Richard Croucher

 Richard Croucher (1949–2022)

Richard Croucher, who died at the age of 73 last December, was a well-known figure in the field of labour studies in Britain and beyond. His books Engineers at War and We Refuse to Starve in Silence made a significant contribution to understanding and popularising working-class resistance in the first fifty years of the twentieth century and engaged a wide readership. For twenty years he worked as Tutor-Organiser for the WEA teaching courses for trade union activists. Subsequently he was a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Trade Union Management at the Cranfield Business School, Cranfield University. As Professor of Comparative Employment Relations at the Middlesex University Business School from 2005, he published on a diverse range of subjects in the fields of employment relations, Human Resource Management and labour history. A gifted researcher and talented teacher, he was a keen but critical advocate of trade unionism and its study. Richard did much to rescue the neglected dimension of international trade unionism from academic marginality. His book, co-authored with Elizabeth Cotton, Global Unions, Global Business, was particularly well received.

Colleagues may be interested in reading a full appreciation of Richard’s life and times written by John McIlroy and Alan Campbell. It may be accessed on the website of the Society for the Study of Labour History at:

Richard Croucher (1949 – 2022) – Society for the Study of Labour History (sslh.org.uk)

Richard Croucher (1949 – 2022) Richard Croucher, who died aged 73 on 16 December 2022, was a versatile scholar and talented labour historian who became well-known as a teacher and researcher in the field of employment relations … sslh.org.uk

Neil Davidson

The London Socialist Historians Group was very sad to learn of the death of Neil Davidson (1957-2020), a socialist and trade union activist and Marxist historian and sociologist based in Edinburgh who worked at the University of Glasgow, whose work on the history of Scotland and Scottish nationalism, and wider theorisations and mediations on the nature of bourgeois revolution, the uneven and combined development of capitalism, neo-liberalism, the nature of the European Union, and the far right were thoughtful, important and powerful contributions to wider debates underway on the Left.  Our condolences to his family, friends, and comrades - RIP Neil.  

Comment by Keith Flett, LSHG Convenor

I was very sorry to learn of the death of Neil Davidson at 62. I’d known Neil for many years as a socialist and historian and its fair to say that he was amongst the earliest supporters and contributors to the work of the London Socialist Historians Group, albeit of course as one of our friends in the north.

He spoke at the 2010 conference on the vote. A synopsis is below and remains very relevant 10 years on. He also spoke at the 2006 conference on the 50^th anniversary of the events of 1956 and indeed at the conference that led to the People’s History of Riots book (CSP).

It wasn’t just the writing though. He had a distinctive speaking style and presence that always made a paper by him an eagerly awaited occasion.

I had read his FB posts on being treated for a brain illness and one always hopes that matters will turn out well as treatment continues. Sadly this is far from always the case.

Neil leaves a substantial legacy as an inspiring speaker and an incisive historian as well as of course a great socialist and comrade.

Synopsis of paper given at the London Socialist Historians conference on the Vote: What Went Wrong? Held at the Institute of Historical Research on 27^th February 2010

Neil Davidson ‘Social Neoliberalism, “Regimes of Consolidation” and the Assault on Representative Democracy, 1989-2008’

Neoliberals claim that the establishment of free market policies will automatically produce comparably beneficial effects in other areas of social life. Not only are these claims false, neoliberalism also exacerbates all the inherent evils which capitalism involves in all its incarnations. Consequently, so long as citizens are able to vote, and as long as they have political parties prepared to represent their interests, however inadequately, for which to vote, there is always the possibility that the neoliberal order might be undermined. Neoclassical solutions to this dilemma were twofold. The first was to ensure that only sympathetic politicians are in control of the state, if necessary by non-democratic means. The Chilean option is not however the preferred one, mainly because of the many inconveniences which military and still more fascist dictatorships tend to involve for bourgeoisies themselves. The recognition that formal democracy was desirable, but that substantive democracy was problematic, suggested a second solution, that economic activity should be removed as far as possible from the responsibility of politicians who might be expected to deploy it for electoral purposes. One of the key successes that neoliberalism has achieved for capital has therefore been to render inconceivable alternatives to the economic policies established by the initial regimes of reorientation–or at any rate, alternatives to their left. Debates now have the quality of a shadow play, an empty ritual in which trivial or superficial differences are emphasised in order to give an impression of real alternatives and justify the continuation of party competition. The increasing irrelevance of politics has given rise to several clear trends across the West, including increasing voter volatility and decreasing partisanship, indicating that many of those electors still involved casting their vote do so–appropriately enough–on a consumer model of political choice, where participation is informed by media-driven perceptions of which result will be to their immediate personal benefit. Unsurprisingly, the numbers prepared to carry out even this minimal level of activity are declining. Central to this shift were the “regimes of consolidation”, formally characterised by social or liberal democratic rhetoric, which were able to incorporate the rhetoric of social solidarity while maintaining and even extending the essential components of neoliberalism. This apparent supplementing of the naked laws of the market was originally marketed as a “third way” between traditional social democracy and neoliberalism, but is more accurately described as “social neo-liberalism”, since it involves not a synthesis of the two, but an adaptation of the former to the latter. Their capitulation represented the final stage in the normalisation of neoliberalism: the point at which it became accepted, not as a temporary aberration associated with the programme of a particular political party, but the framework within which politics would henceforth be conducted. It remains to be seen whether it can survive the renewed onset of economic crisis. (470 words)

