Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

Both communists and non-communists, therefore, felt the same sense of relief and hope when Hitler invaded the USSR on 22 June 1941. In what was essentially a working-class unit like our company, there was more than relief. Generations brought up during the Cold War are not aware how widely British workers and even Labour leaders before the war had thought of Soviet Russia as in some sense ‘a workers’ state’, as well as the one great power committed to opposing fascism, as it were ex officio. And, of course, everybody knew that its support against Hitler was indispensable. There was no shortage of deeply hostile observers and critics, but until the Cold War the dominant image of the USSR in the British labour movement was not that of totalitarianism, mass terror and the gulag. So in June 1941 Party members, sighing with relief, returned to what they had been saying before the war, and rejoined the masses of ordinary Britons. On my suggestion, I got a football signed by every member of the 560th starting with the company sergeant-major, and sent it to the Soviet Embassy in London for transmission to an equivalent engineers’ unit in the Red Army. I think the Daily Mirror, already very much the forces’ paper, published a photo. After 22 June 1941 communist propaganda more or less made itself.

III

However little I contributed to Hitler’s downfall or to the world revolution, there was a lot more to be said for serving in the Royal Engineers than in the Army Education Corps. It is far from clear what the traditional army thought of an outfit that claimed to teach soldiers things they did not need to know as soldiers, and to discuss non-military (or any) matters. It was tolerated, because its head, Colonel Archie White, was a professional soldier who had won a VC in his time and because most serving soldiers in the war were undeniably past and future civilians, whose morale required more than the inculcation of regimental loyalty and pride. The army did not like the AEC’s link with the new Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA),which issued regular monthly discussion pamphlets on political subjects, as like as not written by Labour sympathizers. Conservative politicians were later to hold ABCA responsible for the radicalization of the armed forces who, in 1945, massively voted Labour.

This is to overestimate the interest of the bulk of servicemen and women in specifically political literature. ABCA appealed to and aimed at the reading minorities, but did not excite the masses. If any reading-matter shaped the squaddies’ politics, at all events in or within reach of the UK, it was the Daily Mirror, a brilliantly produced and certainly Labour-sympathizing tabloid more widely read and discussed by the troops than any other. Nor can I claim to have made any greater contribution to the political radicalization of the British army’s Southern Command than to the defeat of Hitler. After June 1941 the Party line was winning the war, and this aligned communists with everyone else, though it made them more reluctant to criticize the government than less aligned and disciplined leftwingers, except on issues suggested by the USSR, such as demanding an invasion of western Europe much sooner than Roosevelt and the even more reluctant Churchill wanted. Public opinion did not need the Party to arouse passionate admiration and enthusiasm for the Red Army and Stalin. During the war my then father-in-law, a retired and non-political sergeant-major in the Coldstream Guards (though a Labour voter in 1945) liked to remind visitors proudly that he looked like Vishinsky, the notorious prosecutor in the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s.

Since the army did not quite know what to do with them, AEC sergeant-instructors like me (the lowest rank in the Corps) found themselves in a curious military limbo, rather like military chaplains, except without the officers’ pips and the ritual occasions for which the padre’s presence was mandatory. They were distributed in ones and twos throughout the training camps or base camps, or attached, without any very clear function, to operational formations. We did not really belong to the outfits that were technically responsible for our rations, quarters and pay; nobody troubled us much. We had arms, but they were so irrelevant that, when I was finally demobilized, there was no available mechanism for handing in my rifle. On the other hand, wherever stationed, I had no difficulty finding a place for my typewriter and a few books. I cannot recall that anyone in the Guards Armoured Division, to which I was attached for a while, ever commented on the appearance of a sergeant whose dress and bearing made no serious attempt to live up to the notoriously exigent requirements of the Household Brigade. Nobody but an Education sergeant would have got away with it. At least until we went overseas, the army allowed us to live a life of semi-detachment. I cannot remember how often I went to London from the various places in southern England to which the AEC took me, but in the end – and particularly after I married in the spring of 1943 – I spent practically every weekend there.

So, for practical purposes I increasingly found myself living like a civilian weekend commuter. Indeed, there were times when even my daily life was hard to distinguish from that of civilians, except for the fact that I wore a uniform. Thus in my last eighteen months I lived in Gloucester, billeted on a Mrs Edwards, an agreeable middle-class lady, friend and supporter of past and future Labour MPs in the area, whose sitting room contained a Matisse of medium quality which her financial adviser – evidently a good one – had persuaded her to buy for investment in 1939 for £900. In the election campaign of 1945 I even canvassed there for the Labour Party, amazed like so many others at the unexpectedly massive support I encountered on the doorsteps. I even found myself, representing the army, addressing the workforce at one of the great aircraft plants along the road from Gloucester to Cheltenham, which were the strongholds of the local CP. I concluded that I was not a natural mass orator.

Nevertheless, London was where I really lived as an adult human being. That is where I had spent all my leaves anyway, in the days of the Blitz of 1940–41, discovering on night-time walks that only a degree of desensitized fatalism (‘it will only hit you if it’s got your name on it’) makes it possible to conduct the usual activities of life under bombardment. That was also where, since I could now get there so often, a less irregular and unpredictable private life became possible. In May 1943 I married Muriel Seaman, whom I had vaguely known as a very attractive LSE communist girl, and who was now working in the Board of Trade. This enables me to say that I was once married to one of the few literal Cockneys (‘born within the sound of Bow bells’), for she was born in the Tower of London, her mother the daughter of a Beefeater (the Wardens of the Tower), her father a sergeant of the Coldstream Guards detachment detailed to guard its treasures. It also helped to clarify my postwar future. As someone married to a full-time senior civil servant, I would have to change my postwar field of research, or face leaving a wife in London while I spent a couple of years in French North Africa. After consulting my old teacher Mounia Postan, now also a temporary civil servant in London, I hit on the history of the Fabian Society, practically all of whose sources were in the metropolis. The subject turned out to be disappointing. But then, so also did my own marriage, like a number of other wartime marriages, although I did not think so at the time. Fortunately, we had no children.

I had met Muriel again through my main London friends, Marjorie, an old flame from the LSE, and her partner, the charming economist Tedy Prager, another old LSE red, who had returned from the temporary exile (Isle of Man, Canada) to which the British government had almost automatically sent so many of the passionately anti-Nazi young Austrian and German refugees. After his Cambridge doctorate he worked in what would today be called a think-tank, PEP (Political and Economic Planning), before returning to Austria in 1945 as a loyal Party member; by then with another wife. From the point of view of his career, professional or perhaps even political, he would have done better to stay. They were among the rare couples of my student generation or age group who lived and worked permanently in wartime London – my cousin Denis Preston’s menage was another – for most of the physically fit men were in uniform, and only a few servicemen, mostly in staff and intelligence work, were based in the metropolis. On the other hand, the place was full of women one had known in student days, for the war provided far more significant jobs for women than before. By age, health and gender, one’s London friends and contemporaries were thus a curiously skewed community. The men blew in and out, visitors from outside, as I was myself. The regular residents were the women, and those unfit and past military age. But there was one more constantly present scene: the foreigners, which, so far as I was concerned, meant those who operated in the German language. So it was natural that Tedy Prager should bring me into the broad ambit of the Free Austrian Movement, in which, of course, as a communist he was deeply involved.

I expect that, at a loose end and a regular visitor to London, I would sooner or later have found my way into the refugee milieu. Indeed, I had come across them from the start in the course of my military duties on Salisbury Plain, for nobody was more likely to be found in restrooms and libraries than the miscellaneous collection of musicians, former archivists, stage-managers and aspirant economists from central Europe whom Britain was employing as unskilled labourers in the Pioneer Corps. (In due course many of them were more rationally employed in the armed forces.) Although I had absolutely no emotional tie to Germany, and little enough to Austria, German had been my language, and since leaving Berlin in 1933 I had made enormous efforts not to forget it in a country where I no longer had to use it. It still remained my private language. I had written my voluminous teenage diaries in it, and even in wartime the diaries I occasionally kept. While English was my regular literary idiom, the very fact that my country refused to make any use of my bilinguality in the war against Hitler made me want to prove I could still write the language. In fact, in 1944 I became a freelance contributor to a poorly printed German exile weekly, financed by the Ministry of Information, Die Zeitung, for which I wrote various literary pieces. Whatever the political or propagandist object of this journal was, it failed to achieve it, and so its disappointed backers shut it down immediately the war ended. The paper was bitterly opposed both by the German social-democratic and socialist exiles and by the communist emigres. From this I infer that I cannot have consulted the Party about it, or, in other words, that I did not think of it as ‘political’ at all. I had written out of the blue to the paper’s literary editor ‘Peter Bratt’, who turned out to be one Wolfgang von Einsiedel, a wonderfully cultured, soft-faced, homosexual relative of Bismarck and numerous Prussian generals, literary editor on the Vossische Zeitung before 1933. He treated me with exemplary kindness, understanding and friendship, no doubt correcting my German. We used to meet and talk in wartime Soho pubs. I lost contact with him after he moved to Munich, but perhaps this book is a suitable place to give thanks to one of the few persons in wartime outside my family and the Communist Party to whom I owe a personal debt.

The Free Austrian Movement, into which Tedy Prager brought me, was a much more serious matter, politically and culturally. Though behind the scenes it was organized by the communists, and therefore run with great efficiency, it succeeded in mobilizing the great bulk of the not very heavily politicized Austrian emigrant community (including my future father-in-law in Manchester), on the basis of a simple and powerful slogan: ‘Austrians are not Germans’. This was a dramatic break with the tradition of the first Austrian Republic (1918–38) in which all parties, with the exception of the handful of surviving Habsburg loyalists – and since about 1936 the communists – assumed the opposite and emphasized that their country was German Austria, and (until Hitler) looked forward to an eventual unification with Germany. Ideologically Hitler’s Anschluss in March 1938 therefore disarmed its opponents: the old socialist leader Karl Renner (who was to become the first President of the second Austrian Republic in 1945) had even welcomed it. The communists had for some time developed an interesting argument in favour of the historic and even cultural separateness of Austria from Germany, for which I was also eventually mobilized, being both a communist and an available qualified historian. (From April 1945 to the time I was demobilized in 1946 I wrote a series of historical articles along these lines in the Free Austrian journals, probably my first published historical work.) Not being Germans was a line that naturally appealed to the overwhelmingly Jewish Austrian emigrant community, which, with all its gratitude and admiration for Britain, in any case seems to have found it harder to assimilate to local society than the emigrant Germans. It also fitted in with the postwar policy of the Allies, which meant that the Free Austrian Movement – by far the best-organized section of the continental refugees – enjoyed some official respect and was largely free from the more public squabbles so typical of emigre ś śpolitics. It was also unusually successful in giving the Austrian child and teenage refugees of the 1938–9 Kindertransporte a sense of community and future in its ‘Young Austria’. At all events, they returned to Austria with the warmest memories of their British exile. Several of my later friends, notably the poet and translator Erich Fried and the painter Georg Eisler, came from this milieu.

Life in semi-detachment from the army was thus acceptable enough, even if hardly demanding. I had a wife, friends and a cultural scene in London, and (thanks to my cousin Denis, who was associated with a tiny periodical for intellectual and mostly left-wing aficionados, Jazz Music) I got to know and learn from the small community of serious jazz and blues fans in and out of London. Indeed, one of my more successful army educational enterprises was a jazz record class I organized for a so-called Young Soldiers training unit in deepest Dorset, for which I travelled regularly to Bournemouth to borrow records, and improve my own knowledge from one of them, Charles Fox. Moreover, though I was not formally organized in any Party branch, as far as I recall, there was plenty of politics to discuss, since in 1943 Moscow seemed to put the entire future of the communist movement into question. It dissolved the Communist International. In the same year the Tehran meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill moved Stalin to announce the prospect of a continued postwar collaboration between capitalism and socialism. The Communist Party of the USA was consequently dissolved. The American communist leader Earl Browder announced that ‘Capitalism and Socialism have begun to find a way to peaceful coexistence and collaboration in the same world’ ⁴ – a proposition no communist would have maintained in public without prior clearance with Stalin – and the British CP based its plans for the future on the assumption that this is what ‘the Tehran line’ meant. Indeed, someone at King Street – I suppose it must have been Emile Burns, the culture commissar at the time – actually asked me to prepare a memorandum for their discussions on the economic possibilities of postwar capitalist–communist development. Loyal and disciplined as we were, not all revolutionaries found these ‘new perspectives’ easy to swallow, even when we could see why it might be sensible to dissolve the Comintern, and had no doubt that socialism was not going to come to the USA in anyone’s lifetime.

And yet, not surprisingly, every day of this existence was a reminder that I was doing nothing to win the war, and that nobody would let me near any job, however modest, where my qualifications and gifts, such as they were, might have been of some use for this purpose. The division to which I was attached prepared to go overseas, but without me. From the cliffs of the Isle of Wight I could see what was clearly the gathering of the invasion fleet for France, while I had nothing better to do than to play the uniformed tourist in Queen Victoria’s camp residence Osborne, and to buy a second-hand copy of Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age in a bookshop. I volunteered to go abroad, but nobody wanted to know. I was sent to Gloucester. As far as the greatest and most decisive crisis in the history of the modern world was concerned, I might as well not have been there.

And yet, although I did not realize it, I was to see something indirectly of the war after all. I was posted to the Military Wing of the City General Hospital, Gloucester, where I acted as a sort of general welfare officer or liaison with civilian bodies offering help. It specialized in serious casualties, increasingly the battle casualties from Normandy, and especially in the treatment of severe burns. It was a place of penicillin, blood and skin transfusions, limbs wrapped in cellophane and men walking around with things like sausages suspended from their faces, dressed in the curiously strident ‘hospital blue’ with the red ties of military patients. It dealt with everybody, even with wounded Germans (one officer explained to me that he had not been a Nazi, but he had given a personal oath of loyalty to the Führer) and Italians (one of them, in bed and reading Strindberg in an Italian translation, talked and talked and would not let me go, though I could barely understand Italian: about Italian officers, Britain and Italy, the future of Italy, the war, anything). We were naturally prouder of our ‘Allies’, whom I recorded in a fortnightly bulletin: the Pole from Torun, who had fought in both armies, deserting from the Germans in Normandy and back there again with the Poles after a night in Edinburgh; and the ward’s showpiece, the little Moroccan, with his thin, high-cheeked Berber face, in bulging hospital blues with a much-unfolded citation for exemplary bravery of ‘le jeune spahi Amor Ben Mohammed’ at Himeimat, who communicated with us via a French Algerian, Private Colleno of the Free French.

It was a place of disaster. And yet, the most extraordinary thing about this place of blood was that in it a death surprised us. It was a place of hope, rather than tragedy. Let me quote what I wrote at the time:

The unexpectedness of seeing people with only half a face and others rescued from burning tanks, has now passed. Occasionally someone comes in whose mutilation is a shade more gruesome, and we hold our breath when we turn to him, for fear our face might give away our shocked repulsion. We can now reflect at leisure that this is how Marsyas looked when Apollo had finished with him; or how unstable the balance of human beauty is, when the absence of a lower jaw will completely unhinge it.

The reason for this callousness is that mutilation is no longer an irrevocable tragedy. Those who come here know, in general, that they will leave in the end as, approximately, human beings. It may – it will, in fact – take them months or even years. The process of completing them, a delicate living sculpture, will take dozens of operations and they will pass through stages when they will look absurd and ridiculous, which may even be worse than looking horrific. But they have hope. What faces them is no longer an eternity shut away in some home, but human life. They lie in saline baths because they have no skin, and joke with one another because they know they will get some. They walk round the ward with faces striped like zebras and pedicles dangling like sausages from their cheeks.

It is only in a hospital such as this that one begins to realize the meaning of Hope.

And not only hope for the body. As the end of the war, and certain victory, drew nearer, hope for the future was in the air. Here are two news items from the bulletin I published for the Military Wing.

I used to be in agricultural work, but my feet are gone, and I can’t do it any longer. Mr Pitts asked me what I wanted to do and I said, having been a motor-mechanic in the Army, how about it? So I’m going to a training school in Bristol … to polish up my i.c. engines, 45/ a week if I live at home, and I’m not forced to stick to the job … I think this plan for setting disabled soldiers on the road is pretty good.

And again: ‘The ABCA Discussion on Friday will be opened by Sgt. Owen RA of Hut 9 who will give his idea of ‘‘How I’d set about rebuilding’’.’ And Sgt Owen, a foreman bricklayer and once TUC delegate for his union, wondered whether ‘any other men in Building have any ideas to bring forward’. The end of the war was near, there would be a General Election (some wards actually asked for the voting forms before they had been distributed) and things would be different. Who did not share this belief in 1944 and 1945, even if the first of our worries after the end of the war was naturally when we would get demobilized?

It was mine too. Pointless as my military service was, while the war lasted it was both normal and necessary. I had no complaints. Once the war was over, as far as I could see, every day in the army was a day wasted. As the summer of 1945 turned to autumn and then to winter, I was approaching the end of my sixth year in uniform, but the army showed no sign of wishing to get rid of me. On the contrary. Early in 1946, to my utter astonishment, it proposed to send me, attached to, of all things, an airborne unit, to, of all places, Palestine. The army seemed to think being sent to fight Jews or Arabs was a compensation for not being sent to fight Germans.

This, finally, was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Communist Jews were, of course, anti-Zionists on principle. And yet, whatever my sympathies, antipathies and loyalties, the situation of a Jewish soldier dropped into the middle of a tripartite dispute between Jews, Arabs and the British was filled with too many complications for me. So, for the first time I pulled strings. I telephoned Donald Beves, the Tutor at King’s, saying I wanted to get out of the army to take up my 1939 research studentship. He wrote the necessary letters, saying how indispensable it was for me to return to Cambridge, and they did the trick. On 8 February 1946 I handed in my uniform, though keeping a gas mask case, which turned out to be a useful shoulder bag, received my civvie clothes and fifty-six days’ demobilization leave. At the age of twenty-eight and a half years, I returned to London and to human life.

11

Cold War

I

In 1948 the borders between East and West in Germany became front lines in the Cold War. During the ‘Berlin Crisis’ which began when the Russians cut land communications to that city in early April, and the long months of the subsequent Berlin airlift, East and West were locked into a dangerous and nerve-racking confrontation of forces. Communists in the West, however insignificant, were ‘on the other side’. As far as I was concerned, the Cold War therefore began in May 1948, when the Foreign Office informed me that it was unfortunately unable to confirm my invitation to take part for a second time in the British Control Commission’s course to ‘re-educate’ the Germans. The reasons, it was abundantly obvious, were political. A silent but comprehensive effort to eliminate known Party members from any positions connected with British public life began about that time. While it was neither as hysterical nor as thorough-going as in the USA, where by the mid-1950s communists, or even self-described Marxists, had virtually disappeared from college and university teaching, it was a bad time to be a communist in the intellectual professions. Public policy encouraged discrimination and treated us as potential or actual traitors, and we were deeply suspect to our employers and colleagues. Liberal anti-communism was not new, but in the Cold War, with ample assistance from propaganda financed by the US and British authorities, the loathing of Stalinism and the belief (not shared by the British government¹) that the USSR was bent on immediate world conquest gave it a new hysterical edge.

