Clio's Lives
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ancient documents. He was, at this time, far less invested, intellectually or
emotionally, in the literal substance of the more specific historical debates
that took place amongst the group (which is not to say that he was ignorant
of or oblivious to them). It was, therefore, natural that he would be just as
inspired by the group’s other main raison d’être, its educational activities.
This manifested not only in the dissemination of its historical work but
in the organisation of large events and conferences and the facilitating of
publications, such as Our History or the Local History Bulletin to encourage
a wide cross-section of popular participation in history-making.
Later, in the wake of protracted and heated debates surrounding the
trajectory of British Marxism, Samuel, in his private notes, wrote
critically on the subjugation of the HGCP’s educational work to the
historiographical debates taking place amongst the academic membership:
Another great weakness which was also the site of division with the group
was local history. Betty Grant almost alone when she joined the group and
produced a remarkable document [on this] Lip service was paid to this
and she soldiered on with Our History.
But if one compares the local history bulletin and Our History … this
looks a very poor relation compared to the ambitious Past and Present.55
A handwritten aside to this:
P&P [Past and Present] epoch making [another sentence not legible]
Belligerently professional.56
55 Raphael Samuel, ‘Notes on Communist Party Historians Group’, Samuel 134/ British Marxist Historians, RSA.
56 Ibid.
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For Samuel, the HGCP had several important influences. Not only did
it demonstrate the importance of history as a crucial tool in the battle
of ideas, the work of members such as Hill also showed creativity in
traversing between nation, theory and in bringing to the fore focus on
popular ideologies as a means of exploring political consciousness. On the
other hand, his experiences with the group also left him with a sense of
frustration at the degree to which the more prestigious academic battles
so often took precedence over the educational-activist agenda.
Oxford student politics
Samuel had long been practising the skills of the aspiring organiser, but it
was during his student days that he really began to develop independently
his political ideas, practices and values, in particular his skills in recruitment
and political organisation. In 1952, he went up to Oxford to read modern
history at Balliol College under the supervision of Christopher Hill.
Whilst under pressure from the party to be a good student, the majority
of his time and efforts were spent on political activity. In this area, his
output during this time was tremendous. He was actively involved in
both the Oxford town party branch and the university’s student group
throughout his undergraduate years, becoming its secretary in the second
year of his degree. He engaged with a range of other left-wing groups and
initiatives, including the Socialist Club. He was the key moving force
behind numerous political petitions and campaigns, always remaining
alert to potential recruitment opportunities for the party. Towards the
end of his Oxford years, he set his sights increasingly towards working
with the Oxford Labour Club.
Samuel, committed to a minority political party that, in the Cold War
years, was viewed by many with hostility and suspicion, had to work
extremely hard in order to gain a voice in Oxford student political debate.
Reinforcing this was the fact that he was now encountering a greater
number of people who were not only acutely aware of the pragmatic
implications of political power but came from families accustomed to
exercising it and who, quite reasonably, expected to do so themselves
in the future. One strategy he adopted for dealing with these issues was
simply to cultivate a considerable flexibility in his political vocabulary.
So intently did Samuel attempt to seek out common ground in discussions
that he was even willing to adopt the less ‘esoteric’ political language
of liberalism, resplendent with references to that comforting cover-all
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concept of tolerance. In the course of this process, he recalled, he could
not help becoming ‘a bit liberal’ himself, emphasising the extent to which
he truly immersed himself into other people’s political languages.57
Another tactic he adopted was organising campaigns on issues that cut
across party-political lines. One revealing instance of this was his efforts
to forge an alliance with existentialist philosophers against the prevailing
dominance of Oxford analytical philosophy. The motivation behind this
was that whilst both the analytical and the Marxist approach to philosophy
gave a privileged position to materialist explanation, analytical philosophy
was characterised by the stress that it placed on the pursuit of ‘objectivity’
in knowledge and in its emphasis on ‘words’ rather than ‘things’.