Deborah Lavin

From David Morgan of the Socialist History Society on facebook:

IT is with deep sadness that I have to inform everyone of the death of our comrade and friend, Deborah Lavin, a very active member, a serious historian and excellent speaker, who organised some excellent lecture series in recent years at Conway Hall. She will be much missed. Longer tributes will follow. RIP Deborah.  


Deborah Lavin was an actress, stand up poet, playwright and most importantly for our purposes an independent historian, interested in the interface of radicalism, socialism and feminism in the 19th century.  Deborah’s short book Charles Bradlaugh contra Karl Marx, Radicalism vs Socialism in the First International was published by the Socialist History Society in 2011 and a review of the work in the LSHG Newsletter by Keith Flett can be read here:

http://londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-bradlaugh-contra-marx.html

A number of talks by Deborah are available via youtube - see for example, her 2016 talk "Charles Bradlaugh and the Early Years of the National Secular Society" here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-mgKtUJ88g

RIP Deborah and condolences from the London Socialist Historians Group to her family, friends and comrades.

Her website with more details of her life and work are here - 

http://deborahlavin.co.uk/

Ruth Frow - obituary (2008)

Ruth Frow 1922-2008

Written By: Maggie Cohen
Date: April 2008

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 31: Summer 2008  

Ruth Frow died unexpectedly aged 85 on 11 January. Ruth was the co‑founder with her long time partner Eddie Frow, who died in 1997, of the Working Class Movement Library in Salford.

The library has grown from the 1960s to be a major resource for British labour history with books, pamphlets and other memorabilia.

Frow, a teacher by profession, shared a passion with her husband for touring the country picking up second hand books. The experience is documented in ‘Travels with a Caravan’, an article in a 1976 issue of History Workshop Journal.

Despite referring to their bibliophilia as more of a disease than a hobby, the Frows’ perspective was not of archaeology but of political activism. Ruth Frow had joined the Communist Party (CP) in Sandwich, Kent, in 1945 and stayed a member when moving to Manchester. She met Eddie Frow at a CP day school on labour history in 1953 and their engagement present was a book on William Morris.
Ruth, again in collaboration with Eddie, produced an extensive series of pamphlets and books on labour history ranging from struggles in the engineering union to the history of militant women.

In Manchester Ruth was a NUT teachers’ union rep and, from the later 1950s, a leading figure in the peace movement. She was co-founder and first chair of CND in Manchester. Taking early retirement in 1980 she was able to devote herself full time to the library. As befitted someone who had been a deputy head teacher of one of Manchester’s largest comprehensive schools, Ruth was a formidable figure but a great encourager of people researching labour history.

After Eddie’s death she continued to be associated with the library and kept it focused not just on preserving the past but also engaging with the future.

The Trustees, Friends and staff of the Working Class Movement Library invite you A Celebration of Ruth Frow's Life on Saturday 5th April at 2pm at Peel Hall, University of Salford, The Crescent, Salford. Tea, coffee and biscuits will be available. (Peel Hall is virtually opposite the Library - but please use the crossing lower down as the road is lethal!).

The most effective way we can commemorate Ruth is to ensure that the library she and Eddie founded to rescue and make available the history of working class people and their struggles for justice, equality and a better life continues, flourishes and reaches out more widely. We know that Ruth would have wholeheartedly approved that we ask for donations in her memory to be made to the Library.

Please extend this invitation to colleagues and friends. We hope to see you on 5th April but know that if you are not able to attend you will be with us in spirit.

