Clio's Lives
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The school and the library in Manchester also meant that Walvin started
to experience worlds beyond the intensely localised environment of his
upbringing. Interestingly, Walvin mentions that his mother’s ‘pervasive
culture of hard work’ together with the need for punctuality in his first
paid job as a newspaper delivery boy ‘helped establish a pattern of work
that became a permanent feature of my working life’ (pp. 159–60).
But what prevailed on the studious Walvin to become a historian and
not something else? He is under no doubt that talking to Second World
War veterans, from his mid-teens, kindled his interest, beginning with
discussions with Joe Eyre over endless cups of tea in his front room (p. 11):
Initially they were all reluctant to talk to me – an awkward but curious
teenager – about their experiences, but eventually they spoke up, sparking
what became my lifelong curiosity about history … I must have been
cheeky and insensitive: an inquisitive teenager firing questions at older
men about issues they were keen to forget and certainly didn’t want to
discuss (pp. x, 19).
As well as hearing about the horrors of their experiences, he was also
exposed to their jingoistic and anti-foreigner attitudes (p. 135), but by
this time he had returned from his first visit to France and rejected such
sentiments. The Suez Crisis also contributed. Walvin could not understand
the seemingly universal disparagement of Egyptians as well as the French:
How could this welter of hostility to outsiders be explained? Perhaps
all this had historical roots and perhaps the explanation lay in Britain’s
historical past? It wasn’t clear at the time, but it now seems obvious: events
were pushing me towards a more serious study of history (p. 146).
A further reinforcing influence, serendipitously, was a schoolteacher
introducing him to films and novels, including Orwell’s The Road to
Wigan Pier (1937), and to the community studies of northern English cities
that were being published in the late 1950s, along with a major sociological
work – Richard Hoggart’s classic, The Uses of Literacy (1957), which
lamented the erosion of ‘authentic’ working-class culture (pp. 82–5).21
21 See N. Dennis, F. Henriques and C. Slaughter, Coal is our Life: An Analysis of a Yorkshire Mining Village (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956). Unbeknownst to Walvin, sociological studies of working-class London were also appearing. These are what Roy Porter was referring to when he
described himself as being brought up in ‘a stable if shabby [south London] working-class community completely undiscovered by sociologists’: Porter, London: A Social History (paperback ed.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), xiii.
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There were no guarantees that Walvin would go to university, which at
that time was highly selective. He got no encouragement from his family
or his wider environment to progress in that direction; any books in the
house, such as his Biggles collection, were kept well out of sight (p. 115).
As he puts it:
[r]elatives clearly found my ideas and questions ‘half-baked’ (their
favourite word for stupid) … acquired, they thought, either by reading
too much or, more directly, by ‘letting France go to your head’ – my
mother’s way of dismissing my new habit of querying life at large (p. 141).
My ideas were rejected as evidence of the dangers of education, and of
reading too much. Grandma in particular seemed especially concerned
about my reading habits. She even warned me directly: ‘You mustn’t
read too much, our Jim. You’ll get a brain tumour.’ Her evidence for this
amazing belief was the sad tale of a local boy who, having passed his 11+,
promptly died of a brain tumour (p. 80).
Even then, a university education would have been out of the question
had Walvin not won a State Scholarship and enrolled at the University
College of North Staffordshire (now Keele University). It was a revelation,
despite some initial social awkwardness. He was being paid to study; there
were creature comforts, such as central heating and indoor lavatories;
there was also a hitherto unimagined sexual freedom, even though
students caught breaking the rules surrounding these matters were
severely punished (especially the females). Walvin chose history over ‘the
intellectual desert of modern languages’ (p. 197). Predictably enough,
he began to distance himself from his background, not deliberately but
because of sustained exposure to new influences.
The hardship of Walvin’s childhood had moderated somewhat during his
teens. Life became marginally easier in the 1950s and more noticeably so
after 1957, as Macmillan had said (p. 170–3). More to the point, Walvin’s
schooling and his commitment to his studies provided a fulfilment that
transcended his background – and it all turned out well in the end. While
not minimising the hardship of 1940s northern England, the mellower
tone of his later chapters suggest that his recounting the events has been
filtered through the lens of subsequent experience.
There was always going to be a better chance that Fitzpatrick might
become an academic historian, partly because Australia did not suffer
the same hardships as did postwar United Kingdom. Neither was class
such a barrier, resulting in a more egalitarian approach to making a career.
