Professor Heathrow

When Asa Briggs​ got a job at the University of Leeds, he and his wife bought what he considered an ‘imposing’ villa on the outskirts of the city. Waspishly, the historian A.J.P. Taylor described it as ‘like Asa himself, small, squat and full of Victorian bric-à-brac’. Of the four recent British giants of broad-gauge history, Adam Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and affectionate account that leaves a slight whiff of constraint. It’s as if Sisman had more to say about ‘Asa’, as a historian for instance, but felt it prudent to leave that judgment to university professionals.

Briggs began as the son of a horse-and-cart grocer in Keighley, whose shop went bust in the 1930s. He ended up in the House of Lords as Baron Briggs of Lewes, welcomed to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, the guest of millionaire and aristocratic friends, chairman or member of countless committees of the great and good, all the while (to the condescending pleasure of posher colleagues) keeping some of his West Yorkshire accent. And yet this is not quite that English bedtime story about low-born talent being absorbed into the establishment and rendered harmless. For the first part of his career, at least, Briggs was a loud, persistent harrier of the status quo, whose resistance to change he despised. ‘We are an intensely conservative society,’ he said on the BBC in 1956, and ‘a class society, with marked social inequality … the obsession with the past, our heritage, not only softens some of the blows of the present but prevents us from tackling some of the present problems of our age … our grammar schools, public schools and universities produce fewer scientists and technologists than in the USA or Russia.’ Noel Annan gave his study of the intellectuals who shaped postwar Britain the title Our Age, but 1945-79 has also been called ‘the Age of Asa’ – the title of a collection of essays edited by Miles Taylor. Briggs became a dominating voice in the Wilson and Callaghan years of Labour government, a time not only of the notorious ‘white heat of technology’ but of huge expansion and transformative innovation in higher and further education. Unlike other academic historians, he actually changed the institutions and practices of his country, as well as emitting a cataract of written history – some excellent and lasting, some rushed and perfunctory (Sisman’s ‘select bibliography’ lists 26 books written or co-written by Briggs, several of them multi-volume).

That figure doesn’t include the many book projects left unfinished or that never got beyond the acceptance of the publisher’s advance, let alone most of his academic and BBC lectures from more than fifty years of teaching. To say Briggs took on too much is a laughable understatement. By the end of his life, his unfinished commitments towered over him. And yet it’s not quite right to conclude that he could never say no. His problem was wonderfully positive: he always said yes, with bursting enthusiasm for the new project. Sometimes he would for a time give it all his terrific energy. But, once launched, he tended to leave to others the practical work of bringing the new idea to reality – a point Sisman makes well. The only grand schemes to which he stayed loyal and (with interruptions) committed were the new University of Sussex and the Open University, of which he was chancellor from 1978 to 1994.

His own politics were flexible: left or leftish, but he never joined a political party. It’s impossible to imagine the Wilson- Callaghan years without Briggs’s multiple pushings at the government for social reforms, and yet, when the peerage finally arrived, he sat in the Lords as a cross-bencher. Almost the only job he undertook that was directly commissioned by a Labour government was the Briggs Report on Nursing, ordered by Richard Crossman when he was minister of health, but only published in 1972 (by which time there was a Conservative government that buried most of its sensible proposals).

This lifelong reluctance to sign up to – or be nailed down by – the causes he fought for irritated some of Briggs’s contemporaries. They found him elusive. That was a physical attribute too: constantly in motion, he acquired a reputation for never being around when a committee or colleague or (sometimes) university student needed him. He seemed always to be off somewhere else in the world, lecturing or chairing. ‘He was a busy, bustling figure who radiated energy and vitality, seemingly always in a hurry, and who travelled so frequently that he earned the nickname “Professor Heathrow”,’ Sisman writes. That sounds dismissive. But Briggs was deeply consistent in everything he did to one principle: fairness.

