The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe

444 Pages·2020·26.834 MB·English

by  Terry Irving

The Fatal Lure
of Politics

The Life and Thought of
Vere Gordon Childe
by
Terry Irving
Front Matter
‘Deeply researched and eloquently written, this is a compelling study
of a formidable socialist thinker and his intellectual milieux.
The Fatal Lure of Politics is a work of prodigious scholarship:
penetrating, engaging and authoritative.’
Phillip Deery
Emeritus Professor of History, Victoria University
‘Finally, we have a definitive study of world-renowned prehistorian
Gordon Childe, Australia’s most famous left-wing intellectual.
Terry Irving’s extraordinary, investigative scholarship is
enlightening and enthralling. This is an important book
and biography at its very best.’
Verity Burgmann
Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Monash University
‘Is science neutral?
Why should Security Intelligence Services
consider an archaeologist ‘a very dangerous person’?
Surveillance, espionage, and censorship were all part of the life
of a young Australian, V. Gordon Childe, who became the most famous
archaeologist of all time. This book offers a masterful account
of the political context of his oeuvre and casts new light
on his most famous book, What Happened in History.
We have been waiting for a book like this for years.’
Margarita Díaz-Andreu
ICREA Research Professor, University of Barcelona
‘Terry Irving’s The Fatal Lure of Politics is a powerful work of
immense scholarship that firmly situates V. Gordon Childe’s
life and work within his commitment to revolutionary politics.
This is a well-written, remarkable piece of research that sheds
important new light on one of anthropology’s most daring minds
and revolutionary figures. It is required reading for anyone
interested in twentieth century intellectual history.’
David H. Price
Professor of Anthropoloyg, Saint Martin’s University
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Renowned Australian-born archaeologist and prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe (1892–
1957) had a lifelong fascination with socialist politics. In his early life he was active in
the Australian labour movement and wrote How Labour Governs (1923), the world’s first
study of parliamentary socialism. However, he decided to pursue a life of scholarship to
‘escape the fatal lure’ of politics and Australian labour’s ‘politicalism’ – his term for its
misguided emphasis on parliamentary representation. In Britain, with the publication of
The Dawn of European Civilization (1925), Childe began a career that would establish him
as preeminent in his field and one of the most distinguished scholars of the mid-twentieth
century. At the same time, he aimed to ‘democratise archaeology’ and involve people in its
practice. What Happened in History (1942), his most popular book, sold 300,000 copies in
its first 15 years. Politics continued to lure Childe, and for forty years he was spied upon
by the security services of Britain and Australia. He supported Russia’s ‘grand and hopeful
experiment’ and opposed the rise of fascism. His Australian background reinforced his
hatred of colonialism and imperialism. Politics was also implicated in his death. There is a
direct line between Childe’s early radicalism and his final – and fatal – political act in the
Blue Mountains west of Sydney. The Fatal Lure of Politics is a new and radically different
biography about the central place of socialist politics in Childe’s life, and his contribution
to the theory of history that this politics entailed.
COPYRIGHT AND IMPRINT INFORMATION
The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe
© Copyright 2020 Terry Irving
All rights reserved. Apart from any uses permitted by Australia’s Copyright Act
1968, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without prior written
permission from the copyright owners. Inquiries should be directed to the publisher.
Monash University Publishing
Matheson Library Annexe, 40 Exhibition Walk, Monash University
Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
www.publishing.monash.edu
www.publishing.monash.edu/books/flp-9781925835748.html
Monash University Publishing brings to the world publications which advance the best
traditions of humane and enlightened thought. Monash University Publishing titles pass