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Having two intellectual parents, one of whom was an historian, was
a good start, and Fitzpatrick did receive an acknowledgement in her
father’s book The Australian Commonwealth (1956) for her help with
‘verifying and correcting’ (p. 103). It was also a good start that Fitzpatrick
was precociously gifted and entered the University of Melbourne aged 16.
Having her fees paid and receiving an allowance by virtue of winning
a Commonwealth Scholarship, she felt unaccustomedly well-off. It also
helped that she lived in a residential college rather than having to continue
enduring an unhappy home life. She was fortunate that she gained
admission to Women’s College, whose rules stipulated the entrants had
to be at least 17. Fitzpatrick petitioned the head of the college to waive
the rule, ‘arguing that [she] needed to be removed from a difficult family
environment’ (p. 125). After a generally unhappy time at her high school,
where brains were frowned upon, Fitzpatrick quickly found a support
group of intellectually minded students.
Fitzpatrick followed a conventional path in becoming an historian.
It started with getting increasingly interested in history and by associating
more with the ‘history crowd’. Brian’s reputation as a historian was also
useful (p. 135). By the start of her third year, she had given up thoughts
of becoming a musician, deciding that it was too insecure a career.
The Melbourne history department also played its part, by ‘implicitly
provid[ing] the standard against which [the units teaching her other
subjects] – the English and Russian Departments, the Conservatorium –
were judged and found wanting’ (p. 151). Throughout
, Fitzpatrick studied
Russia, more by accident than by design, which provided a basis for her
future career as a Russianist (pp. 133–4). Gaining a first-class honours
degree in History and Music, she tutored in the history department for
two-and-a-half years and published her first journal article (pp. 185–8),
before departing for postgraduate study at Oxford University. Hers was,
in a formal sense, a typical enough progression for a bright and aspiring
student.22
22 Fitzpatrick recounts some of her experiences as a young historian in A Spy in the Archives (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2013).
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Motives and constraints
Historians typically pen their memoirs towards the end of a career or in
retirement. They become their own biographers from a variety of motives,
just as they become historians for many reasons. Unusually, My Father’s
Daughter stemmed from a publisher’s offer; having heard Fitzpatrick give
a talk about her father, Louise Adler of Melbourne University Publishing
made the approach for a more extended treatment along the same lines.23
Rickard’s motivation was more personal; after finding a shoebox full of
Philip’s letters to Pearl, ‘he began to feel the need, if only for my own sake,
to unravel their story’ (pp. vii, 1). Walvin, by contrast, was ‘encouraged
… by friends, who having heard me talk about the stories related here,
urged me to write the book’ (p. vii). He elaborated in an email, saying that
he had ‘wanted to write something about this for years – partly personal
curiosity but mainly to record a way of life that has vanished’. There
was ‘also the matter of aging. I realized that unless I turned to this soon,
I might never be able to do it – or lose the ability and evidence to make
it possible’.24 At quite another level, he was motived to write as a gesture
of opposition to the elitism that typifies the autobiographies and the
published letters of historians, which are overwhelmingly by the grandees
and the ‘toffs’ of the profession.25 He ‘thought it right to write a humbler
view – or at least from a humbler position’ – another indication of fidelity
to his working-class roots. It is by no means unusual for elderly historian
memoirists from working- and middle-class backgrounds to ‘to honor the
lived worlds of their youth’.26
The question then turns on: what can decently be said about others;
what ought to remain secret; what simply cannot be said? The three
memoirists certainly take advantage of a climate of opinion that is more
open to frankness and disclosure. Abuse narratives and explicit accounts
of family tragedy are becoming commonplace. Death and disability
narratives (pathographies), which often lay bare intimate details of bodily
23 The talk was turned into short memoir and published in the London Review of Books, 8 February 2007. A slightly longer version was later published as ‘My Father’s Daughter: A Memoir’, in Macintyre and Fitzpatrick, Against the Grain, 163–9.
24 Walvin, email, 26 November 2014.
25 Walvin is referring to: A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983); Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman, eds, One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
26 See D.L. LeMahieu, ‘“Scholarship Boys” in Twilight: The Memoirs of Six Humanists in Post-Industrial Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 53:4 (2014), 1011–31, doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2014.110.
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malfunctionings and mental illness, have burgeoned over the past half
century – an even greater growth area than historians’ autobiographies
has become.27 The increasing popularity of reality TV programs is another
indicator of widening boundaries, especially in its appeal to voyeurism.
