by Doug Munro
couple. Minna’s radicalism increased through her work on Spanish Aid.
Disappointed in the Labour Party’s policy on Spain, she drifted further
towards the radical left. In 1939, Minna followed her younger sisters
in joining the CPGB, a move that precipitated the eventual breakdown
of her marriage to Barnett in 1941.
Communism, with its levelling concept of ‘comrade’, allowed Minna
to escape the confines of ‘the ghetto’, the ‘suburb’ and married life. She
threw herself into party life with gusto, becoming a progress chaser in an
aircraft factory and later the key organiser of the large Slough branch of
the CPGB. At different times, she assumed the roles of literature secretary,
class tutor and engagements secretary for the Worker’s Music Association.
For a significant portion of Samuel’s childhood, Minna was a one-woman
dynamo of public activity, organising, teaching and public speaking.36
Importantly, this was not communism as political theory but as a form
of personal and social liberation.
If Minna’s influence on Samuel was characterised by activism then that
of his uncle, Chimen Abramsky, was defined by its deep intellectualism.
Abramsky was born in Minsk, Russia, in 1916, the son of Yehezkel
Abramsky, a rabbi and gifted Talmudic scholar. The young Abramsky
35 Hampstead Garden Suburb was the brainchild of the social reformer Henrietta Barnett, who had envisaged a community of mixed social classes living together in pleasant green surroundings.
36 Samuel, The Lost World, 63–8; Raphael Samuel, ‘Country Visiting: A Memoir’, Island Stories, 132–52; Alex May, ‘Keal, Minna (1909–1999)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/view/article/73220
(accessed 10 October 2016); Paul Conway, ‘Minna Keal: 1909–1999’.
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CLIo'S LIvES
received little formal schooling but had a procession of private tutors,
later becoming a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During
a visit to family in London, he became stranded by the outbreak of the
Second World War. Taking a job in Shapiro Valentine & Co., Abramsky
met and married Miriam Nerenstein, Minna’s younger sister and Samuel’s
aunt. He joined the party in 1941, becoming the ‘patriarch’ of the family’s
communism. Abramsky was a renowned bibliophile, extraordinarily
widely read and learned. He was meticulous in his scholarship, an expert
in socialist and Jewish history, a lively conversationalist and a compelling
teacher. Samuel’s aunt, Miriam Abramsky, was equally strong in her
political convictions, but preferred to express them through her warm
and welcoming hospitality. The Abramskys’ modest London household
provided a second home for Samuel as he was growing up. It also provided
an intellectual haven for a steady stream of scholars, intellectuals and
leading political and religious figures, all of whom came to engage in
intense political and philosophical debate that would often carry on late
into the night. For all the gravity and passionate nature of the discussion,
this was also a house of laughter, friendship and fun.37
In Samuel’s later autobiographical writing, a distinction in tone
suggests something of his relationship to these two figures. In writing
of his mother, whilst not uncritical, he was consistently affectionate and
enthusiastic in his depiction of her as a constant whirlwind of energy
and activity. The warmth of these portrayals would imply, at the very
least, his strong identification with her activities. His writing on his uncle,
by contrast, is respectful but much cooler in tone.38 Equally, Abramsky’s
tribute to him following his death in 1996 was similarly reserved in some
of its judgements, describing his nephew as a ‘Narodnik’ – referencing
a nineteenth-century Russian populist movement – in his political views
and personal manners.39 These subtleties in tone suggest his attraction to
37 Rapaport-Albert, ‘Chimen Abramsky Obituary’; ‘Professor Chimen Abramsky: Historian’,
The Times, 19 March 2010; Samuel, The Lost World, 63; Peter Dreier, ‘ The House of Twenty Thousand Books by Sasha Abramsky’, Huffington Post, 8 June 2014, www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/
the-house-of-twenty-thousand-books_b_5467086.html (accessed June 2014); Sasha Abramsky, The House of Twenty Thousand Books (London: Halden Publishers, 2014); Sasha Abramsky, ‘The House of Twenty Thousand Books’, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=h37Gf-awf0E&feature=youtu.be,
June 2014 (accessed June 2014).
38 Samuel, The Lost World, 63.
39 A Narodnik was a term used to describe a member of the nineteenth-century Russian populist movement. Chimen Abramsky, ‘Raphael Samuel’, Jewish Chronicle, 17 January 1997.
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8 . AN INGRAINED ACTIvIST
and admiration for his mother’s activism, whilst his more reserved respect
for Abramsky’s deep intellectualism could, it seems, be a point of division
between the two men.
