Angus Calder (1942-2008)

When Angus Calder died in June 2008 the obituarists paid tribute to the many-sided nature of his achievements as a historian, poet, literary critic and cultural commentator. What follows is a more personal appreciation of his work as a historian, with a particular focus on his great book The People’s War (1969). On strictly academic grounds it is a work I have always regarded with profound admiration, but it also reminds me of the origins, more than forty years ago, of an enduring friendship. I first met Angus in 1965. After reading English at Cambridge, where he had been prominent in left-wing politics, he was researching a PhD in political history at Sussex. His topic was Common Wealth, a party of idealistic socialism founded in 1942 by Sir Richard Acland, a wealthy baronet and former Liberal MP, and J. B. Priestley, the novelist and playwright, still trailing clouds of glory from his wartime radio Postscripts. Priestley soon dropped out but Common Wealth caused a splash by fighting and winning by-elections in seats which had previously been held by the Tories, at a time when there was no Labour candidate in the field owing to a by-election truce between the parties. While researching his PhD Angus was also at work on a more ambitious project, a history of wartime Britain which he had been contracted to write for Jonathan Cape. I was a postgraduate student at Nuffield College, Oxford, and my own PhD was on the subject of opposition to wartime government – an opposition that included Common Wealth.

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  Open Access•Joe Moran•Journal of British Studies•2015

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