Marxism rejected both the notions that language could be detached from
the material conditions and productive relationships in which it was
embedded or that knowledge could ever be entirely ‘objective’ or value
free. Samuel, as a communist, found common ground in his critique with
those attracted to existentialist philosophy with its austere insistence on
existence over essence. It was during this venture that he encountered
Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosophy student (and future co-founder
of the first New Left).58
There were further examples of his attempts to find issues or campaigns
that brought together a number of disparate strands of the left-wing
student body. He worked intently on a campaign against the hydrogen
bomb in response to the H-bomb tests that were carried out on Christmas
Island in 1953.59 His work on this campaign actually took him into
a realm outside of the official party policy of this time. He also dedicated
a considerable amount of energy on issues relating to anti-colonialism,
becoming active in the campaign against the British Government’s
deposition of the Guyanese Government in 1954. During his various
campaigning activities, he encountered other figures who would go on
to play key roles in the first New Left, including Stuart Hall, a Jamaican
Rhodes Scholar graduate student, and Peter Sedgwick, a grammar school
boy from a Christian family in Liverpool.60
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid.
59 Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’, 18 September 1987.
60 Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’, 20 October 1987.
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Apart from these specific campaigns, a more structured example of Samuel’s
attempts to liaise across political lines can be seen in his involvement, at
the behest of the party, with the Oxford Socialist Club. The club, a 1930s
breakaway group that had formed out of what had been the Oxford
Labour Club
, had been dormant for some years. The CPGB, committed
to ‘The British Road to Socialism’, viewed the club as an opportunity to
create a ‘broad front organisation’, and so Samuel, along with several of
his friends, set about reviving it. In part, it acted as space that allowed
for those outside of the official party to interact with communist ideas
and politics. Hall later described debate in the club as wide ranging,
pre-empting many of the issues that would later come to preoccupy the
first New Left.61 Hall also recalled Samuel’s remarkable ability to bring
even the most expansive and apparently abstract of questions in socialist
political philosophy back into some kind of direct connection with worker
unrest at the local Cowley car plant, an early glimpse of his prowess for
connective thinking!62 He became closely involved with the club’s journal,
The Oxford Left, initially taking charge of publicity (Trinity 1953),
advancing to the editorial board (Hillary 1954) and eventually becoming
the sole named editor (Michaelmas 1954).63 The journal gives some sense
of Samuel’s interests and political approach during this time. Articles such
as ‘The Mind of British Imperialism’ demonstrated his concern and astute
sensitivity towards the internal dynamics of political mentalities and the
ways in which these were reformulated over time.64
After 1954, however, Samuel began to harbour some scepticism about
the party’s strategic use of the club, feeling that it ‘stopped people being
faced with the hard question of whether or not they would become
Communists’.65 This discomfort could be construed as an example of
his unease with the ‘The British Road to Socialism’ stance of the CPGB
and his absorption of the Cold War Cominform concern to demarcate
61 Stuart Hall, ‘The Life and Times of the First New Left’, New Left Review, 61 (January–February 2010), 182.
62 Stuart Hall, oral communication with author, May 2012, Hampstead, London.
63 Both the Socialist Club and the club’s journal, The Oxford Left, anticipated many of the themes and issues that preoccupied the first New Left and dominated the contents of Universities and Left Review, addressing issues such as the role of intellectuals, colonial issues, questions of contemporary socialism and the politics of popular culture.
64 Raphael Samuel, ‘Socialism and the Middle Classes’, The Oxford Left, Hillary Term (1954); Raphael Samuel, ‘The Mind of British Imperialism’, The Oxford Left, Michaelmas Term (1954).
65 Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’, 18 September 1987. Whilst the CPGB had
committed to ‘The British Road to Socialism’ in 1951, it was only after the death of Stalin in 1953
that a greater sense of the party ‘opening up’ was experienced.
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and clarify political positions. Equally, for a 20-year-old man, still making
the journey from youth to adulthood, such sectarianism might also be
connected to the psychological and emotional processes of late adolescence
and the desire for sharply defined lines between those who were ‘one of
us’ and those who were ‘fellow travellers’, to be approached with caution.
From another perspective, this can also be seen as evidence of his belief in
alliance between openly different factions amongst the left.
Samuel’s growing interest in the Oxford Labour Club was in keeping with
his doubts concerning the use of the Socialist Club in party strategy. It was
also compatible with his desire to forge connections beyond the confines
of student life and his efforts to expand the grounds for intellectual debate.
Following the CPGB’s 1951 policy transition and later the death of Stalin
in 1953, there was a slight thaw in the intensity of the Cold War hostility,
which mellowed, marginally, the general feeling towards communists.
