Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

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Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 29

by Eric J. Hobsbawm


  With the American civil rights movements and the influx of coloured immigrants to Britain, racism became a far more central theme on the left than it had been. Through jazz I found myself associated with an early anti-racist campaign in Britain after the so-called Notting Hill (actually Notting Dale) race riots of 1958, the so-called ‘Stars Campaign for Interracial Friendship’ (SCIF), which was not so much a real political operation (though Colin MacInnes went about the area, a favourite stamping ground of his, posting its news-sheet through letter boxes) as an example of the modern media operation which, like others of its kind, fizzled out after a few months of rather successful publicity. It did indeed mobilize the ‘stars’, mainly of jazz – most of the big British names were there, Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine, Humphrey Lyttelton and Chris Barber, as well as some pop stars – but its strength lay in the operators who could get stories into the press and programmes on to television, and produced newsworthy ideas such as the televised interracial children’s Christmas party of 1958. While it lasted, it enjoyed the invaluable help of the remarkably able and admirable Claudia Jones, a US Communist Party functionary born in the West Indies and expelled as a ‘non-citizen’ from the USA in the witch-hunt days, who did her best, with indifferent success, to bring some Party efficiency and some political structure into the Caribbean immigration in West London and to get adequate backing for her efforts from the British CP. An impressive woman, she has been unjustly forgotten, except perhaps as one of the inspirations behind what has become the annual, and no longer political, Notting Hill Carnival.

  Third World passions did not become a major inspiration for the left until the 1960s, and, incidentally, weaken the hold of the Cold War crusading ideologists on western liberals and social democrats. Yet by the end of the 1950s the Cuban Revolution was already in power, about to add a new image to the iconography of world revolution, and to turn the USA into a highly visible Goliath facing the defiance of a bearded young David. In 1961 the reaction to the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion was immediate – as immediate as the reaction to the Soviet invasion of Hungary had been in 1956 – and it extended far beyond the usual parties, signers of petitions, and indeed the usual range of protesters. Ken Tynan telephoned me desperately the morning the news came through: something must be done! As soon as possible. How could we set about it? Though a genuine man of the left, whose political sincerity both Marlene and I always defended against those who accused him of posing, he was far from the usual member of the ‘stage army of the good’. Had he been, he would have known what to do himself. When we had set up the usual committee, rounded up the usual suspects for letters of protest, and organized a march to Hyde Park – I cannot for the life of me remember whom we had as speakers – I recall noting with agreeable surprise how unlike the usual left-wing demo this one was, at least in appearance. The call to defend Fidel Castro, through Tynan, or perhaps more likely Tynan’s Man Friday Clive Goodwin, actor, agent and activist, had mobilized a remarkable mass of younger theatrical males and females, and young women from the fashion agencies. It was the best-looking political occasion I can remember, a wonderful sight, and all the happier since we knew by then that the American invasion had been defeated.

  So, almost without noticing, I found myself – and the world – slipping into a new mood as the 1950s turned into the 1960s. Even politically, although after 1956 I had neither decided to leave the CP nor been expelled, I no longer found myself as isolated as Party members had once been. Party labels were no longer decisive for those who supported the new political campaigns – anti-nuclear, anti-imperial, anti-racist or whatever. When some communist historians founded a new historical journal, Past & Present, in 1952, about as bad a time in the Cold War as can be imagined, we deliberately planned it not as a Marxist journal, but as a common platform for a ‘popular front’ of historians, to be judged not by the badge in the author’s ideological buttonhole, but by the contents of their articles. We desperately wanted to broaden the base of our editorial board, which at the start was naturally dominated by Party members, since only the rare, usually indigenous, radical historian with a safe academic base, such as A. H. M. Jones, the ancient historian from Cambridge, had the courage to sit at the same table as the bolsheviks. The eminent art historian Rudolf Wittkower was actually warned not to accept our invitation and it was another ten years before Moses Finley, the victim of US McCarthyism welcomed in Cambridge, was prepared to write for us. We were equally keen to extend the range of our contributors. For several years we failed in the first task, although, thanks to our excellent reputation among younger academics, we soon did better on the second. In 1958 we succeeded. A group of non-Marxist historians of subsequent eminence, led by Lawrence Stone, shortly about to go to Princeton, and the present Sir John Elliott, later Regius Professor at Oxford, who had sympathized with our objectives but until then had found it impossible formally to join the former red establishment, offered to join us collectively on condition that we dropped the ideologically suspect phrase ‘a journal of scientific history’ from our mast-head. It was a cheap price to pay. They did not ask us about our political opinions – actually orthodox communists were no longer easy to find on the board – we did not enquire into theirs, and no ideological problems have ever arisen on its board since then. Even the Institute of Historical Research, which had steadfastly refused to include the journal in its library, relented.