On behalf of the staff, volunteers and trustees,
Maggie Cohen, Chair of Trustees
Working Class Movement Library
51 The Crescent, Salford M5 4WX
Tel: 0161 736 3601 Fax: 0161 737 4115
Web: www.wcml.org.uk Email: enquiries@wcml.org.uk

A version of this obituary first appeared in Socialist Worker.
See also Kevin Morgan’s obituary in The Guardian at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/feb/01/labour.uk

Taha Sa'ad Uthman (1916-2004) - obituary (2005)

Taha Sa'ad Uthman (1916-2004)

Written By: Anne Alexander
Date: April 2005

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 24: Summer 2005  

Taha Sa’ad Uthman, who died in November 2004, combined the role of trade union activist and historian of the workers’ movement throughout most of his life. A pioneer of Egyptian labour history, he also played a central role in building independent trade unions during the 1940s, as president of the militant textile workers’ union in the Cairo suburb of Shubra al-Khaima.

Born in 1916 near Bani Suwayf, south of Cairo, he had a better-than-average level of education having studied at a vocational secondary school, and was first employed in Shubra al-Khaima as a foreman in Henri Pierre’s textile factory. However, although better paid than the other Egyptian workers, the foremen only earned around an eighth as much as their European co-workers, and this injustice convinced him that “struggle is the only way to win your rights”. He saw the power of strike action when workers backed a strike by foremen demanding equal pay with the Europeans. Uthman was quickly drawn into union activities, becoming president of the newly established textile workers’ union in 1937.

This was a period when the trade unions were beginning to break free of the influence of patrons among the nobility and the main nationalist party, the Wafd. A certain level of education – whether formal or self-taught – was crucial to the new generation’s bid for independence, as it reduced the activists’ dependence on non-workers. Taha Sa’ad Uthman was among many trade unionists who used the written word as an organising tool - founding newspapers, writing agitational leaflets and producing pamphlets – a tactic which also depended on a certain level of education among their audience. The new methods of organising were crucial not only to the growth of the trade union movement, but also to its rapid politicisation. Nationalist and left-wing ideas were deeply embedded in the culture of many of the independent unions and the textile workers in particular played a central role in the mass strikes and protests demanding the evacuation of British troops from Egypt between 1945 and 1952.

Taha Sa’ad Uthman’s first books appeared in 1945. He wrote a life of Fadali Abd-al-Jayyid, another of the textile union leaders who stood for parliament with the union’s backing in 1945. The same year he also published a history of the struggles of the mechanised textile workers of Cairo. Although these two works were only the first of many (according to some accounts he had published as many as 80 books and pamphlets by the end of his life), they encapsulate much of Uthman’s approach to history. Besides the three volumes of his memoirs, the main focus for his writing was biographical, recording the lives of his generation of trade union leaders for the benefit of newer activists. For Uthman, writing history was always about equipping future generations with the lessons of the past, as he explains in the introduction to his short pamphlet about the trade union lawyer Yusuf Darwish. “My intention is not to glorify Yusuf Darwish, but I hope to prepare the new generation of militants who are ready to work and sacrifice for the sake of the Egyptian toilers and the Egyptian working class, and for the sake of the future goal which will achieve the abolition of the exploitation of man by man.”

For Uthman, the authenticity of workers’ experience is crucial to writing labour history. Joel Beinin, co-author of Workers on the Nile, one of the key texts in English on Egyptian labour history, recalls Uthman speaking at a conference in Cairo in 1987. Uthman complained that well-meaning intellectuals who wrote about the workers’ movement “missed the spirit of life and the details that might appear insignificant but whose influence is great on the course of events and their outcome and the fighting spirit of the working class”. A genuine history of the Egyptian working class movement could only be written primarily by giving voice to those who actually took part in events. It is for this contribution that Uthman’s work deserves to be celebrated.

Al Richardson - obituary (2004)

Al Richardson (1941-2003)

Written By: Ian Birchall
Date: January 2004

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 20: Lent 2004 

‘Against the stream’, the title of one of his books, summed up the work of Al Richardson, who died at the appallingly early age of sixty-one in November.

The sad history of British Stalinism is now trendy, and has spawned more books than it deserves. Those who fought against terrible odds for authentic revolutionary principles have been rather less studied - all too often by those with an interest in proving that their own tendency had inherited the apostolic succession.

In the 1980s Al, together with veteran Trotskyist Sam Bornstein, published two volumes, Against the Stream and War and the International, which remain the best account of British Trotskyism up to 1951. Using extensive documentation from the revolutionary press and internal publications, combined with interviews with surviving activists, they gave a vivid picture of a generation without whose determination the British left would not have the configuration it does today. It has the colour of oral history, but oral history scrupulously checked against the printed word.

