Chloe Ward, who is spending some time with MBS as a Universitas 21 Visiting Fellow from the University of Melbourne writes this week on the transnational history of the Left Book Club. You can follow Chloe on Twitter @doctorchlod.

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In April 1946 Horace Flower, the manager of the Queensland Farmers’ Co-Operative Association, wrote to the British publisher Victor Gollancz. Flower thanked Gollancz for his ‘splendid work … to open the eyes and the minds of so many world-citizens’ through the Left Book Club. He wrote that the Club’s influence through extended well beyond Britain’s borders:

… ‘distance lends enchantment to the view’ … If you remove the distance then you find we are pretty much alike and with about the same large percentage of unthinking citizens who blindly accept what the Beaverbrooks and Northcliffs (sic) of the world tell them to believe” [1]

Gollancz founded the LBC in 1936. It was a publishing enterprise, a Communist front organisation (to some) and, as I plan to argue in my PhD, a social movement. It published, circulated and discussed anti-fascist books chosen every month by Gollancz and the political economists Harold Laski and John Strachey. Its 57,000 members met in 1200 local Club discussion groups across the country. In doing so, they sought to prevent war and bring about a democratic peace.

The international connections of the LBC are relatively underexplored. Flower was one of several thousand Australian LBC subscribers. In Australia, LBC activity centred on radical bookshops in state capitals. As in Britain, the Australian LBC attracted communists, socialists and radicals. Like their British counterparts, they took discussion of the monthly Club book for their principle task. In November 1938 the Sydney group launched a national journal, the Australian Left News, which reported different states’ activities and published original journalism.

Australian Club members used the Club to overcome the ‘tyranny of distance’ between Australia and Britain. In their writings and discussions they made claims for their relevance to British anti-fascist politics. These met relative indifference in Britain. British Club members showed little interest in imperial politics or the Australian LBC. Nonetheless, the ways Australians responded to the LBC and anti-fascist politics speaks to the proliferation of ways of understanding ‘Britishness’ beyond Britain’s borders.

These efforts were largely imaginative. A letter to the ALN described the literal, cultural and political distance involved in joining the European anti-fascist struggle from so far away:

Two months ago you were in London, having tea in Lyons and walking down Oxford Street towards Baker Street station … A short air trip, and you would be within hearing of the guns in the Spanish War. Now you are in another world with new problems and different solutions, and you have to adapt your insular and London self to an Australian and Sydney setting.[2]

Empire held the key to Australians’ claims on a vaunted place in the anti-fascist movement as representatives of white civilization in Asia. In Britain, fallout from the Munich negotiations overshadowed the release of Amleto Vespa’s Secret Agent of Japan in October 1938. In Australia, the book provided a way of internationalizing European diplomacy. In their discussions the Australian groups linked air raid precautions, Munich, and the Japanese threat to Australia’s borders, which they tried to assimilate to a common policy for national and international defence.[3]

The Australian LBC’s organisers argued about where obedience to the British project ended and its reformulation for Australian purposes began. In January 1939 the Adelaide Club took the ALN’s editors to task for abandoning Gollancz’s declared liberal, pluralistic vision of the Club’s politics and taking a forthright, anti-capitalist position. In reply the Sydney group declared that, whatever its sympathies with the original Club, ‘“keeping in step” does not mean imitating … [and] we believe we should supplement from the Australian angle our English contemporary’.[4] This ‘Australian angle’ was largely a political difference. The LBC’s official organisation in Australia, and especially in Sydney where the ALN was produced, had close links to the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), and fewer countervailing forces against its influence, as represented in the British Club by Harold Laski and, increasingly, Gollancz himself.

The Second World War widened the political gulf between the two LBCs. This exposed very different thinking about the ‘democracy’ the Club defended. In Britain, the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the outbreak of war divided Gollancz’s office between its communist and non-communist factions. Gollancz then excised its anti-war membership, including non-communists, from the Club. He argued they betrayed the democratic principles for which the Club was founded and the war was fought. The ban on CPA in June 1940 led to police seizing individuals’ Club books. Club members then united in defence of the liberal freedoms their circulation signified.

