Getting in
We were reading for Higher Certificate and were expected to do well. It was assumed by the family that I would go to ‘BNC’ (Brasenose College, Oxford), following in the footsteps of an uncle and my brother. Nevertheless, even in those days, one had to take an entrance exam and submit to interview. I had been well-drilled in Classics. For the interview, my brother’s advice was: ‘For God’s sake, be interesting.’ I prepared. Presented with a formidable array of gowned Fellows, with the ascetic Principal, Hugh Last, at the head of the table, I was nervous. When eventually the right question came, I was ready.
A rustle went around the table. None of them knew the word. Eventually a classicist spoke up:
I had upstaged a bevy of dons. I was in. And grew more confident. I told them how my father had accepted a bet that he could not collect 1,000 different labels in a year. He won the bet, thanks largely to the Japanese. He gave the lot to me when I was 10. I had collected until I was about 14, but then retired. Hence the ‘erstwhile’. I went on: ‘But I have kept up. King Farouk of Egypt is the leading phillumenist in the world … ’ Then, getting bolder: ‘There are of course several magazines. The best is Match Boxes and Match-Boxing.’ The last was a complete fabrication.
Getting on
I arrived in Oxford with a poor-to-middling academic record and no special interest in law. There was no thought of an academic career as a possibility. I may have been considered quite clever, but everyone including myself was surprised when I was awarded a State Scholarship, probably because I had written an answer on the economic policy of the Gracchi, having randomly borrowed a book from the library.
I had applied to read Law in Oxford for largely negative reasons. I was determined to escape Classics; my father had dissuaded me from History; my brother had read Law, narrowly missed a First, and offered me his notes. I had no curiosity about the subject. For my first five terms I did the bare minimum of work on law and continued to focus on literature, mainly twentieth-century literature under the tutelage of my closest friend, Trevor Rutter. I read voraciously and seriously – once resolving to read Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts five or six times in quick succession in order to try to understand it. My classical background made Roman Law easy, and there was plenty of that, but it had not helped with literary criticism or theory.
I did not enjoy my legal studies nor take them very seriously for my first two years, doing the minimum necessary for preparing generally second-rate essays and scraping through the start-of-term tests (‘Collections’). My mind was more on literature, politics and East Africa. Unlike some other Colleges, which looked down on Law as somewhere between Geography and Agriculture, BNC had a strong legal tradition with a significant number of law students (fourteen or fifteen in our year). We formed a close-knit group, partly because the separate Law Library was also a social club. I attended very few lectures, the main exception being two series on defamation, one by Robert Goff (later Lord Goff) in Lincoln because they were brilliant, one by Alderman Brown (the Lord Mayor of Oxford) in Worcester instead of coffee – dirty stories from the Year Books, mainly about defamation. However, I had two expert and concerned tutors in Barry Nicholas and Ron Maudsley who may have taught me much more than I realised.
Then in my second summer term two things changed. First, in my autodidactic way I started to have a serious philosophical concern. I just could not understand how people could believe anything with confidence in the face of the variety of strongly held opposing beliefs and opinions that there were. Over the Easter vacation 1954 I spent most of my time struggling over an essay, written solely for myself, on what I called ‘the problem of belief’. It was stimulated in part by my reading and being surrounded by political disagreements, but less consciously by an increasing tension between my ‘Oxford self’, represented by my private intellectual life and Oxford politics, and the very different atmosphere when I stayed with my parents on holidays in Dar es Salaam – still in awe of and dominated by my father and his firmly stated outlook on life. I had had previous concerns about theology and confirmation, but this time it was not so much about religion or cosmology as about the psychology of belief.
Enter Hart
The immediate stimulus for the second change was a typical piece of quiet inspiration by my main tutor, Barry Nicholas. Barry liked me, but had dropped some hints that I was not doing myself justice. In April 1954, at the start of the summer term, he told me that the new Professor of Jurisprudence, H. L. A. Hart, was giving his main series of lectures and nobody in the Law Faculty could understand what he was on about. Would I mind going to them and reporting back? I was not planning to attend any lectures that term, but flattered by the invitation, I set out proudly in my gown to walk to the Examination Schools, only to see almost all of the BNC ‘lawyers’, some of whom never attended lectures, walking purposefully in the same direction. Good tutoring.
