MI5 watched Eric Hobsbawm for decades and blocked him from the BBC
In 1945 the BBC judged a young historian a most suitable candidate for its educational broadcasts to returning servicemen. MI5 vetoed him, fearing he would recruit for the Communist Party. Eric Hobsbawm went on to write some of the most widely read histories of the modern world anyway.
Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917, to a London-born Jewish merchant of Polish descent and a mother from a middle-class Austrian Jewish family, neither of them observant. A clerk's slip at his birth turned Hobsbaum into Hobsbawm. He grew up in Vienna and Berlin but spoke English first. His father died in 1929, when Eric was 12, and his mother in 1931; he and his sister Nancy were then raised by an aunt and uncle. He was at school in Berlin when the Nazis took power in 1933, and the family moved to London that year. Being British through his father, he never saw himself as a refugee.
At King's College, Cambridge, from 1936 he joined the Communist Party through the university's Socialist Club, took a double-starred first and was elected to the Cambridge Apostles. His doctorate examined the Fabian Society. Wartime service took him into the Royal Engineers and then army education work, but he was kept from overseas service after using a wall newspaper to argue for a Second Front, a Communist demand. MI5 opened a file on him in 1942.
He found an academic home at Birkbeck in London, a college unusually free of anti-communist feeling, rising to professor between 1970 and 1982 and later serving as its president from 2002 until his death. He described a milder British McCarthyism in which Marxists simply went unpromoted for a decade. The critic Noel Annan said enemies denied him a Cambridge lectureship, though the conservative writer David Pryce-Jones doubted such obstacles existed.
His fame rests on a sweeping account of the long 19th century, from The Age of Revolution to The Age of Empire, and the short 20th century in The Age of Extremes, plus an edited book introducing the idea of invented traditions. A lifelong Marxist, he let those convictions shape his work. He became a Companion of Honour in 1998, won the Balzan Prize in 2003 and died on 1 October 2012.
Source: Eric Hobsbawm