Until then the political temperature, in Britain at least, had been much less overheated. Within the country, Labour now ruled and nobody, certainly not the defeated Conservatives, seriously challenged the far-reaching reforms of the new government. By general agreement, a return to the 1930s was unthinkable or at least unmentionable; the 1945 government enjoyed unquestioned electoral and moral legitimacy, and were, in any case, no more ‘revolutionary’ than the state-directed war effort of the past six years, which had brought the British people a victory that they felt to be profoundly theirs. Internationally, the grand alliance of Britain, the USSR and the USA had won the war, and, diplomats and intelligence services apart, frictions between the wartime allies had not yet erased the consciousness of that common struggle.² In 1945–7 Communist Parties were represented by ministers in the governments of most belligerent and occupied countries in western Europe as well as non-communist ones in eastern Europe.

Men and women returned from the war, or turned from wartime occupations, to peacetime civilian life – to resume their old careers or plans, or to consider what to do next. Friends, who might not have seen each other for years, met again. Most of them would still be alive, for Britain had had a comparatively easy war, compared to the Russians, the Poles, the Yugoslavs and, of course, the Germans. The 1914 war, still known, and for good reason, as the ‘Great War’, killed one quarter of the Oxford and Cambridge students serving in the forces, but I can think of only five or six out of the 200 or so Cambridge contemporaries I knew or knew of, who did not return from the Second. It was a time of comparing notes and for pre-war communists to ask the question: ‘Are you still in the Party?’ A considerable number of pre-war students no longer were.

I returned from the army first, for about a year, to a curious double existence in London and for several days a week as a research student in Cambridge, but from February 1947 to September 1950 as a full-time Londoner. We lived in Gloucester Crescent, a middle-class sliver on the edge of Camden Town, the westernmost outpost of the vast zone of London’s bombed and as yet totally ungentrified East End, which attracted intellectuals both because it was then still extraordinarily cheap and wonderfully accessible: ten minutes by public transport from the university and the British Museum. (Nobody one knew in those days had a car.) It had not yet become the headquarters of a band of very bright 1950s Oxbridge ex-students (actually, more ‘bridge’ than ‘Ox’) gently satirized in strip-cartoons in broadsheet newspapers when middle-class intellectuals became lifestyle setters in the 1960s. Many of them were friends acquired in Cambridge during the Cold War years. In 1946 Gloucester Crescent was not classy, but, as I wrote in a tender piece on Camden Town commissioned for Lilliput by Kaye Webb (then married to the cartoonist Ronald Searle, just returned from the Japanese gulag), one could just pretend the roar of the lions in Regent’s Park Zoo was audible from there. In 1947 we moved to a far more stylish flat behind an early eighteenth-century façade on the north side of Clapham Common opposite the church where the Clapham Sect had worshipped, a barn with a tower. Outside, I recall seeing my new colleague at Birkbeck College, Nikolaus Pevsner, perambulating the area for his great Buildings of England like an examiner giving marks to the past. Inside I struggled, in the end successfully, with my fellowship-cum-doctoral dissertation and, in the end unsuccessfully, with what I did not quite recognize as the problems of my first marriage. As it happens, fifteen years later I was to move into a Victorian house a few minutes away – the first one I ever lived in as owner and not tenant – with Marlene.

Intellectual communists or fellow-travellers were not yet marginalized. Indeed, when the BBC began transmitting its ground-breaking Third Programme, a pre-war (non-communist) Cambridge historian, Peter Laslett, who acted as a talent-scout for it, introduced me to the elderly, worldly-wise, culture-watching Anna (‘Nyuta’) Kallin, its Russian talks producer, who helped my first, initially stumbling, steps in the world of microphones. (Of course it did not matter much: one spoke at most to only a few tens of thousands.) I did several pieces for her in 1947, including what may well have been the first-ever radio talk in English on Karl Kraus.

Party members as yet had no difficulty in getting academic jobs and several historians (including myself) did so, or could have done. I became a lecturer at Birkbeck College in 1947 though the head of my department was well aware of my politics. (Students reassured him, when he asked whether I was trying to indoctrinate them.) I went to the World Youth Festival in Prague with my then wife, who took time off from her job as a Principal in the Board of Trade, that is to say a member of the tiny policy-making elite of the civil service. She was, of course, also a communist, having rejoined when we married – in those days I would have found it inconceivable to marry a non-Party member – and the senior civil service branch met in our Clapham flat.³ As far as I can remember, she did not at the time suggest that it might be better for her career in the civil service not to go to Prague. Ten years or so later, when I offered to sublet half my flat in Bloomsbury to a friend who had gone from Cambridge into the Treasury, he told me sadly that, given my known politics, he simply could not take the risk.

In my case, the end of the war even brought a brief relaxation of anti-communism. The British government, having totally refused to employ my knowledge of German for any purposes whatever during my six years in the army, now found it useful. In 1947 I was asked, presumably via some pre-war Cambridge acquaintance now in the Foreign Office, to help in ‘re-educating’ the Germans in what had once been an imperial hunting-lodge on the Lüneburger Heide in North Germany, a few kilometres from the zonal border with the East, to and from which the railway transported the travelling and smuggling traffic of several thousands a day, plainly winked at by both the British and Russian authorities.⁴ The ‘democratizing’ team, which contained at least one other man banned in the following year, could not possibly be described as politically or even economically ‘sound’. The students were a well-assorted lot, from both West and – still – East: my first experience of the Germans who had stayed in Germany. I note in retrospect that the largely Jewish ‘re-educators’ from Britain – actually the idea that we came to these intelligent people from across the Channel with some patent formula for a democratic future was a bit embarrassing – did not feel the sort of visceral anti-German reaction which the knowledge of Auschwitz and the camps, already common, is today expected to have provoked. We – or at least I – did not.

Certainly one could not help wondering all the time (as I wrote) ‘what may these harmless-looking people not have done between 1933 and 1945?’ Every Ashkenazi Jew lost relatives in the camps: in my case Uncle Victor Friedmann, transported east with Aunt Elsa, a small Sephardic lady, from somewhere in France; Uncle Richard Friedmann with Aunt Julie, who would not leave their fancy goods store in agreeable Marienbad; and Aunt Hedwig Lichtenstern. (As so often among Austrian and German, but not among East European Jews, the old died, while the young got out in time.) Their names were entered in the only memorial I know worthy of the Jewish genocide, the whitewashed walls of the Altneuschul, the ancient synagogue in Prague. These walls, surrounding an empty interior, were completely filled with the names of all Czechoslovak Jews who perished under Hitler, line below line of tidy writing, names, dates, places, in alphabetical order from roof to floor. Nothing at all except the uncountable names of the dead. I read Uncle Richard’s and Aunt Julie’s names there through tears, not long before the Prague Spring of 1968. Some time in the 1970s the Czech regime took the astonishing decision to desecrate the memorial by painting out all the inscriptions. The official excuse is said to have been that no particular group among the many victims of fascism ought to be singled out for special commemoration. They were restored with some delay after the end of communism.

I had not then met people who had survived the camps, Buchenwald and Auschwitz. Some of them were to become colleagues and friends, apparently unmarked by their experiences, and even, much later, prepared to talk about the time when every day of a survivor’s life was bought at the price of someone else’s death. Like Primo Levi they were not unmarked. At least one of them, dear, witty, enthusiastic Georges Haupt, who had entered Auschwitz as a Romanian schoolboy, suddenly collapsed and died at the age of fifty. Still, both conviction and realism saved us from turning the Nazis’ own racist anti-Semitism inside out into an equivalent anti-Teutonism. Even later we (certainly I) blamed not Germans as such but National Socialism, especially as the first serious description and analysis of the univers concentrationnaire I read, Eugen Kogon’s remarkable Der SS-Staat (Frankfurt, 1946) was written by a German, about a camp – Buchenwald – that dehumanized, tortured and killed many, but did not primarily target Jews. Moreover, one look at West German cities, gigantic fields of barely cleared rubble, at the apparently total collapse of the economy in the period before the currency reform, at the yellow-faced people living on barter and camped on station platforms with sacks of potatos, suggested that whatever ordinary Germans had done under Hitler, in 1947 they were paying for what had been done by them or in their name.

As I wrote at the time, it was not hard ‘to understand what [these men and women] have gone through in the past 8 years … raids, expulsions, hunger etc. Men, women and children.’ Anyone who had returned from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp, or even had experienced ‘the awful shocks of the behaviour of the Russians in the first weeks after liberation’ could talk of hard times. Not because the Russians necessarily took it out on the Germans, although the rank-and-file of the Red Army unquestionably had reasons for doing so and did so. (‘They showed no fear whatsoever and their vision of the future was the rape and pillage of Berlin.’⁵) As one of our students, returned from captivity, who has since become one of the most eminent German historians,⁶ explained to me: ‘They did not treat us worse than themselves. It was simply that they were physically so much tougher than we were. They could stand the cold better. That scared us, when we were at the front, and we suffered from it as prisoners. They would dump us on a central-Asian plain in winter and say: build a camp. Start digging.’

It was not surprising that hatred and fear of Russia penetrated the atmosphere in Germany, among both the natives and the vast numbers of refugees – particularly numerous in our part of Lower Saxony – who made Russia responsible for their mass flight or mass expulsion. In 1947 it was a curious, sometimes schizophrenic, combination of feelings: repulsion, superiority, but also respect for the victor, and the contrast between the image of uncontrolled social disintegration in the West and the vague feeling that the discipline ‘over there’ (in the Soviet zone) got people to do a day’s work, controlled the black market, etc. The Marshall Plan and the 1948 currency reform were about to change all this, but in the summer of 1947 a sense of total impotence and blankness about the future still dominated public opinion in the British zone. There could be no German reconstruction without a third world war, one heard in Hamburg. I felt this helplessness myself. ‘Frankly, the more I’m here the more depressed I get,’ I wrote. ‘Hope? I can’t see any.’ This was a spectacularly wrong assessment of West German prospects, but Germany did not look encouraging in 1947.

But what did it make a western communist feel like about the Soviet Union, whose shadow so patently darkened the German scene? No illusions could survive the immediate postwar contact with the Soviet occupation, direct or indirect, just as the hopes of postwar international amity, which were not confined to communists, had a hard time surviving the postwar frictions between the western and eastern military and officials on the ground. The young Austrian refugees from the London wartime emigration who followed their Party’s instruction to return to rebuild their country amid the smell of hungry people in wintry trams and in high-ceilinged, commandeered offices had expected physical hardships, but few had anticipated the actual pervasive anti-Russian mood. For those who lived under, or even had direct contact with, the realities of Soviet-occupied central Europe, being communist was no longer as simple as before the war. We did not lose our faith and our confidence in the eventual superiority of socialism to capitalism, nor our belief in the world-changing potential of Communist Party discipline, but our, or at least my, hopes were now edged with that sense of inevitable tragedy of Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’.⁷ Paradoxically, what made it easier or, for many, possible to maintain the old faith was, more than anything else, the crusading global anti-communism of the West in the Cold War.

II

But let me return to the time of the Berlin airlift. As the wartime alliance broke up, so did the fading hope of postwar co-operation between the two superpowers. In 1947 the communist ministers in western governments began to be edged out of their offices, and so were the non-communist ministers in the countries under communist rule. For purely European purposes a new Communist International (the so-called Communist Information Bureau or Cominform) was set up, to publish a journal which, even by the exacting standards of the Soviet era, must have been the all-time champion of unreadability. ⁸ The eastern regimes, deliberately not set up as communist, but as pluriparty ‘new’ or ‘peoples’ democracies’ with mixed economies, were now assimilated to the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, i.e. the standard Communist Party dictatorships. And for the West, as confrontation became more overt, communists became fifth columnists.

In Britain things began to change, but in a relatively low-key, gentlemanly manner. There was no overt purge of Party members from the civil service, though, where known, they were removed from jobs with access to sensitive information. Those in the politically sensitive ‘administrative’ class were discreetly informed that there was no future for them in the service, but there would be no publicity, if they were to choose to leave of their own free will. One who chose to stay served the rest of his career in those remote corners which large bureaucracies reserve for those who can neither be sacked nor given any job of the slightest responsibility.

There was no actual purge in the universities. Birkbeck College, where I had just begun teaching, was exceptional – at least until the arrival of an ambitious new Master in 1951 – in showing no discernible signs of anti-communism among staff or students. Its students earned their living during the day, and such political tradition as it had was on the left. The mood in the small, crowded and friendly staff common room suggested that it was overwhelmingly composed of Labour voters. Such Tories as there were – I suppose my colleague and later boss Douglas Dakin was one – were hardly typical. He had been secretary of the local branch of the union, the Association of University Teachers, in the intervals of running the entire student side of the college as part-time Registrar (with one secretary), playing cricket and teaching, and handed the union job on to me as soon as I arrived. Moreover, by far the most prestigious member of the college staff was a communist, and employer of Party members in his department, a man closely identified with the USSR, J.D. Bernal, crystallographer and so universal a genius (but for a total blank in music) that he could never concentrate on any topic long enough to win a Nobel Prize, although he was the inspirer of several. Even those who had their doubts about his loyalty to Moscow could hardly forbear to admire this short, bushy-haired man who looked like the essential scientist in a strip-cartoon, walked like a sailor on shore or, as he said, ‘the pobble who had no toes’, and entertained the staff room with well-honed anecdotes about his extraordinarily distinguished time as scientific adviser to Combined Operations during the war. Picasso himself, prevented by the authorities from attending a Soviet-sponsored meeting in Sheffield, had drawn a spirited mural on the wall of Bernal’s flat in Torrington Place, which many years later was to become a sort of logo of Birkbeck. The great artist shared not only Bernal’s communism, but also his legendary polygamy; with the difference only that Bernal genuinely treated the women drawn to him as equal partners, both sexually and intellectually. This reputation for gender equality was what attracted the brilliant Rosalind Franklin to Birkbeck from King’s College, London, dissatisfied with her treatment by the other (male) workers – the ones who got the Nobel Prize – on the famous Double Helix. Though she was notoriously, and understandably, touchy about macho assumptions in colleagues, she was, at least when we talked, full of praise for Bernal as man and scientist, even when she made fun of the Party-line loyalists in his department.

I was lucky to teach at a college which provided a built-in, unforced protection against the pressures of the Cold War outside. Nevertheless, the academic situation was not good. To the best of my knowledge, all communists who had been appointed to academic posts before the summer of 1948 remained in their jobs, and no attempt was made to dismiss them, unless by the non-renewal of short-term contracts, which were extremely rare in those days. On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, no known communists were appointed to university posts for ten years or so from 1948, nor, if already in teaching posts, were they promoted. In the course of that decade, for instance, I was turned down for several posts in economic history in Cambridge – I supervised and examined this subject in the Economics Tripos – and I did not get promotion to a Readership in London until 1959. Even people who had had only a few months’ connection with the Party, such as the economic historian Sidney Pollard, were seriously held back. This was frustrating, but a long way from the American witch-hunting. (No British academic posts, to my knowledge, were made conditional on the formal abjuration of past sin, as happened when the University of Berkeley offered a chair to Pollard several years later – a condition which he refused to accept.) Curiously, there was more of a political purge in parts of Adult Education, a field which attracted a substantial number of reds and other radicals on ideological grounds, notably in the Extramural Delegacy of Oxford University, which had been run for some years by Thomas Hodgkin, a particularly charming member of the British intellectual aristocracy (Quaker branch) who had been expelled from Palestine for joining the Communist Party during his time as aide-de-camp to the British High Commissioner; the Party was the only place where Jews and Arabs mixed as friends and equals. Unfortunately the formidable Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary and still boss of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, had accused the delegacy of harbouring red activists who fomented strikes at what was then the major Morris car plant at Cowley – those were the days when Oxford could be described as ‘the Latin Quarter of Cowley’.⁹ However, even here there was no general purge of communists.

We accepted that ‘this tacit and often half-conscious discrimination, similar to, though less systematic than, the exclusion of social democrats from German university posts before 1914’¹⁰ was relatively mild and concentrated on denouncing American academic McCarthyism – those were the days when the US government refused an entry visa even to the great physicist P. A. M. Dirac – and the dangers that would follow if the American model were to spread to Britain. Nevertheless, in 1950 the historian E. H. Carr was reported as thinking, correctly, that ‘It had become very difficult … to speak dispassionately about Russia except in ‘‘a very woolly Christian kind of way’’ without endangering, if not your bread and butter, then your legitimate hopes of advancement.’ In any case, there is no question that the principle of freedom of expression did not apply to communist and Marxist views, at least in the official media.¹¹

What made communist intellectuals feel members of a harried minority was not so much official or quasi-official victimization, as exclusion. Naturally we were convinced, and sometimes had evidence, that our letters were read, our phone bugged, and that, in case of real war, we would find ourselves interned, hopefully with plenty of time to read and work, on some suitable smaller island of the British archipelago. We resented it, even as we could not deny that, given the Cold War, it was logical behaviour for the government. We were the enemies of NATO, after all. What made the rhetoric of Cold War liberals so intolerable was their conviction that all communists were simply agents of the Soviet enemy and their denial that any communist could therefore possibly be a member in good standing of the intellectual community.

Perhaps friendship might have survived politics–after all, I remained on good terms with Mounia Postan, even though I knew that every one of his job references was a poisoned arrow – but it requires more than the small change of social life. And even the taste of genuine friendship could have the bitter tang of Cold War distrust. When I received my first invitation to the USA, anticipating problems, I asked a colleague and friend (a moderate Labour supporter at the time) whether he would be prepared to write a letter testifying to my academic standing. ‘Of course I will,’ he said. I still remember the momentary sense of abandonment as he added: ‘Of course it has nothing to do with it, but could you just tell me – I mean, not that it matters in the least, but are you still in the Communist Party?’

That is why my most resented memory of the Cold War is not of jobs lost, or letters obviously opened, but of my first book. I had proposed it in 1953 to the publishers Hutchinsons, now long buried in some transatlantic publishing conglomerate, for their University Library, a series of compact texts addressed to students: a short comparative volume on The Rise of the Wage Worker. The proposal was accepted, but when I submitted the finished manuscript, it was turned down on the advice of an anonymous but presumably authoritative reader or readers. It was, they said, too biased, and therefore unacceptable under the contract. No suggestions for modifications were made. I protested. The firm agreed that I had put in a good deal of work, and therefore offered me a good-will payment of 25 guineas.¹² What stuck in my gullet was not only the contemptible amount of the sum – even in the mid-fifties it amounted to the proceeds of two or three book reviews – but the knowledge that the book had almost certainly been turned down on the advice of some senior colleague, as like as not – given the subject – a supporter of the Labour Party. And there was nothing I could do about it. I was sufficiently furious to consult my lawyer, the astute Jack Gaster, about suing Hutchinsons. He told me not to think of it. ‘You may find people to testify to your academic standing, but they will find more to testify that you are biased.’ He was right. I never published the book, though I used parts of it in other publications. What makes the incident so typical of that miserable phase of the Cold War is that some years later my then publisher George Weidenfeld, having asked my advice, published a book of the same length on precisely the same subject, and, in my view, ideologically more obviously controversial, as part of one of those global co-production series which he was then promoting.

