manager of the coronation in 1953’, and Conservative minister for education in 1954, has been described as ‘opinionated, self-assured, a Wykehamist with the manner (so Etonians said) of a Harrovian’.23 And although such tokens of insiderdom have lost much of their purchase since the decade of U and Non-U, they have over the same stretch exhibited remarkable resilience as well. In the 1980s BBC comedy Yes, Prime Minister, the retired head of the civil service, alarmed by proposed spending cuts in higher education, instructs his successor: ‘Sir Humphrey, we must protect the universities. Both of them.’ Commentators agreed on the outline, but not the detail of what, precisely, constituted the Establishment. In Fairlie’s view the Foreign Office was ‘somewhere near the heart’ of it; later, for Kingsley Martin, monarchy stood at its apex;24 Rowse, unsurprisingly, fixed All Souls at its centre. Annan recalled that ‘many of us regarded Macmillan as the arch-Establishment man’.25 Not so Trevor-Roper, who noted at the time: ‘I know the PM personally (he has been my publisher for twenty years) and think I know his character. I know him as a gay, cavalier figure, ready for battle, fond of life and an occasional skirmish, and, above all, a rebel: a rebel against the Establishment.’26 If the elasticity of the concept seems at times to threaten its coherence, sufficient agreement existed to sustain its viability. If people disagreed about Macmillan’s membership of the Establishment, no one would have questioned Cyril John Viscount Radcliffe’s credentials:  BA (Oxon) KBE, GBE, DCL (Oxon), Director General of the wartime Ministry of Information, law lord, privy councillor, partitioner of India (and later of Cyprus), sometime fellow of All Souls, perennial chairman of royal commissions, trustee of the British Museum and so on.27 Protean, adaptable and anonymous, the Establishment did not lend itself readily to hard-edged sociological investigations. In the face of those difficulties Martin offers perhaps one of the more useful definitions of that part of our government that has not been subjected to democratic control. It is the combined influence of persons who play a part 61

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in public life, though they have not been appointed on any public test of merit or election. More important still, they are not subject to dismissal by democratic process. They uphold a tradition and form a core of continuity in our institutions. They are privileged persons and their positions are not as a rule affected by changes in government.28

By the second half of the decade the term had achieved wide circulation. Independent television (ATV) broadcast a half-hour programme on the subject with a panel including Bob (now Lord) Boothby, Lady Violet Bonham Carter and  – in those days still a radical voice  – Paul Johnson. The Archbishop of Canterbury, presumably, had more pressing engagements. In 1957 a periodical, The Twentieth Century, published a special issue entitled ‘Who rules Britain?’ followed two years later by The Establishment: A Symposium, a collection of essays edited by Hugh Thomas and dealing with various pillars of the imagined semi-hidden power structure, including the civil service, the public schools and (in a contribution from Fairlie himself) the BBC. Suddenly there were sightings of ‘Establishments’ all over the place: in Oxford University, in London literary life; there was even, apparently, an ‘Establishment view of the ancient Greek world’.29 By 1960 Hugh Trevor-Roper complained that the word had become ‘hackneyed’.30 He continued to use it all the same.

THE AGE OF ANALYSIS

That the Establishment is ‘not as a rule affected by changes in government’ is a profoundly political statement (or insight). Governments and politicians come and go, bureaucrats and technocrats, mandarins and managers, are always with us. The supposed end of ideology, ‘death’ of political philosophy, and relegation of grand theory to the past, cleared the ground for technique, specialization and analysis  – the ‘detailed examination or study of something so as to determine its nature, structure, or essential features’. Despite her respect for Namier, Veronica Wedgwood explicitly eschewed analysis, reaffirming instead the values of narrative, description and literary style. And ‘how right she is’ declared the defiantly ‘old-fashioned’ Rowse, ‘as against the fashionable analytical 62

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historians who are so determined to show how clever they are at the expense of history’.31 Wedgwood herself took a clear-eyed view of contemporary professional trends and the note of provocative certainty which is most common in history today. Strong in our techniques of research, sustained by card indexes, assisted by microfilms, resting our conclusions on an ever increasing bulk of sifted, calendared, registered documents, we historians grow very pleased with ourselves.32

The political scientists, philosophers and economists grew pleased with themselves too. The great system-builders of political theory were dissected with Popperian scalpels; neo-classical and Marxist economics were declared defunct. Logical Positivism, ever-more refined by linguistic analysis, reduced metaphysics wholesale to a heap of historical dust.33 What, wondered the Listener at the time, would Aristotle and Plato, Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau and John Stuart Mill have made of political philosophy defined as the elucidation of linguistic puzzles?, adding that they would, at least, ‘know that they had been put in their place’.34 Namier’s disdain for historiography fits the pattern. ‘The foremost task of honest history,’ he wrote, ‘is to discredit and drive out its futile and dishonest varieties.’35 Namier’s methodology likewise ensured that he would ‘undoubtedly find his place in the history of this age of “psephology”, Gallup polls, sociological survey and time and motion study: in short the age of analysis.’36 Analogous developments across disciplines were recognized at the time: ‘such names as Wittgenstein and Namier stand out like strong towers for the modern student’ proclaimed a lead article in the TLS. From the places of strength established by these two great captains many expeditions set out […] [and] in their chosen field they feel charged with a missionary zeal to sweep away cant and confusion, and to examine present language or past happenings, as the case may be, with a searching analytic eye.37

One iconic figure at least escaped the great intellectual clearing-out of the 1950s, one whom Isaiah Berlin called ‘the greatest healer of our 63

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time’:  Sigmund Freud.38 Perhaps the collocation of the words ‘analysis’ and ‘psycho’ provided cover. Perhaps in the case of ex-ideologues psychoanalysis itself supplied a psychological need, a substitute for vanished beliefs. Koestler, who back in his Communist Party days compromised his ideological purity by mixing ‘too much Freud [with] not enough Marx’, now applied psychoanalytic categories in his ‘Guide to political neuroses’.39 In later life he endowed a chair of paranormal studies in the University of Edinburgh. The leading popularizer, during the 1950s, of psychology’s claims, Hans Jürgen Eysenck, detected an authoritarian personality profile to both the political hard left and far right  – a not very surprising discovery in the heyday of totalitarian theory. Eysenck, who dismissed psychoanalysis – as distinct from psychology – as ‘essentially non-scientific and to be judged in terms of belief and faith, rather than in terms of proof and verification’, at the same time took an interest, like Koestler, in parapsychology.40 Always subject, especially in the English-speaking world, to charges of quackery, in the postwar period psychoanalysis garnered greater scientific credibility than ever before (or since).41 As one sceptic sniffed in 1953, ‘in the literary world Freudian terms and concepts have been accepted so completely that modern novels are frequently indistinguishable from psychiatric case records’.42 Namier’s engagement with psychoanalytic ideas dated from the 1920s, and though he occasionally – and rather deftly – turned Freudian technique to historical exposition, it is hard to imagine him attempting a full-dress ‘psychobiography’ in the manner of Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther (1958), or Isaac Kramnick’s The Rage of Edmund Burke (1977). Indeed he warned against unrestrained psychological conjecture: Unconscious promptings combine with rational thought, and in every action there are inscrutable components. Undoubtedly one of the most important lines of advance for history, and especially biography, will be through a knowledge of modern psychology. Still, care is required in applying it. The unqualified practitioner must not be let loose, not even on the dead, and a mere smattering of psychology is likely to result in hasty judgments framed in a nauseating jargon.43

After administering that salutary dose of precaution, that most austere of empiricists proceeded during the 1950s to issue a slew of 64

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rhetorically authoritative, empirically unverifiable pronouncements on the non-rational springs of human behaviour, and on the psychological condition of certain historical actors: One inevitable result of heightened psychological awareness is, however, a change of attitude towards so-called political ideas. To treat them as the offspring of pure reason would be to assign to them a parentage about as mythological as that of Pallas Athene. What matters most is the underlying emotions, the music, to which ideas are a mere libretto, often of very inferior quality; and once the emotions have ebbed, the ideas, established high and dry, become doctrine, or at best innocuous clichés.44

Talleyrand, ‘neglected by his parents in early childhood and brought up by dependents […] was a grand seigneur towards men of other classes but had no love of his own and contributed with cold indifference to its downfall’. Horace Walpole’s account of the relationship between George III, Bute, and the Princess of Wales was one of his ‘ “Gothic fancies”, a tale rendered mysterious and sinister by his imagination, a pattern unconsciously derived from his own young years, which he stamped upon a historical canvas’. Burke is characterized as egotistical and ‘a solitary rootless man’ with ‘a streak of persecution mania’ and so on.45 Ever his mentor’s faithful voice, John Brooke explained It is not that Sir Lewis was not interested in the history of ideas […] he was the last person to deny that, say, communism influences the way people think, and that we should write about it. But he just thought that anybody could sit down and turn out a history of ideas, anybody could produce a study of Marx or Lenin simply by reading them. It needed far more imagination to get to the psychological springs of these ideas. In this sense he did discount plans, ideas, and dreams in favour of realities and pressures.

‘History must absorb the findings of psychoanalysis and adapt them for its own purposes’ insisted Brooke, who related Charles Townshend’s treatment of the American colonies to his upbringing, ‘he, who had been the oppressed son, now became the heavy father’.46 The Marquis of 65

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Rockingham’s political conduct he attributed to ‘wounded vanity rather than principle’, and so on.47 Psychoanalysis represented a somewhat exotic Viennese import, Logical Positivism less so. From Burke to Orwell English modes of thought refused abstract theory, or in Logical Positivist terminology, metaphysics; and in that respect the prominence in English intellectual life at mid-century of east and central Europeans is as revealing as it is significant. The list is impressive and includes Wittgenstein, Namier, Popper, Berlin, Eysenck, Ernst Gombrich and Nikolaus Pevsner. ‘England was not an accidental landing-stage on which these intellectuals unwittingly found themselves stranded’, observes Perry Anderson. Fleeing the ideological conflict and political instability of their homelands they came to rest in a stable, tolerant, society ‘free from the contagion of Europe – general ideas’.48 Popper’s piecemeal social engineering, Berlin’s pluralism and preference for ‘negative liberty’ over ‘positive liberty’ (or for freedom from over freedom to), and Namier’s celebration of the organic growth of the British parliament all mirrored English self-images and were fit for Cold War purpose. In short, the emigres codified and systematized the ad hoc and ‘slovenly empiricism of the past’.49 Anderson calls this cohort the ‘White [that is, counter-revolutionary] Emigration’. Astonishingly he never once mentions the fact that most of them were Jews. This may be a case of English tact, or it may be that Anderson did not wish to repeat the experience of Norman Birnbaum. In 1960 Birnbaum sent Berlin the draft of an essay written for the New  York magazine Commentary: It is a philosophical feat of no small order to celebrate, simultaneously, the essential Britishness of British politics and to derive from it prescriptions applicable to all mankind’s ideological ills. Not surprisingly, this feat has been accomplished by a very cosmopolitan group of philosophers long resident in the British Isles. The writings of professor Isaiah Berlin, Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper are adduced whenever British self-congratulation seeks intellectually reputable credentials. Foreign voices have also been heard. Professor Jacob Talmon’s writings have been praised by the Times itself, and Professor Raymond Aron has 66

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been honoured as if he were a Jazz-age Montesquieu, looking admiringly across the channel from Paris.

Unusually for him, Berlin’s response is free of equivocation: If you publish your piece as it stands I shall certainly find myself compelled to write to Commentary to point out the following things […] You speak of us all as ‘cosmopolitans’ who have lived for various periods in England. The latter words are perfectly true. You do not add the adjective ‘rootless’; but since all the persons mentioned by you are Jews, the expression too strongly reminds one of the fact that this is how it is used by the professional anti-Semites in the Soviet Union – and indeed everywhere else. This I shall certainly have to point out to Commentary, which is the very journal for such points. It would be better if instead of saying ‘cosmopolitans’ you openly said ‘Jews of foreign origin’. Other Jews, ‘ideologues’ of equally foreign origin from Marx onwards: Namier, Laski, Deutscher, Shonfeld [sic], Hobsbawm  – I  need not go over the list – oppose ‘us’ and dominate the discussion and influence gentiles. It may be a sound point, but it is certainly anti-Semitic; and as Commentary enjoys lacerating itself, it will surely not decline to print my letter.50

Whatever the reasons for Anderson’s reticence were, it left a gaping hole in what is otherwise a tour de force of historical and critical analysis. It is true, as he says, that the emigres had elective affinities with English intellectual and political styles, and that to them England represented an ‘ideal antipode’ to the ideological and political turmoil from which they fled.51 It is also true, as he does not say, that most of them fled also from the pathological spawn of ethnic nationalism and collectivist ideologies, anti-Semitism. Something more visceral that elective affinity was at work here. A child of Jewish refugees, one Polish the other Austrian, born in England in 1945, recalls that his parents gave their children ‘the precious gift of “becoming English” […] for to be English was to be “safe”. ’52 In the preface to his last book, the Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton wrote: If it is thought that I have painted an unduly favourable picture of the English, this is not the consequence of an unthinking and somewhat old-fashioned patriotism. It is because they so appeared to one who 67

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came upon them from the outside. I was well over seventeen years old when I landed in England on St Valentine’s Day in 1939, and I knew virtually nothing of that country, not even its language. Within a few months it dawned upon me that I had arrived in the country in which I ought to have been born, a conviction surprisingly reinforced by two and a half years spent in the ranks of His Majesty’s Army. In a way, this book tries to pay a debt of gratitude, but it does so after careful reflection and after personal experience of other peoples.53

Ian Buruma’s Anglophile grandfather loved his adopted country all the more for ‘saving’ him and his family from Hitler’s Europe; ‘The Last Englishman’ in Buruma’s book, Anglomania, is Sir Isaiah Berlin.54 Of course English society has never been completely free of the anti-Semitic virus. Orwell grappled in print with his own prejudices. Revelations in 1957 of the operation of Jewish membership quotas in Finchley, and, it soon emerged, in other suburban London golf clubs, are held to have swung Jewish votes away from the Tories and in favour of the Liberal Party in subsequent elections.55 However, an immense distance lies between, but does not excuse, clubland snobberies and Russian pogroms or Nazi death camps  – every one of Berlin’s Latvian relatives were murdered during the Holocaust  – between the slighting, real or imagined, of a touchy fellow of All Souls, and the suitcase standing in the hallway, packed and permanently ready to go.56 For obvious reasons the romance of England as a secure ‘landing-stage’ gained deep purchase from the 1930s onwards. But Jewish Anglophilia had a pedigree stretching back, at least, to the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, who saw cricket as an appropriate national game for the new Jewish state.57 Namier recommended the incorporation of a future Israel into the British Empire as its ‘seventh dominion’,58 thereby allowing him to reconcile his dual nationalisms. In the event the pro-Arab British foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, did not oblige. Namier’s witness to the creation of Israel was strained by both British policy and by a breach with Weizmann. In 1947 Namier converted to Anglicanism shortly before marrying his second wife, a Russian Orthodox Christian, Julia de Beausobre. Weizmann considered this an act of apostasy. The two never spoke again. Namier’s passionate commitment to the Zionist cause may be measured by the years 68

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of work which he devoted to it; but when the time came he did not vote with his feet. Asked whether he might settle in the new Jewish homeland, he answered that he ‘would not be able to feel at home there. Everything will be rough and ready, with no roots, with no organic cohesion, so provisional. No, I could not.’59 He did not, then, accept Koestler’s argument, given in an interview to the Jewish Chronicle in 1950, that diaspora Jews must now either assimilate or emigrate. Berlin did not accept it either, though he confided that he experienced ‘a personal sense not merely of duty but of homecoming every time I visit Israel’. Travelling there with Namier in 1958 he described his companion as ‘walking on air […] [he] loved everybody & everything’.60 Yet both chose England. The emigres’ conservative renditions of English exceptionalism did not go unrecognised, as each in turn duly accepted his gong: Sir Lewis Namier, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sir Karl Popper, Sir Ernst Gombrich, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Sir Geoffrey Elton, Sir Michael Postan. There is a notable absence here: Mr Isaac Deutscher, Marxist historian and author of a majestic trilogy on the life of Leon Trotsky – not Professor Deutscher either, as Berlin made sure.61 Berlin himself, quipped a colleague, received his knighthood ‘for services to conversation’; he was rewarded also, as were the rest, for services to the status quo.

NA M IER  IN C .

In retrospect the impact of The Structure of Politics on historical studies appears truly seminal. For the most part well-reviewed by specialists, the book’s historiographical significance is most keenly registered by Trevelyan’s encomium that there was now ‘a Namier way’ of doing history. The Namier interpretation of the politics of the 1760s, if not all his ways and means, became accepted orthodoxy. In 1949 A.J.P. Taylor concluded a review of Herbert Butterfield’s George III, Lord North and the People by commenting that Historians of the eighteenth century have been in search of new bearings ever since Professor Namier exploded the traditional view of George III and the Whigs twenty years ago. Mr Butterfield starts in 69

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antiquated terms and talks of ‘the Whig oligarchs’ who had engrossed power and place before the accession of George III; this version, if sustained, would have found a new home for lost causes.62

In 1993 J.G.A. Pocock, whose PhD dissertation Butterfield had supervised in the early 1950s, and whose voluminous, groundbreaking and intellectually exacting work on the history of political thought and discourse Namier would have considered ‘flapdoodle’, nonetheless acknowledged the enduring character of Namier’s contribution. Beginning an essay at 1760, Pocock remarks that he thereby runs the risk of ‘seeming to perpetuate ancient myths about a new departure in politics occasioned by [George III’s] policies and personality. These myths are long exploded’.63 Exploded perhaps, but not extinguished. The myths which Namier cleared away in 1929 are conveniently summarized in the then standard account of the early reign of George III given by Trevelyan in his popular History of England (1926). In the 1952 edition, The Structure of Politics is added to the list of recommended further reading on the period. The text is left unaltered. The critical reception of The Structure of Politics and, in the following year, of England in the Age of the American Revolution, combined with Namier’s appointment to a chair in the University of Manchester did not, as it turned out, herald the beginning of a new era in the writing of eighteenth-century British history, let  alone more far-reaching change in historical technique in general. During the 1930s, his time and energies consumed by Zionist politicking, in professional terms Namier became a semi-detached historian. He commuted to Manchester, staying in London over the weekends, and in the war years the university granted him leave for the duration to serve as liaison between the British government and the Polish government-in-exile. He kept his hand in, to be sure, delivering Oxford University’s prestigious Ford Lectures in 1934, publishing Additions and Corrections to Sir John Fortescue’s Edition of the Correspondence of King George III in 1937, reviewing frequently in the TLS, and producing a steady stream of sharp, opinionated essays, many of them subsequently collected and issued under hardback. More and more during these years Namier turned his unforgiving eye to nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history, which engagement 70

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culminated, from an historiographical standpoint, in the publication of his Raleigh Lectures, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (1944). By the beginning of the 1950s, however, he was ready to return to his first love, eighteenth-century British parliamentary history. The times could not have been more auspicious. The British parliament stood at the dead-centre of Namier’s historical (and political) imagination. As early as 1928, in his essay ‘The biography of ordinary men’ he set out his prospectus for what would eventually become The History of Parliament Trust (HOPT). Namier is often reproved for his narrow focus, and the contrast with the range and breath of a Trevelyan, a Hobsbawm, or to look beyond English horizons, a Braudel, is clear-cut. But Namier saw parliament as a ‘marvelous microcosmos of English social and political life’. Close attention to the shifting social composition of the House of Commons, and to the political life of parliamentary boroughs, he argued, would illuminate broad swathes of English history. For example, ‘when brewers, clothiers and iron masters start acquiring seats in the House, it is obvious that fortunes are being made in those branches of trade, and that early capitalists have made an appearance’.64 This proposes a sort of political sociology more suggestive in its possibilities and more appealing to post-Namier historians, than the preoccupation ‘with those problems of political mechanics which have [in 1957] caught the interest of the present day’ and with which the practice of Namierism is usually identified.65 ‘The biography of ordinary men’ also addresses the practical problems of funding, organization and structure which so grand a project as a comprehensive, multi-volume, history of parliament must entail. A sequence of ‘horizontal’ studies of individual constituencies at specific periods would prove more revealing that a collection of ‘vertical’ studies over the longue durée. In short, the task cannot be undertaken by individual researchers, working independently of each other. It has to be organized on a national scale, given national standing, and financed from national resources. A  central organization is required, an editorial board composed of experts and working under the auspices of a parliamentary committee, co-operating with various county organizations, and bodies […] a 71

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Dictionary of Parliamentary Biography should be compiled but based on periods, and not on the alphabet.66

In May 1928, Josiah Wedgwood MP wrote to The Times on the need for a full-scale History of Parliament. Over the coming months he collected the signatures of 512 of his 615 fellow MPs to a petition calling on the government to consider such an enterprise. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, endorsed the proposal and in March 1929 appointed a select committee, chaired by Wedgwood, ‘to report on the materials available for a record of the personnel and politics of past members of parliament of the H of C from 1264 to 1832, and on the cost and desirability of publication’. Committee members included politicians such as the novelist John Buchan, the editor of The Times, J.J. Astor, Namier, the Elizabethan historian John Neale, the medievalist T.F. Tout, A.F. Pollard, and, later on, Yale historian Wallace Notestein. Interestingly, the interim report, published in 1932, recommended inclusion of ‘the parliamentary history of Ireland and Scoland, both for their own sake and for their relevance to Commonwealth countries settled from the British Isles’. Fatally, delivered at the depth of the Great Depression, it estimated costs at £30,000. Failing also to attract financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the project was shelved, revived in 1940 and suspended again in 1942. Finally, in 1951, the Treasury announced a grant of £17,000 per annum over 20 years for a History of Parliament Trust. F.M. Stenton, president of the Royal Historical Society, chaired the editorial board. From the start, however, no one doubted that this was Namier’s history.67 The office lavatory of the project’s offices in the Institute of Historical Research had two towels, one for the great man, one for the rest, and today his ‘founding father’ status is confirmed by the HOPT’s website.68 Namier’s leading role is further confirmed by the organization and structure of the project. Parliamentary history was divided into chronological sections, to each of which were assigned a senior historian as director, with a small team of research assistants. The first set of three volumes (in terms of publication date), covering the period 1754–90, appeared in 1964. Its editors were Namier and Brooke (who took over after Namier’s death). The second set, edited by Sedgwick, and covering 72

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1715–54, appeared in 1970. The next volume, 1558–1603, was published in 1981. The project is still under way.69 The early and disproportionate allocation of HOPT human and financial resources to Namier’s eighteenth century is obvious. The first volume set the template, providing a general survey, accounts of constituencies and elections, and – the finished product of Namier–Stakhanovite research ore  – individual biographies of every MP. Namier was very clear about what he was not doing, alerting Plumb, who at the outset took charge of the 1679–1714 section, to the machinations of ‘the Scottish Committee’ to divide that section at 1707, the year of the Anglo-Scottish Act of Union. He considered the idea imbecilic: if we were writing a history of parliament on constitutional lines, 1688, 1707, 1801, 1832 etc would be milestones separating the consecutive stretches of road traversed; but that as our work is a sociological study based on the biographies of members, and of the groups and parties which they formed, to break up your section in 1707 would be simply insane.

Plumb agreed. To stop at 1707  ‘would be to perpetuate the idiocies of formal constitutional history’.70 Or again: ‘the fact that a man was a “very insignificant MP” does not mean that his biography should be kept short accordingly’ because the completed volumes would have ‘a sociological character’.71 That approach or, one might say, bias, is further underlined by the guidelines for the History of Parliament ‘survey’ essays anatomizing ‘the groups and parties’ of MPs. The topics which will call for attention in the survey are indicated by the following headings: • • • • • • •

age education residence social status occupation parliamentary experience patronage 73

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• • • •

family connection parliamentary ancestry religion nationality72

No mention here, remarkably – even after the requirements of structural analysis are taken into account – of political views. No mention, either, of the House of Lords. The attempt in 1954 by ‘the Neale–Namier alliance’ to ‘flatter, wheedle, and bribe’ K.B. (Bruce) McFarlane into taking over the late medieval section foundered upon McFarlane’s insistence that his brief be extended to include the peerage.73 Butterfield’s description of the Namierites as ‘the most powerfully organized squadron of our historical world at the present time’ has been ridiculed as hysterical.74 The squadron on one count extended to four historians: Brooke, Owen, Sedgwick and Namier himself. But Butterfield’s characteristic lapse into overstatement looks less ridiculous once the History of Parliament and the prevailing modes of academic patronage are entered into the calculation. Richard Pares wrote to Butterfield from Oxford in 1953 that one of my assistants is leaving me at the New Year to take a lectureship at Manchester, and I have to replace him in a hurry. I think there is too little time to advertise and, in any case, I  have always been perfectly successful, up to now, in recruiting my staff with the personal help of friends. I am therefore writing to ask you if you know of anybody who would suit me.75

No search committee, no ‘equal opportunity’, no ‘transparency’! Such frankness would hardly have shocked Butterfield, who had essentially installed Williams in a chair at UCD and ‘elected’ David Knowles by fiat to a fellowship in Peterhouse.76 Jobbery, by its nature, cuts two ways. ‘No pupil of mine,’ said the unclubbable Leavis, ‘was ever appointed to a post in the Cambridge English faculty.’77 Such practices are as old as Plato’s Academy. Patronage, who one knew, or was known to, and the cross-currents of personalized academic politics, were as germane to appointments and promotions as 74

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were scholarly productivity or intellectual merit. Pares refused ‘to be drawn into the whirlpool of gossip, deprecation and faction’ at Oxford.78 Trevor-Roper relished it. If his account of the election to a chair in history sounds satirical, he certainly didn’t make it all up. Enter a last minute candidate whose historical studies, confined to one branch of the state papers during the reign of Elizabeth, have so far yielded, in 25 years, two slender articles. I am sure they are exact and competent articles; but since the author of them touches nothing he does not desiccate, I cannot find anyone who has read them. However, I must not make any uncivil comment on this election, so I will only say that the standards of Oxford professors of history have been maintained. We have now four such professors, and the total output of original work by all four amounts to five articles.79

In the decade after the publication of the Robbins Report (1962) the higher education sector expanded at an unprecedented rate:  student numbers doubled and nine new ‘plate-glass’ universities were founded.80 It is unlikely that this greater mass dissipated faculty gossip, but it did to some extent disperse the power of the patronage-broker. The smaller, more intimate academic world of the 1950s concentrated that power. The history department of the provincial university in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) is six strong; there are all of 13 fellows in C.P. Snow’s fictional Cambridge college in The Masters (1951); during the 1950s the non-fictional Balliol fellowship numbered 27.81 The supply of qualified historians exceeded the demand for them. In such a constricted social and economic environment the HOPT represented a major injection of resources. Namier (who referred to his ‘job of terrifying scale’), and Neale, offered McFarlane £8,000, a research assistant and more: ‘would I just say what I wanted and everything physically possible would be done to meet my wishes’.82 George Kitson Clark, who shared his Cambridge colleague, Butterfield’s, misgivings about collaborative history, worried, too, about the possible ‘exploitation’ of new minted graduate students.83 Namier was accused directly at an Oxford seminar in 1953 of employing research students as ‘a sort of slave labour for their professors’.84 Plumb on the other hand, and quite reasonably, saw opportunity: ‘I have a number of people scattered about the country 75

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who could be doing useful biographical work and I  should like to get them fully employed.’85 Lucy Sutherland likewise quickly ‘collected a few names’ and foresaw ‘quite a future for young historical scholars in this History of Parliament’.86 Perhaps too Trevor-Roper had Namier’s new institutional leverage in mind, as well as his intellectual hegemony, when he described him, playfully, as ‘the dictator of English historical study’.87 Dictators do not allow for the free play of opinion and it has been pointed out that the Namierites ‘won the argument’ with Butterfield by leaving his ‘name out of all their texts and indexes’.88 The same charge has been made in the case of Edmund Burke. As a theorist of party and manufacturer-in-chief, especially in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), of the myth of George III, and above all as a purveyor of ideas in politics, Burke ‘the great charlatan’ offers a standing rebuke to Namier doctrine. Conor Cruise O’Brien launched his biography of Burke with a stinging assault on the Namierites, whom he accused of systematically deflating his hero’s historical importance:  in their treatment of Burke, O’Brien contends, apart from the occasional disparaging aside, the rest is silence.89 In their monographs, of course, the schoolmen ignore historiography generally, not just Butterfield. Book reviewing was another matter. In both its argument and methodology Butterfield’s George III, Lord North and the People (1949) transgressed Namierite orthodoxies. It looked beyond parliament to the out-of-doors agitation for parliamentary reform mobilized by the Yorkshire Association and by the Irish Volunteers, and to the impact of public opinion and of ‘the people’ in the great political conflicts of the day. Nor did Butterfield confine his sources to the gold standard of manuscripts, as he mined printed primary material – newspapers, pamphlets – in search of evidence. That variety of sources and out-of-doors, or extra-parliamentary, perspectives placed the Lord North book – to adapt Whig teleology – on the right side of historiography. But Butterfield left himself open to attack by pushing his case too hard that in 1779–80 Britain came close to revolution, and by littering his text with all-too-evident signs of hasty composition. ‘Butterfield’s way of writing’, remarked Taylor, is evidence of his long success as a lecturer. He says everything twice, in order to give his audience time to get it down; and he repeats every 76

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phrase and idea, rightly confident that his audience can never have it drummed into their thick heads too often.90

Namier’s colleague in Manchester, Eric Robson, scored some easy points: This book is moved by overemphasis both in interpretation and style, and by the incomprehensible language used to maintain the sensational impression of impending revolution […] for mixed metaphors, this account of the author’s hero could hardly be bettered,‘The next turn of the screw was the work of Charles James Fox, who in this period so often added the final stroke to the arguments of his friends and put the crown upon their extravagances, as though determined […] to go one notch higher than the top note of the piano.’ This note Professor Butterfield too often strikes.91

In an otherwise generous review Pares noted that ‘though it is disagreeable to criticize a work of great learning on grounds of style – the book might have been more clearly written’.92 The mauling of George III, Lord North and the People at the hands of Namier’s associates must have been a bruising experience for Butterfield and he did not shy, in private, from assigning bad faith to the ogre of Gower Street93 – accusing Namier of playing ‘tricks’, of trying to restrict access to manuscripts by anyone other than his own disciples, and of behaving in a sinister fashion by writing him courteous letters! He thought Owen’s review of his George III and the Historians (1957) ‘slimy’ and ‘smeary’. Desmond Williams agreed: the review was ‘fundamentally nasty’, and Namier the master of ‘the sneer […] the jibe, and [of] carefully controlled selectivity’.94 In 1955 Williams promised his senior colleague an advance copy of a paper on ‘The historiography of World War II,’95 in which he grapples with Namier’s work on ‘the diplomatic prelude’ of the late 1930s. Butterfield looked forward to reading it but cautioned his protege to ‘check every footnote a score of times, because Namier will take advantage of every slip’. Two weeks later he repeated the injunction: ‘do be careful about the most microscopic points before you publish […] I am sure that Namier (apart from being unfair whenever possible) would pounce on the slightest slip and I  should hate him to score off 77

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you’.96 None of these accusations lacked substance. Namier would indeed later pounce on a slip of Butterfield’s, and sought to superintend reviews of his own books, taking up Plumb’s offer, for instance, to keep the review of his Festschrift from ‘falling into undesirable hands’ at the Cambridge Historical Journal.97 But Butterfield, not himself above such tactics, seems at times to elevate Namier’s routine academic intrigue into the black arts of an historiographical despot. Meanwhile as the dark machinations of Butterfield’s imagination were afoot, Namier continued to collect his well-earned laurels:  honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham and Rome; an honorary fellowship from his beloved Balliol; the 1952 Romanes Lecture (published as ‘Monarchy and the party system’); and also in 1952, and certainly most welcome of all, a knighthood. What could be more gratifying to a man with ‘an incurable faith in the establishment’; lords of ancient descent did not render him obsequious but did produce ‘proper solemnity, for they were [to him] artifacts of Time at its most cunning’.98 Interestingly enough the occasion of his investiture provides an antidote to the legend of the humourless, morose figure haunted by Dostoyevskian angst. After the ceremony, Bob Boothby gave a small celebration party for his old tutor, Namier, and for the also newly knighted Scottish novelist (and neo-Jacobite) Compton Mackenzie. ‘There could hardly have been a more incongruous couple, but they got on like a house on fire. At the end Lewis Namier said; “And now the knights must go home to wash the dishes”.’99 Butterfield’s career also prospered. Elected Professor of Modern History in Cambridge in 1944, and Master of Peterhouse in 1955, in-between he published Christianity and History, The Origins of Modern Science and George III, Lord North and the People – all, remarkably, in 1949 – as well as collections of essays, including History and Human Relations (1951), and, in 1955, the first Wiles lectures, delivered at Queen’s University, Belfast: ‘Man on his past, the study of the history of historical scholarship’. But, ever the cross-grained nonconformist, he did not found a ‘Butterfield School’ (except, arguably, in the field of International Relations). Namier, by contrast, commanded a loyal following of unusual coherence. In hindsight, 1957 may be seen to mark the apogee of the Namier phenomenon. In that year the second, paperback, edition of The Structure of Politics was published. The first identified use of the verb ‘Namierizing’ is 78

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in 1948, of the noun ‘Namierization’ in 1952, and of the verb ‘Namierize’ in 1957, after which, to judge by the Oxford English Dictionary, his name entered the language.100 The standing – among historians – of Namierism at this moment is captured nicely by John Raymond’s satirical account in the New Statesman, of ‘The twenty-ninth annual general meeting of L.B. Namier, Ltd.’: ‘Namier Inc.’.101 Present: Mr R.R. Sedgwick, Dr Lucy Sutherland, and Professor Richard Pares […] [and] the company’s new secretary, Mr John Brooke. Report:  including ‘the completion and inauguration of the vast new Pelham plant at Esher, Surrey, where deposits of raw namierite are mined on the Devonshire and Bedford estates’. The main event of the Group year, of course, had been the completed renovation of the original Namier plant [i.e., the 2nd edition of The Structure of Politics]. The prestige of the firm was unbounded and, despite the usual ill-informed and envious criticism that attached to all highly trained, specialized and successful industries, they continued to enjoy a firm monopoly of the market.

Anticipating Birnbaum’s ‘cosmopolitan’ Emigration’ theses Raymond notes that

and

Anderson’s

‘White

Sir Lewis’s heredity and temperament  – his ancestry includes Polish freemen and learned doctors of the Torah  – go far to explain his engouement with the English. Galicia has its attractions, but at no time in modern history have men looked towards it for the image of a stable society. In Britain Sir Lewis found all that he had missed in Europe […] romanticizing what he has found ever since.

He further mentions ‘Herbert Butterfield, Ltd., a Group specializing in a form of skeleton light industry geared to the wildest speculations’, and contrasts ‘the tremendous range’ of Namier with ‘the microscopic intentions’ of his followers. ‘One has the impression of a Gulliver stitched down by Lilliputians.’ His remarks were prescient. A  few weeks later, in George III and the Historians, Butterfield would launch a full frontal assault on both ‘Gulliver’ and – as the unsaved viewed them – his epigoni. 79

4

CONSENSUS CHALLENGED: CULTURE AND POLITICS IN THE MID-1950S By 1957 Namier Inc.’s ‘firm monopoly’ of the history market appeared secure. Soon to be challenged by ‘Herbert Butterfield Ltd.’, as Raymond called it, the greater threat to Namierite ascendancy lay in the erosion of the wider cultural, social and political consensus which underpinned its successes. Upon reading Kingsley Amis’s comic novel, Lucky Jim (1954), Isaiah Berlin confessed ‘it lowers me more than I can say. No doubt it is a realistic and even gifted description of certain conditions of life, but I  cannot bear the tone, the contents and the images which it forcibly brings up to me.’1 One does not wonder what Berlin, who gushed at the ‘dark mystical Byzantine ceremony’ of the coronation, or Edward Shils, who discerned in that event ‘national communion’, made of the angriest of the so-called ‘Angry Young Men’, John Osborne’s, attack on monarchy four years later as ‘the gold filling in a mouthful of decay’.2 Namier’s ‘encounter at Manchester with a surly ticket-inspector was enough to set him brooding on the collapse of civilized values’. In the 1950s he detected ‘signs everywhere that self-discipline was breaking down among the young, and that officialdom condoned its collapse’.3 The age of deference was giving way, it appeared, to the age of irreverence. The perceptible swerve in the national mood at mid-decade had a generational impetus. In Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger (1956), J.B. Priestley is ridiculed as 80

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an Edwardian bore. But since Priestley himself complained of a national torpor in politics and culture, and there were plenty of more presentable targets around, Osborne took aim presumably at his vintage more than at his persona. He had a point. The Lord Chamberlain (and stage censor), the director-general of the BBC, the prime minister and the despairing Namier were all born in the nineteenth century. Butterfield (who just scraped into the twentieth century) ‘rightly’ abominated the telephone and used metaphors like ‘cinematograph film’ and ‘receiving set’ (or radio), which even at the time sounded antique. His generation was starting to look its age. The atmospherics, what Berlin identified accurately as the tone, of both popular and literary culture began to shift.

THE DISAFFECTED VOICE

Recalling the impact of jazz upon his contemporaries Osborne observed that ‘it was completely different from the kind of voice that we knew at the time’.4 He might as easily have been referring to his own plays or to the other writings of the ‘Angry Young Men’ (AYM). The term was first coined by the press officer of the Royal Court Theatre, where Look Back in Anger had opened on Tuesday 8 May 1956. Asked by a journalist for his opinion of the new playwright, he replied that he supposed him to be ‘a very angry young man’. The phrase took hold and was soon applied to Colin Wilson, whose synthetic philosophical polemic, The Outsider, appeared on 28 May.5 The novelists John Wain and Kingsley Amis were next conscripted retrospectively into the ranks, and others would follow including John Braine and even, momentarily, the sociologist Richard Hoggart. None of them ever volunteered for this imaginary phalanx  – indeed all of them tried to desert. Chronologically the first text of the AYM is Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) – the title, symptomatically, alludes to a jazz record – an indictment of the class constrictions and provincial drabness of postwar austerity Britain (food rationing was not lifted until 1954). The seminal text, however, is the slightly later Lucky Jim. Described by Britain’s best campus novelist as ‘the first British campus novel’, Lucky Jim is a comedy of bad manners, which chronicles the misadventures of its eponymous anti-hero, Jim Dixon, an unambitious 81

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historian newly appointed as a lecturer in a redbrick university, and armed with the draft of a scholarly article on ‘The Economic Effect of the Development of Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485’, the point of which eludes him.6 Disgruntled and unfit for purpose, Jim stumbles through a sequence of comic set-pieces. Invited by his pompous boss, Professor Welch, to a weekend at his country home, where the entertainment is supplied by the singing of madrigals, he manages to burn cigarette holes in the guestroom bed sheets, and proceeds to trim the burnt edges with a shaving razor. Nursing a fierce antipathy towards the professor’s faux metropolitan son, a bearded and pretentious painter (and designs on his girlfriend, Christine), Jim and he finally come to blows. After delivering a drunken lecture on ‘Merrie England’ he is sacked, disentangles himself from his own, histrionic girlfriend and heads south with Christine to London. All harmless knock-about stuff judged by the swinging standards of post-Lady Chatterley trial fiction. Moreover, although Jim bucks bourgeois codes of conduct, his disaffection is personal, temperamental and essentially non-political. Amis himself lacked strong political conviction. In a letter to the Daily Worker responding to a review of his Fabian pamphlet Socialism and the Intellectuals (1957), he writes, I don’t assume that capitalism has ‘had it’. In a way I wish I could, but that’s different. Nor do I  assume that socialism is ‘the society of the future’. It may never come. Or something better may replace it. I  don’t mean the withering away of the state. No world-view, it seems to me, comes within light years of being adequate to the world it professes to categorize. Each fact, each entity, each event is unique. To pretend otherwise is mere Victorian system-building. Marxism, I think, does just that. It repels me also by offering certainty instead of truth.7

Yet innocuous as Lucky Jim reads today it caused much offence at the time; even the book’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, found it – when he finally got around to reading it – ‘vulgar and anti-cultural’.8 To Nancy Mitford it 82

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furnished ‘evidence […] of declining civilization’.9 None of that censure, however, deterred the book-buying public:  Lucky Jim went through 20 editions between 1954 and 1956.10 But it would be wrong to infer from those different receptions a clean-cut generation gap. C.P. Snow provided a blurb for the back cover of the first edition, and John Betjeman reviewed it favourably.11 Both the popularity of, and the hostility towards, the novel may be in part explained by its contemporary social and cultural critique. Despite Amis’s weary disclaimer that ‘Jim is a man in a book, not a generation’, Jim did transgress bourgeois pieties, and mock high cultural affectations (and succeed in ‘lowering’ Isaiah Berlin).12 And this is all expressed in precise, carefully crafted prose, which eschewed literary flourish or allusion; in the deceptively ‘ordinary’ language of his poetic counterparts, like Wain and his friend Philip Larkin, soon to be lumped together in ‘The Movement’. It is a style which repudiates the declamatory, metaphorical abundance of a Dylan Thomas, and the dense and mannered prose of, say, an Elizabeth Bowen, and in which some saw affinities with the stripped-down clarity of the Logical Positivists. Whereas Lucky Jim cut across the grain of the literary Establishment, two years later Look Back in Anger knocked the hinges off its stage door. The critical impact of Look Back in Anger owed much to the force of contrast with the dreary and predictable fare being served up at the time: a settled mix of respectful revival, and drawing-room drama and comedy, all delivered in a prim home counties accent. At the end of 1954 the Spectator’s theatre critic noted ‘it is not easy to recall one English play in the last year which even suggested that there might be a new playwright behind it […] the English stage is passing through a singularly barren period’.13 Theatre owners and managers had, of course, a vital commercial interest in presenting the familiar, the middle-brow, the risk-averse, and the nostalgic to the ticket-buying public and, if by chance boundaries were overstepped, the Lord Chamberlain stood ready off-stage to restore decorum. Priestley provides a glimpse of just how trivial censorship could be, referring to the excision of a song about the prime minister in waiting, Anthony Eden, from a revue, Thirty-odd years of desire Waiting for senior men to retire […] 83

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John Osborne records a more serious act of self-censorship:  the ‘vaguely anti-Queen’ sentiments expressed by a character in his second play, The Entertainer, would have been expressed more forcefully had the Lord Chamberlain not been looking over his shoulder as he wrote.14 ‘We must not poke fun at politicians’ remarks Priestley.15 He did not add that in a classic, if minor, example of Establishment gate-keeping, the censor and the politician in question were friends. Indeed the curriculum vitae of the Lord Chamberlain to the royal household reads like a parody of an Establishment stalwart:  The Rt Hon. Lawrence Roger Lumley, Viscount Lumley, Baron Lumley of Lumley Castle, Earl of Scarborough, Eton, Sandhurst, BA(Oxon), KG, GCIE, GCVO, TD, DL, JP, former Conservative MP, PPS, Governor of Bombay, parliamentary under-secretary of state for India and Burma, Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire and the city of York, Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge (of Freemasons) of England, privy councilor and author of The History of the Eleventh Hussars (1936). Though not in fact a die-hard reactionary, Scarborough was no enthusiast for the avant-garde either.16 Enter ‘Jimmy Porter’, no respecter of the prime minister (Eden), Conservative MPs (including his brother-in-law), or the Bishop of Bromley. Porter, the central character in Look Back in Anger, is described in the stage directions as ‘full of pride’, a man of ‘blistering honesty, or apparent honesty’, who to others appears ‘simply a loudmouth’. The play opens with a declaration of boredom. Sitting in his one-room Midlands flat Porter throws down his newspaper and asks, ‘why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week’s. Different books – same reviews.’ The tense and complicated relationships between Porter and his wife, Alison, Alison’s friend Helena, and Porter’s friend and verbal punching-bag, Cliff, supply the play’s dynamic; Porter’s ‘anger’, his disaffection – vented by ranting monologues – with everything from the posh papers to Christian evangelicals to the sterility of modern politics, displays its intention. The jazz trumpet-playing Porter (Amis and Wilson were fellow aficionados) may be a rebel without a cause, but he is a rather English one, with his taste for the music of Vaughan Williams and endless cups of tea and distaste for the creeping Americanization of English society. It is, however, his rage and resignation at the inspiration deficit of 1950s politics that is, rightly, most often cited: 84

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I suppose people of our generation aren’t able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids. There aren’t any good, brave causes left.

