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This article discusses the figure of the historian, a much-neglected role which historians themselves have done little to illuminate. There are plenty of common-sense definitions which convey something of the role. According to one such explanation, the historian is simply any person who writes history. Perhaps the historian should be defined instead as someone who teaches the subject, as a teacher working in a school, a college or a university? One possible approach might be to define the historian as a man or woman with a critical understanding of the past. Alternatively, the historian is someone who is accorded this status by their contemporaries. This issue of peer acceptance is crucial to the elevation of history as an academic science. There clearly are historical writers who are denied recognition in this way, including historical novelists, family historians, unpublished writers, amateur historical sleuths, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and so on. In exceptional cases, this craft exclusively is to be welcomed. Yet in the overwhelming majority of times, this mystique is a matter of regret. Quite simply less people write about the past, and as a consequence, the spontaneity and the variety of history is diminished. I remember a conference I attended in Central London in 1995. On the platform were Raphael Samuel, Chris Harman, and various members of the London Socialist and Northern Marxist Historians' Groups. The meeting seemed to go well, there was a positive and inclusive atmosphere. There were several hundred people present, most of them activists in various left-wing campaigns. Raphael Samuel described the pleasures of memory, and the radical value of popular history-making. The other speakers continued in a similar vein. From the floor, a woman asked a simple question, 'How would I go about writing history? What would I do?' No professional historian herself, the processes of conducting and publishing research seemed opaque and inaccessible. I don't know whether our questioner became a working historian, but I do know that none of the speakers could offer her any adequate answer, and I doubt that our speaker was the first or last person to ask themselves that question. There have been times when significant research was conducted which attempted to break out from the restricting processes of academic control and craft exclusivity. One example would be the great wave of local, working-class and oral histories published in 1960s and 1970s Britain under the aegis of such organisations as History Workshop in Ruskin and the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers.1 The importance of this public history is that it taught us that there is no reason for our definition of history to concentrate on the formal and the academic to the exclusion of the informal or the inaccessible. The classic examples of this genre include Sheila Rowbotham's Hidden from History, Raphael Samuel's Theatres of Memory, E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working-Class and David Widgery's Some Lives.2 These books and the work of other public historians, successfully demonstrated that our understanding of the past can be broad enough to encompass popular memory, visual sources, architecture, archaeology, or indeed any source we like. Whatever definition of the historian which you choose to adopt, one aspect which it should incorporate would be knowledge of technique. In the same way that a baker is that person who possesses the skills of baking, so a historian is that man or woman who possesses the skills of writing history. The historian is someone who writes about the past in a certain way, who produces and checks records, who acknowledges the work of other historians, and who writes with a discernible accuracy and rigour. In so far as the historian has a particular tool, it is the possession of footnotes.This small and important device is a vital means for other people interested in the past to check the accuracy of a source. The footnote enables others to follow the historian's thought process, and check the accuracy of their recording, it is a vital part of the historian's trade.3 The intention of this paper is to highlight some of the tensions in the role of the historian, between the concern for rigour which I broadly regard as positive, and the concern for craft status, which I would tend to see as less creative and useful for a collective understanding of the past. One of my reasons for writing it was simply to describe how one historical work was written and published. By describing these techniques, I hope to encourage others to write history. Hopefully some of the mystique can be taken away, and others will be encouraged to write themselves. The other reason for writing this paper would be to consider the role of the historian. In this project my position as historian was not a neutral role, nor did it go unchallenged by my collaborators, as I will describe. I wouldn't say that it was a standard historical project - in many ways it was unusual, as I will describe - but by considering my own role in it I hope to say something about the nature of history and the historian. From autumn 1999 to spring 2000, I was the editor responsible for putting together a pamphlet on the history of working-class struggle on Merseyside. This pamphlet was based on a walking-tour organised by a friend Anne Alexander and which was held through Liverpool on the last Sunday in October. Four of us spoke on the day, and the trip was recorded on tape. The tour was a fundraiser for the left-wing newspaper Socialist Worker, but it was publicised very widely across Merseyside. The following list of the pamphlet's chapters conveys the tone of the walk and indeed of the publication which followed from it:
