James Campbell

James Campbell interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 4th September 2009

0:09:07 Born in Cheltenham in 1935; I was brought up by my maternal grandparents so many of the people I knew were a generation older; both these grandparents came from Norwich; my great-great-uncle was born in 1848 and I met him just before he died at nearly one hundred in 1947; he was a bookmaker, known as Count Brown, and he was only one of the few relations that I knew who actually made any money; that caused him to be much ill-thought of by the next generation of the family because he left all his money to two barmaids; he was illiterate though not innumerate, he could sign his name but that was all; my grandfather was at the College of St Mark and St John in Chelsea, training as a teacher, when his great-uncle offered him a job working on the writing bit of the bookmaker business; my grandfather said he was offered £3 a week, which was quite good pay in 1906; he turned down the offer and became a schoolmaster; his father was a garret master - an agent between a shoe manufacturer and the people doing piece work on shoes at home; my grandfather was born in 1886 and his father died when he was five; my grandmother came from a place called Hainford, just north of Norwich; her grandfather kept a pub there called 'The Barley Mow'; she could just remember this pub; his name was Laws and he clearly operated as a kind of witch-doctor for cattle; he would go out an lay hands on them and he had a familiar, a bantam cock, which used to perch on the mantelpiece over the fire in the bar; when he went off on a visit, the cock rode on his shoulder; he went bankrupt in the 1890s; my grandmother was orphaned very young, but her father and two of his brothers had moved from Hainford to Norwich in about the 1860s; he was a gardener and he fell off a ladder when she was five and was killed; one of his brothers founded what became quite a big corn merchants in Norwich called Allen and Page; it was a terrible struggle for bereaved families to keep going at that time; after her father died her mother, with four children, took a tiny shop in a street called Willis Street - it is still there, but is now a little boutique; then it was a small greengrocers, a two up two down, one being the shop; my grandmother could remember her mother getting up very early every morning to push a big flat barrow down to the wholesale market to buy the not very many vegetables that she would sell for a farthing profit; she then died and the children were all brought up by various friends and neighbours; my grandmother's brother, Norman, a clever man, started singing in Norwich Cathedral choir about ten and did so until not long before his death; he combined that with being a night telephone operator in the exchange; I know quite a lot about that generation, things that would surprise people now; my grandfather had two brothers called Charles as the first died and another child was given the same name

9:51:15 Have no siblings but was more or less brought up with two of my cousins; my grandfather's mother died young; his father had enough money to pay for him to go to college; after marrying my grandmother he went to teach in London; they had three daughters in quick succession; the eldest was sickly and it was thought she needed sea air so they went to live in Lowestoft; he was in the Territorial Army and was sent to France, was wounded in the head and invalided out; for the rest of his life, although good to me, was a man of uncertain temper; my orphaned grandmother was partly brought up by friends, and then became a pupil-teacher near Bungay in about 1903; she said it was pretty grim as the only way you could get to Bungay which was seven miles away was by walking; the young had nothing to do when not at school or church and would gather at the crossroads outside the village and throw clods of earth at strangers; neither grandparent was really interested in intellectual things though encouraged me to read; my grandmother did read but I never saw my grandfather read anything other than the newspaper; he read the 'News Chronicle' which summed up his political views

13:57:13 I must have been taken in by my grandparents in 1938; my first memory was seeing trenches being dug in the Kensington Gardens in Lowestoft which I think must have been in connection with the Munich crisis; not long after that we were all evacuated to Derbyshire; sent to a big mining village in the Notts and Derby coal field called Clowne; I remember that when not at work, the miners would squat down in lines against the wall; there was a great deal of religion in the town with a powerful Salvation Army; the Salvationist were the most religious though the Methodists ran them close, but there were quite a number who were neither; physical punishment was a key to child life, though my grandparents never laid a hand on me; I remember when I went to school - Mill Road Mixed Infant School - you had rising tiers of desks so that each child could be seen by the teacher; you wrote on a slate; the first class was taught by Mr Isons, whom I still remember bringing out a cane from a cupboard which he said he hoped he would never have to use; believe you couldn't have run that kind of school in 1940 without at least the threat of physical punishment; the boys were quite often beaten with belts by their fathers and most disliked the "buckle end"; people don't realize that evacuation was stressful and traumatic for the teachers as well as the children; you got about ten days notice; you had to think what to do with your own family, house, furniture, then go off with a train load of children to look after