Look Back in Anger opened to a less-than-full house and the first reviews in the broadsheet papers were tepid. Terence Rattigan, doyen of postwar British drama, did not like it; Noël Coward, another master craftsman, later wondered ‘why the hero is so dreadfully cross and what about?’17 With an initial three-day run, Osborne and his director, Tony Richardson, faced the prospect that their production would not be revived at the end of the month. Ironically, in view of Jimmy Porter’s disdain for them, the ‘quality’ Sunday papers came to the rescue, with a decent review in the Sunday Times and, crucially as it turned out, a keen endorsement in the Observer. The play ‘certainly goes off the deep end,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan, ‘but I cannot regard this as a vice in a theatre that seldom ventures more than a toe in the water.’18 Perhaps at age 29 the Observer’s theatre critic understood why the hero was so dreadfully cross. The Spectator’s critic, who had earlier complained of the barrenness of the theatrical scene, now welcomed a fresh new talent.19 Propelled by publicity, television productions on both BBC and Granada-ITV soon followed and the negotiation of film rights got under way. The term ‘Angry Young Man’ applied initially to Osborne; then, on 12 July, a Daily Mail journalist for the first time used the plural ‘Angry Young Men’. A second article the next day began ‘I have just met my first genius. His name is Colin Wilson’.20 The breathless critical reception which greeted Wilson’s book, The Outsider, counts as one of the more puzzling episodes in English literary history.21 The book’s title alludes to Camus’ L’Étranger and announces a study in existential angst. The reader first encounters the Outsider on page one. ‘An immense confusion bewilders me,’ reflects the hero in a novel by Henri Barbusse, ‘it is as if I could not see things as they were. I see too deep and too much.’ Wilson shares with Isaiah Berlin a penchant for foreign name-dropping. For instance, he discusses the novels of Hermann Hesse not because of their superior quality but ‘because the magnitude of Hesse’s achievement is hardly recognized in English-speaking countries, where translations of most of his works are difficult to find’.22 And so we are taken on a whistle-stop tour of 85

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the writings of, among others, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, H.G. Wells and Hemingway, Camus, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Blake, Sri Ramakrishna and T.E. Lawrence. The principle of selection is that each of these writers (Vincent Van Gogh and Nijinsky also make guest appearances) in their different ways were blessed or burdened with profound insights into the human condition; they were all possessed of a higher understanding which set them ‘outside’ humdrum human society, and all strove after some sort of inner reality. After all ‘the world is not the human bourgeois surface it presents. It is Will, and it is delusion’, but ‘truth must be told, chaos must be faced’.23 Never defined, ‘truth’, in the Wilsonian sense, clearly has a quack spiritual dimension. ‘In the Kabala chaos – tohu bohu – is simply a state in which order is latent; the egg is the “chaos” of the bird.’ ‘Kafka’s Metamorphosis would be a perfectly commonsense parable to a Tibetan Buddhist’, and so on.24 His second, critically eviscerated book is entitled Religion and the Rebel (1957). The critics were impressed by the range of Wilson’s references  – gathered, it soon emerged, in the British Museum reading room by day, while for a time the author slept by night in a sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath – by his youth (age 24) and lack of formal education (he left school at 16), and by the boldness of his argument. Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times (‘this extraordinary book’), and Philip Toynbee in the Observer (‘exhaustive and luminously intelligent’), led the charge. Elizabeth Bowen (‘thunderstruck by the amount he has read’), V.S. Pritchett and others followed.25 It is significant that none of these reviewers were professional philosophers. A.J. Ayer was, and he was not impressed: Dr Johnson said of ‘a woman’s preaching’ that it ‘is like a dog walking on his hinder legs’, ‘it is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ It is in much the same spirit that most of its critics have welcomed Mr. Wilson’s book.26

However, as both Amis in the Spectator and Dwight Macdonald in the New Yorker demonstrated, it did not take a degree in philosophy to see through The Outsider’s pretensions.27 A philistine, ‘jerry-build’, humourless and ‘badly-written work of amateur philosophy’ in Macdonald’s view, 86

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it is intellectually arrogant and packed with irony – none of it intended. Utterly self-absorbed and invincibly confident in his own judgement, ‘Schopenhauer,’ writes Wilson, ‘gave Nietzsche that detachment from himself which is the first condition of self-knowledge.’28 In response to Amis’s review, Wilson advised: ‘I feel you’d better know the worst […] I have a lot of things I want to establish – vital things for the course of modern history and knocking you and other misplaced figures off their pedestals will be the first step.’29 As the first flush of critical acclaim began to subside, the Spectator swiftly introduced yet another new archetype:  ‘The Backsider’, who, at first sight, is more than a man, and even more than a type. He is a social problem. He is the back-to-front man. In physical fact he may (as both Kierkegaard and Bishop Colenso independently noted) wear his outward manifestations in reverse […] the Backsider, admittedly, is of no time or place in especial. He is implicit in the nihilism of the Verdic Upanishads, tacitly admitted in Hardy’s The Return of the Native, and recognized as a retreat into Dionysiac intensity by the censure of many a Papal Bull, not to mention the Encyclical of Pius X, De Vestigiis Nullis Restorsum […] with that knowledge, and a good reference library, the Backsider can be self-motivated into freedom and salvation. Without it, he is still on Hampstead Heath, wakeful but unconscious, with his sleeping bag buttoned up back to front, imprisoned.30

Why a book so easily parodied garnered so much heady praise is not readily explicable. It may be that Connolly and the rest simply didn’t, like the author himself, know what they were talking about; that from the insular perspective of English culture they were dazzled by the Berlinesque parade of exotic-sounding, or obscure, Euro-names. Macdonald speculates that ‘since there has been a lot of worrying about the younger generation, like a parent with a backward child, the elders have applauded, almost desperately, any sign of talent’, especially working-class talent.31 One of the more persuasive reasons for Wilson’s critical success is suggested by the New Statesman review. Perhaps the elders welcomed The Outsider so fulsomely because it took up ‘the history of thought, now the philosophers have dropped it’; perhaps, in the words of the reviewer, it appeared 87

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so important and refreshing because it dealt with big ideas at a time when big ideas were out of fashion.32 Insofar as the book in itself has any political implications, they are, by definition, elitist (some even detected quasi-fascist tendencies in the invoking of an upper-case ‘Will’). In any event the spiritual-religious agenda transcends any project of mere political renewal. Aside from the fact that he liked jazz and still had his own hair and teeth, what Wilson shares with the other AYM is a generalized sense of dissatisfaction, a refusal of the middle-aged values and tradition-bound inertia of contemporary English society. In ‘Lucky Jim and the Labour Party’ David Marquand argues that their attitude towards ‘the smugness of bourgeois life’ and ‘the drab monotony of welfare Britain is commonplace’ among the young. In the absence of big issues ‘the Labour Party today generates none of the enthusiasm of the thirties’, beaching a generation, high, dry, and bitter ‘with nothing to be bitter about; [and a] desire to march with nowhere to march to’. ‘The working masses,’ meanwhile, ‘are happily glued to the telly.’33

PU BL IC ITY, TH E M A S S M E D I A A N D T HE I N TEL L ECTU ALS

The AYM were a myth, a journalists’ fiction, invented to sell newspapers. All of them repudiated the label; none of them identified or consorted with any of the others, and at age 34, in 1956 Amis was not particularly ‘young’, nor especially angry. As writers they had little in common beyond a contempt for contemporary mores. A brief chapter in literary history, the AYM episode is an event in the history of modern publicity.34 Both radio and television had a hand in that event; the press, however, played the biggest role. Tynan’s review in the Observer of Look Back in Anger, and Connolly’s in the Sunday Times of The Outsider, are usually credited with setting off the critical reverberations which brought both these works to public notice. Pace Jimmy Porter, the ‘posh’ Sunday papers boasted intelligent review sections staffed by professional critics. Among the dailies the quality of reviewing descended by gradations from the critical seriousness of high-end broadsheets like the Guardian and The Times, down-market to the ephemeral and, when opportunity presented, 88

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the sensationalist jottings of the Daily Express or the Daily Mail. ‘Popular’ journalists and their readers were more interested in Wilson’s encounter with his girlfriend’s parents, who set about him with horsewhip and umbrella, than in his views on Nietzsche. Wilson’s sudden rise and abrupt fall as a literary celebrity provides a case study in the portrait of an artist as an angry young man. After the event Wilson claimed aloofly to find the whole celebrity game ridiculous: why, after all, should the Evening Standard solicit his views on the Russian space programme? By that time, of course, he had experienced negative publicity – the critics, he wrote, had ‘murdered’ Religion and the Rebel.35 But back in 1956 he threw himself into the game with abandon. It all began with a deft stroke of news management by Victor Gollancz who, a day before the Sunday paper reviews and two before publication, persuaded the Evening News to carry a piece headlined, ‘A Major Writer – and He’s 24’.36 (Three years earlier Amis pronounced himself ‘staggered by the ramifications and efficiency of [the House of Gollancz’s] publicity services’.)37 Critics showered The Outsider with superlatives, journalists coupled the author, on tenuous grounds, with John Osborne, and the AYM were born. Wilson took an active part in his own creation, giving media interviews, posing for photographers in signature polo-neck sweater, mandatory trumpet in hand, or climbing back into his sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath for the benefit of Life magazine. Two books, Declaration (1957), a collection of essays edited by Tom Maschler, and Kenneth Allsop’s The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-Fifties (1958), continued to trade on the AYM brand. If Amis’s refusal to contribute to Mashchler’s volume, and the inclusion of an essay by a 38-year-old woman, novelist Doris Lessing, raised questions about the cohesion of the product, these were not, as yet, reflected by sales. Some 25,000 copies of Declaration sold within three months.38 In Michael Bentley’s biography of Herbert Butterfield, one of the illustrations of his subject is captioned ‘Figure 5. Edward Leigh’s Famous Photograph:  about 1955’. Fame is relative. In 1950s Britain, Winston Churchill, Diana Dors and (briefly) Colin Wilson were famous. Few academics or scholars at the time came close to matching that level of public visibility. Bertrand Russell did, but more because of his support for public causes  – the Congress for Cultural Freedom, against 89

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commercial television, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – than for his accomplishments as a philosopher. One or two historians, such as Arthur Bryant, sold books by the hundreds of thousands, but only the tireless A.J.P. Taylor (‘the Tom Paine of British television […] the giddy Bevanite columnist of the Daily Mirror’, as Trevor-Roper called him), might plausibly be described as famous.39 Most historians would acknowledge, if not all would approve of, the ‘influence’ which the journal Past and Present has exercised on their discipline, and yet during the late 1950s its circulation reached only about 750.40 Of course, because many of the subscribers were university libraries the size of its readership would have been considerably larger. Fortunately, however, historical discourse, which did not make good copy for the popular papers, was never confined to the professional journals, either. Historians, in fact, could turn to the pages of a robust and lively periodical press. It is telling in this respect that, for instance, Trevor-Roper published his attack on Toynbee in Encounter and not in, say, the English Historical Review.41 The TLS, sometimes referred to as the ‘Litt. Supp.’, managed to strike a successful balance between expert analysis and accessibility to the non-specialist reader. A  weekly compendium of book reviews, it concentrated on works of fiction and poetry, philosophy, history, biography and the social sciences. It did not editorialize in any political sense, or comment directly upon current affairs. Appointed editor in 1948, Alan Pryce-Jones energized the TLS; during his tenure, which ran to 1959, he increased the number of pages, from 12 to 16 per issue, and recruited 1,600 new reviewers. Circulation rose to just under 50,000 in 1950, the highest in the periodical’s history, slipping back after a price rise from 3d to 6d in 1951 to around 40,000, where it remained, more or less, for the rest of the decade.42 Unlike the subscription-based journals, TLS distribution extended beyond the university library and the senior common room into bookshops and the more well-stocked newsagents. Until 1974 reviewers remained anonymous, allowing them greater freedom to say precisely what they wanted to say. Trevor-Roper, who never worried about offending anyone in print, denounced the policy, once claiming that ‘if that protection were to go’ the TLS’s contributors would be exposed as ‘almost entirely […] Roman Catholic 90

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undergraduates’ (Pryce-Jones converted to Catholicism in 1950).43 In fact the only common denominator among the contributors – all now identified in the paper’s digital archive  – is intellectual competence. The merits, even ethics, of anonymous reviewing are debatable; but it enabled the editor, for one thing, to commission a Marxist, Isaac Deutscher, to review Hugh Seton-Watson’s The Pattern of Communist Revolution (1953).44 Encounter on the other hand offered the reflections of a Cold Warrior, Franz Borkenau, on a Cold War text.45 In line with its non-technical ethos the TLS sometimes allocated history books to non-historians. Its roster of historian-reviewers nevertheless reads like a Who’s Who of the profession of that period, including Asa Briggs, Denis Brogan, Butterfield, Carr, Elton, Hill, Hobsbawm, David Knowles, Namier, Pares, Plumb, Seton-Watson, Sutherland, Taylor, Trevor-Roper, Wedgwood and Wheeler-Bennett. It is hard to quarrel with the verdict of the TLS’s ‘official’ historian on Pryce-Jones: ‘he brought in an extraordinary range of contributors, and in the years of his editorship the paper became a serious, modern, intellectual journal discussing freely the issues of the day in a way it had never quite been before’.46 Whereas the TLS had a genuinely pluralist character, the other major weeklies had overt political identities. The New Statesman stood to the left and the Spectator to the right. The right-of-centre Time and Tide, which started life in 1920 with a feminist slant, styled itself an ‘Independent Weekly’. Like the TLS, the New Statesman achieved its widest ever circulation during the 1950s; with sales approaching 100,000 it claimed a readership of ‘nearly half-a-million’.47 But it too lost readers in 1951 when it raised the price from 6d to 9d. Prices rose across the newspaper sector because of the postwar shortages, and thus increasing cost, of paper.48 Bound volumes of periodicals from these years have left a few material traces of scarcity in occasional issues printed on smaller-sized paper or on poorer quality paper or with fewer pages than usual  – a handful of gaps in the series indicating missed publication. Such anomalies begin to taper off after 1955, the year in which restrictions on newsprint were finally lifted. Yet the second half of the decade, described as ‘this TV and paperback age’ did not see Lucky Jim in paperback until 1959.49 91

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The New Statesman, edited by Kingsley Martin (who appears on Orwell’s list of possible fellow travellers) articulated the views of the non-communist left epitomized in the late 1940s by Labour MP and assistant editor, R.H.S. Crossman (who also made it onto Orwell’s list). On questions of foreign policy it tilted towards a Crossmanesque ‘third force’, before that option was shut down by polarizing Cold War realities. On the domestic front its sympathies lay with the Bevanites. In 1951 John Freeman joined the editorial board after resigning, along with Bevan and Harold Wilson, from the Labour government in protest at the introduction of charges by the National Health Service. Ironically, the paper’s political influence reached its height when it broke with Bevan over his renunciation of unilateral disarmament at the Labour Party conference in 1957 – an act of apostasy which traumatized Bevan loyalists and earned a sharp rebuke from Priestley’s New Statesman column. Shortly after, Priestley and others met in Martin’s home to launch the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).50 In addition to its core political content the New Statesman allocated generous space to its review section, to which Taylor contributed regularly. Reviews and opinion columns at the Spectator, edited between 1954–9 by the future Tory minister Ian Gilmour, could be equally lively. The paper condemned the Suez intervention and later criticized Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Taylor may have had a rightful claim on the coinage of the term ‘The Establishment’, but it passed into circulation by way of Henry Fairlie’s article in the Spectator. The comparatively large readership of the periodicals and their occasional political impact (which sold copy) provided historians with opportunities to communicate to wider audiences. Of the 31 articles, book reviews, talks and lectures collected in Taylor’s Essays in English History, nine first appeared in the New Statesman, eight in the Manchester Guardian, three in the Listener, two in TLS and one apiece in Encounter, Tribune and the English Historical Review. Butterfield’s photograph may not have been ‘famous’, but it is impossible to imagine a controversy conducted today in the weekly and daily press over a work on historiography, like George III and the Historians. Similarly, the Listener (discontinued in 1991), a periodical which reprinted the scripts of BBC Third Programme (the predecessor of Radio 3 and 4) radio broadcasts, belongs irrevocably to a bygone age. 92

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As an organ of the BBC, a government-chartered public service broadcaster, the Listener had to maintain a ‘balanced’ and ‘objective’ approach to politics and current affairs. Its contributors, of course, were paid to express their opinions, producing a multiplicity of views like the TLS while, for the most part, avoiding the ideological profile of a Spectator or a New Statesman. Like the TLS, the Listener’s ideal reader seems to have been a somewhat serious-minded and educated layperson. Subscribers in 1957 could ponder ‘Destiny and determinism’, ‘Humanism and tonality’, ‘Wordsworth to Yeats’, and, from the historians Richard Pares and Llewellyn Woodward respectively, ‘The revolt against colonialism’ and ‘The reason for Europe’.51 Although certain commentators and politicians were preoccupied with the rise of television during the 1950s and its supposed consequences for British culture and society, radio continued to command a large, if declining, audience. Whereas the New Statesman’s circulation approached 100,000, the Listener’s came close, briefly, to 150,000.52 Starting transmission in 1946, by 1953 between 1.6  million and 4.3 million people were (although 23.4 million were not ever) tuning into the Third Programme.53 Historians and other intellectuals were for a while able to reach many more listeners than readers. If the AYM episode is considered as an event in the history of publicity, ‘they’ scored their first coup on 25 April 1953 when First Reading broadcast a 15-minute extract from the not-yet-published Lucky Jim. John Wain, who made the selection, saw the new radio arts slot as ‘a means of putting over a certain point of view about contemporary letters’.54 Butterfield’s best-selling Christianity and History evolved from lectures delivered to the Cambridge Divinity School in 1948 – through a series of six broadcasts, reprinted in the Listener  – to the book published in 1949.55 On the other side of the decade, in 1961, he delivered a memorial tribute, also reprinted in the Listener, to his old adversary, Namier.56 But among historians it is Taylor, who began his broadcasting career with BBC Forces Radio in 1942, who shines as the star media performer. Opinionated, provocative and contrarian in his views, and clear, epigramatic, and entertaining (or ‘popular’ as his critics sniffed) in presenting them, Taylor at times appeared to court controversy. BBC governors’ eyebrows were raised in 1945 over his talk on ‘Russia’s return as a great power’.57 Nevertheless his instantly recognizable style, liveliness 93

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and strong personality appealed to audiences and programme producers alike, and it is a measure of Taylor’s radio purchase that the BBC broadcast a shortened version of his 1956 Ford Lectures on dissent from British foreign policy (later published as The Trouble Makers). More impressive still, in 1957 he presented the first ever television lecture on history.58 In 1953 in the first of his New Statesman columns ‘Thoughts in the wilderness’, Priestley contemplated television and ‘mass communications’ generally with ‘suspicion and growing alarm’; in his last column in Time and Tide, written shortly before he died in 1955, the former editor of the Spectator, Wilson Harris, worried about the corrosive ‘effects of television on the national character’.59 Such concerns mounted steadily with the ever-increasing sales of television sets and licences  – up from one million in 1951 to 4.5 million in 1955 – and the prospect, then advent, of an ‘independent’ broadcaster. As television consumed more and more of ever-greater numbers of people’s time, politicians, journalists and pundits were aware of the new medium driving profound cultural and social change. The precise nature of that change remained unclear. Many, but not all, prognoses were pessimistic. In a science-fiction flourish foretelling the coming virtual reality, which might have impressed Philip K. Dick had he read it, the alleged ‘Edwardian’ has-been Priestley imagined a time, not this Christmas but possibly the next, when I may have said goodbye to reality, I shall have no party of my own, perhaps will no longer understand what arrangements could be made for one; I will attend, as a Viewer, a party of TV personalities, to enjoy the sparkle of the wine in their glasses, to listen with joy to the crunching of their mince pies; and one or two of them may look straight in my direction, to wish me a Merry Christmas Programme, and a Happy New Year’s viewing.60

Haunted by the spectre of commercial television in America, depicted by its detractors as retailing inane quiz shows and sensationalizing violence in order to sell toothpaste and cornflakes, proposals for introducing independent broadcasting to Britain aroused determined opposition. In 1952 the possibilities of ending the BBC monopoly of the airwaves by permitting competition were mooted in terms of both 94

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the Corporation’s renewed charter and of a government white paper. As public debate heated up, on 18 June 1953, at a meeting convened in the home of Lady Violet Bonham Carter, a number of prominent opponents of commercial television formed The National Television Council (NTC) to resist it. Bonham Carter, president of the Liberal Party and a former BBC governor, was elected chairman. Members included the novelist E.M. Forster, Sir Harold Nicolson, Bertrand Russell and a number of MPs, notably Labour’s Christopher Mayhew  – an experienced broadcaster himself – who wrote a pamphlet, Dear Viewer, which sold 60,000 copies. Within a few weeks supporters of independent television met the challenge by setting up their own campaigning organization  – the Popular Television Association (PTA)  – with the Earl of Derby as president, flanked by vice-presidents Somerset Maugham, the Marquis of Londonderry, Taylor and others.61 Aligned in the opposition camp were the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, several university vice-chancellors, led by Maurice Bowra  – ‘all television corrupts and absolute television corrupts absolutely’62  – much of the press, excepting the Daily Mirror, and the Labour Party, which promised to repeal any new broadcasting legislation upon its return to power. There was no straight party-political divide over the issue, however. Tories generally supported greater ‘free enterprise’ but some, including Anthony Eden, worried about falling standards. The independent lobby combined business interests with disaffected BBC veterans. The BBC, Taylor observed, is ‘highly tolerant in whatever does not matter’.63 The principles at stake in the debate were clear-cut and inscribed in the choice of the words ‘independent’ by the PTA, and ‘commercial’ by the NTC. Malcolm Muggeridge, arguing the case against a BBC monopoly, compared it to the practices of Tito’s Yugoslavia and Franco’s Spain. In defence of public service broadcasting Lady Bonham Carter pointed out that while there was no reason why independent TV could not produce ‘entertainment’ equal to the BBC, the other two purposes set out in [its] charter – information and education – would be lower quality because advertisers would not pay for it. ‘The advertiser is not concerned with the influence of broadcasting on the mind and spirit of the nation. Why should he be? It’s not his business.’64 In private Muggeridge was more ambivalent, once confiding to his diary, ‘always in two minds 95

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Figure 4.1 Family gathering 1950s style.

about TV – half pleased, half disgusted, though, must confess, tickled to be described in Tribune piece as TV star’.65 A second white paper in 1953 framed the longest parliamentary debate since that over the revised prayer book in the 1920s, and the government carrying the day, passed the Broadcasting Act of 1954.66 The first independent-commercial transmission went on the air on 22 September 1955. The sky did not fall in. The Labour Party did not return to power. Three years later Richard Hoggart reflected that ‘the initial doubts about the venture […] have melted like morning mists’.67 Standards, it is probably fair to say, did decline, but this did not worry the BBC’s critics unduly. Priestley, to be sure, grumbled about the new matey informality – ‘people under Cabinet rank and sixty years of age are on Christian name terms at once. It is a wonderful and happy world, this of TV interviews’.68 At the same time, whenever he went into the BBC to record he couldn’t shake off the feeling that the Archbishop of Canterbury or royalty were in the next studio being interviewed by Richard Dimbleby.69 The BBC, in that 96

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view, belonged to the Establishment, to ‘Them’. By contrast, commercial television is – or seems to be more nearly – ‘Us’.70 The challenge to BBC authority fitted a wider cultural pattern of bucking deference. In Taylor’s judgement the campaign for independent television represented nothing less than ‘the biggest knock which respectability has taken in my time’.71

THE F IRST TEL E V I S I O N D O N :   A . J . P.   TAY LO R

When Taylor delivered his first history talk  – ‘The end of the tsars’  – direct to camera in 1957, he was already a well-known television ‘personality’. In 1950, joined by the Labour MP, Michael Foot, Foot’s Tory parliamentary colleague Robert Boothby, and a former independent MP, W.J. Brown, Taylor made up a regular panel of commentators who debated current affairs on the BBC’s In The News programme. Other speakers came and went, and the combination of guests changed from week to week, but for the first two years Taylor, Foot, Boothby and Brown predominated.72 Although this group split evenly along a left–right axis, they were, in party-political terms, unrepresentative. Boothby, a maverick figure within the Conservative Party, was a self-styled ‘Tory Radical’; Brown a right-of-centre independent; Foot a passionate Bevanite; and Taylor a non-party populist. And whereas party managers were unhappy about that line-up, programme makers were delighted by the energy, verbal sparks, and witty exchange which it provided. However, Taylor and company’s good, albeit intellectually charged, TV entertainment, eventually succumbed to BBC ‘balance’. Discouraged by politicians regurgitating party-political platitudes, Taylor, in a fit of pique, and on live TV, finally turned his back to an In The News panel. ‘Rested’ by the BBC as a result of that episode, he appeared only intermittently thereafter. The show expired in 1954, but Taylor and his sparring partners were back, and in top form, the following year on ATV’s pointedly named Free Speech. As a television performer, radio broadcaster, prolific reviewer and opinion columnist, Taylor build a freelance career, public persona and national profile unique among historians  – one which Namier (and others) thought undermined his reputation as a serious scholar. On point 97

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Figure 4.2 A.J.P. Taylor (right) in robust exchange with one of his regular sparring partners, the maverick Tory, Bob Boothby (second left).

of principle, after all, Sir Lewis believed that ‘to popularize usually means to over-simplify’.73 Muggeridge, himself a versatile multi-media ‘star’, expressed the intellectuals’ dilemma another way. Participating in Any Questions? once prompted the thought ‘that constant appearance on such programmes would be degrading. One would be forced to build up a synthetic, vulgar personality.’74 Taylor appears not to have shared his qualms. He revelled in the publicity, the controversies and the money. But he was still aware of the costs. In 1951 he explained to Butterfield that (I am as a historian against all governments and my work seems anti-German partly because I write about the Germans) I think, however, I give an impression in my books of being more dogmatic than I am – no doubt my journalism makes me exaggerate the value of writing in a stimulating way.75

Perhaps Butterfield had that admission in mind in his review of Taylor’s biography of Bismarck (published 1955), which opens: 98

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In English historiography to-day the most picturesque figure, the most striking acrobat and one of the most engaging personalities must be A.J.P. Taylor, whose initials and surname have come to be fused into a single bright light. […] in his hands the reviewing of books has become an exhilaration – he made it admirable for all possible purposes save perhaps that for which it was originally intended. He misunderstands his victims on occasion, but he does so deliberately and with high determination, which is itself a sort of compliment  – so much more acceptable to an author than a stupid inability to comprehend. However much of the journalist there is in him, he evidently knows how to put on a different kind of thinking-cap when he becomes an historian; so that we ought not to confuse the two roles, even if he himself inadvertently gets them entangled at times, or tries to pull our legs about the matter.76

What then did Taylor actually believe? On the subject of his political views or historical methodologies he is not himself an entirely reliable guide. Trevor-Roper’s throw-away remark about ‘the Tom Paine of British television’ is perceptive. Never a Marxist or a doctrinaire socialist of any kind, Taylor distrusted all political parties, including socialist ones, as well as all government. He belonged, rather, to the tradition of the ‘True-Born Englishman’, even, despite his linguistic gifts, European worldview, and admiration of Irish nationalism, to the tribe of Little Englanders. He rejected ideological systems and systematic theories of history. He refused to set foot in the USA. Like Paine, educated by Quakers, he inherited the nonconformist conscience without the religious beliefs. His heroes were William Cobbett and the nineteenth-century English radicals who opposed British foreign policy. Among his own books he liked The Trouble Makers best.77 He was against ‘The Establishment’: in no other European country is the Establishment so clearly defined and so complacently secure […] the Establishment is enlightened; tolerant; even well-meaning. It has never been exclusive, rather drawing in recruits from outside, as soon as they are ready to conform to its standards and become respectable. There is nothing more agreeable in life than to make peace with the Establishment  – and nothing more corrupting.78 99

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Taylor as ‘hereditary dissenter’ (his own term)79 comes through clearly in his journalism and reviewing, in his television punditry, in his books, The Trouble Makers (1957) and English History, 1914–1945 (1965), and (again the resemblance to Cobbett and Paine is striking) in his vigorous, accessible, one might say democratic, prose style. He imagined himself fondly ‘the plain man’s historian’. Taylor prized and mastered the craft – which Namier never did – of strong clear narrative. He liked to draw in, and to hold, his reader’s attention by posing the storyteller’s most elemental question: ‘what happened next?’ He eschewed ‘systems’ of historical explanation, allowing his ‘intuition’ and ‘green fingers’ to follow the sources wherever they might lead. Chance, blunders and folly, he contended, shaped history more than blind impersonal forces. He once set out that view of historical causation in some detail, ‘wars are much like road accidents’ he argued, they have a general cause and particular causes at the same time. Every road accident is caused, in the last resort, by the invention of the internal combustion engine and by man’s desire to get from one place to another. In this sense the ‘cure’ for road accidents is to forbid motor-cars. But a motorist, charged with dangerous driving, would be ill-advised if he pleaded the existence of motor-cars as his sole defense. The police and the courts do not weigh profound causes. They seek a specific cause for each accident – error on the part of the driver; excessive speed; drunkenness; faulty brakes; bad road surface. So it is with wars. ‘International anarchy’ makes wars possible; it does not make war certain. After 1918 more than one writer made his name by demonstrating the profound causes of the First World War; and, though the demonstrations were often correct, they thus diverted attention from the question why that particular war happened at that particular time. Both enquiries make sense on different levels. They are complementary; they do not exclude each other. The Second World War, too, had profound causes; but it also grew out of specific events, and those events are worth detailed examination.80

And yet, although Taylor held to that position throughout his long career, he also espoused a sort of geographical determinism. In his estimate, Germany’s lack of natural frontiers had shaped much of its history, particularly ‘a determination to exterminate the East’.81 The division of the 100

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Netherlands into Holland and Belgium offered another example of geography as destiny. Whereas historians had traditionally accounted for the divide in terms of race and religion, the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl had, in Taylor’s opinion, demonstrated ‘the decisive role played by the Spanish army and the line of the great rivers’.82 As a diplomatic historian – his first calling – a student of the international balance of power and the author of The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (1954) his sensitivity to geographic imperatives is not surprising. And in the contemporary context, he endorsed Russia’s great power for geopolitical reasons: Germany had to be kept in its place. Taylor also on occasion resorted to ‘national character’ as a category of analysis, but in his most controversial work of all, The Origins of the Second World War (1961) he returned boldly to full-blown blunder theory. Taylor later claimed that he did not choose the subjects of his books, that all, with one exception, were suggested to me by others. Ironically the one exception, The Origins of the Second World War, brought more trouble on my head than all my other books put together, trouble that I did not foresee or intend to provoke.83

The claim is disingenuous. How could he not have foreseen that that book, which he states explicitly is a revisionist challenge to the orthodoxy of Hitler’s culpability for starting the war, would not cause ‘trouble’? How could he for a moment have imagined that provocative judgements such that the Munich Agreement (and by extension, the policy of appeasement) ‘was a triumph for all that was best and most enlightened in British life’, would not provoke strong reactions?84 Taylor rejected the conventional wisdom that war had been premeditated by Hitler, and that his actions were predicated upon the ideas set out in Mein Kampf. ‘In my opinion,’ he writes, ‘statesmen are too absorbed by events to follow a pre-conceived plan. They take one step, and the next follows from it. The systems are created by historians.’85 Hitler emerges in his account as a ‘statesman’ in the German tradition – an extremely wicked one to be sure, but also a shrewd opportunist and political tactician, who had more limited aims than usually allowed. As so often with Taylor it is hard in this case to separate the 101

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showman from the scholar. As Trevor-Roper admitted (privately), ‘it is a really most discreditable book, but dammed clever: there are few statements in it which, taken in themselves, and slightly glossed, cannot be defended’.86 Why, he asked in print, did he write it? ‘is it, as some have suggested, a gesture of posthumous defiance to his former master, Sir Lewis Namier, in revenge for some imagined slight?’87 The imagined slight was, of course, Namier’s refusal to recommend him for the Regis Chair in 1957, the chair to which Trevor-Roper himself succeeded. It is a plausible hypothesis. In the wake of that snub Taylor’s posturing  – always unpredictable  – does appear to have become more erratic. ‘I’m afraid since my appointment’ Trevor-Roper speculated at the end of 1958, Taylor has gone berserk: he no longer troubles about the truth. I think originally his anti-German, pro-Russian attitude was not consciously dishonest. I think it sprang from a kind of naivete. But now I think he will say anything, even if he knows it to be untrue.

By publishing The Origins of the Second World War he was ‘jumping on Namier’s grave’.88 Trevor-Roper’s attack on Taylor appeared in Encounter – where he had earlier filleted Arnold Toynbee – and led to a televised confrontation, chaired by Robert Kee, which Taylor, by far the more experienced television performer, won on points. Taylor’s own recognition that the ‘stimulating’ style which he had honed as a journalist sometimes carried over into his historical work, creating an impression of ‘dogmatism’ which he did not perhaps intend; Butterfield’s and Trevor-Roper’s insistence that he routinely discarded facts which might have spoiled rhetorical effect; Muggeridge’s insight that some broadcasters invented simulated ‘synthetic’ persona, and a later commentator’s observation that his overexposure to the media led to ‘the over-production of opinion’ – each of these suggest a close connection between performance and style.89 Taylor held certain views sincerely, and expressed them clearly. He was for unilateral nuclear disarmament and against German rearmament; on the side of ‘the people’, and against ‘the Establishment’; he admired William Cobbett. His statement that as an historian he had a mind ‘too anarchic to be fitted into any system of 102

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thought’ rings true.90 Beyond that it is hard to be sure. He was, above all else, a performer. As a journalist and an historian he developed an arresting, deceptively plain, prose style laced with anecdote, epigram and clever paradox  – and unmistakably his own. Radio, and especially television, exaggerated his techniques. In a sense, like Muggeridge’s media simulacrums, his style took on a life of its own. It began to write him: studied contrariness stirred up publicity and made good entertainment. Excepting the signature bow-tie, which came later, Taylor’s first television lecture set the template from which, into the 1980s, he never departed. Looking  – through his equally trademark spectacles  – directly into camera, he delivered a 30-minute talk without the aid of script, notes, autocue or visual illustration, and finished on the stroke of the half hour. In a medium of sight as well as sound these were remarkable performances, and, remarkably, as far as Taylor’s viewers were concerned, they worked. No historian has ever addressed bigger audiences. But there is a paradox here, one which Taylor would presumably have enjoyed. In retrospect John Brooke found it difficult to account for ‘the growth of “Namierolatry” ’, not least because Namier ‘rarely spoke on the radio and never appeared on television’.91 He did nonetheless devise a new historical methodology, revolutionize the interpretation of his chosen period, and found a ‘school’. Taylor, for all his fame and popularity, did none of these. His influence can be detected, in different ways, in the later work of a number of his graduate students  – Robert Kee, Paul Addison and Kathleen Burk, for example – but none of them were ever ‘Taylorites’ in the way that Brooke was a Namierite. His vision of history as one step following another, signifying nothing, did not inspire acolytes. His television lectures are remembered more for his performances, for this extempore delivery, never slipping up and always finishing on time, than for substance or argument. But, as Taylor himself would undoubtedly have said, since the only point of history is to amuse, ‘it didn’t matter’.

THE SH APE O F T HI N G S TO   C OM E

It is hard not to apply the Whig interpretation of history to certain developments in British politics, culture and society during the mid-1950s; 103

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hard not to see in the opposition to capital punishment, support for decriminalizing homosexual acts, and criticism of the Royal Family, the stirrings, or ‘origins’, of the ‘permissive’ society of the 1960s. In the opening pages of her book The Meaning of Treason (1945) Rebecca West sets the scene in the courtroom for the trial of ‘the radio traitor’, William Joyce, popularly known as ‘Lord Haw Haw’. After depicting Joyce as a pitiful wretch she then compared him ‘with the judicial bench which he faced’. He was of course at an immense disadvantage, as we all should be, for its dignity is authentic. Against oak panels columns run up to a pediment framing the carved royal standard and the sword of justice, which is affixed to the wall, in its jeweled scabbard. At the foot of the wall, in a high-backed chair, sat the Judge, dressed in his scarlet robe, with its neckband of fine linen and its deep cuffs and sash of purplish-back taffeta. Beside him, their chairs set farther back as a sign of their inferiority to him, sat the Lord Mayor of London and two aldermen, wearing their antique robes of black silk with flowing white cravats and gold chains hung with chased badges of office worked in precious metals and enamel. These two sorts of pompous trapping are always given some real meaning by the faces of the men who support them. Judges are chosen for a combination of intellect and character; city honours are usually earned by competence and character and the patience to carry out a routine of tedious public duty over decades These qualities have to be possessed to leave an imprint on the features. Looking from the bench to the dock, it could be seen that not in any sane state would William Joyce have had the ghost of a chance of holding such offices as these.92

Ten years later Jimmy Porter would have been less impressed by Justice Tucker’s Gilbert and Sullivan costume, intellect and character, than by his inherited privilege, Old School Tie (Winchester) and university (New College, Oxon) connections. Lord Goddard (Marlborough, Trinity, Oxon), Lord Chief Justice of the day, who saw nothing wrong with hanging the mentally defective, worried that too many condemned men (and women) were being granted reprieves; the home secretary between 1954 and 1957, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, Viscount Kilmuir (George 104

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Watson College, Edinburgh, Balliol, Oxon) consigned the possibility of miscarriages of justice that resulted in the deaths of innocent men, to the ‘realm of fantasy’. In 1948 a proposal to suspend capital punishment for five years met with the unanimous opposition of the 20 judges of the King’s Bench.93 Between 1949 and 1960 the British state executed 123 people, or, as Arthur Koestler expressed it, an average of just over one person per month.94 The authentic dignity of the bench notwithstanding, as public controversy over (supposedly unimaginable) miscarriages of justice and acts of manifest injustice mounted, public opinion began to turn against the death penalty. The most notorious case involved the hanging of the mentally disabled Derek Bentley in 1953. Bentley’s associate, Christopher Craig, fired the shot which killed PC Miles, of whose murder Bentley, who had been unarmed and in the custody of another policeman at the time, was convicted. Craig, aged 16, went to prison; Bentley, aged 19, went to the gallows. As the abolitionist QC and Labour MP R.T. Paget put it to parliament, ‘a three-quarter witted boy of nineteen is to be hanged for a murder he did not commit, and was not committed until fifteen minutes after he was arrested’. The Bentley sentence and execution caused uproar: petitions for reprieve, demonstrations, letters to the press and, led by Bevan, condemnation by 200 MPs in the House of Commons.95 The execution of Ruth Ellis in 1955, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, provoked similar outrage. The death penalty had been debated in parliament in 1948, leading to a Royal Commission on its suspension, which in its 1953 report it declined to recommend. In 1955, however, a Daily Mirror poll reported for the first time a 65 per cent majority in favour of abolition.96 That year Koestler proposed to the publisher, moralist, and well-known opponent of capital punishment, Victor Gollancz, that he take the lead in a campaign against it.97 On 11 August a group of prominent abolitionists, including Gollancz, Koestler, Paget and the Tory MP, Christopher Hollis, met to launch what became the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (NCACP). Koestler set to work on a pamphlet, which turned into a book, Reflections on Hanging (1956); Gollancz meanwhile began raising funds and mobilizing support. Along with some 400 others, Priestley, Pakenham and the Ulster Unionist MP Montgomery 105

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Hyde attended the first public meeting in Church Hall, Westminster. The presence of Hyde and Hollis illustrates the cross-party appeal of abolition. The Conservative Party, however, continued to harbour a hard-core hanging-and-flogging lobby. The range of opinion on the issue is nicely illustrated by the apostle of ‘negative liberty’, Isaiah Berlin’s, response to Gollancz’s attempt to enlist him to the cause: Dear Victor, I wish I  knew my mind about capital punishment. I  am more against it than for it, and if it were abolished I should, I think, feel relief. Although, at the same time, I do not feel strongly enough to wish to identify myself with a movement of the completely converted. I am in a queer, paradoxical position of being prepared to make a contribution without wishing to join the committee. I do not feel indignant when brutal murderers are executed, although I would rather they were not. While I am in this condition I think I had rather not join. But thank you very much for thinking of me.98

Amis – whose first novel had so lowered Berlin – displayed a dash more intellectual and moral clarity. ‘More power to your elbow in the abolitionist campaign’, he wrote to his publisher. ‘I think the present effort may well turn the scale at last. It certainly deserves to.’99 Berlin’s equivocation could not have been further removed from Gollancz’s absolutist moralist position: ‘many of the arguments for and against’, he stated, though they may have some subsidiary relevance, cannot affect the main issue. There is much discussion, for instance, as to whether or not the death penalty tends to be preventative of murder. For my own part, I  believe the evidence […] to point unmistakably to the absence of any such result; even if, however, a water-tight case could be made out to the contrary, the death penalty would still be wholly inadmissible.100

Gollancz did concede, though, that for practical campaigning purposes the rehearsal and publicizing of arguments for and against could only advance the cause. That task now fell to Koestler. 106

