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Street party, Elder Street 1996 (John Gorman's banner). (Click on the thumbnail to view) |
THE GUARDIAN
10 DECEMBER 1996
From his base in Ruskin College Oxford the historian Raphael Samuel, who has died of cancer aged 61, transformed himself into an institution. For more than thirty years he was settled in his niche as a common-or-garden lecturer at that crucible of working-class adult education and during that time he became an inescapable presence in the historical profession. A key figure in the birth of the radical History Workshop in the late 1960s, he was an academic who worked from his discipline's margins, but increasingly exerted pressure on its centre. So, by 1994 it was Samuel, marginal man, who delivered the James Ford special lecture in English history at Oxford University.
Samuel loved obituaries. He read them with characteristic verve and engagement. He wrote many, pouring warmth and erudition into them. He reflected on the form itself, curious about its historical origins; from hints in R.W. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages he decided its true historical locus lay in medieval monastic life. He was fascinated by the current revival of obituaries turning, in this case, to a rather different source - the American cultural theorist Frederic Jameson's conceptions of postmodernity and of a "nostalgia for the present".
In part, his desire to unravel the secrets of the obituary was merely one enthusiasm amongst many which , at various times, possessed him. But in a larger sense the determination to commemorate the dead lay at the heart of his extraordinary, incomparable passion for the past.
In this he was like a man driven. Consistently unkempt, he lived a life of the mind, while physically possessing the air of an insomniac and a metabolism, which seemed impatient to burn up the calories the moment they entered his body. I have always thought of him as more diminutive than he actually was, pitted against odds larger than he. He was a chaotic, bohemian Prometheus in public with an unabashed sense of self, dedicated to retrieving for all manner of people their memories and their dignity.
Yet for all his activism, the idea that his own life should widely be commemorated would have seemed to him, I think, a bit shocking, or improper. The origins of this reticence and of much else in the life of Raphael Samuel, lie in this youthful commitment to communism and specifically the Communist Party of Great Britain.
"Commitment" here only weakly conveys the fervour with which he embraced the movement. In a celebrated series of essay published in New Left Review in 1985 - at a moment when British Communism was on the point of unravelling - he attempted to explain to a younger, more laid-back generation the interior emotional life of the true believer. "To be a communist", he wrote, "was to have a complete social identity".
He was, in the 1940s, a schoolboy communist growing up in relative impoverishment. He shared this existential, intellectual world with his mother to whom, for Christmas 1950, he gave a copy of In Defence of Materialism by the "father of Russian Marxism", Georgy Plekhanov. He was becoming a young activist, making his own the communist neighbourhoods in north London, St Pancras in particular. During the war years he spent some time in Slough, west of London, around the trading estate where his mother was working and organising.
He read the Daily Worker Football Annual. He learned The Tractor Song in Russian. The first movie he saw recounted the heroic role of children in the Russian revolution of 1905. While still at school in the late 1940s, he joined with his elders who had formed the justly renowned historians' group of the Communist Party, bringing him into contact with such figures as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawn and EP Thompson. Later, when the imperative of militancy combined with what - from a contemporary aspect - looks like the innocent call of romance, it was of course a comrade who became the object of his affections, which were first declared on Arthur's Seat, in Edinburgh, a suitably bracing arcadia.
At Balliol College, Oxford, in the early 1950s, under the benevolent eye of his tutor, Christopher Hill, Raphael Samuel immersed himself in historical study. His tyro activities continued apace. Commanded by the party to get his first, he did just that.
In 1956 came the great crisis in the international communist movement. There was Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev's 'secret speech' on Stalin's crimes followed by the Red Army's crushing of the Hungarian Revolution. Samuel's world fell apart. From that moment his former being and sense of self became, as he described it later, "a lost world". Putting himself back together again, and reconstructing from the debris a political or moral justification for the study of history demanded an intellectual journey, conducted by him with a curious mix of imagination and intransigence, intellectual sophistication and self-declared theoretical naivety.
He became a member of the group centred around the Universities Left Review, which was becoming the New Left Review in 1960 and within which he was a key mover. At the end of the 1950s he was also a co-founder of London's Partisan Coffee House in Soho, the new left's short-lived contribution to the coffee bar boom.
In place of the Party and its cadres, there emerged a more democratic - and modest - conception of "the people" or the "popular" for whom, and to whom, historians should speak. In place of scriptural truth handed down by the Party, there arose a more imaginative mode of writing, encouraging people to think for themselves about the world as a historical place and challenging that which seemed ordained by nature to be permanent. But Samuel's original cast of mind was still evident: obsessional, driven, and - for all its popularism - eccentric, a mentality strangely askew from the imperatives of a modern culture.
Conventionally, reputations of prestigious historians derive from the books they write and their silent elevation thought the academic hierarchies. On neither count, for most of his professional life, could Raphael Samuel have claimed even a look-in. His first single-authored book, Theatres of Memory appeared when he was touching 60- a preposterous way to conduct oneself according to the later norms of academic performance. Far from rising through the ranks and heading for all the pomp of a professorship, he was happy in his chosen milieu of adult education at Ruskin, and generally unimpressed by anything which might smack of careerism. Only earlier this year, in March, he was finally persuaded to apply for a Chair. He moved to the University of East London to launch a new centre for research into East End life. It developed a lifelong interest which had already registered in the marvellous oral history biography which in 1981 he had coaxed out of the East End criminal, Arthur Harding, East End Underworld.
Samuel undermined the professional mysteries of the archive, seeing in primary research the potential for democratising historical study. At Ruskin he was fond of exhorting untrained students to immerse themselves straightaway in the sources. When he lectured, he was in the habit of bringing the archive with him, first in brief cases and shopping bags, later in a niftier array of shoulder- bags. Like a fairground magician he. would pick, as if at random, from a profusion of files and books and scraps of paper, nipping from pile to pile, delighted to share the fruits of his research with his audience.
From this conviction about the democratic properties of historical study emerged the History Workshop. Initially this harnessed the Ruskin ethos of "worker-historians" with the more cosmopolitan intellectual spirit, exemplified in what was then the mildly subversive idea of social history, which could be found at Oxfords St. Anthony's College. In March 1967 the first History Workshop meeting was advertised, "A Day with the Chartists".
The History Workshop was a product of the late 1960s but it has flourished since. Annual meetings, particularly in the early days, were exuberant states of affairs, serious minded carnivals of enthusiasts for history. Regional networks mushroomed. In 1976 the first issue of History Workshop Journal was published. This was inspired by a small group of intellectuals, which had emerged from Ruskin, from Oxford, and from the History Workshop networks. The journal was established on militantly democratic principle, which - in a very different environment - later generations still strive to uphold. But the presence of Raphael Samuel and his erstwhile partner, Anna Davin, were formative and profound.
To read the run of the journals, or to go through the 30 of 40 volumes published in the book imprint which accompanied the journal's early years, is to witness the growth of the historian's mind. In the editorials, countless contributions, "enthusiasms" and reports, can be found the testament not only to Samuel's intellectual vitality and love of history, but to his conception of what history, democratised, might look like.
This massive intellectual output, with every word open to collective scrutiny did not encourage conventional courtesies. What made it happen, as it did for similar ventures, was an intellectual, political and emotional turmoil.
Invariably, Raphael Samuel was mild- mannered and the last to break. When confounded, a bewildered innocence crossed his face. But he was deadly serious about his ideas, with a conviction, which came to him from his communist inheritance. Inevitably, with such a vast output, there was sometimes a lack of discrimination. Those he worked with he charmed, and sent wild in equal measure.
In 1994, as well as delivering the James Ford Lecture, he published the first volume of his Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. It was a series, which aimed to look at the way the past is active in the present. That first volume carried him along the heritage trail and into domestic DIY, inspiring him to conduct a compendious inventory of all manner of contemporary retro-chic.
Through the 1980s his intellectual concerns had shifted from reconstructing the lost experiences of the powerless to a concern with the mechanism by which the past is remembered, dramatised and argued about in the present. His work took on a hue more familiar in cultural studies than in conventional history. This shift was marked by the publication of his article entitled The Philosophy of Brick. It explored the revived penchant in London for brick buildings. These investigations took him to many strange worlds, far removed from the ethos he had imbibed in the streets of St Pancras in the 1940s.
Theatres of Memory was hugely lauded in the quality press, bringing him a new public. Its argument was, trust the people. The heritage industry might be despised by intellectuals, but it struck a resonance deep in the culture of the people and thus could not be ignored. Among the professionals, including friends who had shared much with him, opinion on this was sharply divided. But conceptually, the argument marked the culmination of his thinking since the break of 1956, and his turn for inspiration to the reflexes of the people.
In 1987 he married Alison Light, a union of love, comradeship and hard intellectual sparring: their home became a place of warm entertainment, an axis for an assortment of networks, and an effective workshop of ideas in its own right.
Raphael Samuel believed that the emotional charge of obituaries derived from the symbolic power to "defy the idea of extinction". The symbolic power of his lifetime's work provided an impressive dignity for those ill-served by history, and worked to the same effect.
Bill Schwarz
THE GUARDIAN
11 DECEMBER 1996
Raphael Samuel opened my mind when I was a student in the 1960s. Until I went to Ruskin and met him, my education had come from correspondence courses, which I used to complete in a 14-bunk cabin after 20 hours' duty as a seaman on a liner. To move from that to two of you in a college room with a tutor was an experience, but Raph was never my image of a tutor.
He would turn up with his hair all over the place, in a style of dressing that was all his own and that was brilliant captured in the photograph of him which the Guardian published yesterday. He arrived with bags full of poems and bits of papers and references and he would pull one out when he wanted to make a point.
He made me do something I thought I'd never do. Not just write an essay - that was difficult enough for me - but use the experience of poetry to illustrate a point. Until then I had thought poetry was about them and not us.
He had this tremendous understanding of the inner inferiority that mature students have in a society that tells them they've missed out. He not only understood what was inside the student, he unlocked it and channelled it into written and verbal debate. There wasn't an ounce of superiority in him. In those tutorials he was often as much the student as the lecturer. He learned from you and you learned from him. He was fascinated by other people's experience.
I remember once that I did a mock exam while I was at Ruskin. I had a terrible time. I was so frustrated that I couldn't say what I wanted that I stormed out. Raph chased me down Walton Street, but he couldn't catch me. When I got back there was a note on my desk in that big hand writing of his telling me not to worry and to come and have a talk and a cup of coffee. He was always supportive like that.
