Abstract
On the afternoon of 12 November 1940, Winston Churchill rose to address the assembled House of Commons, and delivered his parliamentary tribute to Neville Chamberlain, the man whom he had succeeded as Prime Minister, and who had died earlier that month.1 It was a spacious and eloquent speech, noteworthy for its breadth of vision, for its generosity of feeling, for its ready appreciation of the transience of public esteem and renown, and for its imaginative sympathy with the cruel disillusion of disappointed hopes. For historians of the twentieth-century Conservative Party, no less than for students of Churchillian rhetoric, it is an oration which merits careful analysis and close attention.2 But my interest in it today centres on some remarks which come early in the speech, and which might have been composed with the imperatives of inaugural-lecture-giving very much in mind. ‘History’, Churchill observed, ‘with its flickering lamp, stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passions of former days.’ And he went on to pose a question which historians should ask themselves every day throughout their working lives, and which I welcome the opportunity to reflect on this afternoon. ‘What’, Churchill inquired, ‘is the worth of all this?’3
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Notes
M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. vi, Finest Hour. 1939–1941 (London, 1983), pp. 900–3.
D. Cannadine (ed.), The Speeches of Winston Churchill (Harmondsworth, 1990), p. 194
D. Cannadine (ed.), The Pleasures of the Past (London, 1989), p. 305. It was to answer the same question (‘What is the use of history?’), posed at almost the same time by one of his younger sons, that Marc Bloch wrote The Historian’s Craft (New York, 1953), p. 4.
A.G. Hopkins, The Future of the Imperial Past (Cambridge, 1997), p. 2
R.J.W. Evans, The Language of History and the History of Language (Oxford, 1998), pp. 33–4. For one outstanding example of the genre, which manages to encompass all three objectives within the confines of a single lecture
see P.K. O’Brien, Power Without Profit: The State and the Economy. 1688–1815 (London, 1991).
This obligation to ‘speak to the world at large’ was the reason F.W. Maitland refused the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge in 1902: see G.R. Elton, F.W. Maitland (London, 1985), p. 14.
Pollard’s creation and its subsequent history is fully dealt with in D.J. Birch and J.M. Horn (eds), The History Laboratory: The Institute of Historical Research 1921–96 (London, 1996), to which I am much indebted. The phrase ‘a world centre for research’ was used by G.M. Trevelyan in his article on the IHR in The Times, 16 December 1937. The chief benefactor to the IHR in Pollard’s time was Sir John Cecil Power, for whom see J.G. Edwards, ‘Sir John Cecil Power
Militant conservative empiricists have never warmed to Pollard (a lifelong Victorian Liberal), preferring to stress what they regard as the shortcomings of his scholarly method, rather than recognizing his massive (and unique) contribution to history and the study of history: see, for example, G.R. Elton, Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 57,115; idem, Henry VIII: An Essay in Revision (London, 1962), pp. 3–11; idem, ‘Introduction’ to A.F. Pollard, Wolsey (London, 1965 edn), pp. xi–xxxvii
J.P. Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (2nd edn, London, 1993), pp. 204–6, 211–15, is slightly more balanced.
See also L. Stone, ‘The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on New Old History’, Past and Present, no. 85 (1979), p. 20
Q.Skinner, ‘Sir Geoffrey Elton and the Practice of History’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Ser., vii (1997), pp. 313–16.
L.F. Salzman, ‘The Victoria County Histories’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xii (1935–36), pp. 65–8
R.B. Pugh, ‘The Structure and Aims of the Victoria History of the Counties of England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xl(1967), p. 5.
Regrettably, there is no full-length study of Pollard, but the outlines of his life may be found in The Times, 5 August 1948, and in the following obituary notices: J.E. Neale, English Historical Review, lxiv (1949), pp. 198–205
C.H. Williams, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, xxii (1949), pp. 1–10
V.H. Galbraith, Proceedings of the British Academy, xxxv (1949), pp. 257–74; Dictionary of National Biography, 1941–1950 (Oxford, 1959), pp. 679–81.
See also D. Cannadine, In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain (London, 2002), pp. 134–58; Oxford DNB, vol. xliv, pp. 746–8; also below, Chapter 3, pp. 60–3.]
For some earlier thoughts, set down just before I left the United Kingdom for the United States, see D. Cannadine, ‘British History: Past, Present–and Future?’, Past and Present, no. 116 (1987), pp. 169–91.
J. Horn, Teachers of History in the Universities of the United Kingdom (London, 1980)
J.M. Horn and J. Winters, Teachers of History in the Universities of the United Kingdom (London, 1999)
Royal Historical Society, Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History (Oxford, 1990), p. ix; ibid. (Oxford, 1998), p. xiii.
Elton, Return to Essentials, p. 41: ‘We historians are, in a way, fighting for our very lives’; P. Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), p. 628: ‘Asa community of scholars, united by common aims, common standards and common purposes, the discipline of history had ceased to exist’; F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992). [For a fuller discussion of these matters, see below, Chapter 1, pp. 20–1.]
R.J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997)
A. Ryan, ‘Introduction’, in A. Ryan et al., After the End of History (London, 1992), pp. 1–5.
A. Clark, Barbarossa: The Russo-German Conflict, 1941–45 (London, 1965)
J.G. Brown, ‘The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland, 1918–29: The Politics of Five Elections’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1982); idem, Maxton (Edinburgh, 1986).
