 E.P. Thompson, the pre-eminent British historian of the twentieth century, was born exactly a hundred years ago. On the centenary, I made a pilgrimage to Halifax, his home for seventeen years, the period which defined his professional, political and personal life. His old home, Holly Bank in Siddal on the outskirts of Halifax, now bears a blue plaque. It's on a steep cobbled street overlooking the town - and the cemetery opposite. I would guess that the spot has not changed much in the sixty or so years since the Thompsons moved out.  It was here at Holly Bank, while Edward was working in the extra-mural department at Leeds University, that the Thompsons laboured in and for the Communist Party - here that Edward and Dorothy expressed their disillusionment in 1956 by publishing The Reasoner and then leaving the party - here that Thompson wrote his political biography of Wiliam Morris (published in 1955) and then his masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class (1963) - here that they raised their three children - here that Dorothy Thompson embarked on her landmark research on Chartism. And West Yorkshire is evident at every turn in The Making of the English Working Class - a work of history with an acute sense of place as well as moment.  The occasion of my visit was a one-day anniversary conference organised - and very successfully so - by the Calderdale Trades Union Council and the Society for the Study of Labour History. More than a hundred people attended.  Tariq Ali made the keynote speech on Zoom. Among those who also spoke (in person) were Katrina Navickas, Penny Corfield, Jane Mayes, Hugo Radice, Judy Cox and Julian Harber.  E.P. Thompson was a resolutely non-metropolitan figure: born in Oxford, educated at Cambridge, forged in Halifax, died in Worcestershire. As an adult, he never lived in London - rare, perhaps, for such a commanding intellectual. And it was so good and important to take the journey to West Yorkshhire to remember him: his activism, his energy, his scholarship, his inspirational force. He was a romantic, a man of 'volcanic passions', in the words of one speaker - and an exceptional historian and socialist. Many years ago, at Warwick University, I chaired a meeti9ng at which he spoke in support of the imprisoned East German intellectual Rudolf Bahro. Later I travelled to Worcestershire to interview him - here's the audio. 
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 This wonderful photo of sixty years or more ago - posted here courtesy of Jean McCrindle - shows two of the key figures of the British New Left ... outside an iconic venue of the New Left. The writing on the back says: 'Ralph [Raphael Samuel] + Edward Thompson + Ernest (the tall guy) + John, Two of the ULR coffee bar people, watching'. E.P. Thompson (1924-1993) was a Marxist humanist, a peace campaigner and the most distinguished historian of his generation, the author notably of The Making of the English Working Class. He was a member of the Communist Party but in 1956, after the revelations of Khrushchev's 'secret speech' at the 20th Congress of the CPSU denouncing Stalin's 'cult of personality', he - along with another Yorkshire-based historian, John Saville - set up what was in effect a dissident journal, the Reasoner. After the Soviet-led invasion of Hungary later in the year, both Thompson and Saville left the CP. They closed the Reasoner after three issues but the following year they started the New Reasoner. It was the birth of the British New Left. Raphael Samuel (1934-1996) was also a historian and the founding figure in the History Workshop movement. He was also a member of the Communist Party, again leaving in 1956. And early in 1957 he - along with Stuart Hall, Chuck Taylor and Gabriel Pearson - set up Universities & Left Review, similar in scope to the New Reasoner, but brighter in design, more concerned about culture and aiming for a slightly younger and less party-oriented readership. The two journals coalesced at the beginning of 1960 to form the New Left Review. It wasn't an easy alliance and Edward Thompson was at times lacerating in his criticism of Raph and of Stuart Hall, the initial editor of NLR. But those early issues of the Review are a world apart from the theory-heavy (indeed, all round heavy) NLR which emerged out of a 'palace coup' a couple of years later. And the iconic venue?  Well, one of Raph Samuel's more quixotic ventures was to establish a ULR coffee bar, the Partisan, in Soho. It lost money - quite a lot of money - but kept going from October 1958 to early 1963 (though it was in some decline after 1961). It was a remarkable venture, a 'socialist coffee house', an 'anti-espresso bar', a meeting place with linked offices above which became the heart of a national New Left Club movement. And all this in Soho - where Marx once lived, where generations of political emigres published and agitated, and which was seen as on the cutting-edge of cool. The coffee house was in Carlisle Street - and that fits with the photo ... it's Soho Square that looms in the background on the right. The historian Mike Berlin made a radio programme about the Partisan - it's below - and his illustrated account of the club published to accompany an exhibition of Roger Mayne's commissioned photos of the Partisan (held at Four Corners in 2017) is worth seeking out. The date of the photo - well probably 1958-60. And Jean McCrindle (born 1937)? Well, she - like Raph - was brought up in a Communist household and joined the CP herself (and also left over Hungary). She was active in the New Left Clubs in Scotland where she was a student. According to Raph (he says he changed his name to Ralph for a while because fellow-YCLers in North London found his real name impossible to pronounce), he and Jean first met at the CP headquarters on King Street in Covent Garden in the underground room where student 'aggregates' were held. He also recalled proposing to Jean when aged 21 at the summit of Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh - though Jean's memory is more that they talked about getting married. There's a celebrated photo of the couple taken at Trafalgar Square in 1956 ...  ... there's no doubt about the location - you can see the National Gallery in the background. And the occasion? Uncertain - but the big political gathering in Trafalgar Square that year was the anti-Suez demonstration on 4th November.