Hart’s lectures aroused my interest and set me on the path to becoming a jurist. For a long time, Jurisprudence had lost touch with Philosophy. Hart was part of a group of Oxford philosophers who pioneered ‘ordinary language philosophy’ or ‘linguistic analysis’ to bring about what was claimed as a ‘Revolution in Philosophy’.1 Hart’s main role was to introduce these techniques of philosophical analysis into Law. These were in fact the second of the series of lectures which outlined the main themes that were to be developed in Hart’s classic, The Concept of Law (1961). Hart was a charming, intellectual-looking, shambling man, with a mellow voice. He was very clear. I still have my notes of the lectures. My main visual memory is of a somewhat rumpled figure sitting at a table in one of the lecture rooms at the Examination Schools. The room was quite full. His legs were visible under the table and as he spoke he kept pulling at one of his socks. As the lecture proceeded he leaned further and further sideways, still fiddling with the sock, until by the end there was little to be seen above the table except one almost horizontal talking head, still audible and lucid, while underneath the action was more visible and enthralling.
At the time I kept an episodic, introspective, adolescent diary. Interestingly, this hardly mentions the impact of Hart. Here my memory is more reliable and more vivid. I was fascinated intellectually as well as visually. The first revelation was that words do not have a proper meaning and that the quest for a definition of law was futile because ‘what is law?’ and other classical questions of jurisprudence had been mis-posed. I quickly read Hart’s inaugural lecture (‘Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence’),2 in which these ideas and Hart’s basic method of conceptual analysis were first proclaimed. I was shocked, fascinated and converted. Most important, I was fruitfully puzzled. Questions could be wrong or poorly articulated; definitions of words could not be true or false; words do not have a proper meaning; often sentences rather than single words are the main unit of meaning; puzzles behind questions can be dissolved by careful analysis of ordinary language.
Final year: 1954–5
I set out to convert my tutor. I learned the basic technique and became obsessed with it. Tutored in turn by two friends, Trevor Rutter and Michael Woods, who were both outstanding philosophy students, I later wrote basically the same essay several times for Barry Nicholas, applying Hart’s method to different concepts – sovereignty, possession, persons, rights and the like. During the long vacation of 1954 in Dar es Salaam, I spent many hours carefully analysing Hart’s inaugural lecture and wrote an ambitious essay advancing his method as the basis for a general approach to Jurisprudence. Barry was impressed, but not converted. This may be the first time that he thought that I was seriously in the running for a First.
With his encouragement I set out to work towards that goal. This involved learning the basic English Law subjects almost from scratch – Contract, Torts, Property, Constitutional Law – in addition to tackling new ones. I embarked on a self-disciplined regime – working 8.30 to 12.30 and 4.00 to 7.00 six days a week, leaving time for sports or walking in the afternoon and for entertainment or reading in the evenings – a forty-two-hour week, generally adhered to far beyond the range of English undergraduates of the time, but nowhere near to that of eager American law students.
A description of a year of swotting is not likely to be interesting and it is not as if it produced any landmarks or epiphanies in my intellectual development. It was in effect my first year of studying Law. I learned a bit of private law doctrine; I tried to approach some topics holistically, for example treating the English Law of Torts, the Roman Law of Delict, and the development of Torts for the Legal History paper as one subject – this integrative approach was helped by attending a few classes led by Harry Lawson, the Professor of Comparative Law, who perkily juggled concepts and won my respect for his kind of analysis. I kept up my interest in Jurisprudence and I allowed some time for my continuing self-education in literature and music.
