Radio 4 – ‘Ziggy Stardust came from Isleworth’

For the next seven days you can listen again to this little radio gem. Radio 4 tackles the influence upon David Bowie’s well-known Ziggy Stardust persona of the now largely forgotten 1950s-60s rocker Vince Taylor. Oral testimony from those who worked with and knew Taylor is used to construct a narrative which takes us on a detour off the highway and into a fascinating little byway of British rock. The story is conveyed with wit, intelligence, sympathy, and no hint of nostalgic indulgence. 10/10.

“So can anyone tell me why there is still an underwear factory in ‘Coronation Street’?”

As a way of opening a seminar which followed an introductory lecture on the economic and social effects of the Industrial Revolution (not a small topic!), I thought this was a flash of inspiration on my part. Only time will tell whether my students feel the same way. My pre-occupation with them and all matters related to my new (part-time) academic environment explains my recent blogging silence.

“Give me it down to there, hair, shoulder-length or longer…”

The more time I spend involved in research and academia, the less inclined I am to criticise the choices which others make in pursuit of what they consider to be ‘important’ or ‘worthwhile’ research. If it floats your boat and those of your (sometimes minuscule ) coterie of co-obsessives, then get on with it and more power to your elbow. Seriously. In return, I expect that most tedious (and often desperate) of questions, ‘why is your research “important”?’, to at least be asked in a spirit of generous enquiry rather than implied criticism. Likewise, I won’t feign interest in a subject which holds no appeal whatsoever for me, nor do I expect anyone to endure what I do if it holds no interest for them. There are plenty of us; there is so much to learn and know; live and let live; horses for courses, etc., etc., etc.

Having said that, cultural relativism can be pushed to breaking point when it appears to support research which results in the statistically (rather than subjectively) bleedin’ obvious. ‘Man bites dog’ is not a new (or, hence, newsworthy) story. Nor, as The Guardian‘s Education supplement’s ‘Improbable Research’ column has noted, is the conclusion that some people have short hair, some people have long hair and some people have medium-length hair (whether ‘thrust upon them’ or not). Like many of us, I have belonged to each of those three cohorts at various stages in my life. I am probably destined, in time (although hopefully in the long- rather than medium- or short-term), to join that other anthropological grouping which might be termed ‘ex-wearers of hair’. Hence, the researchers of ‘Hair Length in Florida Theme Parks: An Approximation of Hair Length in the United States of America’ really could have stayed at home (and perhaps sat on their “appreciably longer than buttock-length” hair?) rather than “combing” through “strands” of “data” to reach their conclusions, as conveyed by The Guardian. The world would happily (or unhappily) continue to turn without the ‘knowledge’ they have gifted to it. Instead, they could just have listened to what Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt MacDermot told us (no less astutely, and with no less quantitive accuracy) in 1967 about “the beauty, the splendour, the wonder” of Hair – whether “bangled, tangled, spangled” or, indeed, “spaghetti-ed”.

OU pretty things

‘While other utopian visions of the Sixties have faded, The Open University remains and has grown,’ according to Yvonne Cook. Her good thumbnail history of the OU appeared in Wednesday’s Independent, in a special supplement to mark the 40th anniversary of the granting of the Open University’s Royal Charter on 23 April 1969.

Cooper quotes the author Philip Pullman, who describes the OU ‘as one of the last remnants of the impulse towards real social inclusion and betterment that underpinned the welfare state. Nothing like it could ever be created today, and so much the worse for today.’ I tend to agree. Happy birthday.

Festival of post-1945 footage

I’m very aware that things have been quiet round here recently, but I hope that normal service will be resumed in 2009.

Earlier in this year, however, I spent a lot of time putting together a variety of clips from YouTube (and/or the BFI and BBC) as additional teaching material for the QMUL Level 1 course ‘The Road From 1945: Britain Since the Second World War’.  My supervisor, Dan Todman of Trenchfever, hit upon the idea (excellent, I think) of a new blog consisting of primary film, televisual and musical sources to complement the other course documents and teaching materials. Although comments are not enabled on the Road from 1945 blog, we would be interested to hear any reactions through the comments which you can post here. 

As we explain on this page, the clips are categorized chronologicaly and cross-referenced thematically.  I was responsible for most of the material which might be of particular interest to Window Smashers: on The Sixties; the 1970s; the 1980s; Music; Cultural History; Political History and Devolution (or, more accurately, the non-English parts of the UK since the late 1960s). 

I’d appreciate any feedback on the the choices of clips, the passages I have written to contextualize them, and the questions I’ve posed to get the students thinking.

The Grunwick Dispute and me – ‘Today’, BBC Radio 4, 28th December 2007

I’m pleased to have made the final edit of Sanchia Berg’s report on the Grunwick Dispute for today’s Today programme on BBC Radio 4, which considered some of the impending new releases from The National Archive under the Thirty Year Rule.

