Beaten But Not Defeated

by Merilyn Moos

  Even if Siegi’s university colleagues did not know the details of his past, Siegi’s left-wing tendencies would have been evident because of his trade-union activities. Siegi’s time at St Cuthbert’s College would have been made more difficult and his and Lotte’s - understandable - tendency towards paranoia reinforced by the heating up of the Cold War.

  But Siegi was a hard working lecturer, much liked by his students. He used to invite them home, I remember, for afternoon tea, an approach which he may have copied from his Oxford days but surely marked him out in the conservative corridors of Durham. Harold Evans had been Siegi’s student back in the 1960s and kindly gave me his impressions of Siegi (private conversation, 2012). He described him as whimsical, and ‘slightly savvy’: sufficiently interested in scholarship that other more mundane matters were not of as much concern to him. He marked with generosity and was very popular with the undergraduates. Evans told me that Siegi stood in a Keynesian tradition; his teaching of economics emphasised the humanitarian, and focused on the impact of government economic policy on the life of the ordinary man and woman, particularly appropriate in the Durham area, with its history of unemployment and deprivation. What was endearing was his enthusiasm for his subject and how relevant he made his teaching. Siegi, Evans said, was very different to many of the other members of the faculty whose heads were buried in Ancient Greece and in Latin, but, regrettably, the students, with their own preoccupations, never really found out what made this unusual lecturer tick.

  In 2011, Roger Till, who had been on the staff along with Siegi, wrote to me: I have pleasant memories of Siegi when he taught at a course in Durham for Trade Unionists [probably in The General and Municipal Workers’ Union in the early/mid 1950s, R.T.] which was organised by Peter Kaim-Caudle …in the University Extra-Mural Department…I could tell how fond of Siegi his students were, not only because they said so but because it soon became obvious how successful he had been. With his friendly appearance and sense of humour he had the gift of making his subject really interesting and relevant to the lives of the industrial workers he was teaching (in personal correspon-dence).

  Siegi also continued writing and getting published regular articles during his time in Durham: Price formation and price maintenance in the aluminium market, 1948 (and therefore probably started at Oxford), Is Adam Smith out of date?, 1950, The scope of automation, 1957 and The effect of automation on industrial relations, 1959. This theme crops up repeatedly. 1959/60 was the year Siegi attended the fourth World Congress of Sociology in Milan as a delegate and read a paper on automation (something I remember his being very proud about). In 1963/64, he read a paper to the ‘Northern Economists’ on ‘Problems of Mixed Economies’, and gave a paper on automation to the National Economic development office. Apparently ‘Mr Moos’ got a sabbatical in the first term of 1965/66 to continue his work on automation, which he hoped would be published (sadly, it never was) but which there was no trace of amongst his voluminous papers. Siegi also read a paper on ‘Problems of automation’ to the London Conference of the Industrial Welfare Society as well as ‘taking part in Extra-Mural activities’. I do not have a copy of this paper but nevertheless find its title significant.

  My memory of him was that he had an abiding interest in automation which he saw as having the potential to free labour-time at the same time as having the potential to end scarcity and therefore having the potential to help bring about socialism (not that this is ever what he actually said). He was, though this is only a suspicion, disappointed by the relative lack of interest in his progressive take on automation. For him to see automation as problematic suggests a growing awareness that the social relations of production were, as ever, going to thwart this new technique’s potential.

  We get a brief glimpse of other aspects of his university life from ‘The Durham Colleges in the University of Durham [annual] Report by the warden’. The first available report is from 1953/54, where it is mentioned that Moos amongst others published ‘A Survey of newspaper Reading by University Students‘. It is in 1956, that the university rewarded him by conferring on him a Master of Arts. I suspect this was his first ever degree!

  He seems generally to have maintained a higher profile in relation to the students, than I imagine was customary in the 1950’s! There is a reference in the 1957/58 report (and, less specifically, in following reports) to Mr Moos and two others having read papers to ‘very successful’ staff-student seminars (also referred to in Siegi’s own papers). He seems to have been an active participant in the university’s staff student academic seminars, addressing them in Michaelmas Term 1965 on Britain’s economic predicament. He was one of only three staff who participated in this staff student cooperation in the late 1950s.

