Elton and the practice of history

My links with Sir Geoffrey Elton were slight but memorable.  I had attended some of his lecture on the Tudors while I was in the sixth form and had dinner with him following a Historical Association conference in Cambridge where I had given a paper on the industrial revolution that he said he enjoyed.  The dinner proved to be an edifying experience during which Elton demonstrated all the qualities that I had heard about from his students and had culled from other historians.  I found that he was pugnacious in his response, devouring arguments and expressing himself with a combination of wit, sarcasm and certitude, a heady mix of relevant and irreverent comment that combined charm and a certain rudeness.  This, I was later told, was not usual as he drew out his sparring partners with a mix of often outrageous and frequently indefensible statements and blunt responses.    Nonetheless it proved to be a memorable evening as he talked about history and what was wrong with it and politics and what was wrong with that as well and responded with barbed words that slurped on into the early hours. 

When Elton died in late 1994, the obituaries inevitably focused on his contribution to the history of Tudor England. His name will forever be identified with the Tudors though even before he died revisionist historians were beginning to chip away at many of his conclusions.[1] This process continues and a cursory glance to bibliographies on Tudor England for current students makes little mention of his work and then critically.  But Elton left another, equally important, legacy: a vigorous defence of traditional, narrative history, history as the reconstruction and telling of tales about past human experiences, actions and thoughts. Elton’s first and most famous foray into the philosophy of history was The Practice of History (1967), a manifesto, he said, setting out his experience of studying, writing and teaching history. This was followed by Political History: Principles and Practice (1970) in which he argued for the centrality and importance of political action in the study of the past and further developed his views on the nature of historical explanation. In Which Road to the Past? (1983), he debated the merits of ‘traditional’ versus ‘scientific’ history with Robert Fogel, the American economic historian and, finally, Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (1991), a restatement of his faith in those ‘old-fashioned convictions and practices’ that informed his work.

Elton presented his writings on the nature and methods of history not as philosophy, but as a pragmatic account of what working historians like himself did. But to make such an account convincing, it was necessary to explain and defend the fundamental assumptions underpinning the discipline’s traditional practices. The  result was a sustained defence of a human action account of the past, that history was not the result of social structures, objective forces or linguistic discourses, but of autonomous human agents and that to explain and comprehend the past, historians must provide an account of those agents’ actions in their own terms, as they were lived and played out at the time as far as the available sources allowed. The assertion of the role of reason in human affairs was also at the heart of Elton’s conception of the purpose of studying history. The study of history is an exercise in reason whose purpose is to enlarge the area of individual experience by teaching about human behaviour. Elton wrote in Return to Essentials

History provides the laboratory in which human experience is analysed, distilled and bottled for use. The so-called lessons of history do not teach you to do this or that now; they teach you to think more deeply, more completely, and on the basis of an enormously enlarged experience, about what it may be possible or desirable to do now ... By enormously enlarging personal experience, history can help us to grow up--to resist those who, with good will or ill, would force us all into the straitjackets of their supposed answers to the problems of existence. [2]

Elton started from the view that in the past there were people like us, with thoughts, feelings, ambitions, concerns and problems. These people lived and made choices and what they did produced the events, effects, creations and results which is history. When people acted in the past, exercised their will and made choices they made their futures and created our present. History for Elton was explicable, but the varieties, complexities and vagaries of human reasoning and thinking in diverse situations made it unpredictable. This led him to assert that those who study the past have a responsibility to acknowledge its humanity:

The recognition that at every moment in the past the future was essentially unpredictable and subject to human choice lies at the heart of a study which respects the past and allows it a life of its own. If men (and women) are treated as devoid of choice, their reason is demolished; the product is a history which dehumanises mankind.

In this perspective, there was little place for the large-scale forces, trends, structures, and patterns beloved by social scientists. Everything in history, the events of the past, happens to and through people. Sociological categories may be useful descriptive short-hands of movements and outcomes over the long-run, but they remained abstractions unable to explain specific actions and events, the details and particularities of past happenings created by real people doing something. ‘History’ Elton argued, ‘deals with the activities of men, not abstractions’.  He nonetheless recognised that all events happen in a context, in particular conditions and circumstances of thought and action but, he maintained, this contest represented a set of influences and constraints on action, not a transcendent force directing or determining action.  Elton developed his account of causation in history in Political History: Principles and Practice. The task of historians, he argued, was to explain the events of the past. They did this by working backwards from known effects to their causes. By ‘causes’ he meant those ‘antecedent events, actions, thoughts and situations’ relevant to the explanation of the event to be explained. Such causes he divided into two types: situational or contextual causes and direct causes.  It is the latter that are decisive: while situational causes (which are anyway largely human creations themselves) produce contexts, it is direct causes--the exercise of human will--which make history.

Direct causes explain why the event actually happened; situational causes explain why direct causes proved effective.

Elton illustrated his point with reference to the type of explanation he proposed in Reformation Europe, 1517-1559 (1963). Situational causes such as the state of the church, nationalist resentment of Italian popes, spiritual dissatisfaction, the growth of humanism and the desire for ecclesiastical wealth allowed or encouraged a particular historical result, the split in the Church of Rome. But that outcome was actually brought about by actions such as those of Luther and other reformers, the separatist moves by the German princes, Henry VIII’s divorce petition and Thomas Cromwell’s programme for a political break with Rome.

Elton claimed that what distinguished history from other approaches to the study of human affairs was the role of evidence in generating and limiting, as well as validating, the statements and conclusions of historians.  His historical method consisted of the critical examination of this evidence to reconstruct the causes of historical events. Elton called his approach to evidence the ‘empirical or thesis-free’ method, meaning that historians must be committed to allowing interpretations of the past to emerge from the evidence not the other way round.  In arguing for the primacy of evidence in historical work, Elton had to deal with how far human subjectivity in the interpretation and selection of the `facts’ intruded into what were claimed to be ‘true’ accounts of the past. Historians are human and there is biased and subjective history as well as balanced and objective history. Furthermore, argued Elton, the process of historical research should not be a matter of selecting facts to prove a thesis or an argument (bad history) but the reconstruction of a real past peopled by real individuals who did things that actually happened (good history) and the veracity of such reconstructions should be assessed and judged against all the known evidence, not just that which is presented in a particular account.  He recognised the difficulty with his ‘practice’ and in The Practice of History, commented:

All assessment of evidence must be the work of the intellect, of the reasoning faculty. The historian cannot but work on the assumption that whatever happened is capable of rational explanation and that evidence is the product of an act discoverable by reason. And yet we all know that this is not quite true; that we act, react and reflect from motives which have little to do with reason and under influences--such as ill-health, a quarrel with people not involved in the transaction, whim and lack of thought--that can but rarely appear in the…evidence. [3]

Elton favoured the writing of history in the form of ‘narratives thickened by analysis’, stories of human action and reaction over time punctuated by in-depth discussions and explanations of direct and situational causes. But no narrative, of necessity composed of a linear sequence of sentences, could adequately capture the simultaneity of thoughts and actions, the complexity and multiplicity of causes, and the interconnectedness of events. Life was a mess on which historians imposed order, shape, pattern, meaning and intelligibility. Elton concluded that ‘In a very real sense history cannot be correctly written’.

How historians conducted this exercise in reason was, for Elton, crucial. Historians’ rejection of all paradigms except the assumption of reason and human choice secured their freedom from all authorities except that of evidence. In preserving their intellectual freedom to insist on the primacy of evidence and simply to state what happened and why, historians contribute to freedom of thought and action for all. On one occasion Elton wrote: ‘history is an unending search for the truth, with the only certainty at each man’s end that there will be more to be said and that, before long, other’s will say it’. In the case of Elton’s ‘philosophy’, much of what he said was often said better by others such as Isaiah Berlin, Carl Becker, R. G. Collingwood, Pieter Geyl, even Jack Hexter. But as one of the greatest practitioners of his craft and as one of the few outright defenders of what he saw as the ‘beleaguered bastion of empiricist and non-ideological history’, Elton deserves more than most to be read and listened to.

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[1] Elton’s publications included The Tudor Revolution in Government (1953); England under the Tudors (1955), The Tudor Constitution (1960), Reformation Europe (1963), Reform and Renewal (1973), Reform and Reformation: England 1509-1558 (1977), The Parliament of England 1559-1581 (1986), and The English (1992). .