By the end of that month the engagement was over. Jean McCrindle - who I met this week - has herself been a lifelong activist, pioneering feminist and teacher and twice stood for Parliament.  This is Maurice Margarot, one of the most prominent of Britain's neo-Jacobins at the close of the eighteenth century. He was a founding - and leading - member of the radical London Corresponding Society and this portrait was issued at the time of Margarot's trial for sedition at the High Court of Edinburgh in January 1794. Maurice Margarot was born in Devon, the son of a wine merchant. The family travelled widely across Europe - a custom which Margarot maintained. He was in France in 1789 at the time of the Revolution. Returning to London in 1792, he became involved in the campaign for Reform. Late in 1793, he attended the Edinburgh Convention, a radical gathering which the authorities regarded as having insurrectionary intent. The portrait below was issued at the time of Margarot's trial - and also formed the frontispiece of the published record of the hearings. He was found guilty and sentenced to transportation to Australia, along with other reformers who became known collectively as 'the Scottish Martyrs to Liberty'. Margarot eventually returned from New South Wales to Britain in around 1810, died five years later (at the age of 70) and was buried in London's Old St Pancras burial ground.  As well as coming across a nice copy of this portrait, I've also recently got hold of a copy of a London Corresponding Society pamphlet in Margarot's name. Here it is:        The historian E.P. Thompson, in his magisterial The Making of the English Working Class, says of Margarot: 'He was energetic and audacious, but badly bitten by the characteristic vice of English Jacobins - self-dramatization.' Ouch!
Of the Edinburgh trial, Thompson records: 'Margarot, who was accompanied to his trial by a procession holding a 'tree of liberty' in the shape of a letter M above his head, overplayed his hand and was too eager for the crown of martyrdom. But he challenged Braxfield [ ie Lord Justice Clerk, the leading judge in Scotland] with great audacity of having boasted at a dinner-party before the trial that he would have the reformers whipped before transportation, and that 'the mob would be the better for losing a little blood'.' This is the exchange which features on the text below the portrait, though that talks of the mob 'letting' a little blood, which I take to mean drawing blood rather than losing it.  I had the chance for a bit of a wander today - and popped in at the Freedom Press bookshop, hidden away (and I really mean hidden away) down an alley at the side of the Whitechapel Gallery. It's the sort of place that's always worth a good rummage. The new stock is largely anarchist or that way inclined - but there's also some second-hand sections which are much more diverse. For the first time, I think, I went to the guy in charge and said one of his books simply shouldn't be on sale at all. A work of philosophy by Herbert Spencer once owned by, and bearing the signature of, the anarchist Matt Kavanagh, and with copious pencil notes either by him or someone else. This should be part of the Freedom Press archive held at the Bishopsgate Institute - I hope that's where this book will be heading. I was happy enough with what I did pick up. I got a 1924 edition of Bertrand Russell's Justice in War-Time with the ownership signature of John Hewetson, one of the defendants in the renowned Freedom trial of 1945 which was about, yes, justice in war-time.  The other really nice book was J.M. Guyau's 1891 volume Education and Heredity: a study in sociology - bought above all for this splendid bookplate. Tom Keell was the mainstay of the Freedom Press for a decade either side of the First World War. The book also has the ownership signature of the educationalist G.W.S. Howson. Why Freedom is disposing of its library in this way, I really don't know. It's not even raking in lots of money. From there to Bishopsgate, where the library often has shelves laden with items for sale - there's usually a few things of interest amid, on this occasion, a remarkable number of titles about Stalin.  This is my favourite of the handful of items I picked up at Bishopsgate today - a pamphlet by the renowned historian E.P. Thompson about the struggle for a free press. It was published in 1952. This pamphlet looks at the history of the movement for a free press, and concludes: 'Today the Daily Worker has become one of the last channels for the circulation of free opinion, the only paper to stand between the people and the unprincipled campaign of lies and war propaganda of the capitalist press.' Four years later, E.P. Thompson walked out of the Communist Party - largely because of disagreements over freedom of expression. And in case you are wondering about the title of this blogpost: We're All Normal And We Want Our Freedom: Tribute To Arthur Lee & Love is a 1994 tribute album for the band Love and its leader Arthur Lee. The album was named after a line in their song "The Red Telephone" from the album Forever Changes. The phrase originated in Marat/Sade, a play written by Peter Weiss.
