Twenty Years On: Views and Reviews of Modern Britain

Preface

Why history? Why Britain? I will here try to provide the reader some indication of what may have led me to become a historian of Britain. I was born in Manhattan in 1932 and lived there for a very brief period before the Depression drove my family to Brooklyn, where I suspect my father, a lawyer, was the sole support of his parents and two of his younger siblings who were still at home. We lived near Grand Army Plaza and I went first to a tiny private school nearby, then to Brooklyn Ethical Culture, and then to sixth grade at public school, perhaps because it was easy to transfer and that was the year we moved back to Manhattan. In Brooklyn, we lived just a few blocks from the just-opened main public library, built in rather grand Art Deco style, and my chief memory of it was my pleasure in reading Dr. Doolittle and Mary Poppins . Was this the origin of my interest in Britain? I haven’t looked into this, but it’s my impression that Hugh Lofting and P. L. Travers were more popular outside of England than within. My parents had a yen to live overlooking the Hudson River, and we moved in 1941 to a fine apartment at Ninetieth Street and Riverside Drive. In my view, growing up in New York gives one an unfair cultural advantage, although it also runs the risk of turning one into a rather odious smart-ass.

What was in my childhood that predisposed me to be a historian of Britain with the particular interests that I have? My father fancied himself as something of an English gentleman, having his clothes and shoes custom-made. He had as his legal signature Stansky. It was only years later that I discovered the reason for this. In the 1920s he was present at some benefit, presumably for a Jewish cause, at which a blown-up check was displayed, signed by a member of the Mond family, Lord Melchett. The signature was simply Melchett, as peers signed themselves. I rather think my father liked to think of himself as Lord Stansky.

My sister was named Marina and I believe that was a little bit of English snobbism, as her name may have been inspired by that of Marina, Duchess of Kent. She was Greek and the name may have been simply one suggested by a Greek friend of our family. In a way, it is rather appropriate that she should have become the Lady Vaizey, the widow of a life peer, John Vaizey, the economist. And she has lived for almost sixty years in England, having a very distinguished career as an art critic.

I had gone to a small private high school and then I went to Yale. That college exerted a great influence upon me, although I had mixed feelings about its worship of worldly success at the same time that it cultivated in its students the veneer of a rather Waspy gentleman. It was there that I became more formally interested in British history. But I suspect even more formative was my first visit to England in the summer of 1950. I went on a Youth Hostel trip to France, Switzerland, and Italy. There were plenty of signs still about of the destruction the war had caused. My two best friends on the trip, two women from Smith, and I decided to extend the trip on our own for two weeks in England. I think that we were led to this idea because one of them had an English cousin, Hugh Alexander, and he would show us about. It was then that I met the English toasters that my friend Peter Mandler has suggested were so important in my thinking about England. The English relation to toast became emblematic. Perhaps those toasters with their primitive technology were all that was available in the 1950s. They bore a marginal relation to electric power as there was an element in the center and you put the bread in, but you had to watch it carefully that it didn’t burn (which it almost always did, or else it didn’t toast and turned soggy) and you had to turn the pieces around. Why the English insist on toast as part of breakfast in any case is quite unclear, as unlike more pleasure-loving Americans, they believe in eating it cold, and frequently soggy. What does the toaster represent: the English diffidence about technology?

My time in London was also important, despite my problems at the bed-and-breakfast where I was staying off the Finchley Road. The geyser to supply hot water, and its needing to be fed with shillings to keep it going, generally defeated me. I also traveled about a bit, hitchhiking to Winchester, Stonehenge, and Salisbury. Somewhat to my surprise, I was seen as an old hand at hosteling, being asked by the hostel warden at Winchester to advise some neophytes. On the other hand, my general scruffiness was adversely and legitimately commented on by the butler at the home of Sir Louis Sterling, the record magnate, where I had been asked to dinner. He was the brother of a close family friend in New York, where Sir Louis had been born.