The Australian LBC reformulated its relationship to Britain once more during the war. ‘Research groups’ of Club members in New South Wales and Victoria published short books about problems of domestic and topical importance to Australians: for example women’s labour, the minimum wage, and housing. Yet even while refocusing the Club’s objectives on Australian issues, these writers united Australian and British interests in visions of future transnational, socialist achievement. One, for example, repeated Stafford Cripps’ declaration that the war was ‘in reality, a people’s war of liberation’ in its epigraph.[5]

Australian LBC readers’ activities are symptomatic of how people could and can define political identities against ‘Britishness’ even outside Britain. Their example also points to the importance of media both in mediating political and cultural identities, and as a tool in their further dissemination. Horace Flower, to his 1946 letter to Gollancz, attached copies of a private newsletter he had distributed locally for the previous three years. Sending the newsletter to the London publisher helped Flower feel he had ‘a definite link with a man who has done a mighty big job towards the evolution of real world-citizens’. Yet Flower’s action, and the activities of the LBC, points to neither to the primacy of Gollancz in the LBC’s achievements, or to objective emergence of cosmopolitan, ‘real world-citizens’. Rather, these are instances of the transnational circulation and appropriation, of ideas about Britain and its place in the world that could inspire political activity in different national contexts.

[1] Horace Flower to Victor Gollancz, Papers of Sir Victor Gollancz, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, MSS.157/3/LB/1/43.

[2] ‘London Letter’, Australian Left News, February 1939, 6.

[3] ‘Australian Group News’, Australian Left News, January 1939, 12.

[4] ‘Action must supplement thought’, Australian Left News, January 1939, 2.

[5] F Oswald Barnett & W.O Burt, Housing the Australian Nation, Research Group of the Left Book Club of Victoria, 1942.

Laura Sefton is a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham.You can follow her on Twitter @laurajsefton. This blog was written on behalf of the various PG students at MBS.

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As the Modern British Studies conference quickly approaches, we are excitedly finalising the details of the postgraduate workshop scheduled to take place on the first morning, 1^st July. The schedule for the event with links to the panellists can be found on the MBS conference pages.

The workshop will be centred around Working Paper 2, co-written by postgraduate researchers in the department in November 2014. We always envisaged that the paper would be referenced in the workshop but in a new political climate, in which the Arts and Humanities are placed in an even more vulnerable position, the concerns raised in the paper seem more pertinent than before. We have therefore asked panellists to briefly respond to two different aspects of the working paper and then we will open up the debate to the floor for lengthy discussion.

Our working paper had two principal concerns: how postgraduates and early career researchers can engage with the Modern British Studies project and the working conditions we needed to do so. One of MBS aims was to “provide sites for research seeking to move beyond the fragmentation of the field whether by academic staff or a postgraduate community.”

Indeed, a key aspect of MBS’s intellectual project is to challenge the “problematic disciplinary, analytic and theoretical fragmentation of the field”, yet we feel strongly that our daily working practices and the research we undertake are intrinsically linked and, as such, the former is as important as the latter.

We called upon MBS to place PGs and ECRs at the heart of the project, firmly believing that they could not fulfill their stated aims without addressing our concerns because fragmentation of the field is not just occurring within research, but amongst researchers.

The isolation of academic research has long been documented, but as academia becomes increasingly specialised, communities are harder to maintain and researchers are further isolated and insular. This is compounded in Modern British history; as the field fragments, our questions become narrower, our answers more focused, our circles of influence smaller and our support networks diminished.

Just as academia demands increasing specialism, it also requires demonstrable engagement. We are told we must engage with the public, we must find ways for our research to have impact otherwise a career in academia, or elsewhere, is impossible. At the same time, we are told that the ‘problem’ is our inability to talk to the public; that our specialised research does not translate to ‘ordinary’ settings, that we cannot address the publics concerns. Yet the subsequent focus on employability, transferable skills and measurable impact usually involves jargon and bureaucracy that only serve to make us even more unrelatable.

