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?\u00a0 In what ways was your day-to-day experience of research and writing then so very different from that of today\u2019s postgraduate, and in what ways has nothing changed?\u00a0 What are the chances today of being left alone for twelve months to write forty thousand words on a subject of one\u2019s own choice?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 For a future doctoral student this was the perfect apprenticeship.\u00a0 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 \u2013 all before I turned twenty-two.\u00a0 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\u2019s nephew?\u00a0 This is most definitely not a lament for the \u2018good old days\u2019, as frankly leaving a young PGR unsupervised for almost a year is indefensible and in different circumstances my thesis might never have been written.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
An epic essay on the Copernican revolution and a half-decent degree saw me offered a postgraduate quota award.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Both graduates and junior lecturers intended moving on and yet somehow never did.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 One of them was Graham Thomas, the idiosyncratic creator of Kent\u2019s British Cartoon Archive.\u00a0 Students either loved or loathed his final year seminar on fascism.\u00a0 For me the long anecdotes, the aper\u00e7us, the wry humour and the ritual lighting of the untipped Senior Service were all pure joy.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I thought I was on safer ground back in the twentieth century until Graham advised that, \u2018A thesis on the OAS [The Day of the Jackal<\/em> was very big at the time] would be terrific, but not if you end up dead in the toilet of a dodgy Marseilles bar.\u2019\u00a0 With me eager to challenge Orwell\u2019s assertion in \u2018Inside the Whale\u2019 that 1920s writers and thinkers were largely apolitical, I suggested \u2018The response of British intellectuals to Fascist Italy\u2019.\u00a0 We shook hands and agreed to meet some time the following year (\u2018I think I\u2019ll need to see a draft\u2026\u2019 \u2013 ten months later the relaxed supervisor turned into an exceptionally rigorous editor).\u00a0 Graham\u2019s hands-off if high risk approach worked.\u00a0 So much so that he scarcely changed his modus operandi for my doctoral thesis later in the decade \u2013 if minimal supervision worked the first time around then let\u2019s do it again.\u00a0 The next time common sense prevailed, and I wisely sought experts in the field to compensate for Graham\u2019s light touch.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 There didn\u2019t seem any obvious process for monitoring my progress as a one-year research student.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t have a funding body keen to know if it was getting value for money; although I\u2019m sure the then Social Science Research Council did request annual reports after I commenced my PhD three years later.<\/p>\n Looking back, it\u2019s striking how little archival work I undertook.\u00a0 Unlike today undergraduate dissertations rarely involved research off-campus, and this clearly influenced my scheme of work.\u00a0 I may even have been told that archives were reserved for doctoral research.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The death of Leonard Woolf and the publication of Michael Holroyd\u2019s ground-breaking biography of Lytton Strachey had prompted a flood of Bloomsbury material, much of it previously unpublished.\u00a0 Because the Woolfs, Maynard Keynes and various other Bloomsbury illuminati were central to my thesis I contacted Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf\u2019s first biographer.\u00a0 It was easy: I phoned the University of Sussex switchboard and they put me straight though to Professor Bell.\u00a0 He invited me to lunch at Falmer, \u2018and if we have time then I\u2019ll take you to meet Duncan.\u2019\u00a0 I\u2019m afraid we never did get to Charleston and a post-prandial stroll with Duncan Grant \u2013 how wonderful that would have been.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Another enjoyable but ultimately fruitless excursion was to seek advice from Michael Holroyd, biographer extraordinaire.\u00a0 Outside his pre-gentrification Edwardian villa in Ladbroke Grove I met my first Rastafarians.\u00a0 Deaf to the drum\u2019n\u2019bass bouncing off his windows Michael made me a pot of tea but announced that he had to leave in twenty minutes \u2013 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.\u00a0 In general though, the speculative phone call seemed to work as did the chance to meet literary grandees giving guest lectures in Canterbury.\u00a0 Stephen Spender, eager to talk about WH Auden, found himself persistently questioned about the fascist-sympathising South African writer Roy Campbell.\u00a0 Spender sent me packing, no doubt venting his spleen in that night\u2019s journal entry.\u00a0 More accommodating was Sir Colin Coote, who knew the Duce was a wrong \u2019un from the moment he arrived in Rome.\u00a0 The reports he filed made uncomfortable reading for many Daily Telegraph<\/em> readers, but his reputation as an uncompromising foreign correspondent earned him the editor\u2019s chair.