Last Monday I spent ten hours on the train – including Eurostar – travelling to a remote village on the border of Haute Marne and Burgundy in the vast Forêts National Park (vast as in seven Exmoors could fit into it – the distances between towns and villages are such that it feels like Texas with trees; unsurprisingly the area as a whole has the lowest population density in France, a reminder that one key factor in French fears for national security post-1870 was a population that didn’t exceed 40 million until after 1945 – and equally unsurprisingly, this is Le Pen territoire with support for the Rassemblement National, the renamed National Front, rock solid). 48 hours later I was on my way home, enjoying an opportunity to play the flaneur as I ambled from the Gare de Lyon to the Gare du Nord and lamenting the contrast between Paris’s Eurostar terminal (spacious, a food hall, fast and efficient security and customs processes) and the crowded hellhole that is St Pancras International’s terminal. In three days I travelled from the south coast of England to the farthest reaches of eastern France, and back again – first thing Thursday morning and I was out on the sea wall facing the Isle of Wight walking Django.
I was in France to visit Sean Greenwood, Emeritus Professor of History at Canterbury Christ Church University, who sadly is unwell. Sean is eight years older than me, but when he was my teaching practice supervisor we bonded over Bob Dylan, George Orwell and the shared experience of writing a master’s thesis in modern British history at Kent (whereas I went back to UKC for my PhD, Sean’s doctorate was secured part-time at the LSE with the legendary DC – Donald – Watt as his supervisor). Until I left Canterbury in the early 1980s I saw a good deal of Sean, but we maintained close contact through common interests and projects, and from 1990 the shared experience of being heads of department in colleges of higher education – he was at Christ Church which in due course became a ‘new’ university and I was at La Sainte Union [LSU] which when it closed in 1997 I and a number of colleagues transferred to the University of Southampton. Into a new century we both remained active members of professional bodies such as History 2000 and History UK. We remained in contact after Sean retired and with his partner Deborah moved to rural France and renovated an old water mill; its library holding what remains an astonishingly impressive collection of history books, not least re Sean’s specialist field of British diplomacy in the last century. Here is someone who could write invaluable university textbooks on Britain and the Cold War and Britain and European integration, and scholarly monographs on the Attlee Government’s policy towards embryonic federalism in western Europe and the life of diplomat extraordinaire Gladwyn Jebb. Along with fellow Cold War historians like John Kent, Sean was a key figure in advancing a revisionist view of Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary, 1945-50. This questioned an orthodox teleological portrayal of the path to NATO’s establishment in April 1949 and highlighted Bevin’s belief until remarkably late in a ‘Third Way’ for Britain, ideally in partnership with France advancing a form of enlightened colonialism (eg the disastrous ‘groundnuts scheme’) and pivoting western Europe into a position genuinely independent of Soviet Communism and American free market capitalism – a genuinely social democratic foreign policy, but one which by mid-1948 (post the Communist coup in Czecholovakia) had fallen prey to harsh proto-Cold War reality. Nor was Ernie Bevin and NATO the only fixed position he called into question – his contribution to the ambitious late 1990s ‘Government and Armed Forces’ project’s collection of essays [for which I wrote on Michael Heseltine and defence management reform inside the MOD] was a convincing argument that Sir Thomas Inskip as Minister for Coordination of Defence, 1936-9, was by no means the poodle of Baldwin and Chamberlain, as insisted upon by his anti-Appeasement critics, but instead an able politician endeavouring to optimise and prioritise limited resources (yes, the consequent poor state of the Army contributed to the BEF’s dismal fate in June 1940, but prioritising Fighter Command was triumphantly validated during the Battle of Britain). Sean’s significance as a Cold War historian was paralleled by his success as a HOD, with History at Christ Church judged exceptional in successive quality audits. His record as a scholar and a teacher was exemplary, indeed outstanding, and had he not been working in a CHE and then a post-92 university I feel sure his achievements would have been more widely recognised (sadly academic snobbery is with us still): Professor Sean Greenwood, CertEd, BA, MA, PhD, FRHisSoc, we salute you – please, don’t go gently into that good night, or at least not just yet.
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