through a rigorous process of independent peer review.
ISBN: 9781925835748 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925835762 (pdf)
ISBN: 9781925835755 (epub)
Series: Biography
Design: Les Thomas
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
Cover image: Childe as he would have liked his friends in the 1920s to remember him.
(Flinders University of South Australia, Evatt Collection Photographs: Evatt_1510_050)
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations .............................................vii
Introduction: A Death in the Cold War ..............................ix
Part 1. Growing up into Revolution: Sydney and Oxford 1892–1917
Chapter 1 Living in a Divided City .............................3
Chapter 2 Students and Workers .............................. 18
Chapter 3 Socialists and Cooperators ...........................34
Chapter 4 A Cold Northern Superculture .......................46
Chapter 5 More Outspoken than Any Other .....................65
Part 2. Labour Intellectual: Australia 1917–1921
Chapter 6 No Compromise ...................................83
Chapter 7 ‘A certain vacillation’ ...............................98
Chapter 8 ‘Yours for the revolution’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Chapter 9 Labour’s Mediating Intellectuals .....................130
Chapter 10 The World of Labour .............................. 146
Chapter 11 A State within the State ............................ 160
Chapter 12 The Intelligence Department ........................ 174
Chapter 13 The Premier’s Minder .............................. 184
Part 3. An Unknown Member of the Proletariat: London 1921–1926
Chapter 14 The Dismissal ....................................201
Chapter 15 A Pauper Colonial ................................ 217
Chapter 16 How Labour Governs and The Dawn .................229
Chapter 17 ‘A movement that will have to go further’ .............. 253
The FaTal lure oF PoliTics
Part 4. What Happens in History: 1927–1957
Chapter 18 Science as Communism ............................ 271
Chapter 19 A Grand and Hopeful Experiment ................... 292
Chapter 20 An Absolutely Sincere Approach to the Party ........... 311
Chapter 21 1956 ........................................... 334
Chapter 22 A Sentimental Excursion ...........................346
Chapter 23 ‘Australia today is far from a socialist society’ ........... 357
Coda: Childe’s Revolutions and the Fatal Lure ...................... 375
Acknowledgements ............................................ 379
Bibliography ................................................. 381
Index .......................................................405
About the Author ............................................. 419
vi
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Govett’s Leap, Blackheath, where Childe’s body was found ..............xiv
The Rectory at St Thomas’s, North Sydney, where Childe lived until 1900 .....4
St Thomas’s Church, North Sydney, c. 1900 ...........................8
Herbert Vere Evatt as a young man .................................16
Harald Ingemann Jensen, c. 1910 ...................................35
Childe’s first gentlemen’s club: Sydney University Union, c. 1910 ..........43
Rajani Palme Dutt, as Childe would have known him at Oxford ..........51
Percy Stephensen at Maryborough Boys’ Grammar School ..............123
Childe as the Premier’s secretary, 1920 .............................187
Childe as a handsome young man .................................189
A smoko at the Labour Research Department summer school, 1922 ......220
Douglas Cole in 1928 ...........................................242
Mr Fat reading How Labour Governs, 1923 ..........................246
Professor V.G. Childe, Edinburgh, 1930s ...........................273
O.G.S. Crawford setting out to democratise archaeology with his bicycle ....282
R.P. Dutt, the communist cadre, in 1943 ............................285
The Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School, London, 1945 ........315
Jack Lindsay and Percy Stephensen at the Fanfrolico Press, London, 1920s ...321
Childe at the Isokon Flats, 1955 ...................................346
Childe and Evatt outside the Great Hall, University of Sydney, 1957 ......359
DEDICATION
In memory of
PETER GATHERCOLE
(1929–2010)
INTRODUCTION:

