The present record, based on memory, on consultation with several old friends (Christopher Hill, John Saville and Victor Kiernan) and on a substantial collection of materials, does not claim to be an actual 'history' of the Historians' Group of the Communist Party, and it covers only the years between 1946 and 1956. Nevertheless it may be of some interest even to those who do not happen to have belonged or who still belong to it. For the Historians' Group played a major part in the development of Marxist historiography in this country, and for reasons which are even now difficult to understand, the bulk of British Marxist theoretical effort was directed into historical work. It played some part in the development of British historiography in general. Finally, members of the group also had a significant role in the discussions which rent the Communist Party after the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956-7, and in the genesis of the various New Lefts which followed.

The present paper therefore attempts to rediscover not merely what the Group did, but also to ask and answer some questions about its rather unusual role in the ten years after the Second World War. It was not formally set up as a group until after the war. If I remember correctly, it grew out of a conference organized to discuss a planned new edition of A. L. Morton's A People's History of England in which both the author and the Party wished to embody the results of discussions among Marxist historians since the date of first publication (1938). These less formal discussions had begun as Christopher Hill recalls, with meetings in Marx House and Balliol in 1938-9 which led to the production of Hill's essay on the English Revolution in 1940. They were, it appears, organized by Robin Page Arnot - the oldest Marxist historian alive in Britain and fortunately, at the time of writing, still very much on the active list. A number of people contributed to Hill's text, and several - the late Dona Torr and Douglas Garman and (pseudonymously) the still active J. Kuczynski debated the booklet after publication in Labour Monthly. The actual Historians' Group, formally established after the war, is still in existence. However, the years between its foundation and the crisis of 1956-7 form a self-contained period, and this is the subject of my memoir.

The present paper therefore attempts to rediscover not merely what the Group did, but also to ask and answer some questions about its rather unusual role in the ten years after the Second World War. It was not formally set up as a group until after the war. If I remember correctly, it grew out of a conference organized to discuss a planned new edition of A. L. Morton's A People's History of England in which both the author and the Party wished to embody the results of discussions among Marxist historians since the date of first publication (1938). These less formal discussions had begun as Christopher Hill recalls, with meetings in Marx House and Balliol in 1938-9 which led to the production of Hill's essay on the English Revolution in 1940. They were, it appears, organized by Robin Page Arnot ­– the oldest Marxist historian alive in Britain and fortunately, at the time of writing, still very much on the active list. A number of people contributed to Hill's text, and several – the late Dona Torr and Douglas Garman and (pseudonymously) the still active J. Kuczynski debated the booklet after publication in Labour Monthly. The actual Historians' Group, formally established after the war, is still in existence. However, the years between its foundation and the crisis of 1956-7 form a self-contained period, and this is the subject of my memoir.

There was no tradition of Marxist history in Britain, though there was a powerful tradition of radical and labour-oriented history, of which Cole and Postgate's The Common People (1938, new edition 1946) was then the most recent example. (In fact, one of the earliest tasks of the Group in 1946 was a critical discussion of this then influential work.) For practical purposes, little Marxist history written in English before the 1930s was available, and the shortage of such work even in the 1930s is indicated by the fact that P. C. Gordon Walker's article on the Reformation in the Economic History Review was widely referred to as Marxist. Foreign Marxist work in translation was also not widely known or available, with the exception of some Russian work (M. N. Pokrovsky, Theodore Rothstein), among which Hessen's 1931 paper on ‘The Social Roots of Newton's Principia’ ought to be singled out, because of its influence not only on potential Marxist historians but also on potential Marxist natural scientists. There were also some works from the heyday of pre-1914 German social-democracy (Kautsky on Thomas More, Bernstein's Cromwell and Communism). However, the basic texts on which we based our attempts at a materialist interpretation of history were the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin themselves. Many of these had been far from readily accessible before the wave of publications in the mid-1930s, which produced Dona Torr's edition of the Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels and other works.

When the student generation of the 1930s, who provided the main stock of the Group, began to produce Marxist historians, a few. re atively senior intellectuals were already Marxist, or beginning to draw closer to Marxism. Though none of them were actually historians by profession, like all Marxists they were drawn to history and contributed to it. The most eminent, the archaeologist and pre-historian V. Gordon Childe, does not seem to have influenced us greatly to start with, perhaps because he was not associated with the Communist Party. The most flourishing group, the Marxist classicists (e.g. Benjamin Farrington, George Thomson) were rather remote from the interests of most of us, though Thomson's Aeschylus and Athens (1940) was much admired and discussed. (The Group organized a critical discussion of this work and its successor, probably in the early 1950s, with contributions from social anthropologists – including a now famous name in the field – archaeologists and philologists.) However, the major historical work which was to influence us crucially was Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism which formulated our main and central problem. This crucial work was not published until 1946. A. L. Morton's People's History has already been mentioned. Thus little work by senior Marxists was available, and some of it (e.g. Roy Pascal's neglected study of the German Reformation of 1932) was not widely known.

