By Joanna Bourke, Professor Emerita of History, Birkbeck, University of London and author of Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning (OUP, 2023).

Bernard Crick at the Annual George Orwell Memorial Lecture (JSTOR)

Bernard Crick was one of the most distinguished British political scientists of the twentieth century and a self-proclaimed polemicist. He established the Department of Sociology and Politics at Birkbeck in 1972 and was its Chair until he took early retirement in 1984. In those thirteen years, Crick transformed Birkbeck’s intellectual and political character, leaving behind one of the most respected Politics Departments in the country.

Crick was born in 1929 and died in 2008, at the age of 79. He studied Economics at University College, London, before moving to the LSE to complete his doctorate, awarded in 1952 and published in 1958 under the title The American Science of Politics. It was a critique of the behaviourist streak of American politics. Although he taught in many American universities (including Harvard, McGill, and Berkeley in the 1950s), his first permanent academic posts were at the LSE and then the University of Sheffield. In 1972, however, he was appointed to Birkbeck to establish the college’s first Department of Politics and Sociology.

Crick was thrilled to be appointed at Birkbeck. He had been commuting to Sheffield from London for years and was relieved to be back in his home-city. He was also a strong supporter of adult education, believing that it was important for students of sociology and politics to have practical experience in the ‘real world’. One of his early messages after arriving at Birkbeck was to inform prospective applicants that ‘candidates from a first degree into which they came straight from school will not usually be considered’! He also thought that adult students improved the entire learning experience. Crick always argued that a university ‘should be a creative sharing, not a departmentalisation of learning’, as he put it in Political Thoughts and Polemics (1990).

For Crick, politics was ‘ethics done in public’. This aphorism was another way of saying that he was an enthusiastic advocate of the unity of theory and practice. This was why, during his editorship of The Political Quarterly, he made it into a leading forum for debate about political theory as well as practice. The entire raison d’être of academic politics was to forge an engaged citizenry. Indeed, the fate of democracy lay with people’s civic literacy, which is why Crick was dismayed by the profound political ignorance of most Britons.

Not surprisingly, Crick was a pragmatist. ‘Real’ politics was messy. It had to deal with the vast diversity of competing and conflicting interests, as well as being unpredictable, which is one reason Crick argued against the ‘scientistic’ behaviourism of many North American schools of political thought. His emphasis was on politics-and-society, rather than political science, with its emphasis on abstracted data rather than social values and meaning. Effective politics involved negotiating, compromising, and seeking consensus. In other words, the world of politics was about reconciling differences. As Crick wrote in 1971, political science had to be ‘aware of the inextricable relationship of theory to practice and hence the need for political relevance’. He quipped that ‘the world may not need political science… but political science needs to be relevant to the world to be profound as a discipline’.

Crick refused to identify with doctrinaire partisans of either the Left or Right but contended in In Defence of Politics that political scientists should ‘argue only for relevance’, retaining an ‘independent-minded critical engagement’ rather than an ‘uncritical commitment or loyalty to party’. When he was asked by one Derbyshire miner who had read his books, ‘Ay, I gets all that; but does thee not believe in anything, Professor lad?’, Crick responded by saying, ‘I am a democratic socialist’. Probably more tellingly, however, is the story that Crick was delighted when one interviewer called him an ‘extremist at the centre’.

The book for which Crick was most proud was his biography of George Orwell, published in 1980. It was the first major study of Orwell and was a best-seller. Crick donated royalties from the hardback version of this book to establish the George Orwell Memorial Trust. He also founded the annual Birkbeck Orwell Lecture and Orwell Prize for political writing. He could frequently be heard reciting Orwell’s famous aphorism: ‘What I have most wanted to do… is to make political writing into an art’.

Crick was an individualist. He was not a ‘team-player’; nor was he a particularly effective administrator, although he was a keen advocate for early career scholars he admired. Labour politician David Blunkett, who studied under Crick, put it well when he called Crick a ‘character…. a one-off’. During his tenure at Birkbeck, Crick promoted the highest scholarship and teaching. The Department he created in 1972 continues to flourish and to ensure that political writing is relevant and rigorous, as well as an art.

By Joanna Bourke, Professor Emerita of History at Birkbeck and author of Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (OUP, 2023)

Barbara Gwladys Hardy was a distinguished literary scholar, who spent most of her career at Birkbeck. She was famous for being one of the UK’s foremost experts on the nineteenth-century novel, but her work included critical analyses ranging from Shakespeare to modernism. Amongst many others, she wrote on George Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Daniel Deronda, Thomas Hardy, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. She was also an accomplished memoirist, as well as a writer of poetry, fiction, and drama. She was President of the Dickens Society and Vice-President of The Thomas Hardy Society.