\u00a0 Sir Colin was charming, and a fount of information.\u00a0 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<\/em> in the 1920s seemed to have an opinion on Mussolini.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly I wrestled with the definition of intellectuals, drawing on Gramsci and Lucien Goldman and eschewing French cultural theorists (out of ignorance not choice).\u00a0 David Caute\u2019s work, notably The Fellow Travellers<\/em>, was a big influence.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think I met another postgraduate all year, not least because there were so few of us.<\/p>\n For a university only eight years old Kent\u2019s Templeman Library had an impressive stock of books and periodicals.\u00a0 Long runs of mid-century magazines facilitated case studies of the New Statesman<\/em> and the Criterion<\/em>, the former floundering until the arrival of Kingsley Martin and the latter too easily swayed by Ezra Pound\u2019s Blackshirt sympathies.\u00a0 My reading ambitions could never be fully met in Canterbury, so I decamped to London.\u00a0 It\u2019s clear from the thesis\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Searching for necessary books or journals depended upon bulky guides to requisite libraries (\u2018Virginia Woolf, diaries vols. I-V, Hogarth Press: BL, BLPES, Sussex\u2019) and whole floors of card catalogue cabinets, each topped with piles of forms on which to fill in required information.\u00a0 In this respect the research process was both analogue and mechanical.\u00a0 It was also by today\u2019s standards incredibly time consuming.<\/p>\n My ever-expanding \u2018data base\u2019 was made up of multiple filing cards and bulging ring binders.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 DH Lawrence of course had a great deal to say about dictatorship Italian-style, as did Bertrand Russell, HG Wells and Wyndham Lewis.\u00a0 Someone else fascinated by Italy was Aldous Huxley, his early novels a revelation.\u00a0 Harold Nicolson\u2019s real-time record of visiting Rome with \u2018Tom\u2019 Mosley was pure Peaky Blinders<\/em>.\u00a0 In my head a structure had emerged, and by late spring 1974 the time was right to put pen to paper.<\/p>\n Chapter by chapter I wrote and finetuned a first draft, before creating a second draft of the whole thesis on my portable typewriter.\u00a0 I amended my manuscript by hand, endeavouring to maintain a legible final version.\u00a0 Graham Thomas corrected and commented where appropriate, and on instruction I added further scribblings \u2013 and that was it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 With no on-campus binding service students were directed to a Victorian printshop just outside Canterbury.\u00a0 Today\u2019s bound theses are compact and well presented, but my MA looks enormous.\u00a0 Given a minimum number of words (twenty-five thousand) but no upper limit, I wrote forty thousand.\u00a0 The font was Garamond twelve-point and the spacing multiple, but one-third of every page was left blank for the insertion of footnotes.\u00a0 My carbon copy isn\u2019t paginated and I haven\u2019t counted, but there are a lot of pages!<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 There was no viva.\u00a0 Presumably there was an examiners\u2019 report, but I never saw it.\u00a0 All I got was a short official letter confirming the award of an MA and inviting me to the next graduation ceremony.\u00a0 Years later I met Rod Kedward, who sadly died this April.\u00a0 He was very friendly, but freely confessed to having no recollection of reading my thesis.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t offended of course \u2013 year on year snowed under with marking why would he remember my ambitious effort to take on George Orwell?<\/p>\n The pandemic meant much of my last book was researched and written at home.\u00a0 As always, I was amazed by how much information was available via the internet.\u00a0 Digital technology and speed of communication facilitates a breadth and depth of research, and a speed of completion, inconceivable in the 1970s.\u00a0 Looking back across the past thirty years, it is striking how quickly the academic community took all of this for granted.\u00a0 There are now of course numerous researchers who have known no other environment.\u00a0 Yet, notwithstanding the arrival of word processing, the quotidian experience of scholarly inquiry \u2013 of historical investigation \u2013 up until the mid-1990s was not that different from when I began my MA.\u00a0 The digital transformation when it occurred was astonishingly fast, but before that change was incremental.\u00a0 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?).\u00a0 Left alone for twelve months to sink or swim, my MA year saw a quantum leap in knowledge and maturity.\u00a0 I gained a greater degree of self-assurance and of self-awareness, plus a degree; all this and a lot of fun.\u00a0 Ironically, the reasons why I enjoyed myself were the same reasons as to why the system had to change.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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?\u00a0 In what ways was your day-to-day experience of research and writing then so very different from that of today\u2019s postgraduate, and in what ways has nothing changed?\u00a0 What are … <\/p>\n