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A.J.P. Taylor in Budapest at a TV interview in 1985. Magdalen College Archives, P310/2/P3 10

A. J. P. Taylor

Scholarly Output

In their attitudes to publishing their outputs, Taylor and McFarlane were wildly different. “Most dons, especially my colleague Bruce McFarlane, ask of an historian – how many of his pupils were placed in the first class? I asked – how many books has he written?”†

We have 85 books written by A. J. P Taylor in Magdalen’s collections, and his works have been translated into many different languages.

† Taylor, A. J. P. (Alan John Percivale). A Personal History. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983. Print. p. 179.

Finnish translation of The Origins of the Second World War by A.J.P. Taylor

Arguably Taylor’s most famous work, The Origins of the Second World War provoked outrage on its publication. In it, Taylor argued against the prevailing view that Hitler’s aggressive expansionist policies were the primary cause of the war, instead suggesting that the actions of other European powers, particularly France and Britain, played a significant role in enabling Hitler’s rise to power and the outbreak of the conflict. In so doing, his critics accused Taylor of being a Hitler apologist. The text has been translated into many different languages, including this Finnish translation published in 1962 – just one year after the original publication.

 

 

Book cover of A.J.P. Taylor's 'A personal history.' The cover has a painting of the author on it, sitting in an arm chair holding his hands together on his lap. He is wearing a suit with one of his trademark bow ties.
Page from a book. Text reads: IX. Oxford; Troubled Beginnings, 1938-40 Returning to Oxford in 1938 was almost as much a venture into a strange land as my original coming up in 1924. I knew my ways about the streets; I had an account at Halls the tailors; the manager of the George restaurant recognized me. Otherwise I seemed to have moved into a different world. In between I had lived in capital cities — Vienna, Paris and, in a sense, Manchester. I had worked in a university department that took historical scholarship seriously. I had belonged to a community with an important place in English society. Suddenly I was transported to a small provincial town and to a university that seemed unaware of any world outside its own. The Fellows of Magdalen, like those of other colleges, were the product of inbreeding. They had been taught by Oxford men at their public schools, had been undergrates at Oxford and had then been elected immediately as Fellows. Of my Magdalen colleagues all except one — Redvers Opie, the economics tutor — were pure Oxford products, and Redvers, though educated at Durham, had never taught outside Oxford. When I arrived many of my colleagues were unmarried and living in college, though this changed during, and perhaps because of, the war. I felt an outsider and was treated as such — unintentionally I am sure. My colleagues were kind and friendly by disposition. It did not occur to them that I was by now a stranger to Oxford or that Margaret and I had no friends or even acquaintances there. No one ever explained anything to me. Not a single Fellow invited us to a meal. It is fair to say that at this time Fellows of colleges still ignored the wives of other Fellows as embarrassing indiscretions so there was nothing personal about it. To add to our isolation, we were living in a small furnished house and had little room for entertaining. We tried once or twice with little success, and it became clear to me that we ought to give lavish dinner parties in college instead of inviting people to our home — a form of expense to which I was unaccustomed. Another lapse into blindness caused me little resentment at the time, though it seems outrageous in retrospect. By an antiquated clause in the college statutes a Fellow, though elected for five years and normally re-elected until he reached retiring age, was on 'probation' for his first year and excluded from College meetings. If however 137
Page from a book, text reads: he had been a Fellow of another college for a single year, he proceeded straight to `actuality'. I had been a university lecturer for eight years, doing the work of a professor. I had sat on a faculty board and examined for higher degrees. Yet not a single Fellow of Magdalen suggested that I should be allowed to skip the probationary year as I could have done under the college statutes, though if I had been a youngster with a junior fellowship at another college for a year I should have done so automatically. As soon as I had some influence in college I got this ridiculous rule changed — originally for the benefit of Austen Gill who came to us after years as a lecturer at Edinburgh and also as head of the British Council in Paris. When I put the idea forward Bruce McFarlane, the most pronounced Red in the college and a self-proclaimed Communist, said: `It never occurred to me that we could do this.' He and my other colleagues simply assumed that my university career was only just beginning and that I had had no previous existence. I