Tom Lodge’s distinguished academic career in York, South Africa and Ireland has been shaped by numerous formative influences. In this profile, he traces most of them, from early school days in Nigeria and Borneo to a seminal visit to the political hot-bed of Soweto in the summer of 1976. He also remembers the effect on his life of his time at Bedales – the music of the 1960s, the teaching of Ruth Whiting and Tim Williams, among others, and the spirit of gentleness that he encountered at the school.
The story of Tom Lodge’s roots and upbringing offers a series of clues, amounting almost to a sign-post, to the widely varied, international life that he has subsequently chosen to lead. That story begins in Prague just before the Curtain that was descending across Europe finally assumed its more familiar Iron quality.
“My father, who worked for the British Council, married my Czech mother in Prague in 1949,” Tom explains. “The two of them left for Britain almost immediately as the marriage annoyed the Czech authorities. Subsequently my father’s job meant that we moved as a family to Nigeria when I was five years old. All my earliest memories are peripatetic ones – we later decamped to Borneo, where I spent my primary school days and the first year of secondary school. Good day schools, both in Africa and Borneo, quite unlike my father’s unhappy experience of being sent away from India to board in England at the age of five. I especially remember a particularly enthusiastic class teacher in Borneo and being surrounded by class mates who were either ethnically Chinese or from more local Borneo families. Quite a lot of the curriculum seemed to involve local culture – we went on field trips - which, as I look back, probably kindled my interest in social history.”
Most children of British Council families of the era eventually had to face up to the reality of sending their children to school back in Britain and Tom was no exception. “In Sabah I was taking up a place that otherwise would have been filled by a local pupil so boarding school it had to be. Bedales appealed to my parents for a couple of reasons,” he reflects.
They liked the co-educational aspect of the school and they also approved of the spirit of kindliness that they had detected there.
"After some sort of two-day interview process, I was accepted and began my first term at what seemed to me at the time to be a rather austere place with the vast echoing space of the quad at its heart."
A little understandable home-sickness aside, Tom settled quickly into his new environment. “Because I was so used to travelling around the place, I was less liable to be pining for home than most of my contemporaries,” he notes. “And we were all looked after considerately by house-masters such as John Slater and George Smith; I certainly never encountered any unkindness at any point. Both John Slater and George Smith hated bullying and worked hard to prevent it from happening. As a group, I think we were actually rather well-behaved for most of the time (this wasn’t Dartington Hall, after all!). It was the 1960s, though, and we were all able to play whatever music we fancied. I could almost recall each individual year of my time at Bedales by the dominant rock band of the moment. The new politics, the advent of long hair and the flared trousers that became so ubiquitous are also strong memories. Not all the politics was so new. In my first term there was a mock election in which Gyles Brandreth was the Tory candidate. He won, of course.”
Outside the classroom, Tom avoided sport as much as possible, learned to drive a tractor (very badly) and pursued a lively interest in painting and drawing. “Fortunately for me, Christopher Cash ran something of an open house that encouraged you to do more or less as you wanted in that regard,” he says. “As far as the rest of the arts were concerned, I was never especially musical and an enthusiastic rather than talented actor in school plays. I was better at designing stage sets.”
Academically there were a number of mentors for the young Tom to observe: “One of them was Rachel Cary Field, who gave me extra lessons so that I could pronounce my tee-haitches. She also taught me how to read aloud and enjoy the way good writing sounds. English, art, history and geography were my A Levels and it was therefore natural that Ruth Whiting should have been a primary influence at school. As a person, I found her to be gentle and unassuming; as a teacher she invested a great deal in her charges. She had, I think, been a voluntary worker in Nigeria at an earlier stage of her life, which clearly had great resonance for me personally and I would imagine that she had a lot to do with a history syllabus that had a decent focus on West African affairs. Thirty years later Ruth visited me in Johannesburg when she brought a class out to Swaziland.”
“Tim Williams was another teacher who left his mark on me,” Tom continues. “He was very much a disciple of F.R. Leavis, who, as coincidence would have it, taught me briefly when I was at university in York. Tim was a much better teacher than Leavis; it was from him that I learned the importance of really close textual analysis that would later stand me in such good stead. In general, I was at least on convivial terms with most of my teachers. We were all lucky that at Bedales, teachers invited engagement from their students.”