Ironically, this preparation for the ‘real world’ renders us unable to fully engage with the big questions the public are now asking. As Britain’s future and place in the world is debated and austerity, privatization and the very meaning of society dominate public discussion, critical analysis and sound judgements are needed more than ever before. We should not engage for the sake of engaging but because we are passionate about intellectual knowledge and have a firm belief in its value to wider society.

Moreover, PGs and ECRs are also under greater pressures to research, teach, network and demonstrate impact in an increasingly competitive environment. It is unsurprising then that resilience gets weakened, wellbeing suffers and passion gives way to pragmatism.

Too often HEIs’ defence of PGs and ECRs and fleeting moments of unity are centred on the critique of specific cases within other universities. Whilst it is right that institutions are held accountable for their actions, classifying them as out of the ordinary enables other institutions to normalize their own working practices. A thorough and open debate about the academic landscape and the socio-economic position of postgraduates and ECRs is desperately needed. Even the discursive framework used to talk about postgraduates and early career researchers is problematic, maintaining hierarchies in universities that are surely detrimental to collaborative research.

If MBS seeks collaboration and engagement it must continue to provide an Intellectually rigorous and supportive environment for all of its researchers. Yet, as proud as we are to be active and respected members of the MBS community at Birmingham, we are also members of the wider postgraduate community in Britain and beyond. MBS must use its influence to show solidarity with PGs and ECRs and provide a forum to openly discuss our concerns.

We believe then that MBS can be, and should, be, a space for all postgraduates working under the umbrella of Modern British Studies who seek debate, conversation and the means for genuine engagement in a supportive environment. As part of this, the waiving of all costs for all postgraduates, ECRs and the unwaged, is particularly welcomed, but this is only a start. We urge all postgraduates and ECRs to attend the workshop on 1^st July as well as writing a blog post* about the conference. This way we can begin building a strong community of researchers working in Modern British Studies.

*For further information about the blog posts please see here

Thanks to those of you who have registered for the Modern British Studies Conference in July. We are really looking forward to hosting this. Because of support from the University of Birmingham and the Economic History Society we have been able to make registration and catering costs completely free for over 100 postgraduates, people on temporary contracts and those that are currently between posts. Our excellent PGs will be sharing some news about the PG/ECR workshop they have organized in the near future.

Part of the challenge we have set ourselves is to make sure that we involve new scholars in the on-going conversations around the conference and feed these into proceedings. We also want to make sure that those unable to come along are able to tap into some of the discussions which take place.

We have, therefore, been grappling with how we might capture the energy, new ideas, reflections, questions and criticisms that come out of a conference and put these to use. We have various ideas about making sure some of the conference contributions are made sustainable – including podcasts, Twitter,  but would welcome any bright ideas on this.

As part of this, we are also asking everyone who has registered for free to offer some reflections on the conference as part of the MBS blog.

We are very open minded about what might be posted here (feel free to browse through our somewhat eclectic back catalogue of posts), but we are really eager to share conference reports, feedback notes, reflections on projects, responses to specific papers, questions, or agendas, social media responses, photo essays, reviews of the plenary sessions, etc.. etc.. we hope people will feel free to be as creative or even formulaic as you like.

MBS people at Birmingham have been thinking a lot about the various funding models that exist for academic conferences and their different inequities. We hope that by showing the energy and ideas that can be brought to an event by making it both relatively low-cost and, hopefully, accessible to emerging scholars will, perhaps, help set an example for future events.

A series of blog posts by those who have been able to come and contribute because of the omission of fees will, we think, demonstrate in a modest way the value in rethinking our funding models for conference more widely.

Our experiments with blog writing have, for the most part, been fun, challenging and rewarding and we have been surprised and delighted that each post has been generally widely read.

We hope you like this idea. Part of the plan  for MBS at Birmingham is to create different spaces for conversations – please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions, suggestions or ideas. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing you all here in July.