Inadvertently, Hugh Alexander would play an important part in my life. He was a civil servant and a chess champion. He was also a central figure, a friend and colleague of Alan Turing, at Bletchley, the famous Enigma code-cracking establishment, which at that point was completely unknown. But most to the point for my subsequent life, he was a Kingsman, having done a BA at King’s College, and when he took the three of us to Cambridge naturally he emphasized his college. I think that these were crucial seeds in my interest in England, which would grow in the following years. But they had existed already in the years at Yale. In my freshman year I had taken the honors English class, taught by stars of the English Department, in my case Louis Martz, in which we read intensively a group of English poets running from Chaucer to Eliot. Eliot was a reigning deity at Yale at that point. I even participated in a quite hysterical musical based on The Waste Land at a cast party done by the stage hands, of whom I was one, of the Yale undergraduate drama society.

Interest in England was naturally reinforced by the Anglophilia of Yale, although surprisingly I never took a course in English history, not even the legendary one given by Lewis Curtis, father of my classmate Perry Curtis, who is himself a very distinguished historian of Britain. A great influence was my classmate Russell Thomas, with whom I’ve lost touch. His father, with the wonderful name of Thomas Thomas, had in some capacity participated in the Versailles Conference. He was a Harvard classmate of T. S. Eliot’s elder brother. Russell was the nephew of the great editor Maxwell Perkins. Through these connections Russell knew a great deal about the English literary scene. He seemed extraordinarily knowledgeable about the particular mixture of art, ideas, and gossip—or if you prefer, social and family connections—that characterized that world and has interested me ever since. We would have tea almost every day at the Elizabethan Club and also more drunken conversations with our friends about once a week when we consumed quite disgusting amounts of cheap sherry. As an undergraduate, I took mostly European Continental History. I had taken the freshman European survey with lectures by Sherman Kent and Basil Henning.

The class I enjoyed most was the junior intensive history seminar taught by Leonard Krieger. It was there that I wrote my first paper on Englishmen and the Spanish Civil War. It was about John Cornford, who had been killed in the war. Perhaps I was fascinated that Bernard Knox, who gave a fabulous course at Yale on Greek plays—I still have the books for it—had fought alongside Cornford in Spain on behalf of the Loyalists. I also had an odd experience of the growing strength of McCarthyism at the time. Knox had written the chapter on Cornford in Spain in the Cornford memorial book published shortly after his death, so it was no secret that Knox had been there. I mentioned this in my paper, which presumably no one would see but Professor Krieger. Nevertheless, as I remember, he told me that this was a bad idea to mention him and that somehow I might get Knox in trouble. Fifteen years later, when William Abrahams and I wrote Journey to the Frontier about Cornford and Julian Bell, Knox wanted himself to be in the book under a pseudonym. It would be some years before he started to write a series of essays about the Civil War. I went on to write a senior essay at Yale on four Englishmen and their involvement in the Civil War: Cornford, Julian Bell, George Orwell, and Stephen Spender. Knox in one of his essays wrote that a Yale student, presumably me, turned to him once and exclaimed, You’re my thesis.

What to do after Yale? Law school? Graduate school in History? I wasn’t sure, and a nice solution would be to study in England. I applied for the scholarships available at the time. I didn’t even get Yale’s endorsement for the Rhodes, but there would have been no way I would have received one. Five of my classmates did so, including my freshman roommate, Don Erickson, and the eventual Yale Law School dean and judge Guido Calabresi. At that point, Woodrow Wilson fellowships might take one to England, but I felt I had blown the interview by mispronouncing Walter Bagehot’s last name. Marshalls came into existence the following year and I’m sure I wouldn’t have won one. The Ehrman Fellowship from Yale to King’s was only available every other year, not that year. (Standish Meacham would have it the following year, which made the second year at King’s that much more pleasurable. We had been contemporaries at Yale, but I didn’t get to know him well and he did not become a close friend until we were together at both Cambridge and Harvard for quite a few years.) The annual Yale fellowship to Clare College at Cambridge was won by one of the stars of our class, Jim Thomson, and he too would become a close friend at both Cambridge and later Harvard.

We were far from being a rich family, but my parents with great generosity offered to stake me to the time in England. At that time it was comparatively inexpensive. I think that my father felt that this might lead me ultimately to study law, but if so he never said so explicitly. I applied to King’s as an affiliated student to do a second BA in two years and was turned down. I was so upset that I burned the letter. And lo and behold about a week later I received a telegram reversing the decision and saying that room had been found. I should have asked at some point, but I never did, how this came about. My theory was that Hugh Alexander had intervened with the senior tutor, his old friend Patrick Wilkinson. In a sense it was an introduction to one characteristic of the English system. It tries to look objective, but in so many ways what happens is tied to whom you might know and someone putting in a word.

