Editorial

Much of this issue of History Workshop Journal looks back to the middle years of the twentieth century. Our feature ‘Sexual Politics in mid twentieth-century Britain’ explores the sexual and social upheavals during and after the Second World War. Though the topics covered are diverse – from provincial adultery to 1950s queer London, from the emotional dynamics of a socialist marriage to the sexual dynamics of the films Kes and Billy Elliot – what unites these pieces is their concern to delineate the complex and sometimes fraught relations between politics and emotion, between mutuality and individualism, and between public engagement and private selves.

That same concern prompts our second feature in this issue, which marks the fiftieth anniversary of a momentous year. In a sense, this journal itself, like so much of what emerged from the radical culture of the 1960s and 1970s, was a product of the events of 1956. From the ‘secret speech’ given by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Anglo-French and Israeli invasion of Egypt and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, the British left, in common with comrades throughout the world, found some of its most fundamental assumptions shaken to the bone. For at least one member of the founding Editorial Collective of History Workshop Journal, Raphael Samuel, the Soviet invasion of Hungary had a profound and lasting impact, both on his politics and his writing of history, as it did for a generation of broadly socialist or communist historians. For others of us, children or young people in 1956, the impact of that year's events was less direct but still fundamental. For anyone who came on to the left in the 1960s, be it in London or Lahore, the legacy of that year was iconic, profound and continuously divisive.

To others 1956 was the year of Suez. For those living in the Middle East war and occupation were traumatic day-to-day reality. For the former imperial powers, Britain and France, the ‘nationalization’ of the Suez Canal by Nasser was a blow to their control of crucial sea routes and the tip of an anti-imperialist iceberg which could not be ignored. To many young men and women, particularly in Britain, the invasion was a violent demonstration that despite all the gains of 1945–50 in terms of social justice, the British Lion, albeit a moth-eaten and battered beast, was still capable of behaving as if the year were 1880.

When we came to look at the possibility of marking 1956 in some way we were deeply conscious of these separate legacies. We were also aware that many others would look again at those histories – and that has certainly been the case. In the last months the broadcast media and the broadsheet press in Britain have returned time and again to 1956, and especially to Suez. In much of this writing the Anglo-French and Israeli interventions have been cast, through the lens of hindsight, as forerunners of strictly contemporary events like the Iraq War and the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. While this has merit, it can obscure the experiences of those who lived through the earlier time. This is especially the case in regard to Anglo-American relations which in the memories of 1956 seem to have played a much lesser part than in subsequent analytical accounts.

All this has led us to take, for the present at least, a rather different view of 1956. In the feature on that year which forms part of this issue we have brought together a number of memoirs of 1956 from very different perspectives – and not usually the expected ones. In the pieces by Rod Prince, Michael Wolfers, and Jean McCrindle we have the memories of three young Britons – one just finishing military service, one a schoolboy and one a youthful activist from a Communist Party background. They reflect inevitably their different ages, involvements and subsequent political development. McCrindle vividly portrays how her own disillusionment with the Communist Party after Hungary led, paradoxically, to a kind of liberation: the Hungarian Revolution...