Kmflett's Blog

Beards, the left & the British Marxist Historians

William Morris, had one, a beard that is as well as a temper. So did Morris’s nemesis H M Hyndman.

By the 1920s however if facial hair was worn at all on the left it was a moustache. The beard of Keir Hardie had passed into history as he had himself

A clean shaven culture developed ( left politics being mostly male affair at this point…) which linked to a concept of working-class respectability. If you came from a background where it was a struggle to wash and get clean then there was a premium on appearing clean cut and shaven. Beards by contrast suggested perhaps the opposite.

George Orwell, himself a veteran moustache wearer wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier about:

all that dreary tribe of high-minded’ women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat

Raphael Samuel hints in The Lost World of British Communism that facial hair was frowned upon in the Communist Party. The idea of CPGB leader Harry Pollitt with a beard is as unthinkable as it is for senior Labour figures like Nye Bevan.

Indeed after Hardie no Labour leader had a beard until Jeremy Corbyn

At some point in the 1950s beards however made a re-entry to the left. Perhaps it was part of post-1945 youth culture and/or CND but by the late 1960s hair was big on the left.

Eric Hobsbawm who again never seems to have a beard did however opine on them once in a programme he did for the BBC Third Programme, now Radio 3.

It is covered in the 2019 biography of Hobsbawm by Richard Evans.

After the Second World War Hobsbawm was barred from a full time job at the BBC because he was a Communist. He worked as a junior academic instead.

However the BBC and the Third Programme were prepared to employ him on an ad hoc basis with proposals for programmes assessed individually.

One talk on the French satirical magazine Le Canard enchaine had a section on ‘The beard and the Third Republic’. Evans suggests this was because Hobsbawm felt listeners needed to be ‘entertained’.

The focus was on the ‘Effect of the disappearance of bearded Radical-Socialists on their most loyal tormenters’. The point being apparently that like its British broad equivalent the magazine liked making jokes about socialists with beards but found it harder to joke about their beards if they didn’t have one.

The whole episode underlines the point that before the arrival of the hirsute revolt and revival in the 1950s, beard wearers were regarded as at best a joke on the left and at worst as a political error.

Perhaps true in this respect to his CPGB past E P Thompson, himself not a beard wearer, in Warwick University Ltd (1970) made clear his disdain for ‘hairy’ students with long hair and facial hair. He saw in this a possible link to intellectual laziness and general irregularity of habit when it came to the need to oppose capital.

There is one exception I can think of, the sadly late Brian Manning. Manning was on the Editorial Board of Past and Present in the 1950s and a member of the CP Historians Group although not formally a member. A student of Christopher Hill (perpetually clean shaven) Manning researched and wrote extensively on the English Civil War. Certainly when I knew him in the 1980s and after, when he was a member of the London Socialist Historians Group (beards welcome) he was a beard wearer. He also smoked a pipe a habit he shared with Hobsbawm and perhaps more in line with CP traditions.