  So both my personal life became in some sense ‘normal’ and (in spite of the rhetoric to the contrary) the world I lived in was – or at least looked like – a less insecure and provisional place, and was certainly a more prosperous one. The first observation was undeniable, even though my academic career was still taking its time to develop. I was not to get my chair, or the usual marks of official recognition – academies, the first honorary degrees – until the 1970s, when I was well into my fifties. In retrospect I can see this was a stroke of luck, for nothing is worse for a career than to reach the peak too soon and face the long march along the flat plateau of the establishment or, even worse, the lengthening distance between present achievement and the work that once made one’s reputation. Just because I had started late, and been held up for so many years, I continued to have better things to look forward to at an age when others could expect only to postpone decline.

  As for the world, we knew quite well that its stability was only apparent, even though its extraordinary economic and technological leap forward was plain. Nevertheless, for those of us lucky enough to live in central and western Europe, it was not an illusion. We may not have fully recognized our good fortune yet, but we lived in the lands of the blessed: a region without war, without the prospect or fear of social upheaval, in which most people enjoyed a life of wealth, a range of choices in life and leisure, and a degree of social security beyond the reach of all but the very rich in our parents’ generation, and beyond even the dreams of the poor. Ours was a better place to live in than any other part of the world.

  I was soon to discover that this could not be said of other parts of the globe. Nor, as the 1960s were soon to show, did it satisfy the inhabitants of the lands of the blessed.

  14

  Under Cnicht

  In 1961, shortly after sitting down with Bertrand Russell and perhaps 12,000 others, on a famous anti-nuclear occasion in Trafalgar Square, fortunately unarrested by the police, I was told by my friend and brother-Apostle Robin Gandy that I looked a bit stressed, and that he thought a few days with him in North Wales would do me good. He had a small, almost aggressively primitive cottage there, next to a dying chapel, where, between hill walks and rock scrambles, he pondered the problems of mathematical logic. In those days, before the wonderful network of small rural railway lines in Britain had been destroyed, it was still possible to travel gently between trees through the heartlands of central Wales and, once the coast was reached, by a not entirely misnamed Cambrian Coast Express to Penrhyndeudraeth in what was still for Anglophones the county of Merioneth, the la
st area in the British Isles that still voted to ban the sale or public consumption of alcohol on the Lord’s day. There Robin met me on his motorbike, in his habitual black leather gear, to save me a few miles’ trudge across the coastal ridge and the table-flat plain (The Traeth) that had been a sea inlet until it was drained in the early nineteenth century by the seawall built by a Mr Maddocks, after whom the new port of Portmadoc was to be named. The enterprise had been much admired by progressive visitors, among them the poet Shelley. Before that, ships had been able to sail to the foot of the mountains, using the dramatic and unmistakable triangle of Cnicht (The Knight) as a landmark. The name suggests that it reminded them of a medieval helmet. Where the road left the Traeth and started to climb gently to the high Croesor valley just below Cnicht was the frontier of Clough’s kingdom. There I and, when I remarried, Marlene and the children, would spend most of our holidays for the next quarter of a century.