J. Keegan, The First World War (London, 1998)
O. Figes, The People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London, 1997)
R.J. Overy, Russia’s War (London, 1998)
N. Ferguson, The Pity of War (London, 1998).
S. Schama, A History of Britain: vol. i, At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC–AD 1603 (London, 2000); vol. ii, The British Wars, 1603–1776 (London, 2001); vol. iii, The Fate of Empire, 1776–2000 (London, 2002).]
R. Pares, The Historian’s Business and Other Essays (Oxford, 1961), p. 10
K.V. Thomas, ‘History and Anthropology’, Past and Present, no. 24 (1963), p. 18
M. Howard, The Lessons of History (Oxford, 1991), pp. 8–9
D. Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (London, 1992), pp. 183–4
J.L. Gaddis, On Contemporary History (Oxford, 1995), pp. 19–25
A.C. Grayling, Moral Values (London, 1997), pp. 52–4. The most famous (and influential) exposition of a ‘liberal education’ is in J.H. Newman, The Idea of a University (ed. F.M. Turner, New Haven, 1996), Discourses v and vi, pp. 76–108.
W.O. Chadwick, Freedom and the Historian (Cambridge, 1969), p. 39: ‘History… does more than any other discipline to free the mind from the tyranny of present opinion’
B. Bailyn, On the Teaching and Writing of History (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1994), p. 12: ‘History… is… a way of getting out of the boundaries of one’s own life and culture and of seeing more of what human experience has been.’
See also G.F. Kennan, ‘The Experience of Writing History’, Virginia Quarterly Review, xxxvi (1960), pp. 211–14: ‘Every age thinks itself to be the most important age that ever occurred’, a fallacy which only history can dispel.
The case for historians as a hegemonic power elite has been put by K. Jenkins, Re-Thinking History (London, 1991), pp. 19–21; idem, On ‘What is History?’ From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (London, 1995), p. 22. For a powerful and persuasive riposte, see Evans, In Defence of History, pp. 204–23. In the early 1950s, writing about academic life in Cambridge during the 1930s, C.P. Snow (The Masters (London, 1952), p. 387) claimed dons lived ‘the least anxious, the most comfortable, the freest lives’ of any professional group he had encountered. Such a claim would be inconceivable today; but it was probably right then: see A. Flexner, Universities: American, English, German (New York, 1930), p. 288
D. Cannadine, ‘The Era of Todd, Plumb and Snow’, in D. Reynolds (ed.), Christ’s: A Cambridge College Over Five Centuries (London, 2004), pp. 214–15].
A.H. Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion (Oxford, 1992), esp. pp. viii, 2, 124–5, 134–7, 175–6, 268–70
J.R. Vincent, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to History (London, 1995), p. 53.
Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion, p. 137, notes that since 1975, academic salaries have been stationary in real terms, while those in other professions have risen by one third.
M. Strathearn, ‘From improvement to enhancement: an anthropological comment on the audit culture’, Cambridge Review, November 1997, p. 123.
H. Swain, ‘RAE can “corrupt” research’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 26 March 1999, p. 8.
Strathearn, ‘From improvement to enhancement’, pp. 123–4. [For a fuller discussion of J.H. Plumb’s The Growth of Political Stability in England, see below, Chapter 10, pp. 235–73.]
H.R. Trevor-Roper, History: Professional and Lay (Oxford, 1958).
The dangers of over-specialization were already being drawn attention to by C.N.L. Brooke, The Dullness of the Past (Liverpool, 1957), pp. 7–8
and by H. Butterfield, The Present State of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 3–4.
For the general decline in academic authority, see Z. Bauman, ‘Universities: Old, New and Different’, in A. Smith and F. Webster (eds), The Postmodern University? Contested Visions of Higher Education in Society (Buckingham, 1997), pp. 21–4.
R.W. Winks, The Imperial Revolution: Yesterday and Tomorrow (Oxford, 1994), p. 11.
D. Bythell, The Handloom Weavers: A Study in the English Cotton Industry During the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1969). Happily, academic housing is not yet as bad as described in J.G. Timmins, Handloom Weavers’ Cottages in Central Lancashire,, Centre for North-West Regional Studies, occasional paper, no. 3 (Lancaster, 1977).
The German Chancellor Helmut Kohl did not send his two sons to the Universities of Heidelberg or Munich. But nor did he send them to Cambridge or Oxford: they went to Harvard and MIT. See J. Joffe, The Future of the Great Powers (Phoenix, 1998), p. 40. I am grateful to David Goodhart for this reference.
It was something of a commonplace for professors in the 1960s to deplore increased government interference in universities. See especially, C. Wilson, History in Special and in General (Cambridge, 1964), p. 23: ‘From reformers, politicians and government committees, comes a steady stream of exhortations, threats and sermons on our duties.’ What, one wonders, would he make of things today?
B.H. Liddell Hart, Reputations Ten Years After (Boston, 1928), p. 163.
V.H. Galbraith, Historical Study and the State (Oxford, 1948), p. 19.
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Cannadine, D. (2008). Prologue: Making History, Now!. In: Making History Now and Then. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230594265_1
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