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The Manchester Guardian. Although Taylor and
Muggeridge fell out over communism and the Soviet
Union and sparred quite robustly in television debates
they remained life long friends. Margaret Taylor later
took up with the poet Dylan Thomas with AJP even
providing an Oxford cottage for his wife’s lover to
recover from a nervous breakdown. After their divorce
Margaret stayed in the house even after his second
wife Eve moved in. With so many dependents (by this
time six children and two wives ) it’s perhaps not
surprising that Taylor was such a prolific worker.
Left-wing Taylor had a famous rivalry with the right-
wing historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. The two men had
been good friends but fell out irreconcilably when
competing for the Regius Professorship for History
at Oxford. Many Oxford dons lobbied against Taylor
because of his media career and the Conservative
Prime Minister Harold MacMillan awarded the chair
to Trevor-Roper. The two historians often locked horns
in television debates. One of their more famous
exchanges took place in 1961. Trevor-Roper said
"
I'm afraid that your book
The Origins of the Second
World War
may damage your reputation as a
historian"
. Never one to take prisoners Taylor replied
"
Your criticism of me would damage your reputation
as a historian, if you had one
."
AJP Taylor continued to lecture on the telly, becoming
ever more cantankerous and irascible as he grew older.
I seriously doubt if anyone ever wrote to him for a
signed photograph. Trevor-Roper suffered a huge
ignominy in 1983 when he authenticated the so-called
Hitler Diaries
in The Sunday Times leading the
satirical magazine Private Eye to nickname him Hugh
Very-Ropey.
The First TV Don
Alan John Percival Taylor, born in 1906, specialised
in the history of 19th and 20th century diplomacy.
He came from wealthy left wing parents. His mother
Constance was a suffragette, an advocate of free
love and a pacifist who sent her son to Quaker
schools. At university Taylor joined the Communist
Party of Great Britain but left over what he saw as
their ineffectual stand during the Great Strike of
1926. He was a Labour Party member for the rest of
his long life. Taylor made his first radio programmes
during WWII and began his television career with
In the News
on the BBC in 1950. It didn’t take long
for his argumentative and dismissive style to earn
him the soubriquet of ‘the sulky don” and when he
actively campaigned for more TV channels he was
dropped by the BBC and moved to a rival
programme on ITV. It was with ITV that he made
the first British television history programmes
between 1957 and 1961. These were essentially
static lectures straight to camera but without notes.
Taylor came before the celebrity age or the tabloids
would have been very interested in him. Three times
he married, the first time to Margaret who he loved
deeply even though she was often unfaithful to him.
For a time in the 1930s the professor and his wife
shared a home with another television ‘talking-head’
of this period Malcolm Muggeridge and his wife
Kitty. Croydon born and son of the Labour MP for
Romford, Muggeridge scraped a pass degree at
Cambridge and went off to India and Egypt to teach.
Muggeridge’s journalistic career began in Egypt
when he met Swallows & Amazon’s author Arthur
Ransome who introduced him to his employers,
AJP Taylor