  The ruler, indeed the maker, of this kingdom, Clough Williams-Ellis, was a tall, straight, affable, roman-nosed figure, invariably in a tweed jacket, breeches and yellow stockings – he was the only man to wear this gear on his visits to the Athenaeum – by then in his later seventies. The best way to introduce him to a generation for whom the Britain he came from is as alien as Tolstoy’s Russia, is to say that when he married during the First World War, his fellow-officers asked him what he wanted for a wedding present. He wanted to build a folly – a fragment of a mock medieval fortress with a view of the sea. It was built. One got to it through an iron gate, painted in ‘Clough’s green’, the unmistakable colour of iron and woodwork in Clough’s kingdom, opposite the main entrance to his house, Plas Brondanw, a small ancient pile with a wonderful formal garden opening on a vista of the peak of Snowdon framed by Clough’s characteristic urns and arches. From the gate one strolled a couple of hundred yards along a gently rising avenue whose trees he had also planted. (Trees were one of his many passions. He was so outraged at the proposal to sell off for property development the wonderful Grand Avenue of trees which led to the great house of Stowe, which he was engaged in turning into a public school, that he bought it himself and saw to it that it was preserved. It was perhaps his major contribution to the project.) Our children loved to play in the tower, climbing the stairs that went nowhere except to a view over the sea and a damp stretch of moorland beyond which, a few miles away, one saw the Big and Little Moelwyn, the other two mountains of the kingdom, after which Clough had named his son, who had not returned from the war. It had once served as a set for a movie about China. Clough was enormously pleased about this. It was not romantic absurdity as such that he loved, but play, not to mention celebrities. Besides, it is almost certain that the film company had come to Merioneth not because a small piece of it could be made to look more Chinese than any other part of Great Britain, but because star and crew could stay at the best-known of Clough’s creations, the greatest of his follies, Portmeirion. This was and remains a life-size quasi-baroque toy-town pretending to be on the Italian Riviera, colours and all, which suddenly emerges from rhododendron-covered rocks across the grey waters of the wide shallow estuary that leads into Cardigan Bay. He paid for its constant extension by turning part of it into the sort of hotel and holiday village which slightly bohemian showbusiness people found irresistible (with fireworks rather than golf courses), and eventually, perhaps more reluctantly, with the money spent by day trippers. (Friends of the family were let in free.) Nothing about Portmeirion was or is quite real – although it was filled with authentic statues and bits of architectural decor saved by Clough from destruction – but everything represented daydreams, not, however, without the potential for nightmares. It was later chosen as the setting for a cult British television series, The Prisoner, in which a Kafkaesque victim found he could not escape from an environment full equally of charm and menace. Neither could the makers of the series, which therefore came to a sudden stop after seventeen episodes. It is still repeated from time to time for a large community of aficionados.

  In some ways Clough, proud of his standing as a professional architect, also became the victim of the environment he had created and could not escape. As the younger son of a landowning family, he had to earn a living, and architecture, his passion from childhood, fitted both his background and his inclinations. He had only one term’s formal training. What he lacked in professional qualifications, he made up for in country roots, informed enthusiasm and the sort of contacts a handsome and charming young man of good family could easily make in the weekend-party environment of Edwardian Britain, which was, after all, his own. Friends, or friends of friends, gave him the chance to build stables, then estate cottages, then wings of country houses, and public schools, even a complete and massive Edwardian pile, Llangoed Hall, on the Breconshire banks of the Wye, which survives as a hotel. (Actually the great majority of his buildings were of modest size.) And yet Portmeirion typecast him as ‘not a serious architect’ by the standards of the highly developed professional puritanism of the era of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. He got the official recognition of a knighthood as Sir (Bertram) Clough Williams-Ellis only at the age of eighty-seven.