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Reflections on Hanging begins with the author’s acknowledgement of the profound and enduring impact upon him of spending three months under sentence of death in a condemned cell during the Spanish Civil War, hearing nightly the last footsteps of fellow prisoners being marched to face the firing squad: ‘I shall never achieve real peace of mind until hanging is abolished.’101 In what follows he draws on the historical record, statistics, arguments about retribution, tradition and deterrence, and points to the experience of other ‘civilised’ countries from Australia to Sweden, which had managed to do well enough without recourse to judicial execution. It is a powerful and impassioned, well-documented, sharply presented polemic which, thanks to a five-part serialization in the Observer, reached a large readership. In February the House of Commons passed a motion that ‘the death penalty for murder no longer accords with the needs or the interests of a civilised society’. The prime minister duly taking the resolution under consideration, Gollancz, mistakenly scenting victory, began to wind down the NCACP. Eden, however, allowed only a private members’ bill to go forward, and that, any abolitionist could see, would be run into the ground by the Tory backwoodsmen. A compromise Homicide Act which reduced the number of capital offences – for example admitting a ‘diminished responsibility’ defence – eventually made it onto the statute book in 1957, but hangings continued – the last carried out in 1964. Abolition was not finally achieved until 1970. On the evening of 24 May 1956, the NCACP held its biggest ever rally in Festival Hall. The same evening a play opened in a small Stratford theatre in London’s East End. The timing could not have been better, for Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow packs a harrowing indictment of capital punishment. There were other satisfying coincidences. One of Behan’s early patrons first encountered the future playwright as a young man in Dublin collecting signatures to a petition for Koestler’s reprieve. And like Koestler, Behan knew whereof he spoke. In 1943, while serving time in Mountjoy prison for IRA activities, he had met a condemned man, Bernard Kirwan (an ODC, or ordinary decent criminal, to use later Irish republican parlance), and been in his cell on the night Kirwan hanged. Behan began to write a play, set in Mountjoy that night – which became The Quare Fellow  – in the Curragh internment camp in 1946. Before 107

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arriving in London it had premiered in November 1954 in another small experimental theatre: The Pike, in Dublin. Lacking an executioner of its own, the Irish state employed the services of the English hangman, Albert Pierrepoint, whom Behan invited to the first night in Stratford East. He declined. Fortunately for Behan the Observer’s critic, Kenneth Tynan, did attend, and in his review the following Sunday announced, for the second time that month, an event in theatre history. ‘It is Ireland’s sacred duty,’ he concluded, ‘to send over, every few years, a playwright to save English theatre from its inarticulate glumness.’102 Tynan thus helped kick-start the careers of two dramatists, Osborne and Behan, within the space of a few weeks. The Irishman took it from there. As if in a play with a small cast of characters, Behan was interviewed – like Osborne shortly before – by Malcolm Muggeridge on Panorama and, as the first person ever to appear drunk on a live chat show, made television history. Viewers complained to the BBC, but the next morning Behan awoke to find himself the toast of the taxi drivers of London, a chatty subspecies known for its ‘string ’em up gov’ sentiment. ‘Whether it was The Quare Fellow or the drink that put Brendan on the map. I’ll never know’ the play’s director, Joan Littlewood, later recalled. In any event, from the Panorama commotion on, few writers, estimates his biographer, ‘would make more skillful use of the media in furthering their literary careers’.103 Perhaps by publicizing his play, which soon transferred to the West End, Behan’s antics in their own way contributed as much to the abolitionist cause as Koestler’s Reflections. It is not at all surprising that in the case of homosexual law reform the same protagonists show up on both sides of the debate as in the campaign against capital punishment. Montgomery Hyde, who in parliament had seconded the motion against the death penalty in 1956, supported legal rights for homosexuals in 1958. In 1948 the Lord Chancellor, Viscount Kilmuir, then plain Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, ruled out the possibility of miscarriages of justice; in 1958 he refused to go ‘down in history as the man who made sodomy legal’. The great irony is that it was none other than Maxwell-Fyfe who had brought Viscount Kilmuir to that impasse, by pressing the then home secretary for the appointment of a Royal Commission of inquiry into the problems of (female) prostitution and (male) homosexuality.104 The subsequent 108

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Wolfenden Report appeared in September 1957, confirming for Kilmuir the iron law of unintended consequences. Wolfenden concluded that the government’s obligation to maintain public order and decency did not extend to the regulation of private behaviour and that, therefore, homosexual acts between consenting adults should no longer be criminal offences. On 7 March 1958 The Times printed a letter, signed by among others Bertrand Russell, Priestley and Berlin, calling on parliament to act on the report’s recommendations. The following month Gollancz joined the newly formed Homosexual Law Reform Society, which lobbied MPs, circulated campaigning literature and organized meetings – mainly in student unions. Parliament, predictably, rejected Wolfenden at the end of the year.105 Homosexuals continued to be sent to jail, a policy which one critic compared to ‘locking up an alcoholic in a brewery’.106 Like abolition, reform of the laws (including censorship) protecting public decency and policing sexual morality were a long time coming. Implementation of Wolfenden’s recommendations had to await the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, but by 1958 the shape of things to come appeared clear enough. ‘It is a foregone conclusion that the homosexual laws will not be reformed yet’ editorialized The Times, ‘it is an equally foregone conclusion that reform must eventually come’.107 Those who held fast to such traditional values as locking up homosexual ‘offenders’, deferring to judicial opinion, patriotism and hanging, also generally revered monarchy. ‘Televised recordings of the coronation’ averred the Daily Mail in 1957, ‘showed the world not only the beauty of the ceremonial, but the essential spirituality of the rite’. The quasi-official BBC set the tone for royalty-watchers ‘with its staff of highly-trained palace lackeys, with graveyard voices and a ponderous language suffused with Shakespearian and semi-Biblical echoes’.108 The paradox of the modern monarchy, sceptics noted, was that this ‘meaningless symbol’, ‘which history had rendered ineffectual and irrelevant’, in its media-enhanced ‘contemporary version has attracted more adulation, not less, with the extinction of its power and authority’.109 Such views might be expected of a Malcolm Muggeridge, and certainly of a John Osborne; the person, however, who in August 1957 sparked off public controversy over the function of the Royal Family cut a most unlikely figure:  John Crigg, a peer of the realm, Lord Altrincham. 109

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Whereas Osborne openly, and in a British context very unusually, saw republicanism as the optimum alternative to ‘the Royalty religion’, Altrincham issued a well-intentioned call for what is today termed ‘modernization’. In an article in his own magazine National and English Review he described royal courtiers as ‘tweedy’ and the Queen’s style of speech as ‘frankly a pain in the neck’. A presumably stunned BBC at first maintained radio silence. Kingsley Martin’s New Statesman supported his lordship, while the Observer sacked him as one of its columnists. Then in October an article ‘Does England really need a queen?’, written by Muggeridge for the American Saturday Evening Post, leaked onto the front pages of the British press. Muggeridge quickly received the answer to his question in sack-loads of hate-mail, abusive telephone calls and the vandalizing of his home.110 And all this provoked by what he assumed were ‘sensible and amicable observations’.111 Osborne’s attack on monarchy, on the other hand, left no room for misunderstanding, denouncing it as ‘totem worship’, a ‘fatuous industry’, poisonous ‘national swill’ and ‘the last circus of a civilization that has lost faith in itself, and sold itself for a splendid triviality’.112 His polemic had no political significance, but his language, his disrespect for the most traditional and hitherto near-sacrosanct of all British institutions, did register a broader cultural shift in the second half of the 1950s. Again it is a matter of tone, of atmospherics. But soon this restlessness and unfocused dissatisfaction turned to real political purpose as the generation of Lucky Jim (along with more seasoned dissenters like Priestley and Taylor) finally did find somewhere to march too: Aldermaston.

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5

THE PRACTICE OF HISTORY AT MID-CENTURY Concerns about the overspecialization of historical writing continued to be voiced throughout Namier’s decade. In 1950 Max Beloff blamed the tendency on a disciplinary inferiority complex in relation to the social sciences. The historian, he argues, Partly in self-defense deliberately presents his findings in the most technical language possible and is unconcerned if the result is repellent […] genuine historical works are read almost exclusively by their author’s fellow practitioners who lie in wait to tear each other’s eyes out in the learned reviews’.1

Butterfield worried about the pedagogical limitations of increasing specialization, recommending – in 1943 – the valuable elasticity in a longer period examination-paper with copious options, as distinct from a brief question-paper embracing only a restricted period but imposing (of necessity) a closer test. In the latter case any wealth of options would only open the door to further specialization within the shortened period.

In 1961 he returned to the matter criticizing, from the standpoint of a teacher, the inherent narrowness of the Namier way. In some colleges, he complained, ‘people have burrowed themselves like moles into 111

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smaller and smaller holes – in a little biographical hole here, in a little diplomatic hole there  – and their minds have ceased to develop’. Much preferable were undergraduates at ease in many periods of history.2 Trevor-Roper charged the ‘Medieval Manchester Mice’, who had monopolized the Oxford Regius Chair for 30 years, with reducing their subject ‘to petty clerical antiquarianism’ and commended the historical expert ‘boldly moving out of his special period – not least because of the disgruntled muttering of those other specialists who remain imbedded in thesis’.3 Specialization and professionalization are close relatives. In the case of academic history, specialization is nurtured at the level of post-graduate research, designed to make an original contribution to knowledge, and likewise by the scholarly monograph, both fully equipped with the ‘apparatus’ of primary sources, footnotes and bibliography  – what Butterfield called ‘technical’ as opposed to ‘general’ or synoptic history. The other main conduit for work of this kind is the professional journal. Indeed the launch of the English Historical Review (EHR) in 1886 marks a foundational moment in the development of the English historical profession, and the tables of contents of this Oxford-based, peer-reviewed, quarterly publication, reveal a great deal, at any given moment, about how historians understood the scope and purposes of their discipline. Editorial preferences during the 1950s were weighted towards medieval  – and excluded twentieth-century  – history (although A.J.P. Taylor did manage to slip in an essay on ‘British Policy in Morocco, 1886–1902’ (English Historical Review, July 1951)). The essays are often quite narrowly – or according to taste, precisely – conceived, usually Anglocentric, and for the most part deal with matters high-political or diplomatic; eschewing, for the most part, European – and especially extra European – social, cultural and intellectual history. The EHR moreover, served as a sort of template for the other mainstream journals, with the exception of the Economic History Review (founded 1927) which is by definition specialist. Another exception to the EHR rule arrived in February 1952 from outside the mainstream, Past and Present: A Journal of Scientific History (P&P). An initiative of the Communist Party Historians Group in the range  – both chronological and geographical – as in the conceptual innovation of much of 112

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the material which it published, P&P owed as much to the example of the French journal Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations as it did to Marxist theory. To the English historical profession it owed its commitment to scholarly rigour and intellectual excellence.

THE STATE O F T HE   A R T

In the 1950s British and Irish historians (the two leading academic historians in Ireland in this period, Robin Dudley Edwards and T.W. Moody, were both graduates of the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research in the 1930s) did not, generally, theorize about the nature of history. Some, like Taylor, dismissed historical theories outright as useless abstractions. A  few, like Trevor-Roper and Dudley Edwards, committed their reflections to paper, but not to print.4 Among historians, always excepting members of the Communist Party Historians Group, only the author of The Whig Interpretation of History devoted serious attention to theoretical issues. Essays in Butterfield’s History and Human Relations (1951) addressed big questions like the pitfalls of ‘Official History’ and ‘The tragic element in modern international conflict’. In his 1954 Wiles Lectures in Belfast, published as Man on His Past (1955) he offered wide-ranging meditations on the history of historiography. As for the rest of his professional colleagues, they were content to cede ‘metahistory’ to the philosophers of history  – to Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper. Significantly, all three repudiated theories of historical determinism and denied the existence of historical patterns or ‘laws’; all, implicitly, fixed Marxist doctrine in their cross-hairs. But if the philosophers thereby furnished positivist historians with theoretical reinforcement, the historians themselves did not much care. As Alan Bullock observed, ‘metahistory, to borrow a phrase of Mr. Isaiah Berlin […] is a kind of speculative activity which many professional historians eye with distrust and dislike’; they prefer instead, in G.N. Clark’s words, to ‘try to find the truth about this or that, not about things in general’. In short, they are hostile ‘towards philosophical history in the grand style’. In his ‘Some considerations on the present state of historical studies’ E.L. Woodward reassured his listeners (and subsequently, readers) that he 113

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had no intention of ‘approaching the fundamental problem of the nature of historical knowledge’, finding himself, thereby ‘in good company if I evade a master problem of this kind, since nearly all English historians have evaded it’.5 In 1967 Gareth Stedman Jones complained ‘that the progress of British historiography in the last 100 years provides a spectacular case of arrested intellectual development, and conceptual poverty’, and insofar as that astringent New Left Review indictment is valid, then during the early 1950s, when venerable, culturally endorsed, suspicions of ‘speculative activity’ converged with the so-called End of Ideology, historiography, surely, passed through one of its more conceptually anorexic phases. At the beginning of the decade that most brash exponent of ‘this or that’ history, A.J.P. Taylor, announced that ‘in England there are no schools of history; there are only individual historians’; commended the upper-case ‘T’ Tory historian, Keith Feiling, for avoiding Whig fallacies – for showing ‘how the past worked rather than how it was preparing for the present’; and made the by now ritual bow to Namier. Although The Structure of Politics, he writes, ‘was published over 20  years ago, it can be no more ignored in a discussion of modern history than the Origin of Species could be ignored in a discussion of biology’. Echoing Beloff ’s very recent strictures on ‘repellant’ technical language, Taylor condemns heavy, clumsy, gnarled and graceless professional exposition, adding that ‘tired metaphors and flabby sentences should be as unforgivable in an historian as a faulty reference or an inaccurate quotation’. Some of these positions certainly hold up, but in epistemological terms, they don’t add up to much.6 The same order of theoretical value attaches to Namier’s reflections on the nature of history. He even adopts some of the same phrases and prescriptions as Taylor. History, he states, is ‘necessarily subjective and individual’; the historian’s purpose is to ‘discover how things work’, and ‘the great historian’ is like ‘the great artist or doctor [or biologist]: after he has done his work, others should not be able to practice within its sphere in terms of the preceding era’.7 Namier warns against the danger of facile historical analogy and illustrates his point with one of those flashes of insight that periodically light up his densely compacted prose. 114

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When the Russian revolution broke out in March 1917 there were people who expected that the Russian armies would now fight with a new élan, forgetting that in 1792 war broke out in the third year of revolution, while in 1917 revolution broke out in the third year of war; the French peasant-soldier – to mention but one factor – went to the front to retain the land he had seized, while the Russian peasant-soldier went home to seize it.8

But, strictly speaking, this passage is more about the past – and how men misunderstand it – than historical epistemology, and this holds true for much of his essay. Namier believed – like Butterfield – in the immanence of the past in man and society. All men are not born free, because they are everywhere captive to ‘custom and tradition’. ‘The past’, that is, ‘is on top of us and with us all the time’ (or as Butterfield put it, ‘the past, like the spent part of a cinematograph film, is coiled up inside the present’).9 The one law of history to which he did subscribe was the law of unintended consequences. Social and political change according to this rule, though ‘man-generated […] is seldom man controlled’ (or as Butterfield put it, ‘there is something in the nature of historical events which twists the course of history in a direction no man ever intended’).10 The fond notion that man can, by the application of reason, plan the future, is not merely folly, but hubris: the way of life of a nation, les moeurs, cannot be transformed by an act of will or an edict […] planned change can envisage only a narrow sector of life, while the wider repercussions can seldom be forecast. Hence the admitted superiority of ‘organic change’; of empiric practice advancing by slow tentative steps’.11

Moreover, man’s trust in reason, per se, discounts the profound workings of the unconscious mind – thus Namier’s insistence upon the profound explanatory power of psychoanalysis. Setting psychoanalysis to one side, there is deep, unwitting, irony in the decidedly Burkean texture of Namier’s thought. Namier detested Burke as, in his view, a prating ideologue; indeed as the foremost man of political ideas and theorist of political party, Burke is a standing affront to the entire Namierite construct of mid-eighteenth-century politics. In a 115

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spirited, at times overwrought, defence of his hero, Conor Cruise O’Brien (or Conor Cruise O’Burke, as E.P. Thompson dubbed him) accused the Namierites of diminishing Burke’s stature by, except for the occasional disparaging aside, pointedly ignoring him.12 Clearly O’Brien had not come across Namier’s review in the Spectator of the first volume of the Burke correspondence. His attack is worth quoting at length: Burke’s writings, admired beyond measure and most copiously quoted for nearly 200 years, stand as a magnificent façade between the man and his readers. Since emotions as a rule governed his thinking, his personality has to be probed in its depths to get to the root of his doctrines and ideas. His argument and narrative, captivating by their surface clarity and imaginative wealth, by their wide and bold generalizations and the power and drive of his thought, too readily induce conviction while the underlying passion and obsessions stay concealed. When capable of taking a detached view, Burke was shrewd and practical in appraising situations; but on the whole he signally lacked detachment. When the trend of his perceptions is examined, he is frequently found to be a poor observer, only in distant touch with reality, and apt to substitute for it figments of his own imagination, which grow and harden and finish by dominating both him and widening rings of men whom he influenced.

Burke, moreover, is an unreliable witness, and an egocentric, self-righteous, ‘solitary rootless man’ with ‘a streak of persecution mania’.13 Butterfield, a great admirer of Burke, was nevertheless right when he said in his memorial broadcast of his bête noire some of his thought is thoroughly English and (much as he would have hated this) certain strands of it always remind me of Edmund Burke. He speaks, for example of having a ‘spiritual inheritance superior to the thoughts, will or intentions of any single generation’.

Or, as another historian notes, paradoxical as it may seem for the school of historians who came to despise Burke as the charlatan of eighteenth-century politics […] the ‘Namier school’ has accepted a view of society and the conditioning factors in political development that are remarkably Burkean.14 116

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Namier and Bullock’s brief forays into epistemology-lite were both published in History Today (founded 1951)  – and in a further irony Namier chose to scorn popular history in a popular history magazine! The TLS carried Taylor’s effort. Such high-flying cogitations, it would seem, were not as yet deemed fit for professional journal print. Yet Stedman Jones detects an ‘unfreezing of historical debate [beginning] sometime after 1956’.15 If so, then any new developments in historical theory and practice can be conveniently measured against the state of the art, as expounded by a number of prominent historians in a special issue of the TLS published at the beginning of that pivotal year. There is plenty of evidence to be found here, and elsewhere, to support the profile of British historical studies at this juncture as unreflectively empiricist. G.N. Clark defined ‘History’ as a ‘hard core of facts […] with a surrounding pulp of disputable interpretation’.16 Namier claimed that he had the great advantage of aproaching [the archive] with a completely virgin mind, never having read the great Whig historians and thus being immune from the pre-conceived notions that blinded other scholars to the significance of what they found, or more important still, did not find, in those documents.17

And yet, for all its commitment to scholarly detachment, by insisting, at every turn, upon the individuality of the historian, that generation showed itself well aware of the problems of bias and value-judgement in historical interpretation. One of them, Taylor, little troubled by epistemological puzzles, nonetheless recognized that, pace Namier, ‘no historian starts out with his mind a blank to be gradually filled in by the evidence’.18 They strove not to eliminate subjectivity, but to limit its distorting effects by careful source criticism and the rigorous application of ‘scientific’ methodology. They were equally aware that the element of personal judgement and the finite character of the ‘evidence’ guaranteed disagreement; that history is bound to be, in the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl’s phrase, an argument without end.19 Hence Butterfield’s belief in the intellectual dividends of controversy. Once the ‘facts’ had been gathered, moreover, Butterfield remained alert to the complex processes of selection, exclusion, and interpretation inherent in the act of historical 117

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‘abridgement’ which followed: on what criteria is one ‘fact’ chosen and another discarded? In 1956 the TLS published a special issue to mark the jubilee of the Historical Association which, including an account of the Association’s first 50 years, had 17 contributors and ran to 28 pages. Several full- and half-page advertisements of their history lists by publishers, among them Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Collins and Macmillan, tell their own tale. Most titles are by academic historians, but popular (or from the publishers’ perspective, commercial) authors such as Cecil Woodham-Smith, Churchill, Harold Nicolson and C.V. Wedgwood are well represented, indicating an unresolved tension between the professional and the ‘dilettante’. Namier’s low opinion of popularizers is a matter of record. On the other hand, in the opening contribution to the special issue, ‘The larger view of history’, Geoffrey Barraclough complains about the overspecialization, ‘fragmentation’, ‘atomization’, ‘cult of the particular’ and ‘pursuit of method and technique for their own sakes’ which all, in his view, blighted academic history as currently practised. A period of ‘fifty years of the past’, he estimates, had become a red line, ‘beyond which no historian should trespass, if he wished to escape denunciation as a dilettante’.20 From the ranks of the dilettantes themselves, Wedgwood offered a spirited, Trevelyanesque, defence of ‘History as literature’. Some of the contributions are stock-takings of developments within historical writing over the previous 50 years, some identify contemporary trends, others again give off a distinct whiff of the agenda or manifesto. Barraclough sees increasingly refined and sophisticated statistical analysis as both an antidote to intellectually low-yield particularism and as a practical solution to the problem of better controlling the modern world’s flood tide of information, which now threatened to submerge the solitary-man-in-the-archive. The causes of the flood were identified as technological change and bureaucratic expansion. Over the previous half-century, according to Toynbee, the vast volume [of] information has been multiplied at least sixfold by the invention of the typewriter, with its carbon copies, and of the Dictaphone. For men become prodigal in generating documentation 118

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when their winged words are put on paper for them by a girl with a machine.21

The ‘Official Historian’, W.  Keith Hancock, burrowing ceaselessly away in the vaults of Whitehall, reveals that civil service documentation ‘could only be measured in miles of shelf-space’.22 The possible influence of the Cold War on contemporary historical scholarship is mentioned only once  – by Taylor  – although the relationship is implicit in Barraclough’s contention that, in light of the new bi-polar geopolitical realities, the study of Russian history had assumed urgent significance. Cold War pressures generally went unacknowledged, or unnoticed, because they were often  – to use Taylor’s word  – insidious, although in Blair Worden’s recollection, to be sure, the ideological stakes in the debate over the origins of the English Civil War (or ‘Puritan Revolution’) were in plain sight. Much the same is true of the metahistorical attack on ‘determinism’, but less clear, or relevant, in other fields. The contribution to the TLS on economic history by M.M. (‘Mounia’) Postan is suggestive in this respect.23 An exacting and prolific scholar of medieval agrarian, and by this time near contemporary, economic history, Postan was born a subject of the Tsar in Bessarabia. As a soldier and a student in St Petersburg, Kiev and Odessa, he (like the young Isaiah Berlin) witnessed the Russian Revolution first hand. In 1920 he arrived in Britain and in 1926 became a British citizen. Annan describes him simply as ‘a refugee from the Bolsheviks’.24 His political views during the 1950s may be gleaned from, among other things, his determination to thwart the professional progress of his former student, the communist Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm’s postwar election to a fellowship in King’s College, Cambridge, stood no chance of translating into a lectureship in Cambridge University, so long as Professor Postan had any say in the matter. Hobsbawm knew that every one of Postan’s job references for him were ‘poisoned arrow[s]’, yet he continued to hold his old tutor in high intellectual and personal regard. ‘Perhaps friendship might have survived politics’, he recalled, ‘after all, I  remained on good terms with Mounia Postan’.25 In his brief survey of ‘economic history of the vintage of 1955’ Postan stresses the new emphasis on the problem of economic growth, 119

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or development, and singles out the work of the American historian, Walt Whitman Rostow. Understanding the preconditions and dynamics of economic growth is not only a valid but a crucial task of economic history. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, growth theory had a transparent political agenda: Rostow’s best known book, The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) is subtitled A Non-Communist Manifesto. Rostow was, in fact, the very epitome of the intellectual as Cold Warrior.26 As professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s CIA-funded Center for International Studies, he co-wrote The Dynamics of Soviet Society (1953) and The Prospects for Communist China (1954); as a national security advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson he advocated the ‘carpet-bombing’ of North Vietnam. Like that other Cold War ‘Liberal’, Berlin, he was (to use Berlin’s description of himself) ‘a terrific domino man’.27 That is, he subscribed to the thesis that if South Vietnam ‘fell’ it would set off a domino effect, toppling over the neighbouring countries, and land the whole of South East Asia in the Soviet sphere of influence. In addition to carpet-bombing, geopolitical catastrophe could be averted, he believed, by sponsoring economic development in the Third World. Although deeply involved in contemporary questions of foreign affairs, especially in respect of the ‘developing world’, Rostow’s theory of the stages leading to the ‘take-off into self-sustained economic growth’ evolved from his earlier work on the British industrial revolution. ‘Development policy from the Marshall plan onwards’ has been described as ‘a form of Cold War arm-wrestling’28 and no one, least of all Postan, could have missed Rostow’s point: growth, or more broadly speaking ‘modernization’, mass consumerism and prosperity, were all the fruits of capitalist enterprise. Communism, quite literally, could not deliver the goods. In 1966 the TLS repeated the exercise under the rubric ‘New ways in history’. Of the 11 contributors only one, Barraclough, survived from the original line-up. Two changes at once stand out: a left-wing tilt towards ‘social history’, generously defined, and wider global perspectives. E.P. Thompson writes on ‘History from below’, and the interdisciplinary ‘tools’ recommended by Keith Thomas in ‘The tools and the job’ include sociology, demography and social anthropology. And whereas the original exercise contained pieces on German revisionism, the French historiography of the French Revolution, and the (north) American character, 120

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the new one addressed Latin America, Africa and Asia respectively. Ironically, the preceding cohort of historians were now subjected to ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, against which Thompson warned in the treatment of his historical actors. Carr had already skewered adamantine empiricist assumptions in What is History? ‘If ’, he mused standing Sir George Clark on his head, I were to call history ‘a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts’, my statement would, no doubt, be one-sided and misleading, but no more so, I venture to think, than the original dictum.29

Thomas opens his contribution with the prediction that ‘future histories of English historical writing are likely to reveal the first half of the twentieth century as a time when most historians lost their bearings’.30 The following year Stedman Jones saw the TLS surveys as casting belated light on the comparative backwardness of British (as opposed, most obviously, to French) historiography over ‘the last 100 years’.31 But these bleak appraisals are perhaps a little too sweeping, as Barraclough’s presence in both special issues suggests. ‘What is required,’ he argued in 1956, ‘is not so much new techniques as a radical examination of the assumptions upon which history has been written.’ Taylor’s view that in the field of diplomatic history ‘it is fitting that historians in what is called the age of the masses should abandon the archives for the study of public opinion  – a study, however, more easily preached than practiced’; Plumb’s estimate of the profound importance of sociology – ‘a young and as yet tentative discipline’ – ‘to any investigation of social history’;32 and Postan’s observation that economic historians had begun to choose their problems ‘from the hypotheses of the social sciences’ would not have looked out of place in 1966. Beyond the pages of the TLS Butterfield continued to grapple with the implications of elision entailed, necessarily, in the act of historical ‘abridgement’. He had nothing to say about the rhetorical, fictive and literary weft and weave of historical narrative, but then it would be a bit anachronistic to fault him for his innocence of the work of Hayden White. In another sense, however, the class of 1956 did deserve a slap of condescension because they were themselves, and especially the Namierites, 121

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too often guilty of smugness and condescension towards their predecessors. ‘According to one story in circulation many years ago, Namier declined to teach later eighteenth-century British history on taking up his professorial appointment at Manchester, because no books were available with which it could be correctly taught’.33 In 1961 John Brooke forecast that ‘fifty years from now all history will be done as Sir Lewis does it’,34 at once a preposterous prediction, and a warning to all historians against hubris. At which of our certainties today will historians in the 2060s scratch their heads in disbelief?

‘AN INVIGORATING CONTROVERSY’: BUTTERFIELD AND THE N AM IER  S C HO O L

It would be fanciful indeed to portray the master of a Cambridge college as a sort of angry middle-aged man; as an improbable envoy of the new critical spirit. Butterfield nonetheless did insist upon his nonconformity and suspicion of officialdom, and in 1957 his George III and the Historians challenged prevailing orthodoxies. Moreover, the ‘invigorating controversy’ which his book set off fed upon another fact of public culture at that juncture: the comparative intellectual seriousness of the periodical and ‘quality’ newspaper press. As noted earlier, today a work on historiography or eighteenth-century politics would be unlikely to attract reviews beyond the pages of the TLS, the London Review of Books or the specialist historical journals. Thirty years on, one historian recalled that even by the standards of the day, ‘the sales promotions of this book by the publisher was quite unprecedented for a work of purely academic interest’; while later again another asked ‘why did we spend so much energy on those early years of George III’s reign?’ At the time Taylor, typically, wondered at all the fuss: ‘did it really matter all that much?’35 In 1957 Macmillan republished The Structure of Politics in a new paperback edition; a book hailed by Wedgwood as nothing less than ‘one of the great events of our time’.36 Namier’s stature seemed secure. The signals, however, were mixed. In 1961, the year after his death, Carr rated him ‘the greatest British historian’ of his generation; to Toynbee it looked ‘as if, in the field of historical studies, Namier and his fellow pioneers in 122

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prosopography were “the wave of the future” – or, at any rate, one crest of it’.37 And yet, by 1964 Namier’s devoted disciple lamented ‘the lowest point yet reached of Namier’s reputation, a reputation which after having grown steadily for over twenty years began to take a turn downhill in the late 1950s’. Brooke was sure where the blame lay. ‘The Namier revolution had been met by the Butterfield reaction’ and younger historians were no longer under his spell.38 The Butterfield-Namier controversy is, of course, well known to students of historiography and of eighteenth-century history, and has been revisited several times.39 The stress has been mainly on historiographic, methodological and paradigmatic issues, but the debate may also be read as an episode in 1950s British (or Anglo-American) intellectual history; and one which had subterranean European and – upon Namier’s premise that there is no such thing as a disembodied idea  – generally understated personal dimensions. Namierism exhibited distinctively 1950s attributes: an emphasis on technique; a repudiation of political ideology  – ‘what shams and disasters political ideologies are apt to be’40 – and a view of the achievements of past scholarship not as foundations, however imperfect, upon which to build, but rather as so much rubble to be cleared away. These attributes were clear enough to contemporaries, who noted Namierism’s affinities with broader developments in ‘the age of analysis’, and ‘the elaborate scholarship of those who compile tables of parliamentarians with the aid, in some cases, of business machine cards’.41 Butterfield made the connection too, pointing out that John B. Owen’s Rise of the Pelhams (1957) ‘is chiefly preoccupied with those problems of political mechanics which have caught the interest of the present day’.42 Sir Lewis understood that longer stretches of the eighteenth century could only be Namierized with the help of fellow, like-minded, historians. So, in tandem with ‘The History of Parliament’, a series of monographs on the model of The Structure of Politics was conceived and inaugurated in 1956 by Brooke’s The Chatham Administration; next came J.B. Owen’s The Rise of the Pelhams. At last, it appeared, the ‘Namier revolution’ was underway. But as a shrewd student of 1848 Sir Lewis may not have been too surprised at the counter-revolution which swiftly followed. 123

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Butterfield’s oeuvre ranged over Christianity and history, international relations, the history of science, historiography and eighteenth-century British politics. By throwing that extra-parliamentary nuisance, ‘the people’, into the political scales, his book, George III, Lord North and the People, constituted an implicit critique of the Namier interpretation. And although Namier’s aproach to European history was more capacious, the fine-tuning historical technicians of mid-eighteenth-century politics can only have found Butterfield’s breadth of interests suspect and superficial, and looked askance at his forays into historiography as a waste of time. Finally, it has been suggested, those professional sceptics about the role of political ideas in history distrusted Butterfield – a sometime Methodist lay preacher – as a ‘Christian thinker, which [they thought] disqualified him as a balanced critic’.43 In Brooke’s mordant recollection ‘Butterfield set out to burn us at the intellectual stake, without passion or ill-feeling, solely for the good of our souls, and to prevent future historians being contaminated’.44 These antipathies long after resurfaced in John Kenyon’s cutting verdict that Butterfield was a man with a reputation rather like an inverted cone, his wide-ranging prestige balanced on a tiny platform of achievement. But he had always had a well cultivated moral tone, and he had grown more righteous with the years.45

By 1957 these mutual antagonisms had been smouldering for over 20 years: what seems to have finally fanned them into a conflagration was the publication of The Chatham Administration. Butterfield managed to place hostile reviews in four different venues – an extraordinary display of dubious professional ethics, not least because as an established scholar he attacked a younger colleague’s first book. Brooke understood, of course, that Namier constituted the actual target.46 Indeed, this tactic  – proxy attacks on the principal by way of his subalterns – became a marked feature of the entire controversy. Butterfield had given Brooke’s book ‘a trouncing’ and intended to ‘give it a bigger one later on’; meanwhile he flew ‘a kite’ on the ‘Namier School’ in Encounter preparatory to ‘a full-dress attack’.47 George III and the Historians is part study in the historiography of the early years of George III’s reign, stretching back to the Annual Register 124

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and Horace Walpole, and part polemical analysis of the ‘Namier School’. Butterfield took historiography seriously and felt other historians should do so as well, but there is no doubt that it is the Namier section of his book which represents its real purpose and which engaged his passions. Never a disciplined writer, he later admitted (privately) that he had written the final section ‘in a fever’.48 Butterfield began by ritually praising Sir Lewis as ‘a pioneer and a stimulus, a tremendous fountain of energies’ and for his ‘precision’, ‘solid contribution to scholarship’, ‘industry’ and ‘brilliant imagination’.49 Then he presented the articles of indictment. First, structural analysis, by freezing history at a particular moment, in this case 1760–1, inhibited the writing of political narrative. Next, structure, understood as factionalism and ‘the manipulative side of politics’,50 is reductive, more or less expunging the other stuff of politics – policy making, parliamentary debate, public opinion – from the record. It is reductive too in its tendency ‘to drain the intellectual content out of the things that politicians do’,51 and in its attribution of political conduct to vested interest. In reality might not political actions be sometimes prompted by political ideas? Might not some politicians sometimes move beyond the imperatives of faction and vested interest and act in the public interest (as they see it)? ‘It is not clear,’ Butterfield argued, ‘that the Namier method possesses the kind of receiving-set that is capable of catching all the relevant wavelengths.’52 Other charges include: ‘excessive atomization’ or head-counting; the interpretative limitations of ‘mere technique’; and the modern school’s (as he sometimes calls it) contempt for its predecessors. Instead of citing previous historians the Namierites cite each other.53 It is this latter charge which, perhaps, bothered Butterfield most. Here he moves beyond a critique of methodology and substantive argument about eighteenth-century history to a sort of sociology of one wing of his profession. What he detects is collective self-regard, cliquishness, self-referential insularity and even the traits of a cult. Hence his strategic deployment of the words ‘school’, ‘master’ and ‘disciple’. In the preface the reader is alerted to the existence of ‘the most powerfully organized squadron of our historical world at the present time’, and warned of the spectre of Nineteen Eighty-Four when a whole field of study might become the monopoly of a group and a party, all reviewing one another and standing shoulder to shoulder in 125

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order to stifle the discrepant idea, the new intellectual system, or the warning voice of the skeptic.

In fact, such party-line conformity was already evident among the rank-and-file. Brooke’s Chatham Administration launched a projected series, ‘England in the Age of the American Revolution’, which ‘according to Sir Lewis Namier, is, in one respect at least, “a co-operative undertaking” so that “the individuality of the collaborators merges into that of the team” ’.54 When Butterfield came to repeat this – erroneous – claim in the pages of the TLS, he came also to regret it. Butterfield made a strong case, a case which seems all the more compelling from the perspective of our post-Namier age. John Owen, for example, felt it politic to yield ground on the role of ideology in history, admitting that ‘the counting of heads does not necessarily mean the discounting of ideas’.55 But in practice it did. Namier found the ideas of a visiting American scholar ‘rather absurd. He asked me about the influence of Adam Smith on Charles Townshend and his American policy – Brooke very rightly remarked that the Townshend duties are a thing which any clerk in the treasury would have suggested.’56 He once told Caroline Robbins, author of the seminal The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, ‘that he could not read her book. It was a book about ideas, and ideas meant nothing to him. He had given it to his wife to read.’57 Put another way the Namierites were ‘fonder of analyzing division lists than of discussing what the division was about’.58 Butterfield weakened his case, however, and, ultimately, distracted attention from the substance of his critique by exposing his flanks to counter-attack on the grounds of error, prose, style or tone, and overstatement. ‘Some reviewers have referred to the rather generous quota of factual errors contained in the present volume,’ notes Owen – helpfully adding ‘but this seems irrelevant.’59 And yet, as Butterfield found to his cost, error is not necessarily irrelevant or trivial. Eager to arraign the ‘school’ for trying to impose a stifling orthodoxy, he responded to the front page TLS review in part by reasserting that in the new ‘England in the Age of the American Revolution’ series ‘the individuality of the collaborators merges into that of the team’. That formulation had precisely the opposite meaning to Namier’s prospectus: 126

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and while the History of Parliament is a cooperative undertaking in which the individuality of the collaborators merges into that of the team, every volume of England in the Age of the American Revolution will be individual work, the author’s garden plot on which he labours.

Sir Lewis, with his eagle-eye for detail – and in his sole public utterance on the entire affair – swooped immediately. Attributing the slip to the Burkean defect of ‘emotion’, rather than to bad faith, he concluded his letter to the editor by asking his adversary ‘why not admit the mistake?’ Backed into a corner of his own making, the Master of Peterhouse bowed out with as much grace as he could muster: ‘I have produced the effect of a wrong transcription’ he replied, ‘(which I cannot excuse or account for) […] I  certainly confess the mistake, and apologize to him, to Mr. Brooke, and to your original reviewer’.60 Unfortunately for Butterfield the matter did not rest there. ‘It is a great pity’, began a review less than two weeks later, that the manuscript of this book did not remain in the drawer of the Master of Peterhouse’s desk for another year or so […] it has been so hurriedly written and so carelessly revised that even the humblest member of that [Namier] school could have a happy field day with the gross errors of fact and wild misquotations is [sic] contains. A scholar who harps on the virtues of technical history and makes a mystique of scholarship ought to get his house in order before he takes on such heavy-weights as Sir Lewis Namier and his disciples.61

The story behind the ‘wrong transcription’ is an interesting one. In 1955 Desmond Williams promised Butterfield an advance copy of a paper on ‘The historiography of World War II’.62 In it he contests Namier’s interpretation of ‘the diplomatic prelude’ to the war. Butterfield looked forward to reading it but cautioned Williams to ‘check every footnote a score of times, because Namier will take advantage of every slip’. Two weeks later he repeated the injunction: ‘do be careful about the most microscopic points before you publish […] I am sure that Namier (apart from being unfair whenever possible) would pounce on the slightest slip and I should hate him to score off you’.63 After he himself had been pounced upon Butterfield recalled his sage advice and offered Williams these reflections: 127

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what I am sorry about is that after giving you so many warnings about the danger of criticizing Namier unless one took care of every detail and made sure of the proof corrections, I did in fact all the things which I told you not to do, and I believe I have never done them in regard to any other printed work […] in a fever, I slapped everything down without much thought, and for the first time in my life I neglected the proof correction very badly […] what really worried me, however, was that I did make some slips for which I am to blame, and therefore deserve some of the criticism. And of course my side is greatly weakened if it can be argued that it represents inaccurate history.64

This episode had an interesting coda as well. Butterfield’s mistranscription had certainly distorted what Namier had stated, but it proved closer to the truth than what Namier had claimed about individual ‘garden plots’. In the foreword to Namier and Brooke’s Charles Townshend (1964), on which the two authors had collaborated, and which Brooke completed after Sir Lewis’s death, Lady Namier affirmed ‘how inextricably the two writers’ minds had to blend before this biography […] could be published’.65 A blending which, it should be added, seems to have transcended mere intellect: speaking about Sir Lewis after his death Brooke had the disconcerting habit, especially for an historian – if not for a true ‘disciple’ – of wandering in and out of the present tense.66 Butterfield’s ‘fever’ and his aside about Namier’s habitual unfairness help account for his polemical excesses. Brooke’s perception that the controversy had been conducted ‘without passion or ill-feeling’ is wrong. Butterfield, with good reason, blamed bad reviews of his Lord North book back in 1949–50 on friends of Namier,67 accused him of playing ‘tricks’, of trying to restrict access to manuscripts by anyone other than his own adherents, and of behaving in a sinister fashion by writing him courteous letters! He thought Owen’s review of his George III ‘slimy’ and ‘smeary’.68 Williams agreed: the review was ‘fundamentally nasty’, and Namier the master of ‘the sneer […] the jibe, and [of] carefully controlled selectivity’.69 Confronting such a formidable, humourless, pedantic and abrasive opponent, at the height of his professional power, took intellectual courage, but when his personal animus seeped into print Butterfield set himself up for charges of testiness, petulance and, ironically, ‘unfairness’.70 On 128

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the other side of the debate, Namier angrily demanded from the Spectator an editorial disavowal of Williams’ review of a volume of his essays on European history. Using epigoni as surrogate targets, it appears, cut in both directions.71 Above all Butterfield gave hostages to ridicule by sounding the alarm about a powerful ‘squadron’, marching lock-step towards an historiographical Nineteen Eighty-Four. At times the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s praise for George III comes close to paraphrase, writing of ‘Sir Lewis Namier and his well-drilled associates’. In the same groove David Thomson refers to ‘the well-disciplined ranks of that forbidding school, for unswerving loyalty to the sacred technique has come to be a matter of somewhat uncritical faith’.72 Few other notices, however, were so persuaded. After doubting the coherence, even existence, of the ‘squadron’ C.L. Mowat argued: that Sir Lewis’s writings and views command respect is a tribute to the erudition, passion, and grace he brings to all he touches; that reviews of his works are glowing and deferential, with criticism muted and tentative, is no proof of the existence of a school so formidable ‘as to check the free play of criticism’. If we are going to make a school out of any historian who occupies an important chair, influences others by what he writes, and trains a new generation of historians, shall we not have to posit a Butterfield school – or squadron – and place Professor Butterfield also among the admirals?73

Namier himself dismissed what he called his critics’ ‘figments of imagination and nightmarish visions’.74 The exchange in the Spectator between Williams and Namier, and the close relationship between Williams and Butterfield, afford a rare glimpse of a vital dimension of the controversy – both subtext and context – which went unspoken. Namier and Butterfield’s disagreements extended beyond historical methodologies or the interpretation of eighteenth-century English history into the realm of contemporary European history and geopolitics. Butterfield, who had a dubious record on appeasement, remained a consistent anti-anti-German. Neither the patriotism of the author of The Englishman and his History nor the sincerity of his 129

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condemnation of totalitarianism is in doubt. Rather, his Christian and ‘tragic’ sense of history fed a ‘brooding theological defeatism which has made him argue […] that right and wrong are so uniformly distributed in human conflict that the only sensible position for a practical man is neutrality’.75 From that standpoint Namier-style Germanophobic invective (or ‘essentialism’ as it would be called nowadays) both transgressed Butterfieldian protocols of scholarly detachment and skewed the historical record. Intent, presumably, on administering an antidote to the ahistorical partisanship of the Namier–Taylor–Wheeler–Bennett axis, Williams claimed in 1958 to be working on a study of Hitler, 1919–39. ‘As you may see shortly,’ he informed Butterfield, ‘part I and part II would amount, under the present arrangement, to 1750 to 1800 pages of print. I’m going to have a big headache this summer.’76 In 1961 he expected that ‘my own Mein Kampf edition should be out later this year’.77 The point is not only that conflicting worldviews rubbing up against one another in one sphere sharpened the dispute in another, over George III – which they did – but just as importantly that Butterfield’s positions exemplify a hostility towards ‘Official History’, meaning, in the first instance, government-authorized and funded histories of Britain’s role in World War II, based largely on departmental records. This he faulted for partisanship and selectivity in the use of documentation.78 More perhaps than Namier’s interpretation or methods, what irked the nonconformist in Butterfield was his aura of authority and perceived attempt to impose an orthodoxy. After all, he had himself experienced this directly, when George III, Lord North and the People was faulted in reviews for not keeping up with the Namierite times. Namierism resembled ‘Official History’ not least in its affiliation with the state-funded History of Parliament. On the near-contemporary European front Williams charged Namier with pushing the ‘official’ line outright.79 And, in a further parallel, Butterfield on different occasions accused both the Foreign Office and Namier of limiting access to documentary material.80 Thus, as a professional historian he felt as duty-bound to challenge the Namier hegemony as he had earlier felt compelled to turn down an invitation to serve on a UNESCO committee, and to expose the biases and elisions of British Official History. The controversy rumbled inconclusively on into 1958  – when Butterfield fired a parting shot in the journal History81  – and petered 130

