Clio's Lives
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earnest discussions within Women’s College on the morality of premarital
sex would be the case (p. 144). Her first serious relationship started in her
second year, but neither she nor her partner was interested in marriage –
in Fitzpatrick’s case because she ‘was afraid of suffering [Doff’s] dreadful
fate and being deprived not only of a career but of all possibility of
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happiness and enjoyment in life’ (p. 148). There were other complicated
relationships. What stands out is the frankness with which they are related,
without being unfair to the other person.13
Music and sport
In referring to the late 1950s ‘tug of war for the cultural soul of Britain’,
Walvin laments the consequent polarisation of opinion and taste. There
was a high-browed culture represented by so-called serious literature
and classical music as opposed to a popular culture of comics, trashy
novels and pop music: ‘What was it going to be? Bill Haley or Barbirolli?
The Brains Trust or ITV?’ There was also a widespread feeling that high
culture, such as orchestral music, and sport were oppositional:
From the first I thought much of the debate oddly unnecessary. Why
did it have to be one or the other? Why couldn’t we settle for a new kind
of cultural pluralism that allowed people to pick and choose as they saw
fit. Was it so odd to like the Hallé [Orchestra] and Manchester United?
(p. 133).
Rickard and Fitzpatrick did not embrace cultural pluralism to the same
extent. The subject of sport never comes up in An Imperial Affair, in
contrast to Rickard’s discussions of his parents’ musical interests and his
own involvement in the theatre. For her part, Fitzpatrick gave up sport
altogether when she went to university ‘and, having become an intellectual
snob, looked down on it, especially hockey’ (p. 117). Walvin, by contrast,
is passionate about soccer and Manchester United – a devotion that
remains undiminished, and has led him to writing books on the subject.14
Thus, Different Times includes an entire chapter on soccer, culminating
in the Munich air disaster of 1958. The 23 fatalities included eight
Manchester United players, the famous Busby Babes. It was not the first
such soccer disaster nor the most serious, but it hit home hard: older
13 See also Peter Nicholls, ‘Sheila Fitzpatrick as an Australian Teenager’, in Golfo Alexapoulos, Julie Hessler and Kiril Tomoff, eds, Writing the Stalin Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 197–202.
14 James Walvin, The People’s Game: A Social History of British Football (London: Allen Lane, 1975); Walvin, Football and the Decline of Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), doi.org/10.1007/978-1-
349-18196-4.
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people averred that it felt even worse than the Blitz.15 The mood of misery
in Manchester following the Munich air disaster is caught by Walvin,
who was witness to the city’s reactions. The hearses proceeded from
Manchester airport to Old Trafford, and ‘[d]espite the bad weather and
the time (it was almost midnight), huge crowds turned out to line the
streets to pay their silent respects. The misery of it all lingered over the city
like one of its infamous dark skies, and simply wouldn’t go away’ (p. 156).
What also has not gone away, different times or not, is the behaviour of
supporters – ‘the raw adult vulgarity, and … football’s amazing ability to
transform normal folk into demented ranters’ (p. 149).
The three memoirists are in greater accord when it comes to music.
It should hardly surprise that classical music continues to play a significant
part in all of their lives. They were brought up at a transitional time
when the radio and the gramophone represented the only switch on–
switch off home entertainment, so people still had to make their own
amusements, and learning a musical instrument was more in evidence
than today. Despite straitened family circumstances, Fitzpatrick learned
the violin from the age of five or six (just as her brother learned the piano)
and received enormous encouragement from Brian, himself a lover of
Beethoven (pp. 74–6). She was talented, but her approach was akin to that
of her schoolwork in that she could do well with insufficient effort. Her
involvement in music and playing in various orchestras was a significant
part in Fitzpatrick’s early life. Reflecting on her adolescent violin playing,
Fitzpatrick saw it as ‘quite separate from the family; that must have been
one of its advantages’ (p. 91). She put the violin aside at the onset of
university studies. There was a brief resurgence of interest in music a few
years later (p. 180), but only in later years, following a bereavement,
did Fitzpatrick resume active musicianship in chamber music, mainly
quartets.16
Neither Walvin nor Rickard had such intense encounters with music, but
it was still a presence. Philip Rickard was a church organist and it was
music that brought him and Pearl together (p. 6). Music remained ‘part of
the family culture’ throughout their marriage: there was a ritual of sherry
and music before dinner (p. 115), and they were at the heart of the church
15 Less than eight-and-a-half years earlier, an aircraft carrying the Italian champions Torino crashed with total loss of life, and again it took a full decade to rebuild the team. Paul Dietschy, ‘The Superga Disaster and the Death of the “great Torino”’, Soccer & Society, 5:2 (2004), 298–310, doi.
org/10.1080/ 1466097042000235272.