The books were published by Socialist Platform, the publishing company Al helped to found. He was profoundly distrustful of ‘labour history’ as studied in the universities, believing the socialist movement should take care of its own history. For some thirty years he taught history in a South London comprehensive, and showed a certain disdain for the world of higher education. Despite this - or rather because of this - he cherished the highest standards of scholarship, visible in the meticulous footnoting of books and journals he edited. He laboured over these late into the night, a fact which may have contributed to his early death. He would phone me at 11.00 p.m. to check the dates of obscure figures from the French Revolution.

There are criticisms to be made of Al’s work. His wholly justified loathing of Stalinism meant that he underestimated the pernicious effects of social democracy on the British labour movement. He never grasped the argument about women’s oppression - though he did justice to the courageous women of wartime Trotskyism.

He accumulated a magnificent collection of Trotskyist literature, always made available to serious historians. Hopefully it will be preserved in an accessible location.

From 1988 onwards Al was editor of the journal Revolutionary History [see LSHG Newsletter Lent 2001]. Although he could be, to say the least, abrasive about - and to - those he disagreed with, he drew round him a group of people committed to the history of the international revolutionary movement. Initially Revolutionary History concerned itself primarily with the organised Trotskyist movement; in later years it broadened its scope. By the early nineties Stalinism had collapsed - though Al still saw baleful Stalinist influences in many quarters, notably in Blair’s Labour Party - and he was increasingly aware of the limitations of ‘orthodox Trotskyism’, becoming more interested in such figures as Rosmer, Souvarine and Serge.

By training Al was an ancient historian; he remained deeply interested in Egyptology. He was a talented linguist, but also fiercely loyal to his Yorkshire roots: he must have been the only Marxist historian to insist on pronouncing the word bourgeois as ‘boozh-waz’. In recent months I was helping him with a translation of hitherto unknown writings by Victor Serge on Russian literature in the 1920s. Happily, this was virtually complete and should appear next year.

Al’s funeral was moving and well-attended. Besides a large and affectionate contingent from his school, there were members and ex-members of most tendencies of the Trotskyist left, united, if by nothing else, in their respect for Al.

Christopher Hill - obituary (2003)

Christopher Hill, 1912-2003

Written By: Keith Flett
Date: April 2003

Published In LSHG Newsletter  Issue 18: Summer 2003  

Christopher Hill, who has died aged 91, was one of a generation of marxist historians who were able to reach and influence a far wider audience than simply those in the academy. Several of Hill’s books were standard school texts for example.

Hill’s reputation and influence has provoked a range of obituaries and comment. These span from the interesting (Tristram Hunt's comparison of Hill with Hugh Trevor Roper, who also died earlier this year), to the nasty (the attempt by The Times to smear Hill as a Soviet spy when he couldn't answer back), to the extremely silly (Norman Stone’s assertion in the London Evening Standard that Hill could not be trusted because he, allegedly, dyed his hair).

Martin Kettle’s Obituary in The Guardian (February 26th 2003) and Brian Manning’s piece in Socialist Review (March 2003) give a very fair assessment both of Hill’s life and publications and the historical questions raised by his work and I do not intend to go over the same ground here.

However it is worth looking at some of the outstanding questions that Hill’s death leaves others to pick up. Firstly, as David Renton has argued (Socialist Review April 2003) Hill’s first book, The English Revolution 1640 (1940), far from being a work of mechanical Stalinism, raised a number of important questions about how marxists saw the English Civil War. For Hill at that time it was to be seen as a class war. Brian Manning has emphasised that Hill later modified his position on the nature and character of the Civil War. By 1980 Hill had ceased to argue that the bourgeoisie had been an active agent in the outcome of the Civil War, even if this outcome was favourable to its development. The issue of what a bourgeois revolution is and is not and who makes it is an important debate for marxist historians and one which ought to be continued.

Secondly there is the question of Hill’s politics. Whether he was indeed a Soviet “spy” when Britain was actually a wartime ally of Russia (and therefore presumably had few significant secrets from it) can be left to right-wing historians who want to re-fight the Cold War. Hill left the CP in the aftermath of Hungary but not before he had been part of the minority report on inner-party Democracy at the subsequent Congress. This suggests that he had a slightly different perspective on the CP than John Saville and Edward Thompson who had already departed at this stage or Eric Hobsbawm who did not depart until closing time. Clearly he was what would generally be recognised as a Stalinist from the late 1930s until the mid-1950s, although as with Hobsbawm there was not, thankfully, a direct link between his day to day politics and his marxist history. After this the nature of his marxism can only really be judged through his historical work. The World Turned Upside Down (1972) suggested that he was fully aware and in tune with the politics of the then new left and his appearances at the SWP’s Marxism summer schools in the 1990s indicate that in later life he had left any idea of Stalinist politics long behind.

