Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years ago.
J. M. KEYNES, 19361
WHAT Albert Einstein called ‘a holy curiosity’2 in human beings takes a vast variety of forms as does the power of imagination with which it is twinned. My imagination, such as it is, is heavily historical and has been, in terms of my conscious memory, since the late 1950s at the very least. I suspect, though cannot know, that the hippocampus – the memory sector – of my brain is the most developed though, inevitably, for a postwar baby born in 1947, it is now fraying more than a tad. And I always had a certain sympathy with that extraordinary scholar-politician Enoch Powell, when he declared, as he often did in one form of words or another, to a student audience at Trinity College, Dublin in 1964, that ‘the life of nations, no less than that of men, is lived largely in the imagination.’3
Yet, in that same speech devoted to Britain’s history as an imperial power, Mr Powell went on to claim that ‘all history is myth. It is a pattern which men weave out of the materials of the past. The moment a fact enters into history it becomes mythical, because it has been taken and fitted into its place in a set of ordered relationships which is the creation of a human mind and not otherwise present in nature.’4
How much débris passes through what my friend Sir Mark Allen calls ‘the nit-comb of history’5 is a haunting one for historians. Benjamin Disraeli captured this anxiety in his novel Sybil, or the Two Nations in 1845 when he wrote of the historians of England: ‘Generally speaking, all the great events have been distorted, most of the important causes concealed, some of the principal characters never appear, and all who figure are so misunderstood and misrepresented, that the result is a complete mystification …’6 Inevitably, the scholar’s capacity to capture and reconstruct the past before applying his or her historical imagination will always and everywhere be seriously limited.
Enoch Powell knew as much as any man or woman I’ve known about the power of historical imagination to move and stir individuals and audiences. Indeed, he became an instant household name when he did just that during a speech on immigration in Birmingham in April 1968.7
Even on less sensitive topics there was always an air of the psychodramatic about Mr Powell when he came into BBC Broadcasting House for a Radio 4 Analysis discussion I was chairing, whether it be with Tony Benn on the royal prerogative8 or Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey on Cabinet government.9 He taught me a lesson, for example, when I read his speech to the Royal Society of St George on St George’s Eve in April 1964. Using the historical threads that bound him, he possibly revealed more of himself that evening than on any other public occasion10 when his distillation of historical imagination took him back to the late Middle Ages:
Backward travels our gaze, beyond the grenadiers and the philosophers of the eighteenth century, beyond the pikemen and the preachers of the seventeenth, back through the brash, adventurous days of the Tudors, and there at last we find them … in many a village church, beneath the tall tracery of a perpendicular East window and the coffered ceiling of the chantry chapel. From brass and stone, from line and effigy, their eyes look out at us, and we gaze into them, as if we would win some answer from their inscrutable silence.
Tell us what it is that binds us together; show us the clue that leads through a thousand years; whisper to us the secret of this charmed life of England, that we in our time may know how to hold it fast.11
Imagine these thoughts, those images, intoned in that extraordinary West Midlands accent rising up, sentence by sentence, as if its deliverer were a kind of classically educated air-raid siren.
In contrast, the distillation of my frenzy is deeply prosaic and covers but a tiny patch of our past in terms of its concentration – Britain post-Victory in Europe. It spans the generation that stood firm during the Second World War, finally prevailed with its allies then bred me and my generation. Mine is not a thing of effigy and line, of 800-year-old village churches (much as I, too, love them). Mine is an early welfare state Britain, an age of relative political consensus, possessing a strong sense of a stoical, admirable recently shared past of great and sustained collective effort. Buckled to this was a postwar austerity, an absence of conspicuous consumption, out of which would come a juster, healthier, better-educated and more socially harmonious country when easier times returned. That was the aspiration. That is still my sustaining myth – my gold standard – which I profoundly hope will not prove to be the high-water mark of institutionalised decency in British history (though I strongly fear it might).
There are, no doubt, a whole sheaf of my sustaining myths running through the pages that follow. I am especially prone to them in those passages of personal history where, as Seamus Heaney put it, ‘hope and history rhyme’.12 For example, when talking to Steve Kelly, a fellow member of my postwar generation, about his forthcoming study of Britain in the 1950s I found myself saying that in the early to middle part of that decade – in the afterglow of the 1953 Coronation, the successful ascent of Everest by a British and Commonwealth team, the UK crafting the first commercial jetliner (the Comet), pioneering civil nuclear power, mixing quite naturally, it seemed, the deeply ancient and the highly modern – the feeling was ‘that one really did belong to a success-story nation.’13
It did feel good. And the rockier patches in Britain’s fortunes since that boyhood formation have very definitely not felt good. And, as during the summer riots of 2011, they still don’t. I am not, as Anthony Trollope described his fictional Whig-Liberal Prime Minister, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium, one of those for whom ‘patriotism … was a fever’.14 But I have always taken it badly when things run wrong for our country, especially when an element of own-goal scoring is involved.
In fact, writing the history of one’s own times is a thing of ‘paradox’, as Julian Barnes caught it, with a Disraelian touch, in his Booker Prizewinning The Sense of an Ending in 2011:
The history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us and time is supposed to measure history isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history – even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?15
Yet the pitfalls of writing the history of one’s own country within very largely the compass of one’s own memory and experience of it are trumped by the perpetual fascination of its curiosity-filled pursuit undertaken, one can only hope, in the spirit of Spinoza, who declared in 1677 that ‘I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.’16 For even if you have lived through the years you are describing there has to be an element of what Sir Keith Thomas called ‘retrospective ethnography of … approaching the past in a way an anthropologist might approach some exotic society’ in his marvellous reconstruction of early modern England, The Ends of Life.17
The opportunity to ‘backward travel my gaze’ I owe to the Trustees of the annual Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University, Belfast who invited me to take to the podium in May 2012. I am very grateful to Professor Peter Gray, Head of the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s, for making the arrangements run so smoothly and for the pleasure of working with him. The invitation was especially welcome because I have always relished giving seminars at Queen’s, having benefited from forty years of friendship and wisdom generously given by Professor Keith Jeffery (we jointly authored our first book, States of Emergency, thirty years ago18). And I enjoy immensely the companionship of sitting on the crossbenches of the House of Lords with Professor Lord Bew.