16 The original version of My Father’s Daughter contained a separate chapter on music.
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choir when they finally settled in Sydney. They were also avid concert- and
theatre-goers (pp. 38–9) and they instilled in Rickard a love of classical
music. Although never a choirboy, the Anglican Church was and remains
important for Rickard, who has written a history of his parish church
in North Melbourne.17 When his voice broke, he was encouraged to
take singing lessons. Later, as an actor-singer in London, he harboured
ambitions for opera and lieder. More to the point, ‘it was the world of
theatre, always a site for cultural subversion, that offered the real [sexual]
freedom I had been groping towards all along. There I came to realise that
the temptation I had been resisting was in fact, for me, the truth to be
embraced’.18 He only ceased his ‘raffish career’ in theatre in 1971, when
appointed to a lectureship at Monash University.19
Walvin’s musical experiences began at the age of six when he joined the
local Anglican parish. Neither parent was Anglican, or musical, but Walvin
was attracted to St John’s because its Sunday school offered social activities
and ‘a range of instruction’ (p. 108). There, his singing was noted by the
choir mistress and he was inducted into the choir. He had the singular
good fortune that a First World War veteran liked his singing voice and
gave him hours of tuition. Rickard was also a choirboy and he also took
singing lessons (p. 115),
but these activities had a lesser effect than they
did on Walvin, for whom St John’s was an important part of his growing
up. It had two long-term effects on Walvin. One was to provide ‘an early
apprenticeship for a career which required me to sing for my supper in
front of students and the public’ (p. 108). Second, and despite losing his
faith, he acknowledges that:
the Church of England left its fingerprints all over me. Its rituals, its
calendar, its hymns and liturgy, all and more remain embedded deep in
my brain. Today, there are times when I feel I am one of a dying breed of
Anglican survivors. In recent years I have attended funerals where the only
people in church who seemed to know the hymns, prayers and protocols
were me, the minister and the organist (p. 112).
17 John Rickard, An Assemblage of Decent Men and Women: A History of the Anglican Parish of St Mary’s North Melbourne 1853–2000 (Melbourne: St Mary’s Anglican Church, North Melbourne, 2008).
18 Rickard, ‘Sydney: The Class of ’51’, 176.
19 Rickard has written a number of academic articles on the theatre: ‘“A Fine Song and Dance!”: Manning Clark’s History – The Musical’, Victorian Historical Journal, 59:3–4 (1988), 3–20; ‘ The Boys in the Band Revisited’, Meanjin, 52:4 (1993), 661–6; ‘The Melbourne Theatre Scene: A Personal Perspective’, in Seamus O’Hanlon and Tanja Luckins, eds, Go! Melbourne in the Sixties (Melbourne: Circa, 2005), 17–30.
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Self-representation
The three memoirists represent their selves in quite different ways. Rickard,
for the most part, remains a shadowy figure in a text which, after all, is
a portrait of his parents’ marriage. He is the little boy in the background,
who occasionally emerges to recall an event; to accentuate the obscurity,
he sometimes refers to himself as ‘John’, rather than by a pronoun. Only in
his final year at school, followed by his tertiary education, his involvement
in the theatre and sexual awakening does he emerge as a more rounded
individual.
Walvin presents himself as curious and self-motivated, characteristics that
coexisted with a sceptical attitude and a strain of indignation, making him
a ‘prickly teenager’ with ‘an abrasive, bolshie view of the world’ (pp. 45–6,
82). He finally lost his religious faith at the age of 17 after increasingly
questioning the very worth of a God who had reduced his family and
those around them to such dire circumstances (p. 111). The ultimate
break was a result of the vicar’s enthusiastic endorsement of capital
punishment, although Walvin suggests that this was the occasion rather
than the cause. Walvin also bristled during the 1959 election campaign
when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan used the phrase, ‘You’ve never
had it so good’, which he later realised was broadly correct, but at the time
it seemed a ‘sneering insult’ (pp. 168–9). He also admits that the English
class system ‘irritated me immensely’ (p. 163).
Misgivings were also directed at the British Empire. The qualms initially
centred on his grandparents:
What had this great empire done for them, or for my relatives and our
neighbours? My grandparents lived simple, often impoverished, lives with
little to show for a hard week’s work except a couple of shillings deposited
in the holidays savings club, and the few pennies set aside in the local
burial club. Their meagre pleasures seemed a poor reward for their part in
an imperial success story (p. 80).
