Raphael Samuel and People's History

Transcript of a talk given to Socialist History Society

As a way to resurrect this mainly dormant Substack, and to find a way to do something with this piece of writing that otherwise would languish on my hard drive, i’m publishing today the text of a talk i gave to the Socialist History Society on Saturday, 1st June 2024. The society is superb, and it was an honour to present this text to them. There’s a recording of it, along with the response by the great Anna Davin, on their website for anyone who wants to listen.

I imagine everyone in this room is familiar with the life and work of Raphael Samuel – probably, in some ways, more than I am. Perhaps you knew him personally or saw his notoriously revelatory, or slightly chaotic, lecturing style. So I won’t do too much by way of introduction.

But I want to talk to you today, firstly, about what the aim of this new volume of essays is – first and most obviously, to help communicate the importance of Raph’s historical work to a new generation of readers, those of my generation and younger who never got a chance to experience his influence directly.

But I also want to talk about the origins of his particular form of people’s history. I want to do that by talking through a few scenes from Raph’s life – the first from late, in the early 1990s, the rest from much before that, mainly the late 1950s and early 1960s. I hope these will help to achieve both goals.

So, the first:

There is a video of Raphael Samuel, one of the most original of that remarkable generation of historians within the British left in the late twentieth century, sitting in a characteristically book-filled room, his unruly mop of thick black hair pushed across the crown of his head, discussing the drama of British history. The recording, short at only a minute and a half, is now on YouTube and is one of only a handful of surviving recordings of that famously captivating lecturer.

‘If you want to understand Britain between the two wars’, he says, his eyes bright with the enthusiasm and attentiveness that marked the ‘rare capacity to listen’ that his widow Alison Light has suggested made him so charismatic, then ‘something like the ballroom dancing craze of the 1920s … or the rambling craze, or the cycling craze’ is equally as important as the major political shifts of those decisive decades. By taking seriously and understanding such fleeting national enthusiasms – everything from sunbathing to cycling – as the raw material of history, not only can we understand the changing relationship between people and nature or work, but perhaps we can also see something new in the drama of history. History from below, he says, is ‘at least as dramatic … as history from above’. ‘I absolutely refuse the idea that the Treaty of Utrecht, interesting though it is, … represents as it were the high point of national drama.’

Such was his thoroughly democratic historical vision. More than that, history, according to him, was far too important to be left to professional historians alone. Theatres of Memory, the only sole-authored book he published in his lifetime, is a thrilling and often labyrinthine text that evokes the occult Renaissance memory theatres of its title. The book is a study of those sources of unofficial memory that for most people constitute their historical consciousness. Historians, who spend their lives writing specialised texts, often read by none but the accredited few, have at best a walk-on part; the book’s joy coming as much from following the unexpected detours and new connections as from its central argument.

It is also, as Bill Schwarz remarks in his preface to the second edition, a self-consciously open text. Samuel, Schwarz writes, ‘works to minimize, at every point, the gap between the author and the printed word and between the printed word and the reader.’ His vast erudition and the depth of his historical understanding was not used to build new, professionalised historical structures, but to tear them down. If there was an animating spirit of his work it was a deep faith in the ability, and necessity, of ordinary people to become the custodians of their own histories. His mission was nothing less than the democratisation of historical knowledge.

‘History,’ he wrote, ‘in the hands of the professional historian, is apt to present itself as an esoteric form of knowledge’. It is a discipline that, with all its Rankean claims to scientific specialism, and in the hands of its ensconced elite, forgets as much as it remembers. It serves to enclose knowledge behind thick walls of academic apparatus. The professional’s view of knowledge is a hierarchical one. Knowledge flows downward from its practitioners to, if they are lucky, the inert public at large. And what counts as history, and who counts as a historian, is radically curtailed. 

Samuel’s aim in Theatres of Memory is to disrupt this hierarchy, and to take such disparaged cultural forms as historical re-enactment societies, the boom in period productions on stage and screen, and such miscellany of the heritage industry as Crabtree and Evelyn seriously. What, he asks, can the mania in the late 1980s for bare brickwork in interiors tell us about how contemporary society sees its own past? How can we read popular culture – David Lynch’s The Elephant Man; Christine Edzard’s Little Dorrit – as a crucible of popular memory? And just what does each say about the popular articulations of the past in the present?