Thirdly there is the question of Hill’s day job as Master of Balliol. Balliol may be the most “left” of the Oxford Colleges, but this can’t really account for how it came to elect an ex-Communist and still prominent marxist to run the place during the Cold War, as it did from 1965 to 1978. By all accounts Hill did a very good job, but the mere fact that he did it at all suggests, as some of the Obituaries have hinted, that a history of Hill’s life and ideas is almost as interesting to marxist historians as his marxist history itself.

We shall need to fight to defend his legacy from the right, from revisionists and from those on the left who would prefer a hagiographic view of Hill to an engagement with the controversies that he started.

Obituary - Roy Porter (2002)

Obituary: Roy Porter

Written By: Liz Willis
Date: April 2002

Published In LSHG Newsletter Issue 15: Summer 2002  

Roy Porter, 31 Dec. 1946 - 4 March 2002

A Socialist Historian’s Historian

In the Guardian of 5 March 2002 Sarah Dunant’s letter about Roy Porter was headed “Passionate Democrat of Learning”, while John Ezard referred to him as a “tireless historian”. The obituary by WF Bynum in the same edition went into his academic achievements and personal qualities, mentioning in passing that although he “had great sympathy with the underdog, he kept his own political beliefs hidden.” So his heart was in the right place, and he didn’t wear a manifesto on his sleeve. Fair enough, but without seeking to conscript Porter into the ranks of any followers of party lines, there is more to say about the significance of his work from a left perspective. 

The breadth and variety of his interests, thoroughness of his research and honesty of its presentation ensure that there is a rich, lasting store of information and comment to draw upon. To take a recent example, among the longest index entries in his Enlightenment are those for Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, as well as, more generally, “working class”, and “women”. His many themes related to social class, gender relations, economic inequalities, cultural changes - in general, the diversity of human experience. - though not as antiquarian anecdotalism or heterogeneous hodge-podge, still less empiricist eclecticism. And he did more than stock-pile the ammunition. Not afraid of ideas, he could argue cogently and uninhibitedly, producing (evidence-based) theories and generalisations with the best while acknowledging complexities and nuances. Having things to say, he went ahead and said them, often firing a well-aimed shot (if the metaphor is not too bellicose for such a genial character), from throwaway lines about the “Treadmill of pious gratitude” endured by inhabitants of charitable institutions, to the pages devoted to his denunciation of Thatcherite policies, in particular the abolition of the GLC, in his Social History of London (the book on which he gave an LSHG seminar). He was prepared to undermine stereotypes, look at things from another point of view than that of the winners, or the rulers, and counter with equal vigour the view of great-man-driven progress, or post-modernist denials of validity or meaning.

Known as a populariser - someone who made history of medicine sexy and relevant, super-star of the genre through its flourishing in the 1980s and ‘90s - he was to be found expounding his subject in TV sound-bites, on radio review panels, in prestigious lectures or at students’ seminars. This did not entail dumbing-down - he routinely enlivened his narratives with exuberant phrase-making, unabashed alliteration and an erudite vocabulary as well as jokes - but an evident taking for granted that history was for, about, potentially by and accessible to everyone. There are plenty of reasons for socialist historians to appreciate having his extensive output to nourish and stimulate our own efforts, and to regret its having come to so abrupt an end.

Obituary - William A. "Bill" Pelz

From LSHG Newsletter #63 (Spring 2018). 

William A. “Bill” Pelz 



A brief obituary by Patrick Quinn and Eric Schuster


Bill Pelz, a well-known socialist activist and prolific scholar in the field of European and comparative Labor History died at the age of 66 in Chicago on Sunday, 10 December, 2017, following a heart attack.

Bill was born into a working class family on the South Side of Chicago. After graduation from high school he became a bus driver, "but later lowered my expectations and became an academic historian". An SDS member for a brief time before its demise, he joined the Chicago branch of the International Socialists (IS) at the beginning of the 1970s and soon became one of the best known leaders of the Left in Chicago. He was an early member of the Red Rose Collective, along with historians Mark Lause and David Roediger, and later a long-time member of the New World Resource Center. Both were radical Chicago book shops and important local organizing and information centers. He helped organize Chicago's first Rock Against Racism concert, and later joined Solidarity, served as International Secretary for the Socialist Party USA, and was the Chicago Political Education Office for the Democratic Socialists of American (DSA).