Further proof of Minna’s influence can be seen in his early ambition to
the role of the party organiser.40 In this ambition he followed his mother
(the key organiser for the Slough branch of the party), indicating once again
the significance of her influence upon him. In terms of the overall CPGB
organisational structure, the ‘organiser’ was drawn from amongst the rank-
and-file membership. They were distinguished from their comrades by
their self-taught intellectual prowess forming a sort of ‘proletarian clerisy’.
The role of the organiser forged a bridge between the wider body of party
members and the party’s hierarchy.41 His aspiration to this role provides
an intriguing insight into his youthful character. As a precocious and
intelligent child from a family who had become well established within
the party structure (Abramsky also held key party positions serving as the
secretary of the party’s Jewish committee, the editor of The Jewish Clarion
and chairman of the party’s Middle East Committee), Samuel might well
have aspired to a more ‘authoritative’ position.42 And yet, he remained
attracted to this particular role that placed him in much closer relation to
the rank-and-file membership.
In the ‘Lost World’ essays, he supplied his readers with some descriptions
of the nature and the implications of these sorts of more practical ‘activist-
leadership’ roles in the party drawing on both his personal experiences
and official party documentation to do so. They make revealing reading:
In the localities, too, authority was expected to be self-effacing. Branch
secretaries were expected to comport themselves as co-workers, taking on
a good deal of the dogsbody work, as the price of the trust which reposed
in them. At branch meetings he/she was to exercise a pastoral care, drawing
the members in by allocating tasks to them, ‘involving’ them in the processes
of decision making … [and] encouraging new comers to ‘express’ themselves. 43
40 Brian Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’, 18 September 1987, transcripts in author’s possession, copies deposited at Raphael Samuel Archive (hereafter RSA), Bishopsgate Institute, London; Samuel, The Lost World, 88.
41 I
bid., 201.
42 Rapaport-Albert, ‘Chimen Abramsky Obituary’.
43 Samuel, The Lost World, 125 (emphasis added).
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And:
One started at the ‘level’ of the sympathiser, emphasising common ground,
‘building’ on particular issues, while at the same time investing them with
Party-mindedness. Plied with Party literature, invited to Party meetings,
above all ‘involved’ in some species of Party work … the sympathiser was
drawn into the comradeship of the Party by a hundred subtle threats.44
The role, as he recalled and described it, has some notable features. First, it
was an acutely social role dealing directly with people. Second, it required
the individuals in question to have a clear consciousness of their own
performance in relation to the people they were dealing with, coming
across as a co-worker, being welcoming and inclusive and so on. Third,
much depended upon the individual’s ability to synthesise different areas of
expertise into a collective endeavour and identify areas of common ground
between their interests and the person(s) they were engaging with. Finally,
it called upon skills in using that common ground as the basis to infuse the
subject with ‘party mindedness’, to provoke an internal transformation, all
the more plausible and effective because the subject was complicit in the
process. To summarise, this role utilised forms of intelligence and skill both
pragmatic and profoundly psychological in character.
There are two key points to take from Samuel’s early childhood communism.
First, his earliest encounters with communism were profoundly social,
rather than theoretical, in nature, experienced as a way of life rather
than a political idea. Second, this Popular Front, wartime communism
was heavily characterised by a complex dualism that bore significant
consequences for the development of his thinking and behaviour.
The party of his youth trod a precarious line between cooperation and
critique, between unifying invocations of the nation and the divisive
implications of class politics, between loyalty to Britain and to the Soviet
Union. The organiser, the role he came to aspire to, further rehearsed this
duality, being simultaneously part of but also at a distance from the wider
movement. All these factors prompted in him an early but acute self-
consciousness in terms of his positioning in relation to others and their
positioning in relation to him. Intellectually, it accustomed him to moving
deftly between descriptive modes and equipped him with the capacity to
continually connect the particular instance with the wider picture that,
at this time, was provided by communism as a political cause.
44 Ibid., 125–6 (emphasis added).
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8 . AN INGRAINED ACTIvIST
The Historians’ Group of the
Communist Party
The HGCP (1946–56) exemplified something of this dualism in its
attempt to integrate Marxist political analysis with a reclaiming of the
national past. The group formed in 1948 and contained a mixture of
old and young, academic and non-academic historians.45 Samuel was the
group’s youngest member, joining in 1951 as a schoolboy. As Bill Schwarz
has argued, the group’s work constituted a more substantial theorisation
of popular frontism and its call for a battle of ideas.46 This was, in part,
conveyed through the historical work produced by its members who, it
has been argued, laid the grounds for the development of critical cultural
history.47 A less acknowledged but important dimension of its activities
lay in its educational-activist agenda, which aimed to encourage and
support history-making as a common social activity and political tool
in the battle of ideas. Despite drawing its initial impetus and objectives
from the Popular Front, the group worked in very different times,
which, inevitably, impacted upon the nature of its work.48 The group’s
working life was conducted against the backdrop of the Cold War, and
the increased hostility that this fostered towards British communists, the
original enemies within, put even greater pressure on the need to forge
direct links between Marxism as a critical political-economic theory and
the domestic past.49 At the same time, the stark dividing line imposed by
the Cold War meant that there was also increased pressure for conformity
to the party line. This produced tensions within the party, in particular
towards the intellectuals and artists amongst the membership whose work,
45 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party’, in Maurice Cornforth, ed., Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A.L. Morton (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), 21–47.
