James Callaghan, 1976–1979

Abstract

I first met Jim Callaghan when I chaired an election meeting at which he spoke, held in Brynmill School, Swansea, in October 1959. I recall that as a highly effective, old-fashioned election meeting, before a packed audience. Its success was largely due to Callaghan’s own charismatic, and unscripted, performance that evening. I still remember his confronting a lone heckler with a question (referring to the atrocious deaths of 11 Mau Mau prisoners in a British military camp in Kenya): ‘Do you want the Union Jack to fly over Hola Camp?’ To an impressionable young history lecturer, albeit one rather hazy about where Hola Camp actually was, the note of idealism was irresistible, John Bright or Keir Hardie come again.