A Tribute to Peter Quennell and Alan Hodge

A personal tribute to Peter Quennell and the late Alan Hodge – equally familiar to us under those well known initials, P. Q. and A. H. – for their work for History Today can but be personal. Since I have been called upon to make it, perhaps I may be forgiven for stating my one qualification. Though I was not concerned in the original planning of the journal, I was consulted by its backers quite early on for my judgement as to its character and prospects.

I approved enthusiastically; it was just the historical journal that was needed to bridge the gap between specialist journals, all too often unreadable by the general public, and the intelligent reader who wanted to read history, the public for which has been constantly growing wider – a significant phenomenon of our time.

Then, too, the illustrations, something of a new feature, were made important from the first; this too was right and proper, and imaginative, in an age when the accent on the visual has come to the fore, also increasingly broadening its scope.

That the original lines upon which History Today was laid down were well conceived has been borne out by the way in which the character of the journal has endured, essentially unchanged, and maintained its appeal and its faithful readership over several continents – if mainly in the English-speaking world.

It has kept its standards, in a time when too often standards are lowered to gain a wider circulation. That these objectives have been secured, while History Today has made its own characteristic contribution to the historical world, constitutes the best of all tributes to the work of Peter Quennell and Alan Hodge.

They both had the advantage of being equally interested in history and literature, and in realising that history is an important department of literature. This, though completely traditional and indeed obvious, is now a rather original stance in the increasing specialization in our studies – to which History Today has offered, under P. Q. and A. H., a salutary corrective and set a good model.

Samuel Eliot Morison, probably the greatest of all American historians (and an early subscriber to History Today), called attention to the necessity of maintaining just these standards this journal has stood for all along – good scholarship plus readability – in his manifesto, ‘History as a Literary Art.’

He wrote, ‘in the period between the two World Wars, I became exercised over the bad English used by students of history and over the dull pedantic manner in which many historical monographs were being presented... There has been a chain reaction of dullness. Professors who have risen to positions of eminence by writing dull, solid, valuable monographs that nobody reads outside the profession, teach graduate students to write dull, solid, valuable monographs like theirs.’ The result is that ‘the American reading public for the most part is blissfully ignorant of this vast output’, and hardly anybody reads their academic books except other academics.

This is a double pity when it means that academics do not know how to write – the rot has not gone so far here – and when, in default of books that are both scholarly and readable, the general public gets into the hands of charlatans, partisans, people with pet hobbies (e.g. about Richard III, or Shakespeare) who tell them all wrong. P. Q. and A. H. exemplified good literary standards – A. H. in co-operation with the poet Robert Graves in an original book as historical as it is literary, The Long Week-end, in itself a portrait of the period between wars; in his wartime experience of writing and writers at the Ministry of Information; in a book of his own on readership and reading; and again in collaboration with P. Q. in an historical book, The Past We Share.

P. Q. was born in the purple, his parents – Marjorie and C. H. B. Quennell – the authors of that original venture in social history, The History of Everyday Things, of crafts, tools, techniques, objects around us we take for granted. Peter, however, began with literature, was already well known as a schoolboy for his sophisticated and original poems, went on to write about Baudelaire and the Symbolists, books of travel and short stories, and about art – I remember with pleasure a little book about Constantin Guys.

He and I were contemporaries at Oxford, Peter holding the English Literature scholarship at Balliol, while I held that at Christ Church. The dons pushed me, not unwilling, into history; Peter came more gradually to history through a succession of books on the history of literature in his chosen period, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several volumes on Byron, then Pope, Dr Johnson and, more strictly historical, Queen Caroline.

He has emerged as one of the most distinguished writers of our time, with an equal interest in history and literature, discriminating and sensitive, also sensible to a degree unusual among critics, illuminating because perceptive, above all stylish. In addition to this, he has the eye and the knowledge of an artist, and this must have contributed most valuably to one of the special distinctions of History Today, its illustrations.

This is a field in which I do not qualify to speak, and where I feel a certain lack of confidence. I do not know how P. Q. and A. H. divided the field here – I expect they collaborated with their usual success, each adding his own inflexion, to our great profit. I can only contribute my own witness: I always learn from the illustrations. As a long-time contributor I would make suggestions, but invariably found that the editors brought to light something new – for example in a recent article on the Duchy of Cornwall, a print I had never even seen.

This matter of illustrations is far more important than people, especially historians, realise. For most of them do not have much visual, or aesthetic, sense – here one should appreciate the valuable contribution History Today has made and continues to make for us. Mr W. S. Lewis, one of the great scholars of our time, has collected along with his Horace Walpole treasures and other mss. at Farmington, Conn., the finest repertory of eighteenth century engravings of portraits outside the British Library. But, Namier told him, he had never had the curiosity to consult these portraits.

That is an imaginative defect in an historian, and one sees the result in the rather prosaic, flat rendering of the personalities in Namier’s books. An historian can learn a great deal by carefully scrutinising the faces of the people he is writing about – of Elizabeth I, for instance, or the court of Henry VIII as rendered by Holbein. Professor Trevor-Roper, in his admirable article on Clarendon, has pointed out how that great historian collected in his gallery portraits of the people he was writing about – one reason why he was able to describe their personalities so well to us.