 Back in 1963, E.P. Thompson wrote the most influential post-war book of British history, The Making of the English Working Class. I came across it a decade or more later, and dipped into it repeatedly rather than read it throughout (it's a bit of a doorstopper). It made its mark on me, prompting me to do a postgraduate degree at the Centre for the Study of Social History at Warwick, where Edward Thompson had been the presiding genius. By the time I got there, he had left academia behind. I came across him only occasionally - attending a seminar he gave when he, as I recall, unilaterally changed the subject to the haunting death of his older brother, Frank, in Bulgaria towards the end of the Second World War; I chaired a meeting at which he spoke, calling for the release of the East German dissident Rudolf Bahro; and much later, in 1991, I interviewed Edward and his wife Dorothy about their years in the Communist Party, and the audio is posted elsewhere on this site. I knew that in the early 1950s in particular, E.P. Thompson was an active member of the CP in Halifax, and teaching in the Extramural Studies department at the University of Leeds - and that both these aspects of his life fed into the writing of The Making. What I had not appreciated, and this I have to confess is a very personal obsession, is that Edward Thompson had more than a passing acquaintance with my home town of Morley. David Goodway's contribution to a new book entitled E.P. Thompson and English Radicalism (edited by Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor and published by Manchester University Press) spells out how Thompson's role as an adult educator informed the making of The Making. Morley was one of fourteen venues where Thompson held classes. He found the large oval table in the Library's reading room ideal for his purpose. And in 1963-4, after the publication of his seminal work, he commented of Morley: 'Within living memory ... it seems, miners have worked lying down in eighteen-inch seams, children have been in the mills at the age of nine, urine has been collected from pub urinals for scouring, while the brother of one of the students still uses teazles to raise the 'nap'. It is difficult to believe that the industrial revolution has yet occurred in Morley, and next year's syllabus (in the later 19th century) will seem like a tour through the space age'. My own association with Morley Library is restricted to attending stamp club sessions there, rather unwillingly, as a child. My father was on Morley council at the time Thompson was writing his book. My father was an independent, which usually meant Tory but in his case Liberal. He never came across E.P. Thompson, but much to my surprise talked of attending Workers' Educational Association classes - one on history held at Morley Grammar School, and another during the war which he attended with his mother (a JP and National Liberal) at the unlikely venue of the Gildersome Conservative Club. All this is incidental, but out of a web of such tenuous links, affinities and association are built. And I am more than a little chuffed to discover that E.P. Thompson taught in Morley. 
Morley Library with the Town Hall in the distance
Simply the most influential work of history of our times. And this morning I chanced across a 1963 first edition of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class at the excellent Black Gull bookshop in East Finchley. It was published by Victor Gollancz, and this copy is in excellent condition with the original dust wrapper. It wasn't cheap, but it's made my weekend!  The illustration on the cover is entitled 'Victory of Peterloo' - the massacre on Manchester's St Peter's Fields - from William Hone's Political Tracts of 1819. Thompson's agenda was the working-class radicalism of the period from the French Revolution to the Regency.
And his goal, as he famously declared in the preface, was to 'rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.' |
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