did not share this view. The system of teaching also disturbed me although I ought to have realized what it was like from my own experience -as an undergraduate. At Manchester we had been concerned to train historians. Magdalen, like all the other colleges, was interested only in getting high examination marks for the pupils. The Final Honours School was scrutinized like a table in the Football League. How many Firsts did we get? The teaching was geared to this aim. The individual tuition, so prized at Oxford and now mistakenly aped by other universities, were essentially cram sessions. The good tutor was the one who taught his pupils the best tricks for passing examinations. The system, apart from being the reverse of scholarly, was time-consuming. I always resented it. There is something to be said for an occasional long session with a really able pupil. The others are far better handled in threes or fours. As soon as I found my way about, I cut down on individual tutorials and operated in pairs, much to the disapproval of my colleague Bruce McFarlane. Magdalen was in bad shape when I went there though I did not know it. George Gordon, the president, liked the glamour of his office but he was a lax administrator. For instance he did not enforce the statute that I must sleep in college for my first three years. No doubt a fortunate lapse for I should have resigned at once if he had attempted to do so. But it would have been better if he had had the statute repealed, as I did some years later. The college was also at loggerheads with its bursar. Ten years before the then bursar, an elderly clergyman, had made off with some of the college funds. He was of course dismissed and the college decided this time to appoint an efficient administrator. They imported a civil servant from the Sudan, and he, in true civil servant fashion, though it his main duty to thwart the Fellows in every way. By the time I arrived every college meeting was 138
Page from a book. Text reads: a brawl. There was a committee to supervise the bursar, and the bursar protesting against such treatment. Under such circumstances college business fell into chaos. Magdalen ought to have been more distinguished than it was. It had a large income which it mismanaged. It had beautiful buildings and the finest grounds in either Oxford or Cambridge. Moreover it was being revolutionized by a single man — Harry Weldon — his baptismal names were Thomas Dewar, but he converted to Harry, the name of a famous music-hall artist. Harry had come back from the first war an iconoclast, to find Magdalen sleepy, oldfashioned and still much as it had been in Gibbon's day. He had ruthlessly turned it upsidedown, insisting on merit instead of high connexions as the main reason for admission and on efficient teaching rather than piety as the main qualification for a Fellow. By the time I came to Magdalen he had largely succeeded. The college now prided itself, somewhat excessively I thought, on its intellectual distinction. Underneath there was a great deal of the old Magdalen, complacent and aloof, and a detachment from the university, only paralleled by King's College, Cambridge. Harry was the most stimulting among the Fellows to me and no doubt to many others. He had started as an orthodox follower of Kant's and had recently discovered the form of philosophy, called, I believe, logical positivism. He embraced it and carried it to extremes. All value judgements became for him matters of taste, neither true nor false. He was the Geist der stets verneint. There is a very good, though malicious, portrait of Harry in C. S. Lewis's novel, This Hideous Strength. There Harry encourages a young Fellow to sell his soul to the devil. When the bargain goes wrong, Harry says: 'My dear fellow, it was your decision. What else did you expect?' C. S. Lewis, too, was of course a very able man. Intellectually he was as destructive as Harry and yet professed an urgent Low Church piety which he preached everywhere except in the college common room. He was also a distinguished literary scholar, curiously combining adult gifts of appreciation with adolescent taste. He preferred above all else 'a rattling good yarn' and said to me one day: 'I have had a marvellous summer. I have re-read all Scott's novels.' Though I was his colleague for many years and often talked to him, I never discovered what was really in his mind. Perhaps, despite his genuine piety, there was truth in the remark of someone at a religious gathering: `Who is the man in the corner showing oil?' John Austin, the other philosopher, was an abler man than either Harry or Lewis and also a more attractive character. I came to love him though his mind was beyond mine. When I came to Oxford a byelection was on, with Munich as the principal topic of controversy and Quintin Hogg as the pro-Munich candidate. Austin coined the slogan: `A vote for Hogg is a vote for Hitler.' I told him that this was 139