‘Schools’, the final examination, was a test of stamina as much as nerves, eight three-hour papers in five days. I came away exhausted but feeling quite confident, except that I knew that I had messed up my Land Law (‘Real Property’) paper. I had in fact prepared some ingenious theses on seisin, the doctrine of estates, and the rule against perpetuities, but the paper turned out to be a simple test of elementary knowledge, which I had omitted to mug up. I knew that if called for an oral examination (‘viva’) I would be questioned on this, so I was able to prepare. I learned later that Herbert Hart and Vere Davidge, a notorious anti-intellectual blackletter lawyer from Keble (the examiner in Land Law), had disagreed about whether I deserved a First. I had four alphas, one near miss in Torts (trying to be too original?) and a gamma in Real Property. At the viva my proponent, the Professor of Jurisprudence, had to quiz me on such matters as how many witnesses are required for a valid will, while Davidge snorted and the Chairman, Barry Nicholas, had to stay quiet because he had been my tutor. My mark in Property was moved up to Beta and I was awarded a First.
In the same examination, another candidate’s paper on Jurisprudence so impressed Hart that he purloined the script. He spent the rest of his career worrying about Ronald Dworkin’s challenge to his positivism and engineered his election as his successor. Apparently, Hart liked my paper, but not enough to steal it. If I had not got a First, I would almost certainly not have become an academic. My father said that it was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
Later I heard another interesting rumour. It seemed a bit out of character that Herbert Hart should have opted to take on examining responsibilities so soon after his election to the Chair. One possible explanation, that I have not been able to confirm or refute, is that he realised that in Oxford it is almost impossible to change the syllabus in Law through normal procedures. Given that, even in Oxford, examinations are the main instrument of power over changes in students’ and teachers’ behaviour, how could Hart achieve a Revolution in Jurisprudence? Having accepted appointment as an examiner, he changed the rubric of the question paper in Jurisprudence: instead of ‘Answer FOUR questions’ out of eight, he substituted ‘Answer FOUR questions’ out of sixteen – roughly eight old-style Particular Jurisprudence topics and eight new-style questions. How else could he have succeeded? Nicola Lacey, his biographer, had not heard this story, but told me that it is plausible as Hart was an adept academic politician.
Undergraduate legal education in retrospect
As an undergraduate I did not think much about the kind or the quality of the process I was going through. Later Barry Nicholas said jokingly in an after-dinner speech that I had made my reputation by attacking my Oxford legal education. This was partly true. Early in my career I regularly attacked the dominance and narrowness of doctrinal approaches to understanding law. I have always been grateful to Barry and, as we shall see, I never rejected doctrine as such, but merely tried to set it in broader frameworks and contexts.3
At Oxford I encountered a rather casual kind of doctrinalism in my formal legal education. One studied the English Law of Real Property, Torts and Contract mainly by reading cases, given structure by textbooks, which were precise, clear, and focused almost entirely on concepts and rules. They were products of ‘the common law mind’ and so hardly ‘scientific’. We learned mainly doctrine and how to apply it to particular, usually hypothetical, situations. Even the study of Roman Law, Legal History and Jurisprudence was generally positivistic and rule-centric, but not dogmatically so. Professor Hart provided a conceptual basis for doctrinal positivism by emphasising that the concepts of a rule and a rule system were important in understanding law theoretically – that is, a legal system is a system of rules combining primary and secondary rules validated by a ‘rule of recognition’ which exists as a social fact.
From Barry and others I learned to write essays, parse concepts, think clearly and a bit about constructing arguments. Hart aroused my interest in Jurisprudence and especially in linguistic analysis rather than in the concept of law as a system of rules, which never fitted my assumptions. From tutorials in Legal History with Derek Hall of Exeter I learned that historians can fight acrimoniously about their interpretations of evidence. In my informal self-education, I rather preferred the grand historical vision of Sir Henry Maine, the politically sensitive approach of Wolfgang Friedmann and a Danish book on The Right of Property by Frederik Vinding Kruse because it contained pictures of houses and factories. Law books then had neither pictures nor conversation. It was not until later that I realised that each of these three indirectly subverted the doctrinal tradition.