[2] G.R. Elton Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 72-73.

[3] G.R. Elton The Practice of History, Fontana, 1969, p. 64.

The Craft of History

I have several connections with Marc Bloch, the French historian who was shot in 1944 for being in the Resistance during the war.  My great-uncle studied briefly with him in Paris in 1938 just after Bloch moved from to the capital from his position as Professor of Medieval History at the University of Strasbourg and who always proclaimed he was the ‘best’ historian he’d ever worked with.  His La Societe feodale was one of the first books I read at university in the late-60s though in a translation that betrayed the elegance of the original and several years ago I acquired a copy of a book on medieval France that Bloch had signed and which, presumably came from his own library.  Although medieval history had come a long way in the past seventy years, Bloch remains an important historian who is still worth reading even if some of his conclusions are now open to question.  Very few academics revolutionise the way in which History is studied, but Bloch did that, helping to create the hugely influential Annales school, which argued compellingly in favour of the study of ‘history from below’—of everyday life, that is, studied in the context of geography and the social environment and over la longue durée, the long term: typically a thousand years or more.

 

His Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien was first published in England as The Historian’s Craft in 1954, an American edition had appeared the previous year.  Written between 1941 and 1943 ‘as a simple antidote by which, amid sorrows and anxieties, both personal and collective’, it was never completed and was ‘reconstructed’ from three draft copies by his friend Lucien Febvre.  It lacks any references –Bloch intended to add these later—and whether what we have is what Bloch would have ultimately published is debatable.  It was a work in progress but despite this it has proved a popular and widely read study that has been translated into eight languages.  In 1952, Italian and Spanish translations appeared,  soon followed in 1953 by an English translation. Other translations have appeared: in Germany, Estonia, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. The total circulation of the book is over 450,000 copies worldwide.

The Historian’s Craft  was a response to Bloch’s son’s question ‘What is the use of history?’ and is divided into an introduction and five chapters: the past and history, evidence, historical criticism, historical analysis and causation.  For Bloch, history is the science of men in time.  Time is a continuum and the past can only be explained in terms of the present and the present in terms of the past.  This was echoed several decades later by Arthur Marwick when he called history ‘a social necessity’.  The reciprocal relationship between past and present, Bloch argued, can be penetrated by the use of tools of the historical dialectic such as observation, criticism, analysis and the concept of causation.  Observation was a complex search for ‘tracks’ often partially obliterated or wholly destroyed while evidence changes its character and meaning and can only be interpreted by rigorous criticism.  Perhaps the most important chapter is on historical analysis.  For Bloch, if historians are to fulfil their real function, they must be able to see what is behind the record, to fathom what is never recorded in so many words.  There must be a victory of mind over material.

Bloch’s focus is on professional practice based on a division of labour and specialisation and cooperation of all those who practice’ .  The originality of the work lies in the consideration of the new developments in the history of epistemology and philosophy of science. Bloch placed considerable emphasis on communication issues: communication with the community of historians demanding a common language and communication with the public through a language accessible to everyone. Bloch was convinced that the historian’s function was to strive to enrich the collective memory, not simply in the service of a country and that historians alone were willing to serve all humanity. 

What are turning points in history?

Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517, the Renaissance, the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Waterloo a decade later, the outbreak of the First World War in 1914….are all regarded by historians (well at least some of them) as ‘turning points’ in history. But what does this actually mean?  In Martin Luther’s case, his actions precipitated the Reformation; the Renaissance marked the divide between medievalism and modernism; Trafalgar and Waterloo were landmark battles that marked Napoleon’s final defeat on sea and land; while the First World War marked the end of autocratic regimes and the beginnings of European-wide democratic systems of government.  But this is a retrospective judgement, a construct historians use to delineate the distinction between events and those events that have a retrospective significance.  Take, for instance, Luther’s action.  There had been criticism of the Papacy almost since it was established a thousand years earlier: it was too worldly, too corrupt, too concerned with economic and political aggrandisement than spiritual purity.  In nailing his list of criticisms to the cathedral door, Luther was doing what others had done in the past and would do so in the future: he was suggesting that some reform of the Church was necessary to make in more spiritual and concerned with the spiritual needs of the people.  It was a petition seeking support, comment and debate.  Luther may have been seeking a re-formation of the Church as an institution but only later did he seek a doctrinal reformation.  Had Luther’s criticism been addressed by the Church would there have been a Reformation at all?  Possibly but equally possibly not.

So what is a turning point in history?  If one accepts that the past is a linear progression from A to B (and it’s a pretty messy linear progression anyway), then a turning point marks the point at which individuals, groups, nations or states move in a radically different direction.  It’s a bit like going up the M1 and intending to come off at junction 25 but deciding, for whatever reason, to leave at junction 23.  You may not have planned it -- and turning points are almost always not planned – but it seemed a good idea at the time.  Only later do you realise that it literally marked a turning point.  Life, now as then, is made up of choices and possibilities and we all have pasts that could have led to different presents.  Individuals in the past had myriad possibilities just as we do and it is historians who judge whether decision C marked a turning point or not and inevitably historians disagree over this and there is further confusion since what are turning points change over time.  Take, for instance, the Suffragette movement.  The early historiography of the movement established a linear connection between its growing militancy and women (some at least) obtaining the vote in 1918.  More recently historians have suggested that militancy far from helping this process of voting changes possibly delayed it and that the role of non-militant suffragists was far more important in persuading male politicians that giving women the vote did not threaten Britain’s emerging democracy.  So which was the turning point, the formation of the Nation Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1897 or the formation of the Women’s Suffrage and Political Union six years later?  The significance of particular events in the Second World War also illustrates the problem of defining turning points.  Which of the following marked a turning point? The defeat of the U-boat threat in the Atlantic, the Battle of Britain, Pear Harbor, El Alamein and D-Day.  All? Some? None? Or were they simply part of the process that led to the real turning point: the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945? 

The use of turning points is a historiographical short-hand for something of significance, a point where things change irremediably. But it is always a matter of debate and argument.  If there ever was a collective noun for historians, it would be a disagreement.

Some further ideas on E. H. Carr

John Tosh, in the most recent edition of The Pursuit of History describes Carr’s book as ‘still unsurpassed as a stimulating and provocative statement by a radically inclined scholar’[1]. Keith Jenkins, much less inclined to view Carr as a radical scholar, nevertheless confirms the importance of What is History? suggesting that, along with Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice of History both texts are still popularly seen as ‘‘essential introductions’ to the ‘history question’’[2]. Jenkins concludes both Carr and Elton ‘have long set the agenda for much if not all of the crucially important preliminary thinking about the question of what is history’.[3]   So, according to Tosh and Jenkins, there remains, in Britain at least, in a lively dialogue with What is History?. Why is this the case? The reason lies in the position Carr took on the nature of historical knowledge, a position that brought him into a long conflict with, among others, the Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton. John Tosh commented further that ‘The controversy between Carr and Elton is the best starting-point for the debate about the standing of historical knowledge’.[4] Until Jenkins’ re-appraisal of Carr’s philosophy of history, Carr had been viewed almost universally among British historians as standing for a very distinctive relativist, if not indeed a sceptical conception of the functioning of the historian.

Explaining Carr’s ‘radicalism’, Michael Stanford has claimed Carr ‘insisted that the historian cannot divorce himself from the outlook and interests of his age’.[5] Stanford quotes Carr’s own claim that the historian ‘is part of history’ with a particular ‘angle of vision over the past’.[6] As Stanford points out, Carr’s ‘first answer...to the question What is History? is that it is a continuous ‘process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past’. While this was not a fresh insight with Carr, it still established him out for a number of years as someone with a novel stance. However, over time, the effect of his argument was to increasingly balance the excesses of the hard core empiricists. In What is History?, Carr propelled British historiography that pivoted on a new epistemological certitude.

The claim to epistemological radicalism on behalf of Carr does not seem especially convincing. Why? Today, more and more history writing is based on the assumption that we can know nothing genuinely truthful about the reality of the past. It would be tempting, but wholly incorrect, to say that history’s pendulum has swung far more to the notion of history as a construction or fabrication of the historian. Rather, what has happened is that the contemporary conditions of existence have created a much deeper uncertainty about the nature of knowledge-creation and its uses in the humanities. It is not about swings in intellectual fashion.