For me, Raph was the Ruskin experience. He arrived during my time there. I think he only intended to be there for one or two years, but he stayed the rest of his life. Ruskin was phenomenal. It wasn't Oxford, but it was in Oxford. For people like me it was hard. Having been big fish in small pools we were suddenly turned into small fish in big ones. Ruskin's founders said that they wanted "to take the windbags out of the trade union movement and fill them with sand so that they are the sandbags for stability not windbags for the revolution". Raphael never saw it that way. He made revolution sound warm and not painful. He spoke for the heart and the soul of the labour movement, real people, real workers.
He never forgot you. When I was standing for the deputy leadership of the party in 1992 after Roy Hattersley resigned, I came under a lot of attack from people who said I could never hold the job because I might stumble over my words and say the wrong things. Completely out of the blue, Raph wrote this wonderful piece for the Guardian about me, recalling some very strong memories of those Ruskin years and urging support for me. It moved me to tears.
He knew what was in the heart and he knew what was in the head. He wasn't taken in by an establishment that just judges by the mouth and the glamour. I felt really proud that he felt that way about me and that he was still there after 30 years.
I was devastated to hear of his death. He had such a genuine love for people. He had the loveliest warm smile, a warm knowing smile. It was truly comradely. Everything was lovely about that man.
John Prescott
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'Ralph' at Balliol, 1956. (Click on the thumbnail to view) |
11 DECEMBER 1996
Raphael Samuel brought to the writing and popularisation of history a seemingly inexhaustible energy and creativity. He was also an inspired teacher and the author of books and essays, which have expanded beyond recognition the intellectual and imaginative ranges both of English history and of the writing of history itself.
But he was not only a teacher and a writer; he was also an organiser and a prophet, a close, and sometimes uncanny reader of "the signs of the times". He preached and practised a new vision of popular history: a democratic history which put the everyday lives of ordinary people at the heart of a large and even sweeping history of the nations of Britain over the last two centuries.
Samuel gave new meaning to the idea of history as an experimental art, inventing the History Workshop (a term he borrowed from one of his heroines, Joan Littlewood, founder of Theatre Workshop) first as a local and then as an international movement. The extent of his empathy was exceptional. No one charted more exactly the ways in which the Industrial Revolution had increased the extent of toil in every branch of Victorian industry, but no one could have acknowledged more generously the contribution of Tory antiquaries in Early Hanoverian England to the writing of national history. His cast of historical actors ranged from Catholic priests ministering among the post-famine Irish poor, the proletarian Gladstonian roughs of Headington Quarry through South Wales village Bolsheviks in the 1920, to the mobsters of the Edwardian East End underworld.
His insights were the product of an omnivorous intellectual appetite, which crossed disciplines and periods: Samuel wrote with the insights of a literary critic, the acuity of an anthropologist and the wit of a political journalist. Up until his last hours he remained passionately engaged with the future of history, both of his own many projects and those of the many friends and admirers whom he had helped to inspire.
Raphael Samuel was brought up in a London household that was Jewish and Communist. His political education and his love for history were nurtured by progressive schooling at King Alfred's School, Hampstead, and Balliol College, Oxford, where he became a devoted student, and later friend, of Christopher Hill. In 1956 he left the Communist Party which had done so much to shape his youthful years and was one of the founder editors, together with Stuart Hall and Charles Taylor, of what was soon to become New Left Review. He settled in Spitalfields in east London in an early-l8th-century house, which contrived to have been inhabited by Jews, Jacobins and silk- weavers. This was to become his own workshop and later the home which he made with his wife, the writer and critic Alison Light.
In 1962 Samuel was appointed Tutor in Sociology at Ruskin College, Oxford, a trade-union supported institution which prepared for university working people who had left school without qualifications. Upon the post he stamped his genius. He was a brilliant, if eccentric, teacher. Rather than submitting his students to the textbook learning of vocational courses, Samuel believed that every person had a history/story of importance to tell, and one which they could be empowered to write, thus becoming the historians of their own past. As one student wrote: "1 came to Ruskin knowing I could not write an essay, and left Ruskin sure that I could write a book". To those who took up this challenge Samuel was a source of, sometimes obstinate, always uplifting, faith in themselves. He led people on journeys of creative self-discovery by blowing away the walls, which separated working people from literary culture.
From Ruskin, beginning in 1966, Samuel also launched a series of national workshops on topics which were then unheard of as the stuff of history and are now the sine qua non of every history course: women's history, the history of childhood, empire and patriotism, the changing definitions of nations, the cultural diversity of Britain. Participation in these workshops in the 1970s and 1980s sometimes encompassed thousands. These gatherings had not only a political aim - the exploration of difficult areas of national life - but also a radical pedagogic purpose. Established professors and well-known intellectuals shared platforms with Ruskin students, offering the first fruits of their research.
Samuel did not call for the dismantling of conventional academic hierarchies, he simply dismantled them. Many of the contributors - professional historians and students - became the first writers for the History Workshop Journal which he co-founded in 1975 and is now a leading international historic review. Here, a group of radical historians formed an extended family which soon stretched to all continents, but which had at its centre Samuel's tireless inspiration and continuous intellectual growth.
In the 1980s, when so many intellectuals of the Left retreated from the public sphere or fell silent, Samuel was intrigued rather than repelled by Thatcherite Britain. Thatcherism expressed and mobilized some deep-rooted popular yearnings, which Samuel was determined to understand. He was not afraid to share some of the enthusiasms in popular culture which others spurned. The new leisure-time pursuits of the 1980s fascinated him as much as Staffordshire figurines and Victorian music-hall.
The engagement with the continuous remaking of a people's past, through the barely remarked and kaleidoscopic shifts in popular sources of enthusiasm and identifications, began to be put together in his magnum opus, Theatres of Memory, the first volume of which appeared in 1994. Samuel was a powerful, idiosyncratic thinker. But in his own inimitable way, he long anticipated an understanding of culture, which is now global.
Even in his last year Raphael Samuel was engaged in new projects. He became Professor at the University of East London and began to form a centre for London History.
Gareth Stedman Jones
11 DECEMBER 1996
After the death of E.P.Thompson in 1993, that of Raphael Samuel is the gravest loss to the profession of history - but to a special kind of history; rooted in left-wing politics, and aiming to rediscover the lives of the millions overlooked by historians of big names and big events.
Thompson and Samuel had much in common. Both learnt their trade in adult education, not in the universities. Both left the Communist party in 1956 to devote themselves to the New Left, which sought to free the spirit of socialism from the dark record of Stalinism and also from the pragmatism of social democracy. in a speech in 1988, at a conference (or reunion) of "The New Left 30 Years On", Samuel recalled: "We were all forward-looking and iconoclastic, breaking with age-old shibboleths".
He came from a Jewish family with roots in the East End of London, and spent his boyhood a wartime evacuee in Buckinghamshire and then in Hampstead Garden Suburb, where he went to the progressive King Alfred's School. After his parents were divorced (his father was a solicitor), Raphael was brought up by his mother Minna Keal, a gifted composer, with close links to his uncle, the historian Chimen Abramsky. Minria Keal. Abramsky and Abramsky's wife were active and dedicated communists and the boy was initiated into the faith - though that word is unjust to the intellectual sophistication of scholarly Marxism.
Samuel was born to be an historian and was already in a Communist historians' discussion group as a precocious schoolboy. He had the vital quality of living at the same time in the past, the present and the future.
Everything interested him, from public health to colonial rebellion and from street lighting to street fighting. Up to the end of his life he would argue as fervently about the tactics of the Chartists as about the destruction of the Labour Party (as he saw it) by Tony Blair.
At Balliol College, Oxford, Samuel's tutor was Christopher Hill, an authority on 17th century revolutionary traditions and another Marxist (also to leave the CP in 1956). He gained a first and began teaching at Ruskin College. He was the founder, with Stuart Hall and others, of Universities and Left Review, a journal born of the political turmoil caused by the simultaneous crises of Hungary and Suez. It sponsored a crowded, excited meeting in London addressed by yet another Marxist scholar, Isaac Deutscher.
Thompson had founded the New Reasoner and were was no room for two similar journals, so they merged in 1960 as The New Left Review edited by Hall. The New Left was now a movement, with hundreds of activists who trod the road to Aldermaston and waved banners at demonstrations on all kinds of issues. Samuel was once arrested and, rather than save his time by pleading guilty and paying the fine, went to court to debate the right to remonstrate with the magistrate. He was fined anyway.
Inevitably, the atmosphere of the movement was, in a then popular phrase, one of creative chaos. A Soho coffee house, called The Partisan, was started not just as a rendezvous but as an enterprise, which, it was confidently believed, would finance the movement and the journal. in the 1950s it was difficult to lose money with a coffee house, but the New Left managed it.
Meanwhile, Samuel was rushing between London and Oxford, loyal to Ruskin, where he went on teaching until the year of his death, despite opportunities to move to more prestigious jobs. Around him a school of new historians grew up, some in academia and some writing as freelances holding down mundane jobs, for one of Samuel's tenets was that there should be no distinction between amateur and professional. From the 1960s, he was the moving spirit in a loose organisation called History Workshop which held numerous large or small meetings up arid down the country for the pooling of ideas and fresh knowledge. With NLR, Samuel brought contributors together for the History Workshop Journal.
In appearance, and in his clothing, which was casual to the point of improvisation, Samuel never changed. His long, wildly straying hair and his narrow eager face were perfectly right for his fervent, restless personality. He was slightly built and thin to the verge of being cadaverous, so that his friends were sometimes unaware of the onset of cancer. In later years he was described as looking like a 1960s character, but perhaps he was more like a Bohemian of the era of Baudelaire.
Together with a New Left friend, Dennis Butt, he bought a beautiful old house in Spitalfields, the district in East London first settled by Huguenot refugees (to be succeeded in due course by waves of Jews and Bangladeshis). Besides being beautiful, the house was quite large, but such houses could be picked up cheap before gentrification descended on Spitalfields. When that did happen the houses were mostly subjected to fashionable transformation. But in Samuel's house the creaky stairs, uneven floors and panelled wall were sacrosanct.
Indeed, tradition and revolution were the two poles of Samuel's compass. When it became customary on the Left to deplore what has come to be called the heritage industry, Samuel defended it. For him, popular songs, colloquial catchphrases and domestic objects of any kind were to be loved whether they had survived or whether they were being revived in fashion or advertising.
This was the theme of his book Theatres of Memory, which appeared in 1994 and which he planned to follow with a second volume. It was his only book as sole author, though he had collaborated on several, as well as contributing to many collections and writing countless articles and reviews.
Unlike some historians, Samuel read novels and poems and was often at the theatre or the cinema. His wife Alison Light, whom he married in 1987, is a lecturer in English Literature at University College London. Samuel was always highly attractive to women, perhaps because they felt that he had to be taken care of. The marriage was supremely happy, and gave him, so far as anything could, a point of rest.
