THE MILLIONAIRE HISTORY MAN
Kathleen Burk discovers the wealth amassed by A.J.P. Taylor.• the first telly don THE ACADEMIC who writes for the pop- ular press and goes on television, thereby doubling his salary, is a commonplace nowadays. So one forgets that there had to be a first. No one cuts you dead in the Common Room or suggests that you be dismissed from your Fellowship because you write for newspapers. Indeed, envy or malice rather than self-righteous outrage is the more usual response. But the first was A.J.P. Taylor (1906-1990). He both glo- ried in and suffered for his pioneering journalistic career. He began in the mid- 1930s with reviews for the Manchester Guardian, and progressed from writing his- torical essays for it by the late 1930s and political leaders in the final months of the war to writing both reviews and commen- taries for an increasingly wide range of serious papers, and increasingly populist columns for the popular press from the early 1950s onwards. Along the way, he earned the contempt of many of his col- leagues, growing fame amongst a mass readership, and a lot of money.
Taylor was also the first academic to take advantage of television to further his career. The amount editors pay for materi- al depends on one or more of three vari- ables: whether it is any good; whether it says what the editor would like said; and whether the writer's fame is such that his very name will increase sales. Taylor worked hard to fulfil all three criteria, and his television appearances, beginning with the legendary In the News (the first, and immensely popular, televised political dis- cussion programme) in 1950, ensured that his face was easily recognised across the social classes.
Editors of the popular press exploited the link: his byline on the Sunday Pictorial (fore- runner of the Sunday Mirror) in 1951 was, 'A million people see and hear this man on Fri- day nights'; while in January 1953 the Daily Herald announced his new column on the front page: `A.J.P. Taylor, the blunt-spoken Oxford don who was sacked from televi- sion's In the News, is to write a weekly com- mentary . . . Viewers know that Taylor says what he thinks — and it is always forthright, provocative and original.' Other editors utilised his fame, but hated having to do it: David Astor, proprietor and editor of the Observer, signed Taylor up for his paper in 1957 purely because he would boost circula- tion figures, privately referring to him as a `terrible man'.
How did he do it? Looking over his freelance career, it is possible to extract from it certain rules of procedure which the aspiring academic freelancer might usefully ponder. The first rule is to build up an area of expertise, but for a public career it must be one which is relevant to public interests and concerns. In Taylor's case this was modern, indeed contempo- rary, European history, central to public discussion in the years surrounding the second world war. The second rule is to publish a good book or two. During the 1930s, Taylor published three books; indeed, from the 1930s to the 1960s he published at least two books a decade of scholarly worth. His expertise was thus repeatedly validated, and those editors who hired him knew that he was not only skilled at producing the material they required, but also learned enough for his accuracy to be trusted and his opinions generally accepted in the outside world.
The third rule is to arrange for steady book-reviewing — the easiest way into the public eye — and it was the Manchester Guardian which set Taylor off on his free- lance career. Regular reviewing was important because it gave him practice in communicating to non-specialists and non- historians, and gained him regular expo- sure to a national readership. It had also, by 1937, increased his income by 40 per cent.
The fourth rule is to move beyond book- reviewing into wider popular and political Ding, ding, ding, went Noddy's little cash register.' articles, and for Taylor the Guardian proved to be a particularly serendipitous home. The editor, A.P. Wadsworth, was also an historian, and he encouraged Tay- lor both to review frequently and to widen his scope by writing longer pieces on his- torical anniversaries or drawing historical parallels. Taylor's debut in this genre was `The Case of Mr Eden: An Historical View', drawing parallels with previous French and British resignation crises. His eye became attuned to anniversaries, and his future editors (and producers) regularly received ideas for such pieces — the ori- gins and ends of wars, parliamentary crises, the lives and deaths of statesmen.