It follows, a growing number of historians believe that we do not ‘discover’ patterns in apparently contingent events because, instead, we unavoidably impose our own hierarchies of significance on them. Few historians today are naive realists and accept there must be given meaning in the evidence. While we may all agree at the level of the event that something happened at a particular time and place in the past, its significance is provided by the historian. Meaning is not immanent in the event itself. Moreover, the challenge to the distinction of fact and fiction as historians configure their historical narratives, and further acknowledgments of the cognitive power of rhetoric, style and trope (metaphors are arguments and explanations) provide not only a formal challenge to traditional empiricism, but forces them to acknowledge that as historians we are making moral choices as we describe past reality.

Does all this add up to a more fundamental criticism of historical knowing than Carr imagined in What is History?? I think so. If this catalogue is what historical relativism means today, it provides a much larger agenda for the contemporary historian than Carr’s acceptance that the historian is in a dialogue with the facts or that sources only become evidence when used by the historian. As Jenkins has pointed out at some length, Carr ultimately accepts the epistemological model of historical explanation as the definitive mode for generating historical understanding and meaning[7]. This fundamentally devalues the currency of what he has to say, as it does of all reconstructionist empiricists who followed his lead. This judgment is not, of course, widely shared by them. For illustration, it is the claim of the historian of Latin America Alan Knight that Carr remains significant today precisely because of his warning a generation ago to historians to ‘interrogate documents and to display a due scepticism as regards their writer’s motives’[8]. To maintain, as Knight does, that Carr is thus in some way pre-empting the post-modern challenge to historical knowing is unhelpful to those who would seriously wish to establish Carr’s contribution in What is History?. It would be an act of substantial historical imagination to proclaim Carr as a precursor of post-modernist history.

Carr is also not forgotten by political philosopher and critic of post-modernist history Alex Callinicos, who deploys him somewhat differently. In his defence of Marxist theory of interpretation, Callinicos begins with the contribution of a variety of so called relativist historians of which Carr is one (others include Croce, Collingwood, Becker and Beard). Acknowledging the ‘discursive character of historical facts’[9], Callinicos quotes Carr’s opinion (following Collingwood) that the facts of history never come to us pure, but are always refracted through the mind of the historian. For Callinicos this insight signals the problem of the subjectivity of the historian, but does not diminish the role of empirically derived evidence in the process of historical study.

Of course, Carr tried to fix the status of evidence with his own objections to what he understood to be the logic of Collingwood’s sceptical position. Collingwood’s logic could, claims Carr, lead to the dangerous idea that there is no certainty in historical meaning. There are only the discourses of historians, a situation that Carr refers to as ‘total scepticism’, a situation where history ends up as ‘something spun out of the human brain’ suggesting there can be no ‘objective historical truth’.[10] Carr’s objectivist anchor is dropped here. He explicitly rejected Nietzsche’s notion that historical truth is effectively defined by fitness for purpose, and the basis for Carr’s opinion was his belief in the power of empiricism to deliver the truth, whether it fits or not.[11] Historians ultimately serve the evidence, not vice versa. This guiding precept excludes the possibility that ‘one interpretation is as good as another’ even when we cannot guarantee ‘objective or truthful interpretation’.

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[1] John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, London, Longman, 1991, p. 234.

[2] Keith Jenkins, On ‘What is History?’, London, Routledge, 1995, pp. 1-2.

[3]Ibid, Keith Jenkins, On ‘What is History?’ p. 3.

[4] John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, London, Longman, 1991, p. 236.

[5] Michael Stanford, A Companion to the Study of History, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1994, p. 86.

[6] Ibid, Michael Stanford, A Companion to the Study of History, p. 86.

[7] Keith Jenkins, On ‘What is History?’, London, Routledge, 1995, pp. 1-6, 43-63.

[8] Alan Knight, ‘Latin America’ in Michael Bentley, (ed.), Companion to Historiography, London, Routledge, 1997, p. 747.

[9] Alex Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995, p. 76.

[10] E.H. Carr, What is History? London, Penguin, 1961, p. 26

[11] Ibid, E.H. Carr, What is History? p. 27.

Debt-write off plan for teachers

Things have come a long way since I first trained to be a teacher.  The course I did lasted a year and though thoroughly enjoyable did little to prepare me for what life was like day after day in the classroom.  I learned a lot about the history of education (for me very interesting but for my science colleagues of no interest at all), the philosophy, sociology and psychology of education but it was really the term I spent on work experience that was of greatest value.  I’m not sure the school felt the same.  My head of department visited my class once and my tutor twice but I still ended up with a distinction…I still wonder why.  I had one class on Monday afternoon, all day Tuesday and Wednesday and one class first thing on Thursday morning and when I asked what I should do for the remainder of the time was told to go home…so a very long weekend.  Having mentored trainee teachers over a twenty year period myself, what is now offered as training is infinitely superior though undoubtedly less enjoyable.  Does it produce better teachers, since many in the Labour Party and the current Minister (if not the head of Ofsted) appear to think that we now have the best teachers ever?  I’m not convinced.  Certainly teachers are now better at planning learning and lessons…no longer a back of the envelop job or as a colleague of mine once said, I planned my lessons in my first year of teaching and twenty years later I’m still using them.  But, and I’ve observed this, there is then an almost determinist process of getting through the plan even when it is evident that the plan is not working or when the students have engaged with the lesson and want to explore things not on the plan and are disappointed because the teacher intends to follow the plan at all costs.  You may think, and probably correctly, that this is evidence of a teacher insufficiently confident in their own ability and unwilling to tear up the plan.  Perhaps I was lucky when doing a lesson during Ofsted on the poor in the sixteenth century and students turned the lesson into a comparison with how the poor were dealt with then and now and my plan went out of the window that the inspector (about my age and with similar experiences I suspect) really enjoyed it and graded it outstanding…planning is essential for good learning but in itself it will not necessarily lead to good learning.  Students enjoy spontaneity, anecdotes, red herrings (they’re always good at finding them) and getting you off the point (ditto), but that’s what education is about…it isn’t neat, determinist or inflexible.

So should we be aiming for teaching, in the words of Stephen Twigg, to be ‘an elite profession of top graduates’?   Well yes, if that means that teachers will again become a respected profession.  But, just because you’re a top graduate, will not necessarily make you a competent let alone a good teacher.  To be a good teacher you need three things: a willingness to learn along with your students, a personality that is open and accessible to students and, and I’ve always believed that this is essential, the ability to recognise that although you will get through to many even most of your students, in some cases you won’t and it doesn’t matter what you do; all you can hope is that another teacher will.  Now that is not something that automatically comes from a high-level or a lower level degree , it’s not something that can really be taught (though training can refine it) and is ultimately something that you either have (in which case teaching is for you) or not (don’t touch it with a barge-pole as you’ll suffer and more importantly so will your kids).  Having a National College for Teaching Excellence and using a debt write-off plan to bribe people to enter it (a bit harsh perhaps) will certainly encourage good candidates for teaching but there is one big problem.  As soon as you establish any College for Excellence, the tendency is for its trainees to go into the profession and rapidly gain promotion and in teaching that means promotion out of the classroom.  Yes you monitor the teaching of others and provide advice to improve it but the impact of your specific skills on students inevitably diminishes.  As a teacher you might be in the classroom twenty hours a week, as a head of department fifteen and so on and like everyone you are promoted to your level of incompetence (that is, unless you decide to stop seeking advancement and do what you enjoy and are good at).  When I became a teacher I did so because I wanted to get students to enjoy my subject and enjoy learning about it and I spent many enjoyable years successfully doing that.  Today, teaching has lost that simplicity (you may think rightly) and, to my mind, students have lost out as a consequence.  Yes we should always strive to improve the quality of teachers and Stephen Twigg is right when he says that ‘Our education system is only as good as its staff’ but unless what is being taught and how its is being taught addresses the needs and interests of students, it doesn't matter whether the teachers are top graduates or not, they won’t learn effectively.

Too clever by half: intellectuals and politics

Although the definition of politics as the ‘art of the possible’ was attributed to RAB Butler in 1971, it was in fact originally made by Otto von Bismarck in 1867.  Yet it and Harold Wilson’s much vaunted aphorism that ‘ a week is a long time in politics’ in many ways characterise the ways in which politicians construe politics in Britain.  Walter Bagehot in his essay on Sir Robert Peel published in 1856 was more explicit in his view of politicians: ‘a constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities….[with] the powers of a first-rate man and the creed of a second-rate man…His intellect, admirable in administrative routines…was not of the class which creates, or which readily even believes an absolutely new idea…’   Scepticism towards intellectuals and ideas in politics has a long pedigree and there is a certain irony in the fact that Arthur Balfour, arguably Britain’s only intellectual as prime minister, wrote on the question of philosophical scepticism. 