Bill became s Chicago-based academic scholar and professor of history and political science, first at Roosevelt University; then DePaul University, where he was Director of Social Science Programs; and for the last 20 years a popular and award-winning faculty member at Elgin Community College. He received a history PhD from Northern Illinois University, where he studied with Marxist Historians Meg and C.H. George, completing a dissertation on the German Revolution and the Spartakusbund. He founded and led the Institute of Working Class History, co-founded the International Association for the Study of Strikes and Social Conflicts, and helped edit the Encyclopedia of the European Left. Bill also served on the board of the Illinois Labor History Society, which oversees the Haymarket Memorial and the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument.

As a scholar Bill produced many books and articles, including A People's History of Modern Europe (2016), Karl Marx: A World To Win (2011), Against Capitalism: the European Left on the March (2007), The Spartakusbund and the German Working Class Movement (1989), and Wilhelm Liebknecht and Germany Social Democracy: A Documentary History (2016). Also of note, Bill edited the Eugene V. Debs Reader (2000) (2007), with an introduction by Howard Zinn. For many years Bill published film reviews in Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies. At the time of his death A People's History of the German Revolution had been completed for Pluto Press. He also served on the editorial board for The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, and co-edited a forthcoming volume in that series.

Generations of workers, students, and leftists in Chicago looked to Bill for inspiration, good humor, generous friendship, and political curiosity. The international academic community widely admired his commitment to revolutionary principles, and in that milieu he was known as a careful, serious, and rigorous historian. He will be sorely missed. He is survived by his wife, Dr. Adrienne Butler. A memorial service for Bill will be held in Chicago in January 2018.

 A version of this obituary will be also be published in Against the Current. 

Edited to add: A Memorial for Bill Pelz will be held in Chicago on 28 January 2018.  

Obituaries may be also read here: https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/5193
and on http://www.internationale-rosa-luxemburg-gesellschaft.de/html/english.html


If you would like to submit a brief note to be read aloud at the Memorial,
please submit it by January 21 to this email: eschuster3@gmail.com 

Archive: Twenty Years On: Raphael Samuel

Twenty Years On: Raphael Samuel

It is twenty years since the death of one of the most significant socialist historians of the post-1945 era, Raphael Samuel. In the age of post-truth particularly his work, focused as it was on the recovery of working class and plebeian history and dominated by the rigour of the carefully researched footnote deserves to be not just remembered but taken as an exemplar.

Below is an obituary that appeared in Socialist Review January 1997 by Keith Flett

Obituary: Artisan of history

Raphael Samuel (26 Dec 1934- 9 Dec 1996)

Keith Flett

Raphael Samuel, who has died aged 61, was a youthful member of the Communist Party Historians’ Group in the 1950s when its leading members included Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson. However, he left the CP in 1956 and as a socialist historian he was very much a child of the `new left’ and the upheavals of the 1960s.

Samuel studied under Christopher Hill at Balliol College, Oxford, in the early 1950s, but, unlike the older generation of Marxist historians, Samuel never sought academic advancement. His published work, usually under the banner of the History Workshop, was invariably a collaborative exercise, and for more than 30 years from 1962 he remained a tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford, encouraging mature trade union students to take an interest in historical research.

History Workshop collections edited by Samuel, such as Village Life and Labour and Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers, opened up a focus on the history of ordinary working people, and the essays were usually written by `worker historians’ ­ often students of Samuel at Ruskin.

So thirteen History Workshop pamphlets including Stan Shipley’s Club Life and Socialism in mid-Victorian London were published between 1970 and 1974. Shipley had been an AEU branch secretary in Walthamstow.

Perhaps ironically, shortly before his death Samuel was persuaded to take a long overdue and much deserved professorship at a new centre for the study of community in the East End of London at the University of East London.

                            

Samuel was a key figure behind the rise of the History Workshop movement which began life at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1966 as an informal seminar on the English countryside in the 19th century. The principal, Samuel has related, almost closed it down, worried that students were listening to each other rather than to the lecturers. History Workshop Journal followed in 1975.

The Workshops in particular brought together large numbers of rank and file socialist historians committed to recovering the past from the viewpoint of ordinary people. Early sessions famously included topics such as `A Day With the Chartists’ which sought to recreate the ideas, experiences and conditions that the Chartists had encountered.

The Workshop in particular became very much a product, as Samuel recorded in People’s History and Socialist Theory [1981], of the events and enthusiasms of 1968. Ruskin was out on strike days before the Paris events of May 1968.

Raphael Samuel was one of the most prominent historians in the country to support history from below ­ the attempt to actively recover the history of ordinary people and their movements. In many ways this was a step forward from the sometimes rather rigid orthodoxies of more mechanical Marxist histories. It fed in directly, too, to the resurgence of socialist ideas after 1968 and to the birth of the women’s movement in which the History Workshop Conference of November 1968 played a central organising role.