Under these circumstances, and even though by 1958 the ideological temperature of the Cold War had become a shade less icy, the decision of George (now Lord) Weidenfeld to commission me to write, for an advance on publication of £500, a volume in a gigantic and still not completed history of civilization he was then planning, was admirable and not without courage. It turned out to be The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 , the first volume of a four-volume history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I was quite well known for my identification with the Communist Party. He was a commercial publisher and a person not uninterested in good relations with the social and political establishment. I owe him a lasting debt of gratitude. Who recommended me to him? I can only speculate, since Lord Weidenfeld himself claims not to remember. I suspect it was J. L. Talmon, of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, who had been his first choice for the volume in question, but who wanted to drop out. Talmon and I had found ourselves arguing about the nature of democracy and the Jacobins in the French Revolution, and respected each other, though we disagreed on most other things, notably Zionism.

III

The darkest period of public anti-communism, the years of the Korean War and, incidentally, of the opening instalment of the great ‘Cambridge Spy’ serial – the defection of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 – coincided with a dark moment in my own life. In the summer of 1950 my first marriage, rocky for some time, broke up in circumstances which left me wounded and for some years acutely unhappy. After I left our flat in Clapham Common, I never saw Muriel again except at the moment of our divorce. Fortunately I had won a Fellowship at King’s the year before, and the college – such things were then possible – at a moment’s notice found me a set of rooms in the wonderful Gibbs Building next to the chapel. King’s was my permanent base for the next five years, though I continued to teach at Birkbeck, either returning to Cambridge by a late train, or staying a night or two in the room I rented in the house of friends in another part of Clapham. Those were black times, both politically and personally. What was more painful: my divorce or the execution of the Rosenbergs, which so many communists at the time felt as a personal defeat and a personal tragedy? It is difficult to separate the two strands that merged in a common mood of determination to survive them: by work, by travel, even by political defiance, as when I invited the physicist Alan Nunn May, just released from jail for nuclear espionage, to a King’s Feast. I may add that, as so often, King’s behaved impeccably on this occasion; and so did Cambridge when a former mayor and owner of the local newspaper demanded the dismissal of the Assistant Schools Medical Officer, the Austrian refugee Hilde Broda, on the grounds that she had married Alan Nunn May since taking her job. The motion was thrown out without a division. Britain was not the USA.

Looking back, I have mixed feelings about my postwar years at Cambridge. On the one hand I did not take to village life – even in a village of dons – where the range of social relations was both constricted and, to some extent, obligatory. My instincts are and were metropolitan, and in Cambridge there was neither anonymity nor privacy, except in one’s own room behind the closed outer door or ‘sported oak’. (In those days all doors to students’ or dons’ living quarters were left unlocked, unless the inhabitant was either not in Cambridge or wished to indicate that [s]he did not want to be disturbed.) What is more, every day I spent there reminded me of the fact that the university did not want me. The posts for which I applied, then and later, went to others. I applied for them really only out of pride. Neither I nor, after I remarried, Marlene, would have wanted to live permanently in Cambridge, or in any other small university-dominated town. The only lengthy visiting posts we really enjoyed have been in capitals: Paris and, above all, Manhattan. In short, when, after six years of my Fellowship, I moved back to London, I felt I had returned to my proper territory.

On the other hand, being a single man living in college, Cambridge gave me another bite at the cherry of student life. Of course it was not the life of the 1930s: for one thing, those among my contemporaries who had become dons had changed their views, and the general depoliticization of the undergraduates was acutely depressing. The sort of political student I remembered, and felt at ease with, was now to be found only among South Asians and Chinese – who were admittedly not rare in the economics faculty, for which I supervised and examined: students such as the young A. K. Sen, who had come to Trinity as a graduate from Presidency College, Calcutta, to sit at the feet of Maurice Dobb and Piero Sraffa, his brilliance already evident. Of course, one saw student life differently as a Fellow, and was treated differently by the undergraduates, even in free-and-easy King’s. (The pre-war atmosphere of cultured homosexuality was still strong in the college, although from 1952 on the turn to heterosexuality became obvious, with patently woman-oriented new arrivals on King’s fashion scene, such as the future journalist and writer Neal Ascherson, and the transformation of young men such as the future media designer Mark Boxer, who having established themselves in the old mode, transferred to the new.) I did, however, have one asset that brought me closer to the life and mood of the 1950s male student mood than I could otherwise have been, but not – at this time – to the young women (although supervising those studying history and economics in Newnham helped). I was an Apostle, and therefore on close terms with some of them. This may therefore be a suitable moment to say something about this odd Cambridge institution: still extant and flourishing, still keeping its actual active membership secret, although most of its pre-1939 history is by now a matter of public record, and few of its retired members make any secret of their apostolicity. It was and is a small community, essentially of brilliant undergraduates or early postgraduates, co-opting others to maintain itself in being, whose purpose is to read and discuss papers written by its members at weekly meetings. Undergraduates were the core of the Apostles. Indeed, by definition they are ‘the Society’, since those who left ‘the real world’ of its meetings for ‘the phenomenal world’ outside, by graduating or leaving Cambridge (‘taking wings’ and therefore being known as ‘Angels’) necessarily had to defer to the active brethren.

I had been elected to the Cambridge Conversazione Society in my last undergraduate term in 1939, together with another Kingsman, the later Walter Wallich of the BBC, son of the director of the Deutsche Bank and descendant of its founder who, after the Kristallnacht of 1938, having sent wife and children abroad in good time, took a train from Berlin to Cologne and jumped off the bridge into the Rhine. It was an invitation that hardly any Cambridge undergraduate was likely to refuse, since even revolutionaries like to be in a suitable tradition. Who would not wish to be associated with the names of earlier Apostles, which were more or less the great names of nineteenth-century Cambridge: the poet Tennyson, the marvellous physicist Clerk Maxwell, the greatest of Cambridge historians, Frederick Maitland, Bertrand Russell and the glories of Edwardian Cambridge – Keynes, Wittgenstein and Moore, Whitehead and, in literature, E. M. Forster and Rupert Brooke. Only the greatest of nineteenth-century Cambridge names was missing, Charles Darwin of Christ’s. Actually, the bulk of the Victorian and Edwardian Apostles, who have been exhaustively and perceptively analysed by an American professor,¹³ were by no means in that class, and, since greatness of intellectual (or other) achievement often requires running the risk of boring friends whose interests do not coincide completely with your own – and no Apostle would have wanted to bore the other brethren – many of them suffered in later life from their inability to live up to the exemplars of their great tradition.

It may be worth observing that communism had nothing to do with my election, although the famous photo of six Apostles that appears in every book on the Cambridge spies contains four communists. It is no surprise that the Party was heavily represented in the society of the Spanish Civil War years. However, neither John Cornford and James Klugmann nor any of the heads of the Party in my time were Apostles, nor (with one exception) was any Marxist don of the 1930s. The criterion for being elected to the society was, and presumably still is, not subject or belief, or even intellectual distinction, but ‘being apostolic’, whatever that meant – and it was, and no doubt continues to be, endlessly discussed among the brethren. For that matter, neither were the Cambridge spies recruited primarily through the Apostles (except via Anthony Blunt): of the Cambridge Five three had nothing whatever to do with the society (Philby, Maclean and Cairncross).

The war had suspended the ‘real world’ in Cambridge, although a number of senior Angels continued in at least intermittent residence as dons. If I am not mistaken, only two pre-war active brethren returned to Cambridge as research students, myself and the late Matthew Hodgart, a black-haired, moon-faced, hard-drinking literary Scot, perhaps the most brilliant of my undergraduate friends, by then no longer a communist. We were, or rather, since he was not present, I was charged by the assembled Angels at the society’s first postwar annual dinner in 1946 (at Kettners in Soho) to revive it. We did this by recruiting among pre-war friends who had returned to Cambridge, and the students sent to me for supervision by King’s. When I became a Fellow, I recruited a college friend, the Canadian economist Harry Johnson. Since I also supervised economics students in economic history, the postwar Apostles thus found themselves continuing the tradition of Maynard Keynes. However, increasingly, the arts, i.e. history and English, tended to fill the society of the 1950s – together with the unclassified multiple brilliance of Jonathan Miller, who read natural sciences. Before the 1939 war many of them would have gone into the civil service, but now the non-economists among them flocked into two expanding occupations: ‘the media’ and university teaching, sometimes in succession. Women began to be elected only in the 1960s.

After the war the most famous surviving Apostle, the novelist E. M. Forster, moved into King’s College, and, loyal as ever to the society, offered his rooms for its Sunday evening meetings, sitting quietly in the corner – he probably never said much even in his youth – listening to the young brethren speaking literally (in the society’s argot) ‘on the hearth-rug’, since fireplaces fed from coal-scuttles were still the main Cambridge line of defence against the raw eastern climate. Never a habitual scribbler, by this time Morgan had virtually stopped writing, although he took enormous trouble to avoid the slightest hint of cliche ś or platitude in such few texts as he still composed. He had no family, except that of his old policeman lover. I do not think he was ever as much at ease in the postwar world as he would have liked to be, but he was consoled by the unchanging nature of the youth surrounding him. In the early 1960s I once tried to introduce him to the later twentieth century by taking him to see the American soliloquist – one could hardly call him a ‘comedian’ any longer – Lenny Bruce, who was briefly performing at the Establishment, a shortlived Soho club, on his way to rapid self-destruction. Morgan was, as always, courteous and endlessly considerate, but this was not his wavelength.

It has been said by a perceptive observer of the society’s first century that ‘the Apostles devoted themselves to two things above all else, and did so with a pure intensity which to an unkind eye might look absurd, but to a kind eye absolutely admirable. These were friendship on the one hand, and intellectual honesty, on the other.’ ¹⁴ Both were still very central to the Apostles of my time, though the dons who participated in these sessions, being older, probably injected a dose of diplomacy into the ‘intellectual honesty’ they brought to their personal relations. Still, both crossed the barriers of age and temperament, and I, as well as my family, owe to the undergraduate Apostles of the early fifties (and to the young men and women I met with and through them) a number of lasting friendships.

III

I cannot say that the first half of the 1950s was a happy time for me in my personal life. I filled it with work, with writing, thinking and teaching, with a lot of travel during university vacations, and, dutifully, with Party work. Fortunately, moving out of London had put me out of the range of London local branch work – organization, canvassing, selling the Daily Worker (renamed Morning Star after 1956) – for which I had no natural taste or suitable temperament. From then on, in effect, I operated entirely in academic or intellectual groups.

Intellectually, though, those were good years. The mind of most people is at its sharpest and most adventurous in their twenties, but I returned from the army passionately determined to catch up on the ideas of the lost war years, and just young enough to do so. There is nothing for the self-education of academics like the need to prepare lectures, and, since the four or five of us in Birkbeck’s history department had to cover all history since antiquity, I had to have a very wide range as a lecturer, even without the additional demands made on me as a supervisor in Cambridge. Academic careers might be blocked, but the historical world was not. What happened in the wider world of historians in those years is the subject of another chapter. For the present purposes it is enough to note that I began to publish in the professional journals from 1949, to play a part in international congresses and in the Economic History Society (to the council of which I was elected in 1952). Above all, from 1946 to 1956 we – a group of comrades and friends – conducted a continuous Marxist seminar for ourselves in the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, by means of endless duplicated discussion papers and regular meetings, mainly in the upper room of the Garibaldi Restaurant in Saffron Hill and occasionally in the then shabby premises of Marx House on Clerkenwell Green. Those who know only the buzzing, gentrified Clerkenwell of 2000 cannot imagine the empty, cold, grey dankness of those streets at weekends fifty years ago, when the Dickensian fog, which disappeared after 1953, was still likely to fall like a vast yellow-grey blindfold on London. Perhaps this was where we really became historians. Others have spoken of ‘the astonishing impact of [this] generation of Marxist historians’ without whom ‘the worldwide influence of British historical scholarship, especially since the 1960s, is inconceivable’. ¹⁵ Among other things it gave birth to a successful and eventually influential historical journal in 1952, but Past & Present was born not in Clerkenwell, but in the more agreeable ambience of University College, Gower Street.

The Historians’ Group broke up in the year of communist crisis, 1956. Until then we, and certainly I, had remained loyal, disciplined and politically aligned Communist Party members, helped no doubt by the wild rhetoric of crusading anti-communism of the ‘Free World’. But it was far from easy.

The Soviet Union, God knows, made it harder and harder. Intellectuals were, of course, under particular pressure, since from 1947 on the beliefs to which they were committed were reduced to a catechism of orthodoxies, some only faintly related to Marxism, and several – especially in the natural sciences – absurd. After the official triumph of ‘Lysenkoism’ in the USSR this was a major problem in the Cambridge graduate branch, several, perhaps most, of whose older members were natural scientists. Were they, like the great geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, quietly to withdraw from the Party, unable to accept untruth? Were they, like J. D. Bernal, to ruin their public standing by trying, if not quite managing, to defend the Soviets? Were they simply to shut their eyes, say nothing, and go on with their work as before? The peculiarities of Stalinist science were not quite so damaging elsewhere. Communist psychologists, for instance, found Moscow’s insistence on Pavlov (‘conditioned reflexes’) less constricting, partly because of the experimental, positivist, behaviourist and strongly anti-psychoanalytical slant of British psychology departments. But these were the special problems of intellectuals, and for various reasons they did not seriously affect British communist historians who kept away from Russian and Communist Party history. Obviously, none of us believed the version of Soviet Party history contained in the, pedagogically brilliant, text of Stalin’s History of the CPSU (b): Short Course. But there were more general problems, even if we leave aside the horrors of the Soviet camps, the extent of which communists did not then recognize.

What were British, and even more Cambridge, communists, who had been deeply involved in wartime relations with the Yugoslav Partisans, to think of the 1948 split between Stalin and Tito? We were close to Yugoslav communism. Young Brits by the hundred flocked into the country to build the so-called ‘Youth Railway’, including notably Edward Thompson, not yet a historian, whose brother Frank had his wartime base among the Macedonian Partisans, until he went on to fight and die with the Bulgarian ones. How could one possibly believe the official Soviet line that Tito had to be excommunicated because he had long prepared to betray the interests of proletarian internationalism in the interests of foreign intelligence services? We could understand that James Klugmann was forced to disavow Tito, but we did not believe him and, since he had until recently told us the opposite – and so had the newly formed Cominform, whose headquarters were initially in Belgrade – we knew he did not believe it either. In short, we stayed loyal to Moscow because the cause of world socialism could dispense with the support of a small, if heroic and admired, country, but not with that of Stalin’s superpower.

Unlike what happened in the 1930s, I cannot recall any serious efforts to compel Party members to justify the succession of show trials which disfigured the last years of Stalin, but this may merely mean that intellectuals like myself had given up the effort to be convinced. Few of us knew anything about Bulgaria, so the first of the trials, against Traicho Kostov (executed in 1949), left me unhappy but not unduly sceptical. The trial of Laszlo Rajk in Hungary in the autumn of 1949 was another matter. Among the ‘agents of the British Secret Service’ alleged to have undermined communism, the indictment named (and suitable confessions doubtless confirmed) someone I knew personally: the journalist Basil Davidson. I simply did not believe this. A big, tough man with a sharp mind, already grizzling wiry hair, an eye for women and a very attractive wife, Basil had had what they called a ‘good’ but unorthodox war. He had fought with the Yugoslav Partisans in the flat, fertile Vojvodina adjoining Hungary – terrible guerrilla territory – then with the Italian Partisans in the Ligurian mountains, and written a good book, Partisan Picture, about both. (It gave him the necessary training for his later footslogging with African liberation fighters in the hinterlands of Portuguese Guinea and Angola.) We became, and still remain, friends. The Hungarian accusation was not incredible in itself. In fact, though I did not then know it, Davidson had in his time, like other British journalists on the continent, been recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service and sent to Hungary. It would not have surprised me if he had known Rajk then. What made me sceptical, apart from my personal judgement of the man, was the fact that his career as a journalist had taken a sharp turn for the worse with the Cold War. After leaving the (London) Times he was, in effect, edged out of the New Statesman and Nation, then at its height as the organ of the respectable left, as a fellow-traveller. Nobody wanted him. He was about to construct for himself a new freelance career as a highly respected pioneer historian of Africa, and an expert on the anti-imperialist liberation movements south of the Sahara. The accusation simply made no sense.

The last and biggest set of East European show trials, in Czechoslovakia, sounded even less convincing; quite apart from the markedly anti-Semitic tinge which they shared with the notorious 1952 ‘doctors’ plot’ against Stalin in the USSR itself. My student generation knew many of the young Czech emigrants to Britain. We knew at least one of the executed ‘traitors’ well: Otto Sling, married to the ever-reliable Marion Wilbraham from the pre-war Youth Peace Movement, had returned to his country to become Party chief of Brno, Czechoslovakia’s second city. By this time even the – expected – official Party defence of the Czech trial seemed to show a certain lack of conviction.

Patently people like myself did not remain in the Communist Party because we had many illusions about the USSR, although undoubtedly we had some. For instance, we clearly underestimated the horrors of what had gone on in the USSR under Stalin, until it was denounced by Khrushchev in 1956. Since a good deal of information was available about the Soviet camps, which could not easily be ignored, it is no excuse to point out that even western critics did not document the full extent of the system until 1956. ¹⁶ Moreover, after 1956 many of us did leave the Party. Why, then, did we remain?

Perhaps the best way to recapture the mood of the peak years of the Cold War – essentially the period from Hiroshima to Panmunjom – is by an episode from the life of Bertrand Russell, which the great philosopher did not like to have recalled in his later days as an anti-nuclear activist. Shortly after the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, Russell concluded that the American monopoly of nuclear arms would be only temporary. While it was, the USA should exploit it, if need be by a pre-emptive nuclear attack against Moscow. This would prevent the USSR launching on the course of imminent world conquest to which he believed it to be committed, and would it was hoped destroy a regime which he regarded as utterly appalling. In short, as far as the people of the USSR were concerned, he believed in the then familiar western Cold War slogan ‘Better dead than red’. In practice other peoples were the only ones to whom this literally senseless slogan was applied. If it had any sense it meant, not that Cubans or Vietnamese or, if it should so happen, Italians should commit suicide rather than live under a communist government, but that they should be killed by the arms of the Free World to prevent this awful contingency. (No sane person seriously expected mass suicide in either Britain or the USA.)