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out thereafter. In a radio broadcast shortly after Namier’s death in 1960 Butterfield paid handsome (if qualified) homage to his ‘old enemy’. Similarly, he described him to the journalist, Ved Mehta, as ‘a giant  – perhaps the only giant in our time […] a historian’s historian’. In 1964 the first set of three volumes of The History of Parliament, covering the years 1754–90, were published, and controversy flared briefly one last time. Taylor mocked this imposing monument to scholarship as ‘unmistakably an elephant, and white at that’. Then, underlining once more Butterfield’s defence of narrative, he observed: Namier’s influence counted for much. He loved detail. He could also survey a century in a few sentences. He never attempted the middle range. He wanted history and life to stand still. He told me once: ‘the one thing I dislike about history is that it moves.’82

Butterfield lauded the volumes as an unmatched resource, but once again could not resist the barb. ‘The student of history’, he admitted, now has a magnificent work of reference, which for many years will give him ample food for reflection and some writers of history will no longer withhold their books from publication out of fear that a whipper-snapper at the Institute of Historical Research will catch them out on, say, the way in which R.N. Aldworth voted on the issue of the Minorca inquiry, April 26, 1757.83

Butterfield thought that ‘history thrives on controversy’,84 and his strike against the Namierites certainly jolted a field of historical study endangered, if not yet characterized, by intellectual complacency, myopia and dullness. To be sure, his attack on the monopolizing tendencies of the ‘powerfully organized squadron’ was alarmist and overblown; on the other hand it was not quite the ‘figment of imagination’ which Namier alleged either. True, the Namier School, as identified by Butterfield, comprised all of four members – Sedgwick, Brooke, Owen and Namier himself  – but it also boasted fellow travellers, including (some would say) Richard Pares,85 Lucy Sutherland and Betty Kemp, the medievalist J.S. Roskell, Sir John Neale (according to Taylor),86 a seventeenth-century branch, represented by D.  Brunton and D.H. 131

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Pennington’s Members of the Long Parliament (1954),87 Ian Christie, who had a distinguished career ahead of him, and an American subsidiary, ‘Robert Walcott’,88 and by this time enjoyed a secure institutional berth in the publicly endowed History of Parliament Trust, by which Christie and Brooke were employed, and to the biographies of which Sutherland and Kemp generously contributed. Four does not seem such a ludicrously small figure anyway, when the comparative, face-to-face, smallness of the pre-1960s historical profession and academic community is remembered. Nor was inflated language about coterieism confined to Butterfield, as the well-drilled and disciplined ranks of dull disciples marching across the review pages testify. Over in Dublin, Williams’ colleague, Dudley Edwards, characterized Namierites as ‘serfs’; in the New Statesman they show up as ‘Lilliputians’.89 At the time not even Butterfield believed that he had ‘won’ the argument. No schoolmen were converted. And yet an aura had been exorcized. Brooke got that much right. So too did Butterfield. Not everyone had taken his side but, surveying the immediate outcome, he noted that ‘I never had any doubt about the book altering the state of George III studies, because it would fork criticisms of Namier out of people who never put them in print before’.90 Insofar as his interventions shook things up he counted the controversy a success. To the reviewer who thought that ‘upon Sir Lewis and his collaborators Professor Butterfield, it must be confessed, inflicts only light damage’, he might have replied, as he had earlier written in another context, that nevertheless ‘the clash of controversy ultimately produc[es] a more highly-tested form of truth’.91 Taylor found the Butterfield–Namier controversy ‘invigorating’, yet wondered if it really mattered. But Taylor’s studied weariness is no reason to discount the real achievements of Namier and his followers.92 As an early reviewer of The Structure of Politics noted, it had ‘permanent value’.93 So too do many of the findings, however one-dimensional or limited in scope, of others of the Namier persuasion right up to the present. And, as Butterfield readily acknowledged, their deep research and rigorous analysis – its lacunae and defects notwithstanding – set higher standards for all professional historians. But it may be that the debate matters more because some of the methodological and conceptual issues raised by 132

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Butterfield – the proper function of narrative, for instance, or the influence of political ideas – are of perennial concern to historians, especially political historians, in general.94 The Namier phenomenon is important too, to understanding certain developments in post-Namier historiography. Implicitly or explicitly a number of key texts in eighteenth-century British historical studies can be read as repudiations of the Namier paradigm. For example, in John Brewer’s account, the political upheavals of the early 1760s are propelled by the press and by extra-parliamentary agitation.95 In his The Making of the English Working Class (1963)  – probably the most influential book of the new social history of the 1960s – E.P. Thompson observed that for 100 years after 1688 this compromise – the oligarchy of landed and commercial property – remained unchallenged, although with a thickening texture of corruption, purchase, and interest whose complexities have been lovingly chronicled by Sir Lewis Namier and his school.96

Thompson then set out to lovingly chronicle the serious challenge to that oligarchy which did emerge in the 1790s. The transformation of the history of political thought is usually, and accurately enough, framed as a transcending of the ‘timeless’ Great Books tradition in favour of historical contextualization and the reconstruction of political ‘languages’. The shadow cast by Namier more often goes unnoticed. It is perfectly clear who the doyen of the history of political thought, J.G.A. Pocock, had in mind when he wrote: to divide the eighteenth century at 1760, the date of George III’s accession, risks seeming to perpetuate ancient myths about a new departure in politics occasioned by that king’s policies and personality. These myths are long exploded. Nevertheless, Britain was still a personal monarchy – it can be argued that George III was the last great personal monarch in its history – and in the history of political discourse it is in fact possible to find some new departures, taking their rise from actions the new king took, or was said to have taken, soon after his accession. The myth of George III is a fact of this kind of history, even if it presents as facts events and intentions which must be dismissed as myths from history in general.97 133

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Yet another leading exponent of ‘this kind of history’, Quentin Skinner, looked back in anger to the era of Namier’s ascendancy, portraying him as a ‘sarcastic critic of the belief that any social theories (or flapdoodle, as he preferred to call them) could possibly be relevant to the explanation of political behaviour or the processes of social change’.98 Finally, although he did not do so in a systematic or theoretical, much less a restrained, way, Butterfield essayed a crude but insightful group-psychological and sociological analysis of the Namier ‘School’ with implications far beyond that time or coterie. Two years after George III and the Historians appeared, Ernest Gellner’s book Words and Things provided a similar, though more sophisticated, critique of Oxford’s linguistic philosophers. Stressing the relevance of the ‘social and institutional milieu of the thinker’, and likening that milieu to those of ‘tribes’ and ‘conclaves’, he concludes that ‘the psychological effects of belief reinforced by participation in a group, each member of which sees all others as fully convinced, are fairly obvious’.99 Membership of the group is fortified, moreover, by a shared conviction that it has somehow cracked the code of how philosophy (or history or economics) is done, thereby superseding, and rendering irrelevant, all previous attempts to penetrate the mysteries of the craft. A species of intellectual hubris, or complacency, resistant to alternative views, results. It is impossible to imagine a John Brooke unsettled by the latest discoveries in the history of, say, gender or of print culture. And, in the end, that confidence betokens a psychological and emotional, as much as a rational or scholarly, condition.100 Of course Butterfield, champion of the principle (or chimera) of scholarly detachment, could not himself slip such non-‘scientific’ snares. He did, after all, ignite a controversy driven by politics, personality, personal enmities and loyalties, emotional investments, ‘anger’ and ‘fever’.

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‘OUT OF APATHY’? Probably the most cited line from Look Back in Anger, first performed in May 1956, is the one about there not being ‘any brave, good causes left’. As it turned out there was one shortly on its way, in the shape of opposition to Franco-British military intervention in the Suez Canal.

SU EZ

On 26 July 1956, President Nasser’s Egyptian government nationalized the Suez Canal Company, precipitating the most traumatic domestic political crisis in postwar British history. Britain had controlled, or, from an Arab nationalist perspective, occupied, the canal zone until withdrawing under the terms of the 1954 Anglo-Egyptian pact. The British deemed free passage through the canal essential to their (and ‘the West’s’) shipping, commercial and strategic interests. Viewed from both Downing Street and Fleet Street, Nasser’s seizure of that vital artery could not be allowed to stand. The geopolitics of the unfolding crisis, played out at the intersection of Western imperialism, Arab nationalism and Cold War rivalries, were intricate, multilayered and complex. Egypt, Great Britain, France, Israel, the United Nations and the United States were all party to the conflict. Nevertheless, the British press, as is its knack, distilled all that international clamour down to a simple, forceful, message. ‘No More Adolf Hitlers’ blared the Daily Herald on the 27 July.1 135

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The Daily Herald supported the Labour Party, and from the outset left and right shared an assumption that a valid, direct and compelling analogy could be drawn between Nasser’s aggression and that of Hitler and (Prime Minister Eden’s preferred candidate) Mussolini.2 The lesson of history was clear: appeasing dictators came at too costly a price. Even after Labour opposed military intervention neither Gaitskell nor Bevan ever argued that because Eden was wrong Nasser was right. If Eden had been able to act sooner all might have gone well for him, on the home front at least; but the time-consuming logistics of military preparation and the public relations necessity of appearing to seek a diplomatic solution rendered that impossible. War planning and mobilization and the rounds of diplomatic initiative dragged on in tandem through the late summer. Above all, Britain’s closest ally, America, stood in the way of early unilateral action. President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were unwilling, in an election year, to flout hostile American public opinion; both men had a residual Rooseveltian aversion to British imperialism and, decisively, both calculated that a ‘colonialist’style incursion into a ‘Third World’ country would push the entire Arab world into the orbit of the Soviet Union – which had already supplied Egypt with arms. Eden, ironically, reached the opposite conclusion, writing to Eisenhower about ‘strengthening the weakest point in the line against communism’.3 Failing to win American acquiescence, his options seemed to be reduced to military intervention, against the wishes of the Americans; or inaction, in defiance of his own anti-appeasement convictions. There were, however, other players in this drama. Israel considered Egypt its primary enemy, while France suspected Nasser of stirring up nationalist sentiment in her Algerian colony.4 In October the French and Israelis hatched a secret plan, into which the British entered, to retake the canal and, hopefully, to topple the Nasser regime along the way. Israel would invade and Britain and France would then intervene in a ‘police action’ to separate the belligerents, end the fighting, and restore order and ‘international’ control of the canal zone. On 29 October Israeli tanks crossed the border into Sinai. Britain issued a 12-hour ultimatum to both sides to withdraw, and two days later, preparatory to landing in Port Said, began aerial bombardment of Egyptian targets. 136

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For many, rising doubts about, or outright opposition to, Eden’s bellicose policy were stilled momentarily by the gut instinct to support ‘our boys’. According to a Daily Express poll ‘only thirty per cent of the country opposed the government […] while fifty-one and a half percent supported it’.5 Public opinion remained bitterly and deeply divided, however, and transcended traditional party alignments. In addition to the usual suspects – Bevanites (but not including Dick Crossman) and perpetual intellectual dissenters like Bertrand Russell and A.J.P. Taylor – others who were against the war included Earl Mountbatten, the Duke of Devonshire, the editor of the Spectator Ian Gilmour and an appalled, but publicly silent, Trevor-Roper. On the morning of Sunday 4 November, as the Anglo-French fleet sailed through the Mediterranean, the Observer denounced Britain’s intervention; at lunchtime Taylor and Michael Foot pointedly ignored their ‘war criminal’ fellow panellists on ATV’s Free Speech progamme, turning directly onto camera to launch a passionate attack on Eden’s folly;6 that afternoon Bevan delivered a rousing speech to 30,000 protestors in Trafalgar Square and that evening – in a seminal moment in British television history – Gaitskell, leader of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition, condemned Her Majesty’s government in time of war for acting illegally. A banner prominently on display in Trafalgar Square declared ‘Law not War’. That same day, 4 November, Russia invaded its restive satellite state, Hungary; but by what moral standard, in which court of world opinion, could Britain now pass judgement on that further breach of international law? The following day the troops and paratroopers landed, quickly secured Port Said, and began the advance south. In military terms the operation proceeded smoothly and with only light casualties. The ceasefire which came into effect at midnight on 6 November owed everything to economic and political pressures far beyond the remit of the generals and soldiers on the ground. As soon as the United States withdrew support for the pound, the chancellor, Macmillan – a strong pro-intervention voice in cabinet – accepted the inevitable and advised his colleagues to accede to American demands and call a halt to hostilities. The Anglo-French armies withdrew from the canal zone, to be replaced by a United Nations peacekeeping force. Eden, his already fragile health breaking down, extended his catalogue of political misjudgements 137

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by withdrawing from the country to recuperate in Ian Fleming’s Jamaican home, ‘Goldeneye’. And ‘so’, noted Trevor-Roper, surveying the wreckage, we are condemned by all, haven’t secured the canal, have put it out of action, haven’t got rid of Nasser, and look like making a present of the Middle East to Russia. Was ever a good case so wantonly bungled?7

At the height of the crisis Isaiah Berlin asked with faux humility ‘why shd my views be of the slightest interest to anyone?’8 In fact, they are of interest to the historian of this sorry episode, because the sharp rift on the question of Suez which sundered the Oxford academic community reflects wider divisions among intellectuals and within British society more generally. ‘Most’ of Balliol’s dons sent a telegram to the Conservative MP Nigel Nicolson asking him to oppose the government.9 Trevor-Roper was unusual in opposing the ‘police action’ (not on grounds of principle, but because he saw it as a horribly botched job) but not publicly so. Nonetheless, his restraint notwithstanding, he soon found that I am losing all my friends owing to my nonconformity in the present political furore. I dare not call at the Sunday Times office lest I be dismissed for deviation. I think I am the only person in Oxford who refused to sign either of the two petitions, one denouncing the government for its lack of virtue, the other praising it for its genius.

Actually he was not alone. Berlin, his colleague and occasional ally in the faculty trenches, likewise ‘signed no letters or counter-letters, appeared on no platforms or counter-platforms’.10 But there the similarity ends. In Trevor-Roper’s estimate ‘our worthless Prime Minister’ was a ‘vain, ineffectual Man of Blood’; whereas Berlin praised his ‘great moral splendour’.11 To Eden’s wife, ‘Dearest Clarissa’, Berlin wrote: This is only to say at this moment when undergraduates are demonstrating in the High Street against the government, and dons are going about speechless with indignation, and the Manchester Guardian has declared that our moral credit has gone virtually forever, and the Observer is surely going to preach with the peculiar mixture of sanctimoniousness & hysteria which is more nauseating than even the New 138

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Statesman – I should like to offer the Prime Minister all my admiration and sympathy. His action seems to me very brave very patriotic and – I shd have thought – absolutely just.12

Trevor-Roper wished ‘not to partake of the braying and counter-braying of my asinine colleagues’ and in post-Suez Oxford recognized ‘an atmosphere which I have known only once before, but which was then identical with the atmosphere today: the atmosphere of 1938, of Munich’. How shall I ever forget Munich? My friends were divided, families were divided, social life was forced into new patterns. The cleavage cut society into novel forms: it did not correspond with any of the old cleavages of political party, economic activity, social class […] it is incredible how similar the atmosphere is today. With true-blue tories who, with absolute unanimity, declare forth the genius of Eden, it is impossible quite to argue […] and now again, as in 1938, society is divided and it is hardly possible to speak across the divisions. In London, people are excluded from dinner parties &, in the country, from shooting parties, if they do not proclaim the genius of Eden.13

‘The people who fuss are the dons’, observed Berlin, of whom the vast majority is violently against the Government. People even like Marcus Dick who are conservatives and members of the Conservative Party are dreadfully upset and cannot eat or drink, and find themselves unable to teach and are all in a condition of moral topor and go about with a hangdog look and think the whole thing worse than Munich and the day when it happened literally the worst day of their lives. I do not begin to think all this, whereas of course I felt it about Munich.

Berlin readily acknowledged that rules had been broken and understood the ‘moral shock’ of his colleagues, but, upon drawing up a ‘utilitarian balance’ of the whole affair, felt no shock himself. The ends, apparently, do sometimes justify the means, although never, of course, in the case of the Soviet Union. At the end of November 1956, Berlin finally did manage to work up sufficient moral indignation to sign a petition: ‘a violent document about Hungary’.14 139

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DEC LARAT IO N A N D C O N V I CT I O N

The short- and longer-term significance of Suez in terms of the end of empire and of Britain’s ‘great power’ pretensions is clear enough; its impact upon politics, culture and society, less so. Writing ‘just three weeks after’ Suez, the crisis did not cause Kingsley Amis to revise his downbeat assessment that ‘very few causes offer themselves to the cruising rebel’: ‘no Spain, no fascism, no mass unemployment’. On the contrary, although it was ‘too early to say what long-term effect, if any, the Hungarian and Egyptian crises will have on the behaviour of our romantics’, he predicted, ‘(hoping to be proved wrong) that such effect will be slight. If the crises settle down quickly, as at the moment they show signs of doing, they will soon slip the minds of most people, intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike’. ‘Nobody who attended the great demonstration in Trafalgar Square’, responded Paul Johnson, ‘feels the need for another Spain’. And more, ‘never in modern history has the intellectual element in a nation been so united, militant, and, I submit, successful’. Norman MacKenzie thought that the ‘final futile fling of imperialism at Suez’ had broken ‘the crust of apathy’ at home. ‘I don’t think’, reflected Taylor nearly 20 years later, ‘it’s made much difference in the long run’.15 A plausible case can be made for both positions. The fingerprints of Eden’s successor as prime minister, Harold Macmillan, were all over the Suez debacle, and yet he led the Tories to their third consecutive general election victory in 1959. The circulation of the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph did not decline. On the other hand, in retrospect, 1956, the year of the Angry Young Men, the campaign against capital punishment and the demonstration in Trafalgar Square, does look like one of those ‘turning points’ of which historians are so fond. In the second half of the 1950s left-wing political analysis and cultural criticism diagnosed British politics and society as in stasis. According to this view, by creating the welfare state, what might be called the Labour Party ‘establishment’ had exhausted its historic mission, settled for a new, uninspiring, status quo, and lost all sense of direction. The welfare state, as one critic put it, had become the ‘stalemate state’.16 In The Future of Socialism Anthony Crosland addressed that condition from the standpoint of the Labour right; new ideas and new directions were, however, 140

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more likely to be generated by the discontented left, positioned outside the traditional party (including the post-Hungary Communist Party) gridlock. It is no coincidence that the largest political mobilization of the decade, CND, had no formal party affiliation or sponsorship. Indeed the Labour Party leadership and the majority of the parliamentary party supported Britain’s possession of an ‘independent nuclear deterrent’. Cultural critique and ideological reevaluation came in a number of ways: an elaboration of the Angry Young Men’s intellectually dispersed protest against the dull conformities of contemporary society, as expressed in the volume of essays, Declaration (1957); the overlapping, but more politically focused, appraisal of the welfare state and its alternatives articulated in another collection, Conviction (1958); and the extended and thoroughgoing discussion among non-communist and ex-communist Marxists, and others, which led to the formation of the New Left.17 In his introduction to the eight essays which make up Declaration, the editor, Tom Maschler, attributes the phrase ‘Angry Young Men’ to low journalism, and points out that the contributors ‘do not belong to a united movement’; that in fact ‘they attack one another directly or indirectly in these pages’, and that Amis declined an invitation to join their company. Potted disclaimers dispensed, what does unite this disparate group, explains Maschler, is a shared ‘indignation against the apathy, the complacency, the idealistic bankruptcy of their environment’.18 They certainly were a motley crew. The self-styled ‘outsiders’ – Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd – spurn political commitments altogether in pursuit of a hazily religious, sub-Nietzscheian, spiritual renewal; while John Wain, Kenneth Tynan and Doris Lessing attend to mainly literary matters, informed, in the ex-communist Lessing’s case, by ideological presuppositions; only Osborne corresponded to the new-minted stereotype of the AYM with his scatter-gun blasts at more or less everything. The film critic and film-maker Lindsay Anderson’s contribution, ‘Get Out and Push!’, is equally trenchant, but more politically coherent. Back in 1954, Brendan Behan, an Irish Republican with a soft spot for the ancient foe, began one of his humorous columns in the Irish Press with the observation that ‘nobody enters or re-enters England with greater reluctance than the intellectual native of that country’.19 And so, begins Anderson: ‘lets face it; coming back to Britain is always 141

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Figure 6.1 Poking fun at the intellectual pretensions of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (Tribune, 1956).

something of an ordeal. It ought not to be but it is’. Nor is it just ‘the sauce bottles on café tables, and the chips with everything’, the Daily Express, and the obsession with Britain’s ‘Greatness’, rooted in the past, and ratified by patriotic historians such as Sir Arthur Byrant and A.L. Rowse. Post-Suez Britain, ‘an industrial, imperialist country that has lost its economic superiority and its empire, has yet to find, or accept, its new identity’. And, he asks, ‘if “Land of Hope and Glory” is to be decently shelved, what song are we to sing?’ Not, he quickly answers, ‘The Red Flag’. The Labour movement had suffered a ‘failure of imagination […] the old, moral inspiration of radicalism has dribbled away […] the trade unions are as capable of philistine, narrowly sectional actions as the Tories – perhaps more so’.20 Here is the authentic voice, avant la lettre, of the ‘New Left’. However, while Anderson skewers the political quietism and negativity of Wain and Amis, his own credo of ‘fighting means commitment’, and affirmation of humanist values, hardly amounts to a political programme either.21 142

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The Listener complained of ‘the conceit, the self-importance, the humourlessness and intolerance of these young authors’, but, at least in respect of Anderson and Osborne, might have added ‘vigour’.22 In ‘They call it cricket’, Osborne announces that he will not ‘hand out his gospel version of the Labour Party’s next manifesto’ but simply fling down a few statements – you can take your pick. They will be what are often called ‘sweeping statements’, but I believe we are living at a time when a few ‘sweeping statements’ may be valuable. It is too late for caution.

And these, with a sort of slapdash splenetic energy, he proceeds to deliver: dispatching ‘our H-bomb’ as ‘the most debased, criminal swindle in British history’, royalty worship as ‘national swill’, the BBC staffed by ‘palace lackeys’, and ‘most critics’ ‘sodden’ as they are ‘in the culture-mores of Oxford and Cambridge’. Again, like Anderson and the rest, he offers no worked-out alternative – ‘I am not going to define my socialism’.23 Why should he? Declaration, after all, is a series of personal statements by writers, whose first responsibility is to their craft, not to a political platform. Some 25,000 copies of the book were sold within three months. Conviction is a more coherent volume, which critiques contemporary British politics and culture, economy, science and society, mainly, but not exclusively, from the perspective of the New Statesman Labour left. Two of the 12 contributors were on the New Statesman editorial staff, and a third worked for the Tribune; four had stood as Labour Party candidates in general elections. Sociologists, economists and journalists with a scientist, a philosopher and a literary critic thrown in, this group of rather earnest youngish men (and woman, Iris Murdoch) shared a view of Britain’s recent past which helped account for her current predicaments. Several looked back in approval to the popular front-style political engagements of the 1930s, to the national solidarities of the war years, and to the reforming spirit and achievements of the 1945 Labour government. By 1950, however, they believed that the Labour Party had ‘run out of ideas’; that ‘instead of realizing that their work was only beginning, the Labour leaders thought that it was at an end’.24 Since then, that 143

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leadership had squandered its radical vision. Meanwhile, as the trade union movement became ever more bureaucratic and self-serving, an entire, materially secure (or so it seemed), politically complacent, generation settled for the mundane satisfactions of the private sphere. Was there really, as some asserted, ‘nothing left to reform’ and nowhere left to march to?25 The contributors to Conviction were agreed that while the welfare state had delivered real advances in living standards, change was too slow, not far-reaching enough, and had had a politically numbing effect upon the working class. ‘The present offers a rare challenge’, contended Richard Hoggart, ‘to effect the future of a society which is now, by its very success in material improvement, in danger of weakening its hold on its own moral strengths.’26 Nor did the ideological small change of Butskellite consensus promise a way forward; British politics, rather, had ‘reverted to what they were in the mid-eighteenth century:  fundamental agreement on principles, concealed by a fierce squabble for places’.27 And a good thing too, Namier would undoubtedly have said, for these essays addressed dilemmas as understood by the left. ‘Post-war society’, wrote Peter Shore, ‘is significantly different from pre-war and […] whatever else it may be it is not trending towards a socialist society.’28 Shore invoked Burnham’s Managerial Revolution to argue for the primacy of control in nationalized industries over public ownership. Public ownership, as Paul Johnson put it, ‘is merely an alternative system of management’.29 Johnson recommended disestablishing the Church and abolishing – simultaneously and soon – the monarchy, the House of Lords, the honours system, the Inns of Court and the corporate bodies which governed the public schools, and Oxford and Cambridge universities! His fellow contributors were more temperate, advocating greater democratic control of science and industry, and a more imaginative looking beyond the narrow confines of routine politics to the politics of ordinary culture. Raymond Williams’ essay in particular drew on that robust English tradition of cultural criticism and moral evaluation, represented by the likes of William Cobbett, William Morris and F.R. Leavis, which so helped to fashion new thinking on the emerging New Left. 144

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MONARCHY REVISITED

The dissenting polemic of the late 1950s is peppered by side-swipes at, and one frontal assault upon, the institution of monarchy. This may well have been prompted by the public controversy on the role of the modern monarchy which broke out in August 1957, because before that, and except for listing the Crown and Court as ‘pillars’ of the ‘Establishment’, critics of the Establishment had little to say on the subject. Monarchy was typically perceived, by the time such critics got around to putting it into words, as ‘unimportant, benign, and utterly irrelevant to anything that matters’30  – a view summed up at the time of the coronation by the New Statesman’s advice to the public to simply enjoy the show. Emptied of the political power to do harm, and so blended with the national identity as to be both ubiquitous – in the popular press – and near invisible – to serious political analysis – monarchical anachronism generally escaped the attentions of socialist would-be modernizers. Williams, as we have seen, never added either ‘monarchy’ or ‘republicanism’ to the lexicon of ‘keywords’ which he was then collecting. Similarly, Christopher Hill, Marxist historian of the English ‘revolution’,31 who was interested primarily in the social anatomies and (underlying) economic causes of the revolution, mentions republicanism, even in his discussion of the republican theorist, James Harrington, only in passing.32 Initial public criticism of the monarchy  – or more precisely of the Royal Family’s style and entourage  – came from a most unlikely source:  John Crigg, Lord Altrincham, who published the offending article in the National and English Review, a magazine which he both owned and edited. In a plea, effectively, for more up-to-date presentation, Altrincham, a Tory and a royalist, complained of stuffy courtiers, and the Queen’s stilted elocution. The reaction was fierce. While the BBC reacted initially with dignified silence and the New Statesman supported the delinquent noble lord, the Observer sacked him as a columnist; most sensationally he was caught by television cameras on the receiving end of a slap to the face by an elderly member of the hard-right ‘League of Empire Loyalists’.33 Malcolm Muggeridge next 145

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entered the fray in October, when his, he ‘fondly supposed, sensible and amiable, observations on the monarchy’ appeared in the New York Saturday Evening Post, under the heading ‘Does England really need a queen?’ The Post released the article to the British press, provoking a second round of outrage. Muggeridge later recalled that up until that point he had regarded the monarchy as ‘essentially comical’, and conceded that ‘constitutional monarchy, as such, has much to recommend it’; he did not anticipate the ‘deadly solemnity’ and ‘furious indignation’ with which his innocuous comments were met. Inundated by abusive letters and telephone calls, burned in effigy, and his house daubed with yellow paint, this experience certainly gave pause for reflection on the meaning of monarchy in modern Britain.34 Neither Muggeridge nor Altrincham were anti-monarchist. Only John Osborne among the critics essayed an explicitly republican case against monarchy. First, he stripped it of its quasi-sacral mystique, what the Daily Mail called the ‘spirituality of the rite’, and Edward Shils the ‘national communion’ of coronation: when Roman crowds gather outside St. Peter’s they are taking part in a moral system, however detestable it may be. When the mobs rush forward in the Mall they are taking part in the last circus of a civilization that has lost faith in itself, and has sold itself to a splendid triviality.

In practice, however, the ‘meaningless symbol’ of the Crown obstructed meaningful political progress. Any socialist party, he argued, that is not republican is not crediting its political followers with reason or intelligence. By suggesting to a man that fatuity, as long as it is hallowed by tradition, is admirable, you cannot expect him to treat a complex social concept with any seriousness. He is not conditioned to seriousness but to totem worship. Whilst a ridiculous anachronism is reverenced as a serious institution, the road to socialism will be bedeviled by regard for implicit ruling-class ideals like ‘restraint’, ‘good taste’, ‘healthy caution’ and so on.35

Osborne’s own lack of restraint, good taste and so on in respect of royalty was rewarded by the Royal Court Theatre’s cancellation of a reception to 146

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celebrate the publication of Declaration; the revellers merrily switching to the subterranean pleasures of the Pheasantry in Chelsea.36 All of this rhetoric appears not to have left a dent on the general public devotion to the Royal Family. On the contrary, by 1961 ‘it [was] an indubitable fact’, in Muggeridge’s estimate, that ‘the monarchy’s popularity-rating has never been higher’.37 He, and others, advanced two basic reasons for this:  the influence of mass communications and of snobbery. Norman MacKenzie viewed the ‘Happy Family’ as a repository of nostalgia and a triumph of advertising; Osborne blamed BBC ‘graveyard voices and […] ponderous language, stuffed with Shakespearian and Biblical echoes’ for investing the Crown with prefab gravitas; Muggeridge  – who could not decide whether the controversy surrounding his article was spontaneous or whipped up by the press – also mocked ‘the more ponderous and high-minded’ royalty commentators like ‘Mr Richard Dimbleby’. In any event he attributed the monarchy’s continued high ratings, at least in part, to the way in which it was so ‘ingeniously spot-lighted and produced’.38 His other explanation is social. One paradox of the rise of the welfare state, according to Muggeridge (and Paul Johnson), was an intensification of snobbery and class consciousness. The attempt to legislate equality had generated a new compensatory emphasis on the outward display of hierarchy and inequality. The Establishment and its ancient institutions once again demonstrated a capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and to co-opt the upwardly mobile. ‘Public schools, which once counted those on their waiting-lists in scores, now count them in hundreds. Everyone wants to speak like a BBC announcer [and] to dress like the Windsors.’ And in such a status-fixated social climate what could be more ‘U’ than ‘even the humble OBE’ or Her Britannic Majesty herself?39 The popular appeal of the monarchy has oscillated violently since 1957, but there is no doubting its remarkable resilience. Viewed through the prism of, say, Prince William’s marriage ceremony (2011) or the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee (2012), the griping of Osborne and the rest appears paltry and ineffectual. A different impression emerges, however, if the angle of vision is switched to 1953, when such disrespect for royalty seemed scarcely imaginable. Deference towards monarchy did not collapse, to be sure, but an antique cultural taboo had been breached nonetheless. 147

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THE CAM PAIG N F O R N U C LE A R D I S A R M A MENT

The Listener critic who found the young Declaration authors so tiresome also discerned their angst:  ‘they are obsessed by the hydrogen bomb [and] with their future so menaced, how can they be blamed for feeling bitter with society, with the “Establishment”, and with the older generation?’40 ‘We are living in a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive and precarious,’ wrote Doris Lessing, that it is a question whether soon there will be people left alive to write books and to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of us; and we are haunted, all of us, by the threat that even if some madman does not destroy us all, our children may be born deformed or mad.41

Other contributors to Conviction sounded variations on the same tune. ‘To me,’ proclaimed MacKenzie, ‘the peril of nuclear war seems just as great a threat as Hitler’s form of genocide.’ The scientist Nigel Calder began to write his essay during an overnight stop in a schoolroom in Reading, while on the march to the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment ‘to protest against an outgrowth of advanced physics which promises to destroy the species Homo sapiens and leave Rattus norvegicus to come out of the sewers and inherit the earth’.42 In 1958 the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) emerged as the largest, most passionate, extra-parliamentary protest movement since the days of the Suffragettes. Once underway, it moved quickly, although popular mobilization had taken some time in the making. Lord Russell, who became president of CND, recalled that ‘throughout the forties and early fifties, my mind was in a state of confused agitation on the nuclear question’.43 In 1954, 100 Labour MPs signed a motion calling for a halt to nuclear weapons tests and, sometime later, small activist groups such as the Direct Action Committee (DAC) continued to oppose nuclear policy. Then, in 1957, a sequence of events pushed the issue to the forefront of public debate. First, a government White Paper, published in April and authored by the secretary for defence, Duncan Sandys, prioritized nuclear deterrence over conventional land forces (which were to be reduced in size) and coolly admitted ‘that there is at present no means 148

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Figure 6.2 Badge bearing the iconic symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). of providing adequate protection for the people of this country against the consequences of an attack with nuclear weapons’. Next, in May, the British exploded a H-Bomb over Christmas Island in the Pacific. But perhaps the greatest spur to action came from Nye Bevan’s speech on 3 October to the Labour Party Conference in Brighton. Bevan, who had returned to the front bench as shadow foreign secretary, stunned his supporters on the left by rejecting unilateral disarmament, and doing so with his customary eloquence. Unilateral nuclear disarmament, he declared, is not statesmanship, only ‘an emotional spasm’. No foreign secretary, he insisted, in a phrase which resonated in British political memory, should be sent ‘naked into the international conference chamber’. Bevan’s apostasy certainly concentrated the minds of the disarmers; in the conference, however, the unilateralist motion was, courtesy of the trade union block vote, massively crushed. It was in this heightened atmosphere that on 2 November the New Statesman published J.B. Priestley’s short seminal article, ‘Britain and the nuclear bombs’. Warning against the danger of turning the country into vast ‘radio-active cemetery’, and of the costly geopolitical folly of an independent British deterrent, Priestley then made what would become CND’s central argument: ‘only a decisive “unilateral” move […] can 149

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achieve the moral force it needs to be effective […] our bargaining power is slight; the force of our example might be great’.44 Or, as Michael Foot put it, ‘Britain’s readiness to renounce the weapon […] could capture the imagination of millions of people in many lands – including those living behind the Iron Curtain and in the United States’.45 Finally, in his closing call to action, Priestley struck a distinctively fifties note: ‘the British of these times […] often seem to be waiting for something better than party squabbles and appeals to their narrowest self-interest, something great and noble in its intention that would seem to make them feel good again’ – waiting, that is, for precisely the sort of ‘brave, good cause’ that Jimmy Porter thought had had its day. Towards the end of November, Kingsley Martin hosted a dinner party at his home attended by, among others, Priestley, Lord Russell, and George F.  Kennan. Kennan, author of the doctrine of ‘containing’ communism, and sometime US ambassador to Moscow, had recently delivered the BBC Reith Lectures on ‘Russia, the atom and the West’, and registered his doubts about the efficacy of deterrence. This gathering laid the ground for CND. A second, more formal meeting followed on 15 January 1958, at No. 2 Amen Court, the home of Canon John Collins near St Paul’s Cathedral. The executive committee formed at this meeting included Collins as chairman, the scientist Nigel Calder as vice-chairman, Priestley, Martin, Foot and the journalist James Cameron. Russell was nominated (non-executive) president, and they were joined soon after by A.J.P. Taylor. ‘We were an odd collection,’ recalled Taylor, ‘appointed by nobody and convinced that we could change the world by our own unaided efforts; at any rate that we would have to try.’46 Odd, perhaps, but seasoned campaigners all. Back in 1946 Collins had, with Victor Gollancz (a CND ‘sponsor’), founded Christian Action, and along with Priestley and Martin had served on the executive committee of the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment. As editor of Tribune Foot had voiced opposition to the bomb since at least 1955. Taylor trod self-consciously in the footsteps of the Englishmen he ‘most revere[d]’, those radical dissidents from British foreign policy, who were the subject of his Ford Lectures two years before, now published as The Trouble Makers (1957).47 150

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The executive committee was, as Taylor notes, ‘appointed by nobody’. Nor did CND have a membership, constitution or structure, only an ‘Advisory Committee for Co-ordination and Action’ of like-minded, often purely local, groups and committees. The DAC not CND organized the first, emblematic, march to Aldermaston. The deliberate avoidance of structure represented contemporary reactions against bureaucratization and conventional party politics. Raymond Williams by this time had come to hold Communist Party ‘centralism’ in ‘contempt’.48 E.P. Thompson rebuked ‘older politicians who mistake the machinery of politics for the thing itself ’ and applauded ‘the young marchers to Aldermaston’ who ‘understood that “politics” have become too serious to be left to the routines of politicians’.49 Tory spokesmen, predictably, depicted CND in off-the-peg Cold War terms as communist-influenced ‘friends of Russia’; whereas in hindsight Hobsbawm described it as by far the biggest and most important mobilization of the postwar British left.50 If the Tory view is flat nonsense, Hobsbawm’s is too monochrome. For one thing the lack of structure ensured that CND was ‘the only campaign never infiltrated by communists’. The Daily Worker, it is true, gave CND events greater coverage than other papers, but since the Party could never demand Soviet disarmament, it maintained an ambivalent attitude towards such an – to the Marxist mind – ideologically underdeveloped, ‘single-issue’, movement.51 It is also the case that the great majority of CND supporters were left of centre. Five Labour MPs participated in the first Aldermaston march. Priestley, Martin and Taylor all belonged, in the broadest sense, to the non-party left; so did Canon Collins, but his Christian beliefs were as important to him (and to many others) as his political convictions in determining his opposition to nuclear weapons. The Aldermaston marchers filed into Reading town centre to the strains of a Salvation Army band.52 Moreover, pace Hobsbawm, CND ‘presented Marxists with the puzzling and somewhat disturbing spectacle of a radical movement with an absentee proletariat’. ‘The quiet suburbanites were on the march’, commented the Daily Mail. ‘A movement of eggheads for eggheads, with no industrial workers’, in Taylor’s verdict; all the same he still considered his high-profile role in CND ‘the best, by which I mean the worthiest, activity, I ever undertook’.53 151

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On 17 February CND held its first public meeting, at Central Hall, Westminster. Upwards of 5,000 people attended, many of them packed into overflow rooms equipped with loudspeakers. From the platform Foot and Taylor in particular, two of the most gifted public speakers of the era, inspired the audience with the verbal pyrotechnics and moral passion of their speeches. Afterwards some 100 or so protestors staged an impromptu demonstration in nearby Downing Street. The police, caught off guard, reacted aggressively, roughing up the crowd, including the ‘egghead’ Doris Lessing; Lord Kennet, a Labour peer (though not a unilateralist), was mauled by a police dog.54 CND organized 270 meetings in 1958; Taylor alone spoke ‘in the Albert Hall, Leeds City Hall, the Free Trade Hall Manchester (twice), Sheffield City Hall, the Usher Hall Edinburgh, Newcastle Town Hall, Birmingham City Hall’ and ‘plenty more’.55 The Aldermaston march, however, proved the signature event of the year. On 4 April, a cold, rainy, Good Friday, 4,000 marchers set off from Trafalgar Square on their four-day journey to the nuclear research facility in Berkshire. The weather did not improve  – this was a very British affair – and the numbers fluctuated, swelling to perhaps 10,000 on the final mile. ‘Get out and push!’ exclaimed Lindsay Anderson in Declaration (Lessing and Kenneth Tynan were also on the march); now the first generation ‘in the history of mankind to experience adolescence within a culture where the possibility of human annihilation has become an after-dinner platitude’ made itself heard, a song in their voice as they went on their way.56 Anderson himself made a documentary film of the turn-out, March to Aldermaston, on the proverbial shoe-string budget and with the help of freely supplied technical assistance.57 In the Easter long weekends over the coming years the route was reversed – Aldermaston to London – and the numbers steadily grew. But in the end, if it were to succeed, CND needed to somehow translate its brand of ‘anti-politics’ – the key to its ability to mobilize large numbers – into practical politics. ‘I know of no other way of obtaining a non-nuclear Britain’, wrote Martin in 1960, ‘except by converting the Labour Party.’58 Here was a tall order indeed. Duncan Sandys, after all, considered the loyal opposition ‘99.5 p.c. sound’ on defence policy.59 And yet after the first two Aldermaston marches perhaps the high tide of CND achievement came at the 1960 Labour Conference in 152

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Scarborough, which – courtesy, once more, of the trade union, especially Frank Cousins’ TGWU, block vote – adopted British unilateral disarmament as Party policy. This bitterly fractious conference gave rise to Gaitskell’s rousing ‘fight, fight and fight again’ speech, and the next year at Blackpool a majority of delegates duly returned to the ‘multilaterialist’ mainstream. CND meanwhile began to splinter – the fate of all broad-based single issue ‘coalitions’  – with the formation of the more militant ‘Committee of 100’, and grumbling over Canon Collins’ style of leadership. In a number of ways, however, CND may still be counted a success – in mobilizing popular support, in raising public awareness of a most vital issue, and in pushing the bomb to the forefront of political debate. Taylor long afterwards placed the movement’s eventual failure in historical perspective: we made one great mistake which ultimately doomed CND to futility. We thought that Great Britain was still a great power whose example would affect the rest of the world. Ironically we were the last imperialists. If Great Britain renounced nuclear weapons without waiting for international agreement, we should light such a candle as would never be put out. Alas this was not true. No one cared in the slightest whether Great Britain had the bomb or did not have the bomb. The rest of the world would not be impressed if we gave it up. In fact the only correct argument against the bomb, still valid, was that since it did not matter in the slightest whether we had it or not, it would be cheaper not to have it.60

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7

THE NEW LEFT ‘A ferment of change […] a gale […] a hurricane […] began with the drama of 1956’: thus in her autobiography Doris Lessing refers, not to the Suez crisis, but to tanks on the streets of Budapest and to the shattering impact that these had upon the British Communist Party.1 ‘For more than a year’, Hobsbawm recalls in his memoir, ‘British communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective break-down.’2 Up to a quarter of the party membership, including up to a third of the staff of the Daily Worker, either quit, or were expelled from the ranks, in protest at the ‘party line’ supporting the Soviet action. Intriguingly, historians, most prominently E.P. Thompson and John Saville, led the way. As this political and ideological rupture proved to be an intellectual watershed as well, the motives and reasons behind the resignations were constitutive to the new directions in history (and what came to be called ‘Cultural Studies’) over the coming years. History began to change ‘sometime after 1956’, argues Stedman Jones – an (uncharacteristically) imprecise observation which stands up to close scrutiny all the same. It is often assumed, and for good reasons, that breaking with ‘the Party’ must always be a wrenching experience, but Claud Cockburn, former editor of the Daily Worker, writing shortly after the traumas of 1956–7 about his own departure in 1947, usefully qualifies that assumption: with many examples before them, people are accustomed to expect something abrupt, sensational and Pauline in the way of a conversion – some explosion on the road to Damascus capable of explaining 154