This year he was given the professorship, which he should have had earlier, in his home patch, at the University of East London. He made plans for teaching and research, but did not live to implement them.
His wife and mother survive him.
Mervyn Jones
12 DECEMBER 1996
Raphael Samuel, who has died aged 61, was one of post-war Britain's most notable historians.
From a position on the political Left, and firmly on the margins of his
discipline, he reshaped the ways in which British history was studied and
written. He was concerned with changing the questions we ask of the past,
and to whom we should address those questions.
In his work in the late 1960s he was overwhelmingly interested in the "lived
experience" of the ordinary people of the past. In his essay "Quarry
Roughs", published in Village Life and Labour (1975), he used
a mixture of oral history and local sources to transform ideas of what we
can know about communities in the past.
In the late 1970s he moved on to write about the cultures of the inter-war Left, illuminating the huge contribution to the development of British culture, and especially theatre, made by largely forgotten, and frequently amateur, pioneers.
In the 1980s his project changed again. Like many on the Left he had a fascination with Mrs Thatcher and Thatcherism and, in a series of meetings and then collections of essays, he sought to understand the historical roots of her appeal. The result was the three-volume collection Patriotism (1989), which he edited.
In the last six years, Samuel's focus shifted to questions of the past as present, especially ideas of heritage. It was this that formed the core of his provocative and powerful book Theatres of Memory (1994). Much of his later work owed a good deal to his wife, the writer and critic Alison Light, whom he married in 1987.
Through all this, the focus of Samuel's work remained the ordinary and the everyday. His was not a history of great battles or titanic class struggles; his working class was concerned with making do, with petty crime, with music halls and popular ballads. His patriotisms were small and local.
Raphael Elkan Samuel was horn in London on Dec 26 1934, the son of Jewish communists. His childhood was dislocated by war and evacuation. Only in the late 1940s did he settle, with his mother, the composer Minna Keal, on the axis of the East End and north London, which was to remain his territory.
He went up to Balliol in the early 1950s, a loyal Communist Party member. However, like many of his generation he left the Party in 1956 over the suppression of the Hungarian uprising.
He was a key figure in the early years of the New Left, but it was the upsurge of a new generation of activism in the mid-1960s which, brought him back into politics and marked the beginning of his historical work.
This will always be associated with Ruskin College, the adult education college in Oxford which had close links with the trade union movement. Samuel went to Ruskin in 1962 as tutor in sociology. By 1967 he had moved to the teaching of social history. His teaching was inspired, as was his profound belief in history, and in the importance of primary sources.
In the 1960s, even to progressive university teachers, the thought that you sent students, let alone ex-miners, ex-farm workers, or ex-typists, into record offices to write history, rather than study the text-books, was astonishing.
The History Workshop movement in which Samuel was the key figure demonstrates the inspirational success of his teaching. Beginning in 1967 with a small meeting on Chartism, it burgeoned in the early 1970s; its weekend meetings at Ruskin regularly attracted more than 1,000 people to talk history and argue politics until dawn. The movement changed, spreading to local groups, and today still maintains a momentum of its own. Equally permanent was the foundation, in 1975, of History Workshop Journal. Among the founders were three former students of Samuel: Sally Alexander, Alun Howkins and Stan Shipley, all of whom went on to academic careers.
"Making academics", though was never Samuel's purpose. He remained at Ruskin until March this year when the lure of the East End took him to a professorship at the University of East London and the directorship of a centre for East End history. That project remains unfinished, but Samuel completed a second volume of Theatres of Memory, and talked of writing volumes three and four.
John Keegan writes: Ralph Samuel was already at Balliol when I went up in 1953 and known to everyone in the college as a leading member of the Oxford University Communist Party. He was a true believer, so much so that some of his contemporaries claim to have seen him in tears at the news of "Uncle" Joe Stalin's death. Forever busy in the Party's cause, he bustled about college, distributing pamphlets, organising meetings and conferring intensely (it seemed hourly) with the two of three other Balliol men who carried Party cards.
His politics did not prevent his being one of the best-liked Balliol men of his time. Ralph was lovable. He wore his heart on his sleeve, and his heart was full of concern for the underdog, the unhappy, the lonely, the overlooked. The Balliol Tories, who included at least two future cabinet ministers, took collective fun in mocking the difficulties into which Soviet policy landed him, but as individuals they respected his humanity and enjoyed his friendship. Ralph, despite the extremity of his views, was always ready to seek common ground with his political opponents and was delighted when he found it.
Ralph's real commitment was to truth as he saw it. After his rejection of the Communist Party, he devoted himself to the propagation of an ideal vision of the world, which he seemed to believed could be achieved by a re-evaluation of the past in terms of the part played in history by ordinary people.
He was wholly without ambition. Despite the wide following he attracted, particularly among young people, he made no attempt to build an academic career or seek prestigious appointments. He found his deepest satisfaction in teaching his vision of history to people from unacademic and underprivileged origins. He even failed to exploit his remarkable personal attractiveness, perhaps because his chief quality was a fundamental spiritual modesty.
Ralph and I could not have been less alike. He was a Jew of unshakable Left-wing conviction, I a Right-wing Roman Catholic. Nevertheless we were friends and like all who knew him, I mourn the passing of a good man from this world.
Socialism mourns a historian of intellect and humanity
NEW STATESMAN
20 DECEMBER 1996
In one way, Raphael Samuel, who died in mid- December, was the essence of "old" Labour: on the side of the workers against bosses, bastion of Ruskin College, in love with the highways and byways of proletarian history. My enduring memory of him, however, is of the most questioning historian I have encountered. Nobody was less sentimental about the bad old past. In a sense he was not "Labour" at all: although he left the Communists in 1956, he never became a Labour Party member. I last saw him 12 days before his death at his home, with his wife and beloved companion Alison Light.
The physical signs of his illness were terribly apparent, but mentally and spiritually he was as sharp as a needle, as funny and hungry for argument as ever. "Cancer", as he put it calmly, talking about the writing of the second volume of his great work, Theatres of Memory 'imposes a deadline, literally."
I asked him how he became a historian. He spoke fondly of a Russian-émigré uncle who used to take him to the Communist History Group, so that as a teenager he met some of the great Marxist historians of an older generation - Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill. When I said teasingly that he was still a communist at heart, he seemed surprised. However, I always detected in him a special kind of mid-century British CP fervour, which had the elevation and liberation of ordinary people as its taken-for-granted goal. It was a quaint affectation that he called friends "comrade" in everyday speech, as others might say "mate": he is the only person I have ever heard using the term without sounding silly or threatening.
He was the kindest of men, though sometimes one of the most infuriating. I first got to know him at New Society Christmas Parties in Covent Garden. I came to know him better when I was trying to put together a collection of essays for the Fabian Society and he agreed to be a contributor. He showed great enthusiasm for the project - short of actually delivering his manuscript. The result was a series of lunches, from which I returned empty-handed but intellectually invigorated.
What excited him most were the experiences of individuals who contributed to the stream of events yet were seldom noticed. For him, there were no humdrum lives, and no humdrum people. A favourite Samuel word was "moving" - used to describe the way people coped, making the best of things for themselves, their families, and their communities. He found the respect and interest of ordinary people in traditions that middle-class liberals often dismiss "moving".
Raphael Samuel's death is not just moving. It is a big loss to cultural thought. And the sad feature of the Götterdàmmerung days of the British Library Reading Room will be the absence of a gaunt figure, a slick of unkempt hair falling over his face, head buried in the pre-electronic leather-bound catalogues at the heart of the Rotunda.
Ben Pilmott
LE MONDE
20 DECEMBER 1996
L'Historien anglais Raphael Samuel, emporté par un cancer le 9 décembre a l'ãge de soixante-et-un ans, a construit une vie et une oeuvre de reputation internationale sur le rapport entre le passé et le present.
Les milieux successifs qui avaient étés les siens dans sa jeunesse l'avaient orienté dans cette voie. Sa famille appartenait à cette communauté des ouvriers juifs de Londres pour que un engagement politique à gauche est aussi naturel que la passion pour l'histoire. Tout jeune, il avait adhéré au Parti commnuniste et avait participé aux côtés de ses aîné - Hill, Hobsbawn, Thompson - au groupe des historiens de ce parti dont les discussions ont renouvelé la façon de faire de l'histoire. Survint l'insurrection de Budapest, Samuel quitta le parti et refit sa vie et ses pensées. Il devint ce que nous appelons en France un intellectuel, menant de pair un engagement constant à gauche et des travaux d'historien dont il revendiquait l'opposition à la tradition de la neutralité historique.
Il trouva sa voie dans "la volonté délibérée d'échapper aux conventions et à la froideur des seminaires de recherche" Il prit pour themes la mémoire du passé, l'interprétation du quotidien, la constitution de la notion du partrimoine et ce qu'on appellerait de ce coté de la Manche l'emergence des "lieux de mémoire". On en retiendra deux livres: East End Underworld, truculente biographie d'un petit truand de l'Est de Londres, et Theatres of Memory, enquête excitante sur la montée du rétro dans la culture britannique contemporaine. Ces deux grands livres exprimaient un choix politique: "Predre au sérieux le sentiment de perte d'identité et d'appauvrissement culturel qui s'est devéloppé en Grande-Bretagne ces dernières années, en réponse au changement social depuis la guerre, et faire face aux aspirations nostalgiques dont se nourrissent des mouvements comme le Front national (anglais)." Cette perspective l'amena avant bien d'autres dans des voies pionnières: le rencours au témoignage oral, l'étude de l'archéologie industrielle, l'utilisation de sources nouvelles comme les photos et les chansons, la reconnaissance des raports entre femmes et hommes comme clé des representations et des decisions. Ainsi le Grande-Bretagne at-elle pu éviter le divorce entre histoire sociale et culturelle. Mais, pour Samuel, l'historien devait intervenir de toutes ses forces dans le vie de la cité. Il batailla donc pour faire évoluer l'enseignement de l'histoire dans les écoles et les lycées de Grande-Bretagne. Il dirigea des volumes sur l'histoire du patriotisme dans son pays. La nation était au coeur de ses interrogations, qu'il partageait avec un mouvement d'etudiants, de chercheurs et d'ouvriers dont il etait un des animateurs: les Ateliers de l'Histoire (History Workshop), né en 1966, dont l'élan se prolonge depuis 1976 dans le revue du même nom.
Aucun des livres écrits ou dirigés par Raphael Samuel n'est traduit en français. Pourtant son oeuvre, sa rigueur dans le métier d'historien, son culte de l'archive son sens du partage du savoir méritent un large echo dans notre pays, lui aussi confronté au probléme d'une réappropriation critique de son passé.
