Kmflett's Blog

Christopher Hill. His highest ambition was to be a  Yorkshire cricketer but be became one of the most well-known British Marxist Historians

A biography of the British Marxist Historian Christopher Hill(1912-2003) has long been awaited and Michael Braddick has now written one (Verso 2025).

There is a wealth of interesting information and some fascinating incidental detail.

The Hill family were from Yorkshire and fielded a family cricket team. Braddick notes that Hill’s ambition was to play cricket for Yorkshire. Hill told the historian Penny Corfield that ‘I practised and practised but I wasn’t any good’.

Hill became a leading of the Communist Party Historians Group, leaving in 1956 and the author of numbers of important works, informed by Marxism, on the English Revolutionary period from the 1640s to the 1660s. He was also Master of Balliol College Oxford

Perhaps Hill made a bigger longer term impact in this context than if he had become a left-wing version of Yorkshire batsman Geoffrey Boycott

On the improvised cricket pitch, however, he was energy itself. He confided that his youthful ambition was to play for his natal county of Yorkshire. To us kids, imbued with stalwart Yorkshirism from our mother, Christopher’s first aim in life seemed entirely laudable and natural. ‘I practised and practised’, he then explained, ‘but I wasn’t any good’.

He told  fellow historian Penny Corfield in a 1988 interview that he had a birth qualification which would have allowed him to play cricket for Yorkshire. It was his highest ambition, higher even than playing cricket for England.

Penelope J Corfield appreciation of Christopher Hill

CHRISTOPHER HILL, THE MARXIST HISTORIAN AS I KNEW HIM

Interestingly Geoffrey Boycott, now well into his eighties, has given a series of interviews to the Telegraph where he notes that in the early 1960s, as he transitioned from being a civil servant to being a cricketer his ambition was to play cricket not for England but for Yorkshire.

Sir Geoffrey Boycott interview: Children were safe when I was growing up