Martin Kettle, Death of an era
From The Guardian, 21 December 1996
Raphael Samuel's funeral in Highgate Cemetery this week seemed more than just
the funeral of a very remarkable man who has died far too early, at the age of
61. It seemed almost like the funeral of a way of thinking and a wake for an era
of the human spirit. To those of us who do not believe in resurrection, it had
a kind of wider finality.
If you didn't know Raphael Samuel, or if his name means nothing to you, which
will be the case for many readers, then I fear it will be hard to explain why
this December death seemed so much more than usually conclusive. Samuel was a
learned and omnivorously enthusiastic historian. He was a tutor of many generations
of working-class students at Ruskin College, an inspirational participant in many
networks, and a man whose intellectual and political passions were rooted in socialism,
in scholarship, and in an unbounded love for the infinite and messy detail of
human life.
Yet even if you didn't know him, he probably left his mark on the way that you
think about the world. Samuel had an unconditional interest in the past. He believed
that history was not merely a tale of kings, queens and governments, nor even
of the long march of the dispossessed towards a society of all for all, though
he was hugely interested in both. He loved people's memories and inheritances,
yours, mine, his own, everyone's. Through his work in the Ruskin History Workshop,
he was, in spite of his apparent aversion to his own celebrity, the presiding
genius of the modern reclamation of the day before yesterday. That book of your
district in old photographs is his legacy, just as much as the more learned books
of his own that he never quite seemed to finish.
The choice of Highgate Cemetery, as Stuart Hall said in his graveside speech,
was massively resonant. This corner of Highgate may not be London's equivalent
of the mur des fédérés in Paris's Père-Lachaise, yet it is the right place to
lay to rest both a passionate socialist and nonpareil chronicler of Victorian
London.
Winter, too, is the right time to bury the dead. A lonely time of inner warmth
and outer cold. We arrived in our ones and twos, murmuring our greetings, looking
to see who else was there, and lining the muddy and gravelled avenue that winds
its way across the damp and wooded hillside graveyard. Familiar figures from what
was once the New Left bent nervously to lift his coffin from the hearse and then
carry it, with its huge bunch of blood-red roses, on his last march.
There was a lone piper. I don't know why, but no matter. We shuffled silently
along the path that takes you past Karl' Marx's mysteriously troublesome monument,
past the lesser and later tombs of socialists who jostle to lie in Marx's shadow,
and upwards past the memorials to those who are merely part of the haphazard society
that inhabits all urban cemeteries. Then, in a high corner looking down over London,
we took up our places as best we could, while Hall and the others delivered their
fine tributes and read heart-stopping words by Auden, MacNeice, Emily Brontë and
John Dotme.
We didn't sing. Now there's a telltale sign of the confusion of the English Left
in 1996. We have no equivalent in this country of Eternal Memory. The International
would not have been truthful any longer, though I bet that all of us who were
there knew the words. Nor, for different reasons would a Christian hymn have done
for this secular Jew, though a hymn would have come very naturally among well-educated
atheists of a certain age. At least we should have sung Jerusalem or, even b