The English view of intellectuals in politics, the view of very different in Scotland where Enlightenment ideas established a long tradition of the intellectual in politics, is far different from perspectives on the Continent and, to some degree, in the United States where being called an intellectual is seen less as a term of derision than a recognition of the political ideas individuals express.  In France, it can even be a career choice.  This is not to say that English politicians do not have ideas, and on occasions original ones but reflects that very English trait that intellectuals are ‘too clever by half’, a sort of inverse intellectual snobbery.  While we value wit and satire, we do not have a real affinity for intellectuals; they are regarded as aloof, impractical and often politically naive.  Politics is about being pragmatic and politicians with intellectual aspirations save them for their autobiographies and even there they often have little significance.  Politicians enter politics for different reasons but a common theme is a desire to make society ‘better’ (no politician would want to make it worse), though there is rarely any attempt to define what ‘better’ actually means.  What the public crave is a politics that delivers what they want, whether that be economic prosperity, political stability or in the past the vote, and they are little interested in the philosophical route politicians take to reach those ends.  The intellectual divide separating conservatism, liberalism and socialism that resulted in vibrant debates not simply about means but ends has been gradually eroded in the past three decades to such an extent that all three major political parties can now be seen as supporting the idea of social democracy, though again without really defining what social democracy actually means, and seeking electoral control of the increasingly unintellectual ‘middle ground’ leaving debates about ideas to the extremes on left and right.  Vision is something politicians talk about when they are in opposition but once in power vision is rarely seen as having any real resonance in the need to find practical and pragmatic solutions to political problems in a 24/7 media age.  Reacting to circumstances has always been an important feature of any form of politics but reacting to situations in an intellectual vacuum makes politics less the art of the possible and more the craft of the administrative detail.

Arrogance, ‘plebs’ and politicians

Arrogance has always been a characteristic of politicians, the belief that they are right and always right.  They will brook little dissent even in democratic systems of government: ‘there is no Plan B’.  In a deferential society this may not have been a problem largely because in return for deference from most in society, the political elite had a reciprocal responsibility of ‘care’ for those lower down the social ladder.  Although this may have satisfied the middle-classes with aspirations to climb into the political elite and who, largely through pressure group politics, could exert some influence on the political elite but that was rarely the case with the urban working-classes largely divorced from the persistent deference of rural Britain.  For the working-classes, there had already been what Thomas Carlyle called ‘an abdication on the part of the governors’ as the political elite removed the paternalistic legislation that protected working people from too much exploitation as ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ replaced any sense of social responsibility.  Some sense of social responsibility may have remained, as fictionalised in Downton Abbey, for ones tenants and servants but this was already in terminal decline by the end of the First World War. 

Conflict between classes was, and remains, an important feature of British society and in the last two decades this had been evident in the growing gap (however you construe it) between rich and poor and a declining ability of individuals to rise in society, something successive governments have failed to resolve despite the dramatic increase in places and entry into higher education.  Keeping the poor in their place is still an important element of some political thinking especially on the political right.  The rhetoric of aspiration is parroted by all political parties and bursaries demonstrate that paternalism is alive and kicking but the reality in most people’s lives is very different and Britain is an increasingly divided society.  There is an elite largely divorced from the lives of ordinary people who frequently do not recognise that their actions have consequences for society as a whole but that do not impinge on their own protected ways of life.  That its actions often appear (and are) immoral or at least amoral but are not recognised as such by those involved is the clearest expression of the arrogance of power in society.  Banks, for instance, have been shown to have acted immorally and, in some cases, illegally but for many higher level bankers this appears to have been perfectly justifiable and when they are called to account before parliamentary select committees they are, to be generous, circumspect in their understanding of the truth.  Where economic prosperity and morality are in conflict it is prosperity that trumps morality every time.

Deference has decayed since the beginnings of the nineteenth century first among the working-classes and, post-1968, among the middle-classes as well and there has been a parallel growth of overt arrogance among politicians of all political colours and across all political institutions, whether local, regional, national or European.  Politicians in the first half of the nineteenth century, for instance, may have regarded much of society as plebeian but recognised that, even though ‘the plebs’ were largely unenfranchised, their aspirations and concerns needed to be taken into account and acted on to prevent the revolutions that characterised much of continental Europe and that the burgeoning middle-classes needed to be brought within the ‘hallowed’ circles of political power.  This sense of connection no longer exists and politicians are regarded as self-serving, money-grubbing parasites who have no real answers to society’s problems but are quite prepared to enrich themselves while the rest of society flounders.  Whether or not Andrew Mitchell actually used the term ‘pleb’ is less important than the perception that his actions demonstrates that the notion ‘we are all in this together’ is palpably untrue.  The idea that ‘we know best’ and an overweening sense of social hubris have never been a solid foundation on which to build effective political power and, as the Romans recognised early in their republic, the patricians in society ignore the plebs at their peril.

Reflections on E. H. Carr’s What is History?

E. H. Carr’s What is History? was first published in 1961 and remains in print today regarded, whether you agree with him or not, as a ‘classic’  of its genre.  It has, after all, sold over a quarter of a million copies since its first publication, and with good reason. I read it first when studying O Levels and later an undergraduate and on several occasions since.   Its droll and incisive prose elegantly attacked the kind of history being taught at school and university that was dominated by high politics and diplomacy, bereft of theory and entirely  unaware that it might be serving some kind of ideological or political purpose.   This was not lost on the vibrant ‘school’ of English Marxist historians, who began to publish widely in the 1960s, after most of them had left the Communist Party in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and devoted themselves to building up the intellectual foundations of the ‘New Left’.  Historians such as Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé and Edward Thompson did far more to undermine historical orthodoxy in the eyes of those of us who entered the hallowed walls of academe in 1968 than did the godly figure of Sir Lewis Namier, whose work we were supposed to admire as the ultimate in historical scholarship.  Today we remember Thompson and his ilk, while Namier whose star flamed so brilliantly and as it turned out briefly is all but forgotten and few of his works remain in print. 

Having read What is History?, I looked forward to reading his study of A History of the Soviet Union. It proved a disappointing, turgid experience.  In the end he completed fourteen massive tomes that were full of information but simply dull.  There were occasional sparks of brilliance as, for instance, in the character sketches of Bolshevik leaders at the beginning of Socialism in One Country but none of the wit, humour and vivacity of What is History?  Jonathan Haslam’s perceptive biography of Carr makes it clear that he was two different people. [1]  On the one hand, Carr was a journalist, sometime deputy editor of The Times, regular writer for the national press, broadcaster and reviewer.  What is History? was obviously written by Carr the journalist and was drafted on a sea-journey from England to San Francisco, far from any libraries or archives. Then there was Carr the bureaucrat and A History of Soviet Russia on the other hand was clearly written by the man who had been a civil servant for so long that he instinctively identified with government (of whatever political hue) and was interested almost exclusively in what went into the making of policy.  The History, despite getting the story right, reads like an extensive civil service minute devoid of drama and agency.  Yet the two books were linked by Carr’s insistence that historians should only be interested in causes of historical events because their explanation served the making of policy in the future.

Edward Hallett Carr (1892-1982)

Like many books that are written quickly and originated as lectures, What is History? is fluent in style, something often missing in more considered works and certainly in the History.  It contains numerous examples of real historians and from real history books to illustrate his argument it is proposing and in contrast to most introductions to history, it addresses its readers as equals. It is witty, amusing and entertaining even when it tackles the most intractable theoretical problems. It still retains after sixty years its power to provoke. It tackles fundamental questions not just of history but also of politics and ethics. It deals with big topics, and deals with them in a masterly fashion backed by substantial references to historians, philosophers, writers and thinkers.  Part of the seductive appeal of What is History? lies in its effortless display of learning. What is History? is important for many reasons, especially Carr’s insistence that ‘History is a process, and you cannot isolate a bit of process and study it on its own - everything is completely interconnected’ .  It is the job of historians to study whatever part of the past they chose to examine in the context both of what came before and after it, and in the context of the interconnections between their subject and its wider context. Above all, Carr reiterated that, whether we like it not, there is always a subjective element in historical writing. Historians are people of their time, with views and assumptions about the world that they cannot remove from their writing and research, even if they can hope to restrain them. It is in this respect that Carr has been most influential and his views most widely accepted by historians.  For this reason, if no other, his work will endure.

