Raphael Samuel, 1935–1996

Abstract

Raphael Samuel, historian, journalist and activist died last December aged 61. Born of East End, Jewish, Communist parents, Samuel attend Baliol College, Oxford and spent most of his working life (from 1963) a tutor at Ruskin College, the adult education college with strong links to the trade union movement. Like many other important people on the academic left, he quit the Communist Party a result of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and became one of the significant people in what became known the New Left. He was the inspiring force behind the History Workshop movement which began within Ruskin College as an attack on the examination system, and the humiliation it imposed on adult students. It was an attempt to create, within a very limited compass, an alternative educational practice. Raphael encouraged the direct investigation of primary sources and argued that adult working men and women, through their life experience, peculiarly well placed to write about many facets of industrial and working class history. From these beginnings developed the History Workshops, celebrations of historical enquiry, and the History Workshop Journal, of which Raphael was an editor from the start in 1975 to the end of his life. Never really a leader, Raphael was a sort of force that got people to do things, to sense their own potential, to question, to argue. There was always a youthfulness about him in spite of his years, which connected with his energy and enthusiasm. I have been lucky enough to meet a lot of intelligent and bright people in my life, I have met few that are brilliant - Raphael was one of them. His capacity and his interests were enormous. I hardly ever remember mentioning a book to him that he had read. Raphael leaves a significant body of work, often editor and contributor rather than sole writer. The 1975 volume Village Life and Labour (the first volume in the History Workshop Series he edited) was a turning point for my own developing interest in how the historical might link with the customary and the folkloric. He was interested in folklore because he was interested in ordinary people, their ideas, their attitudes and their feelings. Folklore was to him part of unofficial knowledge that people had and used in their everyday lives. For a richly suggestive and sensitive account of the relation of folklore to history see the introduction to the volume The Myths We Live By, written with Paul Thompson. Raphael believed that history is not the prerogative of the historian, even postmodernism contends, a historian's 'invention. …