E P Thompson’s Desert Island Discs remains available on Sounds
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0093yqd
The choice of music is interesting in itself but the discussion between Sue Lawley and Thompson also has some interest.
The programme was broadcast in November 1991 and Thompson noted that he had let his Labour Party membership lapse as he had been preoccupied with several years of ill health. In fact he died in August 1993.
The discussion touches on the founding of New Left Review and the importance of CND but perhaps the most interesting point is that Thompson emphasises that his research sources for the Making of the English Working Class were primarily from the West Riding (he was then living in Halifax and working as a WEA tutor across West and North Yorkshire) and that the Making is a West Riding book.
Thompson had noted his use of West Riding sources in the original 1963 Preface where he noted that the book was ‘coloured’ at times by them. In a Preface to the 1980 edition he returned to the point noting that the writing of the book had only been possible in part because of the extra mural classes he had taught in the West Riding in the ten years previous to publication.
He tells Lawley and the point has been made elsewhere that in teaching adult students in the 1950s he found links back to nineteenth century radicalism.
Thompson was determinedly provincial (something he saw as an important political strength) with no great love of London. Of course had his sources been more from the Great Wen the Making might have been a rather different book. Something he perhaps recognised in the book he published with Eileen Yeo, The Unknown Mayhew, which examined Mayhew’s investigations into London labour and poor in the late 1840s and early 1850s
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