Much as he had relished his school days, Tom was eagerly looking to the future when the time came to leave the comforts of Bedales. “It had been six happy years and I had made friendships that in some cases endure to the present day but I wanted to get stuck into other things,” he says. “I started by spending a year as a community service volunteer in Bradford, mostly working as a classroom assistant in an immigration centre. You simply couldn’t imagine anything more different from Bedales – some of the children I dealt with didn’t even have basic literacy in Bengali. They learned incredibly quickly, though.”
From Bradford, it was but a short hop north to York University, where Tom began as an undergraduate in 1971, studying English and history. “I had some sort of an ambition to become a journalist in those days although I can’t say that I felt a strong sense of vocation as a student,” he says. “I was undecided enough to go and see a career advisor at York on one occasion, who suggested that landscape gardening might be the career for me! Essentially, I viewed academia as a bit of an adventure, which might have been what led me to stay on after my degree to do a Master’s in Southern African Studies.”
The seminal moments of Tom’s adult life were now approaching. In 1976, while working at the university’s Centre for Southern Africa Studies as a research assistant he made his first visit to South Africa. “That first time was crucial to me,” he remembers. “It was just a month long but I could already see that something extremely violent was brewing as a response to apartheid and the many injustices that it had spawned. On my last night, 14 June, I was shown around the township of Soweto by a local Anglican priest; two days later, I was back in the UK to read that Soweto was in flames.”
More trips to South Africa would follow for Tom before he accepted a position with the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand (always known informally as Wits) as an assistant lecturer in 1978. It was a position that he initially intended to hold for no longer than two years; by the time Tom finally left Wits he had, with the exception of a three-year sojourn in New York as Program Director for Social Science Research Council between 1988 and 1991, enjoyed an unbroken association of 27 years with the university.
With such longevity comes true expertise and Tom’s books on modern South Africa have made him one of the most respected authorities on the turbulent recent political history of that extraordinary country (his latest book – Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South African Communist Party, 1921-2021 – was published in 2021).
Tom is measured as he contemplates the current political climate in South Africa in the context of the years of struggle that preceded the creation of the new country. “The achievement of building a new democracy has been a considerable one in many ways,” he suggests. “South Africa receives insufficient credit for its accomplishments in fostering tolerance, encouraging freedom of speech and creating a workable public health service, for example. However, I don’t think anyone appreciated how difficult it would be to eradicate the endemic inequality that is entrenched in South African society. Despite various sincere efforts to combat it, the inequality and sense of injustice that it fosters remain and the fact is that the majority of black people in South Africa are still poor by most standards.”
“My academic training as a political scientist tells me that corruption is the almost inevitable result of a society with long-term inequality,” Tom goes on, warming to his theme. “There are moral frames of reference at work here that simply can’t be reconciled and South Africa now works largely through a system of patronage. It exists, there is no quick fix to it and there is no point getting angry about it, even if the attempt to stamp it out must be maintained.”
All of this is said from a slightly greater distance than was once the case. Although Tom returns to South Africa for annual visits, he has, since 2005, plied his academic trade at the University of Limerick in Ireland, first as a Professor of Peace and Conflict studies and more latterly as Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. An Emeritus Professor at the university since 2020, Tom now divides his time between Ireland and a home in the bucolic surroundings of the Dordogne in France.
“The move to Ireland mainly came about because both my wife and I had families in Europe and we didn’t think that it was a good idea for us all to be scattered across continents,” Tom explains. “I also think that academics should move at least once in a while! Ireland has been an ideal place to work and teach – it has a literary culture that still includes buying and reading newspapers, for example – and I’ve also been introduced to the concept of poetry festivals, which are quite rare in other places, and been able to set up a school of creative writing at Limerick in my turn. For my own writing, I’m now turning my attention to something more semi-autobiographical; I’ve been looking at the German occupation of the Czech lands during the war, how that affected my mother and others like her and I want to try and link those experiences to wider events.”
It has been a full life and there isn’t much of it that Tom would be in a hurry to change. “I’m fortunate in that a lot of what I went on to do in later life is precisely what I would have wanted when I was eighteen,” he muses. “Being involved with public affairs, working in and with Africa – these were ambitions fulfilled from my youth. To have been educated at Bedales was another stroke of luck. It was a place from which I took confidence and gained curiosity, a gentle place where you were always taught to question what was around you.”
Tom Lodge was interviewed by James Fairweather in Summer 2022.