The historian who worked so hard it nearly broke him

Telegraph

3 days ago

The historian Asa Briggs apparently aimed to write 1,500 publishable words a day and liked to be working on at least three books at any one time. His Stakhanovite labours included some 45 books, countless reviews, reports, forewords and encyclopaedia entries, unstinting service on countless committees, presenting many lecture series and chairing numerous learned societies. Not to mention a five-volume history of the BBC and the text for a volume of Brooke Bond Tea picture cards.
Though his career is not often celebrated today, his life, as Adam Sisman 's measured but compelling biography makes plain, was both busy and remarkable. It also came at a cost: the very drive that fuelled his output later became a burden, as writing turned from joy to compulsion.
Briggs was born in Keighley in 1921, a grammar school boy raised above a grocer's shop in what he would later call 'modest comfort'. His upbringing was imbued with the northern, nonconformist virtues of hard work, discipline and self-reliance, values he never ceased to embody, even after acquiring grand houses, a peerage and a taste for haute cuisine. (As well as becoming president of the Workers' Education Association, the William Morris Society, the Victorian Society, the Ephemera Society and the Brönte Society, Briggs was also a founding member of the British Academy of Gastronomes.)
He started degrees at Cambridge and LSE, concurrently, at just 16, taking firsts from both of them. By 1942, at 21, he was working at Bletchley Park. Not long after the war, he was teaching at Worcester College, Oxford, where his pupils included a young Rupert Murdoch.
Briggs's professional trajectory, as Sisman puts it, was a story of 'spectacular success'. Vice-Chancellor of Sussex, Chancellor of the Open University, Provost of Worcester, and eventually Lord Briggs of Lewes, he scaled and conquered the post-war academic establishment with dizzying speed and unwavering determination. But though he had a knack for cultivating useful friendships and influencing people, his success did not endear him to everyone. His jet-setting lifestyle led colleagues to dub him 'Professor Heathrow', while the acerbic Hugh Trevor-Roper liked to joke, 'What is the difference between The Lord and The Lord Briggs? The Lord is always with us.'
Sisman, an acclaimed biographer – including of Trevor-Roper, and John le Carré, whose serial affairs he revealed to the world in 2015 – is ideally suited to the job. He's a writer highly attuned to the niceties, sensitivities and indeed the hypocrisies of the British class system and of academic life, a complex terrain which he traverses smoothly. He is also, as he freely admits, necessarily selective: a 'comprehensive' life, he writes, would 'require at least a decade to write' and 'several volumes'. At a little over 400 pages, The Indefatigable Asa Briggs is more than enough: what emerges is a sharply sketched figure, part whirlwind, part workaholic, part Victorian relic.
Briggs's scholarship roamed far beyond the confines of traditional historical research. He was a pioneer of labour history, urban history, local history, business history and the history of communications. But this breadth was also a liability: as AJP Taylor once remarked of The Age of Improvement 1783–1867 (1959), that cursed book inflicted upon generations of British schoolchildren, he was 'a veritable Lysenko of verbiage, making three sentences grow where one would do'. (Victorian People (1955) and Victorian Cities (1963) are much more focused and better reads; the BBC volumes remain his most significant, if not uniformly admired, contribution to original research.)
He was also not always reliable. As Sisman writes, Briggs often accepted commissions he could not fulfil: some he abandoned entirely; others he completed only under duress, to vastly differing standards. In the final decades of his life, the compulsion turned to torment: Sisman notes a growing detachment in the later works, as deadlines loomed and standards slipped.
For a richly researched biography, Briggs's private life remains curiously opaque. There were entanglements with various women, Sisman notes, though he refrains from going into more details – a curious obscurity, given the le Carré book. Briggs met his wife Susan when she worked as his research assistant. She later remarked that love 'was never part of it', but somehow the marriage endured: she had affairs, while together they climbed the social ladder. There's a faint Pooterish air once Briggs reaches the top: letters of complaint to travel agents and cashiers; luncheon with the Queen; and a dinner at Bletchley Park, late in his life, served by the finalists of Celebrity MasterChef.
For all the accounting of Briggs's frenetic activity, though, there's a strange hollowness at the centre of the book: we get no sense of Briggs's interior life. Perhaps there was none: he may have been too busy or too distracted. 'Greedy', one of Sisman's sources, an unnamed historian, calls him. If so, it wasn't just greed for money – though he made plenty – as much as for the role of the historian to become a kind of public institution.
Sisman's biography is dry-eyed but humane and honours the labour without overstating the legacy. It amounts to a portrait of a man who, like Victorian Britain, Briggs's great subject, believed that more was more – and who, like that age, left behind an awful lot, some of it brilliant, some of it best forgotten.
★★★★☆