by Doug Munro
popularity of the new biography had led to a decline in the art of writing
history and that the old alliance between freelance literary history and
progressive politics had broken down, he returned to the academy. Keen
to avail himself of ‘the aura of authority’ that a senior academic position
might confer, he succeeded Bury as Regius Professor of History at
Cambridge in 1928 – the culmination of a fence-building exercise going
back many years.81
Yet he had not abandoned the pursuit of popular literary history.
His tactics may have changed; the goal remained the same. Despite
his formal academic position, he still believed ‘the appeal of history …
[wa]s in the last analysis poetic’, and he saw himself as the heir of Walter
Scott, Macaulay and Carlyle, rather than as Bury’s spiritual successor.82
He was delighted when Strachey abandoned critical Victorian biography
to devote himself to a romantic evocation of Elizabethan court society,
in what he believed was his ‘greatest work’, his Elizabeth and Essex: ‘not
a piece of satire but a piece of life’. So much the more was he appalled
when Strachey returned to his most satirical manner in his last published
set of essays, Portraits in Miniature, especially as the most deflating pieces
were on the Trevelyan family icons, Macaulay and Carlyle.83 By the time
Strachey died in 1932, it was clear that generational and temperamental
differences, exacerbated by the war and by their increasingly divergent
postwar lifestyles, friendships, tastes and judgements as to the role of
biography and history had turned to mutual antipathy. To Strachey’s
Bloomsbury friends, ‘Old Trevy’ was now ‘the complete insider … the
80 Philip Guedalla, review of Louis Napoleon and the Recovery of France, 1848–1856 by F.A. Simpson, TLS, 25 January 1923, 55; G.M. Trevelyan, ‘The Writing of History’, TLS, letters, 1 February 1923, 76; Guedalla, ‘The Writing of History’, TLS, letters, 8 February 1923, 92; Strachey in fact hated Guedalla’s writing, which he saw as a crude parody of his own: Carrington, file of correspondence to Noel Carrington, Tate Gallery Mss, TGA 797/2/22, 7 August 1922.
81 Feske, Belloc to Churchill, 151–5, offers the best analysis of Trevelyan’s retreat to academe; G.M.
Trevelyan, ‘History and Literature’, History, 9 (1924), 81–91, doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.1924.
tb00409.x; Leonard Woolf, ‘The New Art of Biography’, Nation, (38), 12 December 1925, 404; A.F.
Pollard, ‘The Progess of History’, TLS, 26 June 1930, 521–2.
82 Trevelyan, ‘The Present Position of History’, 106; Cannadine, Trevelyan, 196, 159–60; G.M.
Trevelyan, ‘Walter Scott: The Novelist as Historian’, The Times, 21 September 1932.
83 T to S, 28 November 1928, BL, Add.Ms., 60,732, ff. 200–1; Lytton Strachey, Portraits in Miniature (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), which included ‘Six Historians’: Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude and Creighton; for Virginia Woolf on Trevelyan’s reaction, see S to Roger Senhouse, 30 December 1930, Berg, Strachey Mss, Strachey-Senhouse Letters; Holroyd, LSNB, 653.
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7 . INTERSECTING AND CoNTRASTING LIvES
perfect product of the university machine’. To Trevelyan and his fellow
dons, Strachey was an irritating gadfly – and a supercilious intellectual.
‘As to intellectuals,’ Trevy told his daughter in 1942, ‘one of the greatest
disappointments of my life has been the decadence of that class (if you can
call it a class), of which I first became aware when Lytton Strachey came
up to Cambridge.’84
Historical texts, like other literary artefacts, carry their own internal
imperatives. And it is possible that comparative biography – especially
when it tries to highlight temperamental and generational differences – may
explain too much, thereby rendering writings textual y undernourished
and biographically ‘overdetermined’. As Strachey once put it, quoting
Mallarmé, ‘poetry is not written with ideas, it is written with words’: ‘these
things that we have made are as much alive as we are, and we have become
their slaves’.85 Yet it is difficult to believe that Strachey and Trevelyan were
so enslaved; for history is written with ideas and philosophies as well as
with words. And their families, backgrounds, lifestyles, assumptions,
moments and milieus were not irrelevant to their choice of subjects and
to their treatment of them. As such, biography may help to elucidate the
sources of their early friendship and the growing antipathy between them.
Clio, like all the muses, speaks in tongues, and examining Clio’s historians
surely helps us to decipher them.86
84 For Trevelyan on Virginia Woolf, see Cannadine, Trevelyan, 39, 255; T to Mary Moorman, 10
April 1941, PRL, Trevelyan Mss, MM 1/4/29; Anne Bell and Andrew McNeillie, eds, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume IV (London: Hogarth Press, 1982), 24 August 1933, 174; Bell and McNeillie, eds, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume V (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 26 October, 5 November 1940, 333, 337; Feske, Belloc to Churchill, 152–3; T to Mary Moorman, 30 June 1942, PRL, Trevelyan Mss, MM 1/4/30.
