Feature: Remembering Alun Howkins, 1947–2018

Abstract

The death of Alun Howkins in July 2018 has deprived modern British history of one of its most influential and charismatic academics and History Workshop Journal of one of its original, long-serving collective members. Whilst Alun’s interests and publications were broad, cutting across disciplinary boundaries and historical approaches, his central commitment was always to the history of the modern British countryside and the men and women who lived and worked there. This was partly a reflection of his own background and also of the training he had received at Ruskin College in the late 1960s with Raphael Samuel. Alun was born in 1947 in Bicester, Oxfordshire, the older of two children. His father Harold had served a seven-year apprenticeship as a motor mechanic in the 1920s, but after being badly injured in the Middle East during the Second World War he found work only intermittently in that trade and was forced to move to a series of semi and unskilled jobs. As his father’s income fell in the mid 1950s, his mother Lillian went out to work, as an orderly and then cook in the local hospital before moving to the Ministry of Defence Central Ordnance Depot in Bicester, a large local employer. The Howkins family lived in a rented terrace house on the edge of Bicester, which like many small rural market towns was undergoing postwar transformation. Alun’s recollections of the place were ambivalent. He remembered ‘horses in the fields … when cows weren’t all black and white and when corn fields were full of poppies’. But he also recalled ‘low wages and houses without toilets or tap water’ and standing with a union banner ‘while a family was turned out of a cottage, which had been their home for the best part of 20 years’.1 Growing up there didn’t produce any great attachment; for the teenage Alun it was a trap, somewhere to escape.