The main pillars of the Group thus consisted initially of people who had graduated sufficiently early in the 1930s to have done some research, to have begun to publish and, in very exceptional cases, to have begun to teach. Among these Christopher Hill already occupied a special position as the author of a major interpretation of the English Revolution and a link with Soviet economic historians. Others who had published before 1946 or were just about to publish included Brian Pearce, then a Tudor historian, V. G. Kiernan, whose encyclopedic knowledge had already produced a book on the diplomacy of imperialism in China, James B. Jefferys, already a post-doctoral nineteenth-century economic historian whose wartime industrial experience had made him, among other things, the author of what is still one of the best trade union histories (The Story of the Engineers, 1945) and F. D. Klingender the art-historian, whose contacts with the group were not to be close. One or two of the most prominent pre-war Marxist historians of this degree of seniority had already by 1946 moved away from association with communist groups and will not be mentioned as they are entitled to retrospective privacy

A recent article on J. H. Elliott in the New York Review of Books includes a very striking portrait of the founders of the British history journal, Past and Present. The painting includes Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Lawrence Stone, and Keith Thomas (standing); and Christopher Hill, J. H. Elliott, and Joan Thirst (seated). The journal has been an incredibly important platform for some of the best social history being written from its founding in 1952 through the present, and it is very striking to see these pathbreaking historians all depicted together.

The journal was founded post-war by a group of historians who were Marxist and often members of the British Communist Party; but the journal itself maintained an intellectual independence from doctrine and party that allowed it to cultivate genuinely important historical research. As Hill, Hilton, and Hobsbawm put the point in the 1983 essay mentioned below, "In our dealings with Party or Group we were quite explicit in establishing that the journal was independent, and would accept no policy instructions".

There is one element of this piece of intellectual history that I continue to find particularly intriguing. This has to do with the relationship between intellectual honesty and political conviction. How is an historian's work (or the work of a social scientist or philosopher) affected by his or her political convictions? Intellectual honesty seems like a straightforward thing: we want scholars to pursue their findings as the facts and inferences guide them. We want them to help us understand how the world works, based on their best reading of the evidence. We don't want them to "spin" events or processes into alignment with their political ideologies or commitments. So how did this work for the historians of Past and Present and for Communist historians who were not part of the journal like E. P. Thompson?

One part of the answer seems clear: these historians chose their topics for research based on their intuitions about the drivers of history, and these intuitions were certainly bound up in their political commitments and passions. So when Hobsbawm focuses on "Machine Breakers" (1952) or Soboul on "Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793-4" (1954) or Rodney Hilton on "Freedom and Villeinage in England" (1965) or E. P. Thompson on "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd" (1971), the topics they study have an obvious relevance to their political passions. But what about their findings? Are they able to see the aspects of their stories that are unexpected from a classical Marxist point of view? Is history "gnarly" and unpredictable for them? And are they honest in laying out the facts as they found them? Having read each of Hobsbawm, Soboul, Hilton, and Thompson with a certain degree of care over the years, my belief is that they meet this test. Certainly this is true for Thompson; the originality of his classic book, The Making of the English Working Class, is precisely to be found in the fact that it is not a cookie-cutter theory of class. Instead, Thompson goes into great detail, based on a rich variety of primary sources, about the sources of identity that working people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created for themselves. These historians are not doctrinaire in their findings, and they honestly confront the historical realities that they find.

When history emerged as a scholarly discipline in British universities at the end of the 19th century, it rarely took working-class people as its focus. History was about the great and the good – about kings, queens, archbishops and diplomats. Historians studied reigns, constitutions, parliaments, wars and religion. Although some historians inevitably strayed from the mainstream, they rarely organised their ideas around the concept of ‘the working class’. For example, Ivy Pinchbeck’s Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (1930) and, with Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society (1969) certainly foreshadowed the concerns of a later generation of social historians, yet took ‘women’ and ‘children’, rather than the ‘working class’ as their subject.

This changed with the emergence of the social history movement in the second half of the 20th century. At the end of the Second World War and – a decade or so later – as the universities expanded, the historian’s remit widened enormously. Poor and disenfranchised subjects, such as the working women and orph-aned children that Pinchbeck had studied, swiftly moved from the intellectual margins to the mainstream. The newly-formed social history movement splint-ered into numerous branches – black history, subaltern studies, women’s history, urban history, rural history and so on. Soon working-class history had also emerged as a distinct historical specialism. The Communist Party History Group (founded 1946) and the Society for the Study of Labour History (1960) together consolidated its place in the universities. The History Workshop movement, established in the late 1960s with a slightly broader remit, provided an important platform for the study of ordinary people. Now historians of the working class enjoyed all the trappings of a modern academic sub-discipline, with their own societies, annual conferences and journals.

The cause of this fledgling historical strand was greatly advanced through association with some of the leading scholars of the age, including the Communist Party History Group members Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel and E. P. Thompson. These four were also part of the group that founded the journal Past & Present, now widely regarded as one of the most important historical journals published in Britain today. Thompson’s monumental The Making of the English Working Class (1963) was arguably the single most significant contribution to working-class history, but it is easy to forget that he was just one part of a larger community of scholars with a shared interest in the emergence and experiences of the working class at the time of the British Industrial Revolution.