Page from a book. Text reads: the only proposition of his I ever understood. Incidentally the byelection shows how cut off I was. If it had taken place at Manchester, I should have been a principal speaker at the meetings, perhaps even the candidate. As it was, no one asked me to speak and I never even attended a meeting. So far as Oxford was concerned, I did not exist. Bruce McFarlane, the tutor in mediaeval history, also did not bother much about the by-election despite his professed Communist views. We were close colleagues for twenty five years and never had a cross word. But we really did not see eye to eye. I thought that a scholar who was any good should write books as his principal task. Bruce, though I am told a scholar of the first rank, put teaching first and published little during his lifetime — whether becuase he was a perfectionist or because he shrank from criticism I could not decide. As a matter of fact I do not think he was quite of the first rank. He had great learning and took great pains, but it seemed to me that in the last resort he lacked judgement. Also, like most homosexuals, he was neurotic, easily involved with his pupils, whether for or against, and often emotional over college business. While he was alive I hardly confessed these criticisms even to myself. Now I incline to think that his admiring pupils have built him up more than he deserved. I will not draw out the list of Fellows into a catalogue, though in time I was on good terms with all of them and enjoyed the company of most. I am pretty sure I never had a personal enemy in the college; political or moral grounds for disapproval were a different matter. I ought to mention a few of the senior Fellows out of historical curiosity. I suppose Onions was the most distinguished scholar at Magdalen when I went there. Starting as a teacher in a primary school he had become editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and when I knew him, was collecting material for a supplement. This made him more at home with contemporary idioms than any of us were. It also led to an accumulation of `filthy words', which had been excluded from the original dictionary — a curious interest for a pious Anglo Catholic with eleven children. Dixon, the professor of mathematics, though now too old to do creative work in his own subject, was the most cultured man in the college. He spoke perfect French and German. He had walked over the Sudeten mountains fifty years before they became a topic of political conflict. When Gide was brought into dinner by Austen Gill, Dixon was the only Fellow who could converse with him on equal terms. Dixon was also the only person I have known who naturally spoke of Prague in the old English fashion with a short 'a'. Many years before he had married a French woman. She could not stand Oxford life. Dixon took a sensible way out, the only one in my opinion to make Oxford tolerable. He lived in college during term time. In vacations he had a married life with his wife in Folkestone — as near to France as he could make it. 140
Page from a book. Text reads: Benecke, the senior Fellow and a Fellow since 1891, was a period piece. He was a grandson of Mendelssohn's and played the piano beautifully, though he thought this too sensual a pleasure to be indulged in often. He had once had an enthusiasm — for Sir Horance Plunkett's creameries, the solution, he told me, of the Irish problem. He defended the old ways courteously but tenaciously and, I thought, somewhat unscrupulously. Though he never drank and for that matter hardly ate, he insisted on going into common room every night and sat there silently, staring at an empty glass. For him the college was still peopled by such Fellows as Brightman, the world's greatest authority on hymnology, and Green or Grugger who resigned his fellowship the day women were admitted as members of the university and thereafter on his occasional visits to Oxford drew down the blinds of his cab in order not to see any of the abhorred sex. Like most old men Benecke had become a caricature of himself. I suppose I shall too or perhaps have become so already. The only old man I knew who did not was Samuel Alexander, also the only one I revered. Magdalen had been a High Church college, a tradition that Benecke still upheld. Otherwise the tradition was dead apart from the maintenance of an expensive choir. But the college had been the centre of one of the last great religious rows. J. M. Thompson, a man of impeccable orthodoxy, had been appointed Dean of Divinity some time before the first world war. As an academic exercise he set out to demonstrate the evidence of miracles which would in turn prove the historicity of Jesus Christ. He found the evidence inadequate and at once renounced Christianity. The Bishop of Winchester, in whose diocese the college chapel lay, inhibited Thompy from preaching. The college, despite its orthodoxy, stood by him. Thompy became an atheist, though he always insisted on being addressed as Reverend. Wanting something to do, he turned from Christianity to history and became England's leading authority on the French revolution. He was my predecessor as tutor in modern history. The moment he reached the age of sixty, Weldon and others, who cared nothing for his eminence as a scholar and only knew that he was a bad tutor, turned him out. This was a discreditable transaction at which Thompy was rightly aggrieved. I am glad that I made amends later by having him elected an Honorary Fellow — against considerable opposition. Such was Magdalen, a mixture of old and new, with the new gradually being absorbed and tamed. I fitted in easily on the new side though I did not then appreciate the conflicts there had been. John Morris, the law tutor and a good friend, said to me one day: `I wonder whether we should have elected you if we had known how dangerous you were.' And I wonder whether I would have come if I had realized how essentially old-world the college was, still training young men to occupy a privileged position in society. At the time I was unaware of all this. Soon after I became a Fellow, we had a dinner to celebrate the 141
