Alun Howkins

I must have first met Alun around the end of the sixties or the beginning of the seventies – early in the life of History Workshop, as well as fairly early in my own (I would have been about nine, my brothers Mick and Dom seven and eleven); and he is at the heart of all my early memories of the movement. He was always one of our favourite adults, warm, engaged and humorous, and with a great zest and energy about him. Alun, broadly speaking, was great with children – I realize with shock that he can only have been in his early twenties. He was the obvious choice to play the wicked overseer in a play I wrote about rebellious factory children at the Children’s History Workshop in 1972, when I was ten. He was also the centre of the folksong evenings that accompanied workshops all the way through the seventies, and were my favourite part of the weekends. For me Alun was History Workshop, in a real sense; he embodied that early HW ethos – democratic, imaginative, innovative and egalitarian, making space for all voices, in plays and song, young and old – and also its gregarious, communicative and creative practice of history.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Ethos · Favourite · Literature · Theology · African studies and sociopolitical issues · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Race, History, and American Society