But there was more to it. Walvin came to dislike the chauvinism and
the insularity that stemmed from Britain being an imperial power. The
‘demonology of foreigners’ and the prevailing notion that ‘abroad is
beastly’ were part of his environment (pp. 79, 138, 141, 181). Funnily
enough, he had a treasured collection of Biggles books, those empire-
affirming texts par excellence (p. 115). The circuit-breaker was a summer
exchange scheme organised by his school, which had him off to France
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for a month to live with a French family. He returned a confirmed
Francophile and, as a 14-year-old, was now openly questioning the
prevailing assumptions that lands across the sea were a combination of
‘dangerous locations, untrustworthy foreigners, foul local weather, [and]
unspeakable food’ (p. 135). He acknowledges that he must ‘have become
an irritating adolescent challenge to relatives and friends, not merely
because of normal teenage awkwardness, but through my inquisitive and
doubting presence’ (p. 141). Some of Walvin’s attitudes were a product
of his particular working-class upbringing and others were a reaction
against it.
Fitzpatrick presents herself with a searing and uncompromising honesty:
‘As a historian I have always taken pride in putting in what I discovered …
It would have been nice to have left some things out [about myself], but
I found myself unable to do so’ (p. 5). It cannot be easy to write positively
about an unhappy upbringing, but there are times when there is an
element of the self-lacerating: ‘Cynicism and pessimism were a cherished
part of my chosen persona at university’ (p. 127); ‘I had not yet outlived
my adolescent habit of sulking and was prone to moodiness’ (p. 145);
she refers to her ‘habit of not hiding from people things that might hurt
them’ (p. 183); and she applies the words ‘insouciant’ and ‘insouciance’
to herself (pp. 123, 135). It is little wonder that few people write their
autobiographies of childhood given how painful the requisite honesty can
be, both to self and to others.
Becoming historians
The decisions of the three authors to embark on careers as academic
historians involved, in varying proportions, a mix of inner urges and
opportunity, deliberation and chance. There were other choices: Fitzpatrick
had music; Rickard’s first career was in the theatre; and Walvin might have
ended up a schoolteacher but for the opening up of undergraduate places
at the ‘redbrick universities’ in the late 1960s. In that way, numerous
working-class adolescents had the opportunity of a university education
that would otherwise have been beyond reach.
Neither Fitzpatrick nor Rickard particularly liked their time at secondary
school. Rickard finished his schooling at Knox Grammar, a private school
on Sydney’s North Shore, at the time of a philistine headmaster. But two
or three good teachers on the staff (although not the history teacher) gave
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him the idea of going to the University of Sydney where he enrolled for
an Arts/Law degree. It was the family expectation that he would go to
university and, although Philip hoped he would enrol in engineering as he
would have liked for himself, he had no problem with his son doing Arts/
Law. As runner up in the Shell arts scholarship in 1956, he spent a year at
Oxford but does not indicate his course of study. Nor does he say how he
became a historian, apart from indicating that history was his real interest
(pp. 120–2). Nowhere mentioned
in An Imperial Affair is that Rickard
did a potted PPE (Philosophy, Politics & Economics) course at Oxford,
for which he received a diploma. Returning to a job in Australia with
Shell, he drifted into theatre to get away from corporate life, and remained
in acting for 10 years. A friend arranged an introduction to meet John
Legge, the history professor at Monash University, and Rickard embarked
on an MA thesis. What started as ‘initially something to interest me’ then
became a PhD thesis with a supporting scholarship, and eventually he
was offered a lectureship in the Monash history department in 1971. This
was at a time when Australian universities were still expanding, but only
barely in the Monash history department. He described himself to us as
‘the last expansionary appointment’ in the department.20
Neither does Walvin make an extended statement on the steps along the
way to becoming a historian, but he provides numerous clues. His was
not a promising start given that he twice failed his 11-plus examinations,
an iniquitous system whereby 11-year-olds were ‘sorted into educational
sheep and goats’ (pp. 119–20). Instead of enrolling in a grammar school he
was consigned to a technical school and might have withered on the vine
but for an enlightened headmaster, who steered the brighter students into
academic subjects, and ‘a handful of committed teachers’ who inspired
and enthused (p. 130). Another was being able to escape the impossible
conditions for study at home by toddling across the road and working
in Joe Eyre’s front room (pp. 3, 48, 80, 183). Equally important, the
Manchester Central Library was a ‘home away from home’ as a secondary
school student, and became ‘his favourite place in the whole of Manchester
(apart, that is, from Old Trafford)’ (pp. 33–4). He was already showing
considerable motivation and self-discipline in being able to work on his
own (pp. 65, 116) and he describes the Central Library as where his ‘real
education took place’ (p. 130): ‘In the end,’ he writes, ‘my secondary
school suited me well, and what shaped my teenage education were books,
20 John Rickard, telephone interview, 28 June 2015.
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Manchester Central Library and a few devoted schoolmasters’ (p. 120).