This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Writing British national history in the twentieth century Salinsky, Mary Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 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WRITING BRITISH NATIONAL HISTORY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Mary Ruth Salinsky Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD King’s College University of London ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1 I would like to thank all those who have helped and supported me during the writing of this thesis. Several academics read all or part of my work and made useful comments: Dr Michael Kandiah, Dr Peter Mandler, Dr Paul Readman, Dr John Seed and Professor John Tosh. Professor Leslie Howsam at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, was generous in sharing her work in progress. I am particularly grateful to Professor Sir David Cannadine who read my work and gave me much very useful advice and with whom I had many stimulating discussions. Lastly my supervisor Professor Pat Thane was invaluable in guiding me through the research process, making many helpful comments and keeping me on track. I would also like to thank those historians whose work I studied who were kind enough to grant me interviews: Professor Jeremy Black, Sir Roy Strong, Professor Keith Robbins, and Professor Norman Davies. Professor Hugh Kearney kindly answered my questions by email and Professor John Harrison by phone. Their patience and generosity in sharing their views on their own work and on the state of writing British national history at the present time have been invaluable. I am grateful to all the archivists at the repositories I visited: Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Library, East Sussex Record Office, University College London, the British Library, Reading Special Collections, the National Archives, and the Royal Historical Society. My special thanks go to Ashley Schoppe, graduate intern at McFarlin Library University of Tulsa USA, where the archives of Andre Deutsch are deposited, who via email identified material I was interested in, photocopied and posted it to me. I have benefitted greatly from participation in the King’s College PhD history reading group, convened by Kath Sherit, where stimulating discussions and challenging questions helped me to clarify my thoughts. Friends and family also helped: Alison Appleby, Beatrice Clarke and Linda Hampson; my thanks to my daughter for help with formatting. I would particularly like to thank my husband who read many drafts, made many helpful critical comments and was always supportive and encouraging. My interest in historiography was first aroused in 1994 by Professor Janet Coleman, LSE, through her stimulating course on ‘Critical Problems in the History of Political Thought’ for the MSc in Political Theory. 2 DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Ruth and George Fasnacht, from whom I learnt to love history 3 WRITING BRITISH NATIONAL HISTORY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ABSTRACT Popular accounts of British history written around 1900 are very different from those written around 2000. There is no comprehensive study of the nature of this change. The popular narrative of England/Britain has been shaped by the nation’s role in the world, by contemporary historiographical approaches, and the different ways the British have thought about themselves and their nation. Popular, single author comprehensive syntheses of national history reveal assumptions about the character of the nation and the sort of stories that could convincingly be written about it at different times. These works are examined along with interviews of surviving historians and an examination of personal papers and publishers’ archives where possible. Under the impact of war, decolonisation, British nationalisms, the rise of social history and a new self-consciousness in historiography British history has become less Anglo-centric and the Empire is no longer central to the narrative. Historians integrated social and economic history more into their accounts. They were writing narratives that were more tentative, making the existence of multiple stories more explicit, providing more interpretation and attention to the significance of events. The accounts were less masculine but not much less white. Authors of popular British history were still predominantly white Oxbridge educated men. At the end of the century historians wrote livelier histories that were beginning to exploit media other than print. The narrative was less confident in its conclusion, but historians still asserted their belief in the value of British national history. 4 WRITING BRITISH NATIONAL HISTORY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CONTENTS Page Chronological Bibliography of Popular Histories of Britain 6 published 1900-2002 Introduction 8 Chapter 1 Writing and Reading the Nation 15 Chapter 2 History for the New Century 1900-1918 36 Chapter 3 History Between the Wars 1918-1939 50 Chapter 4 History in Wartime 1939-1945 69 Chapter 5 History for a New Jerusalem? 1945-1970 84 Chapter 6 Focus on Political History c1970-c1990 111 Chapter 7 Focus on Social History c1970-c1990 137 Chapter 8 History in the 1990s: One Nation or Four Nations? 162 Chapter 9 Davies and Schama: History for the New Century 185 Conclusion 207 Appendices: 1 Biographical information about historians 216 2 Historians contributing as programme directors on The Long 224 March of Everyman Bibliography 226 5 CHRONOLOGICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF POPULAR HISTORIES OF BRITAIN PUBLISHED 1900-2002 1900-1939 1912 Innes, A D, A History of the British Nation from Earliest Times to the Present Day 2 vols, Rivingtons 1912 Pollard, A F, The History of England: a study in political evolution, Home University Library (Williams and Norgate) 1913 Wingfield-Stratford, E, The History of English Patriotism, 2 vols, John Lane, The Bodley Head 1913-15 Innes, A D, The History of England and the British Empire 4 vols Rivingtons 1917 Chesterton, G K, A Short History of England, Chatto and Windus 1926 Trevelyan, G M, History of England, Longmans 1928 Wingfield-Stratford, Esmé, The History of British Civilisation, Routledge 1930 Sellar, W C, and Yeatman, R J, 1066 And All That, Methuen 1931 Williamson, J A, The Evolution of England: a Commentary on the Facts, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1932 Carrington, C E, and Jackson J Hampden, History of England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1934 Belloc, Hilaire, A shorter history of England, Harrap 1935 Fisher, Mrs H A L (Lettice Fisher), An introductory history of England and Europe from the earliest times to the present day, Gollancz 1935 Murphy, Eileen, Our last two thousand years. An Irishwoman’s history of England, Lovat, Dickson and Thompson 1938 Morton, A L, A People’s History of England, Victor Gollancz Hearnshaw, F J C Outlines of the History of the British Isles, Harrap 1939 Wingfield-Stratford, The Foundations of British Patriotism, Routledge 1940-49 1943 Rowse, A L, The spirit of English history, Cape (revised ed 1993) 1944 Trevelyan, G M, English Social History, Longman (originally published