One: Slavery in Liverpool My role in the group was secondary. The walk was not my idea, nor was the pamphlet ever my possession. It was my suggestion that something should be published, and when everyone agreed with the idea but no-one volunteered to finish it, the task of editor fell to me. Perhaps it was the published writer in me that expected publication, perhaps it was a subconscious reflection of the new environment of over-publication encouraged by the growth of the Research Assessment Exercises in the universities - but for whatever reason, I was the one who suggested publication, and nobody else in the group felt competent to take the pamphlet through to publication. In effect, I was invited to the project late, and for my skills as a historian. There was nothing I did that other people in the group could not have managed themselves. Yet a majority of those involved still felt that a historian would be needed to see the project through. What then was my role, what did I do as a historian? One thing I did not do was write the pamphlet. Of the 10,000 word final draft, I wrote perhaps one-fifth. Four of us spoke on the original walk, Anne, Dave Auty, Norah Rushton and myself, with Anne writing the largest part. About thirty people attended the tour, and their suggestions were added to the pamphlet as well. One speaker, Norah, remembered two months later an essential detail which transformed the account she had given at the time. Other people who weren't there added chapters of their own. Peta Bulmer contributed to the chapter on the Toxteth riots, Babs Hennessy wrote on women's struggles in Liverpool. Dave and Steph Owens have been active socialists on Merseyside for over twenty years, and although they couldn't make the walk, they provided references for the sections on New Unionism and the Great Unrest. Once the tape had been transcribed out, three substantial issues came out, structure, accuracy and production. Each was discussed by the collaborators as a group, as far as possible. One of the first questions was how to structure the material which we had compiled. Anne was keen to retain a sense of her walk, and hoped to see the chapters listed in their walking order. I worried that most people would actually read the pamphlet as if it were a short history book, and they could then be confused if the sections did not appear in a neat chronological order. A compromise was reached, with the chapters appearing in date order, but with five maps added (of Birkenhead, Mann island, Toxteth, Liverpool Lime Street, and Liverpool City Centre) so that the pamphlet retained a sense of place. Everyone in the group agreed that there should be plenty of photographs included, but unfortunately the light was poor on the day, and there were few opportunities to take pictures before the rain fell. Bryan Taylor who type-set the manuscript already had photographs of the Liverpool dock strike scanned on his computer. We added several of these pictures later at the proofing stage. As for the accuracy, several of the chapters were derived from published sources, so I could check the spelling of names and accuracy of dates against the material held in Liverpool's museum (which incorporates the former Museum of Working-Class Life) and in the trade union centre on Hardman Street. A trip to the Maritime Museum also helped when it came to editing the section on slavery. Other sections were based on people's memory, or on the collective memory of an area. For the section on the Liverpool's Unity Theatre, set up out of the Liverpool Communists' Popular Front for Spain, we were able to consult activists with many years connection to the theatre, including one actor who had read a poem on the troupe's first night, way back in 1937. The most time-consuming part of the process was taking the manuscript from a proof stage to final production. This is precisely the task which would normally fall to an outside publisher, although since we were self-publishing the pamphlet, there was nobody else to ask. Having been transcribed, the text was saved in Word, and Bryan Taylor agreed to set it up in PageMaker. Another friend, Nick Blackwell, helped with the cover, which was based on a lino-cut by Anne Alexander, used as a leaflet design in the past. We delivered camera-ready copy to the printer, East End Offset, whose role was little more than photocopying. It cost about £450 to print 500 copies, and some of this money was raised by pre-selling copies to friends and bookshops. We were also lucky to receive some support from Liverpool Trades Council. Incidentally, university lecturers are sponsored all the time. This is why so many books have acknowledgement sections, to thank the various funding councils that allowed the authors to take time off from teaching.5 Indeed in the universities, time is typically the budget unit. In our case we had time but not capital, and consequently any external funding went straight to cover production costs. At the end, I'm afraid, we had no money to spare. One issue which came up was who should be named as the publisher? In order to be able to sell the pamphlet through stores and over the web, we determined to obtain an ISBN number. But to do that, we had to set up an independent publishing house. I suggested the name Hegemon, as a link to Gramsci's