Hardy was a glamorous academic. She was socially gregarious, feminist in her outlook, and politically leftwing. As a young person, she had even joined the Communist Party for a short time. Her early life had been difficult. In her autobiography Swansea Girl, Hardy revealled her pride in being Welsh, but also her family’s financial struggles. They were poor:  her father was a sailor whom she rarely saw while her mother worked in an insurance office. From a young age, it was clear that Hardy was intelligent. She was sent to the selective (‘posh’) Swansea High School for Girls, where teachers complained that she was mischievous. When Higher Education beckoned, she chose to go to University College, London, where she was awarded a BA in 1947 and an MA two years later. By 1951, she could be found at Birkbeck, employed as an assistant lecturer. She was appointed to a Chair in English literature at Royal Holloway but, after five years, returned to Birkbeck in 1970s as the first Geoffrey Tillotson Professor of English Literature.

Hardy’s texts are ‘personal, impassioned and particularised’, as she admitted in a volume of her collected essays. As she insisted in Tellers and Listeners (1975), she believed that ‘nature, not art, makes us all story-tellers’. When she turned to James Joyce’s The Dubliners, she contended that ‘like all great works of art, [it] is about itself. Its stories are about telling, listening and responding to stories’. She understood narrative in a broad sense, including stories, gossip, dreams, secrets, and lies. Narrative was primarily an ‘act of mind transferred to art from life’, she once explained. Indeed, this was the impulse that led Hardy to turn away from ‘theory’: she belonged to the empirical tradition of English criticism.

Hardy’s reputation can be gauged by numerous prizes and other accolades thrust upon her. In 1962, the British Academy awarded her the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her magnum opus, The Novels of George Eliot (1959). This was the book that not only launched her career but also forced literary scholars to take the nineteenth century novel seriously. Then, in 1997, her novel London Lovers won the Society of Author’s Sagittarius Prize and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2006, she was made a Fellow of the British Academy. She retired in 1989, and was succeeded in her Chair by the equally distinguished literary scholar, Professor Isobel Armstrong.

Hardy loved working at Birkbeck. Her lecturing style was bold and entrancing. She would swish into class wearing long William Morris-type dresses and, for an hour without break, would attempt to convey some of her enthusiasm for literature to her class. She was renowned for never referring to notes during lectures. This was a deliberate decision stemming from a searing experience when, during the very first lecture she ever gave in front of a class, she had the misfortune to be ‘inspected’. The Inspector later commended her teaching but criticised her for looking down at her written text too frequently. From that time, she ensured that she prepared meticulously for her classes, but appeared in lecture-halls paperless.

Students and colleagues enjoyed her company. She was very different from her predecessor as Head of the English Department. This was Geoffrey Tillotson, Head between 1944 and 1969. As a tall, lean, ascetic-looking Yorkshireman, Tillotson was a master of irony, bordering on sarcasm. ‘Do not omit to be literate’, he wrote in his immaculate italic handwriting when a student left out an apostrophe. One of Tillotson’s favourite aphorisms was ‘Criticism, trembling with sympathy, cannot but be ruthless!’. In contrast, Hardy was warm and keen to listen as well as speak. One of her students recalled how, one minute, she was laughing loudly with them in the refectory; the next, indignantly railing against gender inequalities. Despite her literary erudition, she was as comfortable debating about whether The Archers (a radio soap opera) was ‘just melodrama, or something more subtle’ as she was unpicking the narrative structure of the Divine Comedy. Although Hardy loved dinner parties (she was a great cook and entertainer) and enjoyed lively discussions, she often joked that one of the chief advantages of working at Birkbeck included ‘a perpetual and automatic alibi for declining unwanted invitations’ to social events: lecturers simply had to say ‘Sorry, I lecture in the evenings’. This excuse also gave Birkbeck lecturers a ‘plausible excuse’ for watching films in the mid-afternoon or even simply ‘lingering over coffee’. More seriously, in 1964, she told The Lodestone (the Birkbeck students’ journal) that the most significant advantages of working at Birkbeck were intellectual. Because academic staff taught in the evenings, she maintained, there is still a goodish chunk of daylight time for research and writing, and the boon of having students who already know the facts of life. This is probably helpful in subjects like psychology… but in teaching English literature it is splendid never to encounter the kind of student who once asked me (in a full-time college) why Othello and Desdemona couldn’t just have talked the whole thing over.