  What is also clear from these reports was his abiding interests in extra-mural work, i.e. the teaching of non-university students. This is often now seen as good practice but was then seen generally as less prestigious. But not by Siegi, who actually wanted to teach the trade unions students and courses. From 1955-59, ‘Moos’, again amongst others in Social Studies. shared the teaching of a course on management problems and other unspecified courses at different times at Sunderland Technical College, Lambton Castle and Durham. In 1958/59, ‘Mr Moos and Mr Odber undertook other extra-mural teaching’. Mr Till’s reference to extra-mural teaching provides us with the detail that this was probably to GMWU members. Indeed, from 1960/61, the report shows Mr Moos apparently increasingly radical activities (It is of course possible that these pursuits had previously not been recorded.) Mr Moos ‘addressed the Trades Councils’, a remarkable inclusion in these august and dry reports. The report states that in 1962/63: ‘He participated in managerial and trade-union courses at Stockton and Conset‘, (presumably to steel-workers).

  Though it does not appear in these Reports, I know that throughout his time in Durham, he taught at the Workers Educational Association (WEA) classes to miners and ship builders. Maybe these were organised under a separate non-University contract. He would come home from the university, and go out again soon after, to far flung pit villages and the even further, to the docks. If he loved anything during his time in Durham, it was this. Not even sickness (for his chest suffered from the climate) would stop him. Here, I suspect, he was able to ‘let go’, to tell the truths of how the capitalist system really worked, to people who wanted to learn and were open to understand. Indeed, I wonder whether one attraction of taking the Durham job was not the reputation of the WEA’s Newcastle ‘Pitmen painters’, reawakening a belief that he could, after all, still be an ‘organic intellectual’ in the class struggle. I suspect that as he watched the tide of the Cold War slowly loosen its grip (though Cuba was yet to come), Siegi was slowly feeling safe enough to involve himself in activities on the margin of the class struggle, but at least remotely attached to it.

  But he was also busy on other fronts, according to the University Reports. With Mr Odber, he attended the annual Conference of the Association of University lecturers in Economics, and, alone, attended a Conference of the University Industrial Relations Association in Oxford. In 1958/59, he gave lectures at Sunderland Technical College to the prudential Assurance Company and to chartered accountants. In the late 1950s, ‘Mr Moos’ attended a conference in London on Pay Structure (but no more detail given). In 1960/61 and the following years, he addressed the Bernard Gilpin Society, as well as giving two talks to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the Rotary Club (!), the National Coal Board and the Socratic Society. In 1962/63, ‘Mr Moos’ lectured at the Commonwealth Institute Conference. Though no details are known, my guess is this would have been a task he prized because of its internationalism. In 1962/63, Siegi also attended the International Congress of Collective Economy in Rome, where he met for the first time, at least in a very long while, his cousin, Lorre, who had got out of Germany, while still a teenager, to Italy.192

  But the reports also highlight by omission what Siegi was not involved in. Professo
r Morris-Jones is a visiting professor of Commonwealth history in India, Dr Bromhead was a visiting professor of Social Sciences in Florida, Prof Morris-Jones conducted a round-table Conference on Civil-Military relations (!) amongst many other roles, Mr Allen was a member of the research committee of the NE Industrial Development Association. Not to ignore Dr Blair, who gave a course of extra-mural lectures on law. (In subsequent years, it is stated ‘Dr Blair made frequent appearances on Tyne Tees Television’ and lectured to police cadets. And yes, it is the father of the warmonger, a leading Conservative: the Chair of the University Conservative Association and a figure whose legalistic idiocies I remember my mild mannered father getting heated about over our meals.) My father appears to have largely stuck to his teaching, I suspect in part because this was his preference, but also because his politics did not encourage his being put forward for more ‘prestigious’ roles.

  This was the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, a period still under the thrall of the Cold War Outside a very small group of revolutionaries, mostly Trotskyists, and the CP, which Siegi would not have touched, there were few places in which to be politically active, especially in Durham, far distant from the early political rumblings of dissent in London. Siegi’s main forum was his AUT branch, where he had many arguments with the right faction in the union, in particular with Leo Blair.