19:21:04 I was not there long; there had been efforts to keep the Lowestoft schools functioning without having to merge with the others; the Lowestoft primary school children were put into a particular Methodist Sunday school premises; I had gone to school first in the local Derbyshire school, but because I came from Lowestoft I joined that group and spent the rest of the war there; I was very well taught, all by one lady called Mrs Barton; seems odd now but she started teaching me when I was five and went right through to the age of ten; when I came back to Lowestoft I went to Lovewell Road School; I remember being encouraged to read 'Robinson Crusoe', 'Treasure Island' and the works of Captain Marryat which I started to read about eight or nine; also read Harrison Ainsworth, and novels by W.H.C. Kingston which took you through the career of three naval officers; it was a good thing for my generation that you read books, not because they were classics, but they were books you really wanted to read

22:09:12 I was detected as being short-sighted by the Derbyshire school medical service almost immediately; such early photographs of me at the age of three or so show me with my eyes screwed up trying to see; it didn't occur to anyone to ask it there was something wrong with my eyes; the school medical service gave every child an eye test and I wore glasses from then on; in those days it was something of a handicap; I was not interested in sport, but you could be slightly mocked for wearing glasses; on hobbies, like a lot of children I collected butterflies, birds' eggs, stamps, but I wasn't interested in nature, just in collecting; seems to be less collecting now; also collected cigarette cards and even cigarette packets as there was far more variety of cigarettes then; you would cut the front off the packet and keep it in an album; during the War people also did a lot of aeroplane spotting; you could buy little books with illustrations of types of aeroplane that you would tick off when you saw one; remember feeling moral indignation when my good friend called Peter Littlewood, a miner's son, claimed to have seen a particular kind of seaplane which I didn't believe he could have done; the winters in Derbyshire tended to be harder with snow; there were two kinds of snowball, one called boys' snowballs you made in the evening and left them to freeze overnight for better effect, whereas the girls' snowballs were made straight away

27:09:01 I guess that my methods as an historian stem in part from the early interest in collecting things, reading and then organizing the information methodically; a thing that people neglect when thinking about history is the need to accumulate and order information; there is a belief in some students that they don't really know anything because that is called rote learning, but they know where to look it up; that is not the way to get a genuine conspectus of anything; it is characteristic of most great historians that they have not only had lightning originality of thought but have also had an enormous range of information; quite often you can't have the first without the second; the collecting may be more directly connected to the understanding; H.W.Garrod said that true learning is more important than real cleverness

30:03:03 After primary school I went, to my eternal good fortune, to Lowestoft Grammar School though then it was still called Lowestoft Municipal Secondary School; I went there in the autumn of 1945; because people didn't enforce conventions about age I was still only ten; they had just come back from evacuation, and had only just got the school straight again; there were only two hundred and fifty pupils, but it was a struggle for the teachers; when I left in 1952 the number had increased to about six hundred; it was a good school, discipline was perfect, and everybody knew what they were supposed to be doing; the headmaster was not particularly liked but he was feared enough to keep order; the teachers were really good; I can remember Stuart Spalding who taught me history; he had been at St Catherineís before the war; he was a very good teacher though his methods would not have been approved of now; in the sixth form he admitted he did not read books any more but was interested to hear about any that we knew the contents of from us; he got a new colleague who was more up to date and issued us with cyclostyled notes; Spalding tore them up as he thought if we could not make our own notes we had better give up; there was a very good English master called Baker, and similar French and classics masters; they were not only good teachers but good models; the number in the sixth form was less than thirty but a lot of us went to good universities; in those days I think that a good grammar school was actually better than a lot of fee-paying schools; in the fifties and sixties they lost quite a lot of the dominating emphasis on sport which had been the intellectual death of some of them