Keighley was a relatively progressive town to grow up in, and yet social unfairness soused it like the rain blowing down from Ilkley Moor. Briggs, in this respect resembling the late Jimmy Reid of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, saw around him capitalism’s monstrous waste of human potential. As Reid would put it, see the Ian Rankin living up that stair who will never write a novel, the Menuhin in the next tenement who will never hold a violin, the Chloe Kelly in that council block who will never hear the roar as she slams a ball into an open goal. For Reid, fairness would only come through social revolution. For Briggs, it was through knowledge: an eruption of public education whose lava would overflow all the conventional boundaries of elitist schooling and narrowly academic universities. As Sisman points out, when Asa left school, there were only fifty thousand university students (almost all of them men) in the whole of Britain. Today, to a substantial degree because of Briggs’s campaigns and ideas, there are more than three million in higher education.

He started at Keighley Grammar School in 1931, already ‘a very clever boy’ who had been writing essays and poems at the age of seven. Shrewd teachers helped him to the top: School Certificate at fourteen, then sixth form, during which he ‘read more poetry, fiction and literary criticism … than he would have read if he had been studying English at university today’. At this stage, it was English rather than history that entranced him. And it was probably a sense of his own precocious mastery of fluent, conventionally decorative prose that later gave him bullet-proof cultural self-confidence as he moved south into the Oxbridge world. For a short time at Keighley Grammar, he fell under the soggy influence of Moral Rearmament, the right-wing purity crusade. His schoolmates derided him, but Briggs always retained an undefined Protestant faith and could be called on for a bracing sermon. His parents were not particularly devout, but passed on a lasting respect for the ‘self-help’ teaching of Samuel Smiles. Not that his veneration of Smiles extended to self-help about the house, where his mother did everything for him; Briggs remained notorious for being unable to change a plug or drive a car.

His school-leaving prize, which he chose for himself, was G.M. Young’s Victorian England: Portrait of an Age. His turn towards history, and towards its Victorian legacy, was beginning. No other book made such an impact on him. ‘It was an inspired choice,’ Sisman writes, ‘for it was a work that Asa would refer to repeatedly for the remainder of his long life.’ From Keighley, aged sixteen, Briggs won a place at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. It was 1938, and the university was still a place of medieval discomfort and restriction, its students almost exclusively ‘hearty, philistine and insular’ middle-class undergraduates. Some new arrivals, like Hobsbawm or the working-class Raymond Williams, were ‘alienated and shocked’ by this. Briggs sailed through almost impervious to it all, soon a star in two different college debating societies and drafting a ‘History of Modern Times’ (his first unfinished project). War brought one immense intellectual blessing to Cambridge: the London School of Economics was evacuated there and Cambridge genius found itself exchanging ideas with Harold Laski (Briggs’s favourite), R.H. Tawney, Denis Brogan, Eileen Power and her Cambridge husband, Michael Postan. Briggs began to read Marx and the new subject of sociology. He was drifting leftwards, remarking (after the Soviet Union had joined the Allies) that a talk on the USSR by the socialist barrister D.N. Pritt was ‘a very good antidote to rotten USA worship’.

By now, the industrious Briggs was making helpful friends. Long afterwards, one of them wrote that ‘he was then more obviously a Yorkshireman – thin, intense and jovial – you couldn’t have a dull lunch with Asa.’ Many of them were waiting to greet him when, after graduating, he was recruited into the deeply secret code-breaking world of Bletchley Park. He always called it his ‘second university’, and Sisman’s long Bletchley chapter is the most intriguing in the book. What exactly Briggs decoded in Hut 6 he never revealed. But passion was everywhere, with young women far outnumbering the young men who bossed them about. Briggs began a long, tormented affair with a young Scottish Catholic. But he was also involved in the intense discussions about the postwar world with colleagues like the future Labour cabinet minister and SDP founder Roy Jenkins or the Americans Telford Taylor (later a Nuremberg prosecutor) and William Bundy (a Kennedy security adviser). Never a communist, he felt emotional solidarity with the Soviet Union as an ally and was indignant if anybody criticised Soviet actions (‘Oh, the Poles!’). Sisman doesn’t ask the question, but it would be interesting to know if Briggs had anything to do with the other intelligence workers (often non- communists) who were so scandalised that Ultra data was withheld from the Red Army that they secretly supplied it themselves.