Another Oxford: Law in some other colleges
I only learned about life in other Houses at Charterhouse after I left. Similarly, I was in BNC with its strong legal tradition and it was some years before I learned of the appalling state of tuition in some other colleges. At a conference bar some twenty years later, I listened to two of my friends reminiscing about their experiences as young college tutors not long after I had graduated. Brian Simpson, always a witty raconteur, told a series of scurrilous stories about Oxford Law colleagues when he was a Fellow of Lincoln.4 Neil MacCormick, a Scotsman, in his first week as a Fellow of Balliol was tutoring law students from Trinity in Real Property.5 Neil had recently read a new textbook on the subject by Megarry and Wade. Thinking that what one of his pupils was reading out as an ‘essay’ sounded familiar, he reached for the book and found that the passage – indeed most of the essay – had been copied out verbatim. He expelled the plagiarist from the tutorial. Panic spread round Broad Street and the Turl on the rumour that there was a mad Scotsman in Balliol who did not understand the culture – for students in some Colleges were expected to copy out the textbook accurately in their weekly essays. One story goes that in New College Jack Butterworth, the Bursar (and my future Vice-Chancellor at Warwick), would nod to a student to start reading, pick up the phone to discuss investments with the College stockbroker, occasionally interrupting the student to say ‘You have left out a paragraph.’
There was another anecdote that I believe has more than a core of truth. At least one of the Law Fellows did not even have a Law degree (also true of Lewis Eliot, C. P. Snow’s narrator in the Strangers and Brothers sequence, who was a Law tutor in Cambridge). This one had done well in Classics at St John’s in 1922 or 1923, and was a good chap, but there was no vacancy for him, so his College suggested that he should read for the Bar and mug up some Roman Law. He was duly elected as a Law Fellow in 1923 or 1924, so that his study of law stopped before the major land law reforms of 1925. Even in the 1950s he refused to allow his pupils to refer to this intrusion on the common law. By then he was said to have published an article on Roman Law, but he was better known in Oxford for his performances on the tennis court. My friend Robert Stevens, an exact contemporary of mine, was at Keble. Vere Davidge, was his tutor, a keen oarsman, a caricature of a bibulous country squire, Master of a hunt and known as the worst law tutor in Oxford. This is the same Davidge who nearly brought me down in my Finals. Small wonder that private crammers did a brisk business with students from the weaker law colleges for their Finals – something that still persists in Germany, where the Professoriate are said not to prepare students for examinations.
I have not tried to research the details of these anecdotes. Apparently, Herbert Hart had a low view of most of his colleagues in the Law Faculty, which corroborates the thrust of this gossip. In a letter to his friend Isaiah Berlin he wrote:
Of course what is odd about the whole faculty (there are 4–5 exceptions) is that they regard themselves as a pack of failed barristers and a weak version of the Real Thing in London. It’s as if the philosophers regard themselves as merely propaedeutic to the Civil Service and the Stock Exchange. Hence the odious veneration and bootlicking attitude to the judges. So what they need most is self-respect. Shall I give it to them? You must hold a class with me one day (Hegel?) and so help.6
This illustrates how things have changed. How lucky I had been to go to Brasenose. And how successful Hart seems to have been in this project: for some legal philosophers in Oxford may now regard themselves as Kings of the heap – or, as Hart’s successor Ronald Dworkin would have put it, ‘the top bananas’ – at least within Law.
1955–7
Three game-changers
Soon after going down from Oxford, three events were game-changers for me. First, between Schools and my viva, six weeks later, there was an epiphanic moment. On a post-exam visit to the Lake District with my mother, at Keswick I bought a tattered copy of R. G. Collingwood’s An Autobiography for, I think, one shilling. I read it on the coach to London. I reread it several times that summer. About forty years later at a conference at Gleneagles, the conservative political theorist Walter Oakeshott invited two young jurists to have a drink with him before lunch. He turned to my colleague and asked: ‘What was the most seminal book in your intellectual development?’ ‘Collingwood’s Autobiography’, said John Finnis, ‘I read it when I was [8?].’ Turning to me: ‘And yours?’ ‘Collingwood’s Autobiography’, I said, ‘I read it when I was 21.’ Late developer. As we shall see, I was telling the truth. I learned later that Oakeshott had himself been influenced by Collingwood.
