No Hiccups

Questions without answers. I exaggerate. Such an unfortunate way to begin. The Schloss seeking to grab the headlines, rather than carefully handling the facts. It won’t do. So I’ll start again. The question is asked, but the answer wanders far from the point the question intends to reach. A few yards on the road, then miles across country, until stopping at digression’s end; many a country pub and cottage missed en route. It is why we never learn about his mother’s character, though we infer a lot from what is said.

Born and brought up in a small village, where the family had lived for four generations, Mrs Mathias had a strong Anglican faith, inherited from her father, a church warden. But now she leaves the village; returning for long stays during the war, when husband works in the navy’s stone frigates - on-shore bases for those too old to sail. What image is forming in our heads…a domestic, pious, conservative woman, more in tune with the country than the city? Someone who belongs to a closed community, is not a citizen of the open society. How did she cope in Bristol? Could it ever feel quite like home….

Peter Mathias’s father is a total contrast. The two most unlikely people to be married, says their son. A Petty Officer Writer on board ship Mr Mathias travelled the world, picking up scraps of eastern religion at each harbour stop. He worked in Germany immediately after its collapse, collecting documents on submarine warfare; these now housed in the national archives. A special person. A man out of the usual run. Not so his wife, once so typical of the British Isles. Only in the early 20th century, perhaps, could there be such a marriage of opposites; a time when societies were transformed, and whole cosmologies were bombed into oblivion. Two worlds collide…the verb is overly dramatic. That great distance, the gap in sensibility, is too wide…no, I need a softer, less brutal image, once that gets us closer to the relationship. A boat sails across the bay, a woman watching it fade into the horizon.

Such familial schizophrenia - am I allowed such an outlandish metaphor? - did not produce any serious consequences in the son. No deep yearning for revolt. No alienated youth lost to a quest for meaning, when life’s fragments are fused together under a single idea. This clever boy glides effortlessly across the academic ice-rink. Easy. Inside a granted maintained school, this pupil of all the talents is a whale in a lake. But what happens when this whale slips into the ocean…I think of Albie in Emyrs Humphreys’s A Toy Epic. Unlike Albie, Peter doesn’t suffer that common crisis of the scholarship boy who, trained in examination success, cannot compete with those capacious, sophisticated, flexible intellects, who absorb ideas not learn them. This chap doesn’t crumple before the super-smart of the upper bourgeoisie. Why? I scramble around for ideas…. 

Did those two years in the army - compulsory for Cambridge - gave him time to adjust? Already mature, able now to meet the challenges of his competitors. Or maybe history doesn’t offer the same problems as the sciences, philosophy or the arts, where talent is often precocious and worldly wise. Possible. Perhaps we need to leave the classroom…Albie was undone by a young woman, whose emotional sophistication overwhelmed him. Not here. Women hardly appear in Peter’s life. Of course, there’s a simple explanation: his genetic inheritance: he just happens to be an intellectual aristocrat. This blue blood has no fear about rivals. This the truth, I suspect. I’d love to learn more about his schooling, which he clearly outgrew early on. How much did our man learn alone? Or am I being carried away on the wrong tide…a level head, a solidity born of that village ancestry, together with the plasticity of the father, who was absorbed into his family’s faith (he was nominally Catholic) did these do the business? Character trumps intelligence; a man strong enough to adapt to any situation. Peter Mathias had the right combination of qualities to succeed. After a star turn at Colston Hospital he finds that he is very good at fitting in. It is why he accepts authority without demure: Vivian Fisher tells him to give up rowing - Exhibitioners should dedicate their life to academic honours -; Charles Wilson advises him not to take a PhD…. Acts of a rite of passage, where the ego is lost to the collective identity of group or tribe. The easiest route to glory, and intellectual success; for to dominate a field we first have to submit to it, let its life enter our soul until we and field are one. An advantage of Cambridge, I suspect, where even the brightest must learn a certain humility; while the majority come to accept they are not superstars.