The same holds good for places – Macaulay always went to see the places he was writing about. G. M. Trevelyan may not have been an aesthete – unlike Burckhardt or Emil Male, Huizinga or John Addington Symonds – but he had a wonderful eye for landscape and lived among portraits. How well I remember his taking me up to see the portrait of Isaac Newton at Trinity, Cambridge, and how revealing it was!

Per contra I remember taking a young American scholar of the English Civil War over the ground of the campaign of 1644 in Cornwall-and he couldn’t see anything. How much reason we have to be grateful to P. Q. and A. H. for opening our eyes – a favourite recommendation of Betjeman’s – and what use we should make of it!

I should like to pay tribute to their catholicity of mind – an indispensable quality in editors, never better exemplified than by P. Q. and A. H. I was always impressed by their openness of mind – from the beginning, for example, their featuring American history. Up to the Second World War this was quite insufficiently studied, perhaps particularly at the universities, let alone in schools – and yet it is obvious that we should know more of the great nation that dominates our fate in this century.

We could talk more about its leading figures, perhaps especially about its particular regions – the South, Middle West, South West, New England, Pacific North West; for the United States is an assemblage of different regions, and the constitutional marvel is how it has held together at all.

By the same token we must know more about China and Russia. P. Q. and A. H. were exemplarily aware of this, and gave us of their largesse articles about India, the Middle East, Europe, South America, Africa – all with their informative illustrations. I expect we shall see an expansion in these last – Africa and South America; I myself have a particular wish for more of the fabulous story of the British Empire in India, of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. Not only fascinating in their individual histories, but important for understanding the times we live in.

P. Q. and A. H. were very much alive to the importance of economic, social, technical history – railways, canals, steamships, mining, the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps we could have more about finance and banking, and biographies of the creative figures in all these fields. History includes, or perhaps necessitates, a sense of humour – though not many historians are aware of it, as Macaulay was; he wrote ‘there is a vile phrase of which bad historians are exceedingly fond, “the dignity of history”’, and made excellent fun of the portentous and long-winded Professor Nares. So, for a sense of fun, we might suggest following the article on Dogs in History, with one on Cats, at least as interesting though more subtle to portray. (Both Richelieu and Abraham Lincoln were devoted to cats – a somehow improbable pair).

Or what about Horses (let alone the history of horse racing) – many horses have won their place in history; like General Lee’s ‘Traveller’, or the Godolphin Arabian who has his tomb at Gogmagog near Cambridge, to which G. M. Trevelyan and I paid a pilgrimage together. P. Q. and A. H. were alive to all these possibilities, saw their capabilities; we might call the pair, who gave so unwonted an example of long and successful collaboration, the ‘Capability Browns’ of their profession.

They were discreetly welcoming to occasional ventures into literary history, with such essays as Joanna Richardson’s on French writers, for example. This was a good idea to follow up, for literature has as much to contribute to history, as history has to literature. The greatest writers are intensely historical or historically minded – Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Walter Scott; Victor Hugo, Balzac, Proust; Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoievsky; Dante, Machiavelli, Cervantes. And this apart from the historians who are great writers as such.

So we can expand along the lines already so sympathetically laid down for us by P. Q. and A. H. I should like to see a series on the great historians of the past – our own medieval historians, Matthew Paris and Gerald of Wales, Bede, Ordericus Vitalis and William of Malmesbury; or Stubbs, the irascible Freeman and that neglected writer of genius, Froude. I should like a series on American historians, not only for their own interest, but to bring home the lesson to American academics that they do indeed have their own excellent tradition of historical writing.

I want to know more about the great German, French, Dutch and Russian historians too; as well as such figures as the most philosophic of Islamic historians, Ibn Khaldun, Jewish historians such as Josephus, or other confessional historians, Western or Eastern.

One must include a word of criticism, I suppose, if only to prove that appreciation and laudation of a line joint effort have not benumbed one’s critical faculty. It is a good thing to encourage the young, if not always old sinners like myself.

Anyone who has had an experience of the excruciating delights of editing will know how often one cannot get the writer one wants for a particular subject, how often one is let down by the writer one chooses, the vagaries, undependability and lack of sense of time (among historians too!) among contributors – the vocational disease of academics, who do not have to keep to a schedule, as my friend Allan Nevins used to point out. He was trained as a journalist, and wrote better than most professors in consequence. Indeed P. Q. and A. H. set an enviable example of patience and tolerance of the short-comings of us contributors – how they achieved it I do not know, but can appreciate.

We can all learn from them – as I registered some years ago when the young men of an Oxford college that shall be nameless dropped its subscription to History Today. Little did they know that it would teach theƒm what they most needed to learn – how to write. The writing of specialist academic journals all too often sounds like the clicking of a hundred typewriters – no variation of rhythm, no sense of humour or irony, no colour or tone, in the end inhuman.

As editors P. Q. and A. H. were above all human and humane. We are grateful for what they did for history in creating History Today – in itself a creative job. It it sad that A. H. will not be able to enjoy the freedom and leisure which we wish P. Q. to write his own books in place of being bothered with other people’s work.