2 - 1795: The Political Lectures [1972]

Summary

The Background

My interviews with the candidates and their agents for ‘Mr. Benn or Lord Stansgate?’ took place in July 1962. I must have submitted the report at the end of the month. At about the same time, I received my A-level results and, as expected, stayed on at school for a third year in the sixth form in order to sit Oxbridge entrance examinations. I took the Cambridge entrance examinations in a freezing Cambridge in December 1962. After receiving an offer of a place at Clare College to read English, I left school at the end of the second term of that school year, at Easter, 1963. I heard at the beginning of January that my Trevelyan scholarship application had not been successful. There were some moderate signs of subversion in my last years at school. I was among the few prefects who caused some stir in the school by wearing a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) badge on school uniform, and I won the annual public speaking competition with a speech which satirically imitated the accent of Harold Macmillan and joked about the policies of his government. The decision to study the electoral process by which Tony Benn sought to renounce his peerage in order to remain an MP was consistent with these anti-establishment demonstrations. The positions adopted were not articulated politically. They simply indicated an underlying moral objection to militarism and to class distinctions. They may also disclose a tension between an inherited framework of moral obligation and a desire to develop and express independent attitudes. It was, perhaps, a wish to explore that tension which caused me to leave school and to spend three months in the spring of 1963 working in a market garden in Vallentuna, near Stockholm, in Sweden. I learnt Swedish, read Strindberg and the whole of Shakespeare, but also observed the ambivalent puritanism and permissiveness of Swedish society.

I started at Clare College just one week before my 19th birthday. I have written elsewhere about the differences of ‘cultural capital’ between students studying English at Clare (and the whole university), dependent on their previous schooling. I was conscious of becoming initiated into a discourse. By the end of the three years I had become proficient. Academic success was my main goal. I simply assumed that this was why I was there.