Taylor's political articles during the war and the immediate postwar period were mostly serious ones devoted to politics and foreign policy, but written in an extremely accessible manner. Wadsworth had told him that anything written for the Guardian was worthless unless it could be easily read by the man on the omnibus on the way to work. The implication was not that it should be full of cheap gibes, but that it must be lucid. Taylor consequently devel- oped his trademark style: he began with a short and arresting first sentence, wrote clearly and maintained a strong theme. He also developed a liking for paradox. This style was adapted for different readerships. His writings for the Times Literary Supple- ment and the New Statesman read rather differently from those for the Daily Herald or, most famously, the Sunday Express. The fifth rule, which in Taylor's case overlapped with the fourth, was the crucial leap — to become a regular broadcaster and television personality. He first broad- cast on the radio in 1942 and became a reg- ular in 1944 (although it did not last long, the mandarins of the spoken word finding him dangerous and distasteful). He moved to television in 1950 as part of the regular team on In the News. In 1957, on the new independent television channel, he gave the first ever series of lectures on television — a series of three on the Russian Revolu- tion, which attracted a viewing audience of 750,000 (out of some two-and-a-half mil- lion households able to receive commercial television). This leap in visibility and recog- nisability made him attractive to the popu- lar press, a most lucrative position to command. He became for successive news- papers the house intellectual with the com- mon touch.
Yet what makes Taylor interesting as a journalist is his sheer range and the num- ber of balls he kept in the air. Take 1957, for example: he wrote seven reviews for the Manchester Guardian, 15 for the New Statesman and 19 for the Observer, he also wrote three columns for the News Chroni- cle, one for the Sunday Graphic, three Lon- don Diaries for the New Statesman and two columns for the Sunday Express, in this last case the beginning of a relationship which was to last until 1978. (He also that year published a book and some essays, made
regular radio and television appearances and maintained a full Oxford teaching career.) Two questions occur: how did he do it and how much money did he make? He did it by hard work — up at dawn, a walk and a cold bath, lunch of bread and cheese alone in his rooms (he believed lunch destroyed the working day) — and an abil- ity to think, and to type, quickly. He was driven by the need to write, and clearly liked to vary the long haul of a book with the short dash of a review or column. He liked book-reviewing in particular because since childhood he had been an obsessive reader — and for someone driven both by the need to read and to write reviewing is ideal. He continued to review right up to the end, when illness prevented both read- ing and writing.
He worked phenomenally hard because he enjoyed it and because he needed the money. He had two complete families by 1957 — his ex-wife Margaret and their four children, and his current wife Eve with their two — and they had to be sup- ported, as neither wife worked regularly outside the home and some of the children were still young. He needed plenty of money, and the evidence suggests that he earned it. His academic salary had been £1,350 in 1950, the first year in which his freelance income surpassed it; by 1957 his academic salary was dwarfed by a free- lance income of at least £4,000, more than £50,000 at today's prices. This pattern con- tinued for the remainder of his career.
My attempt to discover the business his- tory of Taylor's freelance career is based on necessarily patchy evidence. I have still to discover how much he was paid for many of his appearances on television, whether for Free Speech or for most of his lectures. I still do not know what the Sun- day Express paid him, though it must have been more than respectable, nor do I know what he earned from the Observer although I do know that the New States- man paid him a retainer of £300 in 1953. But putting together all the information from agent and publishers, BBC archives and individual letters, my current estimate is that Taylor earned at least £425,000 from 1934 to 1995 from his freelance work — nearly £2 million in today's terms. Of my figure of £425,000, only £47,000 is attributable to print journalism — which must be a severe underestimation, given the gaps in my evidence.
Were Taylor alive and writing today, his freelance income, given his range and pro- ductivity, would be substantial. But he would no longer be, in Lew Grade's words, `an unusual type of star'. The academic journalist is now, thanks to Taylor, a com- mon breed.
The author is Professor of Modern and Con- temporary History at University College Lon- don, and is writing a biography of A.J.P. Taylor to be published by Hutchinson.
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