Gordon Marsden
From History Today, February 1997
Raphael Samuel, who died in December, was not only a good friend personally to History Today, but also a historian who shared our aspiration to make history as accessible to as broad a range of people as possible.
Much has already rightly been written about his seminal role in the founding and development of History Workshop and its Journal, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary last year. Their impromptu, informal and democratised activities were a world away from the formal academic seminar, and typical of Raphael Samuel's concern to encourage in, rather than elbow out, those curious but diffident about studying history. This philosophy of empowerment was one that imbued his work as a tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford, with its working-class and trade union student intake and to which several of its former students, including John Prescott, have movingly testified.
Raphael Samuel was not content to rest on these achievements, in which he had been so prime a mover. He saw far more clearly than many historians, of either Left of Right, the enormous significance that the growth of "heritage" in the 1980s had for "history" and the possibilities for re-engaging popular interest in it. He supported the need for British history to be given a prominent place in any national curriculum - I remember the dropped jaws at an IPPR seminar on national identity when he said Mrs Thatcher had performed a useful service by raising the issue of Victorian Values - but he wanted that history to be pluralist and include the Bryant and May matchgirls' strike as well as Magna Carta.
Raphael Samuel's magpie and boundless enthusiasms found fitting structure in Theatres of Memory, published in 1994. This included a version of the piece Dickens on Stage and Screen that he first wrote as an article for History Today. Much is written nowadays about 'cultural studies' and interdisciplinary history, but Raphael Samuel was avant la lettre in this as in so much else - and a constant source of encouragement to History Today for our own efforts in this direction.
Even when many on the Left lamented the world they lost since 1979, Raphael Samuel retained a positive outlook. Though steeped in the glories of British literature, he was as willing to seek for and try out the significance of popular culture in other media - the music hall bill, TV advertisements, even the package holiday - as he freely confessed, playing optimist to Richard Hoggart's pessimist in a analysis of popular culture in contemporary Britain at a Brighton Festival discussion last year.
Gentle, but always confident of his corner, Raphael Samuel shared with his great inspiration, Dickens, a delight in the sheet diversity of people and their histories. But he realised - as G. K. Chesterton observed in his commentary on Dickens' - Christmas Books - that "there are crickets on the heath as well as on the hearth". His achievement was to bring them chirruping triumphantly for us all to hear.