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so drastic a situation. They do, certainly, quite often happen that way. I can only say that in my case nothing of the sort occurred […] it was a gradual process, involving countless factors, which were by no means all ‘political’ in the strict sense of the word.3

Even so, the gravitational force which the Party exerted on its card-carriers was undeniably powerful. This consisted in much more than the deep political convictions and personal loyalties of its members – other people have spent lifetimes in the Labour, Liberal and Conservative parties. Rather, communism offered the initiate the certainties of a complete, self-contained, ideological system  – a system which explained everything; the psychological and emotional assurance of unquestioning obedience to authority; and as, literally, a way of life, the sense of election, of consequential apartness from the ignorant and mundane routines of the everyday. Koestler’s sermon in The God that Failed, contaminated by the zeal of the (twice-over) convert though it is, is at its most persuasive describing the mentality of the Stalinist-era communist. ‘From the psychologist’s point of view, there is little difference between a revolutionary and a traditional faith’, he writes4 (Orwell, too, liked to compare the Communist Party to the Catholic Church). Equipped with the answer to every question, the true believer escapes ‘the tasteless, colourless world of those who don’t know’. Absolute commitment to the cause alone ‘makes life worth living’.5 Little wonder then that to the uninitiate breaking with the Party appeared abrupt, ‘Pauline’, and dramatic, especially with a Party which unfailingly took its ‘line’ from a Soviet regime which committed the purges of the 1930s, betrayed the Spanish Republic (as Orwell broadcast to the world in Homage to Catalonia (1938)), cynically abandoned ‘collective security’ by entering into the Nazi–Soviet Pact in 1939, sponsored the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, and sent tanks into East Berlin in 1953. ‘Hungary for us’, remembered Lessing, was ‘the culmination of these ugly events’, as a result of which the Party shed successive cohorts of disillusioned, principled, defectors along the way.6 Many a break with the Party, as Cockburn readily concedes, did ‘certainly, quite often happen that way’, but his own ‘gradual process’ – not least in his method  – of getting out, ‘involving [as it did] countless factors, which 155

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were by no means all “political” ’, exemplifies not only the complexities and diversity of other individual experience, but helps explain the thinking of the emergent New Left. Responses to the Hungarian crisis ranged from Hobsbawm’s, who signed the dissident protest in December but stayed in the Party until the early 1990s when, after the collapse of the Soviet ‘experiment’, he allowed his membership to lapse; to the literary critic, Arnold Kettle (d. 1986), who stayed in for the rest of his life; to another historian, Victor Kiernan, who held on until 1959. In 1958 E.P. Thompson declared: ‘I still prefer to call myself a dissident communist rather than a late convert to democratic socialism or any other hybrid.’7 Motives varied. Lessing sounded a personal and ‘cultural’ note. ‘I am an artist, and I’ve exhausted all the experience and emotions that are useful to me as an artist in the old way of being a communist’, she wrote to Thompson, and I shall wither and die and never write another word if I can’t get out of this straightjacket of what we’ve all been thinking and feeling for so long. But this is not a political attitude […] and I suspect you of being an artist […] you have been a pure and high-minded communist, and until recently wouldn’t accept the evil of it, and idealism is hurt and your picture of yourself is damaged. I want to write a lot of books. And the stale aroma of thirty years of dead political words makes me sick.8

Cockburn anticipated that particular brand of frustration. Marx famously remarked that philosophers have interpreted the world in different ways but the point is to change it. By 1946, numbed by the sensation of running on the political and ideological spot, feelings of ‘boredom and futility’ pushed him out of the Party. ‘Marxism has struck few sparks in the political and intellectual life of Britain since 1945’, concluded Saville.9 Cockburn also anticipated the class of ’56 in another way by declining to recant. He ‘was naturally anxious not to do harm to my old friends and associates at the Daily Worker by making any kind of spectacular exit. It would, I  thought, be unbearable to become the centre-piece of a press furore – in which I should inevitably be treated as a kind of Kravchenko 156

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[a Soviet defector who chose freedom]’; saved from a diplomatic illness by an actual stomach ulcer, he set sail, with his Anglo-Irish wife Patricia, for Ireland, certainly to be heard of again.10 Lessing wished to leave ‘without a fuss […] because journalists lay in wait for defectors’.11 Thompson confronted the issue head-on: The aftermath of resignation from the Communist Party is not the best time for writing articles. Silence would be more comfortable […] The Resigner now has a shabby, walking-on part in the contemporary cast. It is assumed that he must make certain stylized gestures – loss of faith, anguished self-analysis, disillusion in political action. The routines are well-known, although the final postures are various; the inhabitant of the political limbo, caught in a conflict between guilt and disgust; the strident anti-communist, taking revenge upon his own youth, making good as a literary mark or a Labour M.P.; the convert to the Holy Church. Although I have resigned from the Communist Party – I remain a Communist.12

Emotionally battered by the ‘hurricane’ of 1956, the defectors were at the same time liberated, both intellectually and politically, by their refusal of Communist Party ownership of Marxist theory and by the loosening Cold War gridlock. Of course British Cold War politics and society never experienced the deep freeze of McCarthy’s America – and commentators did habitually measure the British experience by American standards. When the film director Joseph Losey arrived in Britain in late 1952  – ‘still a Stalinist, I  suppose, of sorts’  – in order to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he had to find underpaid work under assumed names. Somehow, however, he managed to get through it with a little help from my friends. I mean mostly English people who were outraged by the political situation and who really fought. None of them were communists. They all wanted to believe that I was not a communist either, but, none the less, they did defend my right to stay in England because I had to report to Immigration every week, and I never got a permit for more than thirty days.13 157

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The outrage is as telling as Losey’s difficulties. Losey had in fact encountered what R.H.S. Crossman described as two different ‘political atmospheres’. In a brief essay entitled ‘Loyalty’, published state-side in 1956 in the Harvard quarterly, Confluence, Crossman contrasted America’s sometimes ‘hysterial’ intolerance of communism with the more ‘easy-going’ style of the British. Whereas, for example, and according to Irving Kristol, in the US it would be impossible to persuade average citizens ‘that there is no harm in having their children taught the three R’s by a communist’, in Britain ‘avowed communists are permitted to remain masters and even headmasters’. Crossman put the difference down to the more commonsensical and nuanced British evaluation of the communist threat both at home and abroad, and – crucially – to a profound commitment to civil liberties. ‘When we measure the possible risk to Britain arising from a communist party enjoying the freedom which it still enjoys against the actual harm brought about by strong counter-measures’, he reasoned, ‘we believe that the cure would be more dangerous than the disease.’14 The phlegmatic approach articulated by the co-editor of The God that Failed gathered pace after the crises of 1956. Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ speech to the Twentieth Party Congress condemning Stalin’s purges, and the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, had, to be sure, inflicted enormous political damage on communist credibility in Britain, but the ‘hysterical’ excesses of McCarthyism had discredited ‘vulgar’ anti-communism as well. Losey first put his own name to a film in 1957, the year in which Senator Joseph McCarthy, by then a spent political force, died.15 Marxists and even communists were  – ‘to the mixed astonishment and horror of visiting Americans’  – to be found on university staffs. ‘Neither Stalinism nor McCarthyism threatens the British intelligentsia today’, commented Norman Birnbaum in 1958.16 However, although the paranoias and polarities of the high Cold War were steadily dissipating, not least in the public imagination, they had not yet disappeared. Reportedly, MI5 agents and contacts were spying, presumably from force of habit, in ‘every university and college in the country’. ‘It’s going on all the time’, complained a Labour peer in the House of Lords.17 Left-wing intellectuals, meanwhile, were gladly moving on. 158

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CU LTU RAL AN D S O C I O LO G I CA L C R I T I Q U E :   RAYMOND W IL L IAM S AN D R I C HA R D HO G G A R T

Birnbaum, adumbrating the institutional, professional and disciplinary constraints in the modern university system – home to ‘the sober pedestrian rather than the brilliant runner’  – adds that ‘it may be significant that the contemporary British spirit owes much to the extra-mural lecturers (Hoggart, Thompson, Williams)’.18 Thompson’s greatest public visibility and best-known book would come a few years later. But by 1958 Hoggart and Williams had both published books – The Uses of Literacy and Culture and Society, respectively – which made an unusually large impact at the time, and with which their names were to be forever associated. One reviewer referred to ‘The Uses of Culture by Raymond Hoggart’, and indeed the two had much in common.19 Both were of working-class background, Williams, the son of a railway signalman, coming from the ‘border country’ of South Wales, Hoggart, the son of a house painter, from industrial Leeds; both belonged to the generation which grew up during the Great Depression, and fought in World War II; both worked as adult education tutors and taught English; Hoggart published his first book on Auden (1951), Williams his on Reading and Criticism (1950); both, to some considerable degree, came to the question of ‘culture’, broadly defined, by way of Leavis; neither, while positioned securely on the left, was a doctrinaire Marxist. In fact, despite its place in the New Left canon, The Uses of Literacy is not a Marxist text at all. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainment, to give its full title, is more difficult to classify than that. It is an unusual work, divided into two parts: the first, ‘An Older Order’, deals with changes in working-class culture ‘over the last thirty or forty years’; the second with the impact of certain modern mass communications media upon that ‘traditional’ way of life. Drawing largely on the author’s ‘personal experience’, the first part does not pretend to systematic historical or sociological analyses, and reviewers were quick to point out the limitations of this method. Hoggart’s working class, for example, speaks in distinctively Yorkshire accents. To what extent, they wondered, did he present primarily a regional study?20 It is a fair question and Hoggart acknowledged the 159

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pitfalls entailed in his approach; it was, however, an approach analogous to a certain style of travel writing and socially informed reportage represented by the likes of Cobbett’s Rural Rides, Priestley’s English Journey and Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier – and none the worse for that. Hoggart depicts, and in a sense celebrates, an as yet – he contends – not quite bygone urban industrial world, a world of close-knit extended families, staunch local identities and communal solidarities defining ‘Us’ against ‘Them’ – the bosses, public officials, the police, ‘the corporation’ and the school attendance man – who were not so much feared as mistrusted.21 And there is no doubting where his sympathies lay. ‘In writing’ he found himself ‘constantly having to resist a strong inner pressure to make the old much more admirable than the new […] presumably some kind of nostalgia was colouring the material in advance’.22 But while much has been lost, much has been gained. Material progress acts as a solvent on traditional patterns of life, to be sure – but when the cost–benefit balance sheet is drawn up, he concludes that ‘my grandmother and mother would have had less worrying lives had they brought up their families during the mid-twentieth century’.23 Intergenerational poverty and outside toilets have nothing to recommend them. Social and economic change  – new found affluence  – blurred the familiar contours of the ‘classic’ working class, or, in another formulation, it created the ‘semi-detached proletariat’.24 Such are the changes that The Uses of Literacy addresses: the argument is not that there was, in England one generation ago, an urban culture still very much ‘of the people’ and that now there is only a mass urban culture. It is rather that the appeals made by the mass publicists are for a great number of reasons made more insistently, effectively, and in a more comprehensive and centralized form today than they were earlier; that we are moving towards the creation of a mass culture; that the remnants of what was at least in parts an urban culture ‘of the people’ are being destroyed; and that the new mass culture is in some important ways less healthy than the often crude culture it is replacing.25

Hoggart recognized change when he saw it, but insisted upon continuity as well. ‘If we are to understand the present situation of the working 160

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classes’, he argued, ‘we must not pronounce it dead when it still has plenty of life.’26 He is an original and perceptive social critic, but looking back from the vantage point of deindustrialized, financial ‘services’-friendly, multi-ethnic, suburbanized Britain, he appears to have under-estimated the depth and pace of social and economic change with all of its consequences for the ‘working class’. As his journalist son, Simon, noted in 2013, during the 1980s Margaret Thatcher displayed ‘obsessive concern for “the mill girls of Bolton”, even though, thanks to her policies, there were no mill girls left in Bolton’.27 His engagement with popular culture, however, proved altogether more prescient. In part two Hoggart turns to considerations of the socially corrosive, levelling-down and cheapening effects upon working-class culture of mass publications and entertainments (though not including cinema and television). Paperback novels, weekly magazines, the demotic press pin-ups  – ‘the most striking visual feature of mid-twentieth-century mass-art’28  – and pop songs are examined under the microscope of Leavisite close reading and (not surprisingly), found wanting – ‘puff pastry literature, with nothing inside the pastry’ – and integrated into broader social and economic analysis. Sensationalism is driven by competitive commercial pressures; some 80,000 paperback titles are published annually, one in two adults reads the News of the World, Hollywood-packaged Americanization continues on its relentless way, and so on. The picture that emerges is bleak, but not entirely pessimistic, although again, in the harsh light of post-Thatcher Britain some of his examples of traditional working-class resilience in the face of debasing mass culture – working men’s clubs and brass bands (we are back in Hoggart’s native north)  – appear quaint and sentimental. He did, however, sound a warning about the dangers of the contemporary ‘crisis’ which caught the attention of the bright and eager young men and women of the New Left: ‘if the active minority’ of the Labour movement ‘allow themselves too exclusively to think of immediate political and economic objectives’, he predicted, then ‘the pass will be sold culturally behind their backs’.29 The Raymond in Mr ‘Raymond Hoggart’ agreed. Their composite character conflates a point of view and a sensibility. Williams believed that ‘in contemporary Britain, many of the questions which most radically affect the working class are quite clearly cultural questions’; and 161

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he himself experienced this in a visceral way, later recalling ‘the smart, busy, commercial society which I had come to as a stranger, so much so that for years I  had violent headaches when I  passed through London and saw underground advertisements and evening newspapers’. Hoggart complained of the paperbacks ‘which make ragged and gaudy the windows of the stationer, the news magazine shops and the station bookstalls’.30 The main difference between them was Williams’ longue[ish] durée framework. In addition, Williams, unlike Hoggart, engages Marxist theory directly. He knew whereof he spoke. A  member of the Communist Party for about 18  months, when a student in Cambridge in 1939–40, his appalled reaction to the Soviet repression of the East German uprising in 1953 extinguished any of the residual intellectual fellow traveller which may have been left in him.31 Two years later he worked full time in the Labour Party general election campaign. It is revealing how, in Culture and Society, he often refers to ‘the Marxists’ – including those who were his friends – as other people; and it is equally revealing that he chose to devote a chapter to ‘Marxism and Culture’. Marx himself, as Williams points out, ‘recognized difficulty and complexity’ in applying his theories to art and literature: not only is the tone of discussion of these matters normally undogmatic, but also he is quick to restrain, whether in literary theory or practice, what he evidently regarded as an over-enthusiastic, mechanical extension of his political, economic and historical conclusions to other kinds of fact.32

In other words the base-and-superstructure model is too crude. This is the theory that, ultimately, the economic base – or mode and relations of production – determines the shape of politics and religion, law, culture and ‘the ruling ideas’ of the epoch. Williams rejected all this out of hand. For example, alluding elsewhere to Soviet-style ‘socialist realism’ and ‘proletarian art’ he remarks that ‘art that can be defined in advance is unlikely to be worth having’.33 The ‘difficulty and complexity’, to say the least, of applying the base-and-superstructure template to culture, whether narrowly defined 162

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as the arts and learning, or in its widest anthropological sense – meaning a whole way of life – is that it grossly under-estimates the role of human agency in, and allows insufficient autonomy to, man-made custom, practice and imaginative achievement. Men, Marx reminds us, make their own history, though they do not choose the history into which they are born. Excepting Stalinist hacks and cultural commissars busily denouncing ‘Bourgeois formalism’, it would be a gross caricature which attributed such reductionist schema to actual Marxist criticism, particularly, as Williams saw, its English version. He singles out, for instance, Thompson on William Morris who stressed man’s economic and social development as the master-process, and tended to suggest that the arts were passively dependent upon social change [but] […] has not emphasized sufficiently the ideological role of art, its active agency in changing human beings and society as a whole, its agency in man’s class-divided history

Williams’ comments on this were as follows: [I]t is surely surprising to find a Marxist criticizing Morris for seeing ‘man’s economic and social development always as the master-process’. It has normally been assumed that this was precisely what Marx taught, and the position which Marxists wish to defend.34

More generally, he notices ‘in many Englishmen writing as Marxists […] a tradition basically proceeding from the Romantics, and coming down through Arnold and Morris […] supplemented by certain phrases from Marx, while continuing to operate in the older terms’.35 Both Williams and Hoggart themselves belonged to that tradition of English moral and literary criticism. Hoggart describes his book as an exercise in ‘the literary analysis of popular publications’ and an inquiry into ‘what might be called invitations to self-indulgence’.36 Williams endorses the ‘tradition’ (a word he uses repeatedly) by elaborating it, and both display an intellectual debt to Leavis, whom Williams claimed knew ‘more than any Marxist I  have ever met about the real relations between art and experience’. The title Culture and Society may be read as a nod to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy; but it is equally likely 163

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that it alludes to Leavis and Denys Thompson’s Culture and Environment. Williams, like the Leavisites, protests against the atomization of community and the commodification of culture – against the ‘deliberate exploitation of the cheap response which characterizes our civilization  – in the age of industrialization and the emergence of mass society’.37 Leavis ‘rightly acknowledges’ Arnold ‘as his starting point [and] what goes back to Arnold goes back to Coleridge’ and Burke ‘though there are significant changes on the way’.38 These and the other writers enlisted by Williams in his tradition censured the social disruptions caused by industrialization and the individualistic, Utilitarian spirit – what Shelley called ‘the unmitigated exercise of the calculating [as distinct from the imaginative] faculty’; Robert Owen, the ‘low, vulgar, ignorant, and inferior, mode of conducting the affairs of society’; and Carlyle, men ‘grown mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand’.39 But, like Hoggart, Williams refused the seductions of nostalgia:  ‘if there is one thing certain’, he observes ‘about the “organic community” ’ which industrialization has supposedly destroyed, ‘it is that it is always gone’.40 He also rejected Leavis’s view of a discriminating literary minority upon whom ‘depends our power of profiting by the finest experience of the past’. Rather, he believed that ‘cultural training’ and, presumably, adult education, ‘ought essentially […] be a training in democracy’.41

BRITIS H M ARXIST HI STO R I A N S A N D T HE N EW L EFT

Extracts from Culture and Society were first published by Universities and Left Review (U&LR) which, together with the New Reasoner (NR), worked through the post-1956 political and intellectual reconfigurations on the left. The NR was a dissident Communist periodical, launched and edited by E.P. Thompson and John Saville – a lecturer in economic history in the University of Hull. It succeeded the Reasoner, which Thompson began in response to Khrushchev’s Twentieth Party Congress speech, and which the British Communist Party soon suppressed. An advocate of ‘socialist humanism’ in the wake of the ‘shambles of intellectual disgrace and moral collapse’ of 1956,42 the NR sought to break out of the Cold War political and ideological impasse, although, ironically, its reiterated repudiations of 164

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Figure 7.1 The Partisan Coffee House (1958–62). Founded by the historian Raphael Samuel, it served as a Soho venue for New Left and CND activists, folksingers, intellectuals and bohemians. Its patrons included the young Rod Stewart. Stalinist dogmatism placed it firmly in a Cold War context. In contrast, the Marxist-leaning young intellectuals who gathered around U&LR did not carry any Party baggage and ‘tended to treat the conflicts of the Cold War as a past phase’.43 Edward Palmer Thompson supplied the animating spirit of the NR. Born in 1924, he grew up in Boar’s Hill near Oxford. His father, a Methodist minister, served as a Christian missionary and teacher in India, as military chaplain during World War I and as a – somewhat marginalized – lecturer in Sanskrit in the University of Oxford. The son later remembered Gandhi visiting the family home in the 1930s; and playing cricket in the backyard with Nehru. Edward acquired from his father – a disaffected liberal, ambivalent towards the British Empire – ‘the view that no government was to be trusted […] that all governments were, in general, mendacious and should be distrusted’.44 And, even though his father’s religious convictions were dissipated by his Indian experience, the Methodist background is surely significant here, and reminiscent of the exchange between the Quaker-taught ‘hereditary dissenter’, Taylor, and the fast nonconformist, sometime Methodist lay preacher, 165

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Butterfield, about their mutual suspicion of ‘all governments’.45 It is also notable that Thompson’s comrade in the Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG), and Taylor’s Oxford faculty colleague, Christopher Hill, a Marxist and an atheist, hailed, like Butterfield, from the Methodist chapels of Yorkshire. Edward’s older brother, Frank, made, if anything, an even deeper impression on him than his father. Communist activist, poet and soldier, in 1944 he was captured in Bulgaria operating behind enemy lines with anti-Fascist partisans and shot by firing squad. Frank epitomized what his younger brother called ‘the decade of heroes’:  the decade of the popular front, Spain, and ‘the people’s war’; the decade which remained in many ways his political touchstone. Thompson went up to Cambridge in 1941, joined the Communist Party in 1942, and, as a commissioned officer in the British Army, fought in Italy and France. Returning to Cambridge after the war to complete his degree, in 1946 he worked with the international youth brigade building railways in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. In 1948  – the cut-off date for known communists seeking academic jobs – he moved to Halifax as a lecturer, mainly in English, for the Leeds University extramural department and the Workers Education Association. Over the next eight years he remained active in the Party and, with his wife Dorothy, in its historians’ group. He published his first book, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, in 1955. It is a revealing choice of subject. Asked in 1975 which thinkers were his ‘chief theoretical forebears or inspirations’, he replied: ‘Vico, Marx, Blake, Morris – the last two showing how English I am.’46 Morris was the subject of his first book, Blake the subject of his last. Thompson wished to recover a specifically English radical, moral and literary tradition, and to refurbish it, as it were, by applying the insights of Marxist theory. At some 800 pages the length of the Morris book is also instructive. He commented on the revised edition (1977) that it had been purged of ‘Stalinist pieties’; he had also, by Stefan Collini’s account, ‘pruned the luxuriant growth of digressions and polemics that he had come to feel (and certainly been encouraged by readers and reviewers to feel) had encumbered the first edition and made it too long’.47 A poet and elegant prose-stylist, Thompson lacked, in Hobsbawm’s phrase, ‘an in-built sub-editor’.48 Considered by some of his peers an ‘artist’ and a ‘Romantic’, it took 1956, again in Hobsbawm’s 166

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judgement, to make him into primarily an historian, although Thompson later insisted that he ‘never “took a decision” to become one’.49 In fact, such were his passionate commitments, 1956 drew him ineluctably – at steep opportunity costs to his productivity as an historian – into the métier of political and theoretical polemic. The NR encouraged that strong polemical impulse and placed little constraint on the volume of its expression; his 38-page article on ‘Socialist Humanism’ is by far the longest in issue no. 1. At the time Raymond Williams found the NR’s quarrel with the doctrinal rigidities and political conformism of Stalinism sterile and backward-looking, and the admittedly ‘more lightweight’ U&LR’s explorations of ‘current changes in cultural experience’ more interesting and relevant than ‘just reliving the past’. ‘With the advantage of hindsight’, however, he concluded ‘that the pain of reworking that past was necessary’.50 In hindsight also, it may be added, Thompson’s reworkings, his thinking out loud, in the pages of the NR, helped to liberate him (and others) from the reductionist assumptions of the base-and-superstructure model. ‘I commenced to reason’, he once remarked, ‘in my thirty-third year […] in 1956’.51 Too many Marxists, complained John Saville in issue no. 1, apply principles as readymade solutions to problems rather than as a ‘guide’ to solving them. Worse, their tendency towards dogmatism is exacerbated by their becoming ‘enmeshed in Stalinism and infected with its dishonesties, its lies and its half-truths […] what Stalinism did above all was to substitute the smooth formulation for the gritty complexity of the real world’.52 Stalinism, observed Thompson, ‘is, in a true sense, an ideology; that is, a form of false consciousness, deriving from a partial, partisan, view of reality; and, at a certain stage, establishing a system of false or partially false concepts’. In short, ideology (in that sense), orthodoxy and dogmatism – ‘the imposition of a system of authorized pre-conceptions upon reality rather than the derivation of ideas from the study of reality’ – provide the means for not thinking – an inactivity usually detectable in the use of decayed rhetoric. The NR, on the other hand, ‘is Humanist because it places once again real men and women at the centre of socialist theory and aspiration, instead of the resounding abstractions – the Party […] the Two Camps, the Vanguard of the working class – so dear to Stalinism’.53 167

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The NR had an urgent political agenda:  recognizing that ‘a social theory that fails to provide essential clues to contemporary society will soon become a museum piece, and [that] this is the position in which much Marxism now finds itself ’,54 they sought through open debate, fresh reflection and frank dialogue, to stimulate a creative, relevant, intellectual renovation of a moribund Marxist theory. And the working-through of that project would have clear theoretical implications for ‘the materialist conception of history’. The seminal concept of the new critique is ‘agency’. Marx wrote that ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness’. Now Thompson argued over several issues of the NR that men do not only ‘reflect’ experience passively; they also think about that experience; and their thinking affects the way they act. The thinking is the creative part of man, which, even in class society, makes him partly an agent of history, just as he is partly a victim of his environment.

And he rebuked the denial of the creative agency of man […] as moral and intellectual beings in [and] of their own history; in other words, the denial that man can, by a voluntary act of social will, surmount in any significant way the limitations imposed by ‘circumstances’ or ‘historical necessity’.

Thompson urged: We must get rid, once and for all, of the assumption that because we can trace the emergence as a force of this or that idea to a certain social context, we have thereby somehow explained the idea away, and that it is no more than a translation of that social context into terms of thought. We must also deal with it in its own right.55

These are the theorizings of a political engagé to be sure, but they also anticipate the historian who introduced The Making of the English Working Class (1963) as a ‘study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.’ 168

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Finally, when Thompson appeals for the study of ideas ‘in their own right’, he asserts, in Marxist terms, the relative autonomy of ideas from the ‘material base’ of society; and, even if in his later work as an eighteenth-century historian he did acknowledge that he wrote partly against the Namier School, it is unlikely that, in this instance, he had in mind Namier’s dismissal of the influence of ideas in political history.56 It is suggestive, however, that he made his plea for a more serious consideration of ideas in 1958, only months after Butterfield argued in George III and the Historians that, pace Namier, political ideas do matter, and Butterfield’s student, J.G.A. Pocock, published The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, a book which in retrospect would come to be seen as a landmark text in the emergent ‘Cambridge School’ of the history of political thought. The following year Caroline Robbins published the also canonical The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman, a book which Namier refused to read. The U&LR differed from the NR in some important respects. Conceived at Oxford University, among the four editors two – the literary critic Gabriel Pearson, and the historian Raphael Samuel – were former communists; the others were Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher and some class of fellow in All Souls, and Stuart Hall, a Jamaican and a sociologist. All belonged to the postwar generation. As such they were more interested in the contemporary political malaise  – as they understood it  – than in what Thompson called the intellectual disgrace and moral collapse of 1956, editorializing that young people have defected from active political engagement, not because, as they sometimes say ‘there is nothing left to do’, but because the tradition of socialist thinking failed to focus in any creative way the gigantic problems which do, in fact, remain.57

Nevertheless the first issue carried a contribution from Hobsbawm and its very first essay is on ‘Russia in transition’; more significant than the subject, however, is the author, Isaac Deutscher, whom Thompson praised for his ‘flexible and undogmatic approach’. (Isaiah Berlin, getting off his customary fence onto his usual side of it pronounced Deutscher ‘a full-sized charlatan and not a word he says, it seems to me, is to be 169

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believed’.)58 But for the most part the wide and varied material published in the U&LR side-stepped such Cold War asperities, reflecting, rather, the diverse, broad church interests of its editors. The first issue also had contributions from Claude Bourdet, editor of the weekly France Observateur and representative of the nouvelle gauche from which the British New Left borrowed its name; and Lindsay Anderson on ‘Cinema and Commitment’; and over the course of its lifetime from the Spring of 1957 to the end of 1959 the U&LR continued this pluralistic open-ended approach.59 Certain preoccupations did emerge however, grounded in the problematic of contemporary popular culture. According to New Left analysis consumerism, welfare state affluence and mass communications were ‘disarticulating’ many traditional cultural attitudes and eroding older social identities; and culture, far from being a mere epiphenomenon of the material base, is a ‘constitutive dimension of society’ and a crucial arena of political contestation.60 Intellectuals like Williams and Hoggart were already thinking along these lines, and the implications of Cultural Studies, as they came to be called, would be developed and elaborated at length and with great theoretical sophistication over the coming decades, not least by U&LR editor Stuart Hall himself; but looking back he recalled the paucity of ‘indigenous material’ available at the time and the consequent influence of American scholars such as the economist J.K. Galbraith and the sociologist C.  Wright Mills.61 Meanwhile, the old Party hands over at the NR regarded the cultural ‘turn’ with some scepticism and Hall did regret the journal’s ‘lack of organic connections to non-metropolitan working-class life’. The two editorial boards and their cohorts steadily came closer together all the same.62 Despite different provenance and priorities the NR and U&LR cooperated from the start. Thompson wrote in the U&LR, and the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, for example  – who eventually joined the expanded U&LR editorial board – wrote for the NR. Each journal placed advertisements for the other, leading in 1958 to the offer of joint subscriptions, and cooperation between the two publications gradually extended into mutually sponsored political events  – ‘a growing programme of conferences, lectures, and educational projects’.63 The development of a new non-party, anti-bureaucratic political style facilitated 170

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collaboration. The NR was not ‘responsible to any political organization’ and, in its own editorial view, gave political expression to ‘a mood which is very widely diffused, both within the traditional Labour movement and outside it’.64 One veteran remembered the New Left as more of a ‘milieu’ than a ‘movement’.65 Like CND it had no formal membership, no ‘party cards’, no elected leadership, no written constitution. One U&LR editor, Charles Taylor, chaired the Oxford CND and may well have bumped into Raymond Williams or Doris Lessing (of the NR) on the march to Aldermaston, which the London New Left Club helped organize. A spirit of anti-dogmatism reigned. The meetings hosted by Lessing in her London flat were, in her recollection, ‘full of the enjoyment of political battle’. ‘The “bohemia” of the comrades (mostly now ex-communists) was infinitely hospitable [and] undemanding, anticipating the youth culture of the sixties.’66 The ‘mood’ and ‘milieu’ of the New Left ran counter to refighting the battles of the past, and on the eve of the merger of NR and U&LR into the New Left Review at the end of the decade, Thompson observed that since its launch in 1957 the NR had altered some of its views and ‘we [now] tend to see “Marxism” less as a self-sufficient system, more as a major creative influence within a wider socialist tradition’.67 The class of ’56 had come a long way in three short years, and yet in retrospect it can be argued that the CPHG served as ‘a kind of incubator for the development of British cultural Marxist historiography’.68 How and why Stalinist vintage British communist historians managed to incubate (1946–56) freer, more intellectually honest, historical practices is an intriguing question, and part of the explanation is probably wrapped up in the answer to a further question: why, in 1956, did the far larger, more politically important, French and Italian Communist parties not experience the same crisis and trauma as their British counterpart? Different national ‘cultures’, perhaps, as Williams might have argued, or ‘the peculiarities of the English’ as Thompson might have reformulated it. In terms of membership and popular support the British Communist Party never came remotely close to achieving the political clout of the French or the Italian or (in the 1920s and early 1930s) the German or (in the mid-1930s) the Spanish Communist parties. Paradoxically, one reason for this case of arrested development was the robustness of English 171

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radical traditions and the native rootedness of the British Labour movement.69 Marxist ideology, even in Stalinist-size doses, did not inoculate English Marxist intellectuals from the history, culture and society of their own time and place. For example, it is often said that the Labour Party owes more to the chapel than to Capital – that is to say, that historically its deepest roots are in the fertile soil of protestant nonconformity. The relationships between nonconformity, or dissent, and English radical politics more generally, are profound, dynamic and in dispute; it is unlikely then that the dissenting backgrounds of a number of notable English Marxist historians is coincidental. Hill and Thompson were raised in Methodist households; Rodney Hilton referred to the ‘irreligious, cultural tradition of Non-conformism’ in which he grew up; Victor Kiernan’s parents were Congregationalist.70 Thompson rejected outright the idea of any causal connection between that element of his early life and his historical work (although it is easy to imagine the proverbial light bulb popping on in the mind of some vulgar Freudian happening upon his caustic indictment of Methodism  – ‘the chiliasm of despair’, the ‘psychic exploitation’ of working people – in The Making of the English Working Class). Christopher Hill’s career-long engagement with the Puritan sects of seventeenth-century England can be more plausibly traced to his upbringing. Of course none of these historians could have cared less about the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Established Church; the point, however, is not that their historical outlooks were shaped by residual nonconformist views, but that, like A.J.P. Taylor, they inherited social and political sensibilities which did. Thompson’s Marxist vision always drew on, and eventually fused with, the traditions of English radicalism, the moral critique of industrialism and the labour, socialist and ‘people’s’ history represented by the likes of J.L. and Barbara Hammond, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, R.H. Tawney and G.D.H. Cole. He admired the ‘Free Born Englishman’s’ stout defence of his liberties against the intrusions of arbitrary power, and at the same time recognized that while his rights were, by later standards, limited, so too was the ability of the authorities to infringe them limited by the rule of law, the jury system, the right to petition parliament and so on. And in his essay on the theory of ‘The Norman Yoke’ Hill maps out similar ‘free-born’ political terrain.71 William Cobbett is a figure who 172

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exemplified for Thompson both the political struggles of the common people and the moral protest against the social despoliations of industrial capitalism, just as for Taylor he represented the epitome of English traditions of moral protest against British foreign policy and opposition to ‘THE THING’ – rebranded in the 1950s as The Establishment. Certainly Thompson sounds more Cobbettite than Marxist–Leninist when he argues that economic relationships are at the same time moral relationships; relations of production are at the same time relations between people, of oppression or of co-operation: and there is a moral logic as well as an economic logic, which derives from these relationships. The history of class struggle is at the same time the history of human morality.72

English up to the edge of Orwell-style sentimentalism, he once concluded a brief tribute to the West Indian historian and political activist, C.L.R. James, with the remark, ‘I’m afraid that American theorists will not understand this, but the clue to everything lies in his proper appreciation of the game of cricket.’73 Thompson grew up in Oxfordshire playing cricket. Eric Hobsbawm, born in Alexandria and schooled in Vienna and Berlin was, according to one obituarist, by ‘background and orientation […] quintessentially cosmopolitan, but his Englishness was equally pronounced, if idiosyncratic’.74 By his own account he was ‘a sufficiently British type of historian to wish to concentrate on brass tacks, namely, what happened and why’. And it does seem odd – at any rate to an outsider – that in 1958 a famously unrepentant communist could refer in a review essay to ‘our monarchs’ and footnote Duff Cooper as ‘Lord Norwich’.75 But then one of ‘the peculiarities of the English’ is that the keepers of the revolutionary side of their past, while not blind to the republican ideal of ‘The Good Old Cause’, or Thomas Paine, usually recorded only peripheral sightings of it in their masterly explorations of thwarted social (or ‘democratic’) revolution, class formation and class struggle. The master-category of class also crowded out proper consideration of nationalism, although, unlike ‘republicanism’, it does appear in Williams’ Keywords. Dorothy Thompson acknowledged the tunnel vision in retrospect: 173

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I think both as academics and in our own lives most radicals and communists and socialists of my generation thought that the basic conflicts were class conflicts between the exploited and the exploiters, or between the conquered, the victims of imperialism, and the conquerors. We saw these as the major conflicts. Nationalist and other ethnic conflicts were seen as epiphenomenal, encouraged by the exploiters in order to divide the workforce. I think we probably were very wrong on this, and in our analysis of what in fact impels human action, particularly the kind of absolutely destructive and self-sacrificing activity of the volunteer soldier – as Tolstoy said, war demands not only the ability to die for your country but to kill for it. And what people will kill for actually turns out not to be class issues, or gender issues, but very often these very difficult racial, national, ethnic, religious divisions which seemed to people of our generation very superficial, quite unimportant.76

A refugee from Nazi Germany, Hobsbawm’s hostility towards nationalism per se is, to put it mildly, understandable. But if national traditions are ‘invented’ or ‘manufactured’ why is it that class consciousness is ‘made’ by its own makers? His antipathy is as English exceptionalist as it is personal, Marxist and anti-Fascist. ‘See Britain’ is the index entry for ‘England’ in his Nations and Nationalism, where under the sub-category ‘English nationalism’ – ‘a term which itself sounds odd to many ears’ – the reader is directed to a few references to the British problem.77 This inattention is based, presumably, on the Orwellian assumption that nationalism is a regrettable excess which happens abroad. By definition theorists, the Marxist historians were sufficiently ‘English’ to handle intellectual abstraction with care, and too intellectually scrupulous to – knowingly – squeeze recalcitrant ‘facts’ into readymade historical ‘structures’. Thus, in 1948, Hill could write that the Marxist ‘does not deny the influence of ideas on history because he postulates an ultimate economic origin for the ideas’ and commends Engels’ view that the ‘economic structure of society [is] the ultimate – not the only – influence on historical outcomes’.78 They were also professional historians bound, like their professional colleagues, by the rules of documentary evidence. But this produced a certain tension. As political activists they sought to reach an educated audience beyond the ivory tower and, as such, had little patience with the recondite squabbles of what Butterfield 174

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termed ‘technical history’ (for which in practice he showed little taste himself). Thompson later recalled his ‘rather irreverent attitudes to the academic proprieties’, but conceded that he had to sharpen my own scholarly equipment. When you suddenly realize that you are being watched by this largely conservative profession you have to be very sure that your statements are as accurate, as precise, and as well documented as possible.79

Instinctive ‘popular fronters’  – as the editorial policy of Past and Present: A Journal of Scientific History (P&P) confirms – the CPHG believed that Marxist history was not an isolated truth to be defined by how different it was from everything else, but the spearhead of a broad progressive history that we saw as being represented by all manner of radical and labour traditions in British historiography. We saw ourselves not as trying, say, to distinguish ourselves from Tawney, but to push forward that tradition, to make it more explicit, to see Marxism as what these people ought to have been working toward.80

‘Spearhead’: for all their aversion to dogmatism, and their accomplished prose styles, at CPHG meetings they ‘debated the Marxist interpretation of historical problems and did their best, in the military jargon then favoured in Bolshevik circles, to “wage the battle of ideas” on the “front” most suitable to historians’.81 They were, after all, fighting a Cold ‘War’. Even Thompson, scourge of ‘Vanguardist’ rhetoric, originally conceived of the NR as ‘a last stand amid a general rout’ and referred to the ‘forces’ of the ‘Established School of History […] now garrisoned in a number of universities’.82 Nor in the early twenty-first century has this taste for military metaphors entirely evaporated. Like some Japanese soldier in the 1970s fighting on in the jungles of South East Asia, Anne Applebaum  – in a review entitled (with delicious unintended irony) ‘Yesterday’s man?’ of a biography of Arthur Koestler – states that ‘along with Orwell’s Animal Farm and Victor Kravchenko’s I Chose Freedom, Darkness at Noon was one of the books that helped turn the tide on the intellectual front line, and ensured that the West prevailed’.83 Since there was, apparently, a ‘tide’ on ‘the front line’, Koestler, presumably, helped to secure an intellectual beach-head. 175

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Rodney Hilton caught the Janus-like character of the CPHG in a review of Hill’s collected essays, Puritanism and Revolution: We know only too well that under certain conditions, when some Marxists gather (or are gathered) together, a good many meaningless dogmatisms can be hurled about. This is always likely to happen when Marxists meet simply to discuss Marxism. When they meet to discuss real historical problems in the lively, inquisitive, synthesizing spirit of Marx himself, the results can be fruitful in a way that academic fact collection in the absence of general ideas can never be. So it is worthwhile putting on record that, in Britain at any rate, whatever may have been the other short-comings of the leadership of the Communist Party, its laissez-faire policy towards the Marxist intellectuals had some excellent results (including the departure of many of them from party membership in 1956 and 1957). Hill’s work is, then, an outstanding consequence of the free and undogmatic discussion by Marxists of English history.84

Intellectual honesty, a desire to find out, in a spirit of open debate, ‘what happened and why’, primed the historians for the role which they would play in the Party crisis of 1956. The English Historical Review embargoed twentieth-century history because historians were thought too close to events to trust in their disinterestedness and soi-disant ‘objectivity’; members of the CPHG elected, in an untypical act of self-censorship, to avoid the recent past because historical interpretations of events in which the Party had a stake would likely come into conflict with the Party line. After Khrushchev’s revelations that position became untenable. Why, asked Hobsbawm ‘did the historians – not the writers or scientists – take the lead’ in challenging the Party leadership? Because, he suggests, ‘the question about Stalin “the issue of what had been done under Stalin”, and why it had been concealed, was literally a question about history’.85 Over three issues the Reasoner (the publication of which breached Party discipline) openly criticized the leadership, culminating in Hilton calling in its pages for a Soviet withdrawal from Hungary at the precise moment when the Party had endorsed the Soviet action. Thompson was suspended. Hobsbawm signed a letter of protest about Hungary, which the Daily Worker refused to print, and which the dissidents then sent to the Tribune and New Statesman, which did publish it. Hill served as 176

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the spokesman for the minority report submitted to the commission on inter-party democracy. The ‘collective breakdown’ began.86 Breaking with the Party proved a painful experience for men and women who had stood their ground with it through the worst of Cold War times, and it is no surprise that they continued for a time to refight the battles of 1956. But, as the NR, in which the historians remained the dominant voice, worked through its critique of dogmatism and developed its theories of ‘socialist humanism’, it moved ever closer to the positions of the U&LR. These processes were nudged forward, moreover, by the Cold War thaw. In 1952 P&P, never a party organ, had been ostracized by the Institute of Historical Research; in 1958, true to its ‘popular front’ ethos, it expanded the editorial board to include Norman Birnbaum (a sort of ‘fellow-traveller’ anyway) and (more significantly in terms of the ideological semiotics) Lawrence Stone and J.H. Elliott. The new recruits joined up on the condition that the subtitle ‘a Journal of Scientific History’ be dropped, because it evoked the pseudo-scientific pretensions of Marxism rather than J.B. Bury’s ‘nothing more, nothing less’ empiricist delusions. P&P became ‘a Journal of Historical Studies’:  ‘a cheap price to pay’, in Hobsbawm’s mature reflection.87 Soon after, Hilton attributed the under-appreciation of Hill’s, and his other colleagues’, work, to senior common room ‘port and prejudice’, but detected hopeful signs of an end to a barren age of misunderstanding when the politics of the Cold War imposed a veto on the friendly exchange of ideas between different persuasions and held back from circulation such important contributions to knowledge as those made by Christopher Hill.88

‘A barren age’, ‘a parched decade’: in 1953 J.B. Priestley started a column in the New Statesman under the heading ‘Thoughts from the Wilderness’; in 1958–9, in the NR, Alasdair MacIntyre published his ‘Notes from a Moral Wilderness’; 1959 witnessed also the third consecutive Conservative general election victory in eight years; in so many ways to left-leaning intellectuals the Fifties presented a bleak prospect, but, late in the decade the political and intellectual climate began to change. The moral enthusiasm of CND and the sheer intellectual energy of the New Left counteracted the ‘mood of anti-political nausea’.89 Historical studies too were about to change. 177