Page from a book. Text reads: 29oth anniversary of the Restoration of the president and fellows after they had been deprived by James II. As a new Fellow I had to make a speech and took the opportunity in the post-Munich atmosphere to remark that I was sure that we should resist Hitler as steadfastly as our predecessors had resisted James II. Geoffrey Dawson, the appeasing editor of The Times, was present, and my remarks were not well received. Later I used to speculate which of my colleagues would resist and which would collaborate, and my verdict was not as favourable as on the Fellows of 1687, when only one yielded. No doubt this was an unfair judgement. With any luck I shall be one of the few Fellows attending the dinner in 1938 who will attend the Booth anniversary in 1988. This is my one remaining ambition — not that I have had many others. My speech at the Restoration dinner was my only contribution to the Munich controversy or indeed to politics between Munich and the outbreak of war. I assumed that Great Britain and France had abandoned any idea of resisting Hitler and that when he attacked Russia, as I expected him to do, they would either remain neutral or cooperate with him — not a cheerful outlook. Meanwhile I applied myself to the dreary round of tutoring. As an additional absurdity, I had been imported as an expert on European history and had to spend my time teaching English history — the eighteenth century of which I knew only what I vaguely remembered from Namier and the nineteenth century of which I knew nothing at all. Also, though not a good tutor, I was a very good lecturer, a gift which Oxford did not rate highly. However I started cautiously by lecturing on The Habsburg Monarchy and discovered that I could both draw a crowd and keep one. As usual my way of life cut me of£ from my colleagues. The unmarried ones breakfasted together when I was still at home with my family. Most of the Fellows took a hot lunch together while I ate bread and cheese in my room. They ate their free dinner together while I preferred to go home. The grand dinner on Sunday night I never attended at all: thirty or forty Fellows arrayed in dinner jackets, five courses and wine all round. The Sunday night dinner is dead now — killed by the general spread of marriage and the lack of domestic servants. I dou't seem to have done anything during my first year back at Oxford as far as I can recollect. I never went to the concerts of the Oxford Music Society in the historic Music Rooms, perhaps because I thought it was a society only for undergraduates. We never went to the symphony concerts in the Sheldonian, in this case regarding them as second rate charity performances after the great Halle orchestra. Music dropped out of our lives. We tried a few country walks and found the surroundings of Oxford poor stuff after Kinder Scout or Dovedale. In the summer I went to Parsons' Pleasure, the nude bathing place that I had already enjoyed as an undergrate and in my 142
Page from a book. Text reads: tolerance. Margaret's mother was a different matter: a woman of enchanting simplicity and kindness. She had spent most of her life in India and had known well many of her husband's Indian colleagues. I asked her how she got on with the Indian wives. She said: 'Do you know, I went to their houses but they never came to mine. I had never thought of this before'. Such was the British Raj. Bickmarsh Hall, though not particularly congenial, gave us a sort of country home throughout the war, even after Margaret's mother died in 1941. When my two sons, Giles and Sebastian, were a little older, they often went there by themselves. As a further advantage Harold sent us a turkey every Christmas, so we were never stuck for a Christmas dinner. At one time Harold meant to leave Bickmarsh to my sons. In 1945 he fell down dead while inspecting his fields, and it turned out that he had changed his will shortly before he died. I have no idea why. I suppose my political views had offended him in some way. Holywell Ford, our Oxford house, became vacant at the beginning of October. Moving in during the blackout was not easy but we accomplished it somehow. The College bursar, who had disapproved of my getting the house, took the excuse of the war to say that the College could not afford any decorating or improvements. So we settled into a house that was shabby, cold, and so badly wired for electricity as to