The extract from the Memoire below tells you how Lord Denning profoundly influenced my life – and not just as a lawyer.  I idolized him – in the certain and God given knowledge of his failings, and the misgivings of judges who knew so much more than me.  Like Justice T W (Tom) Smith.

I have just read a biography – Lord Denning, Life, Law and Legacy, by James Wilson.  I found it to be excellent.  The author does not lack industry, insight, or maturity, and he is well prepared to square up and avoid idolatry.  I shall not comment further here, but I offer a couple of brief notes – which are reflected in the extracts. 

First, Denning was born in 1899.  In the reign of Queen Victoria, Empress of India.  He put on a uniform and fought – on horseback – in the First World War.  He came not just from a different clime, but a different age.  Do we know what practising law was like when Denning started in it?

Secondly, I am acutely conscious of the differences in judicial technique between Denning and Dixon or Smith.  We cannot afford too much of the former.  About one a century.  Wannabes are bloody dangerous, and self-serving pests.

Thirdly, and relatedly, you would be very unwise not to recognize the sheer horsepower of that intellect.  Again, about one in a century.

Fourthly, I rate Denning as highly as Mansfield – there is none higher – for one simple reason.  They both saw that their main job was to get through their list and release litigants from their agony.  And they did just that, in a way no one since has matched.

Finally, there is that spell-binding courtesy, inside court and out.  It is the first requisite of a judge, and it is just wonderful to see in action, not least so high.  I was so lucky to do just that.  There is something to be said for the good manners they taught under Queen Victoria.

Extract from Memoire

Here is another judge some called ‘Tom’.  Alfred Thompson Denning was known throughout his life as Tom to his friends.  He came from the family of a draper in Hampshire.  He was brought up to avow not only the King James Bible and Shakespeare, but also A Pilgrim’s Progress.  He went to a grammar school and from there on a scholarship to Magdalen at Oxford.  He got First Class Honours in Mathematics and Law. 

Like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Denning put on the uniform, and the Great War had nearly as much impact on him as the Civil War had on Holmes.  One brother became a general in the next war, but another brother died of tuberculosis after the battle of Jutland.  Denning never forgave Admiral Jellicoe for not having a go in trying to finish off the German fleet. 

Like Mansfield, Denning had a horror of unfinished business, and he was never in awe of rank.  He himself survived a gas attack in France, and the snobbery of some at Magdalen, which they say then had a reputation of being a rich man’s college. 

He went to the bench near the end of the Second World War.  He did not give one reserved judgment in his first twelve months.  He almost immediately came under notice as an innovative lawyer with a judgment – given ‘off the reel’- that revived the doctrine of equity precluding people going back on their word in respect of the effect of their contract.  He also wrote prolifically and soon became the darling of law students, and teachers, throughout the common law world.  He had a simple magnetic style that makes governments jittery. 

Denning was the Master of the Rolls, the head of the Court of Appeal in England, for twenty years.  In that time, he redefined the way in which judgments were written in England and elsewhere.  He had a remarkable capacity to state facts simply and then the law just as simply – or so it looked. 

Although he was idolised by academia and younger lawyers, he was distrusted by the old guard on the bench.  He was from time to time criticised, if not savaged, by more conservative lawyers, particularly Lord Simonds.  ‘I, too, was ambitious.  I, too, was accused of heresy – and verbally beheaded, by Lord Simonds.’ 

Our greatest lawyer, Sir Owen Dixon, gave a famous paper (which Smith, J would certainly have agreed with) on the dangers of conscious judicial innovation, and Denning promptly verballed him. 

Denning was protected in his reputation as a radical because this very old-fashioned Englishman, and adherent of the Church of England, was rarely exposed to crime, industrial relations, race relations, or morals generally.  If he had been let loose in those fields, he would have gone down in the esteem of a lot of his admirers. 

Holmes had admired the way that the English Court of Appeal dealt with appeals on the spot.  Denning continued that tradition.  When Denning presided over the Court of Appeal, it heard about 800 cases a year (about the number decided by Lord Mansfield).  About fifty or sixty reached the ultimate court, the House of Lords.  The Court sat five days a week, all day.  Only about one case in ten was reserved.  Judgments had to be written at the weekend.  Only comparatively recently has the court stopped sitting on Fridays. 