Next, I had decided to read for the Bar in a leisurely way while staying with my parents in Tanganyika. It would be a good cover for continuing my self-education. I called at the office of Gibson and Weldon, the private crammers, in order to sign up for their Bar Finals correspondence course. I was interviewed by a cynical man who made it clear that a First from Oxford was a disadvantage – no place for independent thought, speculation or, even worse, criticism or theorising or other academic waffle. Gradgrind personified: what was needed was facts, facts, facts. His attitude was indeed practical so far as the exams were concerned. The idea that studying law involves little more than rote learning of legal rules is still around today in some quarters. This became one of my main targets in the politics and polemics of legal education. I had great pleasure about thirty years later in being an active member of the Hoffman Committee that recommended abolition of the old-style bar exams and the substitution of a skills-based vocational course for a knowledge based, exam-oriented, crammer-dominated system (Chapter 16). The idea that skills could be learned in an institutional setting is still controversial, but no one tried seriously to defend the old system.
The third episode was even more important. Shortly after that bruising encounter, I spent a few days in a solicitor’s firm that specialised in personal injuries cases. At Oxford Salmond on Torts (1953) had been my favourite textbook. It was a conventional, lucid expository work. When I mentioned this to a partner he told me to forget what I had learned in the books because nearly all of his cases were settled out of court with an insurance company or the Motor Insurers’ Bureau involved. Anyway, the whole system needed drastic reform, especially damages. I suffered culture shock. I began to wonder: how could one understand the law relating to personal injuries if one knows nothing about insurance, settlement, the damages lottery and alternatives to the common law action for negligence (Chapter 12)? I felt misled, let down, even betrayed by Salmond and my teachers – a common complaint by law students in most modern legal systems.
This very elementary example of a divide between law in books and law in action was my first step towards legal realism. Back in Oxford, when I complained about this, the responses were as unconvincing as they were dismissive: we never claimed that we were being realistic (half-true); you learn about that in procedure (untrue); we are not a trade school (true); this is all mere common sense (untrue). This led to a question: how can one understand legal doctrine if one knows nothing about how it operates or is used in practice? Later I saw one challenge as being how to get more of the action into the books. On this one, Patrick Atiyah showed one way in 1970 (Chapter 12).
Dropping out
After graduation I had expected to have to do National Service (NS), but as that was running down in 1955 and I had been born abroad and only been in England for education, I was told I was not eligible unless I did a short-term commission for three years. For me this was a welcome way out, but a disappointment for my parents, who feebly urged me to accept the opportunity. My bargain with my father had been that, if I went up to Oxford first, I would join the Territorial Army while there. I had done that and had completed basic training during vacations and even passed the War Office Selection Board for Potential Officers. I had honoured my bargain. It had been most unpleasant and ruined several vacations. But, a regular soldier? Me? I said I would spend the next few months reading for the Bar.
In fact, ahead of my time I dropped out for two years. On my arrival in Dar I found a letter awaiting me from Barry Nicholas saying that Professor Hart had suggested that I try for a Prize Fellowship at All Souls because they had not elected a lawyer for some years and my approach to law was unusual. I was very flattered, but not as impressed as my parents were – it sounded very prestigious to them. We agreed that October 1955 was too soon and that I should plan to sit in October 1956. This was very welcome because now I had a cover for my private plans – reading for the Bar and preparing for All Souls and a similar, less prestigious research fellowship at Magdalen. So, unexpectedly, I had a year’s sabbatical which turned into two. I took a few undemanding memory tests in my Bar correspondence course, but mostly I immersed myself in literature (mainly fiction), Collingwood, some other philosophy, and in African history, anthropology, politics and novels about Africa. I acted as a sounding-board for my father on evening walks, and attended his Sunday morning gramophone ‘concerts’ (Berlioz, Russian opera, Requiems on warped 33.3 rpm records). I also went on safari, visited out-of-the way places, and met an engrossing range of people.
