As a researcher still active in the digital age how does it feel to look back on a thesis that you wrote half a century ago? In what ways was your day-to-day experience of research and writing then so very different from that of today’s postgraduate, and in what ways has nothing changed? What are the chances today of being left alone for twelve months to write forty thousand words on a subject of one’s own choice? This autumn marks fifty years since I began my History MA, packing more reading into one year than in the whole of the previous three. For a future doctoral student this was the perfect apprenticeship. 1973-74 was the year I got drunk with Quentin Bell, took tea with a Fleet Street legend and found myself berated by Stephen Spender – all before I turned twenty-two. We encourage our students to be adventurous and inquiring, but what chance an MA student in the present cautious climate enjoying the equivalent of a liquid lunch with Virginia Woolf’s nephew? This is most definitely not a lament for the ‘good old days’, as frankly leaving a young PGR unsupervised for almost a year is indefensible and in different circumstances my thesis might never have been written. Rather this is the recollection of a world all but disappeared, and yet one that existed within the working lives of older academics still fully engaged with their subjects.
An epic essay on the Copernican revolution and a half-decent degree saw me offered a postgraduate quota award. The University of Kent at Canterbury was both collegiate and collegial, staff, students and ex-students fitting seamlessly into a small and welcoming cathedral city very different from the tourist behometh of today. Both graduates and junior lecturers intended moving on and yet somehow never did. Politics teaching at UKC relied heavily on a cohort of Nuffield College alumni who presumably left Oxford with the intention of one day returning, but who in due course became pillars of the local community. One of them was Graham Thomas, the idiosyncratic creator of Kent’s British Cartoon Archive. Students either loved or loathed his final year seminar on fascism. For me the long anecdotes, the aperçus, the wry humour and the ritual lighting of the untipped Senior Service were all pure joy. Graham Thomas rescued me when a review panel of early modern historians gently pointed out that a thesis on the working and personal relationship of poet Andrew Marvell and political theorist James Harrington necessitated access to a so far undiscovered cache of correspondence. I thought I was on safer ground back in the twentieth century until Graham advised that, ‘A thesis on the OAS [The Day of the Jackal was very big at the time] would be terrific, but not if you end up dead in the toilet of a dodgy Marseilles bar.’ With me eager to challenge Orwell’s assertion in ‘Inside the Whale’ that 1920s writers and thinkers were largely apolitical, I suggested ‘The response of British intellectuals to Fascist Italy’. We shook hands and agreed to meet some time the following year (‘I think I’ll need to see a draft…’ – ten months later the relaxed supervisor turned into an exceptionally rigorous editor). Graham’s hands-off if high risk approach worked. So much so that he scarcely changed his modus operandi for my doctoral thesis later in the decade – if minimal supervision worked the first time around then let’s do it again. The next time common sense prevailed, and I wisely sought experts in the field to compensate for Graham’s light touch.
Back in 1973 the absence of supervision meant no reports, no records of discussion, no agreed objectives ahead of our next meeting, no necessary skills training, and no discussion of future employment opportunities. There didn’t seem any obvious process for monitoring my progress as a one-year research student. I didn’t have a funding body keen to know if it was getting value for money; although I’m sure the then Social Science Research Council did request annual reports after I commenced my PhD three years later.
Looking back, it’s striking how little archival work I undertook. Unlike today undergraduate dissertations rarely involved research off-campus, and this clearly influenced my scheme of work. I may even have been told that archives were reserved for doctoral research. In any case many of my primary sources were available in printed form: I profited greatly from the volume of diaries and collected letters published over the preceding decade. The death of Leonard Woolf and the publication of Michael Holroyd’s ground-breaking biography of Lytton Strachey had prompted a flood of Bloomsbury material, much of it previously unpublished. Because the Woolfs, Maynard Keynes and various other Bloomsbury illuminati were central to my thesis I contacted Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf’s first biographer. It was easy: I phoned the University of Sussex switchboard and they put me straight though to Professor Bell. He invited me to lunch at Falmer, ‘and if we have time then I’ll take you to meet Duncan.’ I’m afraid we never did get to Charleston and a post-prandial stroll with Duncan Grant – how wonderful that would have been. On the day in question my genial and generous host left me with a deep appreciation of chilled Chablis, an imminent hangover and an empty notebook.
Another enjoyable but ultimately fruitless excursion was to seek advice from Michael Holroyd, biographer extraordinaire. Outside his pre-gentrification Edwardian villa in Ladbroke Grove I met my first Rastafarians. Deaf to the drum’n’bass bouncing off his windows Michael made me a pot of tea but announced that he had to leave in twenty minutes – I assumed that he was off to the Garrick or to chair a Society of Authors meeting, but it turned out he was due back at the laundrette. In general though, the speculative phone call seemed to work as did the chance to meet literary grandees giving guest lectures in Canterbury. Stephen Spender, eager to talk about WH Auden, found himself persistently questioned about the fascist-sympathising South African writer Roy Campbell. Spender sent me packing, no doubt venting his spleen in that night’s journal entry. More accommodating was Sir Colin Coote, who knew the Duce was a wrong ’un from the moment he arrived in Rome. The reports he filed made uncomfortable reading for many Daily Telegraph readers, but his reputation as an uncompromising foreign correspondent earned him the editor’s chair. Sir Colin was charming, and a fount of information. My choice of interviewees was arbitrary, and the results piecemeal, but it added the personal touch to my ever-expanding selection of correspondence, confidences and commentaries: contrary to popular perception, everyone in the 1920s seemed to have an opinion on Mussolini.