Samuel could be fiercely critical of socialists with whom he disagreed. Debate has raged, for example, about whether a series of articles he wrote about the Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s in New Left Review under the title `The Lost World of British Communism’ was an attempt to write an affectionate history from below of what it had been like to be a CP member before 1956 or an attack on any kind of left wing political activism.

He was nevertheless a great enthusiast for history and a great encourager of people engaged in socialist historical research. His energy and productivity knew no bounds, whether it was in organising meetings or producing articles.

With his untimely death socialists can make a preliminary attempt to draw a balance sheet of what Raphael achieved. The History Workshop movement, of which Samuel published a 25 year history in 1991, has declined and become, to an extent, sucked into academic respectability.

In recent years it has dropped its masthead describing it as a journal of `socialist and feminist historians’ as it has reflected the pessimism of some on the left about the prospects for change after the collapse of Stalinism. Certainly the early, welcome, focus on working class history and movements and direct links to political activity in the present have largely gone.

Gone too is the commitment to `worker historians’. In its place has come a certain attraction to the ideas of postmodernism. Both the History Workshop ­ where it still functions ­ and History Workshop Journal, however, remain battlegrounds, in historical terms, for many of the ideas, good and bad, which are current on the left.

Their influence, and that of Samuel, has been immense. Groups and publications inspired by them exist in many countries.

History from below as practised by Samuel and others has also met its limitations. In many cases it has led towards an interest in ephemera and detailed micro-

histories which, while of interest to the historian, are certainly not about changing the world. Samuel himself in recent years became increasingly interested, as his 1994 collection of articles Theatres of Memory indicates, in recovering the popular history of culture, cultural objects and artefacts. Samuel saw this interest in heritage as a real living people’s history, genuinely democratic and open to all. It is as a people’s historian rather than as a socialist historian that he would probably wish to be remembered.

Even so socialist history in this country would have been and will be much the poorer without Raphael. He kept his commitment and his ability to argue to the end. I came across him at the Bishopsgate Institute, opposite Liverpool Street station, which was to be the centre of his new chair, weeks before his death.

Despite being terribly ill he found time not only to enquire into my own research but to have a spirited debate about whether Charles Bradlaugh’s National Secular Society, formed in 1866, was a proto-Labour Party. That was Raphael, argumentative and passionate about his history to the end. He was ­ and remained ­ a real product of the 1960s with all the good and bad points that flow from that.

Republished in London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 60 (Spring 2017).

Lord Asa Briggs (1921-2016) and the future of labour history

[From London Socialist Historians Newsletter 58 (Summer 2016)]

For some reason the Guardian obituary of Asa Briggs who has died at 94 while admitting he was a bit of a lefty somehow managed to gloss over his specific relationship with labour history.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/15/lord-briggs-of-lewes-asa-briggs-obituary

I didn’t know and never met Briggs but I certainly did know some of the Marxist historians with whom he was associated in the 1950s and 1960s including Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson and particularly John Saville.

Briggs edited two volumes of Essays in Labour History with Saville (1960) and presided also in 1960 over the founding the Society for the Study of Labour History.

I’m pleased to say that the Society is still very much with us as are conferences organised by it and its journal Labour History Review.

Even so labour history in 2016 is hardly what it was in the 1960s.

I was in the British Library this week looking at the 1994 re-print of Royden Harrison’s Before the Socialists. Harrison was the first co-editor (with Sidney Pollard) of the SSLH bulletin. In his 1994 introduction to BFS first published in 1965, he argues that the 1960s were in effect very much the moment of labour history.

For reasons which are too obvious to bang on about (Thatcher and Blair..) labour history is not currently the most sexy of academic subjects.

As the organiser of the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research I get very few seminar proposals (perhaps a couple a year) in the broad area of labour history.

That is partly because the subject is unfashionable but also partly (see EP Thompson’s 'Homage to Tom Maguire') because radical and socialist history has broadened out and moved on itself.

Pieces about men in suits who attained high office in the labour movement are not generally in vogue.That is not a bad thing if the point is that the movement is much more than that.  On the other hand it is still useful and sometimes interesting to know and understand how they attained such a position and what they got up to while there.

On the same point it is the 40^th anniversary (Spring 1976) of the first issue of History Workshop Journal itself still published and now with a lively website too.

We should at least raise a clenched fist to the role that Lord Asa Briggs played in putting labour history on the political, historical and academic map. He may have been a man of the Establishment (he wrote the official history of the BBC) but he performed some very useful things for our side too.