The pleasure of accepting the Trustees’ invitation was made more exquisite still as it enabled me to cast that backward gaze over those aspects of writing the history of one’s own country in one’s own times that have intrigued me most. The range of topics within these pages reflects the two historical streams that have carried me along in a cataract of boredom-avoidance, first as a journalist and later as a university teacher: the wider themes of Britain’s place in the world plus the defence, diplomatic and intelligence efforts that go with it; the mechanics of the state and parliamentary activities that keep us, we hope, a clean and decent and relatively efficient political society as we do so; the utility of history to government and governed alike; and the need to help create what Walter Bagehot called ‘the instructed imagination’19 vital to those in authority who seek to rise above the commonplace.
I am grateful for lecture and seminar invitations that have enabled me to mount dry runs for a number of chapters inside these covers in addition to the immense stimulus provided by the Wiles Trustees: to the Gresham Society for their invitation to deliver the 2011 Peter Nailor Lecture (chapter 3); to Lady Quinlan, the former Lord Speaker, Baroness Hayman, the Mile End Group and the Trustees of the Michael Quinlan Lecture plus Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank and the Liddell Hart Trustees to deliver the 2011 Sir Michael Quinlan and Sir Basil Liddell Hart lectures respectively (chapter 4); to Baroness Garden of Frognal and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) for the invitation to deliver the Sir Timothy Garden 2011 Lecture (chapter 5); to Professor Christopher Andrew and Dr Peter Martland and the Cambridge Intelligence History Seminar and to Professor Len Scott of the Department of International Politics at the University of Aberystwyth (chapter 6); to Charles Dormer and the King’s School, Grantham for the invitation to deliver the 2011 Burghley Lecture (chapter 7); to the Marquess of Salisbury and the University of Hertfordshire for the invitation to deliver the Chancellor’s Lecture 2012 (chapter 8); and to Vice Admiral Charles Style and the Royal College of Defence Studies for the invitation to deliver the 2011 Churchill Lecture (chapter 10).
I am immensely grateful to Sean Magee of Biteback Publishing, who has now published me in three imprints and brings his very special version of fun and enjoyment to the collaboration. I must thank the late John Ramsden, to whose memory Distilling the Frenzy is dedicated. John was the truest of friends. I don’t think he entirely approved of my injecting the personal into every possible paragraph of my writing. But he tolerated it and could be very funny about it. I miss him greatly.
My gratitude also goes to Matt Lyus, without whose word-processing gifts no book of mine would appear; old friends at the National Archives in Kew; and new friends in the House of Lords Library at Westminster.
PETER HENNESSY,
Walthamstow, Mile End and Westminster,
April 2012
1. J. M. Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Macmillan, 1936), p.383.
2. Life, 2 May 1955.
3. John Wood (ed.), A Nation Not Afraid: The Thinking of Enoch Powell, (Batsford, 1965), p.136. The lecture was delivered on 13 November 1964.
4. Ibid., p.137.
5. Conversation with Sir Mark Allen, 4 February 2012.
6. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or the Two Nations (Oxford World’s Classics edn, 2008), pp. 14–15.
7. Rex Collings (ed.), Reflections of a Statesman: The Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell, (Bellew, 1991), pp.373–9. The speech was delivered to the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre on 20 April 1968.
8. The broadcast script is reproduced in Peter Hennessy, Muddling Through: Power, Politics and the Quality of Government in Postwar Britain, (Gollancz, 1996), pp.16–33.
9. Peter Hennessy and Caroline Anstey, Diminished Responsibility? The Essence of Cabinet Government, Strathclyde/Analysis Papers, No.2 (Department of Government, University of Strathclyde, 1991).
10. His biographer, Simon Heffer, argues that the St George’s Eve speech ‘embraces all the main themes’ that dominated Powell’s political life in the 1960s and 1970s. Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (Weidenfeld, 1998), p.334.
11. Wood (ed.), A Nation Not Afraid, pp.144–5.
12. I am grateful to my friend John Alderdice, Convenor of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords, for bringing Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘The Cure at Troy’ to my attention.
13. Conversation with Steve Kelly, 30 October 2011; Stephen F. Kelly, You’ve Never Had It So Good: Recollections of Life in the 1950s (History Press, 2012), chapter 8, ‘A “Success Story Nation”,’ pp.201–23.
14. Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister (Chapman & Hall, 1876) (Trollope Society/Folio edn, 1991), p.605.
15. Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape, 2011), p.60. I am grateful to Sean Magee for bringing this passage to my attention.
16. Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, chapter 1, section 4. I am grateful to Dr Stuart Aveyard of the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s University, Belfast, for including this in his PhD thesis ‘No Solution: British Government Policy in Northern Ireland under Labour 1974–79’ (2010) as I had not encountered it before.
17. Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (OUP, 2009), p.2.
18. Keith Jeffery and Peter Hennessy, States of Emergency: British Governments and Strikebreaking since 1919 (Routledge, 1983).
19. Norman St John-Stevas (ed.), The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, Volume Three (The Economist, 1968), p.277. The concept appears in Bagehot’s obituary of Lord Palmerston in The Economist, 21 October 1865.