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[1] Haslam, Jonathan, The Vices of Integrity: E.H. Carr 1892-1982, (Verso), 1999, pp. 192-217, for his discussion of the writing and reception of What is History?, .

Nineteenth century social history

Those of you who follow my blogs on nineteenth century British social history might like to know that modified and more recent versions of the blogs are available as a series of Kindle books.  They have been published in two formats . As five single volumes:

• Economy, Population and Transport
• Work, Health and Poverty
• Education, Crime and Leisure
• Class
• Religion and Government

Or as a single volume: Society under Pressure: Britain 1830-1914.  In addition, a supplementary volume Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain 1830-1918 has also been published in both print and Kindle versions.

All of these volumes are available at the click of a mouse from Amazon sites in the UK, Europe and North America and are now also available in India. 

Changing courses or the rubbishing of GCESs

People have been rubbishing GCSEs since they were first proposed in the 1980s: the two tier system of O Levels and CSE was better they maintained so why introduce something new, employers don’t want it and neither do parents and many schools.  Yet, at least initially, it did garner some support especially in schools where heads of department no longer had to make the invidious decision over which exam to enter students for.  By the late 1990s, however, a process of systematic rubbishing of GCSEs began and has continued with increasing ferocity until radical reform became inevitable.  You might have thought that politicians would have welcomed increasingly improving national examination performance but you would be wrong.  Comparison with O Levels suggested that GCSEs were easier and that grades had been inflated to allow incremental improvement in performance.  The buzz words became ‘lack of rigour’ and grade inflation.  As far as politicians of all parties are concerned the current system is discredited, a situation aided by the introduction of the modular approach that allows students to re-sit and improve their marks.  Yet reform will not occur until after the election in 2015 with students not taking the new examination until 2017 with four years of students continuing to take something that is now regarded as discredited! 

Until tomorrow it is unclear precisely what form the new examination will take.  What we do know is that there will be no return to the two tier system and there will be an emphasis on a singly end-of-year exam.  Mr Clegg had suggested that reform will do three simple things:

Firstly give parents confidence in the exams their children are taking, secondly raise standards for all our children in schools in the country but thirdly and crucially not exclude any children from the new exam system.

Finally, its introduction is not going to be rushed: a good thing given the disastrous experience of the last government in introducing reforms at Advanced Level.  These are all positive things though there may be difficulties in applying end-of-year examinations effectively to all subjects.  The production of a portfolio in Art, for instance, could well be retained as part of the assessment even if coursework disappears in other subjects.  There is also still the unresolved issue of the equivalence of vocational courses that provide motivation for students for whom academic courses have little resonance.

The critical issue is whether reform will improve ‘standards’.  The difficulty is that standards are rarely defined precisely and have acquired a rhetorical character than far exceeds their actual nature.  To reiterate a point I’ve made on several occasions about the crucial C/D divide: the standard for achieving a grade C, though not absolute, should be a defined standard that remains unchanged for say a five year period.  If 55 per cent is the pass mark for grade C one year, there is no logical reason (though their may be a statistical one if you want to limit the numbers achieving it) why the same mark should not apply the following year.  It would then be known and consistent over that five year period.  Politicians could then say with confidence, standards have improved or not; parents and employers could have confidence in the system and students (remember them, the ones seemingly forgotten in all the rhetoric) would know where they stood.  Reform may be necessary but if badly handled we’ll just be back into the old and seemingly perennial behaviour of the last half century of rubbishing the examination system.

Rebellion in Canada, 1837-1885, Volume 2: The Irish, the Fenians and the Metis

JUST PUBLISHED

In less than fifty years Canada experienced six major rebellions: in Lower and Upper Canada in late 1837 and 1838, the Fenian rebellions of 1866 and 1870 and the Pembina affair in 1871 and Louis Riel's resistance at Red River in 1869-1870 and his rebellion fifteen years later in Saskatchewan. Each failed to achieve its aims and, in one sense, the two books in the Canadian Rebellion series are studies of political disappointment. The second volume, The Irish, the Fenians and the Metis, considers the impact of the Irish diaspora on the United States and Canada and the rebellions led largely by Irish-American Fenians in the 1860s and 1870s and also the rebellions, led by Louis Riel in 1869-1870 and 1885, by the Metis.

Chapter 1 examines the Irish diaspora to North America during the nineteenth century and focuses especially on the impact of the Famine in the 1840s and 1850s. Chapter 2 considers at the ways in which Irish nationalism maintained a strong political presence in the United States and Canada from the beginning of the nineteenth century and the emergence of the Fenian Brotherhood in New York in 1858. The political impact of this movement was both enhanced and restricted by the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865 yet the Fenians emerged in April 1865 as a powerful, if increasingly divided, force with concrete plans for the liberation of Ireland. Chapter 3 explores in detail at the three Irish-American Fenian incursions into Canada in 1866, 1870 and briefly and debatably in 1871, the impact that they had on Canadian and American politics and how this led to changes in Irish nationalism in the 1870s. Chapters 4 and 5 extend the story geographically beyond Quebec and Ontario across the continent to the unchartered and largely unsettled prairies of the North-West. The importance of rebellion in state-building in Canada is considered in the final chapter.

Contents

Series Preface

1 Famine and Diaspora

2 Irish Nationalism in North America to 1865

3 Rebellions in Canada, 1866, 1870 and 1871

4 Riel and Resistance, 1869-1870

5 Riel and Rebellion, 1885

6 A Contested Consensus

Appendix: Who ran colonial government?

Further Reading

Index

Features

Comprehensive narrative and analysis of the context causes, course and results of the rebellions including analysis of constitutional, political, social, economic and cultural influences

Discusses the effects of the Irish Famine and the resulting emigration to the United States and Canada

Examines the influence of nationalism on political developments in the United States and Canada

Considers the role played by individuals such as John Mahony, Louis Riel and John A. Macdonald on the development of competing political agendas

Examines the rebellions in their historiographical context

Macquarie: opposition and reform

Macquarie’s support of emancipists resulted in sustained opposition almost from the beginning of his governorship. Early in 1810 the senior chaplain, Samuel Marsden[1], refused outright to serve with the emancipist justices, Simeon Lord[2] and Andrew Thompson on the turnpike board for the new Parramatta Road. In 1811, Macquarie flatteringly named a street in Parramatta after Marsden, but despite Wilberforce’s attempts to mediate there was further controversy between them in 1814, and finally in January 1818 Marsden was summoned to Government House and denounced as a ‘secret enemy’. Since the chaplain probably had more influential friends in England than any other colonist he proved a dangerous antagonist. Jeffery Hart Bent, judge of the Supreme Court created under the new Charter of Justice granted in 1814 also proved a vehement opponent.[3] He kept his court closed rather than admit ex-convict attorneys to practise even though there was only one free lawyer in the colony. The governor’s growing rift with both Bent brothers led to their recall. Ellis Bent died before this decision arrived, but his brother returned to England and assisted H.G. Bennet in mounting the campaign against Macquarie in the House of Commons that led to the appointment of a select committee on gaols and of John Thomas Bigge as commissioner to enquire into the affairs of the colony.

Macquarie’s emancipist policy also led to his falling out with his old friend of Indian days, Colonel George Molle[4], who arrived with the 46^th Regiment early in 1814 as lieutenant-governor. Soon after their arrival Molle and his officers complained of high prices and asked for higher pay. They disliked the favour shown by Macquarie to the emancipists, whom they excluded from the regimental mess, even in cases when the governor looked on them with favour. In 1816, William Charles Wentworth insulted Molle in a ‘pipe’ or lampoon. Next year, during the investigation of its authorship, some of the officers of the regiment insulted Macquarie in his turn, and he felt that his ‘old and Much liked Acquaintance’ Molle, on whose ‘Friendship and Candour’ he had relied, had not seriously tried to check the opposition of his juniors to the governor. Molle insisted that D’Arcy Wentworth, William’s father, was responsible for his son’s libels and demanded that he be court-martialled. To end all this bickering, Macquarie asked that the regiment be removed. Fortunately in August 1817 the 48^th arrived to relieve it and Molle left for Madras the following month.

