Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Historian, best known for 'The Making of the English Working Class', founder of the New Left Review, and early CND supporter.
On the island
Eight records
Carolan's ReceiptFavourite
This is uh Irish harp music from the eighteenth century. Extraordinary that it's been preserved so well. And I've now got two Irish granddaughters in County Clare, so that I'm very much more aware of the Irish traditions of music than I was. And this is Derek Bell playing Carol Ann's Receipt, which is marvellous.
the second record comes directly out of these memories. Recently been going up into the attic of our house, and I find an amazing hoard of uh manuscripts which will have to go to one of the national libraries. Including 120 letters and cards from Rubindanath Tagore, the great Bengali poet and dramatist. So and he was also a fantastic songwriter.
Paul Robeson here is singing the Peat Box Odas. I I like to remember I think on Thy Island I'd like to remember through Robeson one's rather naïve anti-racism and the hero figure he was.
John Darland, that wonderful English composer. The guitar or the lute has always been sounding in our house since all my kids have played in one form or another. I think I'll be feeling the lack of this music on the island and need it.
Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
The prisoner's chorus from Beethoven's Vidalio, marvelous moment when the prisoners come up from the underground. And I felt those emotions in nineteen eighty nine when the Czechs and the Poles and the Hungarians were all sort of freeing themselves from the past and this would encourage me on my island.
I think on my island now I'm going to be terribly lonely and melancholy. And so I'll have a rather anguished piece of music to echo my mood. This is by Peter Warlock, the English composer who died before his promise was fulfilled, who did this amazing setting of Yeats's poem which he called The Curlew, and this is the perhaps one of the most agonising sections of it.
Trio for clarinet, viola and piano in E flat major
there's nothing particularly relevant about this record at all, except that we want to recover from the last one with a very beautiful Mozart trio for clarinet, and this will refresh our spirits again.
A cheerful song to end with. This is Purcell's Hark, Hark, How All Things, and it's sung beautifully by Emma Kirkby. Uh I wanted to have an Emma Kirkby with me. Because we once took part not so long ago in a Musicians for Peace concert.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:15Have you also enjoyed making history yourself?
Yes, uh not as successfully as I'd have liked to have done. I mean, it's always being taken out of one's hand. If you ever do succeed in making anything, uh someone else claims that it was their idea and uh takes it off you. Uh I mean, in a certain sense, I think. Some of the gains that have been made towards peace recently are partly the result of the pressure of peace movements, but no one will admit it.
Presenter asks
4:45Have your students been as important to you as you have been to them?
I think … Oh, certainly. Yes. I I think uh the making of the English working class, which you mentioned … An awful lot of that came from teaching those students and listening to them and their sense of immediacy of some of that history. Some of that history of the early nineteenth century was still alive in the West Riding of Yorkshire. And it's a very West Riding book. And it's Westriding but because I was teaching Westriding students.
Presenter asks
13:11When did you feel the first stirrings of disillusion with the Communist Party?
Well, quite a lot stirring the dissolution of the British Congress party. From uh I was for the point of joining it uh because uh it was terribly dominated by the Soviet model of ideas. And um It was careless of precisely those British traditions of democracy and activity. Which, as a historian, were already beginning to interest me. So I'm trying to say that I had sort of reservations, but I didn't have the clarity or the courage to really bring this as point of confrontation in my own mind. I still went along with a lot of things I can now see were absolute rubbish and worse.
The keepsakes
The book
Songs of Innocence and Experience
William Blake
because I'm halfway through writing a book on this and I might be able to go on with it with a typewriter
The luxury
I'd like a typewriter, and I hope I could squeeze it to get a bit of paper at the same time
Presenter asks
18:05What brought about the end of the Cold War?
Well, everyone has their own theories. I mean, one thing obviously was the uh economic burden of war production, particularly on the Soviet bloc. I mean, they just could not sustain this any longer. I think also internal pressures in the in the Soviet bloc, that is, you can't run a modern society with the kind of thought controls that they had. They just had to break out of these things. But in terms of the actual Cold War and the military side of it I think there has been a sad underestimation of the role played by mass peace movements in many parts of the world. I mean, I think these did alter the terms of politics, the art of the possible way. redefined what was possible and necessary for politicians.
Presenter asks
26:07What do you think of the concept of classlessness?
Well, I'm not sure he does. I I uh I don't want to get in too political an argument with you, but uh I don't know how far by a classless society he really means the ending of deep privileges and deep divisions in the society which are structural and not uh abolished by waving a wand and talking about classlessness. I mean, one has to examine what these deep structural divisions are, and how one could possibly overcome them.
Presenter asks
30:57Do you still have the energy and appetite for the fight?
I'm not sure about energy because I've been quite ill and I don't think I'm gonna fully recover my energies. But uh I've got the interest, certainly.
“I do resent the loss of time and the loss of holidays, the loss of time spent with my children, and so on.”
“I remember when Gandhi came once. Just about the height of the sideboard. My main memory of Gandhi coming was the sideboard piled with all these fruits that we didn't didn't usually get. But there he was, and he was doing his daily stint of charcoal that's spinning in the corner of our house, and it's a very treasured memory.”
“I think I came off it the same day that the uh check sort of revolution had obviously broken through … People at Prague got their lungs back the same day.”
“I would not have uh wished to have missed the friendships that have … even if one's running on the road, at least you're talking to someone all the way, and uh no, I don't think I would want association with this kind of movement ever to finish.”
“I learnt to type when I was crossing the Atlantic at the age of five. I used to find my way up to the uh cabin of the radio operator. He used to sit me down to keep me quiet, I suppose, and give me a typewriter. Um and I type very fast with two fingers and fairly accurately.”