Unsurprisingly I wrestled with the definition of intellectuals, drawing on Gramsci and Lucien Goldman and eschewing French cultural theorists (out of ignorance not choice). David Caute’s work, notably The Fellow Travellers, was a big influence. I can remember discussing problems of methodology with friends who were back after a year abroad and seemed far more sophisticated than me; and with my drinking companions in the college bar, both of whom were doctoral students destined for stellar business school careers. I don’t think I met another postgraduate all year, not least because there were so few of us.
For a university only eight years old Kent’s Templeman Library had an impressive stock of books and periodicals. Long runs of mid-century magazines facilitated case studies of the New Statesman and the Criterion, the former floundering until the arrival of Kingsley Martin and the latter too easily swayed by Ezra Pound’s Blackshirt sympathies. My reading ambitions could never be fully met in Canterbury, so I decamped to London. It’s clear from the thesis’s bibliography that completion was only possible thanks to my spending long days seeking out half-forgotten texts at the LSE, and in the old reading room of the British Museum. Searching for necessary books or journals depended upon bulky guides to requisite libraries (‘Virginia Woolf, diaries vols. I-V, Hogarth Press: BL, BLPES, Sussex’) and whole floors of card catalogue cabinets, each topped with piles of forms on which to fill in required information. In this respect the research process was both analogue and mechanical. It was also by today’s standards incredibly time consuming.
My ever-expanding ‘data base’ was made up of multiple filing cards and bulging ring binders. They embraced just about every writer in Britain who ever visited Fascist Italy or commented from afar on the virtues or otherwise of Signor Mussolini. DH Lawrence of course had a great deal to say about dictatorship Italian-style, as did Bertrand Russell, HG Wells and Wyndham Lewis. Someone else fascinated by Italy was Aldous Huxley, his early novels a revelation. Harold Nicolson’s real-time record of visiting Rome with ‘Tom’ Mosley was pure Peaky Blinders. In my head a structure had emerged, and by late spring 1974 the time was right to put pen to paper.
Chapter by chapter I wrote and finetuned a first draft, before creating a second draft of the whole thesis on my portable typewriter. I amended my manuscript by hand, endeavouring to maintain a legible final version. Graham Thomas corrected and commented where appropriate, and on instruction I added further scribblings – and that was it. Faculty secretaries moonlighted as thesis typists, and within weeks I had in my hands a scarcely unrecognisable final text: a top copy and two carbons, with all corrections neatly Typexed. With no on-campus binding service students were directed to a Victorian printshop just outside Canterbury. Today’s bound theses are compact and well presented, but my MA looks enormous. Given a minimum number of words (twenty-five thousand) but no upper limit, I wrote forty thousand. The font was Garamond twelve-point and the spacing multiple, but one-third of every page was left blank for the insertion of footnotes. My carbon copy isn’t paginated and I haven’t counted, but there are a lot of pages!
Roderick Kedward, authority on Occupied France and writer of a much-praised undergraduate guide to mid-century fascism, had agreed to act as external examiner. There was no viva. Presumably there was an examiners’ report, but I never saw it. All I got was a short official letter confirming the award of an MA and inviting me to the next graduation ceremony. Years later I met Rod Kedward, who sadly died this April. He was very friendly, but freely confessed to having no recollection of reading my thesis. I wasn’t offended of course – year on year snowed under with marking why would he remember my ambitious effort to take on George Orwell?
The pandemic meant much of my last book was researched and written at home. As always, I was amazed by how much information was available via the internet. Digital technology and speed of communication facilitates a breadth and depth of research, and a speed of completion, inconceivable in the 1970s. Looking back across the past thirty years, it is striking how quickly the academic community took all of this for granted. There are now of course numerous researchers who have known no other environment. Yet, notwithstanding the arrival of word processing, the quotidian experience of scholarly inquiry – of historical investigation – up until the mid-1990s was not that different from when I began my MA. The digital transformation when it occurred was astonishingly fast, but before that change was incremental. What did occur was the assumption that all history postgraduates should be familiar with relevant archives, and that formal monitoring of progress and performance was in the interest of both institution and student (on this key aspect of quality assurance did CNAA-regulated polytechnics lead the way?). Left alone for twelve months to sink or swim, my MA year saw a quantum leap in knowledge and maturity. I gained a greater degree of self-assurance and of self-awareness, plus a degree; all this and a lot of fun. Ironically, the reasons why I enjoyed myself were the same reasons as to why the system had to change.