Patrick Fridenson
THE GUARDIAN
21 DECEMBER 1996
Raphael Samuel's funeral in Highgate Cemetery this week seemed more than just the funeral of a very remarkable man who has died far too early, at the age of 61. It seemed almost like the funeral of a way of thinking and a wake for an era of the human spirit. To those of us who do not believe in resurrection, it had a kind of wider finality.
If you didn't know Raphael Samuel, or if his name means nothing to you, which will be the case for many readers, then I fear it will be hard to explain why this December death seemed so much more than usually conclusive. Samuel was a learned and omnivorously enthusiastic historian. He was a tutor of many generations of working-class students at Ruskin College, an inspirational participant in many networks, and a man whose intellectual and political passions were rooted in socialism, in scholarship, and in an unbounded love for the infinite and messy detail of human life.
Yet even if you didn't know him, he probably left his mark on the way that you think about the world. Samuel had an unconditional interest in the past. He believed that history was not merely a tale of kings, queens and governments, nor even of the long march of the dispossessed towards a society of all for all, though he was hugely interested in both. He loved people's memories and inheritances, yours, mine, his own, everyone's. Through his work in the Ruskin History Workshop, he was, in spite of his apparent aversion to his own celebrity, the presiding genius of the modern reclamation of the day before yesterday. That book of your district in old photographs is his legacy, just as much as the more learned books of his own that he never quite seemed to finish.
The choice of Highgate Cemetery, as Stuart Hall said in his graveside speech, was massively resonant. This corner of Highgate may not be London's equivalent of the mur des fédérés in Paris's Père-Lachaise, yet it is the right place to lay to rest both a passionate socialist and nonpareil chronicler of Victorian London.
Winter, too, is the right time to bury the dead. A lonely time of inner warmth and outer cold. We arrived in our ones and twos, murmuring our greetings, looking to see who else was there, and lining the muddy and gravelled avenue that winds its way across the damp and wooded hillside graveyard. Familiar figures from what was once the New Left bent nervously to lift his coffin from the hearse and then carry it, with its huge bunch of blood-red roses, on his last march.
There was a lone piper. I don't know why, but no matter. We shuffled silently along the path that takes you past Karl' Marx's mysteriously troublesome monument, past the lesser and later tombs of socialists who jostle to lie in Marx's shadow, and upwards past the memorials to those who are merely part of the haphazard society that inhabits all urban cemeteries. Then, in a high corner looking down over London, we took up our places as best we could, while Hall and the others delivered their fine tributes and read heart-stopping words by Auden, MacNeice, Emily Brontë and John Dotme.
We didn't sing. Now there's a telltale sign of the confusion of the English Left in 1996. We have no equivalent in this country of Eternal Memory. The International would not have been truthful any longer, though I bet that all of us who were there knew the words. Nor, for different reasons would a Christian hymn have done for this secular Jew, though a hymn would have come very naturally among well-educated atheists of a certain age. At least we should have sung Jerusalem or, even better, England Arise.
And yet that's just it. We cannot honestly sing such songs now. We remember the words and they move us greatly, but I don't think many people believe in them any more. A new Jerusalem? Pardon me while I turn my New Labour manifesto to the wall. England Arise? The long, long night is not over and perhaps it never will be. Perhaps, perish the thought, it isn't really night after all. Perhaps too, as A.J.P. Taylor once wrote, England has risen all the same and so, in a way, it doesn't matter so much now as it once did.
Mourners tend to have grey hair. Certainly a lot of those who were there on Wednesday seemed to have. When you go to any funeral you ask yourself worrying questions, like whether anything survives and whether it all mattered as much as it seemed in your hot youth. I cannot believe that anyone who was in Highgate Cemetery last Wednesday did not ask themselves such question under the benevolent shadow of Karl Marx. cannot believe that many of them came up with stories with happy endings, I suspect that Raphael would not have done so either. It isn't just romantic Ireland that's dead and gone. It's romantic, optimistic, everyman's England too. Some day, like the sleeping knights under the hill who provide the most potent image in English legend, perhaps they will rise again. But not, I thought in the cemetery, in our lifetime.
Martin Kettle
26 DECEMBER 1996
Bagpipe music summoned the mourners through the overgrown pathways of Highgate Cemetery, in north London, to the funeral of Raphael Samuel. And hundreds came, stricken by the death of this liveliest of historians, but, at the end of the service, exhilarated by the energy and life he always seemed to draw to him.
Stuart Hall remembered the founding of the Universities and Left Review, in which the free- range Marxist flew the Communist co-op, and read Auden's Musée de Beaux Arts:
| About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a |
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Alun Howkins, one of his countless disciples during his 30-odd years teaching history at Ruskin College, Oxford, remembered "Britain's oldest teenager's" unquenchable enthusiasm for getting people to write their own history: "Where do you come from? Bicester. Gosh, what an interesting place
"Given that I regarded Bicester as deeply uninteresting, and that was the main reason I had come to Oxford, this seemed to be overdoing it, hut it showed his determination to get people to understand and celebrate their own environment.
The main result of this evangelism was the Ruskin history workshops, ranging over all aspects of people's experience, from the Oxford of Hardy's Jude the Obscure to, quite recently, politics and society in Scotland. Often they seemed only a hair's breath from disaster, but it was a lank, black hair's- breadth, and the results - when written up in History Workshop: a Journal of Socialist and Feminist History, or free-standing volumes, about 40 in total - made as effective a revolution in the understanding of history as the French Annales of Bloch and Braudel.
Like the great Victorian Lord Acton, Ralph wrote little in book form: Theatres of Memory in 1994 was just a taster of what could have been a remarkable oeuvre. But, like Acton and the Cambridge Modem History, he laid deep and solid foundations for other scholars: and, unlike Acton, left a rich storehouse of essays and speculative pieces.
Raphael's personal life was bohemian - a long partnership with Anna Davin and after 1987 a happy marriage with Alison Light - and, in a sense, it was very London-centred. However, his local loyalties led to a fascination with other ways in which people attained their own identities, reflected in the three volumes of Patriotism which he edited in 1988.
Not the least of his enthusiasms was Scotland: the pipes, with their echoes of the end of Sunset Song, fell into place.
There are some, particularly on the Left, whose dysfunctional lives reach out to blight those around them: others whose goodwill and fundamental competence is such that it generates enthusiasm and hope. This was seen at the funeral: great grief, but also, as in Auden's poem, life going on and getting the richer because he had been around.
The service ended with the Christian committal, spoken by a clergyman friend, who saw Ralph as one of those oddball secular saints, who become somewhat uncanny centres of energy
I like to think of Ralph turning up beyond the pearly gates, a recording angel tackling the Almighty:"Gosh, what an interesting career. Have you tried to get anything down on paper?"
Christopher Harvie
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Minna and Raphael, Hampstead Garden Suburb, Circa 1936. (Click on the thumbnail to view) |
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Raphael, aged 11. (Click on the thumbnail to view) |
(A shortened version was published 17 January 1997)
Raphael Elkan Samuel, a distinguished social historian of England, and a wonderful man, died from cancer in London on December 9 at the age of nearly sixty-two. He left a profound mark on a whole group of ultra modern social historians in Britain, and his influence began to be felt also in America. Apart from many contributions in articles and books, which he edited, he inspired many ventures, especially among intellectuals of the Left. Two years ago he published a monumental volume Theatres of Memory, which was acclaimed as a masterpiece by the leading scholars from the academic world, irrespective of Left or Right.
He was born in London on 26 December 1934. His father, Barnett Samuel, a traditional and conservative Jew, a solicitor, came from a well- known family in Cardiff. His mother, Minna Nierenstein (later after her second marriage, Minna Keal), a gifted composer, was one of three partners of the well-known Jewish publishing house and bookshop in the East End of London, Shapiro, Valentine.
Raphael was a very precocious child, more of an adult in children's clothing. His parents marriage was an unhappy one, and after his father came out of the army, they divorced. His mother brought him up, and after attending various unconventional schools, he went to the progressive King Alfred's School.
As a result of the rise of fascism in Europe and the Second World War many Jews joined the communist movement. This had a major influence on the young Raphael. He absorbed many communist ideas on equality. As a youngster he took part in demonstrations and helped to distribute leaflets.
In 1952, at the age of 17, he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where his chief tutor was the eminent left-wing historian of the 17th century, Christopher Hill, later Master of Balliol, and subsequently a close friend of Raphael. As an undergraduate his erudition was already formidable, and he received a starred first.
After the famous secret speech of Khrushchev denouncing Stalin in February 1956, and then the bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising by the Soviet army, the Communist Party went through a major crisis, and many people left. A large number of Jews left because of the revelations concerning violent anti-Semitism against Jewish cultural workers and writers. Raphael and his mother left also. Raphael threw himself in great fervour to launch a Left movement outside the Communist Party. He and the sociologist, Stuart Hall, founded the journal New Left Review, and also founded a meeting place, a cafe, The Partisan where left-wing intellectuals met, debated and argued about the future and present of the left. At the same time he received a fellowship in the Institute of Community Studies, founded by Michael Young, later Lord Young. From there he went to Ruskin College, Oxford, the Trade Union College, to teach sociology, and later switched to social history.
In Ruskin College, Raphael found his proper métier, working with mature students from the working class. He launched the History Workshop, which attracted hundreds of people to attend sessions on Chartism, on the role of women in history, and on local histories. It was a genuine populist movement, to try to understand history in its many manifestations. The journal History Workshop became the harbinger of many new ideas in history. Its emphasis was that people, ordinary folk, are the creators of history rather than the politicians or leaders; the bricklayer is as important as the architect. For Raphael, beliefs, artifacts, music halls, and pubs were as important for the historian as parliamentary debates, or decisions by politicians. Memories of working folk should be actively encouraged, and they would show vividly the experience of ordinary people. The volumes of papers presented in the History Workshops challenged many accepted views of history. Raphael encouraged his students to go to the original sources and see for themselves how things were. For him, studying the past, studying our cultural heritage, was a major element in understanding and planning the present and foreseeing the future.
The lessons he drew from his voluminous writings culminated in his magnum opus, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. This was essentially an attempt to see the past reacting on the present and partly looking forward to the future. In a word, the ancient Roman adage applies to him: nothing human was alien to him.
In life he was always rather chaotic, dressed in most casual clothes, mostly without a tie, running along with masses of books under his arm. His lectures were often hilarious, with lots of. notes on scraps of paper, from which he somehow managed to find the right quotations. His students adored him, inspired by his bohemian manner.
In 1994 he was invited to give the very prestigious Ford Lecture at Oxford University, the first time someone not from the established universities was asked to give this important lecture. The Hall of Examinations was crowded; well over five hundred people came to hear him on 'The Tory Interpretation of History'. In the audience were such famous historians as Lord Max Beloff, Christopher Hill, Ross Mackibbin, and many other distinguished scholars. When he finished he received a tumultuous standing ovation.
