David Cannadine

Conflict and Consensus on a Ceremonial Occasion: the Diamond Jubilee in Cambridge in 1897

On 22 June 1897 the Queen-Empress Victoria drove in splendid, imperial state to St Pauls Cathedral, the ‘parish church of the Empire’ there to give thanks for reaching the sixtieth year of her reign. It was, in life, her supreme moment of apotheosis as the matriarch of Europe and mother-figure of an empire of unprecedented size, power and prosperity. Not only in London, but in towns and villages throughout England and around the world, the celebrations extended. ‘From one end of the land to the other’, recalled one provincial newspaper, ‘and indeed wherever the British flag flies, the day was marked in a special manner.’ ‘Everywhere in the Empire that day’, notes James Morris, ‘statues were being unveiled, garrisons were being inspected, thanksgiving services were being held in thatch-roofed outposts of the Anglican communion.’

Historians in ‘the liberal hour’: Lawrence Stone and J. H. Plumb re–visited

This articles assesses the careers and impact of Lawrence Stone and J. H. Plumb, examining their formative influences, and the effect which they in turn had on the writing and practice of history, particularly in the nineteen–sixties. It assesses their two most resonant books: Stone’s The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642(1972) and Plumb’s The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725(1967). The article traces historiographical debate through the twentieth century and into the new millennium, focusing on the buoyant and heady atmosphere of the sixties, which so affected Stone, Plumb and their contemporaries, and the revisionist response which peaked in the nineteen–eighties, and concludes that no historian could or should claim to be unaffected by the times in which he or she writes.

Introduction: Independence Day Ceremonials in Historical Perspective 1

Abstract Independence Day ceremonies deserve serious scholarly attention and should be set in a longer historical time-frame and broader geographical perspective. There was more variation in practice than is generally recognized but common characteristics and general themes emerge. The ceremonies marking Indias independence in 1947 provided a prototype and model. The consensus displayed at Independence was in many ways superficial and the pomp and partying concealed continuing tensions and paradoxes. This article also considers observances in the metropolis, including the elaborate funerals of Churchill, Mountbatten and the Queen Mother, with their sense of recessional and retreat.

The Calthorpe Family and Birmingham, 1810–1910: A ‘Conservative Interest’ Examined 1

In the provincial cities the existence of protected estates like the Calthorpe Estate, which owned and managed Edgbaston in Birmingham, had a strategic influence on the whole development of the city. The owners of such estates, served by solicitors, and themselves serving as patrons of urban parishes, governors of grammar schools and presidents of charitable associations, often provided the backbone of a ‘conservative interest’ in cities whose flavour was essentially radical (Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. 38).

CHURCHILL AND THE BRITISH MONARCHY

In early April 1955, on the eve of his retirement as prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill gave a farewell dinner at 10 Downing Street, at which the principal guests were Queen Elizabeth II and the duke of Edinburgh. At the end of the evening, as he escorted his sovereign to her car, the cameras caught the leave-taking scene: Churchill, full of years and honour, wearing the Order of the Garter which she had given him, and the Order of Merit which her father had bestowed, bowing to the queen, whom he had earlier saluted as ‘the young, gleaming champion’ of the nation’s ‘wise and kindly way of life’. This sunset tableau, combining regal youth and statesmanly age, was reminiscent of Winterhalter’s picture, painted one hundred years before, which had depicted the venerable duke of Wellington doing homage to the young Victoria, to Prince Albert, and to their son, Prince Arthur of Connaught, on the first of May 1851. For Churchill, like the Iron Duke before him, was not only her majesty’s greatest subject: he was also an ardent admirer of the institution of monarchy, and of the person and the character of the last British sovereign he himself would live to serve. Indeed, according to his wife, Clementine, he was ‘Monarchical No 1’.

The Past in the Present

There is more to the history of modern Britain than the account of what has happened to our country during the twentieth century. And there is more to the writing of history than the production of a definitive version of the national past. For countries, like people, do not just make their history, once and for all, as and when it actually happens. They also remake it, again and again, after the event. To this extent all people, and all nations, live in the past as well as in the present. And modern Britain is no exception to this general rule. As a result, we cannot understand the history of our country in the twentieth century, unless we also understand how modern Britain has made sense of the centuries that have gone before.