After his demob in 1945, friends he had made through Bletchley helped to secure Briggs a fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford. Teaching politics and economics on the newish PPE course, he soon won a reputation as ‘a very young don who sparkled with erudition’ and was equipped with a ferocious work-drive. His early morning lectures were packed out, and his contemporaries – students or dons – are a list of names that would dominate the decades to come. Undistracted by a short affair with Iris Murdoch, he was working on the book published as Victorian People (1954), in many ways the most attractive of all his writings. It was almost the first trumpet blast of a counter-offensive, launched to rehabilitate Victorian thought and achievements after the 20th-century rebellion against its emotional and sexual hypocrisy, imperial arrogance and gloomy neo-Gothic architecture.

Briggs asked insistently why, if Victorian society had been so malign, there had been no British revolution in 1848. He contrasted Birmingham, where there hadn’t been a great social gulf between small employers and loom-worker families, with the violent class war between capitalist owners and the silk-weaving proletariat in Lyon. He soon accepted a commission from Birmingham to write the next volume of the city’s history, commuting there from Oxford several days a week. This job converged with his complaint that London-centred historians had almost totally ignored England’s provincial cities, although they had become so vast and wealthy in the Victorian period. Victorian Cities (1963), which is as readable as Victorian People, examined the growth of places like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Middlesbrough.

By then​ , Briggs had left Oxford, moving in 1955 to the history department at Leeds. He was already a celebrity, a regular BBC voice and a popular author. He had travelled enormously, often as a government-sponsored lecturer, to the Gold Coast (soon to be Ghana), Malaya (soon Malaysia) and the British occupation zone of Germany. He had befriended the young Rupert Murdoch when he arrived at Worcester as a student in 1950, and survived a long, crazy car trip with Rupert and his father, Sir Keith, across Europe, Turkey, Syria and Jordan. True to his pious upbringing, Briggs brought back a small phial of water from the Jordan. More important, he married. Susan Banwell, who worked as his research assistant, was a spirited and independent-minded young woman who agreed to marry Briggs on the rebound from a passionate relationship with another don. ‘She was not in love with him – “that was never part of it,” she would say later – but she thought that they might be happy together.’

Leeds was hard for her. In Oxford, she had moved among throngs of entertaining people. Now, in a suburban house, in contact only with a few uninspiring faculty wives and a temperamental black and white TV, life seemed to have stopped. Briggs, in contrast, was flourishing as a professor of history, planning Victorian Cities and fighting to Europeanise the history course. Gradually things improved. Denis Healey and Hugh Gaitskell were among the local Labour MPs who became friends, as did two Tories, Edward Boyle and Keith Joseph (who would phone Briggs in the middle of the night to talk about books). ‘At the time Asa considered himself a socialist and a supporter of the Bevanite wing of the Labour Party. But he was not active in politics and had allowed his membership of the Labour Party to lapse.’

As Sisman’s biography shows, this wariness surfaced throughout Briggs’s life. Some could call it opportunism. Perhaps it was more an instinct to keep his hands free for whatever might be coming next. He avoided head-on controversy or political statements. He sympathised with CND but declined to speak for it; he wrote for the brilliant left-wing journal Past and Present but wouldn’t join its collective. He liked and generally admired Hobsbawm, but his anonymous reader’s report ensured that one of Hobsbawm’s books would not be published. The commitment Briggs never dropped was to extended education. Before he helped found the Open University, of whose planning committee he was a member, he had served the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) for many years, journeying laboriously about Britain to give lectures, and eventually becoming its president.

The Age of Improvement studied England and Wales (Briggs habitually ignored Scotland and Ireland) from the 1780s until the Victorian climax of the 1860s. Published in 1959, it became a lasting success, after a rocky reception. Sisman has dug up an old Spectator review of it by me, in which I complain that ‘names and dates and quotations crowd together so quickly that the page becomes a catalogue, and there is the depressing sensation of reading a précis, boiled industriously together out of ten thousand tracts and theses.’ That was characteristic of a distracted Briggs in a hurry, but not true of his work on the gigantic project of writing the history of the BBC, which he cheerfully took on in 1957. Volume followed slow volume until – now an old man – he handed the job over in 1993. ‘As the reviewer in the Times noted,’ Sisman writes, ‘the task had taken him half as long again as it had taken Gibbon to chronicle the thirteen centuries that separated the age of Trajan from the fall of Constantinople.’