Fortunately, though the possibility of American pre-emptive nuclear strikes worried Whitehall,¹⁷ nobody listened to Russell, who in any case changed his mind when both superpowers had the capacity to destroy one another, thus turning world war into global suicide. Yet before then people, including even some serious politicians, undoubtedly talked in terms of something like an apocalyptic global class war. The issues were enormous. Whichever side one stood on, there was no limit to the price to be paid. The war, especially since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had got the world used to human sacrifices by the hundreds of thousands, even millions. Those who opposed nuclear arms were accused of depriving the West of a necessary, an indispensable arm. We too – I say this with retrospective regret – recognized no limit to the price we were prepared to ask others to pay. It is no mitigation to say that we were prepared to pay it ourselves.

On the one hand, communists saw the USA and its allies threatening the total destruction of a still besieged and vulnerable USSR, in order to bring to a halt the global advance of the forces of revolution since the defeat of Hitler and Hirohito. They still saw the USSR as its indispensable guarantee. On the other hand, for the USA and its allies the USSR was both the threat to the world and a system totally to be rejected. Everything would be so much simpler if it were not a superpower. Everything would be even simpler if it were not there. To us it was obvious that the USSR was not in a position to conquer the world for communism. Some of us were even disappointed because it appeared not to want to. It was – at least western communist intellectuals thought, even if they did not say so – a system with severe defects, but with titanic achievements and still with the unlimited potential of socialism. (Though it now seems incredible, in the 1950s, and not only to its sympathizers, the Soviet Union did not yet look like a foundering economic hulk but like an economy which might well outproduce the West.) To most of the world, it did not seem to be the worst of all possible regimes, but an ally in the fight for emancipation from western imperialism, old and new, and a model for non-European economic and social development. The future of both communists and the regimes and movements of the decolonized and decolonizing world depended on its existence. As far as communists were concerned, supporting and defending the Soviet Union was still the essential international priority.

So we swallowed our doubts and mental reservations and defended it. Or rather, because it was easier, we attacked the capitalist camp for preferring a West Germany run by old Nazis, and soon actually to be rearmed against the USSR, to an East Germany run by old prisoners of Nazi concentration camps; for preferring the old imperialism to the movements of anti-imperial liberation, and a USA which made Franco’s Spain its military base against those who had supported the Republic.

Even so, it was not easy. Being a communist in the West was no problem. The trouble was the experience of communism in the East. But I was soon to see this myself. There were the first signs of some slight thawing on the fringes of the frozen ice-cap of Stalin’s USSR. In 1952, even before the terrible old man died, the historian E. A. Kosminsky was allowed a brief visit to Britain with his wife for the first time since, long ago in the 1920s, he had worked in London on those problems of English manorial history in the Middle Ages that had made him famous in the world of historical scholarship. I took him to the British Museum, for he wanted to use the great round Reading Room again. Could he have a short-term ticket? A lady librarian asked whether he had ever used the library before. He had. ‘Ah,’ she said, looking his name up in the files. ‘No, of course there will be no problem. Do you still live in Torrington Square?’ It was a moment of great emotion for him. A few months later, after Stalin’s death but before post-Stalinism, he arranged for the Soviet Academy of Sciences to invite a group of British Marxist historians to the USSR. It was my first, but not quite my only, experience of the country of the October Revolution. I did not much want to go there again. That visit helped to prepare me for the crucial turning-point in the lives of all communist intellectuals, and in the world communist movement, which is the main subject of the next chapter: the crisis of 1956.

12

Stalin and After

I

I am among the relatively few inhabitants of the world outside what used to be the USSR who has actually seen Stalin; admittedly no longer alive but in a glass case in the great mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square: a small man who seemed even smaller than he actually was (about 5ft 3in) by contrast with the awe-inspiring aura of autocratic power that surrounded him even in death. Unlike Lenin, who is still on view, having so far (2002) resisted eleven post-Soviet years of attempts to remove him, Stalin was displayed only in the brief period between his death in 1953 and 1961. When I saw him in December 1954, he still towered over his country and the world communist movement. As yet he had no effective successor, although Nikita Khrushchev, who inaugurated ‘destalinization’ not many months later, was already occupying the post of General Secretary and getting ready to elbow his rivals aside. However, we knew nothing of what was happening behind the scenes in Moscow.

‘We’ were four members of the Historians’ Group of the British Communist Party invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences during the academic Christmas vacation of 1954–5, as part of the still painfully slow process of extricating Soviet intellectual life from its isolation: Christopher Hill, already well known as a historian of the English Revolution, the Byzantinist Robert Browning, myself and the freelance scholar Leslie (A. L.) Morton, whose Marxist People’s History of England enjoyed the official imprimatur of the Soviet authorities. Probably only Robert Browning, a Scotsman of amazingly wide-ranging erudition and linguistic competence, who gave a paper on the recent decipherment of the Cretan Linear B inscriptions, realized quite how cut off Soviet scholars had been from literature in the English language. (Contacts with France had never been quite so decayed.) Since none of the visitors specialized in Russian history, where the real strength of our hosts naturally lay, on balance they probably benefited more from our conversations than we did.

What did we expect to find in the USSR? We were not totally dependent on the official guide/translators provided for us by the academy, for two of us knew Russian – Christopher Hill, who had spent a year in the USSR in the mid-1930s and had friends there, and the apparently almost accentless Robert Browning. Nevertheless, the USSR two years after Stalin’s death, and indeed for several years thereafter, was not a place given to informal communication with foreigners even in Russian. Not that an official ‘delegation’ invited by the academy, a body with considerable status and clout in Soviet society at that time, left much room for informal contacts or free time. For even the programme of entertainments and cultural visits was geared to the importance of the host organization and, by extrapolation, of its foreign guests. Outside buildings, our feet were barely allowed to touch the ground.

In short, as intellectual VIPs – an unfamiliar role – we almost certainly were treated to more culture than other visiting foreigners, as well as an embarrassing share of products and privileges in a visibly impoverished country. We would, for instance, be whisked straight off the famous Red Arrow Moscow–Leningrad overnight train, to a matinée children’s performance of Swan Lake at the Kirov, installed in the directors’ box, to which, after the performance, the prima ballerina – I think it was Alla Shelest – was brought straight from the stage and still sweating, to be presented to us, four foreigners of no particular importance who found themselves momentarily in the location of power. Almost half a century later, I still feel a sense of curious shame at the memory of her curtsy to us, as the children of Leningrad prepared to go home and the – overwhelmingly Jewish – musicians filed out of the orchestra pit. It was not a good advertisement for communism. But of Russia and Russian life we saw little except the middle-aged women, presumably war widows, hauling stones and clearing rubble from the wintry streets.

What is more, even the intellectuals’ basic resource, ‘looking it up’, was not available. There were no telephone directories, no maps, no public timetables, no basic means of everyday reference. One was struck by the sheer impracticality of a society in which an almost paranoiac fear of espionage turned the information needed for everyday life into a state secret. In short, there was not much to be learned about Russia by visiting it in 1954 that could not have been learned outside.

Still, there was something. There was the evident arbitrariness and unpredictability of its arrangements. There was the astonishing achievement of the Moscow metro, built in the iron era of the 1930s under one of the legendary ‘hard men’ of Stalinism, Lazar Kaganovich, a dream of a future city of palaces for a hungry and pauperized present, but a modern underground which worked – and, I am told, still does – like clockwork. There was the basic difference between the Russians who took decisions and the ones who did not – as we joked among ourselves, they could be recognized by their hair. The ones who took action had hair that stood up on their heads, or had fallen out with the effort, the ones who didn’t could be recognized by the lankness above their foreheads. There was the extraordinary spectacle of an intellectual society barely a generation from the ancient peasantry. I recall the New Year’s Eve party at the Scientists’ Club in Moscow. Between the usual toasts to peace and friendship, someone suggested a contest in remembering proverbs – not just any old saws, but proverbs or phrases about sharp things, such as ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ (needles) or ‘burying the hatchet’. The joint resources of Britain were soon exhausted, but the Russian contestants, all of them established research scientists, went on confronting each other with village wisdom about knives, axes, sickles and sharp or cutting implements and their operations until the contest had to be stopped. That, after all, was what they brought with them from the illiterate villages in which so many of them had been born.

It was an interesting but also a dispiriting trip for foreign communist intellectuals, for we met hardly anyone there like ourselves. Unlike the ‘peoples’ democracies’ and ‘really existing socialisms’ of the rest of Europe, where communists fighting oppression came from persecution to power at the end of the war, in the USSR we found ourselves in a country long governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in which having a career implied being a member of that Party, or at least conforming to its requirements and official statements. Probably some we met were convinced as well as loyal communists, but theirs was an inward-looking Soviet conviction rather than an ecumenical one, although it is likely that we would have had more in common with some of those we asked to meet but who were ‘unfortunately prevented from coming to Moscow by problems of health’, ‘temporarily absent in Gorki’ or not yet returned from the camps. It was much easier to sense what the ‘Great Patriotic War’ meant, privately and emotionally, to the people we saw – particularly in Leningrad, survivor of the terrible wartime siege – than what communism meant to them. At all events I am certain that, standing by the Finland Station in the marvellous winter light of that miraculous city I shall never get used to calling St Petersburg, what we thought about the October Revolution was not the same as what our guides from the Leningrad branch of the Academy of Sciences thought.

I returned from Moscow politically unchanged if depressed, and without any desire to go there again. I did return but only fleetingly, in 1970 for a world historical congress, and in the last years of the USSR for brief tourist excursions from Helsinki, where I spent several summers at a UN Research Institute.⁵

The trip to the USSR in 1954–5 was my first contact with the countries of what was later called ‘really existing socialism’, for my visit to the 1947 World Youth Festival in Prague occurred before the Party had taken full power in the new ‘peoples’ democracies’. Indeed, in Czechoslovakia it had just emerged, with 40 per cent, as by far the largest party in a genuine multiparty general election. Apart from getting to know several of their historians personally, I made direct contact with the other socialist countries only after the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet CP which inaugurated the global crisis of the communist movement, though in the case of my first visit to the German Democratic Republic in April–May 1956, before the publication of Khrushchev’s public attack on Stalin. But by that time everything had changed.

II

There are two ‘ten days that shook the world’ in the history of the revolutionary movement of the last century: the days of the October Revolution, described in John Reed’s book of that title, and the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (14–25 February 1956). Both divide it suddenly and irrevocably into a ‘before’ and ‘after’. I cannot think of any comparable event in the history of any major ideological or political movement. To put it in the simplest terms, the October Revolution created a world communist movement, the Twentieth Congress destroyed it.

The world communist movement had been constructed, on Leninist lines, as a single disciplined army dedicated to the transformation of the world under a centralized and quasi-military command situated in the only state in which ‘the proletariat’ (i.e. the Communist Party) had taken power. It became a movement of global significance only because it was linked to the USSR, which in turn became the country that tore the guts out of Nazi Germany and emerged from the war as a superpower. Bolshevism had transformed one weak regime in a vast but backward country into a superpower. The victory of the cause in other countries, the liberation of the colonial and semi-colonial world, depended on its support and on its sometimes reluctant but real protection. Whatever its weaknesses, its very existence proved that socialism was more than a dream. And the passionate anti-communism of the Cold War crusaders, which saw communists exclusively as agents of Moscow, welded them more firmly to the USSR.

As time went on, and especially during the years of the battles against fascism, the effectively organized revolutionary left had become virtually identified with the Communist Parties. They had absorbed or eliminated other brands of social revolutionaries. While the Communist Universal Church gave rise to one set after another of schismatics and heretics, none of the rebel groups it shed, expelled or killed had ever suceeded in establishing itself more than locally as a rival, until Tito did so in 1948 – but then, unlike any of the others, he was already head of a revolutionary state. As 1956 began, the joint strength of the three rival Trotskyite groups in Britain has been estimated as fewer than 100 persons. ¹ In practice since 1933 the CPs had virtually cornered Marxist theory, largely through the Soviets’ zeal for the distribution of the works of the ‘classics’. It had become increasingly clear that, for Marxists, ‘the Party’ – wherever they lived, and with all their possible reservations – was the only game in town. The great French classicist J. P. Vernant, a communist before the war, broke with the Party by joining the Gaullist Resistance from the start against the then Party line, and had a most distinguished war as ‘Colonel Berthier’, and compagnon de la Libération, but he rejoined the Party after the war, because he remained a revolutionary. Where else could he go? The late Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky, but in his heart a frustrated political leader, said to me, when I first met him at the peak of the communist crisis of 1956–7: ‘Whatever you do, don’t leave the Communist Party. I let myself be expelled in 1932 and have regretted it ever since.’ Unlike me, he never reconciled himself to the fact that he was politically significant only by having become a writer. After all, was not the business of communists changing the world and not merely interpreting it?

III

Why did Khrushchev’s uncompromising denunciation of Stalin destroy the foundations of the global solidarity of communists with Moscow? After all, it continued a process of managed destalinization that had been advancing steadily for more than two years, even though other Communist Parties resented the familiar Soviet habit of suddenly, and without previous information, confronting them with the need to justify some unexpected reversal of policy. (In 1955 Khrushchev’s reconciliation with Tito particularly exasperated comrades who, seven years earlier, had been forced, almost certainly against their will, to hail his excommunication from the True Church.) Indeed, until the leaking of the Khrushchev speech to a wider public, including that of the Communist Parties, the Twentieth Congress looked simply like another, admittedly rather larger, step away from the Stalin era.

I think we must distinguish here between its impact on the leadership of Communist Parties, especially those who already governed states, and on the communist rank-and-file. Naturally, both had accepted the mandatory obligations of a ‘democratic centralism’, which had quietly dropped what measure of democracy it might originally have contained.² And all of them, except perhaps the Chinese CP which nevertheless acknowledged the primacy of Stalin, accepted Moscow as the commander of the disciplined army of world communism in the global Cold War. Both shared the extraordinary, genuine and unforced admiration for Stalin as the leader and embodiment of the Cause, and the well-attested sense of grief and personal loss which communists unquestionably felt at his death in 1953. While this was natural enough for the rank-and-file, for whom he was a remote image of poor people’s triumph and liberation – ‘the fellow with the big moustache’ who might still come one day to get rid of the rich once and for all – it was undoubtedly shared by hard-bitten leaders like Palmiro Togliatti, who knew the terrible dictator at close quarters, and even by his real or prospective victims. Molotov remained loyal to him for thirty-three years after his death, though in his last paranoiac years Stalin had forced him to divorce his wife, had her arrested, interrogated and exiled, and was plainly preparing Molotov himself for a show trial. Anna Pauker, of the Comintern and Romania, wept when she heard of Stalin’s death, even though she had not liked him, had indeed been afraid of him, and was at the time being prepared to be thrown to the wolves as an alleged bourgeois nationalist, agent of Truman and Zionism. (‘Don’t cry,’ said her interrogator. ‘If Stalin were still alive you’d be dead.’³) No wonder that the impassioned attack on his record, and on the ‘cult of personality’, by Khrushchev sent shockwaves through the international communist movement.

On the other hand, much as their leaders admired Stalin and accepted the ‘guiding role’ of the Soviet Party, Communist Parties, in or outside power, were neither ‘monolithic’, in the Stalinist phrase, nor simple executive agents of CPSU policy. And since at least 1947 they had been told to do things by Moscow, often politically prejudicial, which they, or at least substantial sections of their leadership, would never have done themselves. While Stalin lived and the Moscow leadership and power remained ‘monolithic’, that was the end of it. Destalinization reopened closed options, especially since the men in the Kremlin patently lacked the old authority, and still faced strong opposition from the old Stalinists. Because Moscow was (briefly) no longer under monolithic rule. In short, the cracks in the structure of the region under Soviet control could now open. Within a few months of the Twentieth Congress they did so, visibly, in Poland and Hungary. And this in turn aggravated the crises within the non-governmental Communist Parties.

What disturbed the mass of their members was that the brutally ruthless denunciation of Stalin’s misdeeds came, not from ‘the bourgeois press’, whose stories, if read at all, could be rejected a priori as slanders and lies, but from Moscow itself. It was impossible not to take notice of it, but also impossible to know what loyal believers should make of it. Even those who ‘had strong suspicions … [about the facts revealed] amounting to moral certainty for years before Khrushchev spoke’⁴ were shocked at the sheer extent, hitherto not fully realized, of Stalin’s mass murders of communists. (The Khrushchev Report said nothing about the others.) And no thinking communist could escape asking himself or herself some serious questions.

Nevertheless, I think it is safe to say that at the start of 1956 no leadership of any non-state Communist Party seriously thought that destalinization implied a fundamental revision of the role, objectives and history of such Parties. Nor did they expect major troubles from their membership, since the people who remained Party members were those who had resisted the propaganda of the cold warriors for ten years. Yet, probably because of their very confidence, this time they failed to carry a substantial number of their members with them.

In retrospect the reason is obvious. We were not told the truth about something that had to affect the very nature of a communist’s belief. Moreover, we could see that the leadership would have preferred us not to know the truth – they concealed it until Khrushchev’s off-the-record speech had been leaked to the non-communist press – and they manifestly wanted to bring any discussion about it to a close as soon as possible. When the crisis broke out in Poland and Hungary they went on concealing what our own journalists reported. One could understand why as Party organizers they might find this convenient, but it was neither Marxism nor genuine politics. When the familiar call to unswerving loyalty failed, their immediate instinct was to blame the unfortunate vacillations of those well-known elements of instability and weakness, petty-bourgeois intellectuals. It took the Party authorities from March to November to recognize what the Committee of the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group had seen almost immediately, namely that this was ‘the most serious and critical situation the Party was in since its foundation’.⁵ Indeed, after the Hungarian Revolution and Soviet armed intervention later that year, not even the most blindly loyal Party members could reasonably deny it. When the leadership had re-established itself in 1957, after fending off an outburst of open opposition without precedent, the British Communist Party had lost a quarter of its members, a third of the staff of its newspaper, the Daily Worker, and probably the bulk of what remained of the generation of communist intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s. But, though it lost several of its leading trade unionists, it rapidly regained its national industrial influence, which reached its peak in the 1970s and early 1980s.

It is difficult to reconstruct not only the mood but the memory of that traumatic year, rising, through a succession of lesser crises, to the appalling climax of the Soviet army’s reconquest of Hungary, and then stumbling and wrestling to an exhausted defeat through months of doomed and feverish argument. Arnold Wesker’s play Chicken Soup with Barley , about a Jewish working-class family struggling with its communist faith, gives a good idea of what has been called ‘the pain of losing it and the pain of clinging to it’.⁶ Even after practically half a century my throat contracts as I recall the almost intolerable tensions under which we lived month after month, the unending moments of decision about what to say and do on which our future lives seemed to depend, the friends now clinging together or facing one another bitterly as adversaries, the sense of lurching, unwillingly but irreversibly, down the scree towards the fatal rock-face. And this while all of us, except a handful of full-time Party workers, had to go on, as though nothing much had happened, with lives and jobs outside, which temporarily seemed unwanted distractions from the enormous thing that dominated our days and nights. God knows 1956 was a dramatic year in British politics, but in the memory of those who were then communists, everything else has faded. Of course we mobilized against Anthony Eden’s lying government in the Suez crisis together with a for once totally united Labour and Liberal left. But Suez did not keep us from sleeping. Probably the simplest way of putting it is that, for more than a year, British communists lived on the edge of the political equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown.