To hear her report, follow this link to the Today website, then click on the 0630-0700 segment and open the .ram file. If you then fast-forward to around the 17 minute mark you will hear the Guest Editor of this edition, Professor Peter Hennessy, summarizing some of the key political issues of 1977 contained in the about-to-be-declassified files. Peter and Ed Stourton then provide a seamless segue into the Grunwick piece.

‘Testing…’

Yesterday I took part in a very interesting test of a potentially excellent resource which comes online for academic institutions soon and the public “sometime after that”. Although I was given no information in advance – in order to make it a bona fide blind test – no-one swore me to secrecy or made me sign a confidentiality clause afterwards. So I presume this is in the public domain… It is now.

I tested the new, digitized, online BL Newspapers 1800-1900 Archive (which they plan to extend into the C20th “at some stage”). I rated the concept 10/10 and told them that Colindale (in particular) investing large amounts of resources and time in this direction is an extremely positive development which I believe will be widely welcomed and applauded. I’m also impressed that the BL are seeking feedback on the site before it goes live. If they take even some of my comments (which they told me they found constructive) on board I’ll obviously be pleased. But I’d be interested to hear what others think about this and my suggestions to them.

I was quite picky about the site itself. I rated it 7/10 and suggested they make it more Joe Public-friendly by simply using more ‘Plain English’ browsing terms and links. At the moment it looks and works rather like a catalogue written by librarians – a sub-set of the BL integrated catalogue which, I admitted (with only a small degree of shame), I still find rather forbidding and tricky to navigate. I suggested they make it just a little more like the National Archive family history site, i.e., more like a public history archive/database. While there is probably a happy medium to be found between holding the hand of the uninitiated and allowing ‘serious academics’ to cut to the chase of the search, I did suggest that ‘we’ (the serious academics) wouldn’t mind clicking through some ‘How To Use This Site’ pages. Indeed, if we’re completely honest, we occasionally (frequently?) need to refer to them too.

The test itself was great fun: one pleasant hour in a studio with observers behind a two-way mirror and a webcam running on me. A chap sat with me, prompting me to vocalize reactions to what I saw on the site – like a cross between talking your way through an advanced driving test, a more pleasant TV casting, and doing a radio voiceover. It was organized by these people, who were also pleasant to deal with and are always looking for new testing guinea pigs. Nice money too – paid there and then. I recommend.

"Pupil history knowledge ‘patchy’"

…according to Ofsted, The Guardian and the BBC. Mmm. Yes. But I’ve seen or heard no mention during this debate about the almost complete lack of knowledge (due to lack of inclusion in the Curriculum) of any contemporary history. This shocks, disappoints and greatly angers me – as both ‘a historian’ and a C21st ‘citizen’.

Whenever I deal with undergraduates or teenagers (and even some ‘mature’ academics) I am constantly stunned at their complete ignorance of the history of recent decades; the very decades into which they, their friends, their parents and their teachers were born. The defence offered is almost universal: ‘Ah, but that was before my time.’ My stock responses to that are a) most of it was well before my time too – you are wrong to assume otherwise b) you’re a historian – what kind of feeble excuse is that? c) VE Day and the Battle of Hastings weren’t before your time?

I cannot comprehend how sentient human beings can function on a day-to-day basis without an awareness of the immediate historical context – social, cultural, political and economic – which has shaped both the society within which we all now interact and them as individuals within that society. Our ‘hard-wiring’ is, of course, influenced by the events of the long durée. But surely we are at least as much (indeed, I would argue, far more so) a product of the immediate historical context into which we were born?

Hoop Jumping IV: The Journal Experience (or, The Thesis vs. ‘other commitments’)

I attended a two day conference this week on “Getting Published in the Arts and Humanities” organized by Reading University, funded by the AHRC (and therefore free to attend) and held at the Institute of Historical Research. It was pretty useful, if slightly overlong and lacking firm chairmanship. There were two particularly informative speakers (about whom I may blog another time). They were informative because they talked in practical, realistic, human and humourous terms – four approaches which, I think, never go amiss in the often arcane world of academia.

A disproportionately large amount of time was devoted to the issue of writing that ‘elusive’ and ‘important’ first journal article. I had to suppress a little giggle, having just been given the final go-ahead on the final re-write of my Grunwick article that very morning. That sounds hideously cocky, but, in fact, it stemmed from a huge sense of relief at having finally got it off my hands.

I wish all academic journals had larger circulations (ie, more people read them); were cheaper (which they would be if more people read them); and were more ‘accessible’ in every way (which, by definition, they would have become if more people read them). But while we are only too familiar with the concept of ‘dumbing down’, even I don’t really have a clue what I mean by ‘accessible’ – particularly in an era when most people in Britain want to bring back the death penalty; a terrifying number of them read The Sun; many of them drink Bacardi Breezers, etc, etc… While, on one level, I would have preferred to have pitched all of my Grunwick work to a quality commercial periodical or even a broadsheet newspaper (and I seriously considered and investigated this at one point) the inevitable compromises of space and word-limit made this impossible. And the one thing I will not contribute to is further sound-bite over-simplification on a subject which has already suffered this fate far too often in the last thirty years. Indeed, one of the key reasons I wanted to research the Grunwick Dispute in the first place was to re-examine reductive mis-representations.

