Historian who debunked the second world war's myths
By Sue Cameron
Published: June 21 2008 03:00 | Last updated: June 21 2008 03:00
It was a damp basement in 1960s London, piled with closely written sheets of thin, crumbling wartime paper. Most people would have found it a forlorn place. Yet for the young Angus Calder, wandering round the room randomly picking out documents, it was an Aladdin's cave of history. Here was a first-hand account of the London blitz. There were descriptions of what people really felt about rationing, about evacuees, about "Uncle Joe" Stalin.
That dank room contained the hundreds of reports written during the second world war by ordinary men and women for the Mass Observation research group. They had been lying neglected for years. Calder, who has died at 66, was to use them as the basis for his groundbreaking books The People's War: Britain 1939-1945 , published in 1969, and later, in 1991, The Myth of the Blitz . His work challenged the cherished view of a plucky Britain that came smiling through the blitz with people of all classes united by humour, tolerance and the volunteer spirit.
True, Calder found fortitude and courage at all levels of society. Yet as he showed in his vividly written and meticulously researched books, wartime Britain also saw industrial unrest, anti-Semitism, rising crime - the blackout was ideal for thieving - and a growing divide between rich and poor. "The forces of wealth, bureaucracy and privilege," wrote Calder, who was a passionate socialist, "survived with little inconvenience." He details, for example, the outrage of middle-class households when asked to take in vermin-infested evacuees from the slums. One rural council even turned away evacuees on the grounds that large houses could not be used because "the servant problem is acute and it would be unfair to billet children on them".
As well as being a historian, Calder was a poet, critic, essayist and teacher who made a big contribution to literature. Yet The People's War , written when he was still in his 20s, was the first to give the views of ordinary people and the first to question established myths about the war. It influenced people from Sir David Hare, the playwright, to Gordon Brown, the prime minister, who knew Calder when both were historians and Labour party supporters in Edinburgh.
"Angus was an inspirational writer and teacher, an intellectual who engaged with and enriched public life," said Mr Brown this week. "He was a challenger of orthodoxies and a wonderful stimulator of ideas. His People's War broke new ground and influenced countless students of history. But his writing covered a huge range of other topics - from culture and nationalism to the intellectual currents within the British empire. He was a towering figure in the Scottish literary world. His passion, insight and lifelong commitment to both academia and politics inspired me and many others."
It was another Edinburgh historian, Paul Addison, who first rediscovered the Mass Observation reports and Calder always acknowledged this debt. "His books have never been surpassed and they are crammed with vivid detail about people and places," said Mr Addison, author of The Road to 1945 . "Angus put in the awkward squad. His was not the Max Bygraves version of history. He thought of himself as a writer rather than an academic and he was something of a bohemian. A man with a well-stocked mind, he was always wonderful company."
Angus Lindsay Ritchie Calder was born in London in 1942 and educated at Cambridge, where he read English literature. He was much influenced by his father, the Scots-born Ritchie Calder, journalist, diplomat, science writer, founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and ultimately a member of the House of Lords. In Gods, Mongrels and Demons , a collection of dark humour published in 2003, Calder wrote: "My father's exuberant non-career left me unconvinced by the notion that worthwhile people must follow persistent, steady paths (though some have done so). Committed careerists may in fact be very dangerous."
His own unconventional path started with a doctorate at Sussex University, where his supervisor was Asa Briggs and where the Mass Observation reports are now properly housed. His thesis was a study - still unpublished - of the Common Wealth party, a mainly middle-class, idealistic, socialist group that emerged during the second world war.
Calder married Jenni Daiches in 1963 - they had two daughters and a son - and in 1971 they moved to Edinburgh. Despite his English background and accent, he became passionately Scottish and a believer in the particularly Scottish idea of the democratic intellect where a ploughman could become a vice-chancellor.
An engaging, gregarious man, his career took him round the world literally and intellectually. He taught English at the University of Nairobi and held posts at the universities of Malawi and Zimbabwe as well as working in New Zealand - his first published volume of poems was called Waking in Waikato . In 1981 he produced, Revolutionary Empire , a study of Britain's empire up to the American War of Independence, which considered the views of the conquered as much as the conquerors. It had rave reviews but the subsequent, planned volumes never appeared.
One reason was he was spending more time in Edinburgh's pubs. His fondness for drink destroyed his first marriage and his second to Kate Kyle, which produced a son, was brief. Yet he continued to teach, spending 14 years with the Open University, and writing essays of Orwellian standard as well as introductions to writers including Dickens, Scott and T.E. Lawrence. He completed a book on 19th-century Russian writers and wrote, with Paul Addison, A Time to Kill: The Soldier's Experience of the War in the West 1939-45 .
"He had a long, slow decline," said Mr Addison. "Yet he wrote more than most people who live to be 80." Another friend, academic and now Scottish parliament member Christopher Harvie, who went to see him only weeks before he died, said: "He told me: 'This has been a helter- skelter existence - much of it my own fault.' Yet he was remarkable man, an outstanding teacher who could make himself a specialist in anything and who wrote brilliantly."
Sue Cameron
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
Comments