George
Douglas Cole was
born in 1889 and educated at St. Paul's School and Balliol College,
Oxford. At university he was active in
the Fabian Society and his activities brought
him to the attention of Sydney Webb who
arranged for Cole and his contemporary at Cambridge
University, Clifford Allen, to become
members of the Fabian Society Executive.
During the First World War Cole became active in the peace movement.
He was a conscientious objector and
during his campaign against conscription,
met Margaret Postgate. The couple, who married
in 1918, also worked together at the Fabian
Research Department. In 1924 the couple moved to Oxford
where they both became involved in writing and teaching.
Cole became Labour correspondent of the Manchester
Guardian and after the publication of several books, including
The
World of Labour
(1913), William
Cobbett
(1925)
and Robert
Owen
(1925). Cole was appointed as Reader in Economics at University
College, Oxford and in 1944 he was promoted to the post of professor
of social and political theory.
A long-time member of the Fabian
Society, Cole served both as chairman (1939-46 and 1948-50) and
president (1952-57). George
Douglas Cole died in 1959.
(1)
Beatrice Webb, diary entry, (14th February,
1915)
I
often speculate about G. D. H. Cole's future. He interests me because
he shows remarkable intensity of purpose. He has a clear-cutting and
somewhat subtle intellect. But he lacks humour and the bonhomie
which springs from it, and he has an absurd habit of ruling out everybody
and everything that he does not happen to like or find convenient.
He and Sidney (Webb) irritate each other. Cole indulges in a long
list of personal hatreds. The weak point of his outlook is that there
is no one that he does not like except as a temporary tool; he resents
anyone who is not a follower and has a contempt for all leaders other
than himself.
(2)
Margaret Postgate married Douglas Cole in
1918. In her book, Growing
Up Into Revolution, published in 1949, Margaret described her
her husband's compulsive need to write.
Douglas,
besides being a first-class lecturer and teacher, and rather unexpectedly
one of the best chairman of committee I have ever known, is a natural
writer almost to the point of disease. Sit him down anywhere, in practically
any surroundings, lovely or squalid, still or moving - even put him
to bed with a cold - and he will immediately start writing as though
a plug had been pulled out, whereas an ordinary person would read
a book, look at the view, or talk to his neighbours; it is this urge
to write, and to write continually almost without need to correct,
which distinguishes him from almost all other human beings.
(3)
Harold
Wilson,
letter to his parents (May, 1935)
G.D.H. Cole's discussion classes are very good. About eight
or ten of us in his room on settees while he offers cigs, sits down,
smokes, gases and stops for discussion. It's rather good
to put questions to a man like him.
(4)
Harold
Wilson,
Memoirs: 1916-1964 (1986)
I had long held G.D.H. Cole in high regard and found this closer
contact with him most congenial. He was a good-looking man, of medium
height with a good head of hair, and most attractive in speech
and address, except for the manner of his lectures. I had attended
a number of them, which he delivered at great speed, eyes down,
without a single note. His special subjects were economic organization
and history, and he concentrated on these. I was left to
teach economic theory, not the area I preferred.
I took to spending most
Tuesday and Wednesday evenings with him, helping with copy for and
proofs of his articles for the New Statesman and Nation. When the
work was finished, he used to pour out for each of us a glass of Irish
whisky, which he preferred to Scotch. On one of these occasions he
was celebrating his fiftieth birthday. He announced that he had made
a resolution, to foreswear all reading of books and concentrate on
writing them. He was already publishing at least one a year in addition
to his other writings. For the most part they were highly topical
and dated rather quickly but some, particularly those on economic
history, have survived.
It was G.D.H. Cole as
much as any man who finally pointed me in the direction of the Labour
Party. His social and economic theories made it intellectually respectable.
My attitudes had been clarifying for some time and the catalyst was
the unemployment situation. I had seen it years before in the Colne
Valley, with members of my class jobless when they left school. My
own father was still enduring his second painful period out of work.
My religious upbringing and practical studies of economics and unemployment
in which I had been engaged at Oxford combined in one single thought:
unemployment was not only a severe fault of government, but it was
in some way evil, and an affront to the country it afflicted.
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