Very unfairly, some critics wrote off the project as the BBC’s ‘house version’ of its own past. It was true that Briggs – always anxious for money – had long been writing company and institutional histories to order. But their archives enriched his research; Hobsbawm referred to him as ‘the lynchpin of social history in the UK’. In any case, Briggs was acquiring influence beyond scholarship. In 1958 he became a member of the University Grants Committee, which was already planning the new generation of futuristic and innovating universities that would open in the 1960s. Among the projects was a university in Brighton, soon to become the University of Sussex. Its principal, John Fulton, worked to enlist Briggs, who was about to take ship for an assignment in Australia. Fulton offered him the post of his deputy. Briggs hesitated until he, Susan and their two small children were onboard. Then, as the Tannoy warned of departure within minutes, he rushed down the gangplank, telephoned Fulton (who luckily was in his office) to accept, and made it back onto the ship at the last moment.

Only months into his first term at Sussex, in 1961, Briggs wrote excitedly that it was ‘by far the most rewarding academic job I’ve ever done’. There was to be a new Map of Learning, and ‘schools’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’ would do away with the old barriers between departments. Student applications soared unmanageably, before the campus (another new word) buildings were complete. Less welcome was Sussex’s success as a fashionable destination. Only an hour away from London, it was besieged by media greedy for stories about sex, the leggy Jay twins (daughters of the Labour politician, Douglas Jay) and campus revolutions. Briggs, as dean of social sciences, was boosterish about his learning reforms, although much more radical changes, including the Scottish pattern of a generalist first year, had already been introduced at the pioneering University College of North Staffordshire (which became Keele). If you were a history teacher, Briggs wrote, ‘you know something about the future because you are helping to make it.’ His Oxbridge friends filled the Labour cabinets of the 1960s (and, like Jay, sent their children to Sussex University); more radical thinkers, such as E.P. Thompson of the New Left, spoke at the Thursday seminars he organised. He set up an Institute of Development Studies and a Science Policy Research Unit. Galloping through commitments, he kept his watch ten minutes fast as he urged speed during supervisions with an impatient ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ He became a director of Southern TV (ignoring the conflict with his BBC contract), but managed somehow not to accept the chair of the Independent Television Authority (ITA).

Student protest at Sussex brought out the no-nonsense best in Briggs, now vice-chancellor. Through 1968 and well into the 1970s, upheavals ranged from spattering red paint over an American official to crowds furiously drowning out the words of Samuel P. Huntington (for his complicity in the Vietnam War) or Keith Joseph (suspected of favouring eugenics). Student occupations demanded participation and access to ‘secret files’. Briggs was always ready to debate and argue, hour after hour, with the protesters, earning their respect for taking them seriously – and the contempt of stuffier colleagues and university principals, who thought he was ‘letting the side down’ by surrendering to the mob. It’s often said that he was the model for the trendy ‘History Man’ in Malcolm Bradbury’s university novel of that name. But that doesn’t really fit. He rejected soixante-huit and revolutionary ideas because he feared the backlash they might provoke and was generally immune to intellectual fashion.

At Sussex, the list of commitments and duties he failed to complete, fulfilled inadequately or dumped on underlings grew longer. He secured the prewar archive of Mass Observation for the university but was not able to acquire the Reuters back-files or to raise enough funds for a Centre for Communication Studies, to be headed by the pioneering radical journalist Tom Hopkinson. By the 1970s, as he noted, the initial excitement was draining away, and the staff – whatever their politics – were weary of his constant absences. In 1976, with regrets he never quite overcame, Briggs accepted an offer to return to Oxford as provost of Worcester College. ‘It does seem like a cop-out to the port and nuts,’ a colleague wrote. ‘After all, he has told me on countless occasions, after visits to Oxford and Cambridge, that he could never go back to such snobbish, over-privileged places.’ In the same year, he accepted a life peerage from Callaghan’s honours list.

