In 1974 Trevor-Roper had been appointed as one of the four ‘National Directors’ of Times Newspapers Limited charged with upholding the editorial independence and probity of The Times. In 1981, when Rupert Murdoch’s News International bought control of Times Newspapers, Trevor-Roper was one of the ‘Independent Directors’, as the National Directors were renamed, responsible for ‘protecting editorial freedom from interference by the proprietor’.
Two years later, in March 1983, Trevor-Roper was asked by The Times to assess the authenticity of documents, supposedly Hitler’s diaries, for which the German magazine Stern was offering syndication rights for sale under terms of strict secrecy. Murdoch was keen to secure the rights if the diaries could be authenticated. Trevor-Roper flew to Zurich on 7 April, and was allowed a few hours to scrutinize them in a back room of a bank and to question Stern executives, who gave him assurances that later proved to be worthless. Afterwards he submitted to pressure from the editor of The Times and gave a tentative authentication, on the basis of which Murdoch bought the English-language rights. The following letter was written after Trevor-Roper had given his opinion that the Hitler diaries were genuine, but before their discovery was announced to the world’s press at a press conference in Hamburg on 25 April (attended by him). It shows his mind ranging far from the subject of the diaries.
Chiefswood, Melrose Alas, till 17 April only
My dear Blair,
When you were at private school, did you ever (as I did) read Conan Doyle’s The Lost World?1 Probably not; your generation probably read science-fiction at that age. The Lost World was about a plateau in South America which was so inaccessible and isolated behind natural barriers that its fauna had not had to compete in the struggle for existence, and had thus been exempt from the process of evolution. Consequently it was stuck in the Mesozoic age. Dinosaurs swished their long tails as they roamed through the prehistoric vegetation, and pterodactyls flapped their leathery wings as they descended on their carrion or prey. This ‘world that we have lost’, as Laslett1 would call it, was found again, and boldly penetrated, by a learned and adventurous professor from the outer world—I think he was called Professor Challenger—who had various uncomfortable adventures in it. In the end, as far as I remember, he beat a hasty and hazardous retreat, pursued to the frontier-precipice by romping megatheria and snorting brontosaurs.
Well, I am that professor and Peterhouse is that Lost World: an unreformed, unevolved, unreconstructed island, or preservative bottle, left over from the past.2 And no doubt my escape, in the end,—if I escape—will be similar. Already I seem to hear the whirr of those leathern wings, and to feel the scaly horror of those swingeing tails. And yet, is it not flattering Peterhouse to describe it as a plateau? Is it not rather a dank, sunken cavity in which the surviving animals are not huge, roaming dinosaurs and air-borne pterodactyls but immobile molluscs and torpid gastropods? I believe that in fact Conan Doyle’s biology was at fault: that animals which survive in insulation dwindle in bulk and vitality, becoming—like the Carthaginian elephant—miserable shrunken relics of their former selves …
However (though I shall return to this topic) let me not complain. For four weeks I have not looked on that place, nor even thought about it much. I have been sitting at Chiefswood reading the philosophical works of Cicero, Squire Waterton’s Wanderings in South America,3 and the Travels in Tartary and Tibet of the abbé Huc.4 I will not press Cicero upon you—I have special reasons for reading him—but so do you know Waterton, and Huc? I first discovered Waterton as a boy,1 from reading an article in the TLS, which I used to purchase weekly at the bookstall of the now obsolete railway station at Alnwick.2 The article was re-printed recently. He has been a hero of mine ever since; and last month, breaking our northward journey at Nostell Priory, the house of my dear if distant cousin Lord St Oswald,3 I made a pilgrimage to the squire’s house, Walton Hall; which, alas, is now tamed and trimmed as a country club for the inhabitants of Wakefield.