POSTSCRIPT Sir Lewis Namier died in 1960. In some ways it must have been a mercy, for it is certain that the Edwardian gentleman who disapproved of television, the popular press and rude behaviour would have abhorred the ‘permissive society’. In 1961 he remained, in Butterfield’s opinion, ‘a giant’ among historians; ten years later, however, the great man’s stature within the guild had declined so steeply that one of the faithful felt compelled to open an essay by reaffirming an eternal verity:  ‘I believe that, however fashions change, the work of Sir Lewis Namier will remain crucial to an understanding of eighteenth-century politics’.1 The defensive tone is almost audible, the contrast to the fulsome, reverential, praise dished out by the typical 1950s reviewer, arresting. Fashions, it appears, fashions in politics, culture and society, as well as in historical studies, had indeed changed. If by 1970 the Namier way still remained ‘crucial to an understanding of eighteenth-century politics’  – a reasonable and defensible proposition – it was however, to borrow from Trevelyan’s review of The Structure of Politics, merely one way among others. The Namierite monopoly on the history of the period now belonged to the past. And in view of the sweeping disdain for all of the obsolete woolly-headed scholarship which preceded their breakthrough into the kingdom of fact, the detractors and critics may have been justified in experiencing a little Schadenfreude upon witnessing the ironic and – let us face it (to use a proscribed word) – inevitable fall of the House of Namier. How did this happen? First, the Namier interpretation was subject like all other interpretations to the natural cycles of scholarly criticism and revision. Namier 178

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himself stated that ‘the foremost task of honest history is to discredit and drive out its futile and dishonest varieties’, and indeed The Structure of Politics stands as one of the great revisionist texts of twentieth-century – not just British – historiography: it presents a new interpretation of the past which contradicted traditional Whig versions, and produced new archival evidence to demonstrate that position.2 Butterfield undermined Whig history at a theoretical level, but did not supply any coherent alternative. Butterfield’s influence can be detected to some extent in the ‘history of political thought’ and ‘high politics’ schools of history, but he did not found any school of his own. The Namier method never entirely supplanted Whig teleologies. Commenting on a draft of Winston Churchill’s Marlborough, which he thought ‘a great work of art’, he observed: my first criticism concerns your preoccupation with Macaulay. I have heard it said in Whig circles that you are forcing an open door in tilting against him. With that view I do not agree […] the Whig mind is not an open door; it is a rubber ball which speedily regains its previous shape.3

As Michael Bentley has shown, what he calls the ‘modernist persuasion’ in historical studies – and he identifies Namier as a ‘hyper-modernist’ – rejected Whig anachronism, but Whig assumptions persisted nonetheless. Similarly the pseudo-scientific, empiricist, value-free and objectivist assumptions of modernism survived into the postmodern world of Hayden White, ‘narrative tropes’ and self-aware, if not uncontrolled, subjectivity.4 It has been ever thus. Historical schools come and go and overlap. Fashions, and the problem-solving questions asked of the past, change. What is so striking about the Namierites in their heyday is their hubris. Whig historians in their heyday assumed the truth of their master-narrative about the ascent of English liberty, whereas the Namierites asserted the incontrovertibility of their structural-analytic anti-narrative:  there was no other valid way. And in terms of their self-assurance, and the low intellectual esteem in which they regarded their predecessors, the Namierites had plenty of company in adjoining 179

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disciplines, notably economics and philosophy. ‘The mastery of the economy had been achieved.’5 One linguistic philosopher admitted to his ‘deliberate abusiveness’ towards ‘certain older theories’. But at least ‘some traditional philosophy’, noted Ernest Gellner, ‘is treated with respect as honorary linguistic philosophy, misunderstood by its authors and before its time; rather as some Christians have been concerned to include some of the more edifying pre-Christian philosophers amongst the saved’.6 After the great historian has done his work, wrote Namier, ‘others should not be able to practice within its sphere in the terms of the preceding era.’7 Overlapping or coexistence were inadmissible! Yet it is in the nature of historical discourse that as soon as master-concepts, such as Geoffrey Elton’s ‘Tudor Revolution in Government’, Christopher Hill’s ‘Puritan Revolution’ or Namier’s ‘Structure of Politics’ become orthodoxies they will be challenged. In 1957 Butterfield challenged Namier at the conceptual level, and although in the words of a friendly reviewer he ‘inflicted only light damage’, and did not himself think that he had delivered a decisive blow, he did believe that he had ‘forked out’ criticisms from others who had not before put them in print, and which cumulatively challenged the Namier supremacy.8 John Brooke agreed:  ‘the Namier revolution had been met by the Butterfield reaction, and Namier’s reputation for infallibility had been destroyed. He had become fair game at which young historians could practice their aim.’9 Taylor’s and Butterfield’s begrudging reviews of the first published volume of The History of Parliament now consigned the great man himself to ‘the preceding era’. Plumb around the same time reflected that ‘it is a sad comment on the state of historical writing in England that [Namier’s] reputation should have been so high’.10 But while important, there were forces other than scholarly debate working against the Namier School’s once secure ascendancy. Namierism prospered in the conservative, anti-ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, technocratic and consensual political climate of the 1950s. A.J.P. Taylor’s career as historian, journalist and broadcaster flourished in the brash, unbuttoned, sixties. Although he did not change his way of doing history, his most controversial book, The Origins of the Second World War, was published in 1961; and one of his best and 180

Postscript

most popular – English History 1914–1945 – in 1965. His non-academic freelance earnings rose steadily. The bespectacled, bow-tied, Oxford don (who turned 60 in 1966) cuts an unlikely figure as counter-cultural hipster, but his irreverent, man-in-the-street manner did suit the temper of the times. The Namier School’s fastidious buttoned-up style did not. Taylor’s bank balance also benefited from what Stefan Collini dubs ‘the penguinification of British reading’. Richard Hoggart considered the ‘whole Penguin achievement’ as nothing less than ‘one of the more democratic successes of our recent social history’; while J.C.D. Clark speculates that ‘the influence of Penguin books’ in giving wide currency to historians such as Thompson, Hobsbawm, Hill, Stone and Plumb ‘must have been immense’.11 Geoff Eley recalls the impact which both Taylor and Penguins had on him as a schoolboy and undergraduate during the Sixties. Taylor served as an antidote to the ‘variations on the pompous and sentimentalized nationalist history delivered by conservative patriots during the first two postwar decades in Britian’. He first heard of The Making of the English Working Class in 1968 when it arrived in the Paperback Shop, across the street from his Oxford College, ‘which had just received its new Penguin titles (a monthly moment of excitement in those days)’.12 The year 1963 is remembered mainly for the Profumo affair and The Beatles’ first LP. Many historians remembered it also for the publication (as a Gollancz hardback) of The Making of the English Working Class. ‘An erupting historical volcano’, in Hobsbawm’s words. ‘Less a book’, thought Gwyn Williams, ‘than one continuous challenge.’13 But (to paraphrase Mandy Rice-Davies of Profumo affair fame), as fellow Marxist historians they would say that, wouldn’t they? And the book most certainly did not lack critics as Thompson’s reply to them in the postscript to the 1968 Pelican paperback edition shows. However, the fact that he was, according to the Humanities and Social Science Citation Index, the historian most cited in the 1960s and 1970s, tells its own story.14 The reception of The Making of the English Working Class can be read both as a culmination of the labours of the CPHG and the theorizing of the New Left, and as a foundational text of the new, generally left-inclined, social history of the period. Hill’s Puritanism and Revolution appeared in 1958; Rudé’s The Crowd in the French Revolution and Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels in 181

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1959. Between them, in the ten years after 1963, these three historians published 19 new titles. With its focus on political ideas and the subaltern, The Making of the English Working Class depicts a country entirely foreign to Namierland where ‘ordinary men’ sat in that ‘marvelous microcosmos’ of British society at Westminster. The new social history of the 1960s and 1970s would – inevitably – come under challenge too: on one side, from the revisionism of the 1970s and 1980s, and on another from the slightly later, more ideologically cognate, ‘linguistic turn’.15 Thus the historiographical and ideological certainties of the 1960s, like the more narrow and entrenched ‘End of Ideology’ certainties of the 1950s before them, gave ground under the pressures of conceptual innovation and social, political and cultural change. The ‘victory lap’ of the Congress for Cultural Freedom delegates – including a number of British Labour Party revisionists – in Milan in 1955 proved premature. Ideology returned; and history continued, as Pieter Geyl once put it, as argument without end.

182

NO T E S

INTRODUCTION 1 2

3 4

5 6 7

J. Smyth, The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century (Houndmills, 1992). E.H. Carr, ‘Lewis Namier’ in E.H. Carr, From Napoleon to Stalin and Other Essays (Houndmills, 2003), p. 188; L.B. Namier, ‘The biography of ordinary men’, The Nation and Athenaeum (14 July 1928), reprinted in Namier, Skyscrapers and Other Essays (London, 1931; New York, 1968). Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990), p. 270. John Raymond, New Statesman (19 October 1957), reprinted in Raymond, The Doge of Dover, and Other Essays (London, 1960), pp. 62–6; Michael Bentley is perhaps playing off this metaphor  – Raymond refers to the mining of ‘raw namierite’  – when he writes that with the creation of the History of Parliament Trust in 1951  ‘Namierism would now arrive ready-mixed by the lorry-load’:  M.  Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005), p.  139. Robin Dudley Edwards of University College, Dublin, used the term ‘Namier Inc.’ in notes and in correspondence with Herbert Butterfield:  e.g., ‘Notes “Geo III and the historians” ’ (January 1958), Dudley Edwards Papers, UCD LA 22/1275. E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth, 1961, 1964 edn), p. 44. Geoffrey Elton, The Practice of History (Sydney, 1967; London, 1984). Michael Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God (Cambridge, 2011), p. 168.

183

Notes to Pages 3–8

8

J.H. Hexter, ‘The historian and his society: A sociological inquiry – perhaps’ in Hexter, Doing History (London, 1971), pp. 79–80, 101–2. For an equally robust refutation of Hexter’s refutation see John C.  Cairns, ‘Sir Lewis Namier and the history of Europe’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, no. 1 (1974), pp. 3–35. Hegley Harte, Obituary:  ‘Professor Ian R.  Christie’, Independent (5 December 1998).

9

CH APT ER  1:   C U LT U R E A N D S O C I E TY I N B RI TAI N 1

2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9

10

11

Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain From Suez to The Beatles (London, 2006 edn), p. xxiv. ‘Annus Mirabilis’, in Philip Larkin, High Windows (London, 1967). E.P. Thompson, ‘The New Left’, NR, no. 9 (1959), p. 3. P. Anderson, ‘The Left in the fifties’, New Left Review, no. 29 (1965), p. 4. J.B. Priestley, Thoughts in the Wilderness (New York, 1957), pp. 1–3. Norman MacKenzie, ‘After the stalemate state’ in MacKenzie, ed., Conviction (Oxford, 1958), p. 17. Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990 (Harmondsworth, 1996), p. 254. Berlin to Alice James, 6 June 1953:  Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes with the assistance of Serena Moore (London, 2009), pp. 372–8 (at p. 376). Spectator (29 May 1953), p. 689. For Hillary’s ‘coronation gift’ see Gordon T.  Stewart, ‘Tenzing’s two wrist-watches:  The conquest of Everest and late imperial culture in Britain 1921–1953’, Past and Present, no.  149 (November 1995), pp. 171, 186. Kingsley Martin, ‘The royal carnival’, New Statesman and Nation (30 May 1953), p. 632. Edward Shils and Michael Young, ‘The meaning of the coronation’, Sociological Review, vol. 1, no. 3 (1953), pp. 67, 71; Berlin to Alice James, 6 June 1953: Berlin, Enlightening, pp. 372–8 (at p. 376); Spectator (29 May 1953), p. 689. In fairness to Shils, one Mass Observation report noted that the coronation was perceived by television viewers as ‘not only a ceremony but a sacrament’. Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 5 (Oxford, New York, 1995 edn), p. 420, note 2. British Medical Journal, vol. 1, no. 4821 (1953), p. 1207. 184

Notes to Pages 8–12

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31 32

Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and his History (London, 1944, 1945 edn), p. 110–11. Butterfield to the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, marked ‘confidential’, 11 April 1957, CUL BP 76/2. J.H. Plumb, The Making of an Historian, vol. 1 (Athens, GA, 1988), p. 13. ‘Monarchy and the Party System’ in L.B. Namier, Personalities and Powers (London, 1955), p.13. J.H. Plumb, ‘Sir Lewis Namier’, New York Review of Books, vol. 3, no. 8 (3 December 1964). Plumb, The Making of an Historian, p. 99. Jane Ridley’s review of William Shawcross, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, TLS (22 January 2010), p. 10. John Brooke, King George III (London, 1972). ‘The Monarch stands at the apex of this unpublicized part of the state machine’ in Kingsley Martin, The Crown and the Establishment (London, 1962), p. 85. Berlin to Morton White, 22 March 1954: Berlin, Enlightening, pp. 436–8 (at p. 437). Michael Ignatieff, A Life: Isaiah Berlin (New York, 1999), p. 222. Berlin to Morton White, 19 July 1957: Berlin, Enlightening, p. 589. Raymond Williams, Keywords (London, 1976, 1983 edn), p. 15. John Osborne, ‘They call it cricket’ in Tom Maschler, ed., Declaration (London, 1957; New York, 1958), p. 60. Interview of E.J. Hobsbawm in MARHO, The Radical Historians Organization, Visions of History (New York, c. 1983), p. 33; Christopher Hill, R.H. Hilton and E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Past and Present: origins and early years’, Past and Present, no. 100 (1983), p. 8. Sidney Hook, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York, 1987), p. 447. Shils, ‘The end of ideology?’, Encounter (November 1955), pp. 52–8. Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990), pp. 442, 444. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) attributes the first use of the term ‘Cold War’ to Orwell in the Tribune, 19 October 1945; Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, 28 July 1950: Richard Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (London, 2007), p. 47. George Orwell, The English People (London, 1947), p. 12. E.J. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002; New York, 2005), p. 182. 185

Notes to Pages 12–16

33

34 35

36 37

38 39

40

41 42 43

44

‘Dons often whisper in private that Marxists make devious colleagues: appoint one to a department and in ten years they will have taken it over. Liberals pride themselves on their dispassionate observance of merit, but they are often determined to keep a cuckoo out of the nest however fine his feathers. Hobsbawm had been elected to a fellowship at King’s after the war but had no chance of a lectureship at Cambridge so long as that refugee from the Bolsheviks, Munia Postan, had influence. Nor were matters different at London. After seven major publications […] he still had to wait for a chair until the colleague best placed to block his promotion retired. This professor maintained that there were at least two others in the department superior to Hobsbawm – though research has failed to identify them.’ (Annan, Our Age, note, p. 267.) Natalie Zemon Davis in MARHO, Visions of History, p. 107. Christopher Hitchens, Orwell’s Victory (London, 2002),  Chapter  7, ‘The list’, pp.  111–21; Timothy Garton Ash, ‘Orwell’s list’, New  York Review of Books (25 September 2003); Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper:  The Biography (London, 2010, 2011 edn), p. 266. Kingsley Amis, Socialism and the Intellectuals, Fabian Tract, 304 (London, 1957), p. 8. George Orwell, ‘Second thoughts on James Burnham’ in Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 17: Smothered Under Journalism, 1946 (London, 1998), p. 269. Orwell, ‘Second thoughts’, pp. 270–2. Les K. Adler and Thomas G. Paterson, ‘Red fascism: The merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American image of totalitarianism, 1930s–1950s’, The American Historical Review, vol. 75, no.  4 (1970), pp. 1046–64. The locus classicus of Orwell’s frequent ruminations on Englishness is ‘The lion and the unicorn’ in Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 12: A Patriot After All, 1940–1941 (London, 2000). Orwell, The English People, p. 12. Annan, Our Age, p. 20. See Jonathan Schneer, ‘Hopes deferred or shattered:  The British Labour Left and the Third Force Movement, 1945–49’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 56, no. 2 (1984), pp. 197–226. Hugh Wilford, ‘ “Unwitting assets”: British intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 11, no.  1 (2000), pp. 42–60. 186

Notes to Pages 17–23

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66

Virginia Cowles, No Cause for Alarm (London, 1949), p. 42. Edward Shils, ‘The intellectuals:  I  Great Britain’, Encounter (April 1955), p. 10. Shils, ‘The intellectuals’, p. 7. Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956; New  York, 1957), p. 498. Annan, Our Age, p. 444. Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, ed. John Bright-Holmes, entry of 13 December 1951, p. 421. The Art of the Possible: The Memoirs of Lord Butler (Harmondsworth, 1971, 1973), pp. 162–3. Ben Rogers, A.J. Ayer: A Life (New York, 1999), p. 123. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Wartime Journals, ed. Richard Davenport-Hines (London, 2015), p. 41. Christopher Mayhew (recorded and edited by Lyn Smith), A War of Words: Cold War Witness (London, 1999), p. 7. C.P. Snow, ‘The two cultures’, New Statesman (6 October 1956, reprinted 2 January 2013). Robert Hewison, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War, 1945–1960 (New York, Oxford, 1981), pp. 43–4. Maurice Cranston, ‘The literature of ideas’ in John Lehmann, ed., The Craft of Letters in England (London, 1956; Boston, 1957), pp. 205–6, 212. Peter Laslett, ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society (New  York, 1956), pp. vii, x. Hook, Out of Step, pp. 450–5. Italics added. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, pp. 199–200. Irving Kristol, ‘Memoirs of a “Cold Warrior” ’ in Kristol, Neoconservatism, the Autobiography of an Idea (New  York, 1978), pp.  458–60; Stephen Spender, The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People, 1933–75 (London, 1978), p. 163. Diary entry for 22 June 1956 in Janet Morgan, ed., The Backbench Diaries of Richard Crossman (New York, 1981), p. 498. John Sutherland, Stephen Spender: A Literary Life (Oxford, 2004), p. 356. Hook, Out of Step, pp. 364, 433–4; ‘For Cultural Freedom’, from a correspondent (Trevor-Roper), The Economist (15 July 1950). Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, 28 July 1950: Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford, p. 47. Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, p. 200. 187

Notes to Pages 23–28

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Hugh Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London, 2003), pp. 55, 72, 141. Shils, A Fragment of a Sociological Autobiography: The History of my Pursuit of a Few Ideas (New Brunswick, NJ and London, 2006), pp. 96–7. Hewison, In Anger, p.  61, Neil Berry, ‘Encounter’, London Magazine (February–March 1995), p. 49. Kristol, ‘My Cold War’ in Kistrol, Neoconservatism, p. 482. ‘After the apocalypse’, Encounter, vol. 1, no. 1 (October 1953), p. 1. Kristol, ‘Memoirs of a “Cold Warrior” in Neoconservatism, p. 259. Berry, ‘Encounter’, in London Magazine, p. 49. E.P. Thompson, ‘The New Left’, NR, no. 9 (Summer 1959), p. 9. ‘A Life in Writing: Blair Worden’, Guardian (31 January 2009).

CHAPTER  2:   L EW I S N A M I E R A N D T HE HI STORI ANS 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

A.J.P. Taylor, ‘The use of monarchy’ in Taylor, Essays in English History (Harmondsworth, 1976, 1978 edn), pp. 204–5. H. Butterfield, ‘Official history:  its pitfalls and criteria’ in Butterfield, History and Human Relations (London, 1951), p. 216; Butterfield to Adam Watson, 25 August 1953 CUL BP 531/W/30. Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (London, 1980, 1997 edn), p. 21. Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper:  The Biography (London, 2010, 2011 edn), p. 208. Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (New York, 1961, 1983 edn), pp. 214–15. E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth, 1961, 1964 edn), p. 37. Julia Namier, Lewis Namier: A Biography (Oxford, 1971), p. 155. Lewis Namier, ‘History: Its subject-matter and tasks’, History Today (March 1952), p. 160. Ian Gilmour, ‘Sir Lewis Namier’, Spectator (26 July 1960). Adam Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor: A Biography (London, 1994), p. 178. Michael Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield (Cambridge, 2011), p. 216; Nigel Nicolson, ed., Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson: The Later Years, 1945–1962 (New York, 1968), p. 217. Julia Stapleton, Sir Arthur Bryant and National History in Twentieth-Century Britain (Lanham, MD, 2005); David Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (New York, 1992), p. 23. 188

Notes to Pages 29–30

13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20

21 22

23 24 25

26 27 28

Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, pp. 161–3. Namier to Miss A. Monro-Kerr, 9 August 1950: Society of Authors, BL. add ms 633/1/f.38. Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, pp. 168–74. Keith Thomas, ‘The brilliant misfit’, New  York Review of Books, vol. 37, no. 10 (14 June 1990). See Kathleen Burk’s marvellous chapter, ‘The business history of the history business:  How Taylor built his freelance career, 1938–1990’ in her Troublemaker:  The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (Yale and New Haven, 2000). The detail of this story is in question, though the tenor of it less so: Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor, pp. 246–9. Namier, ‘Dream-play of the German century’ [a review of Taylor’s The Course of German History (London, 1945)], TLS (29 September 1945); Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, p. 164. Speculating on the identity of the anonymous reviewer of Bryant’s Age of Elegance in the TLS, Namier wrote: ‘I think Butterfield a better guess than Webster – the article has some of the characteristic defects of Butterfield’s work, but I shall look at it again and see whether the word “whole” is repeated without sense or reason – if it is not the review is not Butterfield’s’ – but it was! Namier to Bryant, 21 November 1950: KCL, LHCMA, Arthur Bryant Papers. E 2/2. Jacob M.  Price, review of Lewis Namier: A Biography (Oxford, 1971), Political Science Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 2 (1973), p. 312. David Cannadine, ‘A.J.P. Taylor’ in History in Our Time (Harmondsworth, 1998), pp.  283–4. (Cannadine is a former student of J.H. Plumb.) Amy Ng, Nationalism and Political Liberty: Redlich, Namier, and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2004), p. 77. Michael Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005), p. 152. A.J.P. Taylor, review of L. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1929, Basingstoke, 2nd edn, 1957) and Betty Kemp, ‘Kings and Commons’, Observer (17 November 1957). E.J. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002, New York, 2005), p. 285. J.B. Owen to Butterfield, 15 November 1961: CUL BP 531/O/61. Keith Thomas, ‘New ways revisited’, TLS (13 October 2006), p. 4. 189

Notes to Pages 30–34

29 30 31 32

33 34

35

36

37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47

Hegley Harte, ‘Obituary:  Professor Ian R. Christie’, Independent (5 December 1998). Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 214. J.B. Owen, The Eighteenth Century, 1714–1815 (London, 1974), p. ix. J.H. Plumb, The Making of an Historian, vol. 1 (Athens, GA, 1988), p. 13; Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (New York 1961, 1963 edn), p. 231. E.g. Arnold Toynbee, ‘Lewis Namier, historian’, Encounter (January 1961), p. 40. Isaac Deutscher, ‘Non-Jewish Jew’ in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Oxford, 1968); Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p.  6; Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle, p. 264; Berlin to Bernard Berenson, 11 April 1958: Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening, Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes with the assistance of Serena Moore (London, 2009), p. 618. This arresting phrase of Namier’s first appeared in the Spectator in 1918, and he chose to reiterate it in his volume of essays, Conflicts, Studies in Contemporary History (London, 1942), p. 94. Namier, ‘Germany III’ in Conflicts: Studies in Contemporary History (London, 1942), p. 94; the biographical detail in this paragraph is drawn from Julia Namier, Lewis Namier. Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, pp. 81, 93. Arnold Toynbee, ‘Lewis Namier, historian’, Encounter (January 1961), p. 43. A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (London, 1994), p. 244. Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 101. Ibid., pp. 105, 111–12. Charles Nagel to Hammerling, 15 April 1914, Nagel Papers Yale University Library, Mss 364/11/164; Namier to Nagel, 19 April 1914:  364/11/165; Namier to Nagel, 4 May 1914:  364/11/168; Nagel to Namier, 9 June 1914:  364/12/169; Namier to Nagel 17 September 1914, 364/12/174 (photocopies). Arnold Toynbee, ‘Sir Lewis Namier’ in Acquaintances (Oxford, 1967), pp. 64–5. Namier, ‘The European situation’ in Skyscrapers and Other Essays (London, 1931), p. 63. First published in the Atlantic Leader, New York (9 July 1914). Namier to Nagel 17 September 1914, Nagel Papers Yale University Library, Mss 364/12/174 (photocopy). Toynbee, ‘Sir Lewis Namier’, p. 63. Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, pp. 124–8. 190

Notes to Pages 35–40

48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59

60

61 62

63 64

‘President Masaryk’ in Namier, Skyscrapers, p. 113. First published in TLS (12 November 1925). The next essay after ‘The victory of an idea’ in Skyscrapers, pp. 122–7, is entitled ‘Zionism’. Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 177. Wheeler-Bennett and Dugdale are duly thanked in the book’s preface. P.B.M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism:  Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction Between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague; Boston, 1978), p. 123. See P.B.M. Blaas, ‘The nineteenth-century topicality of George III’ in Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism, pp. 123–40. Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (Basingstoke, 2nd edn, 1957), p. x. W.E.H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 3 (Basingstoke, 1902 edn), pp.  171–2; D.A. Winstanley, Lord Catham and the Whig Opposition (Cambridge, 1912), p. v; G.M. Trevelyan, History of England (London, 1926), p. 547. Namier, The Structure of Politics, pp. 166, 183. Romney Sedgwick, ‘Putting history in touch with the facts’, Daily Telegraph (23 November 1957). Namier, The Structure of Politics, pp. x–xii. I paraphrase closely Michael Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 313; Butterfield, review of Carr, What is History?, Cambridge Review (1961), p. 172. Namier, The Structure of Politics, p.  xi; W.T. Laprade, ‘The present state of the history of England in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Modern History, no. 4 (1932), p. 581. Namier, The Structure of Politics, p. 158. Namier to Liddell Hart, 12 September 1949: KCL, LHCMA: LH Papers, 1/539/f.26. (Namier was discussing contemporary accounts of the Munich Agreement.) Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931, 1951). Carr (in What is History?, p. 41) remarked that The Whig Interpretation of History does not contain the names of ‘a single Whig except Fox, who was no historian, or a single historian save Acton, who was no Whig’; Frank M. Turner similarly notes the absence from the text of any book titles: see Turner, ‘Review of J.W. Burrow: A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 55, no. 4 (1983), p. 702. 191

Notes to Pages 40–44

65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81

82

Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, pp. v, 10, 36. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, p. 7. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism. Namier to Liddell Hart, 19 January 1952: KCL, LHCMA: LH 1/539/85. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930, 1961 edn), p. 83. Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The end of ideology and the end of the end of ideology’ in MacIntyre, Against The Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN, 1984), p. 8; Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (London, 2000), p. 34. Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, p. 87. Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper, pp. 51–2, 61. Namier, The Structure of Politics, p. 2. G.M. Trevelyan review in The Nation (1929), quoted in D.  Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (New York, 1992), p. 206. Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 223. Plumb, The Making of an Historian, vol. 1, p. 16. Berlin to Felix Frankfurter, 27 August 1937, in Henry Hardy, ed., Isaiah Berlin, Letters 1928–1946 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 248. For Namier’s Zionist career see Norman Rose, Lewis Namier and Zionism (Oxford, 1980), and N.A. Rose, ed., Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale 1936–1947 (London, 1973). Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 265. John Wheeler-Bennett, Knaves, Fools and Heroes in Europe Between the Wars (London, 1974), pp. 16–17. Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor, p.128. Taylor quotes ‘as the verdict of history’ on Trotsky, an American Red Cross officer stationed in Petrograd at the time of the revolution. ‘Trotsky’ in Taylor, Europe: Grandeur and Decline (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 178. Taylor, The Course of German History (London, 1945, New York, 1962), p. 14; Namier, ‘Germany, I. National character’ in Conflicts, p. 80; Taylor, The Course of German History, pp.  18–19; Namier, ‘Germany III. Both slaves and masters’ in Conflicts, p. 89; Namier, ‘Nationality and liberty’ in Avenues of History (London, 1952), p 36; Namier, ‘The German international’ in Conflicts, p. 38; ‘Germany I. National character’, p. 79; Namier, ‘Symmetry and repetition’ in Conflicts, p.  69; Namier, ‘The course of German history’ in Facing East: Essays on Germany, the Balkans, and Russia in the Twentieth Century (London, 1947; New York, 1966), p. 9; 192

Notes to Pages 44–47

83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91

92 93 94

95

96 97

Taylor, The Course of German History, p. 7 (albeit from the 1961 preface); Namier, ‘Germany I.  National character’, p.  81; Namier, ‘Germany II. Names and realities’, p. 85; Taylor, The Course of German History, p. 211; Namier, ‘The German mind and outlook’ in Facing East, p. 35. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (London, 1947, 1995), pp. 5, 14. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (London, 1952, New York, 1962), pp. 807–8. Lidell Hart to Namier, 5 March 1951: KLC, LHCMA, LH Papers 1/539/ff52-4. D.C. Watt, ‘Sir Lewis Namier and contemporary European history’, Cambridge Journal, vol. 7, no. 10 (1954), p. 591. Keith Thomas, ‘The brilliant misfit’, New  York Review of Books, vol. 37, no. 10 (14 June 1990). D.C. Watt, ‘Communication:  British historians, the war guilt issue, and post-war Germanophobia:  A  documentary note’, Historical Journal, vol. 36, no. 1 (1993), p. 181. Butterfield to Vice-Chancellor, Cambridge University, 11 April 1957, CUL BP 76/2, marked ‘confidential’. Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, p. 172. Bentley gamely historicizes Butterfield’s attitudes towards Germany in this period, see especially The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield, pp. 132–43; Butterfield to M.D. O’Sullivan, 18 June 1945: CUL BP 531/O/59; Butterfield to Dr Schnath (at Hanover) 25 July 1956: CUL BP/14. Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p. 276. Namier to Plumb, 30 January 1956: CUL Plumb Papers (uncatalogued). A Festschrift is a collection of writing published in honour of a scholar. Adam Watson to Butterfield, 12 April 1948:  CUL BP 531/W/20 (I have found no record that the lunch ever happened); Paul Johnson, ‘Pakenham, Francis Aungier [Frank]’, ODNB. T.D. Williams, ‘The historiography of World War II’ in Historical Studies I (London, 1958), p. 45; Butterfield, ‘The tragic element in modern international conflict’ in History and Human Relations (London, 1951), p. 10. E.g., Butterfield to Liddell Hart, 30 October 1953, KCL, LHCMA: LH 1/138/37. Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990), p. 270; Anon, review of Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London, 1957), Times Higher Education Supplement (23 December 1957); Taylor, ‘A revolution that failed’, review of Butterfield, George III, Lord North and the People, 1779–1780 (London, 1949), New Statesman (12 November 1949); Arthur 193

Notes to Pages 47–50

98

99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

109

110

Schlesinger Jr, ‘History – humane and scientific’, Encounter, vol. 10, no. 3 (March 1958), p. 76; Elliot Perkins, review of Butterfield, George III, Lord North and the People in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 8, no. 2 (1951), p. 271; Trevor-Roper to Plumb, 5 January 1959: CUL Plumb Papers (uncatalogued); E. Harris Harbison, review of Butterfield, History and Human Relations (London, 1951), William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 9, no. 2 (1952), p. 416. Butterfield, The Englishman and his History (London, 1944, 1945 edn), pp. 105–6; Sir Boyle Roche was a member of the eighteenth-century Irish parliament, famous for malapropisms and mixed metaphors such as: ‘Mr Speaker, I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air and darkening the sky; but I will nip him in the bud.’ Butterfield to Watson, 25 August 1953: CUL BP 531/W/30. Alberto R. Coll, The Wisdom of Statecraft: Sir Herbert Butterfield and the Philosophy of International Politics (Durham, NC, 1985); Karl W. Schweizer and Paul Sharp, eds, The International Thought of Herbert Butterfield (Basingstoke, New York, 2007). Namier, ‘From Vienna to Versailles’ in Conflicts, p.  1; ‘After Vienna and Versailles’ in Conflicts, pp. 32–3. Namier, ‘Germany and Russia’ in Skyscrapers, pp. 73–5. Namier, ‘In times of confusion’ in Conflicts, pp. 95–6. Namier, ‘The Russian Revolution:  1917–1942’, Manchester Guardian (7 November 1942). Taylor, A Personal History (London, 1983), p. 163. ‘Official history: Its pitfalls and criteria’ in Butterfield, History and Human Relations, pp. 217, 221–2. Oxford Radical Association, Britain and the Cold War: The Future of British Foreign Policy (London, 1952), pp. 30, 40. Adam Watson, foreword in Alberto R. Coll, The Wisdom of Statecraft: Sir Herbert Butterfield and the Philosophy of International Politics (Durham, NC, 1985), p.  xiii; Butterfield, ‘Notes on the way. The predicament that leads to war’, Time and Tide (21 January 1950). Basil Liddell Hart, ‘Two words  – the war’s greatest blunder’ in Liddell Hart, Defense of the West: Some Riddles of War and Peace (London, 1950), pp. 45–52. ‘Daddy what was Winston Churchill?’ in Taylor, Essays in English History, pp.  297–8. These lines were written in 1975, but there is no reason to think that his opinions on the matter differed in any way in 1955 or 194

Notes to Pages 50–56

111 112 113

114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128

129

1945. Namier to Liddell Hart, 1 March 1951: KCL, LHCMA: LH Papers 1/539/f.49. Adam Watson, foreword to The Wisdom of Statecraft, p. x. Butterfield to Williams, 1 April 1949: CUL BP 130/Official History/4. Butterfield to Robert (Robin) Dudley Edwards, 3 August 1947:  Dudley Edwards Papers, UCD Archives, LA22/739 (6); Michael Laffen, in his Dictionary of Irish Biography entry about his former teacher, states that he ‘fought for and won the chair of modern history in UCD’. Butterfield’s usually supportive biographer, Michael Bentley, finds it ‘hard to exculpate Butterfield from that preposterous decision’ to parachute Williams into a chair: Butterfield, p. 241. Butterfield to the editor, Studies (16 February 1949): CUL BP 130/Official History/4. Butterfield to Watson, 19 May 1948: CUL BP 531/W/21. ‘The tragic element’ in Butterfield, History and Human Relations, pp. 10–11. Butterfield, ‘Official history’, pp. 186, 198. Butterfield, ‘Official history’, p. 183. Butterfield to A.J.P. Taylor, 2 August 1949: CUL BP 130/Official History/4. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, pp. 40–1. E.L. Woodward to Butterfield, 1 August 1949: CUL BP 130/Official History/4. W.N. Medlicott to Butterfield, 3 August 1949; R.F. Trehane to Butterfield, 13 August 1949: CUL BP 130/Official History/4. Butterfield to Woodward 31 July 1949: CUL BP 120/Official History/4. Williams to Butterfield, 28 July 1976: CUL BP 531/W/370. Butterfield to Bragg, 14 June 1951: CUL BP 531/B/143. Italics added. Butterfield to Williams, 25 June 1950:  CUL BP 531/W/209; Butterfield, George III and the Historians, p. 10. Plumb, The Making of an Historian, vol. 1, p. 4. Williams, ‘The historiography of World War II’, p. 45; ‘Sidelines of history’, review of Namier, Vanished Supremacies: Essays on European History, 1812–1918 (London, 1958), Spectator (14 February 1958), p. 208. Williams to Butterfield, 28 February 1958: CUL BP 531/W/268; Butterfield to Williams, 4 March 1958: CUL BP 531/269. Italics added.

CHAPT ER  3:   T HE ST R U CT U R E O F C O N S E N S U S AT THE AC C ES SIO N O F E LI Z A B E T H  I I 1

Edward Shils, ‘The intellectuals: I Great Britain’, Encounter (April 1955), p. 10; Shils, ‘The end of ideology?’, Encounter (September 1955), p. 53. 195

Notes to Pages 56–61

2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22

Lewis Namier, ‘Human nature in politics’ in Namier, Personalities and Powers (London, 1955), p. 7. Shils, ‘The intellectuals’, p.  10. See also the comments of Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006), pp. 140–9. John Julius Norwich, ed., The Duff Cooper Diaries, 1915–1951 (London, 2005), p. 143. Oxford English Dictionary. D. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain From Suez to The Beatles (London, 2006 edn), p. 560. Special issue, ‘Who rules Britain?’, The Twentieth Century (October 1957), p.  294, reprinted as ‘The Thing’ in A.J.P. Taylor, From Napoleon to the Second International (London, 1995), pp. 50–5. Taylor, ‘The use of monarchy’ in Taylor, Essays in English History (Harmondsworth 1976, 1978 edn), p. 205. Oxford English Dictionary: ‘1923 R. Macaulay. Told by an Idiot ii. xiv. 117. The moderns of one day become the safe establishments of the next.’ The Syndics are Cambridge University faculty appointed to govern the university press. John Banville, Untouchable (New York, 1997), p. 139. Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (1937, New York, 1999), pp. 113–14, 146. Patricia Cockburn, The Years of the Week (Harmondsworth, 1968, 1971 edn), pp.  191–2, 235–6; Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990), p. 197. A.L. Rowse, Appeasement (New York, 1961) published in Great Britain as All Souls and Appeasement (Basingstoke, 1961), preface. Rowse, Appeasement, pp. 1–2. Taylor, review of M.L. Pearle, William Cobbett: A Bibliographical Account of his Life and Times in New Statesman and Nation (29 August 1953). Annan, Our Age, p. 228. Taylor review, New Statesman and Nation (29 August 1953). Henry Fairlie, Spectator (23 September 1955). Italics added. Herbert Butterfield, ‘Why I  am a non-conformist’:  CUL BP 363/2. No date. Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, 25 November 1956:  Richard Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (London, 2007), p. 298. Trevor-Roper to Berenson, 26 September 1956:  Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford, p. 204. 196

Notes to Pages 61–64

23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

On Eccles’ charm see Isaiah Berlin to Arthur Schlesinger, November 1956 in Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes with the assistance of Serena Moore (London, 2009), p. 553; and on his manner, Annan, Our Age, p. 407. Annan refers respectively to those who had attended the socially exclusive English public schools: Winchester, Eton and Harrow. The ‘stage manager’ phrase is taken from the entry for Eccles in the ODNB. Kingsley Martin, The Crown and the Establishment (London, 1962), p. 85. Annan, Our Age, p. 403. Trevor-Roper to Wallace Notestein, 23 March 1960: Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford, p. 297. E. Heward, The Great and the Good: A Life of Lord Radcliffe (Chichester, 1994). Martin, The Crown and the Establishment, pp. 84–5. Oxford English Dictionary: ‘1958 Times Lit. Suppl. 17 Jan. 26/3 Sir Maurice Bowra, in his dexterous résumé of what might be called the Establishment view of the ancient Greek world.’ Trevor-Roper to Wallace Notestein, 23 March 1960: Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford, p. 297. Rowse, review of V.  Wedgwood, The King’s Peace, 1637–1641, Time and Tide, vol. 36, no. 2 (8 January 1955). V. Wedgwood, ‘Historical writing’ in Lehmann, ed., The Craft of Letters in England (London, 1956), p. 204. Maurice Cranston, ‘The literature of ideas’ in Lehmann, ed., The Craft of Letters, pp. 205–17. Listener (17 May 1956). Namier, ‘History:  Its subject-matter and tasks’, History Today (1952), p. 160. ‘The structure of history’, review of Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London, 1957), TLS, lead article (22 November 1957), pp. 697–8. [John Carswell], ‘Riders from the tower’, TLS, lead article (9 March 1956). Berlin, ‘Political ideas in the twentieth century’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 28, no. 3 (1950), pp. 368–9. Michael Scammell, Koestler:  The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic (New  York, 2009), p.  111; Encounter, vol. 1, no. 2 (1953). 197

Notes to Pages 64–68

40

41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49 50

51 52

53 54 55

H.J. Eysenck, Uses and Abuses of Psychology (Harmondsworth, 1953, 1967), p. 226. See more generally The Psychology of Politics (London, 1954), and Sense and Nonsense in Psychology (Baltimore, MD, 1957). Brenda Maddox, Freud’s Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA, 2007 edn), p. 269. Eysenck, Uses and Abuses of Psychology. Namier, ‘Human nature in politics’ in Namier, Personalities and Powers (London, 1955), p. 3. Namier, ‘Human nature in politics’, pp. 3–4. Namier, ‘Talleyrand’ in Vanished Supremacies: Essays on European History, 1812–1918 (London, 1958, New York, 1963), p. 9; ‘George III and Bute’ in Namier, Avenues of History (London, 1952), p. 118; Namier, ‘The character of Burke’, Spectator (19 December 1958), pp. 895–6. Namier and John Brooke, Charles Townshend (New York, 1964), p. 147. Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (New  York 1961, 1963 edn), p.  223; J.  Brooke, ‘Namier and Namierism’, History and Theory, vol. 3, no. 3 (1964), pp. 339–40; Entry on Rockingham in Namier and Brooke (eds), The History of Parliament:  The House of Commons, 1754–1790 (Oxford, 1964), vol. 2, pp. 145–8. Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the national culture’, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 50 (1968), p. 18. Anderson, ‘Components of the national culture’, p. 19. Christopher Hitchens, ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ in Unacknowledged Legislation, Writers in the Public Sphere (London and New  York, 2002), pp.  195–6. Hitchens is right to draw attention to the bizarre bracketing of Namier and Deutscher in this letter. Anderson, ‘Components of the national culture’, p. 18. Vic Seidler, ‘Modernity, Jewishness and “being English” ’ in David Rogers and John McLeod, eds, The Revision of Englishness (Manchester and New York, 2004), p. 17. Geoffrey Elton, The English (Oxford, 1992), p. xii. Ian Buruma, Anglomania: A European Love Affair (New York, 1998), p. 5. (Published in the UK as Voltaire’s Coconuts or Anglomania in Europe.) For the Finchley episode see Geoffrey Alderman, Controversy and Crisis: Studies in the History of the Jews in Modern Britain (Brighton, 2008), pp.  169–70. 1950s Golf Club anti-Semitism is referenced in Frederic Raphael’s somewhat autobiographical novel, The Glittering Prizes (1976). 198

Notes to Pages 68–73

56

57 58 59 60

61 62 63

64

65

66 67

68

69 70

In 1950 Berlin was denied membership of St James Club for antiSemitic reasons and had to settle for Brooks:  Hitchens, ‘Goodbye to Berlin’, p. 193. Buruma, Anglomania, p. 177. Julia Namier, Lewis Namier, p.  201; Norman Rose, Lewis Namier and Zionism (Oxford, 1980), pp. 23, 33. J.L. Talmon, ‘The ordeal of Sir Lewis Namier: The man, the historian, the Jew’, Commentary (March 1962), p. 241. Michael Ignatieff, A Life: Isaiah Berlin (New York, 1999), p. 183; Berlin to S.H. Bergman, 27 August 1952; Berlin to Berenson, 11 April 1958: Berlin, Enlightening, pp. 316, 617–20. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, p. 235. Taylor, ‘A revolution that failed’, New Statesman (12 November 1949). J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Political thought in the English-speaking Atlantic, 1760–1798, part  1:  The imperial crisis’ in J.G.A. Pocock (with Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer) (eds), The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 146. Namier, ‘The biography of ordinary men’ in Skyscrapers and Other Essays (London 1931, New York 1968), pp. 47–8; the term ‘political sociology’ is Gareth Stedman Jones’s: Stedman Jones, ‘The pathology of English history’, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 46 (1967), p. 37. Butterfield, ‘The originality of the Namier School’, Cambridge Review, vol. 77, no. 1909 (25 May 1957), review of John B. Owen, The Rise of the Pelhams. Namier, ‘The biography of ordinary men’, pp. 51–2. My account of the genesis of the History of Parliament draws on David Cannadine, ‘Piety:  Josiah Wedgwood and the history of parliament’ in Cannadine, In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2003), pp. 134–58; and Edith Mary Johnston, ‘Managing an inheritance:  Colonel J.C. Wedgwood, the “History of Parliament” and the lost history of the Irish parliament’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 89C (1989), pp. 167–86. David Cannadine, ‘Parliament: Past history, present history, future history’ in Cannadine, Making History: Now and Then (Houndmills, 2008), p. 65; http://www.histparl.ac.uk. All published volumes are now available online. Namier to Plumb, 2 December 1952; Plumb to Namier, 4 December and 15 December 1952: CUL Plumb Papers (uncatalogued). 199

Notes to Pages 73–76

71 72

73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

Namier to Lucy Sutherland, 2 July 1952: Bodleian Library, Oxford, Dame Lucy Sutherland MSS Box 9 (uncatalogued). E.L.C. Mullins to Sutherland, 6 July 1956. Bodleian Library, Sutherland MSS (uncatalogued). Sir John Neale appears to have been responsible for this check-list: D.W. Hayton, ‘Sir Lewis Namier, Sir John Neale and the shaping of the History of Parliament’, Parliamentary History (2013), pp. 187–211, at p. 200. McFarlane to Gerald Harriss, 3, 6, 16 November 1954 in Harriss, ed., K.B. McFarlane: Letters to Friends, 1940–1966 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 115–17. Butterfield, George III and the Historians, p. 10: John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (London, 1983), p. 265. Pares to Butterfield, 14 December 1953: CUL BP 531/P/1. Michael Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History, Science and God (Cambridge, 2011), p. 171. Robert Hewison, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War, 1945–1960 (New York, Oxford, 1981), p. 46. Pares to Butterfield, 30 June 1954: CUL BP 531/P/2. Trevor-Roper to Berenson, 6 July 1951: Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford, p. 71. A.H. Halsey, ‘Further and higher education’ in Halsey and Josephine Webb, eds, Twentieth-Century British Social Trends (Houndmills, 2000), p.  227. Halsey counts eight, apparently missing the New University of Ulster. Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography (London 2010, 2011 edn), p. 315. Namier to Liddell Hart, 8 March 1951 KCL, LHCMA: LH Papers, 539/56; McFarlane to Harriss, 16 November 1954, Letters to Friends, p. 117. Kitson Clark to Butterfield, 2 August 1951: CUL BP 531/C/49. Sutherland to John Bromley, 16 October 1970: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Sutherland MSS Box 9 (uncatalogued). Plumb to Namier, 27 March 1952: CUL Plumb Papers (uncatalogued). Sutherland to Namier, 24 April 1951; Sutherland to [Merry] Jacobs, 2 June 1951: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Sutherland MSS, Box 9 (uncatalogued). Trevor-Roper to Berenson, 8 September 1954:  Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford, p. 153. Bentley, Butterfield, p. 163. A small exception to this rule is Ian Christie’s The End of North’s Ministry, 1780–1782 (1958) in which Butterfield’s earlier George III, Lord North and the People (London, 1949) is cited a few times. 200

Notes to Pages 76–80

89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

99

100

101

Jim Smyth, ‘Lewis Namier, Herbert Butterfield and Edmund Burke’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no.  3 (2012), pp. 381–9. Taylor, ‘A revolution that failed’, New Statesman (12 November 1949). Eric Robson, TLS (6 January 1950). Italics added. Richard Pares, review of George III, Lord North and the People, English Historical Review, vol. 65, no. 257 (1950), pp. 526–9. The address of the Institute of Historical Research, which housed the History of Parliament Trust. Williams to Butterfield, 27 May, 24 January 1958:  CUL BP 531/W/273; 531/W/266. Subsequently published in Historical Studies I (London, 1958), pp. 33–49. Butterfield to Williams, 11 March, 25 March 1955: CUL BP 531/W/239; 531/W/241. Plumb to Namier, 27 January 1956: CUL Plumb Papers (uncatalogued). Taylor, A Personal History (London, 1983), p. 163; J.  H. Plumb, ‘Sir Lewis Namier’, New  York Review of Books, vol. 3, no.  8 (3 December 1964). Robert Boothby, Recollections of a Rebel (London, 1978), p. 194. Shortly after being knighted, Namier wrote to Plumb, ‘surely you will not go on addressing me as “Dear Sir Lewis”, but as you did hitherto, “Dear Namier” ’ – 17 July, 1952: CUL Plumb Papers (uncatalogued). Neither ‘Namierist’ (Edmund S.  Morgan, ‘The American Revolution: Revisions in need of revising’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 14, no. 1 (1957), p.  4), nor ‘Namierolatry’ (John Brooke, ‘Namier & his critics’, Encounter (February 1965), p. 47) made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. John Raymond, ‘Namier Inc.’ in Raymond, The Doge of Dover, and Other Essays (London, 1960), pp.  62–6. First published in New Statesman (19 October 1957).