Twenty-second birthday
At this time, I had no idea what I wanted to do to earn a living. I wanted to write, but that was not a job. Practice as a solicitor did not appeal at all, and I had taken a strong dislike to the culture of the Bar after a few ghastly dinners at Lincoln’s Inn: indifferent food, patronising, often pompous, junior barristers and exploited, bitter, overseas students.7 Academic law in England was neither highly regarded nor interesting. I wanted to work in Africa, but doing what was unclear. My parents thought that I would make a good ‘administrator’ and argued that there would still be some Empire left to administer, although by 1955–6 that looked unlikely. Anyway, I was moving into an anti-colonial phase. However, in September 1955 an alternative to administration came in view – working in an African university. The enthusiasm for education and eagerness to learn that one came across visiting schools contrasted sharply with the attitude of English schoolboys. There probably is not a term for ‘swot’ or ‘banco fiend’ in Kiswahili. I became fascinated by education, and later, through my interest in African students in UK, in higher education in Africa.
On my twenty-first birthday, 22 September 1955, while visiting the leading boys’ secondary school in Tabora, I met Bernard de Bunsen, the Principal of Makerere College, the only university institution in East Africa. I sought his advice and he invited me to come to Kampala. I spent a few days at Makerere, staying with the Principal, meeting a range of staff and students, mainly hosted by Cranford Pratt, a young Canadian political scientist, who six years later became my boss. It was a strange and fascinating experience, not least because I had heard a great deal of criticism about both staff and students at Makerere and I was able to behave like an inspector – diplomatically, of course – asking sharp questions and getting robust answers. The outcome of my visit was that my interest in African universities was confirmed, but I also gained a quite realistic picture of the institution and its problems and the difficulty of finding a role there for a law graduate. There was no law to teach. None of the other possibilities sounded ideal – teaching public administration, researching customary law, acting as the warden of a hostel, or doing postgraduate work until a law school was set up somewhere. In those days English law graduates did not study for doctorates. Nevertheless, I now knew what I wanted to do – teach Law in Africa.
One interesting point: Law hardly featured in my career choice. My first priority was Africa, my second was education, and Law was the only subject I was qualified to teach. At no stage was private practice of law seriously considered. That explains why later I devoted so much energy to thinking and writing about legal education – not at the time widely considered a respectable subject for a serious jurist or scholar.
Back to Oxford
After five months this fascinating but artificial life in Dar es Salaam proved both lonely and stressful, so I took the opportunity to return to Oxford to do some tutoring at BNC (Barry Nicholas was on sabbatical) and to prepare for All Souls and Magdalen. By then National Service was no longer a serious prospect and I had virtually given up on the Bar.
En route to England I visited Rome in Holy Week, my first encounter with Italy. I had a privileged introduction: Father Walsh, a leading White Father in Dar (and a mentor of Julius Nyerere), gave me an introduction to Father Keane, a former missionary, now retired and living in the Vatican. Not only did he act as an enthusiastic tour guide, but he enabled me to penetrate quite arcane parts of the Vatican and even arranged an audience with the Pope. I was announced as ‘Il Professore Twining from Oxford’. His Holiness looked quizzically at this pimply twenty-one-year-old and said, ‘Ah, Oxford – my boooook is from Oxford’, and moved on. I fell in love with Italy.