As for the abbé Huc, he is a new discovery. I have his work; and yet I had never read it until I had to write a hack article in order to pay the plumber’s bill. Do you know the book? No, or you would surely have sung its praises to me. He dates from the 1840s. He was a Lazarist priest who, after creeping incognito across China, was then nestling in Mongolia, where, with a colleague, he conceived a heroic plan. Since the worldly and sophisticated Jesuits had failed to convert the worldly and sophisticated Chinese, and had merely caused Christian missionaries to be excluded from the Celestial Empire on pain of death, these two evangelists decided to go to Tibet, to convert the holy city of Lhasa, and, through it, the whole Buddhist world of central Asia. So they set out on a terrible journey, in mid-winter, across the Pamirs. They reached Lhasa, set up their chapel, and began their work; but then they were squeezed out by Chinese pressure, and had to make another terrifying journey back through China. Fr Huc’s account is marvellous: beautifully written, with an agreeable mixture of simplicity and quiet irony. Unlike the mondain philosophers of the previous century, he did not like the Chinese at all: thought them worldly, cowardly and corrupt. He liked the nomads of the steppes, even the brigands who haunted the caravan with which they crossed those terrible mountains. Just as the Jesuits saw Confucianism as compatible with Catholicism (give and take a few details, such as the crucifixion), so these missionaries saw Tibetan Buddhism as a mirror-image of popery: Tibet = the Papal States, the Dalai Lama = the Pope, the Grand Lamas = the cardinals, etc. But they did not draw any unorthodox conclusions.
Apart from these purely intellectual journeys to South America and Central Asia, I have, since I saw you, had a real outing to the Caribbean. I went—having been invited to give some elementary lectures to some rich Canadians, as they cruised in a four-masted schooner among those tropical islands—with three ulterior motives. First, it was an opportunity to give Xandra a holiday at the end (as I thought) of the winter. Secondly, I thought that I might discover, and exploit, some Canadian millionaires. Thirdly, I must confess I was quite happy to show my lack of interest in Peterhouse by going off—without revealing my destination—for ten days in full term. The schooner was very luxurious: it had belonged to Miss Post, the heiress of all the Post Toasties in the World, and, after her, to the dictator of Ste. Domingo, Rafael Trujillo.1 The Canadians were very boring (I would rather have been Trujillo’s guest). And I did not, I must admit, think much of those tropical islands: miserable run-down places populated by white drop-outs and black slugs. At St Eustathius, the Dutch island, which was once the great slave emporium of the Western world, I was proudly shown the island’s public library: a room full of trashy paperbacks—the only titles that suggested anything to me were The Works of Sigmund Freud and 1,000 (or was it 10,000?) Homosexuals. I have acquired one Canadian friend—the only person on the boat whom we found interesting, and who promises well for my fund-raising purposes; and now I feel that I need never go back to the Caribbean.
Meanwhile do not think that I have forgotten those essays.1 They are being sedulously polished, arranged, re-arranged, deranged, etc. Nor have I forgotten my friends. Though I have not written many letters to them (or anyone else) I think of them constantly, seeking to earn their approval, or at least to avoid the open signs of their disapproval.
How is your life? How are your studies? St Edmund Hall, as we all know, is a well-ordered college, sustained by the tribute of that Winery in New York and the unavowable subsidies of President Marcos of the Philippine Islands.2 Everything there, I am sure, runs on oiled wheels. You have, I trust, ample leisure for literature, scholarship, society and observation. You are in touch (oh happy state!) with intellectual life: with Catto and Cobb,3 and such great names as these. Toss to me, I beg, in my Fenland prison-house, some crumbs from your feast of the Muses. Have you written on Marvell?4 Have you read Keith Thomas on cats and dogs?5 And the Regius Professor on the Bomb?6
Give me also, if you will, your views on a subject which has much exercised me of late. The Peterhouse historians have for some time been telling the world that the Peterhouse school of history has a special, indeed unique, character, and that this character raises it far above the ordinary vulgar historians of our or any time. Maurice Cowling, in his book (‘the book of a voyeur’, as John Elliott described it) and in the Sunday Times,1 Roger Scruton (ex-Fellow of Peterhouse) in the Times,2 Peregrine Worsthorne (ex-undergraduate of Peterhouse) in the Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator,3 have all banged this drum and blown this trumpet, so that I am beginning to believe that there really is, and must be, such a school. But what is it? What are its distinguishing views?
