Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

RICHARD DAVENPORT HINES

F IFTY YEARS AGO , reviewing Antonia Fraser’s biography of Oliver Cromwell in the New York Review of Books , Blair Worden doubted that she could tell a rising gentleman from a falling one, or a Presbyterian Independent from an Independent Presbyterian. Nor can I. When Conrad Russell wrote in The Causes of the English Civil War that Sir John Culpepper’s remarks on monopolies in 1640 were ‘too well known to need quoting’ he had not met me. My ignorance of the Stuart kingdoms is too sad a fact to insist upon. I am here by one happy chance: that I was an undergraduate at Selwyn College, Cambridge in 1972-3, the first academic year that Blair was Director of Studies in History there . I am here to do Wordsworth’s bidding: to show ‘that best portion of a good man’s life, | His little, unremembered, nameless acts | Of kindness and of love’. Blair was twenty-seven when first I met him: so spry, keen, and gleeful; boyish, festive, and chirpy . He had a sharp sense of performance, and a rich pictorial imagination, which both came to the fore in his direction of an acclaimed production of Chekhov at Cambridge. I kept notes of some of his apothegms at this time: ‘There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.’ Or: ‘Advances to historical understanding are rarely achieved without temporary costs to a sense of historical proportion.’ Blair had a dynamic father, a pioneer of Life Sciences who was appointed to his first professorial chair at the age of 28, a man who hurtled into rooms at full throttle and was full of initiatives and experimental ideas: I remember his beaming pride at the critical acclaim of The Rump Parliament in 1974. Blair was self-aware whereas his father had an unguarded naivete; but the two of them had the same vitality and systematic inquisitiveness. It felt odd to know that the house in Huntingdon where Alastair Worden opened his laboratory in 1951 was Cromwell’s birthplace. Odd to know, too, that Blair helped to buy his father’s first rabbits. Selwyn undergraduate historians basked in the glow of the reviews of The Rump Parliament . Let me quote from Geoffrey Elton’s piece in the Spectator : ‘This is political history at its best – anchored in reality, fascinated by men’s motives and doings, marching steadily through the events to bring out the issues and confusions.’ Blair’s investigative scholarship, his critical scrutiny of evidence, and literary gifts were shot through by his sense of fun. ‘Worden,’ Elton wrote, ‘can jest without destroying the atmosphere of the scene – a rare gift.’ ‘Without a powerful and disciplined historical imagination Dr Worden would, on such a subject, have written … [a] worthy dull book. As it is, he has written one to fascinate and captivate.’

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