Tutoring
Back in Oxford, my immediate concern was teaching. I had about a dozen students at BNC, including for BCL Jurisprudence, John Davies and Tony Hughes, both older than me; both got outstanding Firsts and followed academic careers. I should have retired then. The rest were of mixed ability, mainly struggling with Roman Law. I took my teaching seriously, even kept a teaching diary, but I talked too much. The Oxford tutorial system – these were mostly one–one meetings – allows one to maintain credibility by appearing self-confident. As I got free meals, I ate in a lot, and got to know the bachelor dons, if anything too well. To hold up my end at High Table I followed the advice of my ex-tutor, Ron Maudsley, and mugged up on Mark Pattison’s Memoirs, read the correspondence column of The Times daily, and showed polite interest in improbable train journeys in Continental Europe. This worked and I survived, but the experience left me as ambivalent as ever about Oxford.
It was not an easy period, full of doubts and uncertainties about my future and my commitments. As the exam drew nearer I felt overwhelmed by the prospect of being a Fellow of All Souls and hoped that I would not get it. I made a mess of my papers (and for a similar Fellowship at Magdalen), and joined the honourable company of ‘Failed All Souls’. But this was a hugely educational period. I devoured books, widening my scope beyond literature to include some philosophy, a great deal about African history and politics, and some Law, especially Jurisprudence, and even a bit of substantive law.
Political awakening: 1956
I said earlier that I had a colonial childhood, an anti-colonial adolescence, and a neocolonial start to my career. The claim that I had an anti-colonial adolescence is only plausible if broadly interpreted. There are several complex strands in anti-colonialism – anti-racism, the struggle for self-government and other power struggles, a sense of injustice, nationalist pride, desire for genuine cultural and economic autonomy, hatred of foreign rule sometimes translated into hatred of foreigners generally and, in addition to political independence, a quest for democracy and human rights as aspirations. My parents subscribed to a benevolent ‘multiracial’ version of the imperial dream with a steady gradual path to independence; I accepted much of their ethos uncritically well into my teens, but by my mid-twenties I was a committed supporter of Julius Nyerere’s version of African Socialism. This transition from one moderate ideology to another was convoluted and slow and did not involve a sudden conversion or complete rejection; it was tied up with a struggle for power with a dominating father and doubts about beliefs and values and what I should do with my life. This dragged on into my early twenties and ended with a rejection of benevolent paternalism.8
Students of the heady 1960s called their predecessors ‘the Quiet generation’. True, very few participated in marches, we had not conceived of sit-ins and we were not interested in university governance. But the 1950s had their share of political excitement: the Cold War, self-determination, McCarthyism, the welfare state, the class system, nationalisation, concerns about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and nuclear power were all on the political agenda. 1956 was the key year of my political awakening: that year saw the first Aldermaston march, Sudan and Ghana became independent and this was the year of Suez and Hungary.
‘The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it’.
Harold MacMillan’s famous wind of change speech was not until 1960, but this was public recognition of a situation that had been going on for some years. In Tanganyika African nationalism had begun to be prominent only about 1954 under the leadership of Julius Nyerere and by 1956 it was clear that the nationalist movement was gaining ground rapidly.
In January 1956 my father asked me to provide him with some notes on ‘nationalism’ for a speech he was giving to a Conference of Provincial Commissioners. To my shame, I provided him with a rather ‘academic’ argument, that stressed the strength of nationalist feeling, but did not sharply challenge his views that self-government should be evolutionary, with economic, social and political development ‘marching in step’ and that full Independence was a long way off. At that point I did not think of self-determination as a principle or a right and I did not immediately translate my own desire for autonomy into a principle for colonies.
At the time I was dissatisfied with my effort, and later I became embarrassed by it. During the next few months I read and thought constantly about nationalism. I had, of course, encountered and even debated these issues, but this exercise was the first time I had intellectualised them. My reading was extensive but unsystematic: Thomas Hodgkin’s Nationalism in Colonial Africa, Arnold Toynbee’s The Study of History (abridged), speeches and writings by Nkrumah, Kenyatta and other African leaders, an eclectic glut of novels about Africa, including by Joyce Cary, Joseph Conrad, Alan Paton, Elspeth Huxley, Peter Abrahams, Camara Laye, Amos Tutuola and Laurens van der Post. I also followed events in the press, observed developments in East Africa and reflected on conversations that I had had with African students in the UK, and later in Paris. After about four months I set out to write a rather academic essay, which could be said to be my first venture into political theory. The text and extensive notes survive. It is a mishmash – at once too ‘academic’ and not intellectually disciplined enough. But the process helped me to chart out a position of my own that became significantly different from my father’s, perhaps more at the level of emotion than of abstract ‘reason’.