85 Lytton Strachey, Introduction to George H.W. Rylands, Words and Poetry (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), in LE, 16–19; Strachey, ‘Peace and Peace Traps’, 269–70.
86 Trevelyan, Clio, A Muse and Other Essays.
171
8
An Ingrained Activist: The Early
Years of Raphael Samuel
Sophie Scott-Brown
When Richard Lloyd Jones looked back on his wartime school days at
Long Dene, a progressive boarding school in Buckinghamshire, one
particular incident stuck in his mind.1 He remembered being kept awake
during the hot summer of 1944. It was not the heat alone that was
responsible for this, nor was there any particular physical reason why he
should have been so wakeful. Part of the school’s ethos was a strenuous
emphasis on the pupil’s participating in forms of outdoor and rural work
such as harvesting. All that fresh air and exercise should have been quite
sufficient to exhaust even the most active of small boys. What kept Richard
Lloyd Jones awake was the incessant talking of a young, hyperactive ‘Raf-
Sam’. Lloyd Jones did not recall exactly what it was that so animated his
young classmate, late into that sticky summer’s night, but a reasonable
assumption would be that it was politics, specifically communist politics,
as the nine-year-old Raphael Samuel was already practising his skills as an
aspiring communist propagandist and organiser.2
1 Lloyd Jones later became permanent secretary for Wales (1985–93) and chairman for the Arts Council of Wales (1994–99).
2 Quoted in Sue Smithson, Community Adventure: The Story of Long Dene School (London: New European Publications, 1999), 21. See also: Raphael Samuel, ‘Family Communism’, in Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism (London: Verso, 2006), 60; Raphael Samuel, ‘Country Visiting: A Memoir’, in Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London: Verso, 1998), 135–6.
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CLIo'S LIvES
Raphael Samuel (1934–96) was an unconventional historian. A member
of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and later the youngest
member of the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party (HGCP), in
his youth, he left the party in 1956. He was a founding figure in the first
> British New Left movement and later an adult education history tutor at
the trade union – affiliated Ruskin College, Oxford. As a historian, he
was best known as the moving force behind the early History Workshop
movement (1967–79) and the History Workshop Journal (1976– ). He was
also renowned for his approach to oral and local history, and for his
pioneering work in the history of popular culture and public history.
Compared to some of his close contemporaries, such as Perry Anderson
(b. 1938) or E.P. Thompson (1924–93), Samuel is a relatively neglected
figure.3 Where accounts do exist, interpretations are divided. Given his
early membership of the CPGB and association with the HGCP, he has
naturally been viewed in relation to a trajectory of postwar British cultural
Marxist historiography, and here he has often been found wanting. He is
described by some as populist and romantic, as a man of a different and
dying era (‘the last comrade of the first New Left’) or, more emotively but
still as disingenuously, a confused Marxist, whose work, whilst creative,
lacked structure and critical force.4
Others, however, present a different perspective, challenging the use
of Marxism as a framework for understanding Samuel’s politics and
history. Ken Jones, for example, has argued that Samuel occupied a ‘non-
3 On E.P. Thompson, see: Perry Anderson, Arguments in English Marxism (London: Verso Editions, 1980); Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory: E.P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Bryan Palmer, E.P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions (London: Verso, 1994); Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McCelland, eds, E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990) . On Perry Anderson, see: Gregory Elliot, Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Paul Blackledge, Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (London: Merlin, 2004).
4 Harvey J. Kaye, The Education of Desire: Marxists and the Writing of History (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), 99; Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1997); Kynan Gentry, ‘Ruskin, Radicalism and Raphael Samuel: Politics, Pedagogy and the Origins of the History Workshop’, History Workshop Journal, 76 (2013), 187–211, doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbs042; David Selbourne, ‘On the Methods of the History Workshop’, History Workshop Journal, 9 (1980), 150–61,
doi.org/10.1093/hwj/9.1.150; Selbourne, ‘The Last Comrade: Raphael Samuel, the Ruskin Historian Who Died Last Week Was the Conscience Keeper of the Old Left’, The Observer, 15 December 1996, 24; Richard Hoggart, ‘Review of Theatres of Memory’, Political Quarterly, 66:3 (1995), 215–16; Patrick Wright, ‘Review of Theatres of Memory’, The Guardian, 5 February 1995; Stefan Collini, ‘Speaking with Authority: The Historian as Social Critic’, in English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 95–102; Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Abacas, 2002), 212.