  Clearing my parents’ mountains of papers, I unfortunately threw away most of the union stuff, but a couple of items slipped through. There is Siegi’s letter against the appointment of Chairs of Department in favour of their election, a really radical demand for that time (and still for this), and another letter against the University Grants Committee unachievable intention of measuring student effort as a basis for monies to be bestowed (how topical that is today!).

  Siegi’s final year in Durham was 1965/66. The 1966 election of 1966 which confirmed Labour’s hold on power took place in March and Siegi left Durham soon after for his job at the Board of Trade. The Report is more fulsome in their praise than they often were. It states: ‘Pleasure is tinged with regret on the retirement of Mr Moos [who was 62 in 1966]…Mr Moos has been teaching Economics at Durham since 1947…The Department and the various waves of students how have been taught Statistics and Economic organisation by Mr Moos owe him a great debt for his patience, insight and generous bestowal of his time.’

  Outside the umbrella of the University, though noted in their Yearbook, was that: ‘He took a leading part in local activities in connection with Freedom from Hunger campaign.’ Later on, and not included in these reports, was his activity in ‘War on Want’ (unfortunately I threw away this documentation also). From memory, he was their local Treasurer, and seemed to put a lot of time into their activities, frequently departing for their evening meetings. This is hardly a display of his earlier active politics but does show his continuing commitment to justice and equality. Whether it was through his involvement in Freedom from Hunger or War on Want, placards and paintings to be sold to raise funds sometimes appeared in our house, not that, in its chaos, one would really have noticed.

  Siegi continued to campaign, even if it was mainly through letters and articles. It seems from a letter to the Observer in 1962 that Siegi was campaigning against Britain joining the Common Market (17.10. 1962). I have a copy of a letter he sent the Times in 23.3.65. Clearly aware far earlier than many about the growing war and American atrocities in Vietnam, he condemns the Times’ leader for assuring their leaders that the gas used in Vietnam was less serious than in WWI. ‘Why‘ he writes ‘did you not add not as bad as Hitler’s gas chambers? Then we would have felt thoroughly comfortable.’ It was not published.

  He wrote frequently for the Northern Echo, a prestigious local paper, then under the editorship of Harold Evans (before he rose to higher things), and, as already discussed, once a student of Siegi’s. Harold Evans explained to me that he thought of Siegi as a practical thinker and was glad to get him into the Northern Echo, indeed was touched that Siegi was willing to help him out. For example in April 1962, Siegi wrote the key analysis of the Budget (3.4.1962, letter from Evans) for which Siegi was thanked profusely (12.4.1962, letter from Evans, both in personal possession).

  There is another intriguing letter to Siegi, from 1965, from McAlpine, representing a Scottish company, which was some sort of cooperative made up of Trade Union representatives, community centres and Churches, which wanted to produce ethical products. There is no way of knowing how this all developed, but nevertheless it is interesting that, of all the people possible, it was Siegi whom they approached.

  I used to find my parents paranoia when we were in Durham oppressive but also unintelligible. Why on earth would they think our house was watched? Did they have to cover the phone with cushions to stop their conversations being overheard? But they might have had cause. The CIA requested Lotte’s file from MI5 as late as the first years of the 1950s. Moreover, recently opened MI5 files have divulged that they were still keeping a close eye on Peter Pears in 1951 on the grounds that he was the Vice-President of the Musicians Union for Peace and a member of the League for Democracy, both described by MI5 as ‘Communist Front organisations’. Two years later, in 1953, MI5 were concerned with Pears’ partner, Britten, as a well-known pacifist. MI5’s file on Priestley started in 1933 and effectively continued till 1960. What alerted them appears to be that he was a member of the early National Council for Civil Liberties in the 1930s. The files reveal they were opening his letters, keeping a collection of articles by and about him in the press, and as late as 1956, had a report, presumably from a ‘spy’, of a meeting which Priestley attended about police powers! He was, they said, associated with left-wing causes, but the appreciation that ‘none [were] Communist inspired’ did not stop the surveillance (KV21/3774/5).193 My parents’ paranoia may have been well founded, after all.