There is, however, an obvious tension here. History may be in thrall to all manner of arcane questions and occult knowledges – the ‘cabbala of acronyms, abbreviations and signs,’ he wrote, that typify the discipline’s professionalisation and signal to the lay reader its off-putting specialism, along with its ‘dense thickets of footnotage’ and fetishization of archive-based research – but these are occult methods to which Samuel himself was an adept. Samuel may have sought to democratise and de-professionalise the production of historical knowledge, but as the essays collection, the depth and breadth of his own historical writing should not be forgotten either.

The next scene I want to describe is further back in time, far earlier in Raph’s life. That came in the years after 1956, the great crisis year for the Communist left, both in Britain and in more or less every other country with a Communist presence.

A few years before that, Raph had left the progressive King Alfred's School in Hampstead, to attend Balliol College, on a scholarship, and where he read history under Christopher Hill. Yet, despite the mentorship of another Party member, the atmosphere for the young communist at Oxford was hostile, and Samuel found the intellectual climate of the college cold. As he told Brian Harrison in an interview conducted in the late 1970s, the majority of his time at Oxford was spent, at least initially, ‘as a political activist, as a communist’, helping to revive the moribund Oxford Labour Club as well as organising with the university branch of the CPGB.

After a year’s break in order to do Party work in London, Samuel graduated in the summer of 1956 with a first-class degree. Whereupon he set his sights on becoming a full-time Communist organiser. Yet the events in Eastern Europe were to intervene. Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ was given in late February, and by mid-March the news had begun to trickle through to the British press. By November, the crisis in the Party became more acute again as Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. By the end of 1958, some 10,000 people, Samuel included, had left the Party in protest.

Barely a month after the events in Hungary, Samuel, alongside his friends and comrades from Oxford, Gabriel Pearson, Stuart Hall and Charles Taylor, founded Universities and Left Review, which merged with the New Reasoner two years later to form the New Left Review, which Raph continued to play an editorial role in until 1963, when, under severe financial constraints and mounting internal pressure, the original NLR editorial board, then led by Stuart Hall, was replaced by a new collective under a young historian fresh from Oxford Perry Anderson. Samuel was to edit one transitional issue of the journal in early 1962, published characteristically late and over-length, in the brief hiatus between Hall’s resignation and Anderson’s appointment. 

The early 1960s were something of a political caesura. Into this, many expected, or hoped, to see a new political generation emerge. Yet the cumulative effects of the political and personal crises that began in 1956 began to take their toll. Samuel experienced a deep crisis of confidence and, later, a near breakdown. By 1963, following a severe bout of political disenchantment, he left Britain for Ireland where he hoped to find refuge and the freedom to write history and poetry – even hoping, he later suggested, to become Irish.

Samuel’s stay in Ireland was a significant one. Although he found little work in Dublin, and often went hungry for lack of money, it was not a stay without reward. The research rekindled his passion for history and set the tone for much of his later work. These years also saw the germination of his particular historical and educational philosophy.

Now, I want to highlight three letters Raph wrote to his family around this time in which I think you can see the first fruits of his historical thinking. I have sketched a few of the things so far that helped this to germinate –– his early communism being one, as well as the influence of progressive education during and after the war years, and later the influence of the new left –– there were a few others I should mention: firstly, his family, and his uncle Chiman Ambramsky, and secondly his work interviewing working class families in London’s East End, as well as working class Tories in South London and in the outer suburbs of London, for Michael Young’s Insitute for Community Studies in the late 1950s.

Anyway, to return to the letters. The first is one that Samuel wrote to his mother at some point in 1964, not long after he returned to London from Dublin.

‘When we were students,’ Samuel writes, ‘we were terribly underground and polite, and traditional learning seemed absolutely dominant.’ What was needed, he wrote, was for this ‘academic cast of learning’ to be broken with:

Whether one looks at it in history or sociology or (astonishingly) in English literature, it shows the same ineffable signs. Always one is presented with a great screen of obfuscation, subjects approached so indirectly that it’s the critical mind at work that matters rather than the experience, or the text, itself.

So much of his writing and his teaching was to be conducted to remove such a screen; the aim was to approach the material directly. It is an attempt to uncover something of the quality of life and experience as it was lived. In the often acrimonious and painful aftermath of the first New Left was the making of Raphael Samuel the historian. 

Around this same time, Sheila Rowbotham first encountered Samuel at a lecture he delivered on the famine in Ireland, given either shortly before he left London for Ireland or soon after this return. Rowbotham, at the time a student at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, writes that the lecture was ‘revelatory’:

The small, skinny, dark figure with a lock of black hair falling persistently over his nose had a hypnotic aspect. Raphael kept shifting papers from one great pile to another across the table and, like spectators at Wimbledon, we watched them go faster and faster as his time ran out. His talk was a devastating tour de force in which he described how belief in free trade and opportunism had combined.

