The Life of R. H. Tawney: Socialism and History

433 Pages·2013·1.844 MB·English

by  Lawrence Goldman

The Life of R. H. Tawney
ii
The Life of R. H. Tawney
Socialism and History
Lawrence Goldman
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013
© Lawrence Goldman, 2013
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Lawrence Goldman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be
accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-7809-3704-5
ePDF: 978-1-7809-3612-3
ePub: 978-1-7809-3828-8
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
To Henry Mayr-Harting, Henrietta Leyser
and Mark Whittow
vi
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
List of Illustrations xii
Abbreviations used in the Text xiii
Introduction 1
1 Calcutta, Rugby, Oxford, Whitechapel 1 1
2 Courtship and Marriage 3 5
3 Workers’ Education, 1908–13 5 3
4 The Somme 8 1
5 Reconstruction after the First World War: Coal 109
6 Tawney Between the Wars 133
7 Socialism and Christianity 167
8 Education 199
9 History 217
10 London and Washington: The Second World War 249
11 Last Things: 1945–62 273
12 Conclusion: Politics, Reputation and Style 295
Post Script: Tawney Fifty Years on 317
Notes 321
Illustrations 375
Bibliography of Collections and Published Works Cited in the Text 387
Index 401
Acknowledgements
My interest in R. H. Tawney is personal as well as scholarly. As a junior research
fellow in Cambridge in the 1980s I sometimes found myself taking lunch or
dinner next to the former diplomat and historian Michal Vyvyan, then emeritus
fellow of Trinity College, who was Tawney’s nephew and one of his two literary
executors, and whose reminiscences of his uncle and correspondence feature in
this book. I barely knew who Tawney was at that stage but Vyvyan’s conversation
and recollections of him interested me greatly. Then I left Cambridge and
discovered that I had been appointed to ‘Tawney’s job’ as it was described to me,
teaching adult students as the History and Politics lecturer at the Department
for Continuing Education in the University of Oxford. Tawney had held this
position – in fact, he had invented it himself – between 1908 and 1913. Like
Tawney, I taught four extra-mural evening classes a week and summer schools
as well, and like Tawney I spent five years in the job. The experience was
formative, as it had been for Tawney, and it led me to a scholarly interest in
the history of adult and workers’ education in England, published as a book,
Dons and Workers: Oxford and Adult Education Since 1850 in 1995.1 Tawney
emerged from that study as the most deep-thinking, skilled and radical tutor in
the educational movement which, from the Edwardian period, sent university
tutors to the towns and cities of Britain to teach tutorial classes, as they were
called, to working men and women. The idea of writing his biography began
to take shape, and a first attempt was published in the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography in 2004.2 Not long after Tawney died the other of his literary
executors, Sir Richard Rees, commented that ‘the problem of finding someone
capable of doing justice to the different aspects of Harry’s personality and life
is not a simple one.’3 Though my personal connections with Tawney may be
considered slight and coincidental, they may go some small way towards an
understanding of certain aspects of his career.
While there are many extant summaries of his life and several books which
provide good accounts of his biography, restrictions on the use of Tawney’s
papers, including the amount that could be quoted directly from them, have
deterred a full-scale study of the man up to now. Our knowledge not only of
Acknowledgements ix
Tawney himself but of British socialism, education and historiography in the
first half of the twentieth century have been the poorer for this, and I hope this
book goes some way to make amends. To be able to read Tawney in his own,
often magnificent words, whether in letters, speeches, lectures or unpublished
articles, is one of the aims of this book.
My primary thanks are to Tawney’s great nephew and current literary
executor, Major General Charles Vyvyan, for his interest in the project of writing
Tawney’s life from scratch, for making available to me those items of Tawney’s
personal papers then in the possession of the family, and for permission to quote
in full and at length from the Tawney and Tawney-Vyvyan collections held in the
archives of the British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School
of Economics. I am especially grateful to Sue Donnelly and her admirable team
of archivists at the LSE who made my days there working on Tawney’s papers
and associated collections so pleasant and profitable. Their help with queries
and their general consideration for scholars is exemplary. I would also like to
record my thanks to the staff of the British Library; the National Archives; the
London University Institute of Education library; the Lambeth Palace Library;
the London Metropolitan Archives; the Oxford University Archives; Rhodes
House Library, Oxford; the Cambridge University Library; the libraries of Trinity
College and King’s College in Cambridge and the libraries of Christ Church,
Balliol College and St. Peter’s College in Oxford; Toynbee Hall, Whitechapel;
Rugby School Archives and Tameside Local Studies Library.
For permission to quote from the collections in their ownership or care, I am
grateful to the London School of Economics; London University Institute of
Education; London Metropolitan Archives; the Trades Union Congress Library
of London Metropolitan University; the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library;
the Literary Estate of Lord Dacre of Glanton; the Economic History Society; the
Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge; the Master and Fellows of
Balliol College, Oxford and Rugby School.
Chapter 3 of this book, which is about Tawney’s experience teaching workers
between 1908 and 1913, is an adapted and expanded version of chapter 3 of my
earlier book Dons and Workers. Oxford and Adult Education Since 1850 (Oxford,
1995). I am grateful to the Delegates of Oxford University Press for permission
to use the material in an altered form in this book.
I am grateful to Rugby School for permission to reproduce three photographs
of Tawney as a schoolboy. The remaining photographs are items held in the
Tawney collections at the British Library of Political and Economic Science at