What made things worse was that the family-sized British Communist Party was in many ways, to quote an apocryphal critique by the Comintern, ‘a party of good friends’. Unlike other Parties, it had no history of clamorous expulsions and excommunications. It lacked the particular version of the ‘bolshevik’ house-style of leadership which created ruthless, complacent bullies such as Andre śMarty in the French CP. We were likely to have met and talked to our leaders, liked most of them and at least some of us could understand the pressures upon them. None of the critics wanted to leave the Party, the Party did not want to lose us. Wherever our political future was to take us – and even those who left or were expelled from the Party overwhelmingly remained on the left – all of us lived through the crisis of 1956 as convinced communists.

I would have been in the thick of the crisis in any case, but I was close to the centre of it, since in 1956 I was the chairman of the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group – one of the few times I have been chairman of any organization – and the group emerged almost immediately as the nucleus of vocal opposition to the Party line, when it was brought to us by a King Street spokesman on 8 April 1956, shortly after the Khrushchev speech, or rather after the subsequent British Party Congress which had (vainly) tried to bypass the whole issue. We rebelled and the group made the two most dramatic challenges to the Party. In the first, one of the group’s leading members, Christopher Hill, acted as spokesman for the Minority Report of the Commission on Inner-Party Democracy, i.e. virtual leader of the opposition at the Party Congress of May 1957. In mid-July John Saville of Hull University and E. P. Thompson, then a lecturer in the extramural department of Leeds, launched an unprecedented and by Party convention entirely illegitimate bulletin of opposition within the Party, The Reasoner. (After they left the Party it was revived as The New Reasoner in 1957, with contributions from various sympathetic hands, including myself.) The Soviet intervention in the Hungarian Revolution moved several of us to a second and even more flagrant breach of Party discipline, technically punishable by expulsion, a collective letter of protest, signed by most of the better-known historians (including the usually silent loyalist Maurice Dobb), rejected by the Daily Worker and demonstratively published in the non-Party press.⁷ Only Party members of that generation will appreciate how unpardonable such a breach of discipline was. A few years later this letter allowed me, on an emotional evening in an Austrian pub, to check-mate a very drunken and ill-tempered Arthur Koestler who wanted to know whether people like me had ever opposed the Russians over the Hungarian Revolution.

The historians had been the most consistently flourishing of the Party’s ‘cultural groups’, and a notably loyal one politically. Why did we – more than the writers, more than the scientists, groggy from the impact of the absurdities of Lysenko and official Soviet ideology – find ourselves in the front line of opposition from the start? Essentially, because we had to confront the situation not only as private individuals and communist militants, but in our professional capacity. The issue of what had been done under Stalin, and why it had been concealed, was literally a question about history. So were the open but undiscussed questions about episodes in our own Party’s history which were directly linked to Moscow decisions in the Stalin era, notably the abandonment of the anti-fascist line in 1939–41. So, indeed, was our own political attitude. As someone said on the day of our first rebellion: ‘Why should we simply approve Khrushchev? We do not know, we can only endorse policy – but historians go by evidence.’⁸

This accounts for our only collective intervention as a group in the affairs of the Party in 1956. We demanded a serious history of the CP. King Street, which, as I can now see in retrospect, was desperate to conciliate a troublesome bunch of intellectuals whom they nevertheless recognized as an asset, agreed to set up a commission to discuss the matter. Harry Pollitt, Chairman and unquestioned leader of the Party during our lifetime, Palme Dutt, the ideological guru, and James Klugmann, represented the leadership, I as group chairman and Brian Pearce spoke for the historians. (Brian, once a Tudor specialist, now a superb translator from French and Russian, had long been critical of the myths and silences of CP history. He was to leave the Communist Party for one of the Trotskyite groups.)

I recall frustrating meetings. Not that the historians were faced with a single co-ordinated line. Harry had admired Stalin and, like most old-time Party leaders, neither approved nor respected Khrushchev. He was a working-class leader of major stature with more charisma than any Labour Party leader except Bevan and, as an old boiler-maker, far more sense than Bevan of what the trade unions were about. His instincts and long experience made him sceptical of researchers on Party history. As a politician he knew that coroners’ inquests on ancient quarrels, especially among comrades still living, tended to cause trouble. As an old Comintern hand, he realized that a lot of things could not be told and some had better stay untold. None of us could have known then that in 1937 Pollitt had intervened in Moscow in defence of a former Comintern representative in Britain and his wife, who had just been arrested – possibly going up even to Stalin. This extraordinarily brave and honest step had landed him in serious trouble in those days of paranoiac terror. The Comintern considered replacing him as leader of the Party, and the scenario of a possible show trial was sketched out. He had been saved from the worst, with the aid of a British passport, by Dimitrov, and perhaps by the stubborn refusal under torture of the Comintern’s former organizational chief Osip Piatnitsky to make the required ‘confession’ implicating the designated victims.⁹ Would it have done the movement any good if someone had published this episode in the Party’s history, even if it undoubtedly reflects credit on it and especially on Pollitt himself? He made it clear that in his view the only kind of history that helped the Party was the regimental kind – a record of battles fought, heroic deeds, sacrifices for the cause, red banners waved – to fill the comrades with pride and hope.

The Indo-Scandinavian intellectual Palme Dutt, one of those implausibly tall upper-class figures one occasionally meets among Bengalis, belonged through his mother to an eminent Swedish kindred – Olaf Palme, the socialist premier assassinated in 1986, was another member.⁶ Unlike Harry, Dutt was a natural intellectual as well as an instinctive hardliner. Many years earlier the night he spent in my little house in Cambridge after a meeting had left me with a lasting admiration for his acute mind and a lasting conviction that he was not interested in truth, but used his intellect exclusively to justify and explicate the line of the moment, whatever it was. I now think I was unfair to the intellectual instincts still buried somewhere deeply inside him, or perhaps to his hope of posthumous recognition as something better than a gifted sophist in the service of authority. He granted that a genuine history of the Communist Party was essentially the history of its policies, that is to say of the changes in the line. And this must of course involve critical consideration, and, where necessary, negative judgement. But had the moment for this yet come? He doubted it.

And our old hero James Klugmann? He sat on the far right-hand corner of the table and said nothing. He knew we were right. If we did not produce a history of our Party, including the problematic bits, they would not go away. The history would simply be written by anti-communist scholars – and indeed, within less than two years such a history was written.¹⁰ But he lacked what the great Bismarck once called ‘Zivilcourage ’, civilian as distinct from military courage. He knew what was right, but shied away from saying it in public. (In this he was like a rather different political figure, Isaiah Berlin, about the policies of the State of Israel.) He said nothing, and agreed to take on himself the task of writing an acceptable official history of the CPGB, which he knew to be impossible. Twelve years later he published a first volume which went up to 1924. My fairly savage demonstration that he had been wasting his time did not spoil our relations. ¹¹ Before his death he published a second volume which went up to 1927, just before he would have to face the most controversial episodes. He would never have written more. In the meanwhile he edited Marxism Today , founded as a sop to critics who stayed in the Party in 1957, not exactly encouraging open discussion but not exactly discouraging it either.

IV

When I consider what effect the Twentieth Congress had on the larger historical scene, I feel a little embarrassed to insist on the storms in our British teapot. Following strikes by Polish workers and demonstrations by Polish Catholics – a powerful combination even then – a new communist leadership took over in Poland under Vladislav Gomulka, purged in 1949 and only recently let out of prison. (Fortunately the Poles had evaded organizing the prearranged trials and executions that disfigured Bulgaria, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and could therefore ‘rehabilitate’ living people rather than corpses.) The Chinese, then still part of the international movement, prevailed on the Russians to avoid military action. The Hungarian Revolution which immediately followed was less lucky, almost certainly because its new leadership went beyond what the Soviets could be expected to tolerate, by leaving the eastern military alliance of the Warsaw Pact and declaring their neutrality in the Cold War. None of this, least of all Khrushchev himself, impressed the Chinese, whose relations with the USSR then began to deteriorate sharply. Within a year or two the two communist giants had split. There were now two rival communist movements, though in fact almost all existing Communist Parties remained loyal to the Soviet centre. The so-called ‘Maoism’ of the 1960s created no real parties but small and squabbling activist sects. Even the most serious ostensibly pro-Chinese group, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which seceded from the CPI, was not really Maoist. It carried with it such mass support as there was for communism in India, notably in the state of Kerala, where trucks decorated with the picture of Stalin are still to be seen on country roads, and West Bengal whose 68 million citizens the CPI(M) has now (2002) governed with solid popular support for decades.

In Britain the main effect of the great 1956 earthquake was that it made some 30,000 members of the Communist Party feel terrible, and scattered the forces of the small extreme left. Most of those who left the Party probably quietly dropped out of political activism. (So also did some who remained, like myself, convinced that, since the Party had not reformed itself, it had no long-term political future in the country.) Some joined the three main Trotskyist groups, although these grew not so much by transfers from the CP as by the general cracking of the world communist monolith and the loss of the CP’s virtual monopoly in Marxism. The militant young now had the choice of lefts. Most of the critics from the Historians’ Group, which did not effectively survive the crisis, groped for, or rather tried to build, some ‘New Left’ undefiled by the bad memories of Stalinism.

Saville and Thompson’s New Reasoner (1957–9) became the home for most of the ex-CP intellectuals. Eventually it merged with the Universities and Left Review founded by the youngest former member of the Historians’ Group, Raphael Samuel, together with another ex-communist, Gabriel Pearson, and two rather impressive unattached younger Oxford radicals, the Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. The average age of the editors was twenty-four. From the early 1960s this uneasily merged New Left Review was taken over by a new team of young Oxford post-CP Marxists, the core of which came from the old Anglo-Irish milieu in the Irish Republic. Its chieftain was the remarkably able Perry Anderson (aged twenty-two), who also largely financed it. Unlike the little Britons of the older ‘New Lefts’, its interests were distinctly international, more theoretical, and much less tied to the labour movement or socialist politics. Although it moved into the orbit of the Fourth International it succeeded in establishing itself as the major periodical of a new generation of Anglo-Saxon Marxists.

In practical terms these ‘New Lefts’, although intellectually productive, were negligible. They did not reform the Labour Party (about which they remained ambivalent) or the Communist Party (as happened in Sweden). They produced neither new parties of the left (as in Denmark), nor lasting new organizations of significance, nor even individual national leaders. Thompson himself eventually became nationally famous as a spokesman for nuclear disarmament, but although CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), by far the most important movement of the post-1945 British left, was founded about the same time (1958) it had nothing to do with the crisis in the CP.

In some ways the brief episode of the Partisan Coffee House symbolizes the combination of ideology, impracticality and sentimental hope of those early post-1956 ‘New Lefts’. Like so much else it was the brainchild of Raphael Samuel who, with Edward Thompson, another and greater natural Romantic, emerged as the most original influence among the ex-CP intellectuals. Anyone who knew Raphael during an impassioned life cut short by cancer has exactly the same memories of him: a thin, enthusiastic face with mild, quick-witted eyes under a waterfall of eventually thinning dark hair, rushing from place to place alone, carrying with him wherever he went a vast collection of notes and files from which he struggled to retrieve the right piece of paper. All the work he ever published was part of an infinite all-embracing work-in-progress. He found it impossible to choose between the many marvels of the (overwhelmingly British) past, which is why he never got far with the doctoral thesis I was supposed to supervise – I think it was on Irish labour in Victorian London – or any other project. Not unnaturally for so ingrained an activist, he found his place in Ruskin College, where he taught trade unionists within earshot of the mostly uncaring dons of Oxford University. His history had neither structure nor limits. It was an unending and astonishingly learned perambulation round the wonderful landscapes, of memory and the lives of common people, with an occasional intellectual pounce suggested by some particularly fascinating sight glimpsed on the way.

This eager vagabond figure, the absolute negation of administrative and executive efficiency, carried inside him an explosive charge of energy, an endless capacity to generate ideas and initiatives, and above all a quite astonishing capacity to talk others into realizing them. The Universities and Left Review was one of them, the ‘History Workshop’ movement, origin of the History Workshop Journal (the most influential meeting-point of the post-Marxist historians of the left), was another. The Partisan Coffee House was a third. With two generations of Jewish revolutionary Marxists from Eastern Europe behind him, he dreamed of replacing the Stalinist authoritarianism of the Party with a free-wheeling creative mobilization of political minds, and what better centre for doing so than a cafe? Not one of those neo-baroque quick-consumption coffee bars which were then filling the side streets of the West End with the newly popular Gaggia Espresso machines, but a real Soho café, in which people could discuss theoretical issues, play chess, consume strudel and hold political meetings in a back room, as on the continent in the days before innocence was lost. The profits of the café śwould pay for the Review itself, whose offices would be above it. The Partisan would express both the new spirit of politics and the new spirit of the arts. It would be designed by the cutting-edge young architects of the moment, who were obviously going to be in sympathy with the project. I cannot remember whether jazz sessions were part of the dream. More likely folk sessions. To ensure its bona fides (and perhaps win the support of the older generation) some suitable left-wing personalities would preside over it. I let myself be talked into one of these directorships, against my better judgement. An eminent tweed-suited ex-CP architect with a house in Keats Grove was another. I cannot remember any of the others. Raph took not the slightest notice of any of us.

In retrospect it seems incredible that this hare-brained project got beyond the initial pitch. And yet it did. Even Raphael’s genius as a salesman could not have raised the very substantial amount of money needed without the prior collapse of the Communist Party’s so-called ‘Business Branch’, which had previously provided much of the CP’s income. Until 1956 they had been a solid bastion of loyal orthodoxy who asked visiting Party speakers (actually, me, on the occasion I talked there) to address them on such subjects as ‘The Paris Commune of 1871’. Now prosperous, some of them even very rich, the revelation of what had been done to Soviet Jews in the last Stalin years was too much for these overwhelmingly Jewish East Enders recruited to the Party during the anti-fascist era. Whoever backed the Partisan must have known that it was not a serious business proposition, but something about the youth and the sheer utopian confidence of Raph must have appealed to middle-aged men whose moral universe lay in ruins around them. Somehow Raph got the money, a house was bought or leased in Carlisle Street, Soho, within sight of Marx’s old residence in Dean Street, and the Partisan Coffee House was installed.

It was a scheme designed for disaster. The then current fashion among architects preferred austere interiors looking like station waiting rooms. These attracted the more demoralized bums and the fringe hangers-on of Soho, who were neither welcomed in nor attracted by establishments with a more elaborate decor, especially at night, as well as the Metropolitan Police in search of drug-busts. The large expensive tables and square chunky seats were designed to encourage drafting thesis chapters and long debates on tactics, while minimizing the space for, and the rate of consumption of, income-generating customers. In any case, the management of the Partisan was not strong on checking cash receipts and keeping accounts. In short, though Raphael attempted to explain all this away to the increasingly gloomy directors, the place went out of business within two years. Only nostalgia and the need to maintain contact between the pre- and post-1956 generations of the left can explain why I found myself involved in this lunatic enterprise. And yet, it was not more predictably doomed than the various other political enterprises of those who left the Party in 1956– 7. Like the Partisan Coffee House the political projects of the ‘New Left’ of 1956 are now a half-remembered footnote.

Intellectually 1956 left rather more behind – not least the remarkable impact of E. P. Thompson, who was to be recorded by the Arts and Humanities Citations Index (1976–83) as one of the 100 most-cited twentieth-century authors in any field covered by the Index. Before 1956 he was little known outside the CP, in which he had spent the years since returning from the war as a brilliant, handsome, passionate and oratorically gifted activist in Yorkshire, and his adult classes, whose members saw him as ‘a tall, rangy sort of fellow’ overloaded with nervous energy, explicating poems by William Blake.¹² For his original passion had been for literature rather than history as such, although he was marginally involved in the Historians’ Group. It was 1956 that made him primarily into a historian. His later fame is essentially based on The Making of the English Working Class (1963), an erupting historical volcano of 848 pages which was immediately accepted as a major work even by the world of professional historians, and which captured young radical readers on both sides of the Atlantic overnight, and continental European sociologists and social historians not long after. And this in spite of its almost aggressively brief chronological span and narrowly English – not even British – subject matter. Escaping from the cage of the old Party orthodoxy, it allowed him as well to join a collective debate with other hitherto isolated thinkers of the left, old and new, also often rooted in the adult education movement, notably the other major figure of the first ‘New Left,’ the literary scholar Raymond Williams.

Edward was indeed a person of quite extraordinary gifts, not least the sort of palpable ‘star quality’, which led every eye to turn towards his increasingly craggy good looks whenever he was present on any scene. His ‘work combined passion and intellect, the gifts of the poet, the narrator and the analyst. He was the only historian I knew who had not just talent, brilliance, erudition and the gift of writing, but … ‘‘genius in the traditional sense of the word’’ ’,¹³ and all the more obviously so since he fitted the Romantic image of the genius in looks, life and work – especially with the suitable landscape of the Welsh hills behind him.

In short, he was a man showered by the fairies at birth with all possible gifts except two. Nature had omitted to provide him with an in-built sub-editor and an in-built compass. And, with all his warmth, charm, humour and rage, it left him in some ways insecure and vulnerable. Like so many of his other works, The Making had begun as the first chapter of a short textbook on British labour history from 1790 to 1945, and had just got out of hand. Within a few years he suspended the remarkable studies of eighteenth-century society begun after The Making had turned him temporarily into an orthodox academic, which did not fit his style, to plunge into years of a theoretical struggle against the influence of a French Marxist, the late Louis Althusser, who inspired some of the brightest of the contemporary young leftists at that time. At the end of the seventies all his energy was diverted into the anti-nuclear movement, of which he became the national star. He never returned to history until he was too ill to complete his projects. He died in 1993 in his Worcestershire garden.

One could not fault a scholar for giving up writing for anti-nuclear campaigning in the early 1980s, but the Althusserian episode had no such justification. I told him at the time that it would be criminal to turn from his potentially epoch-making historical work to controverting a thinker who would be dead as an influence in another ten years’ time. And indeed, Althusser was already getting close to his sell-by date in the French Marxisant milieu even then. Though he helped at the time to open theoretical debate on the left, he survives today not as a philosopher but chiefly by virtue of his tragic personal trajectory. He was a manic-depressive who was to kill his wife. But even this was not then predictable, although Althusser in his manic phases was already a somewhat disturbing experience. Shortly before the tragedy he came to London, officially for a seminar at University College, unofficially to mobilize support for some hare-brained stratospheric initiative in which he wanted to involve Marxism Today and myself. His host handed him over to us after a night’s hospitality and Marlene looked after him for a morning, during which, inspired by our modest instrument, he insisted on ordering a grand piano from a local store for delivery to Paris. When picked up by his next caretaker he expressed an immediate interest in a Rolls-Royce (or maybe a Jaguar) from a car showroom in Mayfair which he insisted on visiting. It seemed clear that this brilliant mind was already accelerating the ride of his mental motorbike round some wall of death to a fatal climax.