In 1817, concern was expressed by Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for the Colonies, that Governor Macquarie’s humane and liberal policies were undermining the effectiveness of the transportation system as a means of criminal punishment. As a result, John Thomas Bigge was appointed to inquire into the overall effectiveness of the system, with sweeping inquisitional powers. It was clear that Macquarie as much as the transportation system was under scrutiny. From his arrival in the colony in 1819, Bigge’s relations with Macquarie were strained. Bigge felt that Macquarie’s public works policy was ‘absurd’ and they disagreed on Macquarie’s appointment on 1819 of William Redfern[5], an emancipist, as a magistrate. Bigge could not see the advantages in either the aims or achievements of Macquarie’s emancipist policy. The basic difference between Bigge and Macquarie was that they saw NSW in different ways. Macquarie viewed it as ‘a Penitentiary or Asylum on a Grand Scale’ though he believed that one day it must be one of the greatest and most flourishing Colonies belonging to the British Empire’. By contrast, Bigge was influenced by people such as John Macarthur who saw its potential as a free settlement and wool growing area. Tension turned to antipathy and Bigge found himself more in sympathy with the exclusives of the squattocracy than with the Governor. Bigge was assiduous in assembling evidence in NSW and VDL, but he was far from judicial and impartial in the conclusions he drew. His analysis was unfairly prejudicial of an administration superior to any previously known in the colony that enjoyed widespread popular support among the inhabitants. By that time Macquarie had resigned.

Bigge’s reports were important for the future constitutional and political development of Australia. He emphasised that the population of the colony had grown enormously and now included many free settlers. His three reports, published in 1822 and 1823, questioned the autocratic style of government that had existed since Governor Phillip’s administration. [6] Collectively they prompted the insertion in the New South Wales Act (4 Geo. IV, c. 96) of clauses to set up limited constitutional government through a Legislative Council, to establish VDL as a separate colony, to enable extensive legal reforms and to make new provisions for the reception of convicts from England. Bigge’s first report, The State of the Colony of New South Wales, focused on four principal themes: general colonial conditions, the convict system, relations between social classes and Macquarie’s programme of public works. Much was made of the alleged mismanagement of convicts but Bigge was unconcerned that the convict system was working better than ever before in the colony, that Macquarie’s methods had produced and maintained ‘peace if not harmony’ and that he had ended most brutality and violence. Bigge also criticised Macquarie’s emancipist policy and disapproved of the standing emancipists were allowed in society. He thought the governor’s building programme was wastefully expensive and used his authority to discontinue some projects and to make changes in the construction and intended use of other buildings. Macquarie’s opinion that the report ‘gave no knowledge of the present state of the colony’ was justified by the commissioner’s lack of balance. Bigge failed adequately to explain the colony’s history or contrast the orderly society that he found to the virtual anarchy existing just before Macquarie took office. While Bigge properly exposed inefficiency in district constables, theft of government medical stores, flaws in the ticket-of-leave system for convicts, inadequacies of country education, poor accommodation for female convicts, faulty regulation of liquor traffic and a multitude of similar defects, he failed to account for the very real achievements of government.

If the first report was candid, the second report, The Judicial Establishments of New South Wales and of Van Diemen’s Land, was evasive and indirect. Its analysis of the colonial legal establishments was superficial and he reserved his most valuable conclusions for private dispatch to Bathurst. Bigge’s supplementary instructions allowed him to report privately on matters of this kind but, having elected to do so, he allowed the public report to become a vehicle of insidious attack on Governor Macquarie. In his public report, he relied on statements by Mr Justice Barron Field[7] and Judge-Advocate (Sir) John Wylde[8] disparaging Macquarie but privately admitted that he placed little confidence in either of these officers. Bigge’s lengthy treatment of the old libel case Marsden v. Campbell was calculated to discredit Macquarie since John Campbell had been the governor’s secretary from 1810 to 1821.[9] Most of the recommendations in the report affecting the civil jurisdiction originated from Field and, while Bigge deserved some credit for suggesting reforms in criminal jurisdiction, his part in framing the reconstitution of the courts in 1824 was comparatively small. He simply supported submissions of the colonial lawyers, and especially the earlier recommendations of Judge-Advocate Ellis Bent.[10] Bigge opposed popular demands for legal redress, refused to approve the introduction of jury trial or the modification of the military tribunals that composed the criminal courts. Bigge was the first lawyer of any distinction in the colony yet made surprisingly little personal contribution to founding a sound legal system. His concern was to draw attention to Macquarie’s abuses of his limited legislative and prerogative powers and to condemn the governor’s ‘insensibility to the controlling power of the law’. Like so much of his analyses, it was correct in terms of the letter of the statute book, but was unrealistically applied to a colony where the rule of law was still in an embryonic form.

The third report, The State of Agriculture and Trade in the Colony of New South Wales, was the most impartial and least contentious. It afforded a generally clear picture of farming and grazing in the Sydney district and west of the Blue Mountains. It did not sufficiently acknowledge the important developments of the Illawarra district and tended to suggest incorrectly that agriculture had stagnated under Macquarie. Otherwise it was well presented and included useful accounts of the state of revenue, trade and the country’s economic position.

Macquarie was the first to see beyond the limits of the convict settlement or the opportunities for self-enrichment that had characterised the early colony. His vision, by 1821, was shown in a public building and town-planning programme that had established a solid infrastructure for the colony. Exploration had reached deep into the inland and settlement and agriculture were following, north and south along the coastline and inland beyond Bathurst. Agriculture was, in fact, creating the conditions for the colony to become almost economically self-sufficient. The non-Aboriginal population of the colony including VDL was approximately 37,000, of whom at least 8,000 were free settlers or had been born in the colony. However, frustration and recurring bouts of illness led him to submit his resignation on several occasions. A serious illness in 1819 almost proved fatal, and the pressures of Bigge’s commission of inquiry into the state of the colony reinforced his desire to end his term of office and return home to defend the charges made against his administration. Finally at the end of 1820, he learned that his third application for resignation had been accepted though it was not until 12 February 1822 that he and his wife and son departed for England. Macquarie had converted NSW from a rebellion-torn penitentiary to a settlement of substance. His broad sense of justice and humanity was radical by Georgian standards and was expressed in his willingness to readmit emancipated convicts to society without regard for their past.

By 1822, a colony created by transportation had begun to evolve away from its penal origins. Although free settlers had begun to arrive in the colony in the early 1790s, it was not until after 1815 that in both NSW and VDL, there was sustained growth and new land was brought into cultivation.[11] Constitutionally, NSW was founded as an autocracy run by the Governor, although the early governors effectively ruled by consent, with the advice of military officers, officials and leading settlers and exercised their powers within the restraints of British law. By the early 1820s, it was widely believed that the deterrent effect of transportation had declined and there had been a blurring between the respective positions of emancipists and free settlers. Bigge’s reports sought to restore transportation as ‘an object of real terror’ by calling for greater severity in the treatment of convicts, an end to free grants of land at the end of their sentences and a continuance of their subordinate status by not admitting them to positions of social responsibility. For Bigge, the future of the colony lay with the free settlers who would possess the land, employ the convicts and produce wool. Free immigration was no longer incidental to the purposes of settlement and this meant that the autocratic system needed to be modified and a system of government more suitable for free subjects of the Crown introduced. This, for Bigge, meant a legislature to curb the autocratic tendencies of governors and a judicial system that safeguarded the rule of law. This restraint on rule by decree exacerbated the existing tensions between exclusives and emancipists and opened up a three-way contest for power between successive governors and these two groups that dominated colonial politics until the 1850s.

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[1] Yarwood, A.T., ‘Marsden, Samuel (1765-1838)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 207-212.

[2] Hainsworth, D.R., ‘Lord, Simeon (1771-1840)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 128-131.

[3] On conflict between Macquarie and the Bent brothers, see

[4] Macmillan, David S., ‘Molle, George James (1773-1823)’, ADB, Vol. 2, p. 243.

[5] Ford, Edward, ‘Redfern, William (1774-1833)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 368-371.

