Alan Hodge

Alan Hodge (16 October 1915 – 25 May 1979) was an English historian and journalist.

Alan Hodge was born on 16 October