The truth is that Edward suffered bitterly from the failure of the 1956 ‘New Left’. None of the ex-communist generation expected much of the Labour Party. The new generation of the intellectual young, with whom he wanted desperately not to lose touch, were moving in new and, for him, undesirable directions. Had they his (and Raymond Williams’s) feeling for the moral strength of the British working class? The new theoretically minded continental Marxism was not his, and he detected an ‘irrationalist’ ‘revolting bourgeoisie’ behind the new international student movement. He was on the outer margin of politics. It hurt him. I think this was one reason why he threw himself into the anti-nuclear movement with such passion.

Though I remained in the CP, unlike most of my friends in the Historians’ Group, my situation as a man cut loose from his political moorings was not substantially different from theirs. In any case my relations with them remained the same. The Party asked me to change them, but I refused. They sensibly chose not to expel me, but that was their choice, not mine. Party membership no longer meant to me what it had since 1933. In practice I recycled myself from militant to sympathizer or fellow-traveller or, to put it another way, from effective membership of the British Communist Party to something like spiritual membership of the Italian CP, which fitted my ideas of communism rather better. (The Italian CP returned my sympathies.)

In any case, the individual political activities of none of us mattered much any more. We had influence as teachers, as scholars, as political writers or at best ‘public intellectuals’, and for this – at least in Britain – our membership of Party or organization was irrelevant, except to people who had strong a priori feelings about the CP. If we maintained or acquired influence among the left-wing young, it was because our left-wing past and our present Marxism or commitment to radical scholarship gave us what is today called ‘street cred’, because we wrote about important matters and because they liked what we wrote. From the point of view of this reading public, old or young, the political and ideological differences between Thompson, Raymond Williams and Hobsbawm were less important than that all three belonged to the small minority of ‘names’ – intellectually reputable thinkers and writers – flagged as belonging to the left.

Still, the question remains why, unlike many of my friends, and however much of a dissident, I stayed in the Party. In the course of time I have had to answer this question a number of times. I have been asked it by almost every journalist who has ever interviewed me, for the quickest way of identifying a personality in our media-saturated society is by one or two unique peculiarities: mine are being a professor who likes jazz and who remained in the Communist Party longer than most. I have given substantially the same answer at varying length.¹⁴ It represents my justification in subsequent decades of remaining in the Party, and not necessarily what I felt at the time. It is impossible to reconstruct those feelings now, although, then as later, I was strongly repelled by the idea of being in the company of those ex-communists who turned into fanatical anti-communists, because they could free themselves from the service of ‘The God that Failed’ only by turning him into Satan. There were plenty of them about in the Cold War era.

In retrospect, and seeing the person I was in 1956 as a historian rather than an autobiographer, I think two things explain why I stayed in the Party, though, obviously, considering leaving it. I did not come into communism as a young Briton in England, but as a central European in the collapsing Weimar Republic. And I came into it when being a communist meant not simply fighting fascism but the world revolution. I still belong to the tail-end of the first generation of communists, the ones for whom the October Revolution was the central point of reference in the political universe.

The difference in background and life history was real enough. It had been obvious to me and to others even within the Party. No intellectual brought up in Britain could become a communist with the same sense as a central European of

the day the heavens were falling the hour the earth’s foundations fled

because, with all its problems, this was simply not the situation in the Britain of the 1930s. Yet in some ways, having become a communist before 1935 was even more significant. Politically, having actually joined a Communist Party in 1936, I belong to the era of anti-fascist unity and the Popular Front. It continues to determine my strategic thinking in politics to this day. But emotionally, as one converted as a teenager in the Berlin of 1932, I belonged to the generation tied by an almost unbreakable umbilical cord to hope of the world revolution, and of its original home, the October Revolution, however sceptical or critical of the USSR. For someone who joined the movement where I came from and when I did, it was quite simply more difficult to break with the Party than for those who came later and from elsewhere. In the last analysis I suspect that this was why I allowed myself to stay. Nobody forced me out and the reasons for going were not quite strong enough.

But – and here I speak as autobiographer rather than historian – let me not forget a private emotion: pride. Losing the handicap of Party membership would improve my career prospects, not least in the USA. It would have been easy to slip out quietly. But I could prove myself to myself by succeeding as a known communist – whatever ‘success’ meant – in spite of that handicap, and in the middle of the Cold War. I do not defend this form of egoism, but neither can I deny its force. So I stayed.

13

Watershed

Some moments in history – the outbreaks of the two world wars, for instance – are recognizably catastrophic, like earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. There are similar moments in private life, or at all events, as earlier chapters show, there have been such moments in mine. However, if we want to stay with geological similes, there are other moments that can best be compared with watersheds. Nothing very obvious or dramatic seems to be happening, but after you have crossed an otherwise nondescript bit of territory you notice that you have left an epoch in history, or in your own life, behind. The years on either side of 1960 – my early and middle forties – formed such a watershed in my life. Perhaps also in the social and cultural history of the western world. Certainly of Britain. ¹ This seems to be a good moment to break my long walk through the short twentieth century for a pause to view the landscape.

The second half of the 1950s forms a curious interim in my life. After the end of my King’s Fellowship I moved back to a permanent base in Bloomsbury, a large, partly dark flat full of books and records, overlooking Torrington Place, which, until my marriage in 1962, I successively shared with a series of communist or ex-CP friends: Louis Marks and Henry Collins of the Historians’ Group, the old Marxist literary critic Alick West and the Spanish refugee Vicente Girbau. Since it was central and had enough spare capacity, it also attracted out-of-town and metropolitan overnight visitors and other temporary attachments. It was, to be honest, much more fun than living in a Cambridge college, even though I lived through the worst periods of the crisis of communism and the tearing of political roots there. It had the additional advantage of being so close to Birkbeck that I could, if necessary, go home between lectures. London was a good place to live in. This was the setting in which I lived through the watershed.

That my personal and professional life changed in these years is obvious enough. I met a Viennese-born girl in an ocelot coat in a setting of world politics. We fell in love. She had recently returned from the United Nations’ vain attempt to intervene in the Congo, I was about to go to Castro’s Havana, and Marlene and I married during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It was three years after publishing my first books, and a few weeks before The Age of Revolution, 1789– 1848. Professionally, I was beginning to acquire some international reputation, and therefore to travel outside what had been my habitual range in the 1950s, France, the Iberian Peninsula and Italy. In the 1960s I began my academic trips to the USA and Cuba, I discovered and started to explore Latin America, found myself in Israel and India, and returned to the Mitteleuropa I had not seen since childhood. What is more, I had begun to notice that I no longer lived in the constant expectation of seismic catastrophe as Mitteleuropeans had done in the days of my youth. I began to notice – I do not recall exactly when – that I was operating in a time-frame of decades rather than years or even, as before 1945, months. I did not consciously abandon the basic precautions of the potential refugee which people of my kind learned to observe, whether as Jews or as Reds, against the sudden hazards of economic and political life between the wars: a valid passport, enough immediately available money to buy a ticket to the chosen country of refuge at a moment’s notice, a way of life that permitted quick departures and a rough idea of what to take, if one had to go. In fact, when, shortly after marrying Marlene, and in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, I had to go abroad, I reacted accordingly. I made some financial arrangements, fixed a provisional appointment with Marlene in Buenos Aires, where I was due to be in a week or two, in case things began to look really drastic, and left her enough money for the fare. Nevertheless, though it was quite evident that the Cuban missile crisis was a matter of global life and death, I cannot actually have expected nuclear world war to break out. Had I done so, I suppose I should, logically, have taken Marlene with me immediately, at least to get both of us out of the immediate firing-line. If the worst came to the worst, South America was the least likely battlefield. I already found myself operating on the assumption that the danger to the world came not from the global ambitions or aggressiveness of the USA (the USSR was too weak to have them) but the risks inherent in politicians and generals on both sides playing a game with nuclear bowls which they knew it would be suicide to use – but which might easily slip out of control. In fact we now know that this was precisely the lesson which Kennedy and Khrushchev, neither of whom wanted a war, drew from the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. In short, as far as I was concerned, from 1960 on the Cold War was not over, but it had become dramatically less dangerous.

As for long-term planning, anyone who enters upon marriage can no longer avoid it even if he or she wanted to. I had already been forced to consider the problem a couple of years earlier, when a child was impending from an earlier relationship – my children’s half-brother Joshua – and only the refusal of the woman concerned to leave her husband had removed him from my life into others’ lives. By the middle of the 1960s I was the father of Andy and Julia, the first-time owner of a small car in which I transported them to a holiday cottage in North Wales and first-time house-owner of a large house in an as yet very incompletely gentrified part of Clapham, divided in two by an austere architect friend, which Marlene and I had bought jointly with the taciturn Alan Sillitoe and his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight. ‘Has he won the pools or something?’ the local newsagent asked Marlene, since in those days of full employment he could not understand what an obviously healthy and respectable-looking youngish fellow was doing not going out to work in the morning and coming back of an evening like other men. Though Alan was as much of a workaholic as most writers, this guess was not totally off target: he had, after all, written Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which, thanks to their merits and the enormous growth of secondary education, became two of those contemporary classics which, set for O-level and A-level examinations, generate a lasting flow of royalties. He could afford to live off his books, and could avoid the treadmill of freelance journalism. I, though writing at home, did conform to type, for I went to work at Birkbeck on the Northern Line and came back from there late at night. On the other hand, I remained peculiar, inasmuch as I showed no enthusiasm for gardening, and, unlike the Caribbean electricians and transport workers in the short street that led to the Wandsworth Road outside our front door, I did not spend Sunday mornings cleaning our car.

Clearly I was well on the way to the everyday life of academic and middle-class respectability. At this point, except for travel, nothing much happens any longer to the subject of autobiography except inside his or her head or in other people’s heads. This is also true for that matter of the subjects of biography, as generations of the writers of intellectuals’ lives have learned to their cost. However towering the achievement of Charles Darwin, once he returned from the voyage of the Beagle and married, there is not much more to be said about the material events in his life for his last forty years than that ‘he passed his time at Down, Kent, as a country gentleman’² and to speculate about the reasons for his poor health. The life of the respectable academic is not full of professional drama, or rather its dramas, like those of office politics, are of interest only to those directly involved in them. Again, though there is plenty of drama in family life, especially when parents and teenage children confront each other, third parties, such as the readers of biographies, are usually less gripped by the drama of life inside other families than their own. The scenario is familiar. So the years around 1960 form a watershed not only in my life, but in the shape of this autobiography.

But private lives are embedded in the wider circumstances of history. The most powerful of these was the unexpected good fortune of the age. It crept up on my generation and took us unawares, especially the socialists among us who were unprepared to welcome an era of spectacular capitalist success. By the early 1960s it became hard not to notice it. I cannot say that we recognized it as what I have called ‘The Golden Age’ in my Age of Extremes. That became possible only after 1973, when it was over. Like everyone else, historians are best at being wise after the event. Nevertheless, by the early 1960s it had become evident to my generation in Britain, that is to say the ordinary run of those who had come out of the war in their twenties, that we were living far better than we had ever expected to in the 1930s. If we belonged to the social strata whose male members expected to have ‘careers’ rather than just ‘go to work’ (at that time this was not yet a game played much by women), we discovered that we were doing rather better, sometimes considerably better, than our parents, especially if we had passed more examinations than they had. True, this did not apply to two sections of our generation: those whose careers had reached their peak during the war, and who therefore looked back with nostalgia from the comparative lowlands of postwar civilian life, and the members of the established upper strata, whose parents, as a group, already enjoyed as much wealth, privilege, power or professional distinction as their children could expect to inherit or achieve. Indeed, they might see themselves as also-rans, if they went into the fields in which their fathers had been unusually successful – politics, science, the old professions, or whatever. Who has not been sorry for the political son overshadowed by his father – Winston and Randolph Churchill are the classic example – or the decent but run-of-the-mill natural scientist sons of FRS or Nobel Prize fathers? Like any academic with a Cambridge background, I have known a few.

But for most of us postwar life was an escalator which, without any special effort, took us higher than we had ever expected to be. Even people like myself, whose career progress was unusually retarded by the Cold War, moved along it. Of course this was partly due to my historical luck in entering the academic profession at a time when it was still fairly small, its status was high, and it was consequently quite well paid by the standards the Benthamite, Liberal and Fabian reformers had established for the public service in Victorian and Edwardian days. For though, unlike in other European countries, university teachers were not civil servants, they were under the wing of the state, which provided the funds for the collective five-year forward planning of the universities, but kept at arm’s length. So long as the profession remained small, and free market ideology was held at bay, it was understood that the salary, like the status, of the averagely successful lecturer should take him or her to the level equivalent to an averagely successful civil servant in the administrative grade: not wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, but a decent middle-class existence. The costs were still modest, at least for those of progressive views who wanted to send their children to state schools, and could as yet see no reason for not doing so. The welfare state benefited the middle classes relatively more than the workers. Those were the days when, largely for reasons of principle – and not yet discouraged by the experience of the National Health Service in practice – people like me refused to take out medical insurance. The price of houses remained within reach until the boom of the early 1970s, and the rise in their value gave us a natural bonus. Just before they began their move towards the stratosphere, it was possible to buy a freehold house in Hampstead for just under £20,000 gross, or, allowing for the profit on the sale of the previous house, £7,000 net. For those who married and had children young, there were no doubt a few years of relative tightness, holidays on caravan sites and scrabbling for extra income from schools examinations and the like, but a previously childless academic like myself, halfway up the university scale, who remarried in his forties, had no real problem in maintaining a family. Indeed, I cannot recall a time when my bank account was overdrawn. Such problems as arose were eventually eased by rising earnings from royalties and other literary activities, but around 1960 these were still very marginal additions to my income.

The generations who had become adults before the war could compare their postwar lives to those of their parents, or their own pre-war expectations. It was not so easy for them to see, especially when already facing the unchanging imperatives of bringing up a family, that their situation in the new ‘affluent society’ of the West was different in kind as well as in degree from the past. After all, the permanent household chores were not fundamentally changed but only made easier by new technology. Once married, earning a living, looking after children, house and garden, the washing and washing-up still filled most of a couple’s time and thinking. Only the young and mobile could recognize, and utilize, all the possibilities of a society that for the first time gave them enough money to buy what they wanted, enough time to do what they wanted, or that made them independent of the family in other ways. Youth was the name of the secret ingredient that revolutionized consumer society, and western culture. This is dramatically evident in the rise of rock and roll, a music which depends almost exclusively on customers in their teens or early twenties, or those once converted to this music at that age. US record sales grew from $277 million in 1955, the birth-year of rock and roll, to more than $2,000 million in 1973, of which 75–80 per cent represented rock music and similar sounds.

I certainly do not belong to the rock generation. Nevertheless, I was lucky enough to be present at, and to recognize, the birth of that generation in Britain. For, as it happens, in this country a form of jazz created a bridge between the older forms of youthful pop music and the rock revolution. From 1955, when my King’s Fellowship ran out and I returned to live permanently in London, it happened that I found myself professionally involved in the affairs of jazz. Since I now faced paying rent in London, having lived gratis in a Cambridge college, I thought of a way of earning some extra income. It was about this time that the London cultural establishment, stung by the challenge of the so-called ‘angry young men’ of the 1950s, thought it advisable to pay attention to jazz, for which they advertised their passion. The Observer had hired one of them, Kingsley Amis, as a jazz critic. He was already on the way from left-wing youth to conservative old age, but still quite far from the role of reactionary club-bar buffer into which he was later to settle. Having felt inferior to erudite jazz experts since the early 1930s, I knew very well that I was quite unqualified to be one, but it seemed to me that I understood at least as much about the subject as Kingsley Amis and had been familiar with it much longer. I therefore suggested to Norman Mackenzie, an ex-comrade from LSE days, then working on the New Statesman and Nation, that they also needed a jazz critic. The journal was in its glory days under its great editor Kingsley Martin, who neither knew nor cared about jazz, but could see that one had to keep up with this new cultural fashion, at least by a monthly column. He explained to me that in writing for the paper I should bear in mind its ideal typical reader, a male civil servant in his forties, and handed me over to the then commander of the cultural half of the mag, the admirable Janet Adam Smith, who knew almost everything about literature and mountain climbing, and a very great deal about the rest of the arts, but not about jazz. Because I wanted to keep the personalities of the university teacher and the jazz critic apart, for the next ten years or so I wrote under the pseudonym Francis Newton, after Frankie Newton, one of the few jazz-players known to have been a communist, an excellent but not superstar trumpeter who played with Billie Holiday on the great Commodore Records session that produced ‘Strange Fruit’.

Jazz is not just ‘a certain type of music’ but ‘a remarkable aspect of the society in which we live’,³ not to mention a part of the entertainment industry. Besides, relatively few readers of the New Statesman were likely to go to jazz gigs or buy Thelonious Monk, although I discovered, to my intense pleasure, that the second half of the fifties was a new golden age for the music, whose American stars were now coming to Britain, after being kept out of our island for twenty years by a union dispute. I therefore wrote not only as a reviewer of concerts, records and books but as a historian and reporter. What is more, pretty soon I found myself in contact (probably through my cousin Denis) with the small but culturally hip publishing house of McGibbon and Kee, then financed by a moody millionaire supporter of the Labour Party, Howard Samuel, which had already published books by what was probably the only Old Etonian jazz band leader, Humphrey Lyttelton, and by the difficult, lonely and haunted social explorer of 1950s London, Colin MacInnes, connoisseur of, and guide to, the new black London and the beginnings of the music-saturated teenage culture. They wanted me to write a book about jazz. It appeared as The Jazz Scene in 1959, the same year as my first history book, and was well received though it did not make much money.⁴ It encouraged me to explore the scene more systematically. This was not hard, for at least some of the jazz aficionados of the early 1930s had gone into the music business as agents or promoters, not least cousin Denis, who was establishing himself as probably the leading British record producer in the field of indigenous jazz and ethnic music. Indeed, his fortunes rose with those of the artists he recorded, such as Lonnie Donegan, whose ‘Rock Island Line’ (a jailhouse song originally recorded by the great Leadbelly) exploded into the big time in the spring of 1956. Fortunately also I was at the time unmarried and, teaching in an evening college which did not lecture until six p.m., I could adapt to the rhythm of life of the late-sleeping night people who make up the entertainment scene. Also I lived in Bloomsbury, within ten minutes’ walk of any action anywhere in the West End. So I found myself dropping without difficulty into my habitual role of ‘participant observer’ or kibitzer .