So, I plumped for ‘academic purity’ and went for the journal route. What did I learn, in practical terms?

Firstly, if you think you’ll do ‘just a little bit of further research to expand it a bit’ before you submit the article you will probably find this snowballing no matter how hard you try to control it. You’ll find more and more and more things that you feel you must address and try to squeeze in. You’ll wonder if you should really be writing a book rather than a journal article. (In some cases, you perhaps should be.)

Secondly, even if your work has previously been commended and you believe it is in a well-developed or even ‘finished’ state – both of which were the case with me – you will almost certainly be required to make changes to it. And then maybe some more changes. This will take longer than you will anticipate, even if the changes demanded are fairly minor. It is time-consuming. It is hard work (particularly if you are struggling to come in below the word-limit). It’s not simply about re-formatting footnotes to suit the house style (although that’s a bugger of a job too, software programme or not.)

Thirdly, you’ll have your first taste of the ‘peer review’ process. I’m told that, for almost everyone, the norm is for this to be a rather mixed experience. No matter your age or stage, you’ll feel like you’ve just got your school report card. You will think that those who compliment you are the most insightful minds in the world. You will think that those who criticize you “simply do not understand the crux of your thesis” – or something slightly melodramatic and self-pitying like that. And, weirdest of all, you will have no idea who they are. Therefore, you won’t be able to clarify for them, persuade them, or shout your head off at them (the latter only, of course, in order to demolish their minor quibbles with the intellectual brilliance of your analytical insight). You surrender completely to their ‘authority’ without being able to question the ‘credentials’ which put them in that position of authority over you. That is an extremely odd situation for any fully-grown adult to choose to submit to. In that respect the process is not one of ‘peer review’ at all. You and they are not peers. They have the power to recommend or reject you for publication. The only power you retain is the right to say ‘I’m off and I’m taking my ball (ie, the article) with me’. But unless you are supremely confident that you will get published in another journal, to do that would be to cut off your nose to spite your face. The whole experience rather infantilizes one: or it did me, anyway. I’m neither proud nor ashamed to admit that. When I was acting, I always told the company that I did not want to know when the press were in to see the show, nor did I want to read reviews until after the run was over. With the ‘peer review’ process those options are not available. But there is, apparently, no other way to decide which articles to run and which to reject. (Hmmm. Not sure about that one, but can’t come up with a better suggestion.) I had to accept it, and you will also have to.

Lastly, if your cherished article which you believe you have burnished to within an inch of its life is, as in my case, not a section of your PhD, you’d better have a very patient supervisor who takes a very holistic view of your ‘personal development’. Unless you have the self-discipline of a Zen master, working on the article and/or other public seminar or conference papers will inevitably impinge upon the progress of your thesis. (And that’s without even considering teaching commitments, any domestic problems or periods of ill health; or all of these simultaneously.) It is less a matter of available time than a matter of available head-space. The pay-off, of course, is that you have two subjects on the go, and thus a more ‘well-rounded’ CV. The down-side is that you may not be, eh…quite as on-schedule with your PhD as Brett Holman of Airminded is (and I am pleased to hear that his progress is going so well – it sounds pretty ‘text-book’ to me!)

So, to conclude – and all of the above is, of course, only my reflections on my recent personal experiences, and all our subjects and circumstances vary hugely – getting a journal to accept an article is a much bigger commitment than “just re-working it a bit”. Whatever time you have set aside for it (days, weeks, months): double it. Then, to be on the safe side, add a bit more.

But it is worth it. You know you are going to finally appear in print. That is good news, both “for the CV” and in terms of self-esteem. You may, as I did, have a very pleasant editor and assistant editor to work and negotiate with. You may even, as I did, get a mildly pleasant surprise (thus far) over turn-around times. If you have the urge, the time and the energy: go for it. After all, everything in life is a learning curve. I’ll be better informed, better able to cope with the juggling, and able to do it all quicker the next time round. Won’t I?

Another accolade

It’s not only Dr Todman who gets praise from me. Following the lead of The Guardian last week, I feel the urge to lavish a little praise on Professor Peter Hennessy in advance of the release of his new book Having It So Good (Allen Lane, 2006) on Thursday 19th October. Peter has, in my humble opinion, a unique ability to combine rigorous historical research with journalistic pace and immediacy. His writing also has a degree of wit and panache which has, not surprisingly, earned him a large number of fans beyond the confines of the academy. I was one of them. Peter is one of the key reasons I decided that Queen Mary was the most worthwhile choice of university/college at which to gamble on a return to studying Contemporary History. And I’m glad I did – not least because Peter turned out to be a very generous, active and supportive teacher. Not only is he a considerate man; he’s great fun too. So if you haven’t read any of his books, why not start with this new one?