notion of hegemony.6 This raised eyes at the printers - 'What's a Hegemon then?' - but most members of the group seemed happy with the choice. With a clubs and societies' account, and an ISBN obtained through Whittaker's, we could advertise the pamphlet. So far I have described the act of putting the pamphlet together as a collective process, but there were tensions which arose within the group. One issue was over my role. I came to the project as a practising history teacher. Part of my work involves teaching knowledge and part teaching skills. I find it hard to resist the urge to act as a teacher even though now I was among comrades. One day, for example, I found myself talking to Babs Hennessy on how to write essay plans. Babs is a typist for Liverpool Council, she wasn't educated at university, and she cheerfully told me that she had never written anything for publication before in her life. She confided that when she wrote meetings she always did so without plans and 'from the top of her head'. I tried to show her how a plan might work, how it would sharpen her argument and so on. 'It doesn't make any sense to me,' she replied, 'doesn't it slow everything down to write it all twice?' I could see advantages in her working differently, but I wasn't Babs' teacher, I was her comrade. Rather than sounding too much like a lecturer, I chose to retreat and didn't push the point. There were similar pressures in my relationship with another contributor, Peta. All the time I wanted to hurry her up, as if she were a student behind on a deadline. Again I will admit that I found it difficult to re-adjust from my general working relationship as a teacher to my relationship in this project of equality. I had to learn not to hurry other members of the group, but to progress at their rate. Another source of conflict was the issue of ownership. Although Anne had written much of the walk, she had very little time to contribute towards the editing of the text. Much the same was true for Peta, Babs Hennessy, and Norah Rushton. In each case, these were local activists, and it was their political work which denied them the time to write history. At the time of writing I was less of a day-to-day activist myself, and I had potentially a different outlook on where the pamphlet should go. Peta Bulmer, who helped with the section on Toxteth, sent me the following email on 27 January: "i think it sounds academic, nostalgic and historical. this is all good, but is this what the pamph aims to do? is it a history book or something we can see and use to get people involved in making history today? i don't want it to be a - isn't liverpool ace - book or a - wasn't it better in the past either. it should be, as far as i am concerned, something we can use in order to organise workers now." Peta clearly felt that the pamphlet was moving in the wrong direction. She believed that the problem with the text was an over-concentration on the experience of the past to the exclusion of a politics based on the future: "i think the pamph has a role in documenting the unwritten history of liverpool's class struggle, but at the same time it should be clear that the point is what we do now. this is not obvious from the intro, even though you do say something like this at one point." Her suggestion was that the introduction should be re-written, which it was, but I'm not sure that all Peta's worries were answered. One thing I learned from the experience is that a problem of tone is much harder to resolve than a problem of detail or content. The title of this paper refers to the historian 'as outsider'. I wouldn't want to exaggerate the tensions between myself and the other authors of the pamphlet, but we did come to the process with a different understanding of the past. They were primarily influenced by their experience as socialist activists. For Anne and Peta, certainly, history is a weapon to be used in struggle. I think of a line from Walter Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', which captures the spirit of this activist approach, 'Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the flames of resistance, who understands that if his enemy wins even the dead will not be spared. And that enemy has not ceased to be victorious.'7 History in this view is a means to understanding the present. As a working historian, my approach to the past was necessarily different. I was more concerned to convey the totality of what happened. If only for the sake of professional pride, I wanted readers to have access to a range of accounts. It would then be the reader's choice who to believe. This is a less strident approach to the past, less optimistic perhaps but no less partisan. It is also a style which has a place within the literature. As Bertolt Brecht wrote following Benjamin's death, 'The enemy who drove you from your books / Will not be worn down by the likes of us.'8 I am an activist as well as a historian, and I would hope that my history is shaped by the interplay of these different pressures. But I would recognise the contradiction. Having described some of the tensions within the group, I would also stress the positive side of our collaboration. Writing as part of a group is usually more positive than writing simply as an individual. The advantages of writing history as part of a group include a sharing of skills, and also access to a range of sources that would otherwise be closed to you. I will give just one example. When we were finishing the pamphlet, the last section to be written was the one on women's struggles. A week before the