The history of a curious mind

As a Bletchley Park code-breaker and one of the most eminent, influential historians of our time, Lord Asa Briggs could probably fill several volumes of autobiography with his experiences.

Yet this memoir is the first book the Keighley -born social and cultural historian, now 91, has written about himself.

Candid and unconventional, Asa sets out to trace the ‘special relationships’ which have inspired his writing in these and other areas.

Widely regarded as a pioneering historian, particularly in the Victorian field and the history of broadcasting, Asa traces his love of history back to his days at Keighley Boys’ Grammar School and considers whether being born in an industrial town surrounded by moors has shaped his ideas.

“I loved history... though I was not exclusively interested in it,” he writes. “I wanted above all to be a writer. In my ninetieth year I retain my passion for writing and I am unhappy if I write fewer than 1,000 words a day”.

He continues: “The most thorough and conscientious of my teachers was Kenneth Preston, known as ‘Prut’, who taught us English literature. Under his influence I read more poetry and fiction, and scholarly books about both, when I was in the sixth form than I would now read if I were studying English literature in a university.”

As a boy, Asa would browse through biographies in Keighley library. “It was there that I first studied the politics that I was to introduce into my own version of social history,” he writes.

Recalling Keighley’s first MP, mill owner Isaac Holden, Asa writes: “When I turned to social history in the late 1940s, it was a social history that took full account both of men as different as Isaac Holden and Christopher Wren.”

From Keighley Boys’ Grammar, he went on to Cambridge. During the Second World War he served in the Intelligence Corps, working at Bletchley Park where he was a ‘Hut Six’ cryptographer, deciphering Enigma machine messages from the German Army and Air Force.

After the war he worked in academia at universities including the University of Leeds, where he was Professor of Modern History from 1955 until 1961. In 1987 he became President of the Bronte Society, presiding over its centenary celebrations in 1993.

Illustrated with a quirky selection of charming family photographs, handwritten birthday cards, sketches of Asa by his wife, Susan, and several photographs of pre and post-war Keighley – including a Keighley News image of the old Mechanics Institute burning down in 1962. Asa recalls this as “as big an event in my personal life as the devastating fire in the Crystal Palace in 1936 had been for Londoners” and set him on to social history looking at the impact of such natural disasters.

His book digs deep into his own history, from his education to his recruitment with the Intelligence Corps and his wartime experiences as a ‘Hut Six’ cryptographer, to his work as a historian. Along the way he sets out to trace the personal relationships which have most shaped his life, the childhood friends, Cambridge professors, fellow Bletchley Park code-breakers and historians, family and friends, including Bradford-educated Denis Healy, John Reith and Harold Macmillan.

Writing with warmth, humour and great insight, he considers how places figure as much as people when we recall special relationships.