Keith Flett

Obituary: Bel Druce

From LSHG Newsletter #56 (Autumn 2015)

Obituary: BEL DRUCE (1940-2015)

Those who attend seminars at the IHR may well Bel Druce who until recently was a regular presence. She sadly died over the summer and this piece by Ian Birchall serves to remind us of the life of an activist

 

My friend Bel Druce, who died in August as a result of a heart attack and cancer, had been a regular participant in LSHG seminars for the last few years. Like many LSHG members she was not a professional historian by training, but brought to the group insights derived from her own experience and commitments.

Bel was born in 1940. Her father was a Scottish traindriver and, quite naturally at that time, a trade unionist. Her mother was Swiss. I don’t know the exact circumstances, but just after the end of the War her mother took her to live in Switzerland, for a year, perhaps longer. She returned to England and continued her schooling. She enjoyed learning, and even studied ancient Greek for a year. She would have liked to stay on at school and go on to higher education, but her mother was opposed to this.

In her twenties she married and gave birth to three children. As the children grew older she decided to get the education she had missed out on earlier. She enrolled at the LSE as a mature student and did a degree in anthropology. She followed this up with an MA in Librarianship at University College London. She then considered doing a PhD on the subject – “Language and perception in a multicultural society”. This was based on the principle that the language we use shapes the way in which we perceive the world we live in. Bel wanted to examine this principle in terms of the various versions of English spoken in different ethnic communities in Britain. It would have been a fascinating piece of work, but sadly it never materialised.

For much of her life Bel worked as a librarian, becoming a Senior Librarian in Barnet. She was active in her trade union, NALGO – later UNISON - where she was a popular and effective activist. She was one of the two million who marched against war in Iraq in February 2003 – though later she would worry as to whether the demonstration had achieved anything. She was fiercely anti-racist.

Retirement gave her more scope to pursue her intellectual activities. She became a volunteer worker in the anthropology section of the British Museum. She also started attending evening classes on topics such as political theory. At times she would get into heated arguments with her fellow-students, notably about the Middle East. This was the Bel Druce I met in 2010.

The two most striking things about her were her intellectual curiosity and her capacity for friendship. She had an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and was constantly asking questions, never willing to accept the received orthodoxy about anything. Bel had been an active trade unionist, supported various left-wing causes and subscribed to Red Pepper. But she had never been a member of a political organisation.

Knowing her intellectual curiosity and her fondness for evening classes, I suggested going to various meetings and seminars which might interest her. We started attending meetings of the London Socialist Historians Group. Initially I think she was a bit intimidated by the atmosphere, which could on occasion be a little cliquish, but soon she began to participate in the discussions, and she loved meeting up with other participants for a drink  after the seminars. I introduced her to Keith Flett’s website, which intrigued and amused her. In the summer of 2011, after attending Marxism, she decided to join the SWP. She felt that at last, now, in her seventies, she had found her “political home”. In 2014 she joined RS21. At the same time she became involved in Left Unity in Barnet, where she took on various jobs and responsibilities. She was still working her way towards that “political home” she longed for.

For some time she had been suffering from a problem with her left knee which made it impossible for her to walk any distance. In the summer of 2014 she was outraged by the Israeli bombardment of Gaza but was unable to take part in any of the massive demonstrations in Central London. She did, however, hobble her way up from Turnpike Lane to Haringey Civic Centre on a local demonstration.

In March this year she took part in what was to be her last demonstration; very fittingly it was UN Anti-Racism Day. She wasn’t able to march the full distance, but she joined us at Piccadilly Circus to walk the last few hundred yards to Trafalgar Square. Then we went to a café. I went to get her a cup of coffee; when I returned to the table I found her, typically, deep in political discussion with an anti-nuclear campaigner who had also been on the march.

Bel’s last political involvement was with the election campaign of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition [TUSC]. She wasn’t able to do much campaigning, but she had no less than three window bills for the TUSC candidate in Tottenham, Jenny Sutton, in her front window, and, as she reported, it got her into a number of political discussions with neighbours and passers-by. The very last meeting she attended was Jenny Sutton’s final election rally.

At the beginning of June she was taken into the North Middlesex Hospital. Bel very much appreciated the high standard of care she received and she was able to spend her last weeks in dignity and relatively free from pain. It was easy to see that she was trying to make friends with those who were caring for her, but when one of the staff expressed approval of Jeremy Hunt she immediately started an argument.

Bel’s attitude to history was aptly summed up by Brecht’s poem:

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?

The books are filled with names of kings.

Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

And Babylon, so many times destroyed.

Who built the city up each time?

Ian Birchall

For a fuller account of Bel’s life go to

http://grimanddim.org/under‐the‐sod/2015‐bel‐druce/