ABSTRACT
Uncertainties in the present necessarily destabilise our under standing o f the past, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the rather desperate efforts - no less evident on the Right o f the political spectrum than on the Left - to reconstitute some usable forms o f ‘tradition*. Mrs Thatcher’s appeal for a return to ‘Victo rian values’ - a leitmotif o f her rhetoric when she assumed the leadership o f the Conservative Party, and a centrepiece o f her 1983 election campaign - is an obvious case in point. The call for ‘continuous national history’ is another. In 1983, Lord Hugh Thomas, historian-adviser to the Prime Minister, called for a more patriotic orientation to history teaching in the schools. His call was taken up by Sir Keith Joseph, then minister o f education. He recommended a greater place for national history in the ‘agreed curriculum’ which his departmental officials were drawing up; and in his speech to the Historical Association on 10 February he urged teachers to develop a ‘proper pride’ in the distinctive institutions and ‘shared values’ o f British society - ‘that commonality that defines us’ . Dr Geoffrey Elton, in his inaugural address as Regius Professor o f Modern History in Cambridge, elaborated the point. He was critical o f the multiplication o f options (at Cambridge, it almost seemed that no two students followed the same course); expressed wonder at the attention paid to ‘that curious extra terrestrial place, the Third World’; and regretted the invasion o f history by the social sciences. ‘Long stretches o f English history’ ought to be the backbone o f a university course (‘one strong element o f real continuity’); and he argued that a central focus on government and society was essential i f the study o f history was to resume its traditional role as a training for men o f affairs. Only a continuous national history would show what it was that made England ‘a country worth living in and coming to’ .