34:13:16 At that time I became keen on fishing and spent a lot of my spare time on Elton Broad catching perch and roach; we did plays at school; it was a mixed school which was very unusual for a grammar school in those days; most important, I had very good friends there; the class I was in, which included my cousin, were friendly people and there was virtually no bullying; music was bad; we were not really taught anything apart from singing; the master decided I was a growler and should not sing so I had to turn the pages of the music; it was not a musical culture at all though it is more so now, even in Lowestoft; I did not meet much music until I came to Oxford; it has never been very important to me and I am musically illiterate; though the school was a municipal establishment, I suppose it had vaguely Anglican links; anyone who wanted to go to church on Ascension Day was let off school for an hour and a half to do so, but there were no visiting clergy or anything like that; there were little bits of religious tension but really essentially comic; as far as people were punished for anything, which was rare, it was an hour or two's detention on Saturday morning, but the authorities had a certain amount of trouble with ill-behaved Seventh Day Adventists; I was confirmed many years later; my grandparents thought it right that I should go to church though they did not, and I went until I was about thirteen or fourteen; there was a time when most children's parents went to some kind of church; in the Suffolk countryside there were quite strong Methodist chapels scattered about, and in Lowestoft about five or six big Methodist churches which would be filled every Sunday; in the late sixties and seventies it all just withered and very quickly; I used to go to the Methodist chapel in Clun, Derbyshire; they were quite fun in a way; they did not have a pulpit but a balcony so the preacher could walk up and down; remember one preacher leaning over the balcony and asking the congregation whether it had been saved, and did they know the reality of heaven and hell; I did become fairly religious later in life, some years ago when I was in America; I was about fifty when I was confirmed; it was partly through working on mediaeval religion I began to see more complicated truths in it; now I am a fairly regular church goer; you realize that there is a curious borderland which I inhabit, which is that between belief and appreciation; feel that Dawkins and Hitchins are a rather too self-assured sect; there is no arguing with such people

45:45:05 Lowestoft Grammar School's great days were in the 1960s when you could learn five or six languages there; now I think it is quite a good comprehensive but I doubt that you can still do so; when I was at school there were a number of schools in Norfolk and Suffolk where you could learn Latin and now there is not one; the foundation of various kinds of still very important learning has become class based; I was not very good at languages, but history was what I liked; my grandfather was retired, but was not only supporting me but also my great aunt, and it seemed to me that I must become independent; I think I just applied to Oxford; at that time you could apply to three groups and I got an exhibition at Magdalen, University College and St Catherineís; it was quite a good system as one group was before Christmas, one after, and one in the Easter vacation; a very instructive thing that you learned then was that a boy who was not good at Christmas could become outstandingly good by March; Davis Palliser is a good example; he was turned down by Merton at Christmas but was clearly acceptable by March; fortunately I got the award at Magdalen and came up in 1952; I was much too young but in those days nearly everyone who went to university had done three years in sixth form and not two; one of the great changes in education that is little remarked upon is that the number of years children stay at school has been reduced; in Germany you normally go to university at nineteen; also nearly all my contemporaries had spent two years in the army; I escaped this because of my eyes; when I was accepted by Magdalen they said I should do National Service first so I should ask for an advanced medical examination; I was deemed C3 so not taken into the army although could have been taken into the catering corps if needed; eleven of us came up to Magdalen and our teachers were Bruce McFarlane, Karl Leyser, Don Storey and Alan Taylor; I am ashamed to say I don't think we felt grateful; K.B. McFarlane was a very good teacher if he liked people; I really learned more from the others; he had a very icy, detached temperament; nowadays having published a tiny book and a few articles he would be seen as a burden to the faculty; I was there when one of my colleagues turned up to explain why he hadn't got his essay done; he made his excuses and McFarlane said, "Why do you think I should mind?"; when Alec Myers's book on the household book of Edward IV was published in about 1962, I met Bruce in the High Street and told him I had just been reading it; he said, "Oh dear, has he published it? I implored him like a father not to publish it"; those were the days when you could be warned against (in Galbraith's words), "the gadarene rush to publication"; it is not the RAE world of today