I think the two years in England, 1953 to 1955, were crucial in my shaping as a historian of England. Not that I knew then that I would become that, although it was a possibility. Whatever one might say against Harvard as an arrogant institution, I must say that it was amazingly indulgent to me as an applicant, as I kept applying and then after acceptance deciding not to come at that point to either its law school or its department of history.

In the middle of my Cambridge career, I did make a gesture toward the law through spending my first summer doing a law course at Cambridge as a prerequisite to reading law my second year. My father always felt that I had a hateful time that summer. In fact I had a fine time studying with Roland Brown, who became the attorney general in Tanzania, and Bill Wedderburn, who went on to a distinguished legal career at the London School of Economics as well as becoming a life peer. And I enjoyed reading the wonderful stories of the common law cases. But even if I were to become a lawyer eventually, it did seem to me that I wasn’t getting the most out of Cambridge by doing that, and so I switched back to history. The ever patient senior tutor, Patrick Wilkinson, put up with me. Such figures must be accustomed to the waywardness of youth.

Some years ago there was a discussion on H-Albion on what graduate students should read about modern Britain. I was struck by one person who pointed out that it was hard to find readings on two aspects of England that he believed were extremely and possibly the most important concepts to understand: the continuing importance of class and of the idea of the intellectual aristocracy. I could not have come to a more appropriate place to study for an awareness of the intellectual aristocracy, and like almost any other place in England it was a fine location for the study of class. That year, 1953, Noel Annan, a fellow of King’s and shortly to be its provost, had published in the Festschrift for G. M. Trevelyan his famous essay, The Intellectual Aristocracy. The essay dealt with where the personal and the intellectual met, or to put it another way, the convergence of ideas and gossip. So much of English conversation, it seems to me, consists of telling stories, but stories that might well have some wider point. I had a proclivity already for looking into areas where the personal, the social, the political, the literary, the artistic, and the intellectual combined, but certainly it was reinforced by my two years at King’s. But I also think that it was particularly valuable to be there as an undergraduate, to live my first year in college with a view out of my ground-floor window across the great lawn to Clare, and to the right the chapel, and to the left the Cam. I remember coming out the first night into the front quad and wondering whether I was really there, could this be true, if that doesn’t sound too mawkish.

At that time, unlike now, there weren’t any what are now called taught MA courses. It was either a BA or a PhD, and there was no way I was ready to do the latter. Also, because of conscription and the English habit of men doing their military service before going to university, it meant that there was barely any age difference between myself and those who were also undergraduates. I’m sure that college life was far different from what it had been before the war, but it was also far more traditional than it is now. King’s was still an all-male college. There was still rationing, though barely, and I had to acquire a ration book and hand it in for butter and bacon, if I remember correctly. We still had to wear gowns to dinner, to tutorials, and when we were out of our college at night.

I did a two-year Part Two of the History Tripos course and had fine supervisions in the weekly tutorials, about two-thirds of the time with the solid and more traditional teaching of Christopher Morris and John Saltmarsh, and the other third with Noel Annan and Eric Hobsbawm. The English teaching system, at least as I experienced it, was a combination of the professional and the personal. In the United States, except at the graduate level, I think it is comparatively rare that the student-teacher relationship can be—what should we call it?—a professional friendship. I had known some teachers well at Yale, most notably Charles Blitzer and Howard Lamar. There were very few graduate students and younger faculty who lived in the Yale residential colleges whom one came to know somewhat. There was a senior common room at the Yale colleges whose members would turn up from time to time. But it was very rare to come to know a faculty member well, and to the degree that such a person became a friend he (and in those days at Yale it was inevitably he) would be less likely to be a mentor. Somehow in England it worked out that a person could be both. I had studied with Charles and by chance he was at St. Catharine’s my first year, and it was through him that I met another fellow of St. Catharine’s, John Vaizey, who eight years later would become my brother-in-law. What I did not realize for some time was that King’s was unusual in the closeness of the relationship between the dons and the students, although it certainly existed in other Oxford and Cambridge colleges as I know from the experience of friends. One aspect that may have been unique to King’s was that many of the fellows had lunch with the undergraduates. And then after lunch generally one of the undergraduates would offer the group, including the dons present, coffee in his room. There were still a fair number of bachelor dons who lived in college. There was the colorful but slightly silly provost, Sir John Sheppard, who had been a fringe member of the Bloomsbury Group. Some of the more famous figures who lived in college tended not to come into lunch, for example Dadie Rylands and the great economist A. C. Pigou, who allegedly was only friendly with the undergraduates who were mountain climbers. One saw his tall and eccentric figure strolling along the college walkways. The other economists were quite friendly, such as Robin Marris and Harry Johnston. There was the great bibliographer A. N. L. Munby, who was Librarian of the College. And scientists as well, such as the biologist Kenneth Harrison who was more interested, I think, in the stained glass of the chapel than his subject.

