Now I am always interested in the books which people say had a profound effect on them.
For those in the Labour movement that book is usually "The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists" by Robert Tressell which described the working conditions on a building site in the early years of the last century.
I will have read it sometime in the summer of 1967, by which time I had already been a member of the Labour Party for over a year.
And while the novel is a powerful critique of capitalism, my choice would be A L Morton’s “A People’s History of England”, published in 1938.
I pretty much read it from cover to cover around the same time as Tressell’s book, and in the midst of doing A level History, English and the British Constitution, I found it a revealing and challenging anecdote to traditional accounts of our past.
Moreover, it complimented the teachings of two of my three teachers at Crown Woods and shaped my own thinking and my own approach to teaching and writing history.
It is one of those “general histories” which sweeps through our story, starting during the Neolithic period, and rolling on to the Roman occupation, the Feudal System, the development and dominance of capitalism, into the age of Imperialism, culminating on the eve of the Second World War.
It moves with a pace, is easy to read, but has a sense of authority, and of course advances a different approach which seeks not to explain the past as the actions of Kings and Queens, or “great men and women” but from the bottom up.
It opens with a paragraph which seems all the more relevant at present, starting in prehistory with “Early maps show a world in which Britain is a remote outpost, a shapeless cluster of islands out into the encircling ocean.
But in some of these maps a significant tilt brings their South-western coast close to the North of Spain, reminding us that earlier still, centuries before the making of maps that have survived , Britain lay not outside the world but on a regular trade route which linked Mediterranean civilisation with the amber bearing North”.*
In the course of the book Mr. Morton does not fall into the trap of romanticizing the past, recognizing that while “the Levellers’ movement looks forward to the demands of the Chartists in the Nineteenth Century it had in the Seventeenth no solid backing.
It was movement of a doomed class, the independent farmers, who with the exception of the fortunate few, were in the next two centuries to be slowly crushed by the growth of large-scale capitalist agriculture ……….” **
The first edition published in 1938, ended with an epilogue, written a year earlier, which concluded with “The world stands in the shadow of a war more terrible than that of 1914.
If war comes the British Government must bear a heavy share of the responsibility.
It is not even now too late for the danger to be averted , if the British people, and above all the working people who form the overwhelming majority of the population and who are always the worst suffers in any war, are able to unite in sufficient strength to force the Government to stop aggression and take their stand with France and the Soviet Union for world peace”.***
Twenty-seven years later, writing a forward to a new edition Mr. Morton explained, that he had dropped the epilogue, because it had become “quite inadequate as an account of those momentous years from 1914 to 1938, but didn’t feel himself “competent to deal with the very difficult problems of a period quite outside my own field of study”.****
Now that may be, but I rather think that the closing paragraphs of that epilogue have a resonance today, and even more so if we substitute Brexit for war, and adapt the reference to the named countries.
Location; Britain
Pictures; cover to the 1974 edition, published by Lawrence & Wishart, Peterloo Commemorations, 2019, courtesy of David Harrop, Farm Labourers Lock-Out Demonstration, Manchester, 1874, from the Graphic Newspaper 1874, and NUM badge, 1986 from the collection of Andrew Simpson
**ibid page 247
*** ibid page 526
****Moreton, A.L., Forward to first paperback edition, published by Lawrence & Wishart, 1965
 |
| Book cover, 1974 |
I will have read it sometime in the summer of 1967, by which time I had already been a member of the Labour Party for over a year.
And while the novel is a powerful critique of capitalism, my choice would be A L Morton’s “A People’s History of England”, published in 1938.
I pretty much read it from cover to cover around the same time as Tressell’s book, and in the midst of doing A level History, English and the British Constitution, I found it a revealing and challenging anecdote to traditional accounts of our past.
Moreover, it complimented the teachings of two of my three teachers at Crown Woods and shaped my own thinking and my own approach to teaching and writing history.
It is one of those “general histories” which sweeps through our story, starting during the Neolithic period, and rolling on to the Roman occupation, the Feudal System, the development and dominance of capitalism, into the age of Imperialism, culminating on the eve of the Second World War.
 |
| Peterloo Commemorations, 2019 |
It opens with a paragraph which seems all the more relevant at present, starting in prehistory with “Early maps show a world in which Britain is a remote outpost, a shapeless cluster of islands out into the encircling ocean.
But in some of these maps a significant tilt brings their South-western coast close to the North of Spain, reminding us that earlier still, centuries before the making of maps that have survived , Britain lay not outside the world but on a regular trade route which linked Mediterranean civilisation with the amber bearing North”.*
In the course of the book Mr. Morton does not fall into the trap of romanticizing the past, recognizing that while “the Levellers’ movement looks forward to the demands of the Chartists in the Nineteenth Century it had in the Seventeenth no solid backing.
It was movement of a doomed class, the independent farmers, who with the exception of the fortunate few, were in the next two centuries to be slowly crushed by the growth of large-scale capitalist agriculture ……….” **
 |
| Demonstrations in support of Farm Labourers, 1874 |
If war comes the British Government must bear a heavy share of the responsibility.
It is not even now too late for the danger to be averted , if the British people, and above all the working people who form the overwhelming majority of the population and who are always the worst suffers in any war, are able to unite in sufficient strength to force the Government to stop aggression and take their stand with France and the Soviet Union for world peace”.***
Twenty-seven years later, writing a forward to a new edition Mr. Morton explained, that he had dropped the epilogue, because it had become “quite inadequate as an account of those momentous years from 1914 to 1938, but didn’t feel himself “competent to deal with the very difficult problems of a period quite outside my own field of study”.****
 |
| N.U.M , 1986 |
Location; Britain
Pictures; cover to the 1974 edition, published by Lawrence & Wishart, Peterloo Commemorations, 2019, courtesy of David Harrop, Farm Labourers Lock-Out Demonstration, Manchester, 1874, from the Graphic Newspaper 1874, and NUM badge, 1986 from the collection of Andrew Simpson
*Morton, A. L., A People’s History of England, 1938 Tribes and Legions, page 13, Left Book Club Edition
**ibid page 247
*** ibid page 526
****Moreton, A.L., Forward to first paperback edition, published by Lawrence & Wishart, 1965
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