55:10:10 K.B. McFarlane died in 1965; he was a great believer in short reading lists; he would put up a notice in the Lodge suggesting that gentlemen reading first part English history would be well advised to read the following works; think he probably didn't keep up with the increasing amount of secondary literature on the subject; I think there had been a time when he thought it easier to master the sources on the late English nobility than in fact it proved to be; he gave the Ford Lectures and he did an immense amount of research after that, transcribing documents from archives; one reason why he never published them was that there was an element of slight desperation about it; I don't think he greatly valued competition or criticism; he liked to be the man who knows; Karl Leyser taught nearly everything; when he was elected in 1947, Magdalen was the only college to have two mediaeval history tutors; Bruce McFarlane taught half the intake English 1, the whole intake the first part of English 2 and the special subject; Karl Leyser taught the other half English 1, all the mediaeval history, all the sixteenth century history, political theory which everybody had to do, the special subject on the investiture contest and on Clausewitz's 'Art of War'; the amount of teaching he did compared with McFarlane, was enormous; you couldn't always follow him, particularly on political theory, but on a lot of mediaeval history he was very good; he spoke about it in a way that I found very attractive; he was quite good at praising you for the bits he thought were good

Second Part

0:09:07 Taught by A.J.P. Taylor; tutorial partner was Henry Rack who became a professor of history at Manchester; it was entertaining being taught by him, partly because of his room; a Lowry hung over the mantelpiece; Alan wore a curious velvet suit with a great gold watch that he looked at frequently; he probably took us to be rather boring and sometimes amused himself by lying - on one occasion about the names of Lord High Admirals which he made up; he was a good teacher; his lectures were given without notes with great brio; there were a lot of good lecturers in Oxford in those days but his were the ones people tend to remember; I had been to lectures by Isaiah Berlin which were very difficult because it was impossible to make notes; Alan Bullock's lectures were good, as were Trevor Aston's; also went to Trevor-Roper's and Southern's - it was really a galaxy of talent

4:17:14 Towards the end I shared the Gibbs prize with Keith Thomas; a great thing to get as for two years after when I was doing research I got £30 a year from it; I did not know Keith at the time but had probably met him at the Stubbs Society; of my contemporaries at Magdalen, Michael Hurst and Philip Pettit went on; Pettit wrote on Northamptonshire forests and later became headmaster of Maidstone Grammar School; Godfrey Hodgson, although he didn't become a professional historian has written a lot of history; Howard Temperly became Professor of American History at U.E.A.; I wanted to do a thesis and in those days if you had an exhibition you could get it continued to pay for research; it was still a struggle as I had to help my grandparents with money and worked in a Bird's Eye frozen peas plant where I made more money than I ever did teaching as an historian for some time; there, we did something called quality control and we were supposed to keep an eye on the rate that fruit was freezing in the large freezers; it seemed stupid to me to check raspberries as well as strawberries because if the latter were freezing so would the former; what I hadn't reckoned for was that raspberries shake down in the box so you got an insulated layer of air; as a result of my failure to check them a quantity went off as raspberry juice; I expected to be dismissed but I wasn't; I later read the report on my misadventure written by my boss who didn't mention me but put the failure down to the maintenance department; I started to do a thesis on the Scottish borders in the reign of Richard II; I was supervised first by Galbraith who wasn't good; I had told Bruce McFarlane that I would like to do research on the Domesday book but he said that everybody who worked on it went mad sooner or later; he suggested I spoke to Galbraith who described the life of an historian as one of degradation and shame referring to himself as the head of the profession; I remember him lecturing on Stubbs Charters in a manner which you couldn't get away with now; when he retired my supervisor was May McKissack who was much better; I nearly finished it and ultimately wrote an article on it; in 1957 aged twenty-two I got a job at Worcester College; I had never been to the college before and was surprised by the lake; it was a strong field and Maurice Keen nearly got it though he hadn't taken Schools; they elected me, after which Harry Pitt went to see K.B. McFarlane to tell him, and McFarlane said they had made the right choice; my referees apart from McFarlane were Karl Leyser and McKissack; in those days not having finished a thesis was not an obstacle as none of the major professors of history had done so

