Last month the New Statesman published a special edition to mark the magazine’s 110th anniversary. It was a more modest affair than the centenary issue, to which I contributed as the author of The New Statesman, 1913-1932 Portrait of a Political Weekly (and good luck if you can find let alone afford a copy of that!). The most recent anniversary edition focused on the past decade, and looked to the future rather than once more focusing upon on what Sidney and Beatrice Webb were up to back in 1913. I thought this approach worked really well, but it did get me thinking about my involvement with the paper over the past four decades or more. I sent the following to Jason Cowley, the NS‘s editor, for publication, probably on the website. Jason didn’t want to publish the piece, which is fine, and he asked me to submit a letter instead. I duly did so, but here is the unpublished article:
The late 1970s enjoys near mythical status in the history of the New Statesman, as evident from the 110th anniversary issue. Julian Barnes’s reminiscences took me back forty years. In those days I was a PhD student, my thesis a history of the magazine’s original incarnation. I spent weeks mining the archives at Great Turnstile but not once swapped aperçus with Martin Amis or hung out with Christopher Hitchens. While they were down the pub sorting out the world or lauding Saul Bellow, I was eating my sandwiches in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The only member of staff I ever met was the editor, Bruce Page. Non-acquaintance with the hip cool tyros of the London literati scarcely mattered because pillars of the paper from an earlier era were still alive, all of them highly opinionated and all but one eager to be interviewed.
The exception was Rebecca West who sent me an excoriating letter damning everyone who had ever worked at the New Statesman. With her history of intensive, immersive journalism Dame Rebecca might have made an exception of Bruce Page had she met him. My occasional conversations with Bruce left me unconvinced by his ambitions for the New Statesman as a successor to the Insight investigative team he had created at the Sunday Times – how would all this be paid for? When I found files at Kew identifying former editor Clifford Sharp as a spy Bruce relished the irony – almost every week the paper carried a piece on espionage, so now it would expose one of its own. I was astonished to find my account of Sharp’s anti-Bolshevik activities run as a cover story. When I saw newspaper hoardings in central London announcing ‘NEW STATESMAN EDITOR WAS A SPY’ it took me a while to realise that this was my scoop.
The suggestion that Sharp was a spy came from Norman MacKenzie whose colourful CV included twenty years as Kingsley Martin’s assistant editor. One of Asa Briggs’s maverick appointments at Sussex University, Norman divided his time between advising education secretary of state Shirley Williams and editing the letters of Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Although Professor of Education he was rarely on campus, delegating duties to the departmental secretary, whose main attribute was her ability to decipher Beatrice Webb’s handwriting. Norman gave me a key to his office and open access to the Webbs’ correspondence. He was extraordinarily generous with his time. Most documents related to the New Statesman can be found at the LSE, or in the voluminous archive that Bloomsbury grandees like Leonard Woolf and Quentin Bell established at Sussex in the 1960s. Nevertheless, for full access to the letters and diaries of Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett and other NS luminaries I needed to visit New York and the University of Texas at Austin. At the end of my first year Professor MacKenzie had a quiet word with a pal he knew at the then Social Science Research Council, and within weeks I was landing at JFK.
Norman MacKenzie was like a second supervisor, only distancing himself from my research when appointed as an external examiner – a scenario inconceivable today. The night before my viva Norman phoned me up to announce, ‘We’ll go through the formalities in the morning, but my main concern is where we’re going for lunch…’.
For survivors from the New Statesman’s pioneering days socialism seemed the secret of a long life. A lifelong pacifist, Lord Brockway was a nonagenarian member of the Labour front bench; the division bell interrupted a lengthy anecdote on meeting Eamon de Valera in Lincoln Gaol after the Easter Rising (‘He didn’t stay long!’). It was of course the New Statesman which first published Yeats’s ‘1916’. Fenner Brockway’s contemporaries were still alive – just – and all of them keen to talk.
The beautifully bound, prohibitively expensive monograph by the eminent American academic sailed across the Highgate studio flat landing neatly in the wastepaper basket. An imperious voice announced, ‘And that is what I think of my husband’s biography!’. Notebook in hand, I sat facing Dame Margaret Cole beneath a Salford landscape surprisingly large for an Athena poster: ‘Of course it’s a Lowry!’. GDH Cole, socialist thinker and Oxford don, had helped keep the New Statesman alive when Sharp became a chronic alcoholic in the late 1920s. Cole retained a keen interest in editorial affairs long after Kingsley Martin and John Maynard Keynes arrived as editor and chairman in 1931. His widow made clear to me who had really initiated thirty years of stratospheric sales and a powerful presence on the Labour landscape.
‘No, no, no, it was always Kingsley’s baby!’ insisted Martin’s biographer and favourite feature writer, C.H. Rolph. Here was someone who spent twenty years on the beat before becoming a journalist. He caught me staring at the multicoloured canvas above his mantelpiece: ‘And yes, it’s a Dufy!’.
One-time literary editor Raymond Mortimer maintained the interwar New Statesman and Nation was always a creation of Bloomsbury. Never mind Kingsley Martin – what about Leonard Woolf and Desmond MacCarthy, ‘and of course, dear Maynard’? Mortimer saw his art collection as confirmation of a magazine that had warmly embraced modernism: ‘This of course is a Picasso. No, the other one – that’s a Braque.’
Competing claims for fame plus my chronic failure to recognise masterpieces picked up in Paris for a song are lasting memories of three years immersed in the making of a weekly still alive and flourishing 110 years later. Clifford Sharp’s creation was a magazine largely forgotten once the New Statesman became synonymous with Kingsley Martin and his immediate successors, John Freeman and Paul Johnson. The celebratory lunch with Norman MacKenzie saw no speedy translation of the thesis into a book. That came much later, in the mid-nineties. By then my interviewees had all died. This was a blessing in disguise as each one of them would have insisted that my portrait of the fledgling New Statesman bore absolutely no relation to reality: ‘Who on earth were you talking to, dear boy?!’.
