4 February 2007: Raph Samuel

The first historian I ever met was a scarecrow. He struck me as short: around five and half feet tall. (Memory may be playing tricks). His hair, he wore parted on both sides. The effect tended to accentuate his spreading baldness. He was in his fifties. And he knew everything. Why were their so many names on the war memorials? When did class begin? What was fascism? Who first had used the image of the red flag? Most important of all the questions, and the one uppermost in my mind was this: what should I do to finish the A-level dissertation which I had just begun? 

It was 1989, half of Europe was in chaos, and I was I working on a project  looking at the so called 'Norman Yoke' myths of the nineteenth-century, which maintained that Saxon England had been classless and free. Christopher Hill, I had realised, would be the main source for my dissertation, and I had noticed in the footnotes to one of Hill's papers a generous vote of thanks to his one-time mentor the Communist historian Dona Torr. The name itself yet meant almost nothing to me. I was already thinking, however, that there might be a story in it.

In this way, I met Raphael Samuel, one of the pioneers of history from below, and began to corresponded with him. He invited me to tea at his club (not his phrase, but that's what it was): the British Library, still then of course in the old Reading Room near Tottenham Court Road. He taught me the joys of the East London libraries. And, without telling me, he was kind enough to write a note to my future university tutors, encouraging them to make sure I was properly interviewed and offered a place.

I saw all this by way of thanks, and yet by giving my own recollections I do less than justice to Raph's kindness as a mentor. Dozens of people were to tell me similar stories in future years: Gavin and Tony, Raph's students at Oxford and fanatical Geordies, anarchists, right-wing students of popular Conservatism, no-one was discouraged. 

I still think that one of Raph's best books is his oral history biography of Arthur Harding, East End gangster and some time fascist. I'd never interview a fascist nor encourage anyone else to - for reasons I've explained elsewhere. Raph did, with utmost and characteristic sympathy. Ever rule has its exception; for that rule, this book is it.

Raph Samuel was the best-known figure associated with the History Workshop conferences at Ruskin and the History Workshop Journal. The first of the conference was a planned one-off event, 'A Day with the Chartists', held at Ruskin College, Oxford in March 1967. Key instigators included Tim Mason, the pioneer Marxist historian of Nazi Germany, Sheila Rowbotham, and of course Raph. This is how he described the birth of the movement, 'History Workshop began life at a time when the cultural revolution of the 1960s was carrying all before it. In the universities, disciplinary boundaries were being challenged. In the schools, project work and 'learning by doing' were designed to break down the apartheid which separated the teachers and the taught … At Ruskin, a college of mature students, recruited from working men and women, these ideas had a particular resonance, and the History Workshop was in the first place an attempt to replace the hierarchical relationship of tutor and pupil by one of comradeship in which each became, in some sort, co-learners.'

When History Workshop was set up, there was already an established labour history network, which the movement could draw on. Many of the largest set-piece debates involved figures from this background, like Edward Thompson, who were already well known. But History Workshop rapidly turned its back on the institutional histories of class, locating itself in the space for human 'experience', identified in Thompson's Making. According to Rowbotham, 'What the History Workshop opened up was a personal perspective, the sort of experiential stuff which was around in some of that 1960s writing in general about politics.' 

The Workshop was allied to new ways of writing history, including those associated with the women's movement. In 1981, the editors of the journal changed the masthead of History Workshop from 'a journal of socialist historians' to 'a journal of socialist and feminist historians.' The debt to feminism was not just a matter of content but rather one of tone, style and concern. The subject matter of the History Workshop Journal was increasingly concerned with topics such as sexuality, dreams and psychoanalysis, a preoccupation with the personal rather than the collective. While the first History Workshop publications were often memoirs of working-class life written by trade unionists and young workers from Ruskin, and early articles of the journal contained reports from workers' libraries and the like, the drift of the journal was later towards more abstract discussion of ideas, cut off from historical experience. 

Even the socialist masthead had been dropped, I should say, by the time I met Raph. That part of the movement had gone into a phase of decline, and Raph was already thinking towards his big concluding books on history and memory. I suppose future generations will know Raph not for what he did best (the charismatic face of a great collective effort) but as a public advocate of heritage. His book Theatres of Memory is a statement of affection addressed to local hoarders and collectors, photographers, song-writers, stand-up comics, archivists and historical novelists; archaeologists, map-makers, and antiquarian illustrators; the sort of people who have organised children's theatricals, open-air museums, battle re-enactments, radio programs and TV-fantasies. 

'Historically', he writes, 'preservationism is a cause which owes at least as much to the Left as the Right. The founders of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, William Morris and Philip Webb, were socialists. "Green belts", the exclusion zones around the city where property developers were forbidden to build, were a creation of the 1930s Labour-led London County Council. National Parks were legislated into being by the Attlee Labour government, which has also laid the legislative groundwork for Nature Conservancy and wildlife reserves.'

Despite Raph's undoubted continuing loyalty to the politics of his youth, including his period in the Communist Party and the influence of such relatives as Chimen Abramsky, by 1989 he seemed disappointed with the new world being born. I played up to the role allotted to me, of the new generation exasperated with the timidity of its predecessors. One disappointment I think was the college. Ruskin was already showing signs of decline from its previous role as a great think-tank providing leadership to the trade union movement. The miners had been defeated in 1985. The college was becoming something different: a quite conventional provider of access and similar courses. It had a legacy of radicalism but a future of privatisation. I can only guess at the battles Raph must have fought. He was to leave Ruskin just a few years after I met him, and die not long afterwards. He left the second volume of his great book on heritage incomplete. He left among his friends and former students, and with people like me (who knew him but briefly) a treasure of fond memory.