NOP 1

[Stanley]

NOP 1
(Naïve occasional paper)

[You may have noted that occasionally I allow myself to write what I call a NOP. These are simply a way of triggering myself off into a course of research and I usually send them to a few friends who might be triggered as well. This is the first NOP I wrote when I was starting to try and pull some of my research together. I was under pressure to write books about the textile industry. I have resisted being diverted into publishing in the normal way but by a happy accident am now publishing on the web. I though that what follows might interest someone. By the way, if you haven’t read Norman Davies’ ‘THE ISLES’ you have missed a goody!]

I’ve started me reading to get myself better oriented before I start writing and have decided to take a really broad view of Barlick and read Norman Davies’ EUROPE first. I’ve only got as far as page 2 of the introduction and he’s triggered my thought processes off. Because I am very bad at hanging on to all the concepts, another one always comes along and knocks it out of my head; I thought that when I came across one that really tickled me I’d write a NOP on the subject and start a file. This way, I can sit down and read through a bunch of short pieces and hopefully be triggered off again. That’s the theory, I don’t know whether it will work but it must be better than simply crashing on and losing the thread.

So, occasionally, you might get a NOP from me. If you do you’ll know what is going on. By the way, as far as I know it was David Moore who coined the title, he used to use them as a way of communicating his thoughts to members of his staff.

One more word of explanation and I shan’t say this again; what I am trying to do is get the sweep of the early history into my head before I start writing the bits which are straight out of me and my experience. I want to convey to my readers that the past has a bearing on how the history developed; it didn’t just happen in a vacuum. If I haven’t got this clear in my head before I write the main body I shan’t convey it clearly so that is what this exercise is about, getting me prepared to explain the early stuff to Barlick and soaking my head in it so I can let it permeate the whole work.

There may be questions afterwards.

What has got me going is Norman talking about broad based synthesis versus deep analysis of very narrowly confined subjects. He mentions an apocryphal report of AJP Taylor once saying of one of the latter type: “It’s 90% true and 100% useless1” Norman also talks about the advantage of having a diversity of views on a period of history. He cites Clark and CIVILISATION coming at Europe from the standpoint of a historian of art and culture and Bronowski doing the same thing in THE ASCENT OF MAN but from the base of the history of Science and Technology. His view is that it is no more wrong for a historian to use poetry, music or astrology than it is for a doctor to use X-rays or an archaeologist to use magnetic or radar surveys. Some of the input will be misleading but this is outweighed by the benefits of having the broad spectrum of information.

What strikes me about this is the fact that what I want to do is use the broad approach to cover the early history but allow this to colour the surgical bit where I actually get down to the presentation of the evidence I have gathered. His argument for plurality of interpretation comforts me because I know I am going to be subjective in my treatment of the evidence, I can’t be anything else because so much of it will be coming out of my own experience. I suppose this had been bothering me a bit because I was apprehensive about how what I turn out will be viewed by ‘proper historians’, rather like wondering how the essay will be marked. The one thing I had decided was that I wasn’t going to allow myself to be diverted from my version of the truth by looking over my shoulder and bothering about what other people will think. This had been decided, the nice thing about Norman is that he tends to support that sort of approach. Indeed, in his introduction to Europe and to The Isles he admits that he knows that there will be historians who will criticise his approach because he has allowed himself to be idiosyncratic. Well done Norm. I feel a lot better!

Another thought occurred to me as I was reading him, what he is actually talking about is taking control of his material and not letting anybody else assert any outside control beyond what he admits by using readers and taking advice. This reminded me of Keith Thomas and Religion and the Decline of Magic, a book I have always admired. Thomas cites Magic as being the way ordinary people attempted to control the parts of their lives that otherwise were completely out of control. Religion takes over this role and usurps magic substituting prayer for spells and belief in God for dependence on the intercession of Dark Powers. I like it.

God knows where the next bit came from but it struck me that you could use the same basic need for control as an explanation for the rise of political parties. When we peered in through the windows of Clarion House the other day we were looking at the icons of the ILP displayed in the room and at the root, it was control that they were looking for. Another stray thought popped into my head, a definition of satisfaction could be that control has been achieved. This marches on into a theory I have believed in for a long while that part of the fascination of machining metal is the fact that you are exerting control over what would otherwise be intractable materials. Same applies to any craft where raw materials are converted to a finished article. Let this flow on into a partial explanation why the successful manufacturers at the peak of the Ind Rev had enough confidence to do the things that they did on the scale that they did them. A ‘proper historian’ could have good reason to say that this was a very flimsy basis on which to judge one of the factors that produced the Ind Rev. My view is that he or she would be wrong to discount the possibility and this is an example of the sort of thread I feel runs through the history of Barlick. You start with a Shaman on the moor and trace a link to the RB211.

That’s about it I think. I am convinced the link exists (together with many others of course) and what I’m trying to do is infect my head with these concepts strongly enough to keep them bubbling just below the surface as I write. Reading these NOPS occasionally might remind me of the direction I started off in.

SCG/19 August 2000