John Keegan

From The Daily Telegraph, 12 December 1996

Raphael Samuel, who has died aged 61, was one of post-war Britain's most notable historians.

From a position on the political Left, and firmly on the margins of his discipline, he reshaped the ways in which British history was studied and written. He was concerned with changing the questions we ask of the past, and to whom we should address those questions.

In his work in the late 1960s he was overwhelmingly interested in the "lived experience" of the ordinary people of the past. In his essay "Quarry Roughs", published in Village Life and Labour (1975), he used a mixture of oral history and local sources to transform ideas of what we can know about communities in the past.

In the late 1970s he moved on to write about the cultures of the inter-war Left, illuminating the huge contribution to the development of British culture, and especially theatre, made by largely forgotten, and frequently amateur, pioneers.

In the 1980s his project changed again. Like many on the Left he had a fascination with Mrs Thatcher and Thatcherism and, in a series of meetings and then collections of essays, he sought to understand the historical roots of her appeal. The result was the three-volume collection Patriotism (1989), which he edited.

In the last six years, Samuel's focus shifted to questions of the past as present, especially ideas of heritage. It was this that formed the core of his provocative and powerful book Theatres of Memory (1994). Much of his later work owed a good deal to his wife, the writer and critic Alison Light, whom he married in 1987.

Through all this, the focus of Samuel's work remained the ordinary and the everyday. His was not a history of great battles or titanic class struggles; his working class was concerned with making do, with petty crime, with music halls and popular ballads. His patriotisms were small and local.

Raphael Elkan Samuel was horn in London on Dec 26 1934, the son of Jewish communists. His childhood was dislocated by war and evacuation. Only in the late 1940s did he settle, with his mother, the composer Minna Keal, on the axis of the East End and north London, which was to remain his territory.

He went up to Balliol in the early 1950s, a loyal Communist Party member. However, like many of his generation he left the Party in 1956 over the suppression of the Hungarian uprising.

He was a key figure in the early years of the New Left, but it was the upsurge of a new generation of activism in the mid-1960s which, brought him back into politics and marked the beginning of his historical work.

This will always be associated with Ruskin College, the adult education college in Oxford which had close links with the trade union movement. Samuel went to Ruskin in 1962 as tutor in sociology. By 1967 he had moved to the teaching of social history. His teaching was inspired, as was his profound belief in history, and in the importance of primary sources.

In the 1960s, even to progressive university teachers, the thought that you sent students, let alone ex-miners, ex-farm workers, or ex-typists, into record offices to write history, rather than study the text-books, was astonishing.

The History Workshop movement in which Samuel was the key figure demonstrates the inspirational success of his teaching. Beginning in 1967 with a small meeting on Chartism, it burgeoned in the early 1970s; its weekend meetings at Ruskin regularly attracted more than 1,000 people to talk history and argue politics un