The jazz people were by no means teenagers. And yet both my contemporary sketch of the public for ‘trad jazz’ and ‘skiffle’ and Roger Mayne’s photographs for the first edition of The Jazz Scene show clearly that what the music they made inspired was essentially a somewhat older children’s crusade. They were part of the youth culture that was by then becoming sufficiently visible for those of us who roamed on its outskirts for whatever reason to recognize its existence, although only someone like Colin MacInnes with a special private affinity for adolescent rebellion and independence, could tune in on its wavelength. Nevertheless, apart from a distinct relaxation of female sexual conventions in the vicinity of musicians and singers, it had not yet become married to a counter-culture. That did not happen, at least in Britain, until the 1960s.

Much of what symbolized the youth counter-culture of the 1960s was nevertheless to be taken over from the old jazz scene – notably drugs and the patterns of life of what I once described as ‘the floating, nomadic community of professional black [and white] musicians living on the self-contained and self-sufficient little islands of the popular entertainers and other night people’, the places where the day people got rid of their inhibitions after dark. This was not necessarily a counter-culture in the later sense, for jazz musicians had an almost limitless toleration for any variant of human behaviour, but did not usually make a manifesto of it. The nearest thing to a counter-culture around the jazz scene was to be found on its fringes and among its hangers-on or outside admirers, as among the musicians’ girlfriends on the game who could earn a few hundred pounds in a few hours on the street – good money in the 1950s – and take off for a quick holiday in Morocco, among the conscious rejecters of traditional middle-class conventions, such as Ken Tynan, or among the middle-aged bourgeois insiders asserting outsider status by drinking sessions in the watering-hole of the painter Francis Bacon, Muriel Belcher’s Colony Club in Frith Street, Soho. Not that Muriel’s mostly homosexual crowd was particularly jazz-oriented, although I was introduced into this shabby first-floor room by an admiring reviewer of The Jazz Scene, and was quite likely to meet Colin MacInnes there, who praised jazz but did not understand it, and George Melly, who sang it and did. Melly was part of a fringe of the British jazz scene made up of refugees from middle-class respectability or people who combined their music with activities in the world of words and images. To the fans he was known as a self-parodying blues singer close to a music-hall act, as Wally Fawkes was known as a clarinet player. In the straight world both were much better known as the joint creators of a highly popular strip-cartoon which gently satirized the recognizable members of what was not yet known as the media world.

The third change, this one more readily recognized, was the change in the political or ideological mood after 1956. I can now see that the new factor that brought it about was the end of empires, but in Britain this did not become clear until the 1960s.

The Cold War remained, but, outside western governments, the public’s commitment to an emotional anti-communism began to decline. However much it was denounced, from 1960 the Berlin Wall stabilized the frontier between superpower empires in Europe, neither of which was seriously expected to cross it. We still lived under the black cloud of nuclear apocalypse. It came close in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and in 1963 Stanley Kubrick produced its definitive version, the film Doctor Strangelove – but by then it could already be played for laughs, however black. But CND, the new Campaign for (unilateral British) Nuclear Disarmament (1959), by far the largest public mobilization of the British left, was not intended to, and plainly could not, affect the USA’s and the USSR’s nuclear arms race, although many Britons were sincerely moved by the idea of setting a good moral example to the world. It was about keeping out of the Cold War or, perhaps more exactly, about getting Britain used to no longer being a great power and a global empire. (The argument that Britain’s own nuclear capability was necessary to deter a Soviet attack made no sense, especially as we now know that the bomb had originally been constructed by British governments to maintain their status and independence against the USA rather than to frighten Moscow.)

However, looking back, it is clear that what increasingly shaped the post-1956 politics of the left was a by-product of decolonization and, certainly in Britain, of the mass immigration from the Caribbean parts of the old empire. The crisis of the Fourth Republic in France had little to do with the Cold War, and everything to do with the liberation struggle of the Algerians. I still recall a 1958 mass meeting in Friends’ House to protest against the military coup which ended it, addressed by the red-haired and impassioned journalist Paul Johnson, then a maverick left-wing Catholic, who denounced General de Gaulle as the next fascist dictator. It was largely the shocking and widely publicized French use of torture in Algeria that turned Amnesty International (1961), into a western international campaigning body not primarily directed against eastern abuses of human rights.

With the American civil rights movements and the influx of coloured immigrants to Britain, racism became a far more central theme on the left than it had been. Through jazz I found myself associated with an early anti-racist campaign in Britain after the so-called Notting Hill (actually Notting Dale) race riots of 1958, the so-called ‘Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship’ (SCIF), which was not so much a real political operation (though Colin MacInnes went about the area, a favourite stamping ground of his, posting its news-sheet through letter boxes) as an example of the modern media operation which, like others of its kind, fizzled out after a few months of rather successful publicity. It did indeed mobilize the ‘stars’, mainly of jazz – most of the big British names were there, Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine, Humphrey Lyttelton and Chris Barber, as well as some pop stars – but its strength lay in the operators who could get stories into the press and programmes on to television, and produced newsworthy ideas such as the televised interracial children’s Christmas party of 1958. While it lasted, it enjoyed the invaluable help of the remarkably able and admirable Claudia Jones, a US Communist Party functionary born in the West Indies and expelled as a ‘non-citizen’ from the USA in the witch-hunt days, who did her best, with indifferent success, to bring some Party efficiency and some political structure into the Caribbean immigration in West London and to get adequate backing for her efforts from the British CP. An impressive woman, she has been unjustly forgotten, except perhaps as one of the inspirations behind what has become the annual, and no longer political, Notting Hill Carnival.

Third World passions did not become a major inspiration for the left until the 1960s, and, incidentally, weaken the hold of the Cold War crusading ideologists on western liberals and social democrats. Yet by the end of the 1950s the Cuban Revolution was already in power, about to add a new image to the iconography of world revolution, and to turn the USA into a highly visible Goliath facing the defiance of a bearded young David. In 1961 the reaction to the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion was immediate – as immediate as the reaction to the Soviet invasion of Hungary had been in 1956 – and it extended far beyond the usual parties, signers of petitions, and indeed the usual range of protesters. Ken Tynan telephoned me desperately the morning the news came through: something must be done! As soon as possible. How could we set about it? Though a genuine man of the left, whose political sincerity both Marlene and I always defended against those who accused him of posing, he was far from the usual member of the ‘stage army of the good’. Had he been, he would have known what to do himself. When we had set up the usual committee, rounded up the usual suspects for letters of protest, and organized a march to Hyde Park – I cannot for the life of me remember whom we had as speakers – I recall noting with agreeable surprise how unlike the usual left-wing demo this one was, at least in appearance. The call to defend Fidel Castro, through Tynan, or perhaps more likely Tynan’s Man Friday Clive Goodwin, actor, agent and activist, had mobilized a remarkable mass of younger theatrical males and females, and young women from the fashion agencies. It was the best-looking political occasion I can remember, a wonderful sight, and all the happier since we knew by then that the American invasion had been defeated.

So, almost without noticing, I found myself – and the world – slipping into a new mood as the 1950s turned into the 1960s. Even politically, although after 1956 I had neither decided to leave the CP nor been expelled, I no longer found myself as isolated as Party members had once been. Party labels were no longer decisive for those who supported the new political campaigns – anti-nuclear, anti-imperial, anti-racist or whatever. When some communist historians founded a new historical journal, Past & Present, in 1952, about as bad a time in the Cold War as can be imagined, we deliberately planned it not as a Marxist journal, but as a common platform for a ‘popular front’ of historians, to be judged not by the badge in the author’s ideological buttonhole, but by the contents of their articles. We desperately wanted to broaden the base of our editorial board, which at the start was naturally dominated by Party members, since only the rare, usually indigenous, radical historian with a safe academic base, such as A. H. M. Jones, the ancient historian from Cambridge, had the courage to sit at the same table as the bolsheviks. The eminent art historian Rudolf Wittkower was actually warned not to accept our invitation and it was another ten years before Moses Finley, the victim of US McCarthyism welcomed in Cambridge, was prepared to write for us. We were equally keen to extend the range of our contributors. For several years we failed in the first task, although, thanks to our excellent reputation among younger academics, we soon did better on the second. In 1958 we succeeded. A group of non-Marxist historians of subsequent eminence, led by Lawrence Stone, shortly about to go to Princeton, and the present Sir John Elliott, later Regius Professor at Oxford, who had sympathized with our objectives but until then had found it impossible formally to join the former red establishment, offered to join us collectively on condition that we dropped the ideologically suspect phrase ‘a journal of scientific history’ from our mast-head. It was a cheap price to pay. They did not ask us about our political opinions – actually orthodox communists were no longer easy to find on the board – we did not enquire into theirs, and no ideological problems have ever arisen on its board since then. Even the Institute of Historical Research, which had steadfastly refused to include the journal in its library, relented.

So both my personal life became in some sense ‘normal’ and (in spite of the rhetoric to the contrary) the world I lived in was – or at least looked like – a less insecure and provisional place, and was certainly a more prosperous one. The first observation was undeniable, even though my academic career was still taking its time to develop. I was not to get my chair, or the usual marks of official recognition – academies, the first honorary degrees – until the 1970s, when I was well into my fifties. In retrospect I can see this was a stroke of luck, for nothing is worse for a career than to reach the peak too soon and face the long march along the flat plateau of the establishment or, even worse, the lengthening distance between present achievement and the work that once made one’s reputation. Just because I had started late, and been held up for so many years, I continued to have better things to look forward to at an age when others could expect only to postpone decline.

As for the world, we knew quite well that its stability was only apparent, even though its extraordinary economic and technological leap forward was plain. Nevertheless, for those of us lucky enough to live in central and western Europe, it was not an illusion. We may not have fully recognized our good fortune yet, but we lived in the lands of the blessed: a region without war, without the prospect or fear of social upheaval, in which most people enjoyed a life of wealth, a range of choices in life and leisure, and a degree of social security beyond the reach of all but the very rich in our parents’ generation, and beyond even the dreams of the poor. Ours was a better place to live in than any other part of the world.

I was soon to discover that this could not be said of other parts of the globe. Nor, as the 1960s were soon to show, did it satisfy the inhabitants of the lands of the blessed.

14

Under Cnicht

In 1961, shortly after sitting down with Bertrand Russell and perhaps 12,000 others, on a famous anti-nuclear occasion in Trafalgar Square, fortunately unarrested by the police, I was told by my friend and brother-Apostle Robin Gandy that I looked a bit stressed, and that he thought a few days with him in North Wales would do me good. He had a small, almost aggressively primitive cottage there, next to a dying chapel, where, between hill walks and rock scrambles, he pondered the problems of mathematical logic. In those days, before the wonderful network of small rural railway lines in Britain had been destroyed, it was still possible to travel gently between trees through the heartlands of central Wales and, once the coast was reached, by a not entirely misnamed Cambrian Coast Express to Penrhyndeudraeth in what was still for Anglophones the county of Merioneth, the last area in the British Isles that still voted to ban the sale or public consumption of alcohol on the Lord’s day. There Robin met me on his motorbike, in his habitual black leather gear, to save me a few miles’ trudge across the coastal ridge and the table-flat plain (The Traeth) that had been a sea inlet until it was drained in the early nineteenth century by the seawall built by a Mr Maddocks, after whom the new port of Portmadoc was to be named. The enterprise had been much admired by progressive visitors, among them the poet Shelley. Before that, ships had been able to sail to the foot of the mountains, using the dramatic and unmistakable triangle of Cnicht (The Knight) as a landmark. The name suggests that it reminded them of a medieval helmet. Where the road left the Traeth and started to climb gently to the high Croesor valley just below Cnicht was the frontier of Clough’s kingdom. There I and, when I remarried, Marlene and the children, would spend most of our holidays for the next quarter of a century.

The ruler, indeed the maker, of this kingdom, Clough Williams-Ellis, was a tall, straight, affable, roman-nosed figure, invariably in a tweed jacket, breeches and yellow stockings – he was the only man to wear this gear on his visits to the Athenaeum – by then in his later seventies. The best way to introduce him to a generation for whom the Britain he came from is as alien as Tolstoy’s Russia, is to say that when he married during the First World War, his fellow-officers asked him what he wanted for a wedding present. He wanted to build a folly – a fragment of a mock medieval fortress with a view of the sea. It was built. One got to it through an iron gate, painted in ‘Clough’s green’, the unmistakable colour of iron and woodwork in Clough’s kingdom, opposite the main entrance to his house, Plas Brondanw, a small ancient pile with a wonderful formal garden opening on a vista of the peak of Snowdon framed by Clough’s characteristic urns and arches. From the gate one strolled a couple of hundred yards along a gently rising avenue whose trees he had also planted. (Trees were one of his many passions. He was so outraged at the proposal to sell off for property development the wonderful Grand Avenue of trees which led to the great house of Stowe, which he was engaged in turning into a public school, that he bought it himself and saw to it that it was preserved. It was perhaps his major contribution to the project.) Our children loved to play in the tower, climbing the stairs that went nowhere except to a view over the sea and a damp stretch of moorland beyond which, a few miles away, one saw the Big and Little Moelwyn, the other two mountains of the kingdom, after which Clough had named his son, who had not returned from the war. It had once served as a set for a movie about China. Clough was enormously pleased about this. It was not romantic absurdity as such that he loved, but play, not to mention celebrities. Besides, it is almost certain that the film company had come to Merioneth not because a small piece of it could be made to look more Chinese than any other part of Great Britain, but because star and crew could stay at the best-known of Clough’s creations, the greatest of his follies, Portmeirion. This was and remains a life-size quasi-baroque toy-town pretending to be on the Italian Riviera, colours and all, which suddenly emerges from rhododendron-covered rocks across the grey waters of the wide shallow estuary that leads into Cardigan Bay. He paid for its constant extension by turning part of it into the sort of hotel and holiday village which slightly bohemian showbusiness people found irresistible (with fireworks rather than golf courses), and eventually, perhaps more reluctantly, with the money spent by day trippers. (Friends of the family were let in free.) Nothing about Portmeirion was or is quite real – although it was filled with authentic statues and bits of architectural decor saved by Clough from destruction – but everything represented daydreams, not, however, without the potential for nightmares. It was later chosen as the setting for a cult British television series, The Prisoner, in which a Kafkaesque victim found he could not escape from an environment full equally of charm and menace. Neither could the makers of the series, which therefore came to a sudden stop after seventeen episodes. It is still repeated from time to time for a large community of aficionados.

In some ways Clough, proud of his standing as a professional architect, also became the victim of the environment he had created and could not escape. As the younger son of a landowning family, he had to earn a living, and architecture, his passion from childhood, fitted both his background and his inclinations. He had only one term’s formal training. What he lacked in professional qualifications, he made up for in country roots, informed enthusiasm and the sort of contacts a handsome and charming young man of good family could easily make in the weekend-party environment of Edwardian Britain, which was, after all, his own. Friends, or friends of friends, gave him the chance to build stables, then estate cottages, then wings of country houses, and public schools, even a complete and massive Edwardian pile, Llangoed Hall, on the Breconshire banks of the Wye, which survives as a hotel. (Actually the great majority of his buildings were of modest size.) And yet Portmeirion typecast him as ‘not a serious architect’ by the standards of the highly developed professional puritanism of the era of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. He got the official recognition of a knighthood as Sir (Bertram) Clough Williams-Ellis only at the age of eighty-seven.

This was a complete misunderstanding of the man. For him buildings without trees, walls, views, roads leading to farmyards, cottages or water, had no real meaning. What he wanted to create or shape was not buildings but small worlds in which people lived and worked in a unity of masonry, landscape wild and tame, vistas, symbols and memorials, no doubt also to be admired as an ensemble by visiting travellers. Because it was not a place in which people went about their usual business, but a fun place, a jeu d’esprit, or, more seriously, a momentary dream of utopia, Portmeirion was not typical of what he was about. His ideal was not Lutyens but Squire Headlong, the lord and enthusiastic shaper of, and guide to, a wild Welsh estate in Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall. (The novels, or rather conversation pieces, of Peacock, friend of Shelley and amused admirer of Wales, were required reading in Clough’s kingdom.) And the essence of such an estate must be the characteristic combination of wild natural beauty, poverty and the inhabitants’ indifference to visual aesthetics, so surprising in a people as receptive to music and words as the Welsh. Though he thought it essential to embellish them with suitably symbolic masonry and metalwork, and to draw attention to their romantic potential, his environments were not supposed to be ‘beautiful’ but to be themselves. And, above all, to remain themselves. His campaigns for the conservation of rural landscape against ‘the octopus’ of unplanned ‘development’ went back to the 1920s. Largely to preserve them as they were, he had between the wars bought up the bare hillsides, moors and mountains that constituted his kingdom. Fortunately – for he was comfortably off rather than rich – they had virtually no market value at that time. ‘A ten-guinea fee earned in London paid for many acres of hill-land.’¹

And indeed, though it contained marvellous things, Clough’s kingdom was not conventionally ‘beautiful’. How could it be? Much of it consisted of a spectral, twice-destroyed stony country, always poor, and laid waste by the decline of small uneconomic hill farms and the final collapse of the great slate quarries which, supplying the builders and real-estate developers of Victorian Britain with their roofing, had for a while lifted a barren mountain region out of bare subsistence. It was, literally, a landscape of post-industrial ruins. One could climb from the giant dead quarries of Blaenau Ffestiniog up to the lunar landscape of the abandoned quarry and workers’ barracks below the choughs at Cwmorthin, then down again along the abandoned railway track that led through the bare Cwm Croesor. Serving also the abandoned quarry of Croesor, one of whose former cottages was ours for some years, it led to the abandoned long incline down which the full trucks ran by gravity to the Traeth and eventually across it to be loaded at Portmadoc. It was also a landscape of post-agricultural ruins, such as the one the great poet of the region, R. S. Thomas, speaks of in his ‘The Welsh Hill Country’:

The moss and the mould on the cold chimneys The nettles growing through the cracked doors The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira There are holes in the roofs that are thatched with sunlight The fields are reverting to the bare moor

Even in the 1960s tourism was only slowly beginning to fill the gap – for, though Snowdon dominated the view, the major beauty spots (and mountain climbing centres) of Snowdonia were a few miles away. The ruined Ffestiniog Railway, the narrow-gauge line on which 200 men from Llanfrothen and Penrhyndeudraeth had once travelled daily to the great quarries at Blaenau Ffestiniog, was just beginning to be restored by passionate amateurs for the benefit of grateful tourist parents wondering what to do with their children. For most of our years in North Wales it still stopped dead on an overgrown mountainside before returning to Portmadoc.