Some said that he sat under a palm tree – who knows where the nut may fall? – but it is impossible to find any appellate court in the common law world today operating with the degree of speed, efficiency, rigour, and sheer juristic horse-power, as that over which Denning presided.   Not one appellate court in Australia gets even close now.  Not one of them even tries.  We are only talking of a distance of one generation or so. 

In the course of my grand hitch-hiking tour of Europe, I had a letter of introduction to Lord Denning.  This was a coup for me in January 1967.  Denning was a hero or, as they say now, an icon, for a whole generation of lawyers and law students.  (He still is for me.  He understood Mansfield’s imperative to get the job done and release litigants from their misery.)  I unnerved his associate by asking how you should address a lord.  I found Lord Denning to be a most charming and kindly man.  His first words were, ‘Have we met before?’  After our chat he said that I might care to sit in on the case he was hearing at the moment, but he would not recommend it, because it was a tax case and therefore boring. 

He arranged for me to be shown around the Courts.  His clerk rang me up and asked if I minded if it was a black man.  This sounded odd, but the English were still adjusting to the number of blacks coming there from the former Empire.  A black man did show me around.  We sat down for lunch in Lincoln’s Inn (which goes back to 1422).  There was not a great rush for the others to come and talk to us.  Lord Denning was sitting at the high table.  When he had finished his lunch, he came to ask me how everything was going.  After that, every bastard wanted to talk to us. 

His lordship gave me letters of introduction to big hitters at Oxford and Cambridge.  The envelopes were impressed with the dry seal of his office.  When I produced one to French hitch-hikers at the youth hostel at Stratford, the timbre sec almost blinded them. 

But when I look back now – and I often do – at what Lord Denning did for me, I feel like Charlie Black did when he first saw his King.  Here was the most influential judge in the world, with a forensic mind built like a Rolls Royce engine, at the historical seat of the common law and therefore the British Constitution, meeting a ruffled, pimply law student from the colonies – and remembering him and going out of his way to talk to him.  And he called me by my name.  ‘Hello, Mr Gibson – is everyone looking after you?’  To adapt the response of Charlie Black, ‘it is impossible to overstate the significance of a’ law student being treated by such great man and great judge in this way.  ‘It had simply never entered my mind that I would see this for the first time’ in such a man. 

‘You don’t get over that…’  I floated out to the Strand as if on the clouds.  I would not have been in the least surprised if I had run into Ronald Barassi and he had said ‘G’day, Gibbo – where’ve you been hiding?’  And I often think back on it when I run into one of those bumptious, stuffed prunes or prudes preening themselves as if the world owes them a bloody living, the latterday jumpmasters of footnoted waste.

The civil servant who gave evidence to a committee about the Mandelson appointment looked to me to be a model of a professional office that withers before our eyes even in England now.  We certainly have nothing like it here.  I watched and listened to Sir Olly Robbins for two and a half hours and I thought he was flawless.  By contrast, the woman in the Chair, who is of the same party as the P M, looked to have been committed from the very start to shafting him. 

I thought Sir Olly was entirely professional and objective, and fiercely loyal to those around and beneath him.  He is precisely the kind of person I would like to see in that position.  God knows we could use a touch of it all here.

There is no doubt that serious mistakes were made in the relevant process, and that these were driven by elected politicians.  I could see nothing to criticize in the conduct of this civil servant, but a lot to criticize in his elected superiors. 

Starmer made obvious mistakes.  I doubt whether they are sufficiently clear to warrant his removal by the House.  What his party does is a matter for it.  But I see nothing in the conduct of Sir Olly to warrant his dismissal – and I will be surprised and disappointed if the English courts do not so hold.

Yet the PM dismissed him – and the inference is clear that he did so to protect himself.  I regard this as his most serious misconduct, and my apprehension about the Chair was justified when she later said, after hearing from Sir Olly, that she agreed with her leader. 

This is precisely the cause of the failure of the Westminster System.  It says Ministers are answerable to parliament.  Instead, they blame the civil service – for which they are said to be responsible – and stroll away whistling.  The process is called throwing the target under a bus. It is on that ground that I believe Starmer should be relieved of his office by his party

This phrase is as slippery as it is silly.  Three stories in The Age yesterday show why.