Heritage: The Historic Environment in Historical Perspective

When Sir Kenneth Clark concluded his thirteen-part television series Civilisation, which was first broadcast on BBC 2 in 1969, he did so with a programme entitled ‘Heroic Materialism’, in which he explored and explained how engineering, technology and science had transformed the greater European world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – in many ways beyond recognition, and in some ways (as he saw it) beyond redemption. ‘Heroic’ described both the achievements of such visionary, titanic, creative individuals as Thomas Telford, James Watt and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and also the massive scale of the change their endeavours had wrought on the landscape and environment; while ‘Materialism’ signalled that the creation of prodigious, unprecedented wealth, and its unhappy social consequences of poverty, misery, hypocrisy, cruelty and exploitation, were the dominant themes of the times.2 But it was not just the nature and scope of these developments by which Kenneth Clark was impressed (and personally much perturbed): it was also their traumatically disruptive speed, as ever more rapid, alarming and irreversible change, at a seemingly incremental and exponential rate, and with far-reaching consequences for the world around us, became a permanent, built-in feature of modern life. ‘Imagine’, he urged his audience, in words it might have seemed tasteless to use a generation later in the aftermath of the events of 9/11, ‘an immensely speeded up movie of Manhattan Island during the last hundred years.’ ‘It would’, Clark insisted, ‘look less like a work of man than like some tremendous natural upheaval. It’s godless, it’s brutal, it’s violent.’3

Monarchy: Crowns and Contexts, Thrones and Dominations

We are sometimes told, by those who believe that their prime scholarly task is to study ‘history from below’, that it is a mistake to concern ourselves with kings and queens, courts and coronations, art-patrons and palace-builders, flummery and mummery, because the whole glittering yet tawdry subject is at best elitist, and at worst boring. But throughout most of the human past, peoples, tribes, nations and empires have organized themselves, or have been forcibly organized, on the basis of royal rule, sovereign authority and hereditary succession.2 Moreover, most monarchies have been generically male, and most monarchs have fulfilled a remarkable and powerful range of generically masculine roles, as god, priest, lawgiver, judge, warrior, philosopher, patron and benefactor, which have significantly influenced the societies over which they have presided.3 If, then, we are to come to any settled understanding of the ancient, medieval and early modern history of Europe, to say nothing of the longer-term history of the majority of the globe beyond, we should recognize the importance of monarchy, and we need to study it – not as a wearying and meaningless succession of names and dates and roman numerals, but with all the varied insights and diverse approaches that have been developed by historians, and by those working in neighbouring disciplines, during the last half century.

Economy: The Growth and Fluctuations of the Industrial Revolution

Throughout the twentieth century, Britain was engaged in a dialogue with what increasingly came to seem the much greater, more confident Victorian era; and while one of these many past-and-present national conversations was about the history of parliament, another of them, which began considerably earlier, concerned the causes, the nature, the consequences, the meaning and the moral status of those events, inventions, transformations and developments which took place during the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century economy, and which from the 1840s became known as ‘the Industrial Revolution’. For as the British economy evolved and changed, declined and fell, survived and adapted, between 1900 and 2000, it did so against a historical background of earlier industrial prowess and global supremacy that was being constantly re-interpreted, reevaluated and re-assessed, both by public commentators and, increasingly, by academics, who were economists, historians and economic historians.2 As such, they had agendas and interests which were partly determined by the internal imperatives and academic dynamics of their own professions or sub-specialisms. But those agendas and interests were also externally influenced by the changing circumstances and contemporary conditions of Britain’s twentieth-century economic performance and, on occasions, by the performance of the global economy as a whole.

Perspectives: One Hundred Years of History in Britain

Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, James Bryce delivered his presidential address to the British Academy, an organization which he had helped to establish in 1902 for ‘the promotion of historical, philosophical and philological studies’.2 In the course of his long, varied and distinguished career, Viscount Bryce (he was ennobled in 1907) was a lawyer, journalist, historian, explorer, Liberal MP, cabinet minister, British Ambassador to the United States, chairman of Royal Commissions, and holder of the Order of Merit. In the language of our own time, he was a fully paid-up and card-carrying member of the ‘great and the good’, and like many of those who belonged to the Liberal intelligentsia, he regarded history as both a demanding academic discipline and also as an essential component of the national culture.3 Their age, Bryce told his audience, with evident approval, had seen ‘an immense expansion’ in historical studies and an unprecedented specialization in ‘the various branches of historical inquiry’: so much so, indeed, that all ‘the main lines of human activity’ were now recognized as coming within the bounds of those scholarly endeavours being directed towards the past. ‘This widening of our field’, Bryce went on, ‘may be primarily due to a larger conception of history, which we have now come to regard as a record of every form of human effort and achievement’– efforts and achievements which he insisted were no longer exclusively restricted to the political activities of a privileged elite, but encompassed the deeds and doings of ordinary people.4