The Irish working class, particularly those who made the move across the Irish Sea in the years after that devastating act of colonial violence, were to become the paradigmatic outsider for Samuel: a key figure, along with Gypsies, travellers and other plebeian ‘comers and goers’, in his historical imagination. 

So, we can add here also the influence of Ireland to his key influencing forces –– something I am not sure has really been commented on elsewhere.

The second letter is from 1966, and was written to his mother from a Cheshire record office.

‘it is often the most ordinary things which are the most difficult to rescue from oblivion,’ he wrote, ‘and that's one reason why history sometimes seems to be a thing quite on its own, with its own kinds of subject and reality – revolutions, constitutions, epic heroes – which have little connection with everyday life, and therefore can't be used as part of the evidence on which we try to work out a philosophy of life and of society. You have to work against the grain and bias of the documents to find the material. So simple a thing, I find in my work, as for example a man crossing himself, or keeping sacred pictures in his parlour – or meeting his fellows, or quarrelling in a pub is infinitely more difficult to find than the exquisite points of political controversy and alignment; yet obviously for an understanding of the way in which people lived – of what people are – vastly more important.

During the period, roughly from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s, Samuel’s work bore the strong and obvious influence of the discipline of social anthropology. The essay on the Catholic poor contained in this volume opens with a reflection on ‘the changing balance of intimacy and unease’ shared between a Soho Catholic congregation and its priest, Father Sheridan, who at the weekly meeting of St. Bridget’s Confraternity recites comic stories of Irish life designed, he admits, to excite the ‘risible qualities’ of the women. This relationship between clergy and congregation, Samuel writes, ‘social anthropology may explain’, but the historian, lacking evidence, ‘can do little more than record’.  An earlier essay on the village of Headington Quarry, on the outskirts of Oxford, a version of which is published in the collection too, pushed the anthropological approach further, drawing on living memory and oral testimony to show the village community as a whole way of life.

Samuel was by no means the only historian to turn to the discipline of anthropology for inspiration. In 1963, Keith Thomas published his influential essay for Past and Present on the conjuncture of the two subjects. In it he remarks that even thirty years earlier R.H. Tawney was calling for historians to acquaint themselves with the work of anthropologists. Published that same year was E.P. Thompson’s ground-breaking The Making of the English Working Class, another work hugely indebted to the field of anthropology, followed two years later by Peter Laslett’s similarly ethnographic The World We Have Lost. Each placed an idea of culture as central to their historical analysis, but not culture defined as it was traditionally was the great works of a civilisation. Instead, this was culture as a whole way of life encompassing everything from folklore to trades unions, rough music to sports.

In the interviews with Harrison, Samuel mentions the influence of Erving Goffman’s study of ‘total institutions’ in Asylums, and Samuel’s continuing focus on the concrete and particular, or (to summon a perhaps unhelpful abstraction) the human over the system, shows a clear line of influence from such works of social and historical anthropology.

Now the third letter, this one written to his father, Barnett Samuel, in 1966, testifies to the kind of effect that the infusion of anthropology had on his work. But it also shows the genesis of the History Workshops from the work he was doing with his students during this period.

Both the First and the Second Year History people are turning in first class material which they've dug up in their local reference libraries over the [holiday period], and this makes the History seminars really creative work; certainly it's encouraging the first year people to see that history isn't something you dig out of textbooks and secondary work (however scholarly) but is something which you can make for yourself if you're ready to do the work. It is marvellous the confidence with which people read papers on what they really know and are familiar with – the historical and social character of their own community: and it serves as a very natural basis for many of the most important themes of nineteenth-century history. The sociology is also quite radically improved from the injection of anthropology and folk culture. I've got one excellent folk singer, a miner, who's been admirably fusing his own interests with some of the anthropological stuff: and the seminar discussions and tutorial essays are always about real things – family, community, popular religion, social solidarity, aggression, prejudice. It also puts up lots of valuable questions to the historian.

The letter gives a sense of not only Samuel as a teacher, but also of his work more generally. In the words of Sally Alexander, an early student of Raph’s at Ruskin, his teaching was life-changing: ‘I learnt everything from Raphael,’ she writes, ‘though he scarcely “taught” so much as encouraged, engaged in conversation, led us to the libraries and archives.’

I hope that each of these influences, and all of these separate strands, are evident in this collection. These are, I believe, some of the finest pieces of historical writing produced in Britain in the late twentieth century, and I’m delighted to have had a hand in bringing them to a wider readership.

Thank you