46 Bill Schwarz, ‘“The People” in History: The Communist Party Historians Group 1946–1956’, in Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan, Bill Schwarz and David Sutton, eds, Making Histories: Studies in History-writing and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1982).
47 Jim Obelkevich, ‘New Developments in History in the 1950s and 1960s’, Contemporary British History, 14:4 (2000), 125–6, doi.org/10.1080/13619460008581606; Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).
48 For further discussion of this, see Alastair MacLachlan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay on the Fabrication of Seventeenth Century History (London: Macmillan 1996), doi.org/
10.1007/978-1-349-24572-7; Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 1997).
49 See Harriet Jones, ‘The Impact of the Cold War’, in Paul Addison and Harriet Jones, eds, A Companion to Contemporary Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 24–6.
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naturally, demanded conceptual and creative freedom. Always suspicious
of this bourgeois figure, at the peak of Cold War hostilities, the party
would make little room for anything suggesting ideological deviation.50
Psychologically, the experience of the Cold War, particularly in western
countries such as Britain, exacerbated the already profoundly complex
situation for party members, caught between their political convictions
and their own ethnic identities. Something of this dilemma was illustrated
by the CPGB’s 1951 shift to ‘The Road to British Socialism’, an apparently
ground-breaking shift away from Moscow, part of an attempt to revive
flagging membership.51 In reality, however, this break was limited, as
demonstrated by the party’s refusal to allow the HGCP to undertake
a historical study of the party and its subsequent failure to publicly
critique the decisions and actions of Moscow following the Yugoslav split
in 1948 or after the disastrous events of 1956.
As Schwarz suggested, Christopher Hill’s essay ‘The Norman Yoke’ is
often seen as emblematic of the group’s activities. This essay saw Hill
break from his usual terrain of seventeenth-century high politics and turn
his attention towards popular ideology.52 Tracing the trajectory of popular
accounts and invocations of ‘The Norman Yoke’, he demonstrated how
the story had been continually made and remade in line with shi
fting
political agendas and values. He concluded with the argument that only
in Marxism were the key political principles of the story, ‘the recognition
of class struggle as the basis of politics, the deep sense of Englishness of
the common people’, distilled and clarified.53 But, he warned, these
principles needed the imaginative framework of historical storytelling to
garner widespread appeal.54 The work of Hill and others with the group
offered a bold and compelling attempt at uniting national history with
Marxist theory. In pursuit of this more rigorous analysis of the English
50 On the Communist Party and intellectuals, see Andy Croft, ‘Authors Take Sides: Writers in the Communist Party 1920–1956’, in Kevin Morgan, Nina Fishman and Geoff Andrews, eds, Opening the Books: New Perspectives in the History of British Communism (London: Pluto, 1995), 83–101; Andy Croft, ‘The Boys Around the Corner: The Story of Fore Publications’, in Andy Croft, ed., A Weapon in the Struggle: A Cultural History of the British Communist Party (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 142–62. For a source more contemporaneous to the times, see Neal Wood, Communism and British Intellectuals (London: Gollancz, 1959).
51 Harry Pollitt, ‘The Road to British Socialism’, Looking Ahead (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1947).
52 Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in John Saville, ed., Democracy and the Labour Movement: Essays in Honour of Dona Torr (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), 11–67.
53 Ibid., 66 (emphasis added).
54 Ibid. (emphasis added).
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past, a number of the group, along with other non-Marxist historians,
set up the journal Past and Present (1952– ), which, whilst never a party
mouthpiece, proclaimed itself dedicated to the championing of a new,
scientific approach to history, an approach that distilled and clarified the
colourful events and personnel of history, revealing their connection to
deeper shifts in political-economic structures.
To return to this experience from Samuel’s perspective, it must be
remembered that on joining the group he was still a schoolboy, not
a trained historian. Moreover he was, at this time, a committed activist
and his interest in history was entirely ideological. His excitement was
then piqued by the prospect of political battle rather than the musk of