Of course, Hardy continued, there were some disadvantages as well. Birkbeck students could be ‘maddeningly opinionated’ and there was the perennial problem of booking adequate teaching rooms. But these ‘crumples in the roseleaf’ were ‘mere fleabites’.

Barbara died in 2016, aged 92. She is remembered for her incredible scholarship and literary sensibilities. As she contended in Tellers and Listeners, ‘The good teller and the good listener are loving and truthful, aware of each other, as parents and children, friends and lovers, courteous strangers, novelists and readers’.

By Joanna Bourke, Professor Emerita of History at Birkbeck, University of London and author of Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning (OUP, 2023).

Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, visiting Birkbeck’s Department of Psychology in 1953. Also present are Dr. Fuchs (Chief Technician) and Professor C. A. Mace (founder and Head of Department)- JSTOR image library

Cecil Alec Mace was the first Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck. He was known for his work as an industrial psychologist, as well as his thoughts on causality, the ‘mind-body’ problem, logic, behaviourism, self-identity, and the emotions. He was especially witty when addressing the question: ‘Must philosophers disagree?’, which, he quipped, was guaranteed to result in a room of philosophers spiritedly disagreeing!

Psychology was not Mace’s first choice for a career. When he attended the University of Cambridge, it was to study for Holy Orders. He soon switched to moral philosophy, highly influenced by analytical philosopher G. E. Moore and industrial psychologist Charles Samuel Myers. After academic positions at the University of Nottingham, St. Andrews University, and Bedford College, he joined King’s College London.

Mace’s route to Birkbeck was circuitous. Before the 1940s, psychological studies in the colleges of the University of London were part of a philosophy degree. Since Birkbeck did not have a Professor of Psychology, Birkbeck students took their two compulsory psychology papers at King’s College, under the tutorage of Francis Arthur Powell Aveling. With the start Blitz, all colleges in the University of London except Birkbeck fled the city for less dangerous localities. Aveling, however, was left behind and enthusiastically accepted an invitation by C. E. M. Joad, who was Head of Philosophy at Birkbeck, to transfer his teaching of psychology to Birkbeck’s premises.

It was a bold move, but, when Aveling died the following year, his lectures were taken over by Mace. Like Aveling, Mace was as much a philosopher as a psychologist—indeed, he served as President of both the British Psychological Society as well as the Aristotelian Society. At Birkbeck, however, Mace was responsible for enabling Psychology to be granted its own disciplinary status, separate from philosophy. By 1944, the Philosophy and Psychology Departments had become separate Departments, with Mace acting as Professor of Psychology for seventeen years until he retired in 1961.

Mace had interesting thoughts on the use of incentives in the workplace. He argued against the notion that workers were primarily incentivized my money. Rather, they had a ‘will to work’. Along with Bertrand Russell, Mace contended that ‘belief is central to any analysis of the mind’. He also reflected on how Cartesian concepts might be replaced by ‘psychosomatic’ concepts ‘in which the person is thought of as a being – a single being – who has both bodily and “mental” (or psychological) attributes and whose “experiences” are psychosomatic’. He believed that this would greatly help in physician/patient relations. Well before it became fashionable, Mace was curious about cybernetics and information theory. He was also passionate about the role of both philosophy and psychology in war. During the First World war, he had been a pacifist and, as a consequence, spent that war at Dartmoor prison where he studied the psychological effects of imprisonment. During the Second World War, he was Secretary of the Council for Assisting Refugee Philosophers.

Mace’s thoughts on the ‘psychology of study’ were important in the way he approached his classes at Birkbeck. Mace argued that too much attention was being paid to memorization, contending that the mind (similar to the stomach) ‘must take its meal in moderation’. Students benefitted most from lectures if they spent the time listening, rather than frantically jotting down notes (which, he wittily added, should only be contemplated when the professor ‘has a fit of sneezing’).  This was compatible with Mace’s ‘performative approach’ to teaching. He was an accomplished lecturer, giving his students highly stylized performances on subjects as diverse as the psychology of study, scientific management, the structure of the mind, mental deficiency, and logic. He was reported to have described his philosophy of teaching as ‘All one can do is think aloud, and hope that some of it will brush off’.  When Mace died in 1971, The Times reported that he had been responsible for creating ‘the biggest and best-known psychology department in the country’.

Oil painting of Cecil Alec Mace, unknown artist, Birkbeck image collections: Birkbeck history BH0119