[6] Bigge’s Reports were printed in three volumes. Vol. 1: The State of the Colony of New South Wales, The House of Lords, (Papers 119), printed, 5 August 1822, facs ed., Adelaide, 1966; Vol. 2: The State of Agriculture and Trade in the Colony of New South Wales, The House of Lords, (Paper 119), printed, 4 July, 1823, facs ed., Adelaide, 1971; and, Vol. 3: The Judicial Establishments of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Lands, The House of Lords, (Paper 118), printed, 4 July 1823, facs ed., Adelaide, 1966. See also Ritchie, J., (ed.), The Evidence to the Bigge Reports: New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 2 Vols. Melbourne, 1971 and Bennett, J.M., ‘Bigge, John Thomas (1780-1843)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 99-100.

[7] Currey, C.H., ‘Field, Barron (1786-1846)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 373-376.

[8] Mckay, R.J., ‘Wylde, Sir John (1781-1859)’, ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 627-628.

[9] Holder, R.F., ‘Campbell, John Thomas (1770?-1830)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 199-201. The ‘Philo Free’ letter, was published on 4 January 1817 in the Sydney Gazette, of which Campbell was official censor. This elaborately sarcastic review of the missionary activities of the ‘Christian Mahomet’ of the South Seas was obviously directed at Samuel Marsden who instituted a criminal charge against Campbell. He was found guilty of allowing the libel to appear, but no sentence was passed. Marsden then brought successful civil action and obtained £200 damages. Campbell, in his official apology sent to the Colonial Office by the governor, said that the ‘hasty and inconsiderate Letter’ was inspired by his indignation at Marsden’s ‘marked disrespect’ to the governor’s orders in not attending the meeting of Aboriginals at Parramatta a few days before. Undoubtedly this indignation had been growing for some time over the clergyman’s open defiance of and devious attacks on the governor’s authority and policy.

[10] See Judge-Advocate Bent to Under-Secretary Cooke, 7 May 1810 and Judge-Advocate Bent to Earl Liverpool, 19 October 1811, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 310-377, 621-630.

[11] In 1809, there were an estimated 300 free settlers in NSW and VDL though this figure does not include children. By 1820, there were 1,307 free immigrants.

Shuffling the pack or how not to change your ministers

Ministerial reshuffles are always a mixed bag.  Sometimes it’s a case of rearranging the chairs on the Titanic while occasionally reshuffles represent the beginning of a new direction in policy.  Yesterday’s reshuffle was neither of these.  Although the government is, not surprisingly mid-term, languishing in the polls, it has yet the achieve the Titanic status of the last Labour government.  Despite the many comments that this was a re-launch of the government, it resembles the beginning of part 2 of a drama (or tragedy depending on your viewpoint).  Part 1 was reform, part 2 presentation and delivery so there remains a continuity of policy but no new direction (well in most areas).  The only problem with this approach is that if the policies are wrong, presenting them in a more dynamic way to the public makes little difference.

There are, however, several things that were significant about the changes in ministerial briefs.  First, they demonstrate a weakness at the heart of government.  The top posts have not changed at all: Osborne remains Chancellor, Hague at the Foreign Office and May at the Home Office and Duncan-Smith would not accept a move to the Ministry of Justice.  No ‘night of the long knives’ here.  Secondly, where there were changes at the higher level of government, the moves were concerned with moving the reform agenda on to its delivery stage.  With Hunt replacing Lansley at Health you have a presenter replacing a thinker even if his thoughts on health do not have significant support among professionals or public.  At Transport, it appears that Justine Greening has been moved for stating government policy on the third runway at Heathrow and replaced by  an established politician whose constituency will not be compromised if (or more likely when) the government alters its policy.  Finally, there has been promotion for some of the 2010 intake that represents a shift to an even more free-trade, market oriented, small state approach to policy.

The critical question is whether this really matters to people outside the Westminster bubble.  Most of those promoted, even to relatively senior positions, are largely unknown outside Parliament.  Will replacing Baroness Warsi with Grant Shapps or the lamentable decision to bring back David Lawes after his period in purdah actually make any difference to the general public?  Well, no.  It is clear that policies are not going to change and that the government intended to deliver (or not) them in the next thirty months.  At one level this is a commendable position to take, develop your policy and then implement it.  However, there is always a danger of not having (or at least not publicising) a Plan B since policies can be thrown off-course is things beyond government’s control.  There is always a joker in the pack!

Examinations, justice and persistent change

GCSE examinations should be ‘thoroughly overhauled’ Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, said on the Andrew Marr Show this morning.  Few would disagree with him especially those students whose futures may have been blighted by the failure of the system in English this summer.  Never in all my years’ teaching have I witnessed such an obvious case of injustice in examinations.  It’s nothing to do with rigour or the weasel words of the head of Ofqual that those in January were just lucky to have the grade boundary between C and D ten points lower than in the summer.  Yes students do get grade D when they are predicted, perhaps too optimistically, a grade C, often a crude belief in hope over expectation but what has occurred is, by any definition of the term, unjust. 
I must admit I have never fully understood why grade boundaries have to change year on year (and it should be year on year) unless you are statistically seeking to limit the number of people who get particular grades.  If it is right that a student who scores 55 per cent gets a grade C one year, then I can see no reason why a student who gets 55 per cent the following year should not also get a grade C.  Although it’s been my experience in an option subject that some years are ‘better’ than others, over say a five year period the relative ability of students levelled out.  The only way you can really judge whether one cohort of students has done better or worse than the previous cohort is for the grade boundaries that do not change each year.  There is no reason why after grade boundaries set at one level should not be pushed up after a period of time as a means of encouraging progress but this should be known in advance so that teachers can prepare their students and students know what they have to achieve to achieve the omnipresent grade C. In that way you would have identifiable and known standards at GCSE.
This begs the question of whether we now need GCSE at all and, if we do, where it fits in the evaluation of student progress.  With the increase of the education leaving age at 18, there is a case for examinations at 18+, whether A Levels, vocational qualifications or achievement in apprenticeships as the medium through which schools are judged not GCSEs.  There is also a case for examination of students in all subjects at 11, 14, 16 and 18 but only if the aim of those evaluations is to be able to demonstrate how individual students have progressed.  I would much rather see a school judged, not by the percentage of students who get five A*-C including Maths and English, by the percentage of those students who have shown progress over their performance in the previous evaluation. 
Sir Michael may be right when he says that ‘Our youngsters, when they leave school, will be going into a global marketplace, they [just how many is unclear]have to compete not just against competitors here but the rest of the world’ but they won’t do so if the curriculum and examinations keep changing.  Neither will the persistent rhetoric from politicians that they intend to reverse ‘dumbing down’ that they initiated in the first place.  Mr Cameron said in the Mail on Sunday that there would be ‘no more excuses for failure in schools, no more soft exams and soft discipline’.  Careful for what you wish for David, the apple never falls far from the tree!  It little behoves politicians with their rhetoric of success and the reality of failure to lecture the public on what they will or not accept.

Change under Macquarie

Major-General Lachlan Macquarie, the fifth governor of NSW but the first military officer (Phillip, Hunter, King and Bligh had all been naval men) held office from April 1809 (he took up his commission as governor on 1 January 1810[1]) until his resignation in 1821. [2] As Governor of NSW, he also assumed control of the North Island of New Zealand by the appointment of a Justice of the Peace for the Bay of Islands.[3] After the military coup in 1808, the British Government decided to recall the NSW Corps and replaced them with the 73^rd Regiment.[4] As Macquarie was the officer commanding the 73^rd Regiment, he was at a distinct advantage to his predecessors as senior officer of the garrison as well as Governor. As with previous governors, Macquarie was given absolute authority to make laws and carry them out.[5] The first exercise of authority was in the revoking of all controversial actions of the rebel regime including government appointments, land grants, leases, sentences and pardons.[6] His Instructions were

To improve the Morals of the Colonists, to encourage marriage, to provide for Education, to prohibit the Use of Spirituous Liquors, to increase the Agriculture and Stock, so as to ensure the Certainty of a full supply to the Inhabitants under all Circumstances.[7]

