PICKING THROUGH THE WRECKAGE

A J P TAYLOR THE HISTORY MAN

My favourite subject in secondary school was history.

Almost all the subjects I was taught at Secondary Modern School in the 1960’s were badly taught, this included history, taught by an open racist and supporter of the South African and Rhodesian regimes. Such were the times in which we lived. Still history being such a fascinating subject it was possible to clamber over the clumsy teaching to want to know more. This fascination was first ignited by the BBC documentary series The Great War, narrated by Ralph Richardson. It is worth remembering that this documentary was made just 50 yrs after the outbreak of the war, more recent than Suez is to us today. Both my grandparents had fought in the war which was still very much part of living memory. Watching the black and white images on the screen was to view a recent past that was both strange and savage. It was the first understanding for me that all our lives are lived in context, and that context is history.

It was not until after I left school that I started reading serious history and the historian who provided the most accessible route into the past was A J P Taylor. The phrase public intellectual was not commonly used in those days, at least I do not remember its use, but Alan Taylor was one of the first of that breed, who, through the medium of television and the question panel format, were able to reach an audience previously outside the reach of mere academics. This move was not greeted with universal acclaim and it is widely believed that Taylor’s academic career was damaged as a result of his engagement with the media, not only TV but also the popular press, to which Taylor regularly contributed; he was denied the prestigious Regius Professorship in Modern History at Oxford in 1957. Snobbery, resentment and jealousy at his popularity outside the narrow confines of academe, nowadays I suppose he would be called a ‘celebrity,’ was widespread. After the publication and subsequent controversy surrounding his ‘Origin of the Second World War’ he was vilified and accused of revisionism.

But it was Taylor’s voice that for me, and I expect for a great many others, was the voice of historical context, of modern history. His television lectures were famously unscripted, he simply stood talking directly into the camera, no props, no fancy widgets, just the spoken word. It was amongst the most gripping television I remember. I doubt that anyone today would commission such a programme, would be thought crazy if they pitched the idea. This too remember was mainstream TV, long before multi-channels, Taylor was given a slot on BBC one.

The first of his books I read when I was sixteen was Europe Grandeur and Decline, a Pelican paperback that introduced me to such figures as Metternich, and the complexities of the Hapsburg Empire.[1] And of course it was Taylor’s steady, cautious, measured tones, his wit and sharp intelligence that informed my reading. I particularly enjoyed his witty asides; there were none so mighty to be able to escape a Taylor aside.

Taylor however was swimming increasingly against the prevailing tide in academic history. Diplomatic history, the stories of grand figures on the international stage was increasingly seen as an irrelevance to the real shapers of the historical current, economics and the struggles of ‘the masses.’ Marxist historians were being appointed to all the available academic chairs, whilst the historical debate centred upon economics and the decline of Europe as a centre of industrial and intellectual power. To be Eurocentric, as Taylor clearly was, was to be disconnected from the new realities.[2]

Taylor recognised however that Europe had ceased to be centre stage and understood that Munich was the last occasion when Europe’s destiny remained purely in European hands, the US and Soviet Union being deliberately excluded. Henceforth it would be outside actors who decided the fate of the continent and I cannot recall reading anything of his about the US in particular and the world outside the European sphere in general of any great import.

His interests may have been European and to some extent Russian, or more precisely the Soviet Union, when it impinged on European affairs, but he was no Europhile. He was something of that peculiar phenomenon of the British labour movement, a left wing little Englander, he was interested in Europe precisely because it was filled with people who were foreign and consequently interesting.[3]

Not exactly a fellow traveller but certainly soft on communism, he continued to view Lenin as an essentially good man. He was passionately anti German, though admired Bismarck. He apparently boasted that it was he who had encouraged Benes to expel German citizens from the freshly liberated Czechoslovakia. He also, in a lecture in Dublin, advised the same solution to the problems of Ireland, i.e. the expulsion of the northern Unionist minority. As this was the community into which I was born I could not share Alan Taylor’s sanguine objectivity. Indeed there is something hideously twentieth century in the image of a university professor happily sequestered in ivy clad chambers shifting populations from one part of the map to another. Whilst whispering in Benes ear he knew it would not be he who would be herding hapless Czech/German peasants into cattle tracks whilst they clung to what remained of their worldly possessions. Taylor’s dark side was the dark side of the age into which he was born, and was consequently very dark indeed.

Yet as we approach the 100^th Anniversary of the outbreak of World War 1 it is difficult to find a clearer explanation of the events of June and July 1914 than that provided by Taylor. In 1914 for all the European powers mobilization meant just that, however for Germany mobilization meant war. Germany, so it believed, would be strangled in a purely defensive war, it must knock out France quickly before the massive Russian armies could assemble, and delay they believed would be fatal. None of the Entente powers understood this; even the Kaiser did not grasp this reality. Once Germany felt itself compelled to mobilize a European war became inevitable with catastrophic consequences for the continent. We live with these consequences still. Taylor chose a life picking through the wreckage trying to make sense of what had happened and the world that had been created out of such destruction.

He could at times be remarkably flippant, loved the telling anecdote, and like all masters of style was at risk of placing it above substance. It is also no longer possible to accept some of his more brisk and sweeping statements; still it would be hard to find a clearer introduction to how we got here, to the context in which we now live out our lives. 

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[1] In researching this piece I find I am not alone, see;-http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=160501&sectioncode=26

[2] Though it was Taylor who observed, inaccurately in my opinion, that “...no matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.”

[3] The much derided Hapsburg Empire though provided a template for what European union might look like, with cosmopolitan Vienna and the web of nationalities living largely peacefully side by side. The novelist Joseph Roth, who was certainly no reactionary, thought it far better than the patchwork of mean spirited national states that superseded it. Only Czechoslovakia was a successful thriving democracy and it was undermined by its German citizens and the indifference of the Western democratic states to the fate of a fellow democracy.

The reality of a peaceful European union, of democratic countries co-operating with one another, is little short of a miracle given modern history. Only the English and narrow national chauvinists on the continent begrudge its success.

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