On the twenty seventh of March this year I attended the funeral of Jack Scarisbrick who had died at the age of ninety seven. It was very grand and very catholic: a full church, a requiem mass, a dozen priests, a cardinal (Vincent Nicholls), some Latin and some incense. There were many family members – Jack’s great-grandchildren numbered a dozen and rising. My wife was actually singing at the event, but that had nothing to do with my attendance. Jack had two kinds of fame. He was the founder of Life, the anti-abortion charity which he and his wife Nuala had set up in 1979 as a consequence of the liberalisation of abortion rights in 1967. But he was also a distinguished historian, the author of a very well known book, Henry VIII, which apparently sold 80,000 copies, an enviable number for an academic work. I was there as one of a number of former colleagues; he was appointed to a chair in history at Warwick in 1970 as successor to the founding professor, John Hale.

The event was bound to be, for some of us, an occasion for reminiscence and nostalgia. Of course, most of the colleagues – even, like me, in the extended sense – from the time of Jack’s appointment are now dead, but one did tell me that there had been a concerted effort by existing members of the history department to prevent his appointment and that these had been led by Edward Thompson, better known by the initials E.P. which appear on the front of his book The Making of the English Working Class. I have researched the matter so far as it is now possible to do so and I cannot say for certain that there was such an effort, but it is clear that his appointment aroused opposition and that there was “considerable consternation”.

My first reaction was to be appalled because I assume that academic life should be about diversity and as wide a range of theories, opinions and approaches as possible. But on reflection I have to admit that there must be limits to that diversity and that I could see some merit to the point of view of the leftist historians. Here was a potentially epic struggle between two highly successful historians who were both in their forties and who both had very substantial works to their name. I don’t know how many copies Edward’s book has sold; it was first published in 1963, but was republished as a Pelican in 1968. It’s bigger than Jack’s book (832 pages plays 531) which was first published in 1968. Incidentally, when I say “Jack” and “Edward” I was reasonably friendly with both men in the villagey campus of that time. I often talked to Jack, with cricket being a regular topic and I actually played cricket with Edward (very straight bat) though I suspect he had considerable reservations about me because I publicly opposed his revolutionary fervour during the “troubles” which afflicted Warwick shortly after I arrived. This was probably a disappointment coming from the youngest member of the university staff which I think I then was.

Edward believed in the common man, in “history from below” to use a phrase he had coined in a 1966 article. Jack was the biographer of a monarch and his interest in history from below, to quote one of his colleagues, “registered at zero”. For Edward and several colleagues the project at Warwick was to do history in a different way. The broader diversity of the subject required a Warwick approach that was different from the mainstream. On the other hand the other Jack, Butterworth, the vice-chancellor, was almost certainly convinced that Jack Scarisbrick was a considerably more attractive draw so far as applicants to the university, their parents and their teachers were concerned. And that was the main game at the time. In any case that particular battle had already been fought in an important respect because the “social” historians had already split off in to their own “centre” in 1968, an arrangement which lasted exactly three decades.

There is a legitimate theoretical reason why one might have been reluctant to have Jack Scarisbrick in charge of a university department and that is that he was a conservative, unquestioning Roman Catholic. He was descended from centuries of devout recusant gentry; his ancestral home, Scarisbrick Hall, stands in West Lancashire. It was rebuilt by Pugin and is currently a school. My wife has often complained that she is a former student in Jack’s department and has been a co-parishioner for decades yet he never spoke to her whereas he would treat me, a completely irreligious person, like a long-lost friend. I joked about the solidarity of cricket being more solid than that of religion. But a former colleague put a different light on this when he told me that it was one of Jack’s rules that a married gentleman should never speak to an unaccompanied lady. It occurs to me that a lot of trouble might have been avoided if everybody obeyed this rule.