Much of Clough’s work as ruler of his kingdom was literally making ruins habitable and filling empty walls on still depopulating hillsides. Our first cottage was one of a windswept row of four, built somewhere in the scooped-out bare mountain valley outside the quarry village of Croesor for the local quarry. Its only permanent inhabitant by then was our cherished Nellie Jones, who brought up three children by various fathers, and a dog, in an approximate kitchen, and acted as caretaker for some almost equally rackety English visitors. (The village, or rather hamlet, of Croesor itself was just about to lose its shop-cum-sub-post office, and only a constant battle against the authorities – assisted by Clough’s policy of letting empty cottages to unmarried or abandoned mothers – kept its tiny schoolhouse from closing.) Our second was a sixteenth-century ruin, once part of the complex of buildings that formed the seat of the Anwyl family, fallen on bad times after the eighteenth century, which Clough had transformed into a habitable house for Londoners who did not mind living in extreme discomfort, but in romantic surroundings. Typically, he had left part of a projecting wall of three-feet stone blocks out of which, in the centuries of ruin, a tree had grown so vast and tall that we insisted on a clause in our lease to protect us in case it was toppled by some storm, destroying most of the house. I doubt whether a single inhabited building on his estate was not either first built, restored or made fit for human occupation by him. But the inhabitants belonged to at least two entirely different and barely overlapping species: the second-homers or incomers and the native Welsh.

The incomers were a network of middle-class British intellectuals and a scattering of attached bohemians. In some ways most of them were linked directly or indirectly with the Williams-Ellises. Most of their connections came through Cambridge, which had also been Clough’s own university, and that of his dead son Kitto, whose friends from King’s became part of the Brondanw scene as regular visitors and (in one case) son-in-law. That is how Robin Gandy had first come to the valley. Each of the initial settlers in turn tended to attract their friends, contemporaries, teachers and students, who also came, saw and were conquered: the Hobsbawms, one by one, plus two children, followed by Marlene’s brother, Walter Schwarz, plus wife and five offspring, the historians E. P. and Dorothy Thompson, from the lower slopes of the Moelwyns, and various sons and daughters of the Bennett family whose parents, both English dons, were pillars of Cambridge academic society. In one way or another a substantial set of Cambridge names was already linked with Clough’s kingdom: the philosopher Bertrand Russell on the Portmeirion peninsula; the Nobel Prize physicist Patrick Blackett, settled in retirement in what had been a holiday cottage just above Brondanw, not far from his daughter’s house in Croesor; Joseph Needham, the great historian of Chinese science, spent regular holidays at Portmeirion with one of his two ladies – his wife presumably remaining at home in Cambridge. John Maddox, for many years the editor of Nature, had a spell as a tenant in one of Clough’s cottages on the Traeth; and my teacher, the economic historian Mounia Postan, and his wife Lady Cynthia (Keppel) had a house, once a school, on the outskirts of Ffestiniog. To talk of a ‘Welsh Bloomsbury set’ – the phrase comes from Rupert Crawshay Williams, a locally resident charming and sad philosopher who brought Bertrand Russell into the area – is pushing it a bit. However, an intensive social life flourished among the Anglophones of the Portmeirion peninsula, the Croesor valley and Ffestiniog. One of the most characteristic sounds of holidays in North Wales was that of guests shaking the rain off their waterproofs and dumping wet wellingtons in lobbies as they got ready to entertain and be entertained under some low-slung rural ceiling. And as so many of them lived by the word, there is at least poetic truth in the joke that in the Croesor valley on windless nights one was never out of earshot of some typewriter.

Though science and Cambridge went together, I suspect that it was Clough’s wife, the writer Amabel Williams-Ellis, who got much the greatest satisfaction out of the accumulation of great brains in the local hinterland. A Strachey from a landed and intellectual family with long Indian links, her family connection (both Oxford and Cambridge) was, if anything, with politics. Her journalist father, St Loe Strachey, had carried considerable political weight, and her brother, John Strachey, broke away, first to follow the (then) hope of radical Labour, the dashing womanizer Sir Oswald (‘Tom’) Mosley, until he became the leader of British fascism, then to become the most widely known Communist Party intellectual of the 1930s. He turned away from communism in 1940 and became a prominent, though not notably successful, minister in the Labour governments after 1945. Amabel herself had joined the Communist Party unofficially, and remained a little homesick for the days when the Party was a semi-conspiratorial embattled band of brothers and sisters. She welcomed me as a reminder of those times, someone with whom she could gossip about the comrades, but perhaps chiefly as a reliable conversationalist on intellectual themes. For this purpose she would drive up to our cottage, full of memories, with the excessive care and dangerous slowness of the very aged motorist. Since few except the locals used the Croesor Road, traffic made the necessary allowances for her. Amabel, far more than Clough, had a passion for the intellect. As a girl she had dreamed of becoming a scientist, but that is not what ‘gels’ in her type of family did. Indeed, she was not sent to school at all. She became a writer, in the end best known as a children’s writer, while as was usual in her generation her considerable contribution to Clough’s own writing and thinking was subsumed under his. Amabel was not the tragic kind – indeed, she enjoyed the sweetnesses of life and the new emancipation of women, including (it would seem) a fairly free-wheeling approach to marital fidelity, but, had she not been brought to keep the stiff upper lip of her class, she might have shown some bitterness. She would have made a very professional scientist and she saw to it that at least one of her daughters became a marine biologist. I grew very fond of the old lady, even though sometimes taking avoiding action against her expeditions in search of intellectual enlightenment. We talked a great deal, especially in her last years, after Clough’s death, when she waited for visitors, wanting to die. She did not complain, but made no secret of wanting an end to lying alone bedridden and in pain behind thick stone walls in a damp old house. She had lived enough. However, even political solidarity could never move her to tell me how to find the entrance of the underground workings, somewhere under Clough’s kingdom, where the treasures of the National Gallery had been stored during the Second World War. A communist past was one thing, state secrets quite another.

Apart from the minority who came to do some serious climbing, what brought the rest of us outsiders to the Welsh mountains? Certainly not the search for comfort. In our Welsh cottages we voluntarily lived under the sort of conditions we condemned capitalism for imposing on its exploited toilers. None of us, even given the spartan middle-class styles of the 1950s, would have dreamed of accepting such standards in our everyday lives in London or Cambridge, not even my brother-in-law Walter Schwarz, with his boundless enthusiasm for primitive discomfort as indicating environmentally sound living close to nature. Even so, the only people we could rely on regularly to share the discomforts and the marvels of life in Parc Farm were close and weather-proof friends such as Dorothy Wedderburn. To guarantee even approximate dryness on our first night, we had to pack all blankets and bedclothes into vast airtight plastic bags every time we left Parc. It took two or three days after arrival to dry the house out enough to make it roughly habitable, and even then it was almost impossible to keep warm except in odd corners, in spite of paraffinheaters – basic equipment, though not much good for outdoor toilets – and the fuel for our fireplaces which metropolitan intellectuals, dressed in the local style like tramps, could be seen chopping in the drizzle outside their back doors. Perhaps the sheer physical discomfort of life in Wales was part of its attraction: it made us feel closer to nature, or at least to that constant struggle against the forces of climate and geology which gives such satisfaction. My most vivid memories of North Wales are of these confrontations: taking our two small children along stony, snow-covered tracks to shelter and giving them chocolate in a mountainside cave, returning from a long hike with Robin in persistent, drenching rain, scrambling along sheep-tracks on steep hillsides – if a sheep could do it, why not a middle-aged historian? – above all, walking, balancing and clambering round the steep rocky sanctuary of the Arddy, west of the ridge of Cnicht, rewarded by the familiar but always unexpected sight of the cold lakes hidden in its folds.

But these were visitors’ pleasures. Our part of North Wales also attracted a curious population of permanent or semi-permanent settlers, or rather refugees, from outside: freelance writers, displaced bohemians from Soho, searchers for spiritual salvation on low or irregular incomes, and the odd anarchist intellectual. The presence of Bertrand Russell, the aged guru of anti-nuclear militancy, in Clough’s kingdom brought a number of them into the area; not counting members of his own dysfunctional family. Ralph Schoenman, the young American militant who acquired such remarkable influence over the ancient philosopher at this time, never became part of the local scene. He was too busy whizzing round claiming to save the world, ostensibly in the name of Russell. However, after retiring from this battle Pat Pottle, secretary of the activist Committee of a Hundred (and co-liberator of the Soviet spy George Blake from Brixton jail), settled down in Croesor, attracted by his fellow anti-nuclear activist and revolutionary, the painter Tom Kinsey (later the only known anarchist master of foxhounds, but, Snowdonia being what it is, on foot rather than horseback). After the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 he had organized a demonstration in Portmeirion of thanks to Russell for saving the peace of the world – for it was in a telegram to Russell (in answer to one which Kinsey claimed he had drafted) that Khrushchev had actually made the official public announcement that the crisis was over.

This community of incomers lived side by side with the indigenous Welsh, but divided from them, not only by language but, perhaps even more, by class, lifestyle and the growing separatism of the locals. Sex apart, there were really very few close friendships across the ‘interracial’ divide, and little of that easy neighbourliness and village spirit that made coming to our present, equally remote and even more agricultural community in (Anglophone) Mid-Wales such a relief, especially to that spontaneous socializer, Marlene, after the growing tensions of Croesor.

Unlike the passionately Welsh but 100 per cent Anglophone native gentry, e.g. the Williams-Ellises, by the 1970s permanent settlers from outside began to learn the language themselves, not to communicate, but in deference to the increasingly obvious nationalistic feeling in the region. By the 1960s all except the very oldest and isolated locals were bilingual, bilinguality being essential to any Welsh person, even in the most Cymric village, who expected to watch television and have dealings with people from outside the neighbourhood, including the 80 per cent of his or her country’s non-Welsh-speaking inhabitants. That, indeed, was the fundamental problem for Welsh-speaking areas like ours, and the basis of their increasingly strident nationalism. Even the full linguistic assimilation of a few score foreigners was as nothing compared to the irresistible Anglophone flood of modern civilization.

For most of the mountain people the Welsh language was chiefly a Noah’s Ark in which they could survive the flood as a community. They did not so much want to convert and converse: people looked down on visiting South Walians with their ‘school Welsh’. Unlike Noah, they did not expect the flood to end. They turned inwards because they felt themselves to be in that most desperate of situations, that of a beleaguered, hopeless and permanent minority. But for some there was a solution: compulsory Cymricization, imposed by nationalist political rule. In the meantime the incoming invaders could be discouraged by burning down their second homes. Those who claimed to know said that some of the activists came from Clough’s kingdom, though it was not a centre of cottage-burning. People distinguished between the neighbouring summer visitors they knew and ‘the English’ in general. And although nothing can be kept secret in the countryside, unlike in the big city, no case of terrorist cottage-burning was ever solved by the police.

In some respects the indigenous inhabitants of Clough’s kingdom, and of the mountains of North Wales in general, were therefore as uprooted as the seasonal or even most of the permanent English immigrants, who moved into the farms and cottages abandoned by the natives. Like a house built on subsiding land, the foundations of their society were breaking; unlike such a house, they could not be shored up. Isolation had kept the society together in the past, along with poetry, puritanism and the general poverty of an essentially rural society. All this was now going. The chapels stood empty. (I cannot recall meeting any ministers of religion in our years in the Croesor valley, except the highly anomalous, because Anglican, R. S. Thomas, who came to bury our neighbour and his fellow-poet, in English, Thomas Blackburn, in a steeply sloped graveyard with an unforgettable view of Snowdon.) Total abstinence from alcohol, which had to be the defining criterion of puritan Protestantism in a population so energetically interested in (officially non-existent) non-marital sex, was in retreat. The locus for the new culture of militant Welsh nationalism was not the chapel but the pub. (Clough had built one, the Brondanw Arms, with a beautifully wrought metal wreath as the inn sign, but this motif meant nothing to the inhabitants of Garreg and Llanfrothen, who called it, and the pub, simply The Ring.) Only a tolerant silence about illegitimate babies remained, even the ones that could not be quietly disguised as unexpected younger siblings of their mothers. The hillsides were abandoned for lowland council housing with central heating. Even money now divided communities more, for within the Welsh language community, wealth had not been decisive in the past, since the really rich and powerful were or became anglicized, that is to say they were outside it.

If anything, the hierarchy of status had been spiritual or intellectual – that of minister of religion (that is to say orator), poet and scholar – who might be anyone, a postman with a gift for improvising the complex metres of Welsh verse or, like the great antiquarian and scholar Bob Owen, the pride of Croesor, whose library now forms part of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwith, a clerk at the quarry. (His son and his family – Tuddwr, Gaynor and their children Bob, Eleri and the baby Deian – were and remained our friends in the village.) A less cultural, but still locally recognized male status also came with distinction as a poacher, a widely practised and universally approved sport. Even in our times, when a Welsh friend from an old quarry village wanted to give us salmon for dinner and asked the weekly itinerant fish-seller for the price, the response naturally was: ‘Are you buying or selling?’ R. S. Thomas’s great poems should not mislead us into thinking of most North Wales hill farmers as unintellectual hulks. A lot of Welsh reading and thinking went on under those low roofs, ancestrally designed to combine a maximum view of approaching strangers with maximum shelter from rain and storm. In many ways our neighbour Edgar from Croesor Ychaf, explaining the regular collective pre-shearing round-up by the local farmers and their dogs of all the sheep running free on the mountain, was as knowledgeable about the ecology of the terrain as the college-trained and sullenly nationalist nature warden who had moved into the former village post office, and at least as articulate.

Whether Clough’s kingdom was typical of mountain Wales, I cannot tell, but it was an unstable and unhappy place full of underlying tension. It found expression in a growing, resentful and sometimes rancorous, anti-English feeling, a withdrawal from personal relations which came more naturally to adults than to children.² There were also other signs of social malaise. When what were locally called ‘the orange people’ (the ‘sanyasins’ or followers of the Indian guru Shri Bhagwan) came into the valley in the early 1980s, they won converts among the native Welsh as well as, less surprisingly, in the English bohemian diaspora. And clearly not only because their way to salvation encouraged a lot of free sex. Croesor was a marvellous place for family holidays, but it was not a happy valley.

By the time I retired from Birkbeck in 1982 we had spent time in Clough’s kingdom every year for almost two decades. Bryn Hyfryd, and even more Parc Farm, flanked by the old Manor House (Big Parc), with its visitors and the tiny Gatws bursting with Schwarz cousins, was part of our, and even more of our children’s, lives, and friendships. Just because it was not blanketed by the permanent routines of everyday and professional life, the memories associated with North Wales – even the domestic and family rows – stand out with special vividness: the terrible news of the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968, news of the death of my aunt Mimi brought by telegram – there were still such things – to a phone-less cottage, the car-door torn from its hinges by the storm as we got out to make our way to Edward Thompson’s New Year’s Eve party down the torch-lit path, our drive with Dorothy Wedderburn to picnic past Aberdaron on the far point of the Lleyn peninsula on a sunny Christmas Day, the ancient well in Parc that went on supplying us with water even in the great drought of 1976. Except for the landscape, it was not perfect: living in Boy Scout discomfort became less attractive (it had never appealed to Marlene), and the growth of nationalism soured relations with the Welsh. But, though I was now about to spend four months a year in New York, we would probably have stayed in the Croesor valley to the end of our lives.

But after Clough died in 1978 and Amabel in 1984 things changed. Clough’s grandson, who took over the estate – his parents were busy running the factory and the marketing of Portmeirion pottery – was a passionate Welsh nationalist, who showed no interest in his grandparents’ collection of Cambridge antiques, occupying houses which ought to be re-echoing to the Welsh language of their restored Cymric families. In short, the leases of the outsiders were not renewed. The official reason was that leases would henceforth be given only for permanent residence. We were allowed to stay on year by year until a suitable Welsh tenant could be found, or the estate could raise the money to make the premises of Parc Farm habitable for anyone except a romantic second-homer. We stayed on those terms for a year or two while we looked for another home in Wales, but no longer in North Wales. In any case our friends were also losing their cottages and, by the time I got into my seventies, clambering up Cnicht was no longer so attractive. We found it in the milder landscape and political climate of Powys, from whose hills I can see Cader Idris on a clear day.

My daughter still goes to the valley from time to time. Neither Marlene nor I have been there since we moved away in 1991. I have not the heart to see the place again. But I cannot forget it.

15

The Sixties

I

Sometime in early May 1968 I found myself in Paris, where one of the offshoots of UNESCO had organized a giant conference on ‘Marx and Contemporary Scientific Thought’ to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth. Like most such gatherings, its obvious function was to give a number of academics a free trip to an agreeable tourist centre; and, like most conferences on Marx, especially those to which a platoon of ideological bureaucrats from the USSR contributed extremely boring papers of no interest, it encouraged participants to get out of the conference hall and into the streets. But on 8, 9 and 10 May the streets of Paris – at least those of the 5th and 6th arrondisse ments – were full of demonstrating students. By sheer chance, the commemoration of Marx’s anniversary coincided with the the climax of the great Paris student rebellion. Within a day or two it was to become more than a student rebellion, namely a nationwide workers’ strike and a major political crisis of the regime of General de Gaulle.¹ Within a few months ‘the events of May’ were recognized as the epicentre of a bicontinental outburst of student rebellion, crossing political and ideological frontiers from Berkeley and Mexico City in the west to Warsaw, Prague and Belgrade in the east.

As I write this, I look at the pictures of those Paris days in the anthology of 1968 photographs, published as a volume thirty years later. ² Several of the most impressive were taken on the final day of the Marx Conference – I can still recall the sting of tear-gas after the burning of the Latin Quarter – but my most lasting memory is captured in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s undated picture of a massive student march of protest – a vast, overwhelmingly male, tie-less, clenched-fist concourse of juveniles, still, almost without exception, with the respectable short bourgeois haircuts of the pre-hippy age, almost concealing the presence of an occasional adult face. Yet these occasional adult faces are what I remember most vividly, because they represent both the unity and the incompatibility of the old generation of the left – my own – with the new. I remember my old friend and comrade Albert (‘Marius’) Soboul, holder of the chair in the history of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne, upright, solemn-faced, dressed in the dark suit and tie of an academic grandee, marching abreast of men young enough to be his children who shouted slogans of which he profoundly disapproved as a loyal member of the French Communist Party. But how could a man in the tradition of Revolution and Republic not ‘descendre dans la rue’ on such an occasion? I remember Jean Pronteau – still a senior Party member at that time – who had commanded the 1944 Paris insurrection against the Germans in the Latin Quarter, telling me how moved he was by the sight of barricades going up, spontaneously, at the exact corner of the rue Gay-Lussac where they had been built in 1944, and no doubt where they had been during the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. If noblesse oblige , then so, surely, does a revolutionary tradition.

And indeed, nothing shocked me more at the time than the meeting to which I and several other visiting Marxists from the UNESCO jamboree were invited by, was it the Institut Maurice Thorez or some other academic adjunct to the French Communist Party?, at which points of Marxist interpretation were to be discussed, while the students marched. Nobody appeared to take cognizance of what was happening outside. I caused a few moments of awkwardness by pointing this out. Did we have nothing to say, I asked, about what was happening on the very streets through which we had passed on our way to the meeting? Could we not at least declare our general support? Alas, thirty-four years later I cannot for the life of me remember whether those of us who felt as I did managed to shame the gathering into making such a declaration. It seems unlikely.