CH APT ER  4:   C O N S E N S U S C HA LLE N G E D 1

2

Berlin to Alan Pryce-Jones, 1 April 1954:  Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters 1940–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes, with the assistance of Serena Moore (London, 2009), p. 440. John Osborne, ‘They call it cricket’ in Tom Maschler, ed., Declaration (London, 1957, New York, 1958), pp. 58–60. 201

Notes to Pages 80–86

3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

John Cannon, ‘Namier, Sir Lewis Bernstein (1888–1960), historian’, ODNB; Amy Ng, Nationalism and Political Liberty: Redlich, Namier, and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2004), p. 204. Humphrey Carpenter, The Angry Young Men:  A  Literary Comedy of the 1950s (London, 2002), p. 8. Harry Ritchie, Success Stories:  Literature and the Media in England, 1950–1959 (London, 1988), pp. 25–7. David Lodge distinguishes between the campus novel and ‘the varsity novel, about the goings-on of young people at Oxbridge’: Lodge, ‘Introduction’ in Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (London, 1992, 2000), p. viii. Amis to the editor, Daily Worker (14 February 1957), in Zachary Leader, ed., The Letters of Kingsley Amis (New York, 2001), pp. 502–3. Note 2, Leader, ed., Letters of Kingsley Amis, p. 1045. Carpenter, Angry Young Men, p. 50. Robert Hewison, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War, 1945–1960 (New York, Oxford, 1981), p. 136. Amis to Hilary Rubinstein, 3 July 1953 in Leader, ed., Letters of Kingsley Amis, p. 327, footnote 1; Carpenter, Angry Young Men, pp. 74–5. The ‘man in a book’ quotation is from Hewison, In Anger, p. 117. Quoted in Carpenter, Angry Young Men, p. 89. Osborne, ‘They call it cricket’, p. 50. J.B. Priestley, ‘Sacred white elephants’ in Thoughts in the Wilderness (New York, 1957), p. 73. Katherine Prior, ‘Lumley, Lawrence Roger, eleventh earl of Scarbrough (1896–1969), civil servant’, ODNB; Hewison, In Anger, p. 67. Noël Coward, quoted in Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain From Suez to The Beatles (London, 2006 edn), p. 215. Carpenter, Angry Young Men, p. 131. Anthony Hartley, review of Look Back in Anger, Spectator (18 May 1956), pp. 700–2. Carpenter, Angry Young Men, p, 140. ‘Inside The Outsider’, Dwight Macdonald’s entertaining and sardonic account of this affair, remains, I  think, the best. First published in New Yorker (13 October 1956), it is reprinted in Macdonald, Against the American Grain: Essays (New York, 1962). Colin Wilson, The Outsider (New York, 1956), p. 51. Wilson, The Outsider, pp. 15, 220. 202

Notes to Pages 86–91

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Wilson, The Outsider, pp. 15, 31. Macdonald, ‘Inside The Outsider’, pp. 216–17. Ayer, ‘Mr. Wilson’s Outsider’, Encounter (September 1956), pp. 75–6. Amis, ‘The legion of the lost’, Spectator (15 June 1956), pp. 830–1, and note 21 above. Wilson, The Outsider, p. 125. Amis to Robert Conquest, 20 June 1956 in Leader, ed., Letters of Kingsley Amis, pp. 470–1. Lionel Hale, ‘The Backsider’, Spectator (24 August 1956), p. 260. Macdonald, ‘Inside The Outsider’, p. 221. Mary Scrutton, review of The Outsider, New Statesman (16 June 1956), pp. 700–2. David Marquand, ‘Lucky Jim and the Labour Party’, U&LR, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1957), pp. 57–8. Hewison, In Anger, p. 131. Colin Wilson, ‘The writer and publicity’, Encounter (November 1959), pp. 8–13. Carpenter, Angry Young Men, p. 108. Amis to Hilary Rubinstein, 3 July 1953 in Leader, ed., Letters of Kingsley Amis, p. 327. Ritchie, Success Stories, p. 44. Trevor-Roper to Berenson, 22 March 1957:  Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (London, 2007), p. 222. Christopher Hill, R.H. Hilton and E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Past and Present: Origins and early years’, Past and Present (1983), no. 100, p, 7. Trevor-Roper, ‘Arnold Toynbee’s millennium’, Encounter (June 1957), pp. 14–27. Derwent May, Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (London, 2001), pp. 299, 321. Trevor-Roper to Nicky Mariano, 3 December 1958: Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford, p. 262. May, Critical Times, p. 343. Franz Borkenau, ‘The secret history of communism’, Encounter (February 1954), pp. 71–5. May, Critical Times, p. 351. Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper:  The Biography (London, 2010, 2011 edn), p. 211. 203

Notes to Pages 91–97

48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70

Edward Hyams, The New Statesman:  The History of the First Fifty Years, 1913–1963 (London, 1963), pp. 274–7. Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-Fifties (London, 1958), p.  198; Lodge, ‘Introduction’ in Amis, Lucky Jim, p. 5. Hyams, The New Statesman: The History of the First 50 Years, pp. 279–81, 287. Listener (1 August, 14 November 1957), pp. 159–60, 785–6. Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vol. 4, p. 521. The audience numbers are from a survey cited by Briggs in The History of Broadcasting, vol. 4, p. 508. Carpenter, Angry Young Men, p. 54. Bentley, The Life and Thought of Herbert Butterfield: History Science and God (Cambridge, 2011), p. 216. Butterfield, ‘Sir Lewis Namier as historian’, Listener (18 May 1961) – broadcast 23 March. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting, vol. 4, p. 563; Listener (27 September 1945). Kathleen Burk, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A.J.P. Taylor (New Haven, 2000), p.  391; Peter J.  Beck, Presenting History: Past and Present (Houndmills, 2012), pp. 57–8. J.B. Priestley, Thoughts in the Wilderness (New  York, 1957), pp.  3, 9, 11; ‘Janus’ [Henry Wilson Harris], ‘A Tide-Watchers Log’, Time and Tide (13 January 1955). Priestley, Thoughts in the Wilderness, p. 200. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting, vol. 4, pp. 812–23. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting, vol. 4, p. 147. Burk, Troublemaker, p. 398. ‘Television – commercial, competition?’, Listener (11 February 1954). Muggeridge, Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, ed. John Bright-Holmes (New York, 1982), 21 January 1954, p. 471. John Montgomery, The Fifties (London, 1966), p. 122. Richard Hoggart, ‘BBC and ITV after three years’, U&LR, no. 5 (1958), p. 32. Priestley, Thoughts in the Wilderness, pp. 198–9. Briggs, The History of Broadcasting, vol. 5, p. 9. Hoggart, ‘BBC and ITV after three years’, p. 33. 204

Notes to Pages 97–105

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

Briggs, The History of Broadcasting, vol. 4, p. 803. My discussion of Taylor’s early TV career draws freely on Burk, Troublemaker, pp. 383–92. Namier, ‘History:  Its subject-matter and tasks’, History Today (1952), p. 160. Muggeridge, Like It Was (29–30 January 1954), p. 465. Taylor to Butterfield, 28 July 1949: CUL BP 130/Official History/4. Butterfield review ‘A.J.P. Taylor on Bismarck’, Cambridge Review, vol. 77 (5 November 1956), p. 116. Taylor, ‘Accident prone, or what happened next’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 49, no. 1 (March 1977), p. 11. Taylor, review of M.L. Pearle, William Cobbett: A Bibliographical Account of his Life and Times, New Statesman (29 August 1953). Reprinted in Taylor, Essays in English History (Harmondsworth, 1976, 1978 edn) pp. 49–56. Taylor, ‘Accident prone, or what happened next’, p. 2. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New  York, 1962 edn), pp. 102–3. Taylor, The Course of German History (London, 1945), p. 14. Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (New York, 1961, 1983), p. 152. Taylor, ‘Accident prone, or what happened next’, p. 1. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘A.J.P. Taylor, Hitler, and the war’, Encounter (July 1961), p. 89. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, p. 69. Trevor-Roper to Plumb, 13 July 1961: CUL Plumb Papers, uncatalogued. Trevor-Roper, ‘A.J.P. Taylor, Hitler, and the war’, p. 95. Trevor-Roper to Nicky Mariano, 3 December 1958: Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford, p. 259; Williams to Butterfield, 6 June 1961: CUL BP 531/W/322. Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford, 2006), p. 389. Taylor, ‘Accident prone, or what happened next’, p. 4. John Brooke, ‘Namier & his critics’, Encounter (February 1965), p. 47. Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason (New York, 1947), pp. 5–6. Arthur Koestler, Reflections on Hanging (New  York, 1957), pp.  5, 36, 49, 107. Montgomery, The Fifties, p. 183; Koestler, Reflections, p. xxii. Montgomery, The Fifties, pp. 109–11. Koestler, Reflections, p. 163. 205

Notes to Pages 105–113

97

98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

My account of the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (NCACP) draws on Ruth Dudley Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (London, 1987), pp. 637–47. Berlin to Gollancz, 20 August 1955: Berlin, Enlightening, p. 495. Amis to Gollancz, 7 September 1955 in Letters of Kingsley Amis, p. 452. Edwards, Victor Gollancz, p. 638. Koestler, Reflections, p. xxi. Quoted in Michael O’Sullivan, Brendan Behan: A Life (Boulder, CO, 1999), p. 208. O’Sullivan, Brendan Behan, p. 211. Andrew Holden, Makers and Manners:  Politics and Morality in Postwar Britain (London, 2004), p. 66. Holden, Makers and Manners, pp. 84–7. Montgomery, The Fifties, p. 109. Quoted in Holden, Makers and Manners, p. 87. Osborne, ‘They call it cricket’, p. 58. Osborne, ‘They call it cricket’, p. 59: Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘My Queen and I. A memoir and some reflections’, Encounter (July 1961), p. 18. Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, pp. 550–4. Muggeridge, ‘My Queen and I’, p. 19. Osborne, ‘They call it cricket’, pp. 50, 58–60.

CHAPT ER  5:   T HE P R ACT I C E O F HI STO RY AT M ID -C EN T U RY 1 2

3

4

Max Beloff, ‘History as a creative art’, Listener (13 April 1950), pp. 658–9 (first broadcast on the Third Programme). Butterfield, ‘The history teacher and over-specialization’, Cambridge Review, vol. 65 (27 November 1943), pp. 103–5; Ved Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (New  York, 1961, 1983), pp. 245–6. Trevor-Roper to Berenson, 22 March 1957: Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford:  Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (London, 2007), p.  220; Trevor-Roper to Plumb, 3 December 1961:  CUL Plumb Papers (uncatalogued). E.g. Trevor-Roper to Berenson, undated, early January 1958: DavenportHines, ed., Letters from Oxford, pp. 249–51; Dudley Edwards, ‘Butterfield

206

Notes to Pages 113–116

5

6 7

8 9 10 11 12

13

14

vs Namier’ (notes), 23 November 1957; Edwards to Butterfield, 9 January 1958, Notes ‘Geo III and the Historians’ (January 1958): Dudley Edwards Papers, UCD LA22/1274, 22/1274 (9) 22/1275. Clark, cited in Alan Bullock, ‘The historian’s purpose, history and metahistory’, History Today, vol. 1, no. 2 (1951), p. 5; E.L. Woodward, ‘Some considerations on the present state of historical studies’ (1950) in Woodward, Studies in History: British Academy Lectures, Selected and Introduced by Lucy S. Sutherland (Oxford, 1966), p, 294. Taylor, ‘History in England’, TLS (25 August 1950). All quotations in this paragraph are from this review essay. Namier, ‘History’ in Namier, Avenues of History (London, 1952), pp.  4, 8–9. Published almost simultaneously as ‘History: Its subject-matter and tasks’, History Today (March 1952). Namier, ‘History’, pp. 6–7. Namier, ‘History’, p.  2; Butterfield, The Englishman and his History (London, 1944, 1945 edn), p. 103. Butterfield, The Englishman and his History, p. 103. Namier, ‘History’, p. 2. Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke (Chicago, 1992), pp. xli–xlii, lvi, xlviii; E.P. Thompson, review of The Great Melody, TLS (18 December 1992), p. 2; for Namier on Burke see Jim Smyth, ‘Lewis Namier, Herbert Butterfield and Edmund Burke’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 3 (2012), pp. 381–9. Namier, ‘The character of Burke’, Spectator (19 December 1958), pp. 895–6; this review is discussed in Peter T. Underdown, ‘Sir Lewis Namier’s Burke’, Burke Newsletter, vol. 5, no. 1 (1963), pp. 242–5; J.H. Plumb mischievously speculates further on Namier’s Burkeophobia: ‘He believed implicitly in the art of graphology […] perhaps his unbalanced dislike, one might say loathing, of Edmund Burke stemmed as much from his handwriting as his liberalism.’ (See Plumb, ‘Sir Lewis Namier’, New  York Review of Books, vol. 3, no.  8 (3 December 1964), p. 20.) Butterfield, ‘Sir Lewis Namier as historian’, Listener (18 May 1961) (broadcast 23 March); E.A. Smith, ‘Sir Lewis Namier and British eighteenth-century history’, Parliamentary Affairs, no.  17 (1964), p.  68. Dame Lucy Sutherland also makes much the same point in her

207

Notes to Pages 116–122

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

tribute to Namier, first broadcast on the BBC’s Life & Letters programme, 2 October 1960, and later published in Oxford Magazine on 20 October 1960. Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The pathology of English history’, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 46 (1967), p. 39. Quoted by E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth, 1961, 1964 edn), pp. 9–10. Romney Sedgwick, ‘The Namier revolution: Sir Lewis Namier (1888–1960)’, History Today, vol. 10 (1960), p. 723. Taylor, ‘The rise and fall of “pure” diplomatic history’, TLS (6 January 1956). Chapter 3 of Mehta’s Fly and the Fly-Bottle, which deals with historians, is entitled ‘Argument without end’. Geoffrey Barraclough, ‘The larger view of history’, TLS (6 January 1956), p. ii. Arnold Toynbee, ‘The limitations of historical knowledge’, TLS (6 January 1956), p. iv. W.K. Hancock, ‘Official history’, TLS (6 January 1956), p. xviii. M.M. Postan, ‘Economic social history’, TLS (6 January 1956), p. vi. Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990), p. 267. E.J. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002, New York, 2005), pp. 113–14, 284–5. ‘Rostow, W.W’., American National Biography Online, http://www.anb. org/articles/14/14-01158.html. Christopher Hitchens, ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ in Unacknowledged Legislation, Writers in the Public Sphere (London and New York, 2002), p. 169. Simon Reid-Henry, ‘US economist Walt Rostow and his influence on post-1945 development’, Guardian (8 October 2012). Carr, What is History? pp. 23–4. Thomas, ‘The tools and the job’, TLS (7 April 1966), p. 275. Stedman Jones, ‘The pathology of English history’, pp. 29, 35. Plumb, ‘The interaction of history and biography’, TLS (6 January 1956), p. xxi. Ian R. Christie, Myth and Reality in Late Eighteenth-Century British Politics (Berkeley, CA, 1970), p. 10. Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle, p. 228. Ian R. Christie, ‘George III and the historians – thirty years on’, History, vol 71, no. 232 (1986), n. 1, p. 205; Frank O’Gorman, quoted in Michael 208

Notes to Pages 122–125

36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49

Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the age of Modernism 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005), p.  168; A.J.P. Taylor, review of Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1929, Basingstoke, 2nd edition, 1957)  and Betty Kemp, Kings and Commons, 1660–1832 (Basingstoke, 1957). Wedgwood, ‘Historical writing’, in John Lehmann, ed., The Craft of Letters in England (London 1956), p. 198. Carr, What is History?, p. 37; Toynbee, ‘Lewis Namier, historian’, Encounter (January 1961), p. 40. Brooke, ‘Namier and his critics’, Encounter (February 1965), pp. 47–9. Most recently see Jim Smyth, ‘ “An invigorating controversy”:  Herbert Butterfield and the Namier School’, Eighteenth-Century Thought, vol. 4 (2009), pp.  347–71; Keith C.  Sewell, Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History (Houndmills, 2005), Chapter 11, ‘Butterfield’s critique of Namier’, pp. 181–97; C.T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven, 2004), pp. 278–91; and, for wider institutional and intellectual contexts, Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, a book which began life as Wiles Lectures entitled ‘English historiography in the age of Butterfield and Namier’. Namier, ‘Human nature in politics’ in Namier, Personalities and Powers (London, 1955), p. 7. [John Carswell], ‘The structure of history’, TLS (22 November 1957); ‘Riders from the tower’, TLS, lead article (9 March 1956). Butterfield, ‘The originality of the Namier School’, Cambridge Review, vol. 7, no. 1909 (25 May 1957). Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle, p. 239. Brooke, ‘Namier and his critics’, p. 48. John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (Pittsburgh, 1984), p. 262. Kenyon appears to have been blind to ‘Butterfield’s impish qualities’ evident to his old PhD supervisor, J.H. Plumb – see ‘The road to professional history’ in Plumb, The Making of an Historian, vol. 1 (Athens, GA, 1988), p. 6. Brooke, ‘Namier and his critics’, p. 48. Butterfield to Ross J.S. Hoffman, 29 May 1957:  CUL BP 76/2; Butterfield, ‘George III and the Namier School’, Encounter (April 1957), pp. 70–6. Butterfield to Williams, 28 January 1958: CUL BP 531/W/267. Butterfield, George III and the Historians, p. 200. 209

Notes to Pages 125–128

50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57

58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

Ibid., p, 208. Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p.  210. Basil Williams made a similar point in his review of The Structure of Politics, TLS (31 January 1929). George III and the Historians, pp. 220, 235, 291. Ibid., pp. 8, 10, 289. John B. Owen, ‘Professor Butterfield and the Namier School’, Cambridge Review (10 May 1958), p.  530. But note the slippery qualifier, ‘does not necessarily mean’. Namier to Plumb, 20 March 1957: CUL Plumb Papers (uncatalogued). Butterfield, ‘Notes of US conference of British Studies, April 1963’: CUL BP 76/7. According to J.R. Pole, Robbins ‘would have liked to earn a DLitt from London, her old university, but the application was blocked by a negative report from Namier’:  Pole, ‘Robbins [married name Herben], Caroline (1903–1999), historian’, ODNB. [John Carswell], ‘The structure of history’, TLS, lead article (November 1957), pp. 697–8. Owen, ‘Professor Butterfield and the Namier School’, p, 529. Butterfield, letter to the editor; Namier, letter to the editor; Butterfield, letter to the editor; TLS (29 November 1957; 6 December 1957; 13 December 1957). Anon., Times Higher Education Supplement (25 December 1957). Subsequently published in Historical Studies I (London 1958), pp. 33–49. Butterfield to Williams, 11 March 1955, 25 March 1955:  CUL BP 531/W/239; 531/W/241. Butterfield to Williams, 28 January 1958:  CUL BP 531/W/267. See also Butterfield to Goulding Brown, 16 July 1958: BP129a/1/f.14. Namier and John Brooke, Charles Townshend (London, 1964), p. vi. Mehta, Fly and the Fly-Bottle, pp. 219–22. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter, p.  280. Hostile reviewers included Taylor (New Statesman, 12 November 1949), Romney Sedgwick (Cambridge Review, 22 April 1950)  and (anonymously) Eric Robson (TLS, 6 January 1950). Robson had been a student of Namier’s, and, at the time of writing, was a colleague of his at Manchester. E.g., Butterfield to R.J. Hoffman, 29 May 1957: CUL BP 76/2; Butterfield to Williams, 4 March 1958, BP 531/W/269; Butterfield to Williams, 4 March 1958, BP 531/W/269; Butterfield to Williams, 19 May 1958, BP 351/W/271. 210

Notes to Pages 128–132

69 70

71

72

73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Williams to Butterfield, 27 May 1958:  CUL BP 531/W/273; Williams to Butterfield, 24 January 1958: BP 531/W/266. Owen, ‘Butterfield and the Namier School’, p.  258; Henry Pitt, ‘The crook-taloned birds’, Truth (13 December 1957); Butterfield to the editor of The Economist (26 November 1957): CUL BP 190a/1. The word ‘epigoni’ is offensive, but the concept was nonetheless used at the time. Hugh Trevor-Roper, for instance, argued that it was wrong to hold Namier responsible for his ‘less-inspired followers’ and ‘dull disciples’: The Sunday Times (17 November 1957). Michael Oakeshott, ‘Namier under scrutiny’, Spectator (22 November 1957); David Thomson, ‘The structure of Namierism’, Time and Tide (23 November 1957). C.L. Mowat, ‘George III:  The historians whetstone’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 16, no. 1 (1959), pp. 121–2. Namier, letter to the editor of TLS (6 December 1957). Butterfield, ‘The tragic element in modern international conflict’ in Butterfield, History and Human Relations (London, 1951), pp.  9–36; Arthur Schlesinger Jr, ‘History – humane and scientific’, Encounter, vol. 10, no. 3 (March 1958), p. 76. Williams to Butterfield, 21 May 1957: CUL BP 531/W/263. Williams to Butterfield, 23 June 1961: CUL BP 531/W/324. Butterfield, ‘Official History: Its pitfalls and criteria’ in Butterfield, History and Human Relations (London, 1951), pp 162–224. Williams, ‘Some aspects of contemporary history’, Cambridge Journal, no. 2 (September 1949), p. 739. Butterfield to Williams, and Butterfield to the Master of Peterhouse, 1 April 1949: CUL BP 130/Official History/4; Ross J.S. Hoffman to Butterfield, 22 May; and Butterfield to Hoffman, 29 May 1957: CUL BP 76/2. Butterfield, ‘George III and the constitution’, History, vol. 43, no.  147 (1958), pp. 14–33. Taylor, ‘Westminster white elephant’, Observer (3 May 1964). Butterfield, Listener (8 October 1964), pp. 535–7. Notes on US conference of British Studies, April 1963: CUL BP 76/7. Although in 1957 Pares referred in a letter to ‘the Namier gang’: Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, p. 166. Taylor, ‘History in England’. In 1957 Raymond included Pares (who died in 1958) and Sutherland in ‘Namier Inc’., while Michael Bentley has more recently described Pares as 211

Notes to Pages 132–134

88 89

90 91

92

93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100

‘a Namierite of sorts’: Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, p. 158. Namier certainly admired Pares’ work as his review of George III and the Politicians makes plain: The Sunday Times (8 February 1953); Brunton (killed in a car accident before the publication of that book) and Pennington had both been assistant lecturers at Manchester and research assistants to Namier, at whose suggestion they embarked upon the research of which Members of the Long Parliament is the result. Christie’s The End of North’s Ministry was published in 1958, Walcott’s English Politics in the Early-Eighteenth Century in 1956. Dudley Edwards to Butterfield, 9 January 1958:  CUL BP 531/E/9; John Raymond, ‘Namier Inc.’ in Raymond, The Doge of Dover, and Other Essays (London, 1960), p. 65. Butterfield to Williams, 28 January 1958: CUL BP 531/W/267. Michael Roberts, review of Butterfield, George III and the Historians, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 11, no. 44 (1959), p. 359; Butterfield, ‘Official history: Its pitfalls and criteria’, p. 186. At the height of the forged ‘Hitler Diaries’ furore in 1983, Taylor remarked ‘the question is of little importance […] who cares about Hitler nowadays’:  quoted by Robert Harris, Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries (London, 1986, 1991), p. 330. D.A. Winstanley, review of The Structure of Politics, English Historical Review, vol. 44, no. 176 (1929), p. 660. See, for example, Lawrence Stone, ‘The revival of narrative: Reflections on a new old history’, Past and Present, no. 85 (1979), pp. 3–24. John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976). Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963, 1979 edn), p. 26. Pocock, ‘Political thought in the English-speaking Atlantic, 1760–1798, Part 1: The imperial crisis’ in Pocock, with Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G.  Schwoerer, eds, The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 146. Quoted in Linda Colley, Lewis Namier (London), p. 94. Ernest Gellner, Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study of Ideology (London, 1959), pp. 228–9, 238, 242–3. Joan Robinson provides a striking illustration of these phenomena in the field of economics:

212

Notes to Pages 134–136

Progress is slow partly from mere intellectual inertia […] A professor teaches what he was taught, and his pupils, with a proper respect and reverence for teachers, set up a resistance against critics for no other reason than that it was he whose pupils they were. We have a well-documented example in the case of Pigou and Marshall. Pigou’s review of The General Theory [1936] was harsh and intemperate in tone and, as he afterwards admitted, incorrect in logic. The reason for his performance was that he was deeply grieved and outraged by the way Keynes attacked Marshall. When he happened to pick up the book thirteen years later, and read it calmly, he was amazed to find that he agreed with most of it, and that his review had done Keynes wrong. He had retired, and Keynes was dead, but he asked to be allowed to give two lectures to the undergraduates, to make reparation to Keynes for his unfair review. For the young men, to whom I suppose The General Theory is just another of those classics that you hope your tutor will not notice that you have not read, it was rather mystifying; for those who had lived through the old battles, it was a moving and noble scene. It provides us now with an exceptionally clear-cut example of how personal sentiment can build up a defense for old ideas against new. (Robinson, Economic Philosophy (Chicago, 1962), pp. 79–80)

CH APTER  6:   ‘OU T O F A PAT HY ’ ? 1 2 3 4

Tony Shaw, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion during the Suez Crisis (London, 1996), p. 23. Peter Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990 (Harmondsworth, 1996), pp. 259–60. Quoted in Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain From Suez to The Beatles (London, 2006 edn), p. 17. I am aware that, in strictly constitutional terms, Algeria at this time belonged to metropolitan France. The Algerians did not see it like that of course.

213

Notes to Pages 137–143

5 6 7

8

9 10

11

12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22

Russell Braddon, Suez: Splitting of a Nation (London, 1973), p. 108. Braddon, Suez, pp. 107–9. Trevor-Roper to Berenson, 13 November 1956: Richard Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (London, 2007), pp. 205–6. Isaiah Berlin to Clarissa Eden, 1 November 1956:  Enlightening: Letters 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes with the assistance of Serena Moore (London, 2009), pp. 547–8. Nigel Nicolson, ed., Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson: The Later Years, 1945–1962 (New York, 1968), p. 314. Trevor-Roper to Berenson, 25 November 1956:  Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford, p.  211; Berlin to Michel Strauss, 8 November 1956: Berlin, Enlightening, p. 551. Trevor-Roper to Berenson, 13 and 25 November 1956: Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford, pp. 205, 211; Berlin to Clarissa Eden, 1 November 1956: Berlin, Enlightening, pp. 547–8. Berlin to Clarissa Eden, 1 November 1956: Berlin, Enlightening, pp. 547–8. Trevor-Roper to Berenson, 13 and 25 November 1956: Davenport-Hines, ed., Letters from Oxford, pp. 205, 208. Berlin to Arthur Schlesinger, November, 1956: Davenport-Hines, ed., Enlightening, pp. 556–7. Kingsley Amis, Socialism and the Intellectuals, Fabian Tract, 304 (London, 1957), pp.  7, 9, 11; Paul Johnson, ‘Lucky Jim’s political testament’, New Statesman (12 January 1956), pp.  35–6; Norman MacKenzie, ‘The stalemate state’ in MacKenzie, ed., Conviction, p. 12; Taylor quoted by Braddon, Suez, p. 12. See MacKenzie above. Because, I argue, the emergence of the New Left had a profound effect on the writing of history, it is treated separately in the next chapter. Tom Maschler, ‘Introduction’ in Maschler, ed., Declaration (London, 1957), pp. 7–9. Brendan Behan, ‘Even the English don’t like it  – how sorry they are to return’ in Behan, The Dubbalin Man: A New Selection of His Irish Press Columns (Dublin, 1997), p. 48. Lindsay Anderson, ‘Get out and push!’ in Maschler, ed., Declaration, pp. 137–8, 144–5. Ibid., pp. 159–60. Listener (7 November 1957), p. 728. 214

Notes to Pages 143–148

23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

43

Osborne, ‘They call it cricket’ in Maschler, ed., Declaration, pp.  47, 50, 58, 65. Peter Townsend, ‘A society for people’, and Nigel Calder, ‘The revolutionary in the white coat’ in MacKenzie, ed., Conviction, pp. 96, 144. Taylor, ‘Nothing left to reform  – political consequences of 1945–50’, Manchester Guardian, quoted by Townsend, ‘A society for people’ in MacKenzie, ed., Conviction, p. 102; paraphrase of David Marquand, ‘Lucky Jim and the Labour Party’, U&LR (Spring 1957), vol. 1, no. 1, p. 58. Richard Hoggart, ‘Speaking to each other’ in MacKenzie, ed. Conviction, p. 124. Paul Johnson, ‘A sense of outrage’ in MacKenzie, ed., Conviction, p. 210. Peter Shore, ‘In the room at the top’ in MacKenzie, ed., Conviction, p. 25. Johnson, ‘A sense of outrage’ in MacKenzie, ed., Conviction, p. 211. MacKenzie, ‘The stalemate state’ in MacKenzie, ed., Conviction, p. 17. I place revolution in quotation marks because the upheavals of the 1640s are also referred to as ‘the Great Rebellion’, the ‘Civil War’ and ‘the wars of the three kingdoms’. Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution:  Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London, 1958). Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, pp. 550–2. Ibid., pp. 552–4; Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘The Queen and I’, Encounter (July 1961), pp. 17–18. Osborne, ‘They call it cricket’ in Maschler, ed., Declaration, pp. 58–60. Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949–1962 (New York, 1997). Muggeridge, ‘The Queen and I’, Encounter (July 1961), p. 20. MacKenzie, ‘The stalemate state’ in MacKenzie, ed., Conviction, p.  17; Osborne, ‘They call it cricket’ in Maschler, ed., Declaration, p.  58; Muggeridge, ‘The Queen and I’, Encounter (July 1961), pp. 17, 23. Muggeridge, ‘The Queen and I’, Encounter (July 1961), pp. 21–2. Listener (7 November 1957), p. 729. Lessing, ‘The small personal voice’ in Maschler, ed., Declaration, p. 190. MacKenzie, ‘The stalemate state’ in MacKenzie, ed., Conviction, p.11; Calder, ‘The revolutionary in the white coat’ in MacKenzie, ed., Conviction, pp. 11, 139. Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1944–1969 (New York, 1969), p. 6. 215

Notes to Pages 150–155

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Italics added. Michael Foot, ‘Bevan and the H-bomb’, Tribune (11 October 1957). A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (London, 1983), p. 289. The quotation is from the preface of A.J.P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers, Dissent Over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (1957, 1985 edn), p. 9. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review (London, 1981), p. 91. E.P. Thompson, ‘The New Left’, NR, no. 9 (Summer 1959), p. 3. Christopher Driver, The Disarmers: A Study in Protest (London, 1964), p. 37; E.J. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002, New York, 2005), pp. 211, 228. Taylor, A Personal History, p.  290; Christopher Mayhew, rolling merrily along on his Cold War tramlines, long after claimed that the Communist Party became a ‘major influence’ within CND: Mayhew, A War of Words (London, 1998), pp. 81–2. Driver, The Disarmers, p. 57. Richard Taylor, Against the Bomb: The British Peace Movement, 1958–1965 (Oxford, 1988), p.  317; Driver, The Disarmers, p.  55; Taylor, A Personal History, p. 288. Driver, The Disarmers, p. 53; Taylor, A Personal History, p. 293. Taylor, A Personal History, p. 293. The quotation is from Thompson, ‘The New Left’, NR, no.  9 (Summer 1959), p. 1. Driver, The Disarmers, p. 58. New Statesman (2 July 1960). Driver, The Disarmers, p.57. Taylor, A Personal History, pp. 291–2.

CHAPTER  7:   T HE N E W  LE FT 1 2 3

Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949–1962 (New York, 1997), p. 218. E.J. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002, New York, 2005), p. 206. Claud Cockburn, Crossing the Line: Being the Second Volume of Autobiography (London, 1958), p. 173.

216

Notes to Pages 155–161

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Arthur Koestler and R.H.S. Crossman, eds, The God That Failed: Six Essays in Communism (London, 1950), p. 25. Ibid., p. 32. Lessing, Walking in the Shade, p. 218. E.P. Thompson, ‘Agency and choice  – 1’, NR, no.  5 (Summer 1958), p. 106. Lessing to Thompson, 21 February 1957: Lessing, Walking in the Shade, pp. 213–16. John Saville, ‘A note on dogmatism’, NR, no. 1 (Summer 1957), p. 78. Cockburn, Crossing the Line, pp. 183–5. Lessing, Walking in the Shade, p. 217. E.P. Thompson, ‘Socialism and the intellectuals’, U&LR, vol. 1, no.  1 (Spring 1957), p. 31. Michel Ciment, Conversations with Losey (New York, 1985), pp. 133–5. R.H.S. Crossman, ‘Loyalty’, reprinted in Crossman, The Politics of Socialism (New York, 1965), pp. 168–76. Ciment, Conversations with Losey, p. 146. Norman Birnbaum, ‘Social constraints and academic freedom’, U&LR, no. 5 (Autumn 1958), pp. 47–8. ‘M.I.5. outrage in the universities’, Tribune (31 May 1957). Norman Birnbaum, ‘Social constraints and academic freedom’, p. 52. Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain From Suez to The Beatles (London, 2006 edn), p. 185. Raymond Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957, 1992 Penguin edn), p.  9; Williams, ‘Working class culture’, U&LR, vol. 1, no. 2 (1957), p. 30; M.M. Lewis, review of Hoggart, British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. 6, no. 1 (November 1957), pp. 82–3. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, pp. 72–3. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 13; Williams, ‘Working class culture’, p. 30. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, p. 24. Ibid., p.27. ‘Simon Hoggart’s week: The good, the mad and the ugly’, Guardian (Friday 12 April 2013). Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, p. 213. Ibid., p. 323.

217

Notes to Pages 162–168

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Williams, ‘Working class culture’, p. 29; Williams, ‘Culture is ordinary’ in Norman MacKenzie, ed., Conviction (1958), pp. 81–2; Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, p. 207. Williams, Politics and Letters, Interviews With the New Left Review (London, 1981), pp. 88–9, 93. Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958; New  York, 1983 edn), p. 265. Williams, ‘Working class culture’, p. 30. Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 272–3. Ibid., p. 271. Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, pp. 9, 171. Williams, Culture and Society, p. 257. Ibid., pp. 4, 254. Ibid., pp. 28, 42–3, 72. Ibid., p. 260. Ibid., pp. 253, 263. Thompson, ‘A Psessay in ephology’, NR, no. 10 (Autumn 1959), pp. 7–8. Williams, Politics and Letters, p. 362. Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory: E.P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics (Manchester and New York, 2001), p. 22. Taylor to Butterfield, 28 July; Butterfield to Taylor, 2 August 1949: CUL BP 130/Official History/4. Interview of Thompson in MARHO, The Radical Historians Organization, Visions of History (New York, c.1933), p. 18. MARHO, Visions of History, p. 5; Stefan Collini, ‘Enduring Passion: E.P. Thompson’s reputation’ in Collini, Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (Oxford, 2008), p. 178. E.J. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002, New York, 2005), p. 215. Lessing, Walking in the Shade, p. 213; Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 214; MARHO, Visions of History, p. 5. Williams, Politics and Letters, p. 362. Quoted in Hamilton, Crisis of Theory, p. 53. Saville, ‘A note on dogmatism’, NR, no. 1, p. 79. E.P. Thompson, ‘Socialist humanism, an epistle to the Philistines’, NR, no.1 (1957), pp. 7, 9. Saville, ‘A note on dogmatism’, p. 78.

218

Notes to Pages 168–173

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62

63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75

Thompson, ‘Socialist humanism’, p. 113; ‘Agency and choice – 1’, NR, no. 5 (Summer 1958), pp. 89, 91. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963, 1979 edn), p. 26; MARHO, Visions of History, p. 7. Thompson, U&LR, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1957), p.ii. Thompson, ‘Socialist humanism’, p.  108; Berlin to Frank Wisner, 4 May 1955: Enlightening, Letters 1946–1960, edited by Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes with the assistance of Serena Moore (London, 2009), p. 488. Stuart Hall, ‘Life and times of the first New Left’, New Left Review, no. 61 (January–February 2010), p. 177. Hall, ‘Life and times of the first New Left’, pp. 186–7. Ibid., p.186. Denis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham NC and London, 1997), pp. 61–2; Hall, ‘Life and times of the first New Left’, p. 186. Thompson, ‘The New Left’, NR, no.  9 (Summer 1959), p.  10. The early issues of U&LR also placed advertisements for Encounter: thus, in a small and indirect way the emergent British New Left was subsidized by the CIA. Editorial, NR (Summer 1957), p. 3; Thompson, ‘The New Left’, p. 11. Hall, ‘Life and times of the first New Left’, p. 190. Lessing, Walking in the Shade, pp. 217, 244. Thompson, ‘A Psessay in Ephology’, p. 8. Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain, pp. 10–11. It is worth repeating that I do not use ‘English’ and ‘British’ interchangeably, even when both appear in the same sentence. Harvey J.  Kaye, The British Marxist Historians, an Introductory Analysis (Oxford, 1984), pp. 9–10; Hobsbawm, ‘Kiernan, (Edward) Victor Gordon (1913–2009), historian’ (ODNB). Reprinted in Christopher Hill, Puritans and Revolution (London, 1958, 1968 edn). Cited from a 1959 lecture in Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain, p. 53. ‘C.L.R. James at 80’ in Paul Buhle, ed., C.L.R. James: His Life and Work (London, 1986), p. 249. Roy Foster, ‘Eric Hobsbawm’, Past and Present, no. 218 (2013), p. 6. MARHO, Visions of History, p. 37; Hobsbawm, ‘Twentieth-century British politics’, Past and Present, no. 11 (1957), p. 101 and endnote 5, p. 108.

219

Notes to Pages 174–180

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

‘The personal and the political’, Dorothy Thompson interviewed by Sheila Rowbotham, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 200 (July–August 1993), pp. 93–4. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780:  Programme, Myth, Reality (New York, 1992 edn), p. 11. Cited in Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain, p. 28. MARHO, Visions of History, p. 7. Hobsbawm interview in MARHO, Visions of History, p. 33. Christopher Hill et al., ‘Past and Present, origins and early years’, p. 3. Thompson, ‘A Psessay in Ephology’, p. 8; ‘God & King & Law’, NR, no. 3 (Winter 1957–8), p.69. Anne Applebaum, ‘Yesterday’s man?’, New  York Review of Books (11 February 2010). R.H. Hilton, ‘Christopher Hill and his critics’, NR, no.  8 (Spring 1959), p. 134. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 207. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London, 2003), pp. 206–7. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 231. Hilton, ‘Christopher Hill and his critics’, p. 135. Thompson, ‘The New Left’, pp. 1–3, 6.