A Death in the Cold War
The Australian-born archaeologist and prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe was
one of the most distinguished scholars and public intellectuals of the first half
of the twentieth century. His concepts of the Neolithic and Urban revolutions
‘rank among the most important theoretical advances’ in the study of human
cultural evolution. He wrote 21 books, including the immensely popular
What Happened in History, which sold 300,000 copies for Penguin Books in
its first 15 years. He also wrote 281 articles or chapters and 236 book reviews
in 99 periodicals. His reputation was not confined to the English-speaking
world. His books were translated into 21 languages, and he travelled widely,
finding appreciative audiences in Europe, Russia, Turkey and India, as well
as North America and Australia.1
Publishers in the 30 years after his death issued more of his works than
they had in the slightly more than 30 years of his career. The most recent of
many conferences devoted to assessing his legacy was organised in 2007. Even
outside the academy his name is known. In the 2008 movie Indiana Jones
and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the hero, after smashing his way into a
college library on a motorbike, is recognised by a student who asks Jones for
help to understand the diffusion of civilisation. The hero, an archaeologist
who moonlights as a saviour of civilisation (although he has just done terrible
damage to one of its achievements), resumes his teaching role momentarily
to advise the student to ‘consult the works of Gordon Childe’.2
1 Michael E. Smith, ‘V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: A Historical
Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies’, Town Planning Review, vol. 80, no. 1,
2009, p. 5; Peter Gathercole, ‘Allen Lane’s Archaeological Best Seller’, The Penguin
Collector, no. 46, July 1996; Peter Gathercole and Terry Irving, with the assistance of
Margarita Díaz-Andreu, ‘A Childe Bibliography: A Hand-List of the Works of Vere
Gordon Childe’, European Journal of Archaeology, vol. 12, nos 1–3, 2009, p. 204; Sally
Green, Prehistorian: A Biography of V. Gordon Childe, Moonraker Press, Bradford-on-
Avon, 1981.
2 The papers from a conference organised by Margarita Díaz-Andreu at Durham
University to celebrate Childe’s legacy 50 years after his death are reprinted in the
European Journal of Archaeology, vol. 12, nos 1–3, 2009; Indiana Jones and the Kingdom
of the Crystal Skull, directed by Stephen Spielberg, 2008.
The FaTal lure oF PoliTics
The film is set in 1957, at the height of the Cold War, coincidentally the
year of Childe’s death. There is a surprisingly subversive tinge to the film,
as it reveals the existence of McCarthyite repression in universities. Prior
to his library-vandalising moment, Indiana Jones had been captured by the
Russians as they destroyed an American atomic research station. After an
unlikely escape he resumes teaching (we hear him lecturing about Skara Brae,
Childe’s most famous excavation) only to be sacked by the college because the
FBI thinks his presence with the Russians indicates that he is a communist
sympathiser. His best friend in the college resigns in sympathy, suggesting
that FBI interference was a wider problem, something Childe would have
understood. As a pacifist, anti-imperialist and revolutionary socialist, Childe
was spied upon by the state security bodies of Britain, Australia, the USA, and
possibly the Soviet Union, for 40 years. On several occasions this surveillance
derailed or hampered his career. When his body was found at the bottom of
a cliff in the mountains west of Sydney, there was speculation that his death
was neither deliberate nor accidental but the result of a sinister act.3
Childe’s continuing reputation rests as much on the extraordinary range
of his thought as on its particular usefulness to scholars of archaeology and
prehistory. But his interest in social evolution, the theory of knowledge, and
historical explanation were not just indications of breadth of mind; they placed
him in a particular political setting and defined him as a left-wing intellectual.
The connection between his politics and his career is the starting point for
this study of his life and thought. It seeks to understand his life by placing
him within the tradition of dissenting intellectuals of the left. It examines
his thought to understand the political ideas that gripped that tradition in
the first half of the twentieth century.
Childe’s scholarly reputation, resting on work undertaken in Britain from
the mid-1920s, was the product of what we might call his ‘second life’. He was
33 when he published his first book on prehistory and 35 when he took up his
first academic position. So there was ample time for him to have an interesting
‘first life’; in fact, in his twenties and early thirties he contemplated devoting
his life to politics. Since his days as an undergraduate at the University of
Sydney before the First World War he had been active in left-wing politics,
variously Labor, socialist, anti-war, and radically democratic.
At the same time, he had performed brilliantly in his university examin-
ations in Sydney and Oxford, but when he applied for suitable academic posts
3 Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Oxford
University Press, 1986.
x