Sisman clearly doesn’t regard Briggs’s return to Oxford as a cop-out. He chronicles three objectives that Briggs set himself and achieved: opening the college up by inviting interesting guests to give talks, promoting science research (‘progress was slow’) and getting to know the undergraduates, not least through parties he and Susan threw in the Provost’s Lodge. Sussex had welcomed women students from the outset, but at Worcester it took three years of tactful persuasion before the college accepted the inevitable in 1979. Briggs thought the hesitation ridiculous, but didn’t force the change through. It should be said here that Sisman, faithful and empathetic biographer though he is, overestimates how interesting Oxbridge college affairs are to a general reader. Stories of bickering dons, distinguished guest lists and building projects are dull – unless dramatised as C.P. Snow did in the ‘Strangers and Brothers’ series of novels (predictably, Briggs revered Snow for his attack on the scientific illiteracy of the establishment in Two Cultures).

The late 1970s took Briggs to the peak of his fame. Then, in 1979, the age of Asa ended as Mrs Thatcher set about dismantling the state and society he had helped to build. Her ‘Victorian values’ were almost the reverse of his: individualism, greed, merciless thrift and hyper-patriotism. Nonetheless, he disapproved when in 1985 Oxford dons refused to grant Thatcher the honorary degree customary for prime ministers. He continued to make powerful friends in Drue Heinz, greatest of literary funders and patrons, and Tony O’Reilly, the erratic oligarch of Irish butter. He continued to fly first-class around the world to lecture or chair conferences, growing tetchy with airlines that didn’t show him respect. With Susan, he built a holiday house in the Algarve. He still wrote incessantly. George Weidenfeld financed him to write a splendidly illustrated Social History of England (1983), which had enormous sales on the book club market but was panned by some critics. John Kenyon, in the Observer, pointed out damagingly that Briggs had fallen far behind the times in the social questions he had selected to cover.

Briggs lived a long life, dying in 2016 at the age of 94 (Susan died this June, at 92). He was busy almost to the last, churning out a book a year and often working on three at once, after retiring from Worcester in 1991. Few of them are remembered, apart from his Social History of the Media, co-authored in his ninetieth year. ‘Why did his work tail off so badly during the second half of his career?’ Sisman asks. ‘Why did he not relax in old age?’ His own methods, and his sheer haste, caught up with him. A book about Bethlem Hospital came in 25 years late, and then only because the publishers recruited four younger historians to write most of it. A study of the pioneering sociologist Michael Young, begun in 1991, limped into print ten years later, after Briggs and Young had decided that they disliked each other. There were many other examples of decline. His contribution to the Social History of the Media was nine months late and almost twice the desired length. He delivered the prestigious Ford Lectures in Oxford on his retirement, but his colleagues found them a dismal muddle. Promising a full revision before publication, he was still fiddling with the text sixteen years later ‘in snatched moments in aeroplanes, or in hotel rooms. Most of it consisted of quotations, not linked by coherent argument.’ Oxford University Press, which had intended to publish them, eventually gave up. Briggs’s mighty BBC history, which reached Volume 5 (and 1974) in 1993 after 36 years of work before the Corporation pulled the plug on it, should have been his magnum opus but, as Sisman records, is thought of as his white elephant.

His best work as a historian – he is still the most impressive writer on the strengths of Victorian England – was done before he was fifty. In a prophetic essay that appeared during the high Thatcher years, the young historian David Cannadine wrote in the LRB (6 June 1985) that ‘Briggs has often been described as a steam-engine scholar, pounding along the tracks of historical endeavour like an express train at full throttle.’ No ascetic, he loved good food and drink as much as travelling, hammering at his typewriter and small cigars. As he lay in a coma the day before he died, a Brazilian carer offered to make the grieving family a caipirinha. Up went speechless Asa’s arm: he wanted a cocktail too.

Briggs used sweeping educational change to increase equality in England. He helped to make history, as well as writing it. But as early as 1985, Cannadine was already mourning him. ‘Trevelyan’s English History was an elegiac lament for a world of liberal decency destroyed by the Second World War,’ he wrote. ‘Now, forty years on, Briggs’s very different Social History of England may in its turn stand as a more robust requiem for a world of welfare state decency destroyed by Thatcher.’ Today, as universities falter and plutocratic inequality towers over Asa’s England, will anyone draw a new Map of Learning?