14:15:06 I don't remember what it was like to have students who were almost the same age as me; Worcester was a strange place at the time; for many centuries there had been a very big difference between the large rich colleges and the small poor colleges; the gap, both socially and intellectually, between Christ Church and Balliol, and Worcester was enormous; that has nearly vanished; when I was elected I think I was either the twelfth or thirteenth Fellow; the dominating figures were Masterman and C.H. Wilkinson; the latter had been much decorated in the First World War and was the commander of the training corps in 1939-45 so responsible for the defence of Oxford; he was a very learned bibliographer of English literature; he was succeeded by Christopher Ricks; if you think of people who were taught by Cyril Wilkinson and then by Christopher Ricks, the term culture shock is not enough; it was a very conscientious college; everybody knew most of the undergraduates and Masterman took an interest in them; we didn't do very well in Schools but were improving, and several went on to be eminent historians

19:31:11 Harry Pitt was a very good colleague; he was very tolerant of me and at twenty-two you don't see just how intolerable you are; he did not write much and found it very difficult; he read a lot, and in terms of people teaching well and being a useful influence in the University, people who read a lot are probably at least, or even more important than people who write a lot; he never read rubbish; even I read detective stories; Harry was very interested in music; when I first knew him he was still in his communist phase; he had taken down his picture of Lenin but was pretty left-wing; when he was at Haileybury he had been involved in a demonstration one Sunday when they omitted alternate verses in the hymns; he took trouble with undergraduates; he was rather depressive and could have bad moods, but didn't take it out on students; he was much loved and respected, and rightly so; no one like Harry would get a job now; his contribution to the R.A.E. would have led to investigation; I am very much against such things; it is partly imitated from science, but there is a national need for scientific research; there is not a national need for historical periodicals; the ludicrous production of books has now got to an absurd point; it appears to have come earlier in Roman history; H.H. Jones's in his introduction to his great work on the history of the Roman Empire, writes that he had no time to read all the secondary literature so has stuck to the sources; Harry was a very good Dean; he succeeded Wilkinson, and like him he knew how to exercise authority while being enough of a character, almost with an element of self-caricature, to be entertaining; undergraduates responded well to this

26:38:11 I worked on Scotland for a bit, and on Scotland and the Hundred Years War; I was then required by the Faculty to do the stock lectures for freshmen on Bede which had been given by Michael McClaghan; I got very fascinated by that and started working on Anglo Saxon history and the historiography; I have written a lot of articles on it and a third of a text book, which I am pleased to say is still in print; I gave the Ford Lectures on ëOrigins of the English stateí, more than ten years ago now; I am also very interested in the history of East Anglia; the text book on the Anglo Saxons was written with Patrick Wormald and Eric John; it is quite a good book, not least for being very thoroughly illustrated; it was published in 1982 and I want to redo it - my co-authors, I am sorry to say, are dead; as it is still selling the wretched publishers won't agree; it is irritating as it is used as a textbook in America and for people who study Beowulf etc. it often forms their historical introduction; some Beowulf studies are a little mad; I am a very slow writer as I am endlessly correcting as I go along, and the result is not much better; I used to use a typewriter but then the type I liked become obsolete; now I am very fortunate to have a wife who word processes to perfection; I write by hand on every third line which leaves room for correction