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8 . AN INGRAINED ACTIvIST
conformist’ position in relation to the wider intellectual left. Jones recast
his apparent populism into part of a creative and democratic pedagogical
politics.5 In Samuel’s own conception, the Workshop took its stance on
the democratisation of history, rather than the reformulation of Marxism,
part of an attempt to democratise history and make ‘working-class men
and women producers of their own history’.6 Building on this, Hilda
Kean has pointed to the Workshop as a means of expanding both the
range of the historical subject matter and those considered to be engaged
in historical work. She further contended that it did this by fostering
an inclusive and democratic learning environment and demystifying the
research process.7
These accounts suggest that the Workshop, as a political intervention and
educational initiative, relates more to a species of left-libertarian politics,
characterised, across its various guises, by an anti-authoritarian and
decentralised conception of direct democracy and a view of the individual
as an agent for social change. In education, this corresponds with what
Susan Askew described as a ‘liberatory model’. Whilst primarily concerned
with education for social change and social justice, this model considers
knowledge as intrinsic (rather than extrinsic), stressing individual
change as the prerequisite for larger change and emphasising the need
for an empathetic understanding of social relationships. As a mode of
teaching practice, it adopts a person-centred approach in which learning
is a personalised, reciprocal process and participatory activity. Askew
acknowledged that, within this framework, the exact role of the educator
can be unclear or unexamined, but generally it involves a shift from an
authoritative position to one of facilitation and critique.8
5 Ken Jones, ‘Raphael Samuel: Against Conformity’, Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 5:1 (1998), 17–26, doi.org/10.1080/1358684980050103.
6 Raphael Samuel, ‘Afterword: History Workshop 1966–1980’, in Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge Paul, 1981), 410–17; ‘General Editor’s Introduction’, in Samuel, ed., The History Workshop: A Collectanea 1967–1991 (Oxford: History Workshop 25, 1991).
7 Hilda Kean, ‘Public History and Raphael Samuel: A Forgotten Radical Pedagogy?’, Public History Review, 11 (2004), 51–62; Kean, ‘People, Historians and Public History: Demystifying the Process of History Making’, Public Historian, 32:3 (2010), 25–38, doi.org/10.1525/tph.2010.32.3.25.
8 Susan Askew, ‘Educational Metamorphosis’, in Susan Askew and Eileen Carnell, Transforming Learning: Individual and Global Change (London: Continuum International Publishing, 1998), 84, 89–91. For this in particular application to history see Jorma Kalela, Making History: The Historian and the Uses of the Past (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 159–64.
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CLIo'S LIvES
Sheila Rowbotham, an early Workshop participant, endorses the idea
of Samuel as a liberatory educator, saying:
Raphael was not simply a writer but a renowned organiser, the kind who
was an initiator of great projects with the capacity to yoke his fellow to the
concept and carry them on regardless of grizzles and groans … He was the
world’s most adept hooker, and ruthless behind the charm.9
She added that:
Writers leave visible traces, they contrive their own record. Organisers,
in contrast, have a powerful impact upon those within whom they have
direct contact but tend to live on in oral memory alone.10
What made Samuel distinctive as a historian, then, was not a particular
argument that he advanced about the past, nor a specific theory of history
that he proposed, but his entire way of being a historian. As much as
reclaiming a radical view of the past, Samuel exemplified a radical approach
to the role of the historian. Samuel’s politics were enacted through his
practices of history as much as in his historical writing. This makes him as
an individual as important to ‘read’ as any of his texts. But, as Rowbotham’s
comment suggested, personalised and performative practices leave little
trace on the documentary record. They are deeply embedded in context,
perceived emotionally as much as gras
ped conceptually. This is where the
intimate perspective of the biographical approach can provide valuable
insight, situating the individual within a web of their social, cultural
and historical relationships and permitting an all-important sense of
dynamism, adaption and response, to thinking and acting.
This essay explores Samuel as an intellectual personality distinguished by
a remarkable capacity to recognise and galvanise history-making as an
everyday social activity and potential tool of social critique. It focuses on
Samuel’s formative years, from his early communist childhood through to
his student years, arguing that it was during this period that he absorbed
the values of communism as a moral framework and developed the
distinctive intellectual and practical skills of the grassroots activist and
aspiring party organiser, highly distinctive from those of the traditional
historical scholar or political theorist. These were the values and skills that
shaped his later practices as a historian.
9 Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Some Memories of Raphael’, New Left Review, I/221 (January/February 1997), 128–32.
10 Ibid.
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Communism as a way of life
Samuel was born on 26 December 1934, in North London, to Minna and
Barnett Samuel, part of an extended Jewish family. Minna Samuel was the
daughter of Jacob and Fanny Nerenstein, who had migrated to England
from Grodno, Polish Russia, at the turn of century. Once in England,
they had settled in the East End of London, where Minna was born in
1906 followed by two younger sisters, Miriam and Sarah. Here the family
ran a bookshop and publishing house specialising in Jewish literature,
Shapiro Valentine & Co. on Wentworth Street, East London. Minna
married Barnett Samuel (1906–71), a London solicitor from an orthodox
Jewish family, in 1931 and moved to Hampstead Garden Suburb in North
London. The marriage was short-lived, Minna and Barnett separated in
1941 when Samuel was not quite seven years old, later divorcing in 1946.
Minna raised Samuel, their only child. On returning to London following
evacuation during the war, Minna and Samuel lived in Kentish Town,