Ruskin, Radicalism and Raphael Samuel: Politics, Pedagogy and the Origins of the History Workshop

During the 1980s and early 1990s a number of reflections on the History Workshop were published.¹ Among the varied accounts, one theme in particular – that of the early Workshop’s relationship to Ruskin College – provoked heated, and often personal, debate. On one side was the Workshop’s founder, Raphael Samuel. Linking the Workshop directly to the anti-authoritarian and liberationist movements of the 1960s, he argued that it began as a ‘clandestine’ activity, beleaguered by the hostility of the College authorities, where ‘the very activity of primary research was a forbidden luxury, reserved for those who had been given the accolade of a university degree’.² On the other side were Samuel’s Ruskin colleagues Harold Pollins and Herbert ‘Billy’ Hughes, who questioned the extent of the Workshop’s ‘revolutionary origins’, and rejected charges of the College’s hostility towards the Workshop and its methods. As they correctly noted in defence of the latter charge, while Ruskin was primarily a teaching institution, its students had been encouraged to undertake primary research since the mid 1940s – especially in local history.³ Samuel’s case for the College’s opposition and for Hughes’s alleged ‘indignation that the students were listening to each other’s talks instead of to a lecture’ failed to acknowledge that both the College executive and most of the faculty regarded the Workshop’s development as ‘a valuable extra-curricular activity’.⁴ Pollins, however, was equally guilty of generalization, especially in his claim that the Workshops were quickly taken for granted as a normal feature of College life.⁵ The reality lay somewhere in the middle – the College had been cautiously supportive of the Workshop, yet this support wavered in 1970 following the conjunction of History Workshop 4 and the first Women’s Liberation National Conference, two weekends when large numbers descended on the College during term-time, and the administration (and some students) resented the resulting chaos.⁶

Yet as the debate quickly descended into a series of personal recriminations and accusations of questionable memories, the exchanges unfortunately did little to clarify either the Workshop’s broader origins or the

Fig. 1.

Raphael Samuel, 1934–1996.

wider question of its emergence within the politics of change taking place in Ruskin during the late 1960s. Indeed, short of a handful of brief pieces (principally by Samuel) on the Workshop’s early years, the circumstances of HW’s establishment have received little scholarly attention. Rather, the bulk of published work has tended to explore the broader place of the Workshop in postwar British historiography, or to focus on specific elements, such as the rise of the feminist voice in the Workshop community; the juncture between the Workshop as a ‘movement’ and the establishment of the History Workshop Journal (HWJ); or Workshop efforts to bring together forms of historical or historically informed inquiry which normally existed in separate spheres.⁷ Yet as Barbara Taylor has recently suggested in respect of HWJ, this singular historiographical consideration of the Workshop has tended to obscure internal divisions and what have at times been significant shifts in its goals and objectives.⁸ Indeed, far from defining History Workshop as a consistent position or set of objectives, it is perhaps more appropriate to regard it as a sort of transit lounge: people came in, were influenced, and then moved on, often in disparate directions.⁹ In this respect it more resembles Annales, many of whose historians have insisted that they do not represent a ‘school’, but rather a spirit and a wider approach.¹⁰

Samuel’s own writings on the early Workshop often confused matters further. His anti-authoritarian and at times anarchic stance often led to a somewhat romanticized account of the Workshop — supposedly established as ‘an attack on the examination system — and the humiliations which it imposed on adult students’, or of its broader aims having been to ‘[democratise] the act of historical production, enlarging the constituency of historical writers, and bringing the experience of the present to bear upon the interpretation...