Lachlan Macquarie attributed to John Opie , c.1805-1824

Macquarie insisted on morality, virtue and temperance.[8] He closed 55 inns[9] and increased tax on imported liquor, he remodelled the commissariat[10] and the organisation of the Police Fund as the basis of colonial revenue[11], levied customs duties, opened a new market place[12], created a coinage in 1813 to replace barter, (particularly the ‘rum currency’) and established the first bank in 1817.[13] He opened schools for the young so that the children would become better citizens than their parents.[14] He used emancipist settlers as teachers and eventually at his request, qualified teachers were sent out from England. He allowed ex-convicts to be re-admitted to the rank in society they had forfeited including appointing three emancipists (D’Arcy Wentworth, Andrew Thompson and Simeon Lord) as magistrates in 1810.[15] Macquarie founded new towns at Richmond, Castlereagh, Pitt Town, Wilberforce and Windsor now referred to as the five ‘Macquarie towns’ to the west of Sydney and expanded the settlement. He visited VDL twice[16], Newcastle and Illawarra[17] and founded Port Macquarie. He encouraged exploration including the crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 and opening access to western lands and was responsible for the extension of the colony.[18] Macquarie was also responsible for expanding the public works programme including the first general post office[19], new army barracks, a road to Parramatta from Sydney and a new general hospital. Overall he was responsible for 265 public works of varying scale during his administration, many the work of his chief architect Francis Greenway, an ex-convict.[20] They included new army barracks and three new barrack buildings for convicts, roads to Parramatta and across the Blue Mountains, a hospital, castle-like stables and five planned towns built out of reach of floodwaters along the Hawkesbury River. Central to Macquarie’s administration was his concern for public morality. In some of his earliest orders the prevailing habit of cohabiting without marriage was denounced[21], constables were directed to enforce laws against Sabbath breaking[22] and a regular church parade was introduced for convicts in government employment.[23] It seemed that he was successful in increasing ‘Religious Tendency and Morals’ as both church going and the marriage rate increased.

As the strongest inducement to reform Macquarie decided that ex-convicts, when they had shown that they deserved the favour, should be readmitted to the rank in society they had forfeited. This policy was approved by Liverpool as well as by Wilberforce and the select committee on transportation in 1812, but it aroused immediate indignation among immigrant settlers and military officers and alienated the very classes whose co-operation Castlereagh had advised him to foster. By 1818, he went so far as to suggest the cessation for three years of all immigration apart from ‘respectable Monied Men’. He had found many of the free immigrants unsatisfactory settlers and disapproved of their reluctance to fraternise with ex-convicts.

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[1] Macquarie’s arrival and his proclamation on 1 January 1810 are dealt with in HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 252-253, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, pp. 226-227.

[2] McLachlan, N.D., ‘Macquarie, Lachlan (1762-1824), ADB, Vol. 2, pp. 187-195, Ellis, M.H., Lachlan Macquarie: His Life, Adventures and Times, (Dymock’s Book Arcade) 1947, 2^nd ed., (Angus & Robertson), 1952 and Ritchie, John, Lachlan Macquarie: a biography, (Melbourne University Press), 1986 are useful biographies. Macquarie, Lachlan, Journal of his Tours of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land 1810-1822, (Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales), 1956 provides his own view of governing NSW and VDL. Ibid, Atkinson, Alan, The Europeans in Australia, Vol. 1, pp. 317-342.

[3] New Zealand was part of NSW from 1788 until 1840 when it was proclaimed as a separate colony.

[4] Castlereagh to the Admiralty, 2 May 1809 and Under-Secretary Cooke to Quartermaster-General Gordon, 11 May 1809, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 112-113, 141 detail the recall of the NSW Corps.

[5] T.W. Plummer to Macquarie, 4 May 1809, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 113-124 provides a detailed critique of the situation in NSW and the need for reform. Macquarie’s commission and instructions dated 9 May 1809 are printed in HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 126-140, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, pp. 183-197. See also Castlereagh to Macquarie, 14 May 1809, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 143-147

[6] See the two proclamations issued on 4 January 1810, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 255-259, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, pp 227-231.

[7] See, HRNSW, Vol. 7, p. 137.

[8] See Proclamation, 24 February 1810, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, pp. 278-279.

[9] Government and General Order, 16 February 1810, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 289-290.

[10] Macquarie to Castlereagh, 30 April 1810, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 353-354, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, p. 248.

[11] Macquarie to Liverpool, 18 October 1811, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, pp. 385-386.

[12] Macquarie to Liverpool, 18 October 1811, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, p. 386.

[13] The formation of a bank was first raised in Macquarie to Castlereagh, 30 April 1810, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, p. 264-266 and again 27 October 1810, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, p. 343. The issue continued to be raised in correspondence, see, Liverpool to Macquarie, 26 July 1811, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, p. 365.

[14] Macquarie to Castlereagh, 27 October 1810, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, p. 246.

[15] Macquarie to Castlereagh, 30 April 1810, HRNSW, Vol. 7, p. 356-357, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, p. 276.

[16] Macquarie’s first tour of VDL occurred in 1811: Macquarie to Liverpool, 18 October 1811, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, pp. 378-280, Macquarie to Liverpool, 17 November 1812, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, pp. 581-589 contained Macquarie’s report on the administration of VDL not contained in the Journal. Macquarie announced his intention to tour VDL a second time in Macquarie to Bathurst, 21 March 1821, HRA, Series I, Vol. 10, p. 492. The tour is reported in Macquarie to Bathurst, 17 July 1821, HRA, Series I, Vol. 10, p. 500. Macquarie stated that he has published a Government and General Order, 16 July 1821, giving an account of his ‘Observations and remarks and that he enclosed a copy’, pp. 501-507. Mitchell Library: A777 Journal to and from Van Diemen’s Land 1811 and A784 Journal of A Tour of Inspection in Van Diemen’s Land 1821 are more detailed. See also Sydney Gazette 11 January 1812, pp. 1-2 and Sydney Gazette 21 July 1821.

[17] Macquarie refers to the Northern Settlements at Port Macquarie and Newcastle 1821 in Macquarie to Bathurst, 30 November 1821, HRA, Series I, Vol. 10, p. 573: ‘I have lately made Tours of inspection to the Northern Settlements at Newcastle and Port Macquarie, and afterwards to Bathurst and Illawarra or Five Islands; all of which are fine rich fertile Districts, and promise at no distant period to prove most valuable acquisitions to the Parent Colony. The result of My Observations on these Tours of Inspection I shall do myself the honor of reporting to Your Lordship in Person, on my arrival in England.’ Macquarie must have completed this Despatch some weeks after the date 30 November 1821. He returned to Sydney from the tour to the Northern Settlements on 21 November 1821, travelled to Bathurst and back 15-26 December 1821 and travelled to Illawarra and back 9-17 January 1822. Macquarie’s journals are Mitchell Library: A781 Journal to and from Newcastle, A783 Journal of A Tour of Inspection to Bathurst in Decr. 1821 and A786 Journal of a Tour to the Cow Pastures and Illawarra/in January 1822.

[18] On his tour of the interior in 1810, see, Macquarie to Liverpool, 18 October 1811, HRA, Series I, Vol. 7, pp. 378-380 and of the Bathurst Plains, Macquarie to Bathurst, 24 June 1815, HRA, Series I, Vol. 8, p. 557. Macquarie wrote in Government and General Order 10 June 1815, pp. 568-576 ‘For further Particulars...I take the Liberty to refer Your Lordship to the Accompanying Printed Report of my Tour, which I had published in the Sydney Gazette for the information of the Public (whose Curiosity was all alive on the Subject), soon after my return hither.’ Mitchell Library: A778 Journal of a Tour of Governor Macquarie’s first Inspection of the Interior of the Colony, commencing on Tuesday the 6th of Novr. 1810 and A779 Tour to the New Discovered Country in April 1815 is his detailed record. See also, Sydney Gazette 15 December 1810, p.1, Sydney Gazette 10 June 1815, The Naval Chronicle, Vol. 35, (January-June 1816), pp. 105-112, The Colonial Journal, Vol. 1, (January-July 1816), pp. 69-76 and New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register, Vol. 5, (25), 1 February, 1816, pp. 14-19.

[19] Government and General Order, 23 June 1810, HRNSW, Vol. 7, p. 389.

[20] Herman, Morton, ‘Greenway, Francis (1777-1837)’, ADB, Vol. 1, pp. 470-473. See also Ellis, M.H., Francis Greenway: His Life and Times, (Angus and Robertson), 1953.

[21] Proclamation, 24 February 1810, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 292-294.

[22] See, Government and General Order, 27 January 1810 and 26 May 1810, HRNSW, Vol. 7, pp. 280-281, 382.

[23] Government and General Order, 19 May 1810, HRNSW, Vol. 7, p. 381.