Prince Harry does have some use.  His work with Invictus is good for those in armed services who return from war – and who are seen as failures.  We in Australia have an appalling record on this going back more than seventy years.  In a fine article on the work of Prince Harry, Rob Harris reminds us that a royal commission found that between 1985 and 2021, 2007 defence personnel killed themselves.  That is an appalling indictment on the whole nation.  On which we are silent.

A Canberra Uber driver named Umair Ayub was sacked by the ‘$210 billion global behemoth’ after its robots recorded that he had not maintained the required approval rating.  Uber maintains its huge workforce by algorithms.  (God help anyone who tries to speak to a human being.)  The industrial body recorded that no human being was involved in any of the decision making, and set the decision aside as ‘illogical and arbitrary.’  It was not called on to decide if Uber was guilty of a crime against humanity.

There has been long running litigation about the wealth of Gina Reinhart that has nearly broken the system.  Fifteen years of legal feuding have cost about $100 million.  Gina Reinhart funds an electoral aberration who gets votes by saying there is no such thing as a good Muslim.

Which of those stories best showcases Australian values?

The legal grapevine is inherently unreliable, but some time ago – at least five years ago – I was told by very well-placed sources that some Australian soldiers were in very deep trouble, and would probably face murder charges arising out of events in the war in Afghanistan.  I have some recollection that senior government officials took to warning Australians that they may have to face a difficult legal process as a result.

I was curious then and amazed now that any of this should come as a surprise following our intervention into another military quagmire.  More than ten years ago in a book about revolutions (2014), I wrote about why the American rebels succeeded against the English.  I commented in the terms of the passage cited below.  Clause 13 reads:

Because of its felt superiority, its actual ignorance, and its sustained frustration, the away team resorts to atrocious behaviour that it would never be guilty of in a normal war, or against an enemy of its own kind.

They are facts of life proved over and again since 1776 – not least in Spain when attacked by Bonaparte, when the word ‘guerrilla’ was born.  They were brutally apparent in Vietnam and Afghanistan.  Yes, those sending the men to fight were to blame, but that is no answer for the crimes the men committed while so deployed.

In the case of Roberts-Smith, the charges relate to the acknowledged killings of Afghans.  As I follow it, the case is not one of murder under the general law, but of statutory war crimes.  The allegations involve conduct outside of normal hostilities, and the principal witnesses for the prosecution are soldiers who served with the accused.

That being so, there is little point talking about ‘the fog of war’, or the like.  We are, I gather, speaking of war crimes.  That the conduct alleged occurred during a time of war is a necessary condition of the charge, not a bar to its being proven.

(It is sad to relate that in discussing these charges, it is hard to find in the press any attempt to give details of the charges.  At least in his piece in The Age, Waleed Aly referred to Division 268 of the Federal Criminal Code Act 1995.  Among other things, and at agonising length, it lists as a ‘crime against humanity’ murder, where the conduct of the perpetrator is ‘committed intentionally or knowingly as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population.’  Division 268.70 applies to the killing of a person where that ‘person or persons are neither taking an active part in the hostilities, nor are members of an organised armed group’ and the perpetrator ‘knows of, or is reckless as to, the factual circumstances establishing that the person or persons are neither taking an active part in the hostilities nor are members of an organised armed group’.)

Put to one side the time and millions of dollars spent in examining these events in a horrendous ocean of libel litigation.  The relevant investigation and the current prosecution were led by Mark Weinberg.  You could not imagine a better guarantee of professional integrity.  The law will take its course with safeguards built over a millennium by our ancestors.  Is the jury satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that the charges have been proved in court?

What on earth can people who complain about the present process have in mind?  The only answer I can give is that the noise comes from the usual suspects – and they are common pests. 

The Weekend Australian went into overdrive on a nostalgia highway.  Noel Pearson said ‘any soldier who serves the country should be able to rely on the presumption that their killing in combat was lawful.’  Henry Ergas said killing prisoners in cold blood is ‘completely indefensible’ but how are ‘norms to be sustained when confronting adversaries who reject them altogether’?  Joel Fitzgibbon said jailing Roberts-Smith was a tragedy ‘largely created by journalistic activism and reactive overreach on the part of those who’ve been intensely and relentlessly pressured to respond to the activism.’  None of these commentators is a lawyer, much less one versed in the perils of libel litigation, and their comments are as helpful as mine on brain surgery.

None of those commentators identifies the legal charges against the accused.  These are legal issues.  There is an inherent problem in discussing something where you do not know what you are talking about.