He was primarily motivated by a populist romantic view of history. His manners reminded one of a Russian populist (Narodnik), a kind of secular follower of Tolstoy, Lavrov and the great French historian Michelet. He was a remarkable mixture of some anarchist ideas, of Libertarianism, with some marginal influences of Marx. There was more of William Godwin and Robert Owen in him, than of Marx and Engels.
In the second year of his illness he accepted a Professorship in the University of East London. For many years he had lived in a Huguenot house in Spitalfields and his commitment to East London had inspired much of his historical path. He had many ambitions for the new job, in particular to create there a great Centre for the history of the multi-ethnic communities of East London. Alas, he did not live to realise his plan but his energies in organising and gaining support for the Centre has set up the foundations for its creation. Surrounded by his vast library he died peacefully in the arms of his beloved wife, Alison Light, Research Fellow in the Department of English Literature at University College, London, whom he married in 1987. She and his mother Minna Keal survive him. For his many friends, students and admirers, his death came as a major blow, and an irreparable loss.
Chimen Abramsky
1996 NEWSLETTER
I first met Raphael Samuel, the historian, who died in December, one Sunday morning in the winter of 1962. Following up some rather amateurish research into the old silk-weaving industry of East London, I had found my way to Elder Street, Spitalfields, which in those days was a forgotten early 18th century slum. No. 19, a modest terrace house on the east side with a simple, cement rendered door surround and freshly painted windows somehow looked welcoming so I knocked. The door was opened by a wiry, intense figure with a shock of black hair, and advanced case of five o'clock shadow and an expression of penetrating intelligence. On learning of my interest in the district, he at once took me on trust, inviting me down to his charming basement kitchen to brew a pot of very strong black coffee, using the most painstaking method and the finest ingredients, talking and questioning the whole time in his quiet, rich voice.
Raphael was at that time sharing the house with his friend Peter Marris. Raphael himself was making his name as an academic, spending long period teaching at Ruskin College, Oxford, and as a writer specialising in what soon came to be identified as his own brand of politically aware historical research always known, because of its origins in interviews, as oral history.
Though my own interests were very different, I found Raphael's warmth and intensity irresistible. He was one of those intellectuals who could make one feel one's opinions and experiences were of vastly greater interest than they really were. His personality and appearance never varied in all the years I knew him. Neither did his house, though its occupants came and went, and nor did his political views, which were about as far left of centre as you can get without falling off.
For all his loathing of gentrification, which many people in the early days thought of as the whole point of the Spitalfields Trust, he could see that the area was dying as a genuine working class community, and his sense of history made him a loyal, if wary, supporter of our efforts on behalf of the buildings.
His occasional letters to those in authority, passionate yet logical, detailed but lively, were persuasive models of their kind. His eloquent defence of the Fruit and Vegetable Market, spoken impromptu at a meeting of Trust members at the time of its imminent move out of town, was unforgettable even though he must have known as well as we did that his proposals for its continuation on its historic site were a pipe dream.
Intensity, sincerity and quiet good manners were Raphael's hallmarks. His views, always controversial, became less and less fashionable as the years went by. Yet he never let them stand in the way of friendship; indeed he had a way of letting it be assumed, in conversation, that there was far more common ground beneath his listeners' feet than was usually the case. I was very fond of him, and, along with his other friends and neighbours in Spitalfields, mourn his passing.
Douglas Blain, Secretary.
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Stuart Hall and Raphael at Elder Street, 1995. (Click on the thumbnail to view) |
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1997
Raphael Samuel, who died of cancer in December - in the old weaver's house in Elder Street he loved so much, behind Spitalfields Market in the heart of what was once Jewish and Radical London - was one of the most outstanding, original intellectuals of his generation: a lifelong socialist of deep and complex persuasion, a passionate, creative and innovative social historian, and a man of unique personal qualities and distinction of mind and spirit. Those of us who were privileged to be amongst the great number, whom, as a mark of personal affection, to the end, he addressed as 'comrade', find his untimely death an irreparable loss. Neither the 'first' New Left, which was born in the wake of 1956 (the year of the Anglo-French invasion of Suez and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution - the two paradigmatic events which between them defined the political parameters of a generation, and of which this journal is a principal legatee), nor the History Workshop movement of the 1970s (which transformed the writing of popular working-class history) would have existed without his vision and gift for strategic intervention.
When I first encountered Raphael as an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1950s he was already a sort of a legend - politically and intellectually precocious, steeped in the culture of the Communist Party to which he had been introduced by his mother, Minna (a gifted musician and much later in life a successful composer, as well as a committed Party activist) and his uncle, Chimen Abramsky, the distinguished Jewish historian of the First International, who remembered being quizzed by Raphael, aged eleven, as to who Hobbes was and what was Leviathan. Raphael was the central figure in the small group of young communist undergraduates, centred around Christopher Hill at Balliol, whose open political allegiance to the Party in one sense isolated and drew attention to them - this was the height (or depth?) of the Cold War, and the closer people were to 'the Left' politically, the more vigilant, in some ways, was their anti-communism. In another sense, they were a vital spark in Oxford undergraduate politics, lending to that scene of fiercely ambition rivalries and carefully calibrated self-advancement the unusual whiff of an intense political seriousness. Raphael was simultaneously the pariah and the heart-and-soul of the Oxford political scene. Solid Labour Club supporters, advancing steadily towards their Front Bench careers, were guarded about being seen too closely in converse with 'Raphael' (as he was then known) of his alter-ego and 'terrible twin' Peter Sedgewick. (The physical contrast between them was remarkable: Raphael with his finely chiselled features, gaunt appearance and dark, intense eyes; Peter, the lapsed Anglo-Catholic, with his shock of unruly blond curls, pebble-thick glasses and rolled umbrella.) On the other hand, practically nothing of significance happened in Oxford without Raphael being in some way indirectly involved in it. I remember first meeting the French-Canadian philosopher, Charles ('Chuck') Taylor, then a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol, on a demonstration of a few forlorn souls which Raphael organised against the H-Bomb - long before anyone else I knew was even aware of its political significance (the demo was speedily and weightily dispersed by a group of college boat-club and rugby 'heavies').
By 1955, the political climate had begun to thaw - encouraged in part by the opening of the Khrushchev era, the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which brought the long-buried critique of Stalinism rising to the surface of political debate, as well as by the signs of a more radical and questioning political climate, especially on the cultural and intellectual Left, in Britain. This had its turbulent effects on Oxford politics, making possible a freer and more open dialogue between those of us on the independent Left who had never joined the Party and had been principled anti-Stalinists and those, like Raphael, Peter and others, whom the Khrushchev reforms released into a more open and searching political reassessment. One of the principal scenes where these debates and discussions were enacted was the Socialist Club, a moribund organisational shell left over from the old days of the Popular Front, which a number of us, including Raphael, occupied and revived (it had been kept alive financially by banker's orders from fellow-travelling undergraduates of the 1930's, who had since become established luminaries and had either forgotten to cancel their contributions or were now too embarrassed to do so. This was by no means the last occasion on which Raphael was to deploy political guilt in the service of his deeper stratagems).
The idea of publishing a journal to focus and develop this radical debate, in Oxford and other universities, was already well advanced in Socialist Club circles, much encouraged by Raphael, when, in the late summer of 1956, our cosy world was shattered, first by the trumped-up Anglo-French-Israeli conspiracy which led to the invasion of the Suez Canal zone - which we saw as a sharp reminder that the age of imperialism was not dead - and the use of Soviet tanks to roll over the workers and intellectual opposition of the Imre Nagy government in Hungary - which we saw as the apotheosis of the degeneration of Stalinism and Soviet communism. Actually, Raphael's whole political world, as he had known it had been blown apart, especially by the latter event, and its reverberations within the British Communist Part (which precipitated mass desertions and terminated in the expulsion of the internal opposition led by Edward and Dorothy Thompson, John Saville and others around the Reasoner faction).
| Photographs form the 1950s to the 1980s. | (Click on the thumbnails to view) |
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Without quite understanding what exactly he would do after University, I am sure that up to that point Raphael had assumed - as we all did - that his future would be tied up with some leading intellectual role closely connected with Party work. Party intellectuals had strongly advised him to take a year out from political activism before sitting his Finals and he had only just, in the summer of 1956, duly delivered his First in modern history which had always been the predicted outcome. All this came to a sudden and abrupt hiatus, with Hobsbawm the only historian of the Party's distinguished Historians' Group (including Thompson, Saville, Hill |Hobsbawn, Hilton, Morton, to whose heady intellectual ethos Chimen Abramsky had introduced Raphael even before he had become an undergraduate) who retained his membership. I do not think we can assess the full impact of this major political defeat on Raphael until much later - he was still coming to terms with its deeper meaning for him in the 1960s, when the New Left tide had begun to ebb, and he had pursued his historical research on the role of Irish labour in industrialisation to Dublin, where he was, for a time. Clearly in serious emotional and intellectual difficulties, rescued only from a prolonged breakdown by Christopher Hill's timely recommendation of him to a tutorship at the trade union Ruskin College. In 1956 - immediately, and characteristically - the upheavals impelled him, not towards depression and withdrawal, but into ferocious, indeed pyrotechnic, activity.
Universities and Left Review (which, in 1960, merged with The New Reasoner to form New Left Review, the distant progenitor of this distinguished publication) was the phoenix which arose from those particular ashes. It was edited, on Raphael's suggestion - with a sharp eye for the intricacies of political genealogy - by two ex-communists (Raphael and Gabriel Pearson) and two independent socialists (myself and 'Chuck' Taylor). In fact, however, it was the published 'voice' of a wider political cultural formation, based first in Oxford, but with parallels elsewhere amongst left student intellectuals (as the awkward conjunction of its title suggests), which circumstances then transformed into a much broader and more ambitious organ - as can be seen from the list of contributors to the first issue, which appeared in Spring 1957 (they included Isaac Deutscher, Claude Bourdet, Lindsay Anderson, E.P Thompson, G.D.H Cole, Eric Hobsbawm, Joan Robinson and Basil Davidson).
