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By Root 1627 0

demoralized bums and the fringe hangers-on of Soho, who were neither welcomed in nor attracted by establishments with a more elaborate decor, especially at night, as well as the Metropolitan Police in search of drug-busts. The large expensive tables and square chunky seats were designed to encourage drafting thesis chapters and long debates on tactics, while minimizing the space for, and the rate of consumption of, income-generating customers. In any case, the management of the Partisan was not strong on checking cash receipts and keeping accounts. In short, though Raphael attempted to explain all this away to the increasingly gloomy directors, the place went out of business within two years. Only nostalgia and the need to maintain contact between the pre- and post-1956 generations of the left can explain why I found myself involved in this lunatic enterprise. And yet, it was not more predictably doomed than the various other political enterprises of those who left the Party in 1956– 7. Like the Partisan Coffee House the political projects of the ‘New Left’ of 1956 are now a half-remembered footnote.

Intellectually 1956 left rather more behind – not least the remarkable impact of E. P. Thompson, who was to be recorded by the Arts and Humanities Citations Index (1976–83) as one of the 100 most-cited twentieth-century authors in any field covered by the Index. Before 1956 he was little known outside the CP, in which he had spent the years since returning from the war as a brilliant, handsome, passionate and oratorically gifted activist in Yorkshire, and his adult classes, whose members saw him as ‘a tall, rangy sort of fellow’ overloaded with nervous energy, explicating poems by William Blake.12 For his original passion had been for literature rather than history as such, although he was marginally involved in the Historians’ Group. It was 1956 that made him primarily into a historian. His later fame is essentially based on The Making of the English Working Class (1963), an erupting historical volcano of 848 pages which was immediately accepted as a major work even by the world of professional historians, and which captured young radical readers on both sides of the Atlantic overnight, and continental European sociologists and social historians not long after. And this in spite of its almost aggressively brief chronological span and narrowly English – not even British – subject matter. Escaping from the cage of the old Party orthodoxy, it allowed him as well to join a collective debate with other hitherto isolated thinkers of the left, old and new, also often rooted in the adult education movement, notably the other major figure of the first ‘New Left,’ the literary scholar Raymond Williams.

Edward was indeed a person of quite extraordinary gifts, not least the sort of palpable ‘star quality’, which led every eye to turn towards his increasingly craggy good looks whenever he was present on any scene. His ‘work combined passion and intellect, the gifts of the poet, the narrator and the analyst. He was the only historian I knew who had not just talent, brilliance, erudition and the gift of writing, but … ‘‘genius in the traditional sense of the word’’ ’,13 and all the more obviously so since he fitted the Romantic image of the genius in looks, life and work – especially with the suitable landscape of the Welsh hills behind him.

In short, he was a man showered by the fairies at birth with all possible gifts except two. Nature had omitted to provide him with an in-built sub-editor and an in-built compass. And, with all his warmth, charm, humour and rage, it left him in some ways insecure and vulnerable. Like so many of his other works, The Making had begun as the first chapter of a short textbook on British labour history from 1790 to 1945, and had just got out of hand. Within a few years he suspended the remarkable studies of eighteenth-century society begun after The Making had turned him temporarily into an orthodox academic, which did not fit his style, to plunge into years of a theoretical struggle against the influence