This is the same mob whose ideological romances are making our two-party system unworkable, and they, or most of them, do it out of the same motive – a heartless hunger for money, or wistful Romance.  At bottom, they are distressed that the very notion of ‘war crime’ should disturb the serenity of their vision of patriotism and the myth of the noble, bronzed Anzac.

What about the facts of life?  This hero and his ornately rich backers were so overcome by their own hubris that they embarked on an exercise that screamed with risk, and after subjecting the rest of us to a legal circus that cost $25 million or so, they ended up in the gutter.

BOOK EXTRACT

Although the Americans like to see themselves as having been the underdogs, they won the War of Independence, as they call it, and it is not hard to isolate some of the reasons why their position was eventually so much stronger than that of the English.  You can apply the following criteria to the American War of Independence – or to the Vietnam War, the Russian war in Afghanistan, the second Iraq war, or the present military operations in Afghanistan.  The phrases ‘home team’ and ‘away team’ are used for convenience and not to detract from the significance of the wars, or the valour shown and losses taken by those who actually fought them and are fighting the present one.

1. The away team is the biggest in the world, or as the case may be, the only empire in the world, or the second biggest.
2. The away team is a regular professional army while the home team consists of amateur irregulars.
3. The professional soldiers in the away team have no advantage over the amateurs in the other team because they have not been trained for this kind of war and people who fight for the cause are more reliable than those who do it for money.
4. People defending their own soil are far more motivated than those who cross the world to try to bring them into line.
5. The away team has massive resources and advantages in population and war matériel (such as the navy) and technology, but the home team has local knowledge. 
6. The home team can move more quickly, avoid pitched battles, and use guerrilla tactics, which are sometimes referred to as terrorism, and which, as we saw, the British objected to as not being fair play.
7. The away team has problems with morale and supplies that just get worse as time goes on.
8. The away team finds that winning requires more than just winning battles – they may beat the army of the other side, but they will not beat the country, which has widespread support among its people (even if the people are otherwise split).
9. The away team has a hopeless dilemma – it has to hit hard to win, but every time it hits hard it loses more hearts and minds.
10. The home team finds it is easy to generate heroes and leaders; the away team finds it is easy to sack losers.
11. The home team out-breeds the others – the result is just a matter of time.
12. The war becomes one of exhaustion and attrition, which in turn exaggerates the above advantage of the home team.
13. Because of its felt superiority, its actual ignorance, and its sustained frustration, the away team resorts to atrocious behaviour that it would never be guilty of in a normal war, or against an enemy of its own kind.

In short, the American colonists felt that they were fighting on the moral high ground, a position that they have never surrendered.  Appalling crimes were committed on both sides, especially in the civil war in the south between the Patriots and Loyalists.  There were, Churchill said, ‘atrocities such as we have known in our day in Ireland.’  Professor Gordon S Wood said that the ‘war in the lower south became a series of bloody guerrilla skirmishes with atrocities on both sides’ (like Vietnam).  But for the intervention of the French, this civil war – guerrilla war may have gone on for years and degenerated into what would happen in Latin America with ‘Caesarism, military rule, army mutinies and revolts, and every kind of cruelty’ (like the Roman Empire).

But the terrorism on both sides ceased, and the result was dictated by the sentiment expressed at the time by another former Prime Minister of England.  The older Pitt, by this time the Earl of Chatham, one of the most experienced war time leaders England has ever had, knew what the home ground advantage meant:  ‘My Lords, if I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms – never, never, never.’

As best I can recall, I first same into contact with Sir Lewis Namier in 1962.  For Fifth Form History at Haileybury then, we looked at eighteenth century England.  The subject gripped me and it has stayed with me since.  We were told that Namier had changed the way we might look at history to an extent similar to the way Leavis had changed how we look at literature.  (Leavis does nothing for me.) 

I got into The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, and even then, I felt mesmerised by the detailed digging below and the alpine commentary at the top.  Later I would read the follow-up England in the Age of the American Revolution, and after that his essays and smaller works on other subjects – European and contemporary.  (I now get a similar fix from Sir Ronald Syme and The Roman Revolution.)

It was evident that Namier had served in the Foreign Office and been a journalist and essayist in ways that reflected his East European and Jewish background.  The man’s sheer intellectual horsepower staggered me from the start – and it continues to do so.  I set out why in a book about historians in the terms below.  Namier is an essential part, for better or for worse, of such intellectual furniture as I have been given.

