The Department of History will soon hold our latest Hayes-Robinson Lecture, which commemorates Margaret Hayes-Robinson who headed our department from 1899 to 1911.
Many illustrious historians have given this lecture over the years – Natalie Zemon Davis, Saul Friedländer, Linda Colley, to name just a few – and some were even published as standalone books. This year’s lecture will be given by Prof Nandini Chatterjee on the subject of blood-money claims in Mughal India.
Although the current series began in 1992, I knew that lectures in memory of Hayes-Robinson’s date back to shortly after her death in 1930. This naturally led me to wonder: who gave the first one?
As a historian, my first instinct was to go to the university’s archives, where I came across a tantalising reference to the ‘first Hayes-Robinson lecture’ alongside the name of R. H. Tawney. A Christian socialist and champion of workers' education who made huge mark on the first half of the twentieth century, Tawney was a major thinker of the labour movement. His day job, however, was Professor of Economic History at the LSE, and he published several important works on the history of capitalism. (Rather like Hayes-Robinson, he actually has a series of history lectures named after him.)
I will leave colleagues in British history to judge the significance of inviting Tawney to give the first Hayes-Robinson Lecture. My interest as a current Head of Department was more pragmatic: how did it work back then? The letters in our archives offer some clues.
Of course, the first thing you need if you are going to do almost anything is money, and the money for the Hayes-Robinson Lecture came from… trains. Specifically, the Lecture Fund consisted of £68 invested in the Great Western Railway company, which paid out generous annual dividends. Before the postwar Labour government nationalised the railways, GWR was one of the ‘Big Four’ operators and could even boast the fastest train in the world: the Cheltenham Spa Express. A sound investment.
Academics move rather slower than trains, and the decision to invite Tawney seems to have involved a bit of scouting. Helen Cam (pictured above) – a Royal Holloway graduate who would later become the first woman to get tenure at Harvard – travelled to Oxford to see what people thought. When she finally wrote to Tawney in spring 1932, he responded with excessive modesty that all he could offer was a lecture on ‘“An Economic Historian’s Attitude to History” or some such title’, but if this was not appropriate then ‘so far from feeling hurt, I should be much relieved’!
Putting on a big public lecture these days takes a fair amount of organisation: rooms must be booked, catering organised, registration websites mobilised. It is fair to say that things in the 1930s were rather more relaxed. On 20 November 1932, six days before the lecture, Tawney enquired: ‘Would you let me know the time it is to take place? I don’t seem to have a note of it.’
As for the title, Tawney formed part of a long academic tradition of keeping things as vague as possible to make sure had wiggle room on the night: ‘I propose to lecture on the only historical subject I know anything about, namely economic history. I fear … it is not very suitable for the occasion. If you want to announce a title, perhaps ‘An Economic Historian’s Address’ would do.’
Tawney could at least be precise about one thing: he would get the 5.57 train from London, arriving in Egham at 6.32. Anybody who thinks that history is a story of progress might note that the same train today takes 2 minutes longer.
At this point, the story runs dry. I would love to learn more about that first lecture and any of its successors. Intriguingly, one of the documents in the archival file notes that Tawney was ‘not only a historian, but a good representative of those wider interests of Mrs Hayes which it is the special intention of these lectures to commemorate’. Given Tawney’s breadth as an intellectual and activist, we might wonder what those ‘wider interests’ were.
At the very least, we have cracked the case of who gave the first Hayes-Robinson Lecture. And I hope this might also serve as a reminder to our student historians that if you want to get some answers, so often, there are great things to be found once you break out of Google and get into the libraries and archives – including our own. Until then, see at this year’s lecture!
Robert D. Priest, Feb. 2025
All images are from the file RHC 123/1 in the Archives of Royal Holloway. Thank you to Anne-Marie Purcell, the Archivist and Special Collections Curator, for her help accessing this material.