final text was supposed to be sent off, Babs Hennessy had the idea that such a chapter should be written. Non-one else had thought of it, and as there are no secondary sources available, most of us were sceptical that enough information could be gathered. In this week, Babs contacted council workers, women dockers and other women activists to interview for material. She has lived in Liverpool for fifteen years, much longer than I have. There was no way that Anne or I could have collected such a quality of material in that short time. So although there were tensions, there were also many positive sides to our experience. It was a pleasure to work with the other authors. The point was made earlier that my situation in this project was unlike the conventional role of the historian. In order to keep the pamphlet open, accessible and popular in tone, there were no footnotes, and sources were marked out instead by a list of supplementary reading. Given what has been said about the importance of verification, this seemed to me an important omission. My task was not that of Ranke's diligent researcher, writing history from the 'purest, most immediate documents'.9 Nor could it be compared to Collingwood's idealist historian, straining to enter the thought-patterns of their subject, in his phrase, 'all history is the history of thought'.10 As I have already indicated, most of the pamphlet was written by other people. Yet there is one sense in which my role was similar to the conventional historian's. My function was to check the accuracy of what had already been compiled. The authors of the pamphlet wanted to be sure that their material was accurate enough to be published. This was a negative role, one of omission rather than commission, but it was a historian's task. If I was not quite the historian, was my role more comparable to that of a PhD supervisor? Having recently attended a year-long course in research degree supervision, this is a question which is of importance to me. There was a definite similarity between my role in the group and that described in the literature. Typically, the supervisor appears as a facilitator, someone who passes on experience and know-how. They are the craftsmen to the apprentice. In another paper, I have been more pessimistic about the PhD supervisor's role. It seems to me that the actual relationships between supervisors and graduate students are typically degraded by the impact of the market on education. University departments are under pressure to generate research income, and postgraduate students are rapidly integrated into this cycle. As a result they lose autonomy over their research, and supervisors are a key agent in the degradation of their work.11 It is true that this article has raised several anxieties about my role within the group, yet I would still maintain that our semi-equal relationships were much closer to the ideal relationships which educationalists posit than the unequal relationships actually experienced at university. Finally, what did I learn about history from the experience of editing the pamphlet? One point I re-learned was that history should not be the sole preserve of the professional historians. Any writing about the past is history which is open, in which the author remains aware of contrary views, and in which he or she is determined not to omit nor to distort. Assuming that the skill of historical accuracy and verification should be left to tenured historians simply reduces the numbers of people writing and the range of techniques used. If this article encourages more people to write about the past, if it reduces some of the mystique which does still surround the role of the historian, then it will have served its purpose. This paper was first given at the Ruskin Public History Conference in May 2000. Thanks to Anne Alexander for comments. Notes 1. The limits of this popular theory are discussed in R. Samuel (ed), People's History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp.22-48. 2. S. Rowbotham, Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight against it (London: Pluto, 1977 edn); R. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Volume 1: Past and Present in Popular Culture (London and New York: Verso, 1994); E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 edn); D. Widgery, Some Lives (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1991). 3. This concern with verification is the corollary of Carr's emphasis on the 'facts' of history. See E.H. Carr, What is History? (London: Penguin, 1987 edn), pp.7-30. 4. From D. Renton et al., Socialism in Liverpool: Episodes in a History of Working-Class Struggle (Liverpool: Hegemon Press, 2000). 5. For a sceptical view of this process, M. Shaw, Marxism and Social Science: The Roots of Social Knowledge (London: Pluto, 1975), pp.54-61. 6. A. Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp.416-418. 7. W. Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in W. Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1992 edn), pp.211-45. 8. Cited in W. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (London: Verso, 1983 edn), p.xviii. 9. Some of Ranke's ideas can be read as excerpts in F. Stern, The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (London: Macmillan, 1970 edn), pp.54-62. 10. R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). 11. D. Renton, 'The Insurgent Sociologist: Tactics to Combat Research Degree Supervision', unpublished paper for Edge Hill Course in Research Degree Supervision, 2000. |
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