The other day, a book arrived that I had forgot ordering – Conservative Revolutionary, a biography of Namier by D W Hayton that somehow I had not heard of.  The copy that I got had been owned by a scholar who had carefully annotated some passages in pencil, and helpfully included copies of some of the better reviews. 

My reading life has been blighted by scholars who write far too much and smother you with footnotes, and force you to edit with a view to seeing the kernel and staying sane.  They are incontinent and serial pests.  On the face of it, this book is just another one of those.  Like its subject, the author ruthlessly examines any document he can lay his hands on.  The industry is immense.  But the result, like those of his subject, is a gold-mine.

The story of this man is one that you could read by Balzac or Dostoevsky, but Professor Hayton, of Ulster University, tells it with scrupulous good sense and fairness.  It is one of those books you can read – and go back to again and again.  I do not know if the author is still with us, but the world of letters stands indebted to him.  The study of history is essential to what may still be called a liberal education and this book, a study of the life and thinking of one man, is a most remarkable contribution to it.

As a boring fourth generation white Australian, I must find it impossible to imagine the stresses of an East European of Jewish descent landing on Oxbridge in Edwardian England with an intellectual engine that very few locals could even get near.  And he fell into Balliol, and ‘its tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority.’

He arrived in England with what might fairly be called a fair load of ontological insecurity.  What was he?  A Jewish man born at the fringe of an edgy trouble spot in Poland, whose family had repudiated Judaism and accepted baptism in the Church of Rome, and which was determined to toe the quiet bourgeois line and stay out of trouble. 

Namier moved to England and fell in love with it – especially the better and brighter people – the elite.  He changed his name and got naturalised and took up writing high-brow commentaries on the state of Europe after serving in the Foreign Office during the war.  He got knocked back by Oxford, but had the energy and found the time to do research into English history that would explode in the close world of Oxbridge – but his work and general essays are still read and enjoyed now.  One of the inscriptions on the book of Professor Hayton is from Dostoevsky. 

‘Listen, Kolya, among other things, you are going to be very unhappy in life,’ Alyosha said …. ‘But even so, life on the whole you will bless.’

Namier would have approved that citation – and its source.  And we should remember that Namier undertook a vast excavation decades before the arrival of the digital era so that he was, as Toynbee remarked, obliged to ‘assault infinity with his bare fists.’

But he was, or at least came across as, utterly tactless, and his intellectual elevation was no excuse.  The people we admire do not get there by asking for it.  (A grotesque example is Donald Trump.) 

But Oxbridge can close in on people, and it would be very wrong to suggest that its pillars are immune to jealousy.  Namier was not just smart, but popular.  He could write.  More importantly, he had a much broader vision and canvas than the standard career dons, and he attracted disciples. 

Then, too, he was not just Jewish, but a Zionist – and an activist to boot.  We are currently seeing in Australia the problems that can arise for the Jewish community when Zionism becomes a local political issue.  (Only God knows what Namier would have made of Bibi.) 

The result was unsavoury behaviour like that on show in the film Chariots of Fire.  (‘Well, there goes your Semite, Hugh.  A different God.  A different mountain top.’  Delivered with the slinky venom of Sir John Gielgud, and the exalted ‘amateur’.)  And from people I admire, like A J P Taylor and Sir Jack Plumb, there was a reaction that was, simply, just bitchy.  It reflects badly not just on Oxbridge, but on England – a land that had made Prime Minister the grandson of an Italian Jew.

So, an aura of tragedy hangs over Namier, and the cycle of reaction and rejection in the Academy just goes on.  Curiously enough, Namier was studying in the English ruling class a group of people who had precisely what he lacked – the ability to get on with others.  His widow said that ‘he was always an outsider.  Because he never learned to consort with people, he wanted to find out the principles by which people consort with each other.’

There is real pathos here.  That fine historian, Richard Pares, was a follower of Namier who understood the difficulty of their work.  In working on the office of prime minister, he made a remark that applies to the history of political parties.  The history is ‘more like that of the Cheshire Cat: sometimes there is a whole cat, sometimes no more than a grin, and it is not always the same end that appears first.’  (That recalls for me a remark by the lecturer in the first lecture in Philosophy I Honours at Melbourne in 1964: ‘Like blind men in a dark room looking for a black cat – that does not exist.’)