In the second half of 1956, two particular events dominated my political consciousness: the Suez crisis and the Hungarian invasion – I was in Oxford at the key moments and for once I got really caught up in the political excitement of the day. I had a blazing row with my father over Suez in London in July, although I feebly acknowledged that there were two sides to the issue. I volunteered for Hungary (but was promptly rejected as I knew no Hungarian and had no medical qualification). In October I met an Australian postgraduate of Hungarian descent, who was studying East African history. For the next six months we had an intense personal and intellectual relationship, based mainly on shared commitment to ‘Africa’. By the following spring I was a convinced nationalist.9
Anti-colonial adolescence? Well, if one grants that I was an apolitical adolescent until about 1956, one could say that by then I was anti-racism, pro-Independence, a Tanganyikan nationalist, and prepared to accept, even excited by, the winds of change, without being hypercritical about all aspects of British rule. I think there was an analogy between fending off my parents and other grown-ups (colonial children were forced by their situation to be independent) and feeling empathy for those who resisted and resented foreign rule even by benevolent paternalists – but the analogy can be pressed too far. So, a late-developer mildly rejects colonial rule as past its sell-by date? No, it was more than that: I came to the view that self-determination is a matter of principle. Thereafter I made modest contributions to lowering the flag.
Travel, Love, Marriage, Chicago: 1957
By January 1957 I had failed to get into All Souls and Magdalen, had decided on an academic career in Africa and was contemplating applying to do postgraduate work in the United States. During the next six months I did a Grand Tour of Europe on a shoestring and then, finding that I could extend my air fare for only £14, did another tour, this time of African universities – Salisbury, Accra, Lagos, Ibadan and Ahmadu Bello in Northern Nigeria. However, at Easter I fell in love at first sight, became engaged in July, married in August and whisked my bride off to Chicago in September. That period is a blur with almost no intellectual or academic content, but it was a wonderful culmination to an unforgettable two years.
Why Chicago? It was largely by chance that I came to work with Karl Llewellyn. By 1956 I had decided that I wanted eventually to pursue an academic career teaching Law in Africa rather than the UK. I also wanted to learn more about Jurisprudence and to see something of the United States. I heard that Professor F. H. Lawson, the Professor of Comparative Law at Oxford, was responsible for placing promising Oxford graduates in leading American law schools. When I told him of my interest in the USA and Jurisprudence, he advised me to think in terms of choosing a jurist rather than an institution: ‘At whose feet do you wish to sit?’ He then asked me which living American jurists did I most admire. I needed notice of that question, for apart from adulatory references to Holmes and Pound and denigratory dismissals of madcap Realists – jazz jurisprudence for a jazz age10 – American jurists had not featured in the Oxford curriculum. I went away and read Fuller’s The Law in Quest of Itself, which I found enthralling, and Llewellyn’s The Bramble Bush, which I thought intriguing, but mystifying. I returned to Lawson and told him that my first choice was Fuller and my second Llewellyn. I first wrote to Harvard saying that I would like to come and sit at Professor Fuller’s feet, I was not interested in obtaining a degree but I needed funding. Harvard responded kindly that they only had scholarships for degree courses, and I had missed the application date for the coming academic year. Anyway, I was a bit young for postgraduate work at Harvard. Having learned my first lesson about American law schools, I applied to the University of Chicago in a more conventional way and was awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship to start in September 1957. Newly married, Penelope and I set off for Quebec in the bilges of RMS Ivernia.
