To my generation of Oxford undergraduates, two historians in particular were much admired – Hugh Trevor-Roper and AJP Taylor. I have recently re-read some of their books and have been struck by the qualities of both men. Their rivalry and academic feuding were legendary.
They had very different backgrounds: Trevor-Roper came from a Northumberland gentry family now in reduced circumstances. A brilliant pupil at Charterhouse, he was an undergraduate and scholar of Christ Church, Oxford, and became a lecturer at Merton in 1936. He admired and sought to become a member of the Establishment.
Taylor, 8 years his senior, was also a Northerner from a wealthy pacifist family and was always a non-conformist in life and in politics. His promiscuous mother was a member of the Comintern and all were wildly left-wing. Educated at various Quaker schools, Taylor went up to Oriel College, Oxford in 1924. After studying in Vienna and becoming heavily involved in pro-Soviet organisations he taught at Manchester University and then in 1938 became a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.
During World War 11, Taylor was modestly in the Home Guard. Trevor-Roper was recruited by Military Intelligence, became a captain, and after a chance meeting with Dick White, then head of MI6 in April 1945, he was asked to investigate the death of Adolf Hitler. He produced a masterly report and in 1947 this was published as The Last Days of Hitler. It became a best-seller and Trevor-Roper, now a Fellow and rich, parked his grey Bentley in the Christ Church quad, indulged his taste for fox-hunting and developed a circle of friends among the country house set. He had arrived with a bang.
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| Trevor-Roper, the Establishment man |
Professionally however he had really shot his bolt. An early biography of Laud in 1940 was his only substantive work and his promised magnum opus on the Great Rebellion never appeared. Trevor Roper was a master of the essay in professional journals, book reviews, articles for the Sunday papers. His sardonic prose style made him a highly effective, if cruel, controversialist and he punctured the reputation of the historical philosopher Arnold Toynbee, of the Marxist historians Tawney and Namier, he ridiculed the Catholic Church and indulged his prejudices against the Scots. He wrote plenty (allegedly to finance the extravagance of his wife, a daughter of Earl Haig) and was read avidly. A powerful figure in Oxford, he managed the winning campaign of Harold MacMillan to become vice-chancellor in 1960. MacMillan was his publisher and had in 1957 made Trevor-Roper Regius Professor of Modern History, an appointment in the Prime Minister’s gift.
Alan Taylor was very embittered by Trevor-Roper’s appointment, which he thought he, Taylor, more deserved. Certainly Taylor’s output as a historian was more solid and impressive. Books on the Italian Risorgimento, on the Habsburg Empire, and on Bismarck flowed from his lucid pen and his 1954 The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 is considered his masterpiece, though it is a dense and scholarly diplomatic history. He was very popular among the undergraduates at Oxford and I attended two of his lectures, in a packed audience. But then Taylor’s politics were hardly going to endear him to MacMillan. An opponent of the Korean War and Suez, a supporter of Soviet repression of Hungary in 1956, a founder member of CND, Taylor also wrote for the popular newspapers and by the late 1950’s had become a well-known telly-historian, giving splendid half-hour lectures to the camera without notes , with his owlish appearance and nasal delivery. Taylor’s private life was none too respectable either as he tolerated an open marriage with his first of three wives Margaret, who included their lodger, the bloated, drunken, if brilliant, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, among her many lovers.
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| Taylor the tele-historian |
In 1961, Taylor published his The Origins of the Second World War, a wonderfully readable book, but whose thesis was challenged robustly by Trevor-Roper and many others. Taylor argued that Hitler had no plan to dominate Europe but pursued an opportunistic foreign policy, taking advantage of the diplomatic blunders of Mussolini, Chamberlain, Daladier, Benes and Beck to acquire Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. A picture of Hitler as a rational German politician was painted. The received view was that Hitler was an evil genius with a definite plan to dominate Europe and this view prevailed. An exchange between Trevor-Roper and Taylor gives a flavour of the catty academic in-fighting;
Trevor-Roper: “I am afraid this book will damage your reputation as an historian.”
Taylor: “Your criticism would damage your reputation as an historian, if you had one.”
Taylor paid a price for his revisionism. Magdalen College did not renew his lectureship in 1964 but he bounced back from this reverse with his English History 1914-1945 a hugely successful history in the Oxford series. Taylor remained a respected figure into the 1970’s and wrote an admiring biography of a most unlikely friend and hero for him, Lord Beaverbrook, the right-wing Canadian adventurer and Tory. As the years passed he became more cantankerous until Parkinson’s, a motor accident and a stroke disabled him before his death in 1990.
Trevor-Roper continued to write historical essays of astonishing range, about Homer, the medieval Jews, Erasmus, 17th century religious controversies, the Spanish Enlightenment, Karl Marx, to name just a few. Elevated to the peerage by Thatcher as Lord Dacre in 1979, Trevor-Roper made the mistake of leaving Oxford to become Master of Peterhouse College, Cambridge for 8 unhappy years as he quarrelled with the far right-wing Fellows there. In 1983 catastrophe struck him when as a director of the Sunday Times and Nazi expert, he vouched for the authenticity of purported Hitler Diaries, serialised by the paper. They were quickly exposed as forgeries, when the ink and paper were analysed. Trevor-Roper’s reputation and judgement were in tatters and he was humiliated. He retired eventually to Didcot dying in 2003.
Both men were fine historians, Taylor the greater achiever, Trevor-Roper the better man. Both gave enormous pleasure to their readers.
SMD
24.11.10
Copyright Sidney Donald 2010
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