Well, I am a common garden common lawyer, and over thirty years, I had to sit and make findings of fact on evidence that was conflicting and inadequate.  It was perhaps not unlike the police court Namier referred to, but I sometimes wondered what may have been the difference between me and a mountebank selling snake oil. 

I am, however, a child of my Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and I remain happy to leave all the abstractions and grand but narrow and footnoted theorising to the Europeans – and the Americans. 

Namier said ‘I am no good at abstract thought’ – a profession of the faith of the common law judge.  Namier understood that history is a collection of biographies, that people make history and not vice versa, and that his job was simply to collect the evidence of what real people did so that the court of public opinion can make its assessment. 

It is not therefore surprising that many idolised Namier, as I do now.  As I have remarked before, Tina Turner was wrong.  We need all the heroes we can get, and Namier is one of mine.

Book Extract

(Listening to Historians)

Namier

When Ved Mehta wrote a book about English intellectuals, he went to see a star pupil of the late Sir Lewis Namier (1888-1960), and a keeper of the flame, John Brooke.  A woman showed Mehta to Brooke’s room and said: ‘Mr Brooke is a very eccentric man.  When it gets cold, he wears an electric waistcoat plugged into the light socket, and reads aloud to himself.’  Such conduct would come within most people’s understanding of the word ‘eccentric.’ 

Brooke said that Namier looked on history as bundles of biographies; his interest was in the small men rather than the big; he believed that psychology was as important to history as mathematics was to astronomy; he looked at how men and women responded to the pressure of circumstances; his east European Jewish background enabled him to see his adopted and idolized nation in perspective; unlike liberals, he had no faith in progress – it was not that he did not wish to reform institutions that were decrepit – he just hated seeing them go; he would hammer out the first draft of a work with two-finger typing, and not be able to revise it until his secretary had finished the first draft – a process that might be repeated ten or more times.  He would go back and forth between his research boxes and indexes and his typewriter.  ‘It would be a constant process of writing and rewriting, shaping and reshaping, agony and more agony – and the biography was not more than a seven-thousand word job.’ 

There were other sources of pain.  He never relished acceptance by the English intellectual establishment; his deeply withdrawn nature led him to psychoanalysis; he suffered a cramp in the arm that got worse with the ill treatment of the Jews in the thirties – he was so terrified by the thought of a German occupation that he got a bottle of poison from a doctor friend and carried it in his waistcoat so that he could kill himself if the Germans came. 

But his work, beginning with The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III in 1929, hit English history like an earthquake in much the same way as F R Leavis did with literary criticism – and people who shake up the Establishment like that can expect a backlash.

Namier was, I am told, not an easy person to be with.  Elton called him ‘a man rather good at making enemies.’  He was a dreadful snob and a worse name-dropper.  He was not respected as a teacher, and in good English universities that is a real minus. 

‘His physique itself was impressive to a degree: the guttural, rather toneless voice, intense and implacable; the broad shoulders, the beaked nose, the fathomless eyes; above all his absolute stillness, the stillness one felt of a flywheel revolving too fast for the human eye.’  John Kenyon referred to his ‘granitic seriousness, and the monomaniacal way in which he would impose his thoughts on others.’  Sir Jack Plumb referred to the vulgar name-calling: ‘Constipation Namier – the big shit we can’t get rid of.’ 

Rejection was not new to Namier – his father cut him off for his espousal of Zionism – but exclusion breeds resentment and more exclusion – and Namier fell for the English aristocracy.  According to John Kenyon, his commitment to Zionism ‘increased the coolness of an Arab-orientated upper class.’  A more rewarded historian – a man named Butterfield – had what might be called the Establishment view that ‘the point of teaching history to undergraduates is to turn them into public servants and statesmen…but I happen to think history is a school of wisdom and statesmanship.’  Butterfield thought that Namier’s factual inquiry was cutting the ground from under the feet of would-be philosopher-kings. 

Why not just try to open their minds?  Things have changed.  The advocacy of the ideas or ideals of a dying empire now looks to us like a prospectus for a School for Bullshit.  But Butterfield and others went after Namier like gnats straining at a camel, and Namier became a kind of celebrity.

