Gareth Stedman Jones
From The Independent, 11 December 1996
Raphael Samuel brought to the writing and popularisation of history a seemingly
inexhaustible energy and creativity. He was also an inspired teacher and the author
of books and essays, which have expanded beyond recognition the intellectual and
imaginative ranges both of English history and of the writing of history itself.
But he was not only a teacher and a writer; he was also an organiser and a prophet,
a close, and sometimes uncanny reader of "the signs of the times". He preached
and practised a new vision of popular history: a democratic history which put
the everyday lives of ordinary people at the heart of a large and even sweeping
history of the nations of Britain over the last two centuries.
Samuel gave new meaning to the idea of history as an experimental art, inventing
the History Workshop (a term he borrowed from one of his heroines, Joan Littlewood,
founder of Theatre Workshop) first as a local and then as an international movement.
The extent of his empathy was exceptional. No one charted more exactly the ways
in which the Industrial Revolution had increased the extent of toil in every branch
of Victorian industry, but no one could have acknowledged more generously the
contribution of Tory antiquaries in Early Hanoverian England to the writing of
national history. His cast of historical actors ranged from Catholic priests ministering
among the post-famine Irish poor, the proletarian Gladstonian roughs of Headington
Quarry through South Wales village Bolsheviks in the 1920, to the mobsters of
the Edwardian East End underworld.
His insights were the product of an omnivorous intellectual appetite, which crossed
disciplines and periods: Samuel wrote with the insights of a literary critic,
the acuity of an anthropologist and the wit of a political journalist. Up until
his last hours he remained passionately engaged with the future of history, both
of his own many projects and those of the many friends and admirers whom he had
helped to inspire.
Raphael Samuel was brought up in a London household that was Jewish and Communist.
His political education and his love for history were nurtured by progressive
schooling at King Alfred's School, Hampstead, and Balliol College, Oxford, where
he became a devoted student, and later friend, of Christopher Hill. In 1956 he
left the Communist Party which had done so much to shape his youthful years and
was one of the founder editors, together with Stuart Hall and Charles Taylor,
of what was soon to become New Left Review. He settled in Spitalfields in east
London in an early-l8th-century house, which contrived to have been inhabited
by Jews, Jacobins and silk- weavers. This was to become his own workshop and later
the home which he made with his wife, the writer and critic Alison Light.
In 1962 Samuel was appointed Tutor in Sociology at Ruskin College, Oxford, a
trade-union supported institution which prepared for university working people
who had left school without qualifications. Upon the post he stamped his genius.
He was a brilliant, if eccentric, teacher. Rather than submitting his students
to the textbook learning of vocational courses, Samuel believed that every person
had a history/story of importance to tell, and one which they could be empowered
to write, thus becoming the historians of their own past. As one student wrote:
"1 came to Ruskin knowing I could not write an essay, and left Ruskin sure that
I could write a book". To those who took up this challenge Samuel was a source
of, sometimes obstinate, always upli