So he was a man who believed that the wafer turned into the body of Christ and that the pope carried the full authority bestowed by the son of God over humanity. But the really problematic belief for an academic is in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of books proscribed by the Catholic church. There are 4,000 of them and only in 1966, by which time Jack was already an academic, did it cease to be a sin to read any of them. The list includes what I would regard as the two most important modern philosophers, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and it is still a warning list which says that you may endanger your soul by reading such books. Arguably, if you support an organisation like that you shouldn’t complain about being censored or cancelled yourself and certainly not about colleagues objecting to your appointment. However, I would argue that in practice the threat from the Catholic church to freedom of expression in the universities of my time in England in practice was absolutely minimal – though in Spain and the Republic of Ireland earlier in my life this would not have been the case. I also accept (with doubts rather than reservations) the thesis that Christianity has shown a capacity for evolving in a liberal direction not shown by other religions.

Apologies for the old joke, but in terms of what I believe both Jack and Edward were well on the way to Upminster (which is eight stops beyond Barking on the District Line and the end of the line). Edward believed in the inevitability of progress towards a benign humanistic socialism. The Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union had clearly gone wrong in his view, but they were the right sort of thing. Whereas I agree with Pol Pot: if you allow freedom of any kind capitalism returns within the hour – and I’m in favour of freedom. The Cold War ended shortly before Edward died in 1993; he believed that it was the main obstacle to the (rapid) development of socialist humanism. As the Duke of Wellington said, in a rather different context, “If you believe that, you will believe anything.” Upminster! And I cannot mount the same defence against the developments of what I call the degenerate enlightenment that they are no real threat to freedom of speech.

Our disputes in the early years of “new” universities felt more important than later disputes because we thought we were mapping out new territory and we were right to some degree. The issues, though, have magnified as time has gone on in the light of “politically correct”, “woke” and other censorious tendencies. In the 1970s I was at Stanford; one of the other faculty was William Shockley who had gone from being the Nobel laureate and co-inventor of the transistor to being mainly known as a fully theoretical racist who thought that it was urgent that policy should be informed by an awareness of the knowledge that some races were perniciously inferior to the “white” race. There were only limited attempts to have him dismissed – he was a Nobel Laureate and in his sixties, but he was generally ostracised. On the other hand, he was fairly self-ostracising, unsociable and markedly unpleasant to those working for him by all accounts.

And in the 1990s in philosophy at Warwick there was Nick Land. I will not attempt to clarify what Nick believed. Some of the phrases used to classify him have been, “post-structuralist”, “neo-reactionary”, “cybernetic accelerationist” and “speculative reason”. At times he seemed to believe that human beings no longer existed, but our apparent consciousness was an illusion created by AI (yes, even then). In not being able to summarise his thought I am agreeing with him because he appears to have said of the 2010 collection of his writings called Fanged Noumena variously that he doesn’t know what it says and that he doesn’t necessarily agree with it. But we did talk and he perceived us as having something in common insofar as I had expressed opposition to the later enlightenment (with its religiose constructions of natural rights and equality) and to the anthropocentric nature of much modern thought as well as to democracy in its more extreme forms. But I always argued that my opposition was based on the earlier, sceptical ”Enlightenment” and the writings of Hume, Smith, Voltaire and Montesquieu and was much less complex than his. But colleagues did find him very difficult and somewhat embarrassing whereas he found the requirements of conventional academic life difficult. He resigned in 1998 and appears to be living in China.

My use of the word “embarrassing” in that context stirs me back to my original reaction; in the end you cannot draw a line and you should appoint the most interesting, the most different and the most potentially embarrassing people to posts in academic institutions because society needs them and no one else will have them and occasionally they turn out to be right. What you should not be doing is to ban teaching on the ground that it offends your “values” as Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University banned the teaching of Plato’s Symposium earlier this year because it offended supposed Christian doctrines about the nature of gender. Apart from being appalled I was also mildly amused because half a century ago I was travelling round America and came across Texas A & M and its reputation and its nickname, “the Aggies”. I wrote an article talking about the struggle for America’s soul between the Hippies and the Aggies. The Aggies have done better than I expected.

Lincoln Allison April 2026