Ed. Tim Heald  My Dear Hugh, Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and others,  Francis Lincoln, 2011.

You can take Cobb out of Frinton on Sea and Tunbridge Wells, but you can’t take said locations out of Cobb.  That is to say, in spite of his boozing and juvenile pranksterism, his total immersion in French language and culture, in spite of the Legion d’Honneur and the satisfaction taken in being referred to as a titi Parisien, Cobb’s default position – which becomes clearer with advancing years – is that of an unpolitical English curmudgeon in the 18^th century manner, cynical, pragmatic and hostile to ideas.  A bit like an academic version of Richard Ingrams, a friend of Cobb’s who went to the same school and displays a similar kind of grumpy, frumpy, contrarian, bloody-minded Anglo-eccentricity, of which there is a faint echo in the TV persona of the current editor of Private Eye.  

This particular Shelley I saw plain many years ago - it must have been 1959 or thereabouts - looking jangly, angular and ill at ease (hung over, perhaps) on the prom at Aberystwyth, where he was then lecturing in the History Department of UCW.  His lectures were memorable and unusual in that they were quirky, insightful, focused on personalities and (therefore) a lot of fun – he had a way of touching on the sexual peccadilloes of the likes of Catherine the Great of Russia in a manner that drew hisses of disapproval from some members of the student body, a reaction that puzzled me then, and still does.   Epater les bourgeouis, oui.  Mais, epater les etudiants? In a fascinating letter on the cultural diversity of Calcutta he notes that the Bengalis are intelligent ,and “very WELSH.  I was constantly reminded of Gwyn Alfred Williams!  And the Indian papers ARE VERY Welsh too, in their endless chiseling malice, their slightly obscene harping on seedy scandal.”  Not a million miles removed from Cobb’s lecturing style which was somewhat of the kitchen-sink variety, and refreshingly devoid of uplift. 

 Perhaps his unapologetic Englishness had something to do with the student hisses:  in 1958 he wrote to John Bromley that Richard Pares (recently deceased) was “the sort of person who makes me proud of being an XVIIIth  C historian, and Oxonian and an Englishman.”  So the resolutely unamused could conceivably have been those of a Welsh Nationalist persuasion for whom Cobb never had much time. It’s not at all clear to me that – as Heald asserts - Cobb “would have approved” of the sort of provincialism promoted by Louis Guilloux, who was interested in encouraging the ideals and values of the Breton writer.  He was no lover of assertive minorities – be they “bloody thieving Catalans, one of the really abusive pseudo-nationalities along with Basques, Lets, Lats, Esths, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Quebecois, Irish, Manx, Flems, Armenians, Kurds, Serbs et al.”.  The Welsh don’t figure there, but in 1981 he wrote to Hugh Trevor-Roper that he was “being denounced by the Welsh Nationalists.  This gives me great pleasure.”  It would have been interesting to know just how Cobb had fallen foul of the Welsh Nats – but Heald offers no explanation – just as he offers no biographical detail on the subject of  the radical rabble-rouser Gwyn Alf –  an academic star who shone at Aber  at least as colourfully and brightly as Cobb himself.  Despite asserting that “I am incurably ENGLISH, no Celt in me at all”, and  grumbling that “there is not much to be said for Aberystwyth”,   Cobb was clearly on good terms with many Welshmen, including the Principal of U.C. Aberystwyth, Goronwy Rees – who resigned office in 1960 in somewhat controversial circumstances following the defection of the pro-Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Maclean.  It’s entirely characteristic of Cobb that he should find Rees’s “undoubted villainy rather attractive”, and willing to recycle Isaiah Berlin’s comment that “Goronwy was always so anxious to PLEASE that he would go to bed with anyone, of either sex, who showed an interest in him.”  For what it’s worth, neither Cobb nor his editor throw much light on the Reesian (as distinct from Roosian) villainy that is alleged.

It’s easy to see how Cobb exerted such an attraction, at Aberystwyth, at Balliol College and elsewhere, on the young, impressionable and radically inclined who  delight in seeing sacred cows prodded and held up to ridicule.  Cobb could not abide pomposity, which was why he found Field Marshall Montgomery’s harangues to the soldiery so ludicrous.  Debunking was also a speciality of his friend and correspondent, Hugh Trevor-Roper.  One of the pleasures of Heald’s collection is that of seeing commonly shared assumptions being overturned with gusto.  Thus, compared to Calcutta, Delhi is dull – SUPER LUTYENS, like Cardiff City Centre.  Gandhi “must have been an awful, miserable, pleasure-hating, backtotheland, puritanical little shit, an Indian Robespierre.”  The “bloody” Poles he describes with irritation as “the Irish of the East”.   For reasons that aren’t clear, he has a lasting dislike of RAF types.   Roman Catholicism in general he abominates, and also in the shape of “that horrible man Graham Greene”.  And somewhat piquant, in view of his lifetime’s absorption in the study of the French Revolutionary phenomenon, is his impatience with “this bloody Bicentenaire razzamatazz…. I seem to be becoming something of an English nationalist but how much better we did,  Pitt etc, I mean, than the Paris crowd.”

The question as to how radical Cobb is, or indeed ever was, is an interesting one, and the last quoted remark, from 1989,  suggests a rightwards drift from his early days with a later Paris crowd, when he consorted with Communists and apparently cried quarts over the death of Joseph Stalin.  Over the years a  similar shift appears to have taken place in his responses to Carlyle’s French Revolution.  In 1967 it is “Gosh, what a TERRIFIC historian he is!  Imagination, compassion, a sense of place, a sense of colour and of sound….”  But in 1981 the note has changed.”What an odious, boorish, craggy brutish man!...  Whatever was the matter with him?  How could ANYONE turn against the XVIIIth C when … it was so infinitely superior to the following one?  He sounds like an archetypal Fascist….” 

 Although a considerable fan of the NHS, the doctrinaire Left in the UK never seems to have attracted him, and in the later letters he speaks disparagingly of Neil Kinnock, and admiringly of Mrs Thatcher – but perhaps there is not as substantial a shift or falling from grace here as might first appear.    After all the constant and consistent note in Cobb’s historical writings is his often repeated preference for archives rather than ideas – which is why he abominates the likes of  the “frightful” Jean-Jacques Rousseau and  does not especially warm to Christopher Hill as an historian.  Vachement intellectuel is for him not a term of approval.  It is this quality of Anglo-Saxon groundedness that makes Cobb such a good historian, and nowhere is that groundedness and pragmatism displayed to better advantage than in an essay cited by Heald and  entitled ”Thermidor and the Retreat from Fantasy” that appeared in Encounter in 1982.   It may not been be vachement intellectuel, but it is a highly intelligent piece of scholarship, in which the author appears to better advantage, I would hazard, than in the letters, where groundedness and pragmatism are often less to the fore than a gossipy concern with the multifarious greasy poles of academic advancement  afforded by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.  The puff on the dust jacket of Tim Heald’s book suggests the New Statesman reviewer though his collection “utterly compelling.”  Which is not exactly true.  What the reviewer, Vernon Bogdanov, wrote, was “because I was a don at Oxford for many years, I found this collection of miscellaneous gossip utterly compelling.”  Love of fame, so they say, is the last infirmity of noble mind, and there is something smile-inducing in the discovery that l’etonnant Cobb was quite so attentive to academic promotion, so susceptible to the siren song of recognition in the Times, and so inordinately gratified with the ruban rouge that was eventually conferred upon him.

And for all his energetically expressed dislikes, he had great enthusiasms, too.  Notably, and latterly, for the Spaniards – “about the nicest people in Europe.  Alas, they do not love the French!”