The ULR side of the first New Left was very much a collective effort by a much larger group of whom the editors were, in a sense, only the representatives. But there is a little doubt that, until the merger with The New Reasoner, Raphael was its engine, its political motor, its moving spirit. His political will, determination, and energy were limitless. He persuaded some hapless publisher to print thousands of copies of the first issue on behalf of a group of students (some of us by then post-graduate) who didn't have a penny to our names; and indeed to reprint it before the first debt had been repaid. (This enabled us not only to reach a wider readership, but to edit out the addition concerning, the rising tide of discontent evinced to Madam Furtseyeva, the Soviet Minister of Culture, by Leningrad car workers which Raphael had injudiciously made to Isaac Deutscher's 'World Copyrighted' article on 'Russia in Transition'!) The idea of calling a meeting of journal readers to London to hear Deutscher speak - the beginning of the New Left Club movement - was also his, as was the layout of the room we hired for the occasion in a Bloomsbury hotel; casually arranged for informal political exchange around tables for about sixty people, in a style, he assured us, somewhere between the Parisian Left Bank café and the inter-war Berlin cabaret scene. When we returned from a leisurely Indian meal, 700 people were standing impatiently in a queue outside. In the middle of the Algerian War he brought a galaxy of international socialist intellectuals to London for a 'Cry Europe' meeting without so much as the money to cover the bill for the international telephone calls. The project to buy and run the first post-expresso left-wing coffee house as a way of financing a Soho home for the journal and the club was also his. The definitive vote by the editorial board against this wild scheme, solemnly taken at midnight in Chuck Taylor's room at All Souls, was swept away by the tide of his seductive enthusiasm and the ULR office and Partisan Café at 7 Carlisle Street duly opened, supported by Raphael's shadowy ex-Party benefactors in Hampstead, with Raphael in charge of the kitchen and the menu. The part-international, part-proletarian, part-provincial, part-Jewish-diasporic flavour of its 'Bill of Fare' was pure distilled 'Samuel': 'farmhouse soup….Old fashioned pea soup…Borscht…Irish peasant stew…Baked Yorkshire ham with sauce Cumberland…Boiled Surrey fowl with parsley sauce and Patna rice… Boiled Breconshire Mutton with caper sauce…Frankfurters or Vorscht with potato salad…Apple dumplings with hot lemon sauce…Whitechapel cheese-cake and pastries…Vienna coffee…café filter….Russian tea'.
I remained a friend and comrade of Raphael's throughout his life, but this was the period when we were most closely and intimately connected. We spent many long hours together reading proofs and arguing in the kitchen of the student house where I lived at 12 Richmond Road, in the area of Oxford known as 'Jericho', behind Ruskin, which became a sort of a left-wing refuge from official Oxford. He was an unforgettable, sometimes disturbing presence. We didn't talk much about our personal or family backgrounds then - especially the men! - but I knew he had had a troubled relationship with his father, who had parted company from the family at an early stage of Raphael's life and whom he only occasionally saw. I also knew that, despite his militant secularism, his mother, to whom he was very close, had been born in the old Whitechapel Jewish ghetto into a family of booksellers and that Chimen Abramsky, in whose home Raphael was partly raised, came from a rabbinical family. Culturally, this bookish, Jewish background had clearly been as formative for him as his early active involvement, alongside his mother, in the Communist Party, and together these two cultural worlds had produced in him a passionate egalitarianism, a hatred of all forms of deference, and a high seriousness. He had been nurtured from birth by a love of ideas and had become and intellectual by habit, instinct and vocation, rather than by training. His face at this time was sternly set against worldly pleasures and the culture of trivialization. He had been given his head academically at the very progressive King Alfred's School in Hampstead which he attended, but he had also been 'schooled' canvassing the North London working class estates for the Young Communist League and arrived at Oxford with a range of political and polemical skills at his command. He subsequently evoked the moral earnestness of this ''Lost World of British Communism' most eloquently in the series of articles under this tile in NLR, but he was more reticent about the Jewish aspect. Perhaps there is a later essay reflecting on this, too, in the massive unpublished archive, which he has left behind.
As Bill Schwarx remind us in his obituary of Raphael in The Guardian, hearing Raphael give a paper was a unique experience. He would often arrive late, manifestly still in the throes of composition, papers covered with his writing spilling out of his canvas bag, and literally compose the paper in front of our very eyes by reading selective passages from a manuscript of a hundred pages or more. It was an intellectual tour de force - brilliant, idiosyncratic, but also, for editors and conference organisers alike, alarming, unnerving. His passionate intensity was overwhelming. He could fix you with his deep, dark eyes and, especially when he was trying to persuade you about the unpersuadable, his voice would acquire a deep, rich seductiveness and gradually what you had originally thought to be your 'better judgement' would slowly melt away like an iceberg drifting into tropical waters. The result was often a kind of disorderly chaos which some more careful soul would subsequently have to patch together as best they could - with the usual expression of knowing, after - the event exasperation. But this was the inevitable consequence of his creative capacity to take a leap into the unknown, to make things happen, to seize the moment. He often left me with the feeling that there are only a handful of people in the world who really - against all the odds - make the impossible happen, and Raphael was certainly one of them.
By 1960 Raphael was becoming less involved in the New Left and - I always suspected, though he never said so - less enthusiastic about, though persuaded of the pragmatic necessity for, the ULR-New Reasoner merger. Nevertheless, when I gave up the editorship of New Left Review, in 1961, he became a member of the caretaker team which, for a time, over saw the journal and himself inspired and edited a wonderful issue on the crisis in working class housing - intellectually challenging, a double issue, bulging way beyond it allotted page-length - and, of course, very late! But spiritually he was on the move to other things. The 'making' of one of the great historians of the culture or working people and of popular life, as well as the long love-affair with East London, had begun in earnest. He worked for a time interviewing in East London for the Institute for Community Studies team, Peter Willmott and Michael Young - an experience which underpinned his commitment to the place of oral techniques in social history, of which he made such stunning use in the interviews with the East End criminal, Arthur Harding, which he published in East End Underworld (1981) - and moved to 19 Elder Street in Spitalfields, which became an open house and hospitable centre for the most extraordinary variety of people who shared his growing, passionate obsession with every detail of the history of London's popular daily and working life.
He was also teaching working-class and trade union students at Ruskin, travelling between London and Oxford each week, and it was really the latter experience which formed the context of the next creative phase of his life. He was a gifted indeed a remarkable, teacher. He not only understood and identified with these mature trade unionists who, in the inhospitable climate of Oxford, were struggling to find their way intellectually. More significantly, he profoundly repeated the depth and richness of lived experience which they brought to intellectual work, and grasped how it could enable them - provided he could help them to use and speak from that knowledge and experience - to contectualize and revitalise the more abstract and formal kinds of 'learning' which official Oxford valued. He took them straight to the original historical sources. He helped them to write and speak outwards from what they know, to its broader implication. Instead of teaching them social history, he gave them a historical sense of themselves and made them into the social historians of their own lives and cultures and the active custodians of their own popular memories. The testimonies of the transforming impact of Raphael's passionate conviction that 'history is for everyone and everyone can be a historian' on the lives of several generations of Ruskin students are enough in themselves to move one to tears about how the idea of education, teaching and learning has been obscenely diminished and abused in these harsh and cynical times.
Somewhere in there, the dream that was to become the History Workshop movement was first born. The students were encouraged by Raphael to publish a series of pamphlets based on their own research about their own lives and communities (the language of pit-men and miners, Sally Alexander on St Giles Fair). The early 'workshops' (the air of unfinished, self-made improvisation the title suggested was essential to the whole enterprise) were little more than extended seminars around this work but they rapidly evolved into more ambitious affairs - the regular History Workshops, at Ruskin and elsewhere: those great, crowded, celebratory festivals of learning, with people of all sorts - Ruskin students, history undergraduates, eminent professors, amateur enthusiasts, committed researchers and socialists of all kinds with a passion for history - pursuing and quarrying a rich variety of historical themes (Chartism, childhood, working life, village and rural life, women, popular culture, patriotism, Empire, 'Englishness') in the atmosphere of absolute egalitarianism with Raphael, the Great Leveller, rigourly imposed (no concession being allowed to the eminence and status of the Great and the Good, who were obliged to share the same platform - and probably sleep on the same floor - as some more inexperienced researcher or Ruskin students fresh to the periods of historical scholarship). History Workshop Journal: a Journal of Socialist Historians was launched by Raphael and a group of dedicated friends (including Sally Alexander, Anna Davin, Alun Howkins, Tim Mason, Stan Shipley and Gareth Stedman Jones) in 1975 on one of those historic occasions. It inaugurated an unique and effective collective experiment in the democratisation of history writing, Raphael's commitment to this enterprise animating as much the 'Notes' and 'Enthusiasms' which the journal carried as its many original lengthy studies and essays. The series of History Workshop volumes, many of them edited and introduced by him, followed, including the record of the theatrical confrontations which he staged between Edward Thompson, Richard Johnson and myself (heavily disguised as the spirits of 'History', 'Theory' and 'Cultural Studies') in a disused Oxford church, the air thick with cement dust (amongst many other, less tangible but equally noxious elements) and lit exclusively by floodlights clamped precariously to the scaffolding. In the 1980s Raphael led History Workshop into battle in defence of the teaching of history in the debates around the National Curriculum.
The History Workshop period was an astonishing intervention in the redefinition the deprofessionalization and rewriting of social history. Nevertheless, in a more personal sense, it also, I believe, represented a period of transition for Raphael - among other things, from the early compelling faith in a socialist transformation of society and the agency in this of the proletariat as a political class, which animated his youth, to a more complex and profound historical understanding of class as a social and cultural formation and an enriched historical sense of 'the people and of popular life'. He had written earlier, in New Left Review, about the Tory working class deference voter, but now he seemed for the first time to see conservative and readical secular and religious elements in the complex tapestry of working-class life as equally valid and authentic elements with equally complex historical roots and legacies. This seemed to be part of a slow, complicated coming-to-terms with his own past, a sort of profound reassessment, not of his personal convictions, which at the deep level hardly shifted (he remained culturally a 'communist intellectual' to the end) so much as of the whole legacy of socialism as a political movement. He began in this complex coming-to-terms, not to revise his own commitments and attachments, so much as to see them in a historical light, as belonging to their own historical moment, and in recognizing their historicity, also to acknowledge the possibility of their transformation, even perhaps their supercession. He tried to 'read the signs of the times' and to make sense of the shifting currents and class realignments of Thatcherism in the 1980s - in a series of essays which I think of as his least satisfactory, where his touch and observation seemed least secure. But the larger effort involved a broadening and deepening of sympathies and enthusiasms which were to bear significant fruit.