What does it say of Oxford and Cambridge that Namier was never considered good enough for any of the many chairs that fell vacant during his time?  Well, whatever else they did, they did not prove him wrong, and over time, the waters came in over the site where the bomb had exploded.  You get the impression that Namier did not help ease the pangs of jealousy that his brilliance inevitably provoked by not underestimating his own ability, and by frankly assessing the want of it in those around him in the cloister, a place deeply allergic to bombs going off.

To those who have had to make findings of fact on inadequate and conflicting evidence, the Namier revolution seems to be the unsurprising suggestion that history should be based on evidence rather than romance, on the direct evidence of primary sources rather than on secondary sources that are hearsay. 

Here are some of the larger statements.  From his book England in the Age of the American Revolution, we have the following.

History is made up of juggernauts, revolting to human feelings in their blindness, supremely humorous in their stupidity.  One of the greatest caricaturists that ever lived, Francesco Goya y Lucientes, reached the highest level of historical humour in his picture of a military execution of Spanish rebels.  A bundle of feeling, suffering humanity is huddled together in the last stages of agony, despair or defiance, and facing them stands a row of the most perfectly trained Napoleonic soldiers, with their hats and rifles all cocked at the same angle.  One knows that the next moment the rebels will be at peace, inanimate matter, and the firing squad will dissolve into a number of very ordinary, dull human beings.  Similarly in Breughel’s ‘Fall of Icarus’, the true humour of the tragedy is not so much the pair of naked legs sticking out of the water, as the complete unconcern of all the potential onlookers…….History of infinite weight was to be made in the absurd beginnings of a reign which was to witness the elimination of those who had hitherto governed England…..and the break-up of an Empire such as the world had not seen since the disruption of the Roman Empire – history was to be started in ridiculous beginnings, while small men did things both infinitely smaller and infinitely greater than they knew.

That is writing of immense power.  Here is Namier again on humanity.

Restraint, coupled with the tolerance which it implies and with plain human kindness, is much more valuable in politics than ideas which are ahead of their time; but restraint was a quality in which the eighteenth-century Englishman was as deficient as most other nations are even now.

Here is another extract.

The basic elements of the Imperial Problem during the American Revolution must be sought not so much in conscious opinions and professed views bearing directly on it, as in the very structure and life of the Empire; and in doing that, the words of Danton should be remembered – on ne fait pas le proces aux revolutions.  Those who are out to apportion guilt in history have to keep to views and opinions, judge the collisions of planets by the rules of road traffic, make history into something like a column of motoring accidents, and discuss it in the atmosphere of a police court.

No wonder the idealists and the Glory Boys were crestfallen, but on Namier’s death, an undergraduate wrote to Lady Namier saying that ‘he was probably the only truly great man that I have known personally.’ 

It is not hard to see how Namier could have had precisely that effect.  He was like a great artist who has taken the trouble to learn how to draw.  After Namier had done the hard work of amassing and sifting the evidence, he could allow himself a go with the broad brush.

Here are observations from other writings.

Characteristic of English social groups is the degree of freedom which they leave to the individual and the basic equality of their members, the voluntary submission to the rules of ‘the game’ and the curious mixture of elasticity and rigidity in these rules; most of all, the moral standards which these groups enforce or to which they aspire.  Characteristic of the German social group is the utter, conscious subordination of the individual, the iron discipline which they enforce, the high degree of organisation and efficiency which they attain, and their resultant inhumanity.  The State is an aim in itself…. The English national pattern raises individuals above their average moral level, the German suppresses their human sides. 

And it was again on the masses that Hitler drew: what was worst in the Germans, their hatreds and resentments, their envy and cruelty, their brutality and adoration of force, he focused and radiated back on them.  A master in the realm of psyche, but debarred from that of the spirit, he was the Prophet of the Possessed; and interchange there was between him and them, unknown between any other political leader and his followers.  This is the outstanding fact about Hitler and the Third Reich. 

But revolutions are not made; they occur…. The year 1848 proved in Germany that union could not be achieved through discussion and by agreement; that it could be achieved only by force; that there were not sufficient revolutionary forces in Germany to impose from below; and that, therefore, if it was to be, it had to be imposed by the Prussian army. 