In a way, the English system, at least then, was rather the flipside of the American. It was true that one only read one subject, but in a sense the work of distribution was done less painfully, perhaps, not only through one’s fellow undergraduates but through a sense of the social and intellectual community that was the fellowship that included all members of the college. One was a junior member of college, but very much a treasured and well-treated member of the group. The most famous figure who lived in the college was not an academic at all, E. M. Forster, and he frequently came to lunch as well as taking a small role at the play readings of the 10 Club, of which I became the secretary. The undergraduates I knew best were my fellow historians, among them James Cargill Thompson who died much too young but made his mark as a historian of the Reformation; Neal Ascherson; and Tam Dalyell who was then head of the university Tory organization and had not yet improbably launched upon his splendid career, unusual for a Scottish laird, as a radical MP and ultimately Father of the House. There was a very welcoming Yale person from the class just before my own at the college whom I hadn’t known before—Bob Evans—and it was through him that I so rapidly made many friends. Through Bob Evans as well I also met Frances Cornford, the poet, the granddaughter of Darwin, and of course the mother of John Cornford about whom I had written at Yale. During term she had an almost weekly small at-home that was quite wonderful at which we discussed serious topics with I suspect the excessive earnestness of the young. It was great fun to be on the fringes of the intellectual aristocracy through her and some of the dons one knew at King’s.

I also went to a fair number of lectures. I remember with pleasure those in European history by Herbert Butterfield, Denis Mack Smith, and Denis Brogan; British history by J. H. Plumb, and with its revealing title for imperial history, The Expansion of Europe, which I presume is no longer an acceptable term, with lectures by Jack Gallagher. (I also studied the topic within the college with Ian Stephens who had been editor, I believe, of The Times of India.) There were tour de force lectures by Noel Annan. He as well as Eric Hobsbawm, who at that time had a college research appointment, also gave tutorials to the undergraduate historians of the college. These were the days of McCarthyism. It was much less intense in Britain but it was an interesting question whether it affected Hobsbawm’s career. He had a term fellowship and one speculated whether his Communism impeded a further Cambridge career. At that point he had written very little, and it may have been that moving to Birkbeck College, London, unleashed his creativity to become one of the most famous historians of his time. He had done his dissertation on the Fabians and years later he resisted my attempt to publish it in a series I was editing. I did do a special subject on England and the French Revolution with R. J. White, a conservative and imaginative historian whose From Waterloo to Peterloo I’ve always found a very useful and insightful book.

Not having grown up in England or its empire, there was obviously much for me to learn about the country. On the other hand, it can be an advantage to be an outsider. This was most important in terms of class and the English obsession with the subject. The ideal for the English, it seems to me, is to emerge from the womb knowing all the indicia of class because it is something that one is supposed to know, not learn. And each institution in England adores to establish its own idiosyncratic ways of doing things. My favorite story along this line is that of a young fellow of Queen’s, Oxford, who told me that the only way to find out how to do things in a college is to charge ahead and do it wrong, and then give a college servant the infinite pleasure of telling you how to behave and do it right. The British tend not to know or care about American class but take it as a given that others should be interested in the ramifications of the British class system. Only the bumptious Jasper Rose, a young fellow of the college, once asked me a question no English person would direct to another: What are you, middle class? Perhaps he felt he could dispense with the sort of conversation the English become adept at as a means to discover, to the nth degree, what class position a particular individual holds. The United States tends to be a more localized culture, oddly enough, and the indications of status in one area might be very different from those in another. But in England (I won’t venture to generalize about other parts of