This is a point at which to acknowledge - not for the first time - the intersection of the public and the private, the personal and the political, in his life. Raphael had the most extraordinary fit for friendship. He knew an astonishing range and variety of people each of whom at some point he had engaged in a searching conversation about their background, their families, their work, their life as if preparing everyone for the possibility of becoming another subject of an oral historical testimonial. He quarried their lives as he quarried old bookshops around East End streets and the endless minutiae of London's social life. Consequently, many people, who had only a relatively short personal acquaintance with him, felt attached to him by the warmth and intensity of his relationship to them. Many of these were male friends and comrades, close to him at different times and projects of his life - I think, almost at random, of Peter Sedgwick, Denis Butt, Tim Mason, Alun Howkins, Gareth Stedman Jones, among many others. But he was also deeply attached at different times, to a number of extraordinary women, with whom, he shared a profound intellectual and political, as well as emotional bond. Some like Sally Alexander, became close and lifelong friends and collaborators. Others were, for important periods of his life, his lovers. While he was at Oxford, he found a companion in Jean McCrindle, a comrade with a strong Communist background from Scotland, during the ULR days, Lydia Howard, the daughter of Marghanita Laska, who I think I am correct in saying was a member of the Left Schools Club where they first met: for an important period of his life, Anna Davin, formerly married to Luke Hodgkin (and both comrades from the old Oxford days) who was an inspirer of the History Workshop movement and whose children, while they lived in Elder Street, gave him the enormous pleasure of a surrogate family; Hannah Mitchell, formally the wife of another Oxford comrade, Stanley Mitchell; and finally, Alison Light, writer and critic and herself a chronicler of the popular culture of the 1940s and 1950s, whom he met relatively late in his life (and early in hers), married in 1987, with whom he experienced a deep, intense and sustaining love and affection, to whom he retold his life, who shared with him and supported him through every moment - every hope and fear - of the two years of his illness in whose arms he finally died.
Once again, his life, was transformed by this relationship. In it he found tranquillity, a restfulness that had eluded him and which enabled him to rethink and relive his own turbulent life. From it he drew a deeper interest in literature, a much more profound understanding of culture and cultural forms, a willingness to engage some of the questions posed by literary and cultural theory which at an earlier stage he would have scornfully dismissed, a much winder sympathy for the rich and awkward varieties of working-class life and experience (including the more conservative formation from which Alison had come), and a greater sensitivity to issues of gender. He learned to lower his suspicious puritanical guard a little to take pleasure in some of the common things of life, in walking and swimming and spending time in the country and taking holidays and travelling, even, on occasion, watching television - as well as in the serious pursuits of historical work on which, of course, he continued ceaselessly and obsessively to labour. He began to mellow a little, to relax. His eyes softened around the corners. He learned to laugh more at himself, especially at the memories of his more embattled, younger self. Elder Street which had become a sort of permanently open-unofficial conference centre with some informal seminars always in permanent session in the kitchen, became, also, a home.
I think the effects of his last phase are not only clearly to be seen in, but made possible, the work on popular memory and the heritage debate, that great cornucopia of popular life and customs, the first volume of which - Theatres of Memory - was published in 1994. Of course, in one sense he had been preparing to write such a book every since he first recognised the social history of working-class life as his true vocation in the early 1960s. In another sense, the book, with is defence of the diversity of forms of 'popular history and memory' against the condescension's, as he saw them, of the left critics of the 'Heritage Industry', with its stubborn, militant populism, and is sheer density and weight of example, one piled above another like the books on the shelves of his Spitalfields house that wound their way up his narrow staircase, was the product of a kind of expansion of sympathies, an opening up of himself to the 'play' of the sheet abundant, tumultuous variety of 'the popular', of which the early Raphael would not have been capable.
It is tempting to see and to mourn Raphael's death as the end of an era - and there is a sense in which the very uniqueness of his formation and his capacity to seize his time make him as a person and as a public political figure, unrepeatable. In another sense, what strikes me most profoundly is the way he managed to continually remake himself, and to confront the irreversible transitions and passages through which he passed, with exemplary personal courage and growing insight, and without ever really losing his way, renouncing his political convictions or letting go his attachments to the worlds and the values which formed Him. It was never an antiquarian sense of the past, but the past in the present, as it bears on and reshapes the present, which preoccupied him both as a socialist and as a social historian. He lived for and through his work and only gave in to his illness when he could work no longer. But he faced illness in exactly the same mode as he faced everything else in his life - taking charge of it, working against its grain, seizing it with both hands, fighting with it, refusing its sense of an ending. Even when the mark of his illness became evident in the toll it was taking on his slight frame, he spoke only of his energetically pursued and ambitious new plans for a centre for the history of East London, based at the University of East London, to which he had lately moved from Ruskin. It was always on the cards that death would find him in the middle of some enterprise and come to him as a cruel interruption, leaving so much important work still unfinished. And so it did.
Stuart Hall
NEW LEFT REVIEW
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1997
My first memory of Raphael is at a history meeting at St Hilda's, Oxford in the early 60s. I think it may have been the Stubbs Society, anyway it was August and formal donnish and he was a dark, thin, extraordinary figure with a flop of hair which persistently fell over his eyes. His subject was the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s - a topic about which I knew nothing at all, for it had been side-stepped by my school 'A' levels and the Oxford history curriculum. Both conspired to eschew subjects they deemed emotive.
Raphael's account of the human suffering of the Irish and the dogma of laissez-faire in London was consequently revelatory. It was also quite overwhelming. Raphael was in what I would later come to recognise as overkill. I can still see the great piles of paper on the desk before him. We watched like the crowd at Wimbledon, as one side on our right went down and the other on our left went up. He was intensely concentrated no doubt because he knew dons surrounded him with a sharp nose for sniffing our Marxism, which was far from fashionable in 1963. The evidence against the British ruling class might be piling up on the left, as they and their grotesque economic doctrine of the sanctity of the free market were being nailed, but he had some wily opponents there.
However, in 1963 no one was going to jump in to defend the iron laws of political economy. Lassez-faire was clearly a delusion. Or so it seemed. In retrospect, Raphael's account has assumed a sombre contemporary meaning. But how could we have imagined that laissez-faire could make its comeback irrevocably then. Impossible to imagine Thatcherism in the early sixties. I thought I had left the assumption and values of the Leeds small business world I had been brought up in where only money really counted behind me when I went to Oxford, with its learned people and Gothic grandeur. I assumed Capital Volume I was a historical document, for it seemed self-evident that twentieth-century welfare capitalism was a new phase entirely. Time has its way of twisting the obvious right round. But at nineteen, your sense of lived time is too short for such pondering.
Raphael spoke for a very long time indeed that night. He told a tragic story and made a devastating onslaught on ideology buttressing privilege. Yet he did it with considerable complexity and subtlety. Always quick on his feet intellectually, he did an intricate dance that night and presented us with genuine belief and opportunism so intertwined they were hard to prise apart. I glimpsed how difficult it is to untangle conviction and self-interest. I think he was communicating something else too - which I found a word to express a few years later when I read Gramsci - the power of the hegemonic hold of values and assumptions.
The papers were shifting faster and faster as the minutes ticked by. I suspect he had scuttled over some damning evidence. Yet, of course, there was more than enough - a pattern I was to come to recognise. Publishers waited for his books to be done, journal editors found they had a series when they commissioned an article, and I don't recall Raphael every giving a short talk. Was it, I wonder, a dislike for the boundaries of time which had led him towards the past? This was not one of those occasions, however, when you watch the transfer of paper hopefully craning to see how much writing is left on the untouched pages. It was an event, an occasion. It was riveting and memorable.
My attention was captured despite an anxious and personal predicament which meant I sat uneasily on my seat. Amidst Raphael's account of the hegemonic impact of laissez-faire, I was wondering whether by any chance the St. Hilda's dons might be familiar with the aroma of Suleo which wafted around my thighs. During the winter holidays my boyfriend (who had an advanced and impressive knowledge of Simone de Beauvoir, Kinsey and diaphragms) and I had gone to stay with a friend at Bristol University. We were discovered by her outraged landlord, who threatened to turn us out in the snow - this was before the more amiable moves of permissive sexuality. Fortunately the man relented, but unfortunately the sleeping bag he gave us downstairs was lousy.
I had returned to St. Hilda's with the creatures and had gone in trepidation to the doctor. He was jocular and amused. 'You don't look the type to go with GIs', he declared. It was a statement that puzzled me. What did that type look like and why did lice - or more specifically, crabs - emanate from Americans? He prescribed Suleo, DDT and boiling my underwear. None of these were easy to explain in the St.Hilda's hostel. The DDT was spotted and I was summoned to explain. 'I thought I saw a moth'. Nature was never my strong point. 'It's not the season for moths', boomed the don in charge. In terror, I stuck to my mythical moth. There was no way you could tell a female don in Oxford in 1963 about sex and lice.
And so I wiggled uncomfortably in Raphael's lecturer and my mind on occasions strayed from the starvation of the Irish peasantry to the terrible penalty you might get for transferring your lice to a don's sofa. Someone had recently been expelled from college for being found in bed with her boyfriend. To be culpable of an invasion of lice was surely more heinous, a sin off any known gauge.
All was well - or if it wasn't, I was never captured. I went to hear Raphael again soon after, anticipating another tour de force. It didn't happen. This time he didn't pull it off. He spoke on Tawney and again had great piles of paper, but somehow lost the thread and simply rambled. This figure, who was capable of brilliant hits and meandering misses, remained a rather distant name I heard through friends like Bob Rowthorn, Gareth Stedman Jones, Richard and Robin Blackburn, until around 1966, when I was writing my thesis on the impact of the University Extension movement on working-class students in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the kindliness which he showed to many unconfident students, Raphael read every chapter and commented. As my thesis was three times the required length of a PhD and in handwriting at the time, while Raphael had no official obligation to my outpourings, this was truly a noble act and I felt indebted to him for years. Moreover he read it not as a chore but with an excited jollity. All my obscure Judes were made welcome, as if they were part of some ghostly circle who would be invited round to tea. He delighted in the intellectually questing basket maker Thomas Okie, had time for the ponderous self-improving Frederick Rogers and jumped around with excitement when an 1890s university extension class in the North of England voted for the execution of King Charles. I thus encountered Raphael's great gift as a teacher, which was to make you feel that your findings where important revelations. The interest he communicated gave you the confidence to plough your own furrow.
Raphael got me to speak on 'The Self-Educated Working Man' at the first Ruskin History Workshop, which was still predominately Ruskin working-class male students. Not only was it the first time I had spoken at a conference to a large gathering but I was taking coals to Newcastle-even if the worker students I was talking about had lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I was only dimly aware of the gamble that Raphael had taken in asking me. His readiness to take risks, throw people in the deep end and believe in them was impressive. He had a great capacity for enthusiasm which could over come barriers.