The proper attitude for right-minded Members was one of considered support to the Government in the due performance of its task…But if it was proper for the well-affected Member to co-operate with the Government, so long as his conscience permitted, attendance on the business of the nation was work worthy of its hire, and the unavoidable expenditure in securing a seat deserved sympathetic consideration.  …. Bribery, to be really effective, has to be widespread and open…

Trade was not despised in eighteenth-century England – it was acknowledged to be the great concern of the nation; and money was honoured, the mystic common denominator of all values, the universal repository of as yet undetermined possibilities…. A man’s status in English society has always depended primarily on his own consciousness; for the English are not a methodical or logical nation – they perceive and accept facts without anxiously inquiring into their reasons or meaning.  (England in the Age, etc., 2^nd Ed, 1961); ‘…. Fox would probably have found it easier to account for his fears than for the money…

On Charles Townshend: He did not change or mellow; nor did he learn by experience; there was something ageless about him; never young, he remained immature to the end…Conscious superiority over other men freely flaunted, a capacity for seeing things from every angle displayed with vanity, and the absence of any deeper feelings of attachment left Townshend, as Chase Price put it, ‘entirely unhinged.

The English aristocracy survived, almost alone in Europe.  They had been able to reach an accommodation with the Commons in shaping the English constitution, and they reached an accommodation with business and money in shaping British trade.  This triumph of the English aristocracy is unique in all Europe, and the failure of English historians to notice it, let alone celebrate it, is a sad reflection upon the provincialism and specialization of too much of English historical writing. 

Namier saw it plainly, but he was from out of town.  Maitland frequently stressed the need for a comparative outlook, and was deeply interested in German history.  French historians such as Marc Bloch and Georges Lefebvre laced their analyses of the history of France and Europe with comparisons with what was happening across the Channel, and their work was so much more illuminating as a result. 

But English historians do not often return that serve.  How often do you read in English history how the French law of derogation precluded the French lords from engaging in trade?  For example, under the heading La Noblesse et L’Argent, (The Nobility and Money),Georges Lefebvre remarked that ‘the French lords envied the English lords who became rich on mixing with the bourgeoisie and who, thanks to their Parliament, formed the ministry and government of the nation.’

The English lack of interest in Europe has borne fruit, and is currently celebrating a kind of mordant vindication, but the mind-set may also be at risk of being described as insular – definitively insular – with all the darkening and proud exclusion that that state of mind entails.

They are the kind of sparks you come across when reading Namier.  He was difficult personally, a stranger to his new people, and possibly disloyal to his old people, and he was denied the acceptance that he craved and that he had so plainly earned.  Arnold Toynbee had nothing in common with Namier, but said: ‘I worshipped him.  He was a big man with a big mind.’  Isaiah Berlin said he was ‘an historian who psychoanalysed the past.’ 

When I read Namier, it is like being overtaken by a Bentley or listening to Joan Sutherland – you just know that there is plenty left in the tank.  Just as I think that Maitland’s intellect was far stronger than that of Pollock, so I think that Namier was stronger than Isaiah Berlin – it is just that the other two were better at playing the game.

Sir Geoffrey Elton was another import with a name-change who changed the way people saw his part of the history of England.  Elton said this about the reaction to Namier: ‘…. the violence provoked by Namier owed much to the astonishment felt in conventional circles at the uncalled-for appearance of a historian with Tory predilections who clearly outranked the liberals intellectually.’ 

We all recognize that syndrome immediately – the refuge of the tepid, the mediocre, the smug, and the fellow-travellers.  Namier had a most formidable and penetrating intellect.  And how many historians now would have the courage to refer to ‘plain human kindness’?

Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

Why won’t Europe help Trump in Iran?

As an aged lawyer in Melbourne, I speak with great sorrow about the collapse of public life in our former friend and ally, the United States.

Donald Trump daily gets worse.  He is now talking of bombing people ‘for fun’ and ‘taking’ a sovereign state.  If the chairman of a public company succumbed once to the kind of nonsense that Trump indulges in every day, he would be fired.  If the company failed to act, it would go out of business. 

And yet, the only answer we get is ‘What else could you expect?’.  It is not as if they – and we – were not warned in advance – chapter and verse.

The electors of a nation who tolerate this conduct of a man they have elected as President have abdicated their responsibility to the nation and that of the nation to the world.

Finally, when French ideologues decided to export the Revolution, Robespierre opposed the war on the simple ground that ‘no one likes armed missionaries’.  That truth may be said to be self-evident.

Yours truly

Geoffrey Gibson