On becoming the branch secretary of the communist student group,
he became even more concerned to take the Labour Party seriously as
a political force. This drew him into a closer relationship with the Labour
club, which brought him perilously close to being in direct violation of his
instructions from the CPGB, whose relationship with Labour remained
profoundly uneasy throughout this time.66 The intellectual and emotional
constitution of the Labour club students was distinct from those who
identified with the harder line of communism. Communists, Samuel
would later suggest, formed a sort of ‘literati’, typically harbouring
interests in literature, poetry or philosophy and often knowing very little
about the practicalities of political life.67 Despite articulating a formal
(theoretical) appreciation for the natural sciences, the student communists
that he engaged with were more likely to approach politics on the basis
of larger metaphysical or moral terms. The Labour club, by contrast,
had a more pragmatic character in its understanding of political power,
66 Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’, 18 September 1987. Whilst the CPGB initially
sought a close working relationship with the Attlee-led Labour Government, by 1947, after repeated rejections, the party began to criticise Labour Party policy. Following the defeat of Labour in 1951, the relationship remained hostile. See also Keith Laybourn, Marxism in Britain: Dissent, Decline and Re-emergence, 1945–c.2000 (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 21–2, doi.org/ 10.4324/
9780203300626.
67 A sample of Samuel’s immediate friendship group reflects this: Pearson and Hall were English literature students; Taylor a philosophy student; Sedgwick initially read classics, later changing to psychology.
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largely because they could more confidently expect to exercise it. More
importantly, it had a greater appreciation for the mechanics and apparatus
of political power.
And so Samuel immersed himself in a complex world of alliance and
negotiation, requiring a clever use of language and a strategic engagement
with issues and other political groups. The technique that he most
favoured, and utilised above all others, was, however, an even more
personal one: the adoption of a self-consciously charming and agreeable
public persona.68 He later described this situation:
I mean there wouldn’t be a minute that I wouldn’t be aware that I was
a Communist until I left the Communist Party at 22. Anything I did,
there would always be a kind of sense that it was in some way forwarding
the cause – even if it was something like playing football or tennis or shove
ha’penny or just sitting around, because even making oneself agreeable was
in some sense making one’s unpalatable politics more palatable … There
was a sense of wanting to make the unpalatable palatable by showing
a human face. Given that you actually had a politics that was zealous, the
one thing you didn’t do … in the Communist Party was be zealous about
it because you wouldn’t get a hearing for it in a hostile climate.69
As this comment suggests, there was no dividing line between political
activism and socialising, between politics and personal relationships.
Debates would take place over coffee in the common room or rage late
into the night in student bedrooms. Quite often they were played as
a form of sport involving posturing, jostling, teasing and sparring, all of
which had entertaining, even comedic elements about them. He later
recalled that he had:
actually liked arguing with Tories, and we used to get quite a lot of fun
– in a way, almost as court jesters. It was such an improbable thing for
anybody to be a Communist – and they were very tolerant of us, and we
were delighted to be tolerated.70
Protests, attended by only a handful of people and promptly dispersed
by the college rugby club, provided a sense of camaraderie and solidarity
amongst the motley few who had turned out. In this sense, politics was the
68 One might view his earlier decision to anglicise his name to Ralph as part of this desire.
69 Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’, 20 October 1987.
70 Harrison, ‘Interview with Raphael Samuel’, 18 September 1987.
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source of deep-rooted, long-lasting friendships, amplified and intensified
in their intimacy by the single-sex college environments in which so much
of this discussion and organising took place.71
His extraordinary pursuit of Dennis Butt, a fellow student, gives a striking
illustration of this. Butt was a mature student and former wool sorter
who had come to Oxford University from the independent, trade union
– affiliated Ruskin College. A longstanding Labour man, he went on to
become a ‘prize recruit’ for the CPGB and one of Samuel’s closest friends.72
In the process of attempting to recruit Butt, he immersed himself in the
cultural, psychological and emotional values involved in Labour politics
saying later that: ‘[M]y effort, which lasted about a year, to recruit him,
as it were, on Labour ground. And I actually, without knowing it, made
myself into a kind of labour person.’73 This anecdote, analysed more
closely, suggests a rough prototype for Samuel’s later methodology as
a historian-educator. First, he worked hard to understand not only the
language of labour but also, through forming a close friendship with Butt,
to understand the specific ways that Butt as an individual interpreted it.
He then translated his own politics into a form tailored specifically to
Butt, enabling him to communicate on a deeply personal and meaningful
level with the man. This, in turn, allowed Butt to then ‘metabolise’ this