be a constant fire risk. Magdalen treats its new Fellows differently nowadays. However we thought nothing of it. We had one really large room, perfect for my gramophone with its big horn, and we were soon having music parties for undergraduates once or twice a week. I had expected Oxford to be turned upsidedown by the war as it had been in 1914. Not at all. Undergraduates were told to get on with their work and wait patiently for their call-up. John Biggs-Davidson was, I think, the only one who went off straight away. He became a Royal Marine officer and thought he had pulled ahead. The only active service he ever saw was to occupy Iceland. Some of the Fellows had arranged war occupations or bolt holes for themselves, mostly in the Ministry of Information. No one had thought of putting me on the list, and I was glad enough to go on with my ordinary work. With the coming of war, recent European history was regarded as peculiarly relevant, and I was the only person in the University qualified to lecture on it. Indeed, without my knowing it, the university authorities soon certified my work as being of national importance, and I received exemption from military service throughout the war. As I should have made a poor soldier, I do not think there was anything to be ashamed of about this. At Holywell Ford I took over the garden and found it harder going than that at Disley. It was much larger. The soil was heavier and I could get no manure. It really needed a full-time man and, with the 147
Page from a book. Text reads: war, there was none to be had. At first undergraduates gave me a hand. Later I did it all myself. The labour nearly killed me, but I raised vegetables for a large household throughout the war, to say nothing of apples and other fruits. I also kept hens and, when I realized their greater productivity, Khaki Campbell ducks. Ducks have the great advantage that they lay their eggs early in the morning. I could then let them out on the river, and they got free calories by begging bread from the visitors in the College walks. The hens and ducks, though profitable, were a frightful tie. We could not leave them unattended for a single night and had problems with holidays throughout the war. We had troubles with foxes even though the house was in the centre of Oxford. Once I lost all my ducks to a fox when I did not shut them up properly. More agreeably, an otter came to fish in the pool below Holywell Ford, and I have often watched it on a moonlight night. Holywell Ford was only a hundred yards from the College. Magdalen had been allotted to house the judicial committee of the privy council in an elaborate plan for evacuating London that never came off The bursar therefore said that he had no teaching room for me in College. I agreed to teach at home, an agreeable arrangement for me and not unwelcome to my pupils, who often stayed on to drink beer or play with Giles. But again it cut me off from my colleagues. Often, busy with my garden, I did not walk over to College for a week on end. Holywell Ford cut me off in another way. Few married academics lived in the centre of Oxford. They were in the suburbs of Headington or North Oxford, and it was difficult for us to have much social life. Similarly when the boys made friends at school, they had to make a long bicycle ride to see any of them. It was a hard winter. The Cherwell, which flowed under Holywell Ford, froze over. One day I skated all the way to the northern by-pass, rough going but quite a feat. The house was perishingly cold except when we crouched over our coal-burning stove. Fortunately, when coal ran short, there were plenty of logs in the deer park nearby, and shifting them gave me a further occupation in the afternoons. We had other troubles. Some years before, Bill McElwee and I translated Friedjung's Struggle far Supremacy in Germany, actually my first published work. This brought us into contact with Paula, Friedjung's daughter. In 1938, after the Anschluss, she wrote to me that she and her family, being Jewish, wanted to leave Austria. Would I give them a financial guarantee which would enable them to come to England? They had friends in France and in America, and the guarantee would not be called on. But when war came they were turned out of France or maybe thought it better to bolt, and arrived at our house penniless. Friedjung was a great historian despite being a German Nationalist, and I was glad to help his daughter. But it was an uneasy relationship. Paula and her husband were 148

A Personal History by A.J.P. Taylor

This copy of A.J.P. Taylor’s memoir comes from our Magdalen Authors collection, held here in the Longwall Library. It was given to us by the author upon its publication in 1983. In it, we learn Taylor’s views on Oxford and his colleagues, including K.B. McFarlane. We get details of Taylor’s efforts to make changes at Magdalen – such as the admittance of women – and see his side of what McFarlane deemed ‘the Taylor crisis’ (see McFarlane’s letter to Helena Wright). The painting used for the book’s cover currently hangs in our Summer Common Room.

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K. B. McFarlane