This eager vagabond figure, the absolute negation of administrative and executive efficiency, carried inside him an explosive charge of energy, an endless capacity to generate ideas and initiatives, and above all a quite astonishing capacity to talk others into realizing them. The Universities and Left Review was one of them, the ‘History Workshop’ movement, origin of the History Workshop Journal (the most influential meeting-point of the post-Marxist historians of the left), was another. The Partisan Coffee House was a third. With two generations of Jewish revolutionary Marxists from Eastern Europe behind him, he dreamed of replacing the Stalinist authoritarianism of the Party with a free-wheeling creative mobilization of political minds, and what better centre for doing so than a cafe? Not one of those neo-baroque quick-consumption coffee bars which were then filling the side streets of the West End with the newly popular Gaggia Espresso machines, but a real Soho cafe, in which people could discuss theoretical issues, play chess, consume strudel and hold political meetings in a back room, as on the continent in the days before innocence was lost. The profits of the cafe swould pay for the Review itself, whose offices would be above it. The Partisan would express both the new spirit of politics and the new spirit of the arts. It would be designed by the cutting-edge young architects of the moment, who were obviously going to be in sympathy with the project. I cannot remember whether jazz sessions were part of the dream. More likely folk sessions. To ensure its bona fides (and perhaps win the support of the older generation) some suitable left-wing personalities would preside over it. I let myself be talked into one of these directorships, against my better judgement. An eminent tweed-suited ex-CP architect with a house in Keats Grove was another. I cannot remember any of the others. Raph took not the slightest notice of any of us.
In retrospect it seems incredible that this hare-brained project got beyond the initial pitch. And yet it did. Even Raphael’s genius as a salesman could not have raised the very substantial amount of money needed without the prior collapse of the Communist Party’s so-called ‘Business Branch’, which had previously provided much of the CP’s income. Until 1956 they had been a solid bastion of loyal orthodoxy who asked visiting Party speakers (actually, me, on the occasion I talked there) to address them on such subjects as ‘The Paris Commune of 1871’. Now prosperous, some of them even very rich, the revelation of what had been done to Soviet Jews in the last Stalin years was too much for these overwhelmingly Jewish East Enders recruited to the Party during the anti-fascist era. Whoever backed the Partisan must have known that it was not a serious business proposition, but something about the youth and the sheer utopian confidence of Raph must have appealed to middle-aged men whose moral universe lay in ruins around them. Somehow Raph got the money, a house was bought or leased in Carlisle Street, Soho, within sight of Marx’s old residence in Dean Street, and the Partisan Coffee House was installed.
It was a scheme designed for disaster. The then current fashion among architects preferred austere interiors looking like station waiting rooms. These attracted the more demoralized bums and the fringe hangers-on of Soho, who were neither welcomed in nor attracted by establishments with a more elaborate decor, especially at night, as well as the Metropolitan Police in search of drug-busts. The large expensive tables and square chunky seats were designed to encourage drafting thesis chapters and long debates on tactics, while minimizing the space for, and the rate of consumption of, income-generating customers. In any case, the management of the Partisan was not strong on checking cash receipts and keeping accounts. In short, though Raphael attempted to explain all this away to the increasingly gloomy directors, the place went out of business within two years. Only nostalgia and the need to maintain contact between the pre- and post-1956 generations of the left can explain why I found myself involved in this lunatic enterprise. And yet, it was not more predictably doomed than the various other political enterprises of those who left the Party in 1956– 7. Like the Partisan Coffee House the political projects of the ‘New Left’ of 1956 are now a half-remembered footnote.
Intellectually 1956 left rather more behind – not least the remarkable impact of E. P. Thompson, who was to be recorded by the Arts and Humanities Citations Index (1976–83) as one of the 100 most- cited twentieth-century authors in any field covered by the Index. Before 1956 he was little known outside the CP, in which he had spent the years since returning from the war as a brilliant, handsome, passionate and oratorically gifted activist in Yorkshire, and his adult classes, whose members saw him as ‘a tall, rangy sort of fellow’ overloaded with nervous energy, explicating poems by William Blake.12 For his original passion had been for literature rather than history as such, although he was marginally involved in the Historians’ Group. It was 1956 that made him primarily into a historian. His later fame is essentially based on The Making of the English Working Class (1963), an erupting historical volcano of 848 pages which was immediately accepted as a major work even by the world of professional historians, and which captured young radical readers on both sides of the Atlantic overnight, and continental European sociologists and social historians not long after. And this in spite of its almost aggressively brief chronological span and narrowly English – not even British – subject matter. Escaping from the cage of the old Party orthodoxy, it allowed him as well to join a collective debate with other hitherto isolated thinkers of the left, old and new, also often rooted in the adult education movement, notably the other major figure of the first ‘New Left,’ the literary scholar Raymond Williams.
Edward was indeed a person of quite extraordinary gifts, not least the sort of palpable ‘star quality’, which led every eye to turn towards his increasingly craggy good looks whenever he was present on any scene. His ‘work combined passion and intellect, the gifts of the poet, the narrator and the analyst. He was the only historian I knew who had not just talent, brilliance, erudition and the gift of writing, but … ‘‘genius in the traditional sense of the word’’ ’,13 and all the more obviously so since he fitted the Romantic image of the genius in looks, life and work – especially with the suitable landscape of the Welsh hills behind him.
In short, he was a man showered by the fairies at birth with all possible gifts except two. Nature had omitted to provide him with an in-built sub-editor and an in-built compass. And, with all his warmth, charm, humour and rage, it left him in some ways insecure and vulnerable. Like so many of his other works, The Making had begun as the first chapter of a short textbook on British labour history from 1790 to 1945, and had just got out of hand. Within a few years he suspended the remarkable studies of eighteenth-century society begun after The Making had turned him temporarily into an orthodox academic, which did not fit his style, to plunge into years of a theoretical struggle against the influence of a French Marxist, the late Louis Althusser, who inspired some of the brightest of the contemporary young leftists at that time. At the end of the seventies all his energy was diverted into the anti-nuclear movement, of which he became the national star. He never returned to history until he was too ill to complete his projects. He died in 1993 in his Worcestershire garden.
One could not fault a scholar for giving up writing for anti-nuclear campaigning in the early 1980s, but the Althusserian episode had no such justification. I told him at the time that it would be criminal to turn from his potentially epoch-making historical work to controverting a thinker who would be dead as an influence in another ten years’ time. And indeed, Althusser was already getting close to his sell-by date in the French Marxisant milieu even then. Though he helped at the time to open theoretical debate on the left, he survives today not as a philosopher but chiefly by virtue of his tragic personal trajectory. He was a manic-depressive who was to kill his wife. But even this was not then predictable, although Althusser in his manic phases was already a somewhat disturbing experience. Shortly before the tragedy he came to London, officially for a seminar at University College, unofficially to mobilize support for some hare-brained stratospheric initiative in which he wanted to involve Marxism Today and myself. His host handed him over to us after a night’s hospitality and Marlene looked after him for a morning, during which, inspired by our modest instrument, he insisted on ordering a grand piano from a local store for delivery to Paris. When picked up by his next caretaker he expressed an immediate interest in a Rolls-Royce (or maybe a Jaguar) from a car showroom in Mayfair which he insisted on visiting. It seemed clear that this brilliant mind was already accelerating the ride of his mental motorbike round some wall of death to a fatal climax.
The truth is that Edward suffered bitterly from the failure of the 1956 ‘New Left’. None of the ex-communist generation expected much of the Labour Party. The new generation of the intellectual young, with whom he wanted