He describes the Cambridge economic history of that time as parochial; even though his supervisor worked on innovative material: Unilever. My impression is that Peter, despite this reflective distance, fitted into the Cambridge mould a little too easily, though he was to spend many years in Oxford. His record is that of a solid, economic historian; his specialisms the consumer industries - how apt for post-war Britain! how in accord with the changes in his own life -; his magnum opus a book on the brewing trade; another key work on the retail outlets of conglomerated firms. The subject matter is new, but the approach well within an established academic tradition. Not for this man the excitements of the Sixties; either in Paris - Lévi-Strauss, Foucault - or in his own backyard, where young Turks - Skinner, Dunn - were flashing their philosophical scimitars. A respectable body of work. A safe reputation. His most famous book - I have perhaps unfairly always considered it a textbook - The First Industrial Nation. Someone to carry the tradition along, a teacher to be trusted with the trusteeship of the young.

Nothing wrong with that!

He describes Jesus College as a village - a bit cut off from the rest of Cambridge. Home from home…another clue. While the college’s religion is an exaggerated form of what he knew in Freshford. Peter still adhering to this ‘rural Anglicanism’, and with the same lukewarm piety as his parents, whose big question on Sunday was the state of the fields: dry enough to walk to church, or too wet so forcing the roundabout road? For them all Christianity more a weekly ritual than belief (it is his wife who is devoted to their local church). In a century of violent change and revolutionary upheaval a life of continuity; where everything - supervisor to a Crown Prince of Japan; membership of the Italian Institute of Philosophical Studies in Naples - is absorbed into an even evolutionary flow. An harmonious existence.

Mr Doubt taps me on the shoulder. How does such a free flowing river deal with those rusted tanks, that junk of war, damming up its stream…how handle phenomenon that caused such a dynamic break with the past? The 20th-century, not a tranquil boat ride but a nervous disease.

I am too much the Romantic. British history has learned to live with the longue durée.

I should read The First Industrial Nation which, strangely, given my interests, I have always avoided; believing it staid, old-fashioned, the source for a thousand examination subjects…. Fool! Like all dunderheads I make too many assumptions. Although there are serious questions to ask. Does the work reflect a life, or can the mind float free from its traditional moorings in this bucolic town, a fenland retreat? The links between life and creativity far more tenuous than I am apt to believe.

Read the book Herr Schloss! and ditch your prejudices. I take my friend’s advice, after sulking in the garden.

We are witness to a moment of fascinating social history: the reaction of colleagues to his first book: on brewing. There were two positions. Those related to the big brewing families - who in the 1950s still owned all the great breweries - who chuckled when told of his research. A full stop of silence from the rest; that temperance temperament of a residual non-conformity, especially strong in once Puritan Cambridge. It is an important insight into the 1950s. Even at this late stage, the institutionalisation of modern capitalism was still inchoate; it wasn’t until the 1960s that the corporations properly began to monopolise the scene.1 The reaction also says something about the staying power of Christianity. The faith itself may have been on the wane - this the import of his parents’s story - but its moral outlook suffused the culture, especially amongst the professional middle classes. It was this morality that was to suffer a heart attack in the 1960s.2

And yet. And yet this barge chugs calmly down the canal. We may not get all the answers we want, but we get enough to paint a picture of Oxbridge life; where intelligence and cultivation go hand in hand with a civilised and comfortable existence. Very attractive. Plus the incidental benefits, that gallery of characters: Charles Wilson, Edward Welbourne, Michael Postan, Donald Coleman…. Not a town, not even a campus, but a collection of villages. Ha! here is the final clue, it’s a clincher!

Schloss shakes his head. There is only one place for such clever eccentrics: a hothouse! Something from Kew…a place we are always loathe to leave.

Interview: Peter Mathias

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Notes

1. Anthony Sampson’s fascinating The Sovereign State: The Secret History of ITT and Adam Curtis’s The Mayfair Set describe this shift; which involved the creation of large holding companies - of which Unilever, interestingly, was a pioneer - and new financial instruments, created by an increasingly powerful Wall Street and City of London.

2. The erosion began in the 1950s, and is told in the novels of Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Iris Murdoch and others.

    Stanley Spencer: Cottages at Burghclere