When I, timidly, ask such questions in Peterhouse, the answer (like all answers from that quarter) is oracular but opaque. However, I begin to detect, through the fog, some faint lineaments of a definition. For instance, I learn that the Peterhouse historians are all philosophic historians, and tory historians (they regard me as a ‘Whig’—an Anglican Whig, says Cowling; an infidel Scottish Whig, says Worsthorne). I also learn that their founding fathers are the philosopher Michael Oakeshott4 (why is he not honoured by the Crown, cries Worsthorne; ‘nothing less than an O.M. will do’) and the historian Butterfield. Now I have to admit that I have not read much of either of these gurus—only enough to convince myself that they are not worth reading. In this I may well be wrong. But I am prejudiced against Butterfield by seeing his legacy in Peterhouse—and also the historical mafia which, by his patronage, he created there and elsewhere, largely in Ireland (an academic colony of Peterhouse). To Peterhouse he gave the genius of Cowling; to Dublin that of Desmond Williams.1 Another member of the mafia is Brian Wormald. Cowling has some pupils whom he tries to force on us, but none of them have written anything to indicate their character, except a young man called David Wootton whom Cowling sent to me as a research student in Oxford and then tried to force on Peterhouse as a Fellow; but the Papists stood firm against him, being a Marxist (Cowling has declared, in his book, his own opinion that Marxism is ‘right but unimportant’).2
Now what is the common denominator of this ‘school’? They—or rather those of them who can utter—seem to me to have some common qualities. First, they are all ideologues in search of a dogma. Butterfield was a Methodist tub-preacher. Cowling is a resentful inner émigré from Anglicanism. Wormald is a convert to popery. Secondly, their writing is always opaque and circular and seldom finished—which hardly matters since it has no direction. Butterfield rambles round his Methodist tub. Wormald (as Noël Annan put it) ‘wrote half a book, backwards’. Cowling is writing an open-ended part-work of which vol. 1—the only one in print—leads nowhere. Williams flounders hopelessly in an alcoholic Irish bog. Finally, all these Peterhouse historians praise each other in exaggerated language. They do so in such terms, and with such conviction, that the scientific Fellows of Peterhouse, and the undergraduates (two innocent, credulous classes) really believe—or did believe, as one scientist said to me ‘until you came’—that ‘the Peterhouse school of history’ is an intellectual power-house which has transformed the subject and laid the philosophic base for a revolution in political thought. As this ‘school’, through their friends in the media, have captured columns in the newspapers and programmes on the radio and television, they are now imposing their claims on the world.
Now the question I ask myself is, do I misjudge them in regarding the whole lot of them as a gaggle of muddle-headed muffaroos bumbling and fumbling blindly after each other in broken circles? The words of Oliver Cromwell haunt me: ‘in the bowels of Christ I beseech you, consider that you may be mistaken’.1 I suppose that the only way to determine this question is to sit down with a damp towel round my forehead and read the works of Oakeshott, Butterfield, etc. But No! That I will not do! Life is too short. So I turn to you as the most trusted of my advisers. Have you read this stuff? Can you discover the spinal cord that animates and directs the corpus of their work, and that of their disciples? Please enlighten me so that I can avoid doing an injustice to my colleagues.
In a review of a book on the English historians of the French Revolution, published in 1968, Richard Cobb remarked that those of these historians who lived in Cambridge not only ‘never bothered to cross the Channel’ but ‘were clearly too fixed in their ways, too embedded in their comfortable colleges, even frequently to make the journey to London’. Among these ‘rather idle men’, he singles out, as ‘the arch-sloth’, one Smyth who spent sixty years in Cambridge (‘no wonder he was an important figure there’),2 and remarks that the author of the book under review ‘writes that he [Smyth] had great influence on his pupils, while admitting, rather ruefully, that his work was little known outside Peterhouse’.1 Is Smyth, perhaps, the Founder of the Peterhouse School?
yours ever,
Hugh