Thea Thompson describes Raphael Samuel and his approach to life and work.
Interview with Thea Thompson recorded in 2008 by Robert Wilkinson for Oral History of Oral History in the UK.
C1149/05, Track 10.
Copyright The British Library Board.
[Dur: 00:03:21]
Raphael was always such an enthusiast, yes, I mean very important, and Anna too who they were together at that time. Very, very keen and doing their own recordings, and involving us and we started to go to History Workshop conferences and, as I say, I remember giving a paper on childhood. And we had, you know, quite a lot to do with him, socially as well as in our work, but the two were Raphael, his work and his life were totally inseparable. I mean he just worked all the time, you know?
I mean he was quite a character wasn’t he, I mean just to dwell on him slightly for – yeah.
Very much so.
Was he that inspirational figure that he – people seem to sort of indicate, to you?
[Pause] He was – I wouldn’t call him inspirational really, as far as this work was concerned. I think this came from – it didn’t have life breathed into it, which I think is what inspiration – actually from Raphael. But his encouragement and his enthusiasm, and the way he was always interested in the latest thing one had found out about. I don’t know, how people cook their food, you know, every little detail was always of great interest. It was very, very – it was quite hard doing anything with Raphael academically because he couldn’t really put limits to things. If you’re – I did ask him to come and give a paper to talk to my students, I think it was Paul’s – the whole lot, the oral history – not the oral history, the MA in social history, not just my lot. We were all together, it was a MA and social history seminar, and he spent at least the first part, almost half I think, possibly even more, of the allotted time sorting through his notes. And he – it was – he was extremely obsessional, and very, very unable to … I don’t know, just select. I mean when he finally got books done, they were good, but the one which was – had some very good people, I mean Christopher Hill, you know, the Oxford historian, Hugh Brody, you know, I was very lesser fry in this project to produce the book on childhood, it’s a whole history volume, History Workshop series. Raphael wrote an introduction which included a great deal of my own ideas and stuff and was kind of very shocked when I pointed this out to him. It’s as if he wasn’t – you know, there were no boundaries between – research belonged to everybody. And I didn’t really like this, I wasn’t thinking it was appropriate in the introduction, when, you know, I was repeating some of the same stuff in the article. Anyway, he could never revise it, and I had this article, finished article, you know, footnotes and everything, it was never published, I don’t know what happened to the others. But it was, that was at the time when I found it very, very difficult working with him, and, you know, many people had, from way, way back to the Partisan Coffee House in the ‘50s, had difficult times with him. But then very creative, exceptional people often aren’t particularly easy to work with.