The History Workshops of the late sixties and early seventies were exciting, unpredictable events. An important part of their appeal was the sense of reaching back and identifying with the rebels of yesteryear. Raphael tramped us around Chartist model dwellings and, when E. P. Thompson lectured on the struggle against enclosure, packed like sardines on the floor of Ruskin we cheered wildly as the fences went down. They were political as well as historical gatherings, for we engaged with a past which spoke to a mood in the present. History from below made sense in the context of a ground floor, grass-roots, rank-and-file socialism. But socialism and social history seemed to be stretching into hitherto unrecognisable shapes. Amidst all the stretching Raphael was inspirational and encouragement. But if these early History Workshops were about an engaged history, it was by no means a mechanical fit between history and modern struggles which he imparted; it was rather the intellectual freedom and delight in being curious for is own sake which nurtured the creative stretching. The form mattered as well as the content. The idea of the workshop (already used by Joan Littlewood in radical theatre) was democratic and co-operative, and in its skills and experience mixed. We were changing not just what was known but the approach to knowledge itself - or so we thought.
It was of course to be at the Ruskin History Workshop in autumn 1969 that a small group of us resolved to call the first Women's Liberation Conference. Women's history was this closely connected to the beginnings of the women's movement. Sally Alexander and Anna Davin both played an important role in organising the first conference, which was held at Ruskin in late February 1970, and it started with two historical talks by Jo O'Brien and myself. This early women's history owed a great deal to the history from below which the Ruskin Workshops had helped to develop. It was also influenced by the general ferment of radical ideas in a period when new ways of seeing appeared to be opening on many fronts. Raphael played a vital role in creating a structure through the History Workshops, in which some of this ferment could find form and expression.
Those of us who were involved in the women's groups returned to later History Workshops with our own questions about the part. It was not all sweetness and light. I can remember almost getting into fisticuffs with a trade union student over my right to sell a radical feminist issue of the London women's liberation paper Shrew. It was full of stuff about the 'goddess' of whom I was no devotee, but felt honour-bound through sisterhood to sell nonetheless, whether or not she was relevant to the class struggle.
It seemed at the time that the radical ideas of the time were entirely new, as was the worm's-eye view of daily life which increasingly characterised the Ruskin History Workshops in the early seventies. Looking back now, I can see this interest in documenting the ordinary and everyday which Raphael was to take into his later historical writing has much deeper and longer roots. It has, moreover, permeated our culture far beyond radical history though the TV drama documentary, in film and the theatre. The manner in which a set of perceptions driven by similar concerns can manifest themselves in quite different and apparently disconnected cultural sites around the same time was the kind of puzzle which increasingly came to fascinate Raphael. Yet history of the history Raphael helped to develop is as yet unwritten. One day someone will no doubt sit behind pages and pages of paper, charting it course and chronicling his work.
Writers leave visible traces, they contrive their own record. Organisers, in contrast, have a powerful impact upon those with whom they have direct contact but tend to live on in oral memory alone. Raphael was not simply a writer but a renowned organiser, the kind who was an initiator of great projects with the capacity to yoke his fellow to the concept and carry them on regardless of grizzles and groans. The deliberately dozy, slightly dotty front disguised an iron resolution. He was not one you could say no to easily. This was not just because he was always asking for the most excellent of causes. He was the world's most adept hooker, and ruthless beneath the charm. That voice on the phone. 'Could I just pick your brain, comrade', invariably meant trouble. He would draw you out on anything from the mining industry to the use of formica in 1950s kitchen renovation and you knew very well, even as you expounded away, that there was a wider scheme afoot. By the end of the conversation it was likely you would find yourself doing something you had not intended doing at all, which was completely inconvenient, could take many hours and certainly would put no bread on the table. The funny thing was, I have to admit, that often enough I was glad he'd got me to do it afterwards. People kept on because he was so evidently unstinting of his own time and because his interest was infectious. But also, I suspect, because Raphael had an affinity with those street entertainers and jugglers for whom he had a soft spot. The pomp of ordinary prestige did not move him, but the prestidigitator's dazzle did and he knew how to put on a good show.
In the late sixties I had an historical dream. I had travelled back in time and was in a room bulging with papers that had not survived into the twentieth century. I felt a rush of the most profound excitement and woke up. Raphael sighed when I told him. He was, of course, the ideal commiserator. What was he if not a time traveller? He knew the frustration of history, the slippery sense of not quite being able to touch past reality as well as the passion to reach out to comprehend.
But his love of history and search for understanding was linked to his opposition to injustice and inequality in the here and now. Leafing through James Connolly's Labour in Irish History, I found a quote from James Fintan Lalor on the Irish famine in 1848 which reads like an echo of Raphael's case against abstract market forces. Fintan Lalor's voice comes from the other side, he puts human need before economic dogmas and seeing the famine was social and political, urged the peasants not to pay rent. The land, he believed, should be owned by and serve the needs of people. This early opponent of laissez-faire declared, 'I pierce through the upper stratum of occasional and shifting circumstances to bottom and base on the rock itself'. He thought the egalitarian vision 'might be suppressed for a season', yet was convinced that it 'can never be finally subdued, but will remain and return, outliving and outlasting the cowardice and corruption of generations. I view it as ages will view it, not through the mist of a famine but by the living lights of the firmament.'
NEW LEFT REVIEW
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1997
Raphael Samuel was a founder of this review, a constant friend and counsellor to its editors and an outstanding contributor. The articles he wrote for us proved to be landmark texts, amoungst the dozen or so most important that we have published. The process of extracting them was laborious since Raphael was an obsessive reviser and redrafter who loved trying our different versions. Having submitted a very decent draft of the first part of an article he would, instead of completing it, proceed to submit half a dozen further drafts, some almost imperceptibly different from what had gone before, but successively achieving a transformation. 'This paragraph needs further thickening', he would say of some already vivid or original passage. If one unwisely offered a mite of corroborative material he would eagerly note it down and use it to further embroider his argument, often in ways one had not at all intended. With the patience of colleagues at breaking point and printers' deadlines grotesquely overrun, Raphael would turn in a new utterly resplendent, now very much overlength, version of the still uncompleted article, which we would gratefully publish - accompanied by the inevitable promise of a sequel to follow. To our great loss, this is the last issue of NLR to be delayed by Raphael Samuel.
Raphael's brilliant texts, culminating in his masterpiece, Theatres of Memory, allow one to reconstruct a personal sensibility and political agenda which was often at variance with those of his friends and comrades. While these writings could only have been written by someone shaped by the Communist Party Historian's Group and New Left Marxism, they nevertheless implicitly challenged some of the central notions of progress, class formation and long, or short, revolution which animated the world view of the Left. Notwithstanding a certain stereotype of the History Workshop project, Samuel's own contributions often fell somewhat athwart the mainstream of 'history from below' or construction of labour as a heroic protagonist. Samuel challenged the myth of Britain as workshop of the world and the schema of an industrial revolution by bringing out the huge importance of the nineteenth-century 'penny capitalists'. He recorded the life story of Arthur Harding in loving and meticulous detail; Harding was not a trade union organiser but a Barnardo's boy from a classic Victorian London slum, the Jago, who became a prince of the East End underworld, a leader of the striking-breakers in 1926, and subsequently as associate of Oswald Mosley and the Kray twins. Always attentive to the unexpected, Samuel explored Harding's friendly relations with Jewish neighbours and partners, and his intellectual interests, notably an enthusiasm for the works, read in prison, of Dickens, Gibbon and Victor Hugo - in fact books not so different from those at work in the formation of the auto-dicta Marxist of whom Samuel had just written in NLR in his essay on 'British Marxist Historians 1880 - 1980'.
The poignant essays Samuel published in NLR on 'The Last World of British Communism' in 1985 - 87 once again contrasted with earlier characteristically anti-Stalinist, New Left writing, whereas the early New Left was defined by the break with Stalinism, Samuel, by the mid-eighties, saw communism as a doomed, flawed but noble faith. Without in any way belittling or extenuating the cruelties of Stalinism, he was fascinated by the stern virtues of the historical communist identity, polemically contrasting them with the shallowness of a more reasonable Euro-Communism which had forsworn Stalin's crimes but lost its soul. Although - perhaps because - he left the Communist Party in 1956, when only 21 years old, his account of it is by far the most vividly realised we have. By the age of ten he had imbibed his mother's communist faith and fed it by quizzing his uncle, Chimen Abramsky, on the finer points of labour history and Bolshevik doctrine. He charted the advances of the red Army on the Eastern Front on a bedroom wall map but also relished the foibles of the British comrades who functioned as a sort of extended family. Many of his fellow students at the private North London progressive school he attended also joined the Communist party, probably as a result of his example. In deference to the English milieu he was to call himself Ralph rather than Raphael in his communist and early New Left days. The progressive English nationalism espoused by British communists in the Popular Front epoch and war years was to make a lasting impact on Samuel's outlook, even when later thoroughly qualified by appreciation of the different identities and histories of the 'four nations' yoked within the United Kingdom. Raphael had been admitted to the Communist Party Historians' Group when still a teenager. To Samuel a striking feature of the CPGB was the terms of relative equality it allowed between young and old, men and women, immigrant and native, workers and intellectuals, so long as they unswervingly subscribed to the faith - all of this in such marked contrast to the elaborate deference and rank of wider British society. Raphael was a strong supporter of contemporary social movements, and the alliance of the domestic in his work on contemporary culture registered the strong influence of feminism; nevertheless, he lamented the bygone moral egalitarianism of the communist tradition. In the case of his mother's family he speculated that becoming communist had allowed them to become English, by contrast with the indifference of hostility they elsewhere encountered.
Samuel's gripping evocation of 'the Lost World' was undertaken in no purely antiquarian spirit. Most of Samuel's writing was prompted by what he saw as large but unstable shifts in political culture. Hoping to influence their outcome, he preferred writing articles in newspapers and magazines to writing books. When the 'Gang of Four' split from Labour in 1981, calling in support the shade of R.H. Tawney, Samuel wrote series of polemical articles for the Guardian of a length and seriousness rarely seen in that paper. Though Raphael resisted political instrumentalization of the History Workshop movement, he was proud that some of those who played leading parts in Labour politics, such as Jack Jones, Peter Tatchell and Michael Foot, participated in History Workshop events; the success of his former student John Prescott, now Deputy Leader, naturally pleased him. Samuel's three essays on 'The Lost World' were prompted by the divisions in the British Left of the mid-eighties and the controversies generated by Marxism Today and the Miner's Strike. He abandoned long-mooted historical projects - a promised sequel to the Harding book never appeared - to mobilise his memories, his keen eye and his unrivalled ability to find a document, not necessarily literary in character, to make his point. Samuel was no Bennite but he had an even stronger distrust of the mentality of the modernises, some of them ex-Bennites, who soon began to emerge triumphant from the crisis of Labour and the Left in the mid-eighties. Building on themes already present in his work, he elaborated in reaction a radical and patriotic conservationism that served equally well to resist the heedless and philistine anti-collectivism of Labour and Conservative modernises. Despite his unabash