  This was a complete misunderstanding of the man. For him buildings without trees, walls, views, roads leading to farmyards, cottages or water, had no real meaning. What he wanted to create or shape was not buildings but small worlds in which people lived and worked in a unity of masonry, landscape wild and tame, vistas, symbols and memorials, no doubt also to be admired as an ensemble by visiting travellers. Because it was not a place in which people went about their usual business, but a fun place, a jeu d’esprit, or, more seriously, a momentary dream of utopia, Portmeirion was not typical of what he was about. His ideal was not Lutyens but Squire Headlong, the lord and enthusiastic shaper of, and guide to, a wild Welsh estate in Thomas Love Peacock’s Headlong Hall. (The novels, or rather conversation pieces, of Peacock, friend of Shelley and amused admirer of Wales, were required reading in Clough’s kingdom.) And the essence of such an estate must be the characteristic combination of wild natural beauty, poverty and the inhabitants’ indifference to visual aesthetics, so surprising in a people as receptive to music and words as the Welsh. Though he thought it essential to embellish them with suitably symbolic masonry and metalwork, and to draw attention to their romantic potential, his environments were not supposed to be ‘beautiful’ but to be themselves. And, above all, to remain themselves. His campaigns for the conservation of rural landscape against ‘the octopus’ of unplanned ‘development’ went back to the 1920s. Largely to preserve them as they were, he had between the wars bought up the bare hillsides, moors and mountains that constituted his kingdom. Fortunately – for he was comfortably off rather than rich – they had virtually no market value at that time. ‘A ten-guinea fee earned in London paid for many acres of hill-land.’1

  And indeed, though it contained marvellous things, Clough’s kingdom was not conventionally ‘beautiful’. How could it be? Much of it consisted of a spectral, twice-destroyed stony country, always poor, and laid waste by the decline of small uneconomic hill farms and the final collapse of the great slate quarries which, supplying the builders and real-estate developers of Victorian Britain with their roofing, had for a while lifted a barren mountain region out of bare subsistence. It was, literally, a landscape of post-industrial ruins. One could climb from the giant dead quarries of Blaenau Ffestiniog up to the lunar landscape of the abandoned quarry and workers’ barracks below the choughs at Cwmorthin, then down again along the abandoned railway track that led through the bare Cwm Croesor. Serving also the abandoned quarry of Croesor, one of whose former cottages was ours for some years, it led to the abandoned long incline down which the full trucks ran by gravity to the Traeth and eventually across it to be loaded at Portmadoc. It was also a landscape of post-agricultural ruins, such as the one the great poet of the region, R. S. Thomas, speaks of in his ‘The Welsh Hill Country’:

  The moss and the mould o
n the cold chimneys The nettles growing through the cracked doors The houses stand empty at Nant-yr-Eira There are holes in the roofs that are thatched with sunlight The fields are reverting to the bare moor

  Even in the 1960s tourism was only slowly beginning to fill the gap – for, though Snowdon dominated the view, the major beauty spots (and mountain climbing centres) of Snowdonia were a few miles away. The ruined Ffestiniog Railway, the narrow-gauge line on which 200 men from Llanfrothen and Penrhyndeudraeth had once travelled daily to the great quarries at Blaenau Ffestiniog, was just beginning to be restored by passionate amateurs for the benefit of grateful tourist parents wondering what to do with their children. For most of our years in North Wales it still stopped dead on an overgrown mountainside before returning to Portmadoc.

  Much of Clough’s work as ruler of his kingdom was literally making ruins habitable and filling empty walls on still depopulating hillsides. Our first cottage was one of a windswept row of four, built somewhere in the scooped-out bare mountain valley outside the quarry village of Croesor for the local quarry. Its only permanent inhabitant by then was our cherished Nellie Jones, who brought up three children by various fathers, and a dog, in an approximate kitchen, and acted as caretaker for some almost equally rackety English visitors. (The village, or rather hamlet, of Croesor itself was just about to lose its shop-cum-sub-post office, and only a constant battle against the authorities – assisted by Clough’s policy of letting empty cottages to unmarried or abandoned mothers – kept its tiny schoolhouse from closing.) Our second was a sixteenth-century ruin, once part of the complex of buildings that formed the seat of the Anwyl family, fallen on bad times after the eighteenth century, which Clough had transformed into a habitable house for Londoners who did not mind living in extreme discomfort, but in romantic surroundings. Typically, he had left part of a projecting wall of three-feet stone blocks out of which, in the centuries of ruin, a tree had grown so vast and tall that we insisted on a clause in our lease to protect us in case it was toppled by some storm, destroying most of the house. I doubt whether a single inhabited building on his estate was not either first built, restored or made fit for human occupation by him. But the inhabitants belonged to at least two entirely different and barely overlapping species: the second-homers or incomers and the native Welsh.

 

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