THE JOURNALS OF HUGH TREVOR-ROPER
THE CHINA JOURNALS – IDEOLOGY AND INTRIGUE IN THE 1960S
edited by Richard Davenport
Bloomsbury Academic 2022
ISBN:978-1-3502-7809-7
RRP: $29.99 (pb)
Reviewed by Anne Henderson
Hugh Trevor-Roper is best known for his The Last Days of Hitler. He is also much respected as an historian for his work on World War II and Elizabethan history. An esteemed Oxford don for most of his career, with a short time spent at Cambridge, Trevor-Roper also worked with MI8 and MI6 during World War II, out of which eventually came his 1968 The Philby Affair: Espionage, Treason, and Secret Service. So, it is intriguing to come upon a collection of his writings on Maoist China from the mid-1960s which capture a more polemical side to the revered don and open an insight to a political side of his character.
In March 1965, Trevor-Roper agreed to become a sponsor of the newly formed Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU). His interest in China was one of historical curiosity having come to believe from his work that continuities of history survive upheavals below the surface. As an anti-communist, Trevor-Roper also was of the view that China’s Maoist takeover – unlike communist Russia – was achieved without a reign of terror and with national support. The decade-long Cultural Revolution and its state-sanctioned purges, murders, Red Guards and general violence would not begin until 1966. In 1965, Trevor-Roper was invited to replace Maurice Bowra as one of a SACU party being invited to visit China. He accepted the invitation.
In his journal record of the visit, Trevor-Roper quickly became aware that the group under the auspices of SACU was not being treated to a visit of particular significance. He had been assured they would have access to Maoist leaders, yet he would meet no one of real importance. In a number of ways, his journal quickly registers how his small group of four were being given second-rate attention with ignorant guides and party hacks for interpreters. It would be a rude awakening to the Maoist reality. Being a journal of private thoughts, HTR’s blunt assessments are not only sharp and piercing but also at times quite amusing. Pairing up with filmmaker Robert Bolt, who likewise was irritated by the propaganda and the monotony, he survived by downloading in private when they could.
Having joined SACU in Britain, Trevor-Roper expected that Maoists in China would want to benefit from gaining contemporary knowledge of England from its visitors, just as he desired to learn about Maoist and historical China from the Chinese they met. Instead, he discovered the visit was strictly controlled to prevent his group gaining any real knowledge of contemporary or historic China with the guides and interpreters nothing more than “bigots and parrots” – even poorly educated – with the governing Maoist party raising lower classes to jobs such as greeting visitors and showing them about.
The tours subjected the SACU group to mind-numbing monotony and hours of propaganda, with their Chinese hosts only interested in learning the English language and rejecting – even rudely – any chance to hear of English history or society. In his entry for Monday 20 September, Trevor-Roper captures the atmosphere in a sharply descriptive report:
The face of To Chi-Lou, as he spoke, was a motionless mask; his voice a cold metallic sequence of toneless, unintelligible sounds. We sat there at the mercy of this remorseless bigoted hack…. Robert Bolt ventured to suggest that truth was not so clear-cut. He was treated as a wayward child.
Academics they met seemed likewise limited to explanations that toed the party line. If there was an historical China surviving under this heavy layer of provincialism and re-education, Trevor-Roper could not find it. They were told at one meeting that art had not existed in China before 1949. At the Institute of History, all the speaking was done by the Vice-President whom Trevor-Roper noted “soon revealed himself as a sound party man”. The VP’s three colleagues remained mute sitting opposite him, with HTR describing them as “like schoolboys facing the headmaster”. On leaving, the Vice-President complimented Trevor-Roper on writing The Last Days of Hitler and encouraged him to record the last days of the new Hitler – in other words, US President Lyndon Johnson.
However, it was the reactions of the most devoted members of SACU on the trip – unionist Ernie Roberts and Mary Adams, a former BBC producer and at the time the Deputy Chairman of the newly formed Consumers’ Association – that irked Trevor-Roper more. Mary Adams displayed a rather empty-headed self-importance that showed little understanding of the propaganda she was subjected to. She ended up irritated by the Chinese for their self-righteousness and lack of interest in anything she wanted to pass onto them about Britain even as she sucked up the mindless prattle they were subjected to. Meanwhile, it was the double speak and earnest support for the party line in Ernie Roberts that awakened Trevor-Roper to the suspicion that SACU was a communist front, a reality he found despicable.
Returning to England, Trevor-Roper became aware that Britain’s Security Service believed that SACU was a communist front. An article he had agreed to write for The Sunday Times while highly critical of the trip was to have a more damaging effect with SACU when given the heading “Sick Mind of China”. What followed was a tussle with SACU where Trevor-Roper was systematically forced to the edges of SACU before resigning. Along the way HTR investigated the accounts of the group and discovered large discrepancies in its funding and auditing. A 10,000 word essay written for the magazine Encounter on his findings in China was never published due to concern about libel as HTR pulled no punches in his record of SACU and his trip under its auspices. That Encounter essay forms part of this collection as edited by Richard Davenport. Reading it, one can understand why it did not see the light of day in the mid-1960s. Blunt and honest, the essay reveals the workings of SACU, a communist front organisation and its manipulations, communist style, to repress individual thought within its ranks while masquerading its public operations as a society promoting Anglo-Chinese relations.
The China Journals – Ideology and Intrigue in the 1960s includes an excellent introduction of more than 50 pages by Davenport. This frames the journals and essay to come. A visit to outlawed Taiwan in 1967 revealed much of the Chinese history and culture Trevor-Roper had sought to experience in communist China. In Taiwan his hosts were well-informed and genuinely engaged in their intellectual pursuits. Going on to Cambodia, Trevor-Ropers discovered a unique insight to an ancient world before its Marxist deconstruction. Recording these travels at the time, Trevor-Roper documents elements of lost worlds.
Richard Davenport has assembled an engrossing collection that offers both primary and secondary sources to probe the Marxist invasion of cultural and academic elites in the later twentieth century – something experienced in the 1930s with communist Russia but all the more pervasive with the fellow travellers of communist China in the 1960s and 1970s and the growing expansion of Western universities.
Anne Henderson is Deputy Director of The Sydney Institute and author of Menzies at War, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Prime Minister’s Award for Australian History.