POSTSCRIPT 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

E.H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth, 1961, 1964 edn), p. 37; John M. Simpson, ‘Who steered the gravy train, 1707–1766?’ in N.T. Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison, eds, Scotland in the Age of Improvement (Edinburgh and Chicago, 1970), p.  47  – Simpson refers to an attack on Namier by J.H. Plumb in New Statesman and adds ‘Plumb himself seems to markedly under-estimate Namier’s achievement’ (p. 68). Lewis Namier, ‘History’ in Namier, Avenues of History (London, 1952), p. 6. Julia Namier, Lewis Namier: A Biography (Oxford, 1971), p. 229. I take the overlapping coexistence of historical ‘persuasions’ to be one of the core arguments of Bentley’s Modernizing England’s Past. Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990), p. 444. Gellner, ‘Logical Positivism and the spurious Fox’, U&LR, no. 3 (Winter 1958), p. 67. Namier, ‘History’, pp. 8–9.

220

Notes to Pages 180–182

8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15

Michael Roberts, review of Butterfield, George III and the Historians (London, 1957), Irish Historical Studies, vol. 11, no.  44 (1959), p.  359; Butterfield to Williams, 28 January 1958: CUL BP 531/W/267. John Brooke, ‘Namier and his critics’, Encounter (February 1965), p. 47. J.H. Plumb, ‘Sir Lewis Namier’, New York Review of Books, vol. 3, no. 8 (3 December 1964). Stefan Collini, Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (Oxford, 2008), p. 272; Richard Hoggart, ‘Allen Lane and Penguins’ in Hoggart, An English Temper: Essays on Education, Culture and Communications (London, 1982), p. 124; J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (Cambridge, 1985), p. 6, fn. 10. Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), pp. 2, 4. Ibid., p. 48. Collini, Common Reading, p. 176. The first sentence of Clark’s English Society is ‘This is a revisionist tract’. For a lively account of the debates and transformations within English historical studies in the postwar era see Clark’s Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986); and for an analysis of the rise of cultural history see Eley, A Crooked Line.

221

SEL E C T B I B L I OGR APH Y

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES British Library Society of Authors, add ms 633 Cambridge University Library Butterfield Papers Plumb Papers King’s College, London, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives Bryant Papers Liddell Hart Papers Oxford University, Bodleian Library Sutherland Papers University College, Dublin, Archives Dudley Edwards Papers Yale University, Library Nagel Papers, Ms 364/40/466 (photocopies)

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Butler, R.A.B, The Art of the Possible: The Memoirs of Lord Butler (Harmondsworth, 1971, 1973). Ciment, Michel, Conversations with Losey (New York, 1985). Davenport-Hines, Richard, ed., Letters From Oxford:  Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson (London, 2007) Hall, Stuart, ‘Life and times of the first New Left’, New Left Review, no. 61 (January–February 2010). Harriss, Gerald, ed., K.B. McFarlane: Letters to Friends, 1940–1966 (Oxford, 1997). Hobsbawm, E.J., Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London, 2002; New York, 2005). Hook, Sidney, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York, 1987). Kristol, Irving, ‘Memoirs of a “Cold Warrior” ’, in Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York, 1978). Leader, Zachary, ed., The Letters of Kingsley Amis (New York, 2001). Lessing, Doris, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949– 1962 (New York, 1997). Mayhew, Christopher, A War of Words: Cold War Witness, recorded and edited by Lyn Smith (London, 1999). Nicolson, Nigel, ed., Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson: The Later Years, 1945–1962 (New York, 1968). Rose, Norman, Buffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale 1936–1947 (London, 1973). Russell, Bertrand, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1944–1969 (New York, 1969). Taylor, A.J.P., ‘Accident prone, or what happened next’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 49, no. 1 (March 1977). ———A Personal History (London, 1983). Williams, Raymond, Politics and Letters: Interviews With the New Left Review (London, 1981).

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Hayton, D.W., ‘Sir Lewis Namier, Sir John Neale and the shaping of the History of Parliament’, Parliamentary History, vol. 32, no 1 (2013). Hewison, Robert, In Anger: British Culture in the Cold War, 1945–1960 (New York, Oxford, 1981). Hexter, J.H., ‘The historian and his society: A sociological inquiry – perhaps’ in Hexter, Doing History (London, 1971). Hill, Christopher, Hilton, R.H., and Hobsbawm, E.J., ‘Past and Present, origins and early years’, Past and Present, no. 100 (1983). Hitchens, Christopher, Orwell’s Victory (London, 2002). ——— Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (London and New York, 2002). Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy (1957, 1992 Penguin edn). Holden, Andrew, Makers and Manners: Politics and Morality in Postwar Britain (London, 2004). Hyams, Edward, The New Statesman: The History of the First Fifty Years, 1913– 1963 (London, 1963). Ignatieff, Michael, A Life: Isaiah Berlin (New York, 1999). Johnston, Edith Mary, ‘Managing an inheritance:  Colonel J.C. Wedgwood, the “History of Parliament” and the lost history of the Irish parliament’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. 89C (1989). Johnson, Paul, ‘Lucky Jim’s political testament’, New Statesman (12 January 1956). Kaye, Harvey J., The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis (Oxford, 1984). Kenyon, John, The History Men (London, 1983). Koestler, Arthur, Reflections on Hanging (New York, 1957). Laprade, W.T., ‘The present state of the history of England in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Modern History, no. 4 (1932). Laslett, Peter, ed., Philosophy, Politics and Society (New York, 1956). Lehmann, John, ed., The Craft of Letters in England (London, 1956). Liddell Hart, Basil, ‘Two words  – the war’s greatest blunder’ in Defense of the West: Some Riddles of War and Peace (London, 1950). Macdonald, Dwight, ‘Inside the outsider’ in Essays Against the American Grain (New York, 1962). MacIntyre, Alasdair, ‘The end of ideology and the end of the End of Ideology’ in Against the Self-Images of the Age Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN, 1984). McIntire, C.T., Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven, 2004). MacKenzie, Norman, ed., Conviction (1958). 228

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Maddox, Brenda, Freud’s Wizard: Ernest Jones and the Transformation of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, MA, 2007 edn). MARHO, The Radical Historians Organization, Visions of History (New  York, c.1983). Marquand, David, ‘Lucky Jim and the Labour Party’, U&LR (Spring 1957). Martin, Kingsley, ‘The royal carnival’, New Statesman and Nation (30 May 1953). ——— The Crown and the Establishment (London, 1962). Maschler, Tom, ed., Declaration (London, 1957, New York, 1958). May, Derwent, Critical Times:  The History of the Times Literary Supplement (London, 2001). Mehta, Ved, Fly and the Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (1961, New York, 1983). Montgomery, John, The Fifties (London, 1966). Muggeridge, Malcolm, ‘My Queen and I:  A  memoir and some reflections’, Encounter (July 1961). Namier, Julia, Lewis Namier: A Biography (Oxford, 1971). Namier, Lewis, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1929; Basingstoke, 2nd edn, 1957). ——— England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930, 1961 edn), ——— Skyscrapers and Other Essays (London, 1931; New York, 1968). ——— Conflicts: Studies in Contemporary History (London, 1942). ——— Facing East: Essays on Germany, the Balkans, and Russia in the Twentieth Century (London, 1947; New York, 1966). ——— Avenues of History (London, 1952). ——— Personalities and Powers (London, 1955). ——— ‘The character of Burke’, Spectator (19 December 1958). ——— Vanished Supremacies: Essays on European History, 1812–1918 (London, 1958). Namier, Lewis (with Brooke, John), Charles Townshend (New York, 1964). Ng, Amy, Nationalism and Political Liberty:  Redlich, Namier, and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2004). O’Brien, Conor Cruise, The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthologyy of Edmund Burke (Chicago, 1992). Ortolano, Guy, The Two Cultures Controversy:  Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge, 2009). Orwell, George, The English People (London, 1947). ——— ‘Second thoughts on James Burnham’ and ‘Second thoughts’ in Davison, Peter, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell, vol. 17: Smothered under Journalism, 1946 (London, 1998). 229

Cold War Culture

Osborne, John, Look Back in Anger (London, 1957). O’Sullivan, Michael, Brendan Behan: A Life (Boulder, CO, 1999). Owen, John B., ‘Professor Butterfield and the Namier School’, Cambridge Review (10 May 1958). Oxford Radical Association, Britain and the Cold War:  The Future of British Foreign Policy (London, 1952). Plumb, J.H., ‘Sir Lewis Namier’, New  York Review of Books, vol 3, no.  8 (3 December 1964). ——— The Making of an Historian, vol. 1 (Athens, GA, 1988). Priestley, J.B., Thoughts in the Wilderness (New York, 1957). Raymond, John, ‘Namier Inc’ in Raymond, The Doge of Dover, and Other Essays (London, 1960). Ritchie, Harry, Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950–1959 (London, 1988). Rogers, Ben, A.J. Ayer: A Life (New York, 1999). Rose, Norman, Lewis Namier and Zionism (Oxford, 1980). Sandbrook, Dominic, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to The Beatles (London, 2006 edn). Scammell, Michael, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a TwentiethCentury Skeptic (New York, 2009). Schneer, Jonathan, ‘Hopes deferred or shattered: The British Labour Left and the Third Force Movement, 1945–49’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 56, no. 2 (1984). Sedgwick, Romney, ‘Putting history in touch with the facts’, Daily Telegraph (23 November 1957). ——— ‘The Namier revolution: Sir Lewis Namier (1888–1960)’, History Today, no. 10 (1960). Sewell, Keith C., Herbert Butterfield and the Interpretation of History (Houndmills, 2005). Shaw, Tony, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media: Propaganda and Persuasion During the Suez Crisis (London, 1996). Shils, Edward, ‘The end of ideology?’, Encounter (November 1955). Shils, Edward and Young, Michael, ‘The meaning of the coronation’, Sociological Review, vol. 1, no. 3 (1953), pp. 67, 71. Shils, Edward and Young, Michael, ‘The intellectuals: I Great Britain’, Encounter (April 1955). Sisman, Adam, A.J.P. Taylor: A Biography (London, 1994). ——— Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography (London, 2010, 2011 edn). 230

Select Bibliography

Smith, E.A., ‘Sir Lewis Namier and British eighteenth-century history’, Parliamentary Affairs, no. 17 (1964). Smyth, Jim, ‘ “An invigorating controversy”: Herbert Butterfield and the Namier School’, Eighteenth-Century Thought, no. 4 (2009). ——— ‘Lewis Namier, Herbert Butterfield and Edmund Burke’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 35, no. 3 (2012). Spender, Stephen, The Thirties and After:  Poetry, Politics, People, 1933–75 (London, 1978). Stapleton, Julia, Sir Arthur Bryant and National History in Twentieth-Century Britain (Lanham, MD, 2005). Stedman Jones, Gareth, ‘The pathology of English history’, New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 46 (1967). Stewart, Gordon T., ‘Tenzing’s two wrist-watches:  The conquest of Everest and late imperial culture in Britain 1921–1953’, Past and Present, no. 149 (November 1995). Stonor Saunders, Frances, Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London, 2000). Sutherland, John, Stephen Spender: A Literary Life (Oxford, 2004). Talmon, J.L., ‘The ordeal of Sir Lewis Namier: The man, the historian, the Jew’, Commentary (March 1962). Taylor, A.J.P., The Course of German History (London, 1945; New York, 1962). ——— ‘History in England’, TLS (25 August 1950). ——— The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (London, 1957, 1985 edn). ——— The Origins of the Second World War (New York, 1962 edn). ——— Essays in English History (Harmondsworth, 1976, 1978 edn). Taylor, Richard, Against the Bomb:  The British Peace Movement, 1958–1965 (Oxford, 1988). Thomas, Keith, ‘The brilliant misfit’, New York Review of Books (14 June 1990). Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963, 1979 edn). Toynbee, Arnold, ‘Lewis Namier, historian’, Encounter (January 1961). ——— ‘Sir Lewis Namier’ in Toynbee, Acquaintances (Oxford, 1967). Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ‘A.J.P. Taylor, Hitler, and the war’, Encounter (July 1961). Underdown, Peter T., ‘Sir Lewis Namier’s Burke’, Burke Newsletter, vol. 5, no. 1 (1963). Watt, D.C., ‘Sir Lewis Namier and contemporary European history’, Cambridge Journal, vol. 7, no. 10 (1954). 231

Cold War Culture

——— ‘Communication:  British historians, the war guilt issue, and post-war Germanophobia:  a documentary note’, Historical Journal, vol. 36, no.  1 (1993). Wilford, Hugh, ‘ “Unwitting Assets”:  British intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 11, no. 1 (2000). ———The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London, 2003). Williams, Raymond, ‘Working Class Culture’, U&LR, vol. 1, no. 2 (1957). ——— Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958; New York, 1983 edn). ——— Keywords (London, 1976, 1983 edn). Williams, T.D., ‘Some aspects of contemporary history’, Cambridge Journal, no. 2 (September 1949). ——— ‘The historiography of World War II’, Historical Studies I (London, 1958). Wilson, Colin, The Outsider (New York, 1956). ——— ‘The writer and publicity’, Encounter (November 1959). Woodward, E.L., ‘Some considerations on the present state of historical studies’ (1950) in Studies in History:  British Academy Lectures, Selected and Introduced by Lucy S Sutherland (Oxford, 1966).

232

INDEX

Addison, Paul, historian, 103 All Souls College, Oxford, 32–3, 43, 59, 61, 68, 169 Allsop, Kenneth, writer, 89 Altrincham, John Grigg, Lord, 109–10, 145–6 Americanization, 25, 84, 94, 161 Amis, Kingsley, novelist, 13, 75, 84, 86–7 Lucky Jim, 75, 80–3, 88–9, 106, 140–2 Socialism and the Intellectuals, 82 Anderson, Lindsay, film-maker, 4, 11, 25, 141–3, 152, 170 Anderson, Perry, Marxist theorist, 66, 79 Anglophilia, 7, 31, 68–9 Angry Young Men (AYM), 31, 80–9, 93, 140–1 Annales, French historical journal, 113 Annan, Noel, Baron Annan, 2, 12, 15, 18, 61, 119 anti-communism, 20–6, 48, 158 anti-Semitism, 31–3, 66–8

appeasement, 43, 46, 49, 59, 101, 129, 136 Applebaum, Anne, historian, 175 Archbishops of Canterbury, 59–60, 62, 95–6 Arnold, Matthew, literary and cultural critic, 15, 163–4 Aron, Raymond, French intellectual, 16, 66 Associated Television (ATV), 62, 97, 137 Atlanticists, 62, 97, 137 Austria, 31, 33–4, 67 Ayer, Sir A.J. (Freddie), philosopher, 18–19, 22, 86 balance of power, doctrine of, 48–50, 101 Banville, John, novelist, 58 Barraclough, Geoffrey, historian, 118–21 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 16, 60–2, 81, 85, 92–7, 108–10, 143, 145, 147, 150

233

Cold War Culture

Behan, Brendan, playwright, 107–8, 141 Bell, Daniel, sociologist, 23 Beloff, Max, Baron Beloff, historian, 23, 111, 114 Beneš, Dr Edvard, Czechoslovakian president (1935–8, 1945–8), 35 Bentley, Derek, hanged, 105 Bentley, Michael, historian, 40, 89, 179 Berlin, Sir Isaiah, doyen of Cold War ‘liberals’, 6, 10, 21, 31, 42, 63, 66, 68–9, 80–1, 83, 85, 87, 106, 109, 113, 119–20, 138–9, 169 Betjeman, John, poet, 83 Bevan, Aneurin ‘Nye’, 17–18, 105 and Bevanites, 23, 90, 92, 97, 137 condemns the Suez incursion, 136–7 renounces unilateral nuclear disarmament, 92, 149 Bevin, Ernest, Foreign Secretary (1945–51), 56, 68 Birnbaum, Norman, sociologist, 12, 25, 66, 79, 158, 159, 177 Blaas, P.B.M., historian, 40 Blunt, Anthony, art historian, Cambridge spy, 57–8 Bonham Carter, Lady Violet, Liberal grandee, opponent of commercial television, 60, 62, 95 Boothby, Robert ‘Bob’, self-styled ‘Tory Radical’, MP, pundit, later peer, 55, 62, 78, 97 Borkenau, Franz, anti-communist ideologue, 12, 15, 22, 24, 32, 91 Bourdet, Claude, editor of France Observateur, 170 Bowen, Elizabeth, novelist, 83, 86

Bowra, Sir Maurice, classicist, professional Oxford don, 60, 95 Braine, John, novelist, 81 Braudel, Ferdinand, historian, 71 Brewer, John, historian, 133 Briggs, Asa, Baron Briggs, historian, 91 British Society for Cultural Freedom (BSCF), 23 Brogan, Denis, historian, 15, 91 Brooke, John, Namierite historian, 9, 31–2, 65, 72, 74, 79, 103, 122–4, 126–8, 131–2, 134, 180 Brown, W.J., independent MP, broadcaster, 97 Brunton, D., historian, 131 Bullock, Alan, historian, 45, 49, 54, 113, 117 Burgess, Anthony, Cambridge spy, 57 Burk, Kathleen, historian, 103 Burke, Edmund, eighteenth-century politician and political writer, 15, 37, 39, 43, 48, 64–6, 76, 115–16, 127, 164 Burnham, James, American anticommunist, writer, 12, 14–15, 19, 22, 32, 144 The Managerial Revolution, 12, 14, 144 Bury, J.B., historian, 40, 177 Butler, R.A.B. (‘Rab’), Tory Minister 17–18 (see ‘Butskellism’) Butskellism, 18, 55, 144 Butterfield, Sir Herbert, historian, 29, 38–9, 43, 46, 60, 69, 70, 75–9, 80–1, 89, 91–3, 102, 111–13, 115–17, 166, 174–5, 178–80 Christianity and History, 28, 47, 78, 93 early life and career, 39

234

Index

The Englishman and his History, 3, 8, 10, 17, 129 George III and the Historians, 2, 77–9, 92, 122–34, 169 George III, Lord North and the People, 76–8, 124, 128, 130 political and geo-political views, 8, 10, 15, 26, 46–7, 49–54 prose style, mixed opinions about, 29, 39–40, 76–7 The Whig Interpretation of History, 36, 39–41, 113 Bryant, Sir Arthur, popular historian, 15, 28, 90 Calder, Nigel, scientist, 148, 150 Cameron, James, journalist, founder member of CND, 150 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), 92, 141, 148–53, 165, 171, 177 carpet-bombing, see Rostow, Walt Whitman Carr, E.H., historian, 2–3, 26, 28, 34, 48–9, 91, 121–2 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 16, 20–5, 120 Christie, Ian. R., Namierite historian, 3, 30, 132 Churchill, Sir Winston, prime minister (1940–5, 1951–5), historian, 9, 43, 89, 118, 179 Clark, George Kitson, historian, 75 Clark, G.N., historian, 113, 117 Clark, J.C.D., historian, 181 Cobbett, William, English radical, 99–100, 102, 144, 160, 172–3 Cockburn, Claud, journalist, 24, 59, 154 Cole, G.D.H., historian, 10–11, 172 Collini, Stefan, intellectual historian, 166, 181

Collins, Canon John, chair of CND, 150, 153 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), 11, 22, 24, 64, 151, 158, 162, 164, 171, 176 in crisis (1956), 141, 154–7 fellow travellers, 21, 23, 47, 92, 131, 162, 177 Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG), 112–13, 164, 166, 171, 175–6, 181 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 16, 20–3, 89 Berlin conference (1950), 12 Milan conference (1955), 12, 23, 82, 166, 171, 182 Connolly, Cyril, literary critic, 86 consensus, cultural and intellectual, 22–5, 80 economic and political, 16–8, 23–4, 26, 45–6, 55–7, 80, 144 Conservative Party, 11, 97, 106, 139, 155 consumerism, 5–6, 141, 143–4, 148 Conviction, volume of essays, 5, 141, 143–4, 148 coronation, 6–8, 10–11, 61, 80, 109, 145–6 Cousins, Frank, General Secretary, Transport and General Workers Union (1956–69), 153 Coward, Noël, playwright, 85 Cowles, Virginia, author and journalist, 17, 56 Cranston, Maurice, philosopher, 19 cricket, 68, 143, 165, 173 Crosland, Anthony, Gaitskillite Labour MP, 16–18, 23–4, 55, 140 The Future of Socialism, 17–18, 140

235

Cold War Culture

Crossman, Richard ‘Dick’, Bevanite, Labour MP, political writer, 16, 23, 92, 137, 158 Czechoslovakia, 34–5, 155 Daily Worker, 24, 82, 151, 154, 156, 176 Davis, Natalie Zemon, historian, 13 Dawson, Geoffrey, editor of The Times (1933–41), 59 Declaration, volume of essays, 89, 141–3, 146–7, 148, 152 Deutscher, Mr Isaac, Marxist historian, 24, 31, 67, 69, 91, 169 Dimbleby, Richard, broadcaster, 96, 147 disarmament, see Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Dmowski, Roman, Polish anti-Semite, 32, 34 Dors, Diana, film star, 89 Duff Cooper, Alfred, Lord Norwich, Conservative politician, diplomat, memoirist, writer, 56–7, 173 Dugdale, Blanche ‘Baffy’, English Zionist, 35, 43 Dulles, John Foster, US Secretary of State (1953–9), 136 Eccles, Sir David, Minister for Education, President of the Board of Trade, Wykehamist, etc., 61 Eden, Sir Anthony, prime minister (1955–7), 83–4, 95, 107, 136–9, 140 Edwards, R.D., historian, 113, 132 Eley, Geoff, historian, 181 Elliott, J.H., historian, 177 Ellis, Ruth, last woman to be hanged in Britain, 105

Elton, Sir Geoffrey, historian, 2, 27, 67–8, 91, 180 empiricism, 38, 66, 113–14, 117, 121 Encounter magazine, 12, 21–5, 27, 102, 124 End of Ideology, 11–14, 16, 23, 27, 42, 56–7, 62, 114, 182 Englishness, 3, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 23, 32, 44–6, 55, 66–9, 84, 99, 116, 144, 163, 166, 171–4 Erikson, Erik, psychoanalyst, 64 Establishment, the, 10–11, 57–62, 78, 83–4, 93, 97, 99, 102, 140, 145, 147–8, 173 Eysenck, Hans Jürgen, popularizing psychologist, 64, 66 Fairlie, Henry, journalist, 57–62, 92 Feiling, Sir Keith, historian, 114 Finchley, golf club anti-Semitism, 68 Finley, Moses, classical historian, 12 flapdoodle, 70, 134 Fleming, Ian, novelist, 138 Foot, Michael, Bevanite Labour MP, broadcaster and journalist, 97, 137, 150, 152 Forster, E.M., novelist, 95 France and the French, 8, 16, 22, 24, 56, 113, 121, 135–7, 170–1 Freeman, John, Labour MP, broadcaster, 92 Freud, Sigmund, and Freudianism, 35, 41, 63–5, 172 Gaitskell, Hugh, leader of the Labour opposition, 18, 136–7, 153 and Gaitskellism, 16, 24 Galbraith, J.K., economist, 170 Gellner, Ernest, anthropologist, philosopher, political theorist, 134, 180

236

Index

geopolitics, 14, 48–50, 100–2, 129, 135 see also balance of power German history, 34, 42–6, 98, 100–2, 120 German Question, 14, 22, 31, 34, 43–50, 102, 129–30 Geyl, Pieter, historian, 101, 117, 182 Gilmour, Ian, editor, Spectator (1954–9), 28, 92, 137 God that Failed, The, 16, 22, 155, 158 Goddard, Rayner, Baron Goddard, Lord Chief Justice, views on capital punishment, 104 Gollancz, Victor, publisher, ‘Christian socialist’, anti-capital punishment campaigner, 23, 82, 89, 105–7, 109, 150, 181 Gombrich, Sir Ernst, art historian, 66 great and the good, the, 60–1 Hall, Stuart, sociologist, co-editor, Universities and Left Review, 169–70 Hamilton, Richard, pop artist, 5 Hammond, J.L. and Barbara, labour historians, 172 Hancock, W. Keith, official historian, 119 Harris, Wilson, editor, Spectator (1932–53), 94 Headlam-Morley, Sir James, diplomat, 34 Healey, Denis, Atlanticist Labour MP, 16, 23–4 Herzl, Theodor, founder of Zionism, 68 Hexter, J.H., historian, 3, 27 Hill, Christopher, historian (CPHG), 25, 26, 91, 145, 166, 172, 174, 176–7, 180–1

Hilton, Rodney, medieval historian (CPHG), 172, 176–7 historiography, 2, 19, 37–9, 40, 47, 51–2, 63, 76–7, 92, 99, 113–14, 121, 123–7, 133, 175, 179 controversy, 24, 27, 90, 92, 101–2, 122–34 determinism, 2, 93, 100, 113, 119 economic, 30, 82, 112, 119–20, 145, 164, 174 Marxist, 4, 11, 16, 26, 28, 69, 113, 145, 163, 164–9, 171–7 medieval, 74, 112, 119 metahistory, 113, 119, 121, 179 ‘modernist’, 40–1, 125, 179 Namierite, 1–3, 19, 30–1, 37–42, 43–6, 63, 64–5, 69–79, 80, 111–12, 114–18, 121–34, 169, 178, 278 ‘official’, 9, 50–3, 91, 113, 119, 130 popular, 28, 70, 93, 98, 117–18 revisionism, 12, 37, 101, 120, 178–9, 182 social, 28, 71, 73, 120–1, 133, 181–2 specialization, 30–1, 62, 79, 111–12, 118 Whig, 36–42, 69, 76, 103, 113–14, 117, 179 History of Parliament Trust, 71–6, 132 History Today, 28, 117 Hobsbawm, E.J., historian (CPHG) OM, 1, 11–13, 25, 30–1, 67, 71, 91, 119, 151, 154, 156, 166, 173–4, 176, 177, 181, 189 Hoggart, Richard, sociologist, 25, 81, 96, 144, 159–64, 170, 181 The Uses of Literacy, 159–61 Hoggart, Simon, journalist, 161

237

Cold War Culture

Hollis, Christopher, Conservative MP and anti-capital punishment campaigner, 105–6 Holroyd, Stuart, novelist, ‘Angry Young Man’, 141 homosexuality, 104, 108–9 Honours system, 104, 144, see also knighthoods Hook, Sidney, philosopher, professional anti-communist, 11–12, 15, 20–2 Hopkins, Bill, pseudo-Nietzschean novelist, ‘Angry Young Man’, 141 Hungary, Soviet invasion of, 137, 139, 140–1, 155–6, 158, 176 Hyde, H. Montgomery, Ulster Unionist MP and anti-capital punishment campaigner, 105–6, 108 imperialism, 11, 55, 68, 93, 135–6, 140, 142, 145, 165, 174 Information Research Department (IRD), 23, 26 Ireland, 1, 51, 72, 108, 157 Israel, 15, 35, 68–9, 135–6 Jacob, E.F., medieval historian, 42 James, C.L.R., historian, Trotskyist, pan-Africanist, author of Beyond a Boundary, 173 jazz, 67, 81, 84, 88–9 Jenkins, Roy, Gaitskellite Labour MP, 16, 23 Jewish identities, 31, 66–9 Johnson, Paul, journalist, 62, 140, 144, 147 Jones, Gareth Stedman, historian, 114 judiciary, 104–5, 107–9

Kee, Robert, historian, broadcaster, 102–3 Kemp, Betty, historian, 131–2 Kenyon, John, historian, 124 Kettle, Arnold, Marxist literary critic, 156 Keynesianism, 16, 18–19, 26–7, 55, 212–13 Kiernan, Victor, historian (CPHG), 156, 172 knighthoods, 10, 69, 78 Knowles, David, Benedictine monk and historian of monasticism, 74, 91 Koestler, Arthur, anti-communist, novelist, polemicist, anti-capital punishment campaigner, 12–13, 15, 22, 24, 64, 69, 175 Darkness at Noon, 13, 22, 175 The God that Failed, 16, 22, 105–8, 155, 158 Reflections on Hanging, 105 Kramnick, Isaac, historian, 64 Kravchenko, Victor, Soviet defector, 156–7, 175 Kristol, Irving, co-editor, Encounter, 21, 23–5, 158 Korean War, 22 Labour Party, 16, 18–19, 23, 56, 88, 92, 95–6, 136, 140–1, 143, 149, 152, 162, 172, 182 Larkin, Philip, poet, 85 Laski, Harold, political theorist, 67 Laslett, Peter, political scientist, historian, 20 Leavis, F.R., literary critic, 24, 54, 74, 144, 159, 161, 163–4 Lecky, W.E.H., Whig historian, 37 Lessing, Doris, novelist, 89, 141, 148, 154–7, 159, 171 238

Index

Liddell Hart, Basil, military historian, 45, 50 Littlewood, Joan, theatrical producer and director, 108 Logical Positivism, self-regarding philosophical technique, 18–20, 63, 66, 83 Lord Chamberlain, see Lumley, Lawrence Roger Losey, Joseph, film director, 12, 157–8 Lumley, Lawrence Roger, Earl of Scarborough (etc.), Lord Chamberlain, 81, 83–4 MacAndrew, Charles, historian, 33 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Whig historian, 28, 42, 179 Macdonald, Dwight, literary critic, 24–5, 86–7 MacIntyre, Alasdair, philosopher, 170, 177 Mackenzie, Compton, novelist, 78 MacKenzie, Norman, journalist, 5, 140, 147–8 Maclean, Donald, Cambridge spy, 59 Macmillan, Harold, prime minister (1957–63), 5–6, 28–9, 36, 43, 61, 92, 118, 122, 137, 140 Maitland, F.W., legal historian, 40 Marquand, David, political writer, 88 Martin, Kingsley, editor, New Statesman, author, 6, 10, 13, 92, 150 Marxism, 1, 4, 11, 16, 18–19, 24–5, 26, 28, 57–8, 63–5, 69, 82, 91, 99, 113, 141, 145, 151, 156–9, 162–9, 171–7, 186 Masaryk, Tomáš, Czechoslovakian president (1918–35), 35

Maschler, Tom, editor, publisher, 89, 141 mass communications, 13, 94, 147, 159, 170, see also publicity Maugham, Somerset, novelist, 95 Maxwell-Fyfe, Sir David, Viscount Kilmuir, Lord Chancellor and Home Secretary, 104–5, 108–9 Mayhew, Christopher, Labour MP strenuous Cold Warrior, 19, 95 McCarthyism, 12–13, 22–3, 25, 157–8 McFarlane, K.B. (Bruce), medieval historian, 74–5 Medlicott, W.N., ‘official’ historian, 53 Mehta, Ved, journalist, 27, 28, 131 Mills, C. Wright, sociologist, 170 Mitford, Nancy, novelist, 24, 83 monarchy, 6–11, 24, 28, 31, 36–7, 61, 78, 80, 96, 104, 109–10, 133, 144, 145–7 Moody, T.W., historian, 113 Morris, William, designer, author, socialist, 15, 144, 163, 166 Morrison, Herbert, deputy prime minister (1945–51), 56 ‘Movement’ poetry, 83 Mowat, C.L., historian, 129 Muggeridge, Malcolm, journalist, broadcaster, 95, 98, 102–3, 108–9 on television, 95–6, 120–3 views on monarchy, 98, 109–10, 145–7 Namier, Clara, 34 Namier, Lady Julia, 28, 68 Namier, Sir Lewis, historian, 1–3, 8–11, 27–9, 42, 62–3, 67, 77–8, 80, 91, 93, 97, 100, 102,

239

Cold War Culture

111, 115, 117, 122–4, 128–31, 144, 178–80 early life, 31–6, 130 and Germany, 31, 43–50, 130 and the History of Parliament Trust, 131, 716 Namierism, 2, 3, 11, 19, 30–1, 30–4, 38, 54, 74, 76, 79, 80, 103, 111, 116, 123–7, 169, 178–9, 181 personality, 32–4, 64–5 political ideas, 1–2, 56, 65, 70, 115, 125–6, 133–4, 169 prose style, 29–31, 114 prosopography, 30, 38, 123 psychoanalysis, 35, 41, 64–5, 115 structural analysis and The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 28, 30–1, 37–42, 78, 114, 180, 182 and Zionism, 31, 35, 42, 68–70 nationalism, 10, 34–3, 36, 49, 67–8, 99, 135, 173–4 Nazism, 14, 22, 44–5, 48–9, 68, 155, 174 Neale, Sir John, historian, 3, 9, 72, 74–5, 131 New Left, 4, 141–2, 144, 156, 159, 161, 164–82 New Left Review, 114, 171 New Reasoner (NR), 164–5, 167–71 New Statesman, 5–6, 57, 79, 87, 91–4, 110, 145, 176–7 Nicolson, Sir Harold, diarist, writer, royal biographer, 28, 57, 118 Nicolson, Harold, Jr, Conservative MP, 138 Notestein, Wallace, historian, 72 Oakeshott, Michael, philosopher, 23, 113, 129

O’Brien, Conor Cruise, writer, 76, 116 O’Gorman, Frank, historian, 30 Orwell, George, 12–15, 23, 47, 68, 92, 155, 160, 175 and Englishness, 12–15, 44–5, 66, 173–4 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 13–15, 22, 125, 129 Osborne, John, playwright, ‘Angry Young Man’, 80–2, 89, 108–9, 141–2 critic of monarchy, 80, 82, 109–10, 146–7 Look Back in Anger, 80–5, 88, 135 Out of Apathy, volume of essays, 4 Owen, John B., Namierite historian, 30–1, 74, 77, 123, 126, 128, 131 Oxbridge (the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, taken separately and together), 3, 9–10, 17, 19, 29–33, 39, 42–3, 46, 50, 57–60, 62, 70, 74–5, 78, 93, 112, 118–19, 122, 134, 138–9, 143–4, 162, 166, 169, 171, 181 Paget, R.T. QC, Labour MP, capital punishment abolitionist, 105 Paine, Thomas, English radical, 90, 99–100, 173 Pakenham, Frank, Earl of Longford, anti-capital punishment campaigner, 47, 105 Pares, Richard, historian, 74–5, 77, 79, 91, 93, 131 Pareto, Vilfredo, sociologist, 14, 32 Past and Present, historical journal, 11, 90, 112–13, 175 Pearson, Gabriel, literary critic, co-editor, Universities and Left Review, 169 240

Index

Pennington, D.H., historian, 131–2 periodical press, 90–3 Pevsner, Sir Nikolaus, architectural historian, 66 Plumb, Sir J.H., historian, 8–9, 54, 73, 75, 78, 91, 121, 180–1 Pocock, J.G.A., historian of political thought, 70, 133, 169 Poland, 15, 28, 31–2, 34–5 Polanyi, Michael, chemist and philosopher, 66 Pollard, A.F., founder and first director of the Institute of Historical Research, 33, 77 Popper, Sir Karl, philosopher, 20, 63, 66, 113 Postan, Sir M.M. ‘Mounia’, historian, 51, 69, 119–21 Powell, Enoch, Conservative MP, 18 press, the, 86, 95, 105, 133, 147 Priestley, J.B., writer, broadcaster, pundit, 4, 11, 15, 25, 44, 80–1, 83–4, 105, 109–10, 160, 177 CND, 92, 149–51 on television, 5, 94, 96 Pritchett, V.S., writer, 86 Protestant nonconformity (dissent), 47, 50, 52, 100, 100, 122, 165–6, 172 Pryce-Jones, Alan, editor, Times Literary Supplement, 90–1 psychoanalysis, 28, 35, 41, 63–6, 115 publicity, 85, 88–90, see also mass communications Radcliffe, Cyril John, Viscount, Establishment archetype, 61 Rattigan, Terence, playwright, 85 Raymond, John, journalist, 79 Rees, Goronwy, and the Cambridge spies, 59–60

Reik, Theodor, Freudian psychoanalyst, 35 Republicanism, 10–11, 26, 107, 110, 141, 145–6, 173 Rice-Davies, Mandy, national treasure, 181 Richardson, Tony, stage director, 85 Robbins, Caroline, historian, 126, 169 Robson, Eric, historian, 77 Roskell, J.S., medieval historian, 131 Rostow, Walt Whitman, development economist, advocate of carpet-bombing, 120 Rowse, A.L., historian, 15, 43, 59, 61–2, 142 Rudé, George, historian (CPHG), 1, 25, 181–2 Russell, Bertrand, 3rd Earl Russell, philosopher, Whig grandee, 19, 24, 89, 95, 109, 137, 148, 150 Russia, 14, 24, 31, 33, 43, 48–50, 68, 89, 101–2, 115, 119, 137–8, 150–1, 169 Samuel, Raphael, historian, co-editor, Universities and Left Review, 169 Sandys, Duncan, Minister of Defence (1957–9), 148, 152 Saville, John, historian (CPHG), 154, 156, 164, 167 Sedgwick, Romney, Namierite historian, 72, 74, 79, 131 Seton-Watson, Hugh, historian of Russia and of communism, 25, 91 Shils, Edward, sociologist, 7–8, 10, 12, 15, 17, 56, 80, 146 Shore, Peter, Labour politician, 144

241

Cold War Culture

Skinner, Quentin, historian of political thought, 134 Snow, C.P., novelist, scientist, 27, 75, 83 socialism, 14, 17–18, 24, 32, 56, 82, 140, 143, 146, 156 socialist humanism, 164, 167, 177 Soviet Union, 13–14, 16, 21–2, 43, 48–50, 67, 120, 136, 139, 151, 154–7, 162, 176 Spender, Stephen, poet, co-editor, Encounter, 21, 24 Stalinism, 12, 158, 167 Stenton, Sir F.M., historian, 9, 72 Stone, Lawrence, historian, 27, 177 Strachey, Lytton, Eminent Victorians, 41 Suez Canal crisis, 55, 92, 135–40, 154 Sutherland, Dame Lucy, historian, 30, 76, 79, 91, 131–2 Talmon, Jacob, historian, 15, 66 Tawney, R.H., historian, 172, 175 Taylor, A.J.P., historian, 3, 22, 26–7, 29–30, 44, 52, 54, 95, 100, 102–3, 112, 113–14, 117, 119, 121, 122, 130–2, 166 as broadcaster, reviewer, and journalist, 25, 29, 43, 69, 76–7, 90, 92–4, 102, 137, 180–1 in CND, 110, 150–3 The Origins of the Second World War 101–2, 180 political views of, 43, 47–9, 57, 60, 99, 100, 102, 137, 165, 172–3 The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918, 27, 101 The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939, 94–99, 150

Taylor, Charles, philosopher, co-editor, Universities and Left Review, Chair Oxford CND, 169, 171 television, 5, 12, 29, 31, 55, 62, 85, 88, 90, 93–8, 100, 102–3, 108, 137, 145, 161, 178 Broadcasting Act (1954), 95–6 theatre, 83–5 Thomas, Dylan, poet, 62 Thomas, Hugh, journalist and historian, 62 Thomas, Keith, historian, 29–30, 46, 120 Thompson, Denys, literary critic, 164 Thompson, Dorothy, historian (CPHG), 166, 173 Thompson, E.P., historian (CPHG), New Left pioneer, 1, 4, 11, 15, 25, 31, 36, 116, 120–1, 133, 151, 154, 156–7, 159, 163–70, 175–6, 181 The Making of the English Working Class, 1, 31, 133, 168, 172, 181–2 Thomson, David, historian, 129 Times Literary Supplement (TLS), 60, 63, 70, 90–3, 117, 119–21, 126 totalitarianism, 13–5, 22–4, 26, 32, 64, 130 Tout, T.F., medieval historian, 72 Toynbee, Arnold, metahistorian, 32–3, 90, 102, 118–19, 122 Toynbee, Philip, writer and critic, 86 Trade Union movement, 13, 142, 144, 149, 153 Trehane, R.F., ‘official’ historian, 53 Trevelyan, G.M., Whig historian, 28, 37, 42, 69, 118, 178

242

Index

Trevelyan, Sir George Otto, Whig historian, 37 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, Baron Dacre, historian, essayist, 12–13, 19, 22, 23, 27, 29, 41, 45, 60–2, 75–6, 90–1, 99, 102, 112, 113, 137–9 The Last Days of Hitler, 29 Trotsky, Leon, Bolshevik revolutionary, 43, 48, 69 Tucker, James Frederick, Baron Tucker, high court judge, 104 Tynan, Kenneth, theatre critic, 24, 85, 88, 108, 141, 152 unconditional surrender, doctrine of, 49–50 Universities and Left Review (U&LR), 164–5, 167, 169–71, 177 USA, A.J.P. Taylor refuses to set foot in, 97 ‘best top nation since Rome’, 49 cultural influence of, 61, 84, 94, see also jazz and the Suez crisis, 135–7 Vienna, and Viennese, 19, 20, 35, 66, 173 Wain, John, novelist, retrospectively conscripted ‘Angry Young Man’, 81, 83, 93, 141–2 Walcott, Robert, Namierite historian, 3 Walpole, Horace, eighteenth-century politician, gossip, author, and letter-writer, 37, 39, 65, 125

Watson, John Hugh ‘Adam’, diplomatist, Atlanticist, Information Research Department (IRD) operative, 23, 25–6, 47–8 Watt, D.C., historian, 45–6 Waugh, Evelyn, 58 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, Fabian intellectuals, 172 Wedgwood, Dame Veronica, historian, 62–3, 91, 118, 122 Wedgwood, Josiah, Liberal MP, pioneer of the ‘History of Parliament’ project, 72 Weizmann, Chaim, Zionist leader, first president of Israel, 35, 42, 68 welfare state, 16, 23, 26, 55, 88, 140–1, 144, 147, 170 West, Dame Rebecca, writer, 104 Wheeler-Bennett, John, historian, devout royal biographer, 9, 36, 43, 49, 54, 91, 130 White, Hayden, metahistorian, theorist, 121, 179 Williams, Gwyn, historian, 181 Williams, Raymond, cultural critic, 11, 15, 25, 144–5, 151, 159, 161–4, 167, 170–1 Culture and Society, 159, 162–4 Keywords, 11, 145, 175 Williams, T.D. ‘Desmond’, historian, 47–8, 50–1, 53–4, 74, 77, 127–30, 132 Wilson, Colin, writer, ‘Angry Young Man’, 81, 84–5, 141 The Outsider, 81, 85–88 publicity, Wilson a creation (and victim) of, 88–9 Wilson, Harold, resigns from Attlee government, 92

243

Cold War Culture

Winstanley, D.A., historian, 37 Wittgensteinian philosophy, 19, 63 Wolfenden Report on homosexual law (1957), 109 Woodham-Smith, Cecil, popular historian, 118 Woodward, E.L., historian, 52–3, 93, 113 Worden, Blair, historian, 25, 27, 119

Workers Education Association, 159, 166 Worsthorne, Sir Peregrine, journalist, 24 Wykehamist, one who is or has been a pupil at Winchester College, 60–1 Zionism, 31, 35, 68

244