  Durham was not a happy time for my family. My mother, unlike Siegi, had no public role to play beyond that of mother and housewife, and though this may have fitted in with the 1950’s image of what the married woman was all about, it certainly did not suit her. She loathed Durham’s provincialism and conservatism. Unknown to me, she spent much of her time writing, hidden away in my parents’ bedroom. She succeeded in having a play put on in the West End in 1962: ‘Come Back with Diamonds’ which was a dramatisation of her time in Moscow and did not present the Stalinist regime in a positive light. It was booed off the stage by, my mother stated, a Stalinist mob who sat in the front seats - this event is even recorded in the reviews. So much must have been riding on this final success after so much loss that for the play to be withdrawn must have been devastating. I imagine how much she will have wanted to turn her back on Durham and the evidence suggests she did not start writing again till after their move to London.

  Durham was also where I grew up and when Siegi, generally working, and Lotte, generally out of reach in her bedroom, had to bring up their daughter. Looking back, I am aware as I was not at the time of how deeply isolated our little family unit was, without any extended family to speak of. My parents never talked about their families and I was aware from an early age that this was a forbidden zone, about which one must never ask. Moreover, we lived in a small conservative ecclesiastic city where my parents had few friends. (Gary Sargent, the artist, was an exception, but they only got to know him and his wife, Val, in their last years in Durham.)

  While I Ioved my father, he expected his child to conform to rules which even in the 1950s would have seemed archaic in many households. He had a room in the house which was his study (my mother had to use their bed-room for her copious writing) which I was not allowed to enter and I expected to get shouted at if I did dare to knock at the door. I had to find a way to amuse myself as a child which is how books became my best friends. Till about the age of fifteen – when I finally rebelled, I was banished to my tiny bedroom at 7pm and would sit in bed reading and miserable. I guess the ghosts of the past were allowed out after I was sent off to bed and Siegi and L
otte could talk to each other out of my ear-shot about what they never wanted me to hear.

  My father took occasional breaks from his work to go for walks with me and the dog, My father, I suspect to make up for the absence of a family network, found dogs to befriend me, which indeed they did. My mother did not sympathise with this initiative and never had anything to do with either of our two dogs. The second dog, Biscuit (after the brandy), was a lurcher which my father obtained from a farm, a mix of a collie and a greyhound and absurdly fast. Talking to Ken Worpole, it appears my father told him after Biscuit’s death how much he liked lurchers because they were the dog preferred by the Durham miners.

  The older I got, the worse things became. As I reached adolescence, my father increasingly frightened me. There was a dress code that I would not have dared to break - of wearing loose demure cloths. As my mother told me: your father does not want to see your breasts (!). I stopped wanting to be anywhere near him. Even in the sixth-form, I was rarely allowed out and my friends were not welcomed. The appearance of a ‘boy-friend’ was an emotional disaster and effectively caused me to end my relationship with my father till I became pregnant decades later. It is difficult to square my father with Siegi, the man who lived in bohemian Berlin in the late 1920s and dedicated himself to revolutionary struggle. My guess is that he - and my mother - were walking on such emotionally thin ice, that they could not cope with any sort of ‘disturbances’ in their lives.

  My parents adopted a consciously assimilationist perspective to my schooling. I was first sent to a Church of England primary school and then to the local Grammar School. My parents had rejected the route most middle-class Durham parents took of sending their daughters to the private school or of sending me to the more prestigious and predominantly middle-class Grammar school in Newcastle. Durham Girls Grammar School’s pupils were, most unusually, largely from families where the father was working at or down the pits. While I had few friends at grammar school, I learnt from the parents of those I had, rather than from my ‘socialist’ parents, about the working class, the importance of trade unions and class solidarity. This affected me in a way that my parents may not have anticipated and did not always accept. My father actively discouraged me from any political interest, banning me for example from joining CND. I assume he thought he was keeping me safe. Far from my following in my parents’ political foot-steps, as most people assume, it was my act of rebelling against their politics which took me into the revolutionary left. I escaped from them to university at Oxford in 1962.