32:16:22 I have written a bit on the making of the Stubbs Charters and am interested in nineteenth-century historiography and the complicated relationship that it has to politics; a simple example is the way that you find that historians such as Stubbs are very anti-French; they associate France with dictatorship, oppression etc.; you find that this only starts to change late in the century; I noticed it reading Kilvert's diary that he was passionately opposed to Napoleon III in 1870, and praying that the French will not reach the Rhine; if I were doing nineteenth-century history I would study the Anglo-French relationship as there are all sorts of important lessons; the bitter arms race after the Crimean War produced enormous fortifications at Spithead etc. and the invention of new types of ship; in Kipling's book on 'A Fleet in Being' he talks about manoeuvres; the study of Mediaeval history was infused with values and if you read Stubbs it is teaching you how to deal with difficult matters, to be true citizens; Maitland belonged to the enlightened Cambridge view of the evolution of society so you study law because you can see a collective mind at work; Powicke's life of Bismarck, published in 1914, is a vigorous account of national right, of how a developing nations creates is own morality and justification; it is the sort of stuff that if published now would be deemed almost wicked; in Anglo-Saxon history I was really interested in the development of the state; the English State is largely an Anglo-Saxon creation; Jefferson idealized the Anglo-Saxons and actually wrote an Anglo-Saxon grammar; I am now working on lost sources, and how you can show by chance survivals that there were an enormous quantity of written materials which have gone; to go too far in the line of argument that as there were many more materials later that this alters everything is dangerous; one interest is how much writing was done on wax; part of a Mediaeval record does survive which is a sheet of wax; on Roman records, someone worked out that the total records of elaborate discharge certificates given to Roman soldiers must have been at least eighteen million of which seven survive; the archives of the Byzantine state were kept in the enormous open spaces behind and under the seats in the hippodrome and all disappeared; there are then fascinating discoveries of things found at Novgorod where because things are preserved in acid soil you get this correspondence written on bark; what I am trying to do is to collect accounts like this and try to think how far history has been distorted by people playing a game with it; this consists of seeing something like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle with hundreds of pieces, and only having thirty pieces and jamming them all together; I am a very quick reader but not so good at memorizing as I was

41:05:05 Can't remember why you were not encouraged to read Maitland; may be that most did Stubbs Charters, also Maitland difficult to present to students; furthermore, the apparent simplicity of his writing contains so much sophistication that you are not going to get much out of it until you are sophisticated yourself; he is a great historian, partly because of his enormous learning and very quick mind; also his wonderful capacity for linking the conceptual and the practical, and of explaining very complicated things in an interesting and plausible way, at the same time being able to put things in the long context of progress, and the immediate context of how things would affect a particular person; there is general power of mind to deal with such very large subjects with such comprehensive lucidity; it is a particular tone too, a tone of discourse which is neither patronizing nor consciously simplifying; most of us just can't do it and there is no doubt that it came naturally to him as his early writings are as sophisticated as his later; he didn't take up legal history until he was over thirty; he did not think you could be a political theorist without being a legal historian; many Germans thought like this and a vast amount of legal and historical thought is German in origin

47:14:03 View that much of what we take to be modernity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was actually much older; the acceptance of the contrary view is largely due to nothing simpler than the failure to study Mediaeval history; Elton was no mediaevalist; the only other thing one can set beside England in that way is Denmark which also has a very long history; a large part of the books on the invention of the modern state is nonsense; there is some truth in the view that after the war, even Oxford was influenced by Marxist thought which did believe in a great divide between pre and post modernity; Bruce McFarlane's views had started off as very Marxist; there was a great dullness in the teaching of history in the 1920s and 30s; it isn't so much that new views had become widely accepted but that old views had been tired out