{"id":172,"date":"2023-05-08T12:05:30","date_gmt":"2023-05-08T12:05:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/?p=172"},"modified":"2023-05-08T12:05:30","modified_gmt":"2023-05-08T12:05:30","slug":"new-statesmans-110th-anniversary-going-back-forty-odd-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/tdby\/2023\/05\/08\/new-statesmans-110th-anniversary-going-back-forty-odd-years\/","title":{"rendered":"New Statesman’s 110th anniversary – going back forty-odd years"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month the New Statesman<\/em> published a special edition to mark the magazine’s 110th anniversary.\u00a0 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<\/em> (and good luck if you can find let alone afford a copy of that!).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I sent the following to Jason Cowley, the NS<\/em>‘s editor, for publication, probably on the website.\u00a0 Jason didn’t want to publish the piece, which is fine, and he asked me to submit a letter instead.\u00a0 I duly did so, but here is the unpublished article:<\/p>\n

The late 1970s enjoys near mythical status in the history of the New Statesman<\/em>, as evident from the 110th anniversary issue.\u00a0 Julian Barnes\u2019s reminiscences took me back forty years.\u00a0 In those days I was a PhD student, my thesis a history of the magazine\u2019s original incarnation.\u00a0 I spent weeks mining the archives at Great Turnstile but not once swapped aper\u00e7us with Martin Amis or hung out with Christopher Hitchens.\u00a0 While they were down the pub sorting out the world or lauding Saul Bellow, I was eating my sandwiches in Lincoln\u2019s Inn Fields.\u00a0 The only member of staff I ever met was the editor, Bruce Page.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The exception was Rebecca West who sent me an excoriating letter damning everyone who had ever worked at the New Statesman<\/em>.\u00a0 With her history of intensive, immersive journalism Dame Rebecca might have made an exception of Bruce Page had she met him.\u00a0 My occasional conversations with Bruce left me unconvinced by his ambitions for the New Statesman<\/em> as a successor to the Insight investigative team he had created at the Sunday Times<\/em> \u2013 how would all this be paid for?\u00a0 When I found files at Kew identifying former editor Clifford Sharp as a spy Bruce relished the irony \u2013 almost every week the paper carried a piece on espionage, so now it would expose one of its own.\u00a0 I was astonished to find my account of Sharp\u2019s anti-Bolshevik activities run as a cover story.\u00a0 When I saw newspaper hoardings in central London announcing \u2018NEW STATESMAN EDITOR WAS A SPY\u2019 it took me a while to realise that this was my scoop.<\/p>\n

The suggestion that Sharp was a spy came from Norman MacKenzie whose colourful CV included twenty years as Kingsley Martin\u2019s assistant editor.\u00a0 One of Asa Briggs\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s handwriting.\u00a0 Norman gave me a key to his office and open access to the Webbs\u2019 correspondence.\u00a0 He was extraordinarily generous with his time.\u00a0 Most documents related to the New Statesman<\/em> 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Norman MacKenzie was like a second supervisor, only distancing himself from my research when appointed as an external examiner \u2013 a scenario inconceivable today.\u00a0 The night before my viva Norman phoned me up to announce, \u2018We\u2019ll go through the formalities in the morning, but my main concern is where we\u2019re going for lunch\u2026\u2019.<\/p>\n

For survivors from the New Statesman<\/em>\u2019s pioneering days socialism seemed the secret of a long life.\u00a0 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 (\u2018He didn\u2019t stay long!\u2019).\u00a0 It was of course the New Statesman<\/em> which first published Yeats\u2019s \u20181916\u2019.\u00a0 Fenner Brockway\u2019s contemporaries were still alive \u2013 just \u2013 and all of them keen to talk.<\/p>\n

The beautifully bound, prohibitively expensive monograph by the eminent American academic sailed across the Highgate studio flat landing neatly in the wastepaper basket.\u00a0 An imperious voice announced, \u2018And that<\/em> is what I think of my husband\u2019s biography!\u2019.\u00a0 Notebook in hand, I sat facing Dame Margaret Cole beneath a Salford landscape surprisingly large for an Athena poster: \u2018Of course it\u2019s a Lowry!\u2019.\u00a0 GDH Cole, socialist thinker and Oxford don, had helped keep the New<\/em> Statesman<\/em> alive when Sharp became a chronic alcoholic in the late 1920s.\u00a0 Cole retained a keen interest in editorial affairs long after Kingsley Martin and John Maynard Keynes arrived as editor and chairman in 1931.\u00a0 His widow made clear to me who had really initiated thirty years of stratospheric sales and a powerful presence on the Labour landscape.<\/p>\n

\u2018No, no, no, it was always Kingsley\u2019s baby!\u2019 insisted Martin\u2019s biographer and favourite feature writer, C.H. Rolph.\u00a0 Here was someone who spent twenty years on the beat before becoming a journalist.\u00a0 He caught me staring at the multicoloured canvas above his mantelpiece: \u2018And yes, it\u2019s a Dufy!\u2019.<\/p>\n

One-time literary editor Raymond Mortimer maintained the interwar New Statesman and Nation <\/em>was always a creation of Bloomsbury.\u00a0 Never mind Kingsley Martin \u2013 what about Leonard Woolf and Desmond MacCarthy, \u2018and of course, dear Maynard\u2019?\u00a0 Mortimer saw his art collection as confirmation of a magazine that had warmly embraced modernism: \u2018This of course is a Picasso.\u00a0 No, the other one \u2013 that\u2019s a Braque.\u2019<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Clifford Sharp\u2019s creation was a magazine largely forgotten once the New Statesman<\/em> became synonymous with Kingsley Martin and his immediate successors, John Freeman and Paul Johnson.\u00a0 The celebratory lunch with Norman MacKenzie saw no speedy translation of the thesis into a book.\u00a0 That came much later, in the mid-nineties.\u00a0 By then my interviewees had all died.\u00a0 This was a blessing in disguise as each one of them would have insisted that my portrait of the fledgling New Statesman<\/em> bore absolutely no relation to reality: \u2018Who on earth were you talking to, dear boy?!\u2019.<\/p>\n

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Last month the New Statesman published a special edition to mark the magazine’s 110th anniversary.\u00a0 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 … <\/p>\n

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