All the same, there are restraints, often self-imposed. Rickard and
Fitzpatrick would have been unlikely to have embarked on their projects
had their parents been alive. The impulse would be to leave their memories
undisturbed. Rickard said as much when an interviewer ‘asked him what
he imagine[d] his parents might have thought of the book. I don’t think
he found answering this question difficult. His parents’ generation valued
its privacy; they would surely not have welcomed the exposure of their
lives to public view’.28 Whereas Rickard’s sister was encouraging from the
outset, it was not so straightforward for Walvin. Only when his brother
Ian came to terms with his parentage and could talk about it openly
did Walvin feel that his autobiography of childhood was a publishable
prospect.29
Brief assessments
By what means do memoirists excavate and recall the past? There was
that shoebox of letters from Rickard’s father to his mother, miraculously
preserved (the other side of the correspondence is missing). This started
him on the project as well as making it possible. The letters form the
empirical core but there were other letters, this time between parents
and children and between siblings (pp. 125–6, 142). His parents kept
diaries while in England in the mid to late 1930s. Pearl’s diaries seem less
extensive (pp. 27, 40, 44, 47). Philip’s diaries were seemingly kept over
a longer period and contain longer entries (pp. 41–7), and they were not
necessarily a private affair; on at least one occasion, at the end of a 17-day
motoring holiday, he typed up ‘fifteen foolscap pages, which was designed
not only as their own record, but to be circulated to their families in
Australia’ (p. 32). Finally, there are Rickard’s own diaries, which he kept
from the age of 15. The extent to which diaries can be misleading is
27 Anne Hunsacker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (2nd ed.; West Lafayette: Purdue Research Foundation, 1999), 3.
28 Frank Bongiorno, ‘Imperial Intimacies’, review of An Imperial Affair by John Rickard, Inside Story, 19 September 2014, insidestory.org.au/imperial-intimacies (accessed 20 October 2014); see also Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Family Memoir and Self-Discovery’, Life Writing, 12:2 (2015), 127–38,
doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2015.1023925.
29 Walvin, email, 26 November 2014; Walvin, Different Times, 61.
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indicated by Rickard’s admission that his homosexuality was something
he ‘could only hint at’ in his earlier diaries (p. 121). In addition, Rickard
engaged in wider research and drew from his knowledge of Australian
history. He also engaged in ‘optical research’ – the term coined by
a biographer of Mary Queen of Scots who ‘visited every conceivable
castle, quagmire, byre or whatever associated with the Queen in three
countries’30 – as when he revisited Dubbo in New South Wales to gauge
how the town, and more particularly the house, where he had lived almost
50 years earlier had changed (pp. 108–9).
At least two evidential points emerge from a reading of An Imperial Affair.
One is the manner in which Rickard chews over the evidence, attempting
to extract the last drop of meaning from a documentation that is rich
in some respects but replete with omissions. The other concerns the
limitations of memory, which itself is compounded by the gaps in the
record. Rickard recalls a couple of dramatic incidents between his parents
over Philip’s infidelities (pp. 2–3, 100–1), but he was not in all places
at all times. Besides, there is the fact of life for our authors that when
they were growing up there were things were not said or done ‘in front
of the children’ (p. 135). There was also the feeling that one’s business
was one’s own, and if outsiders were to be kept in the dark on privacy
grounds (p. 133), then so were the children. Rickard is sometimes left
to remark that he has no memory of particular incidents (pp. 64, 94,
102). At one point, he mentions that ‘beneath th[e] well ordered surface
[of family life] there was an undertow of unhappiness which I have no
memory of recognising’ (p. 65). Indeed, he admits, as a young child,
to having ‘no inkling of what [his] mother was going through’ when Pearl
was taking treatment for her depressive disorder (p. 86). Rickard clearly
discovered more about his parents from their letters than he ever would
have imagined.
Different Times, by contrast, is not an archivally based book. Walvin
had few, if any, written family records on which to draw. He did keep
youthful diaries, long lost during one of several relocations. He was forced
to write largely from memory, and there is always the problem in these
circumstances as to what gets forgotten or misrepresented. As it is, he gives
two examples of suddenly remembering long-forgotten events (pp. 89,
130). An important proviso is that his two brothers and an older cousin read
30 Antonia Fraser, ‘Optical Research’, in Mark Bostridge, ed., Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales (London: Continuum, 2004), 113.
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drafts and provided their own perspectives as well as making corrections.
It would be useful to know the specifics and the extent of such inputs,
just as it would the extent to which Rickard’s sister’s sometimes ‘different
perspectives’ had on An Imperial Marriage.31 Another qualification is that
Walvin drew on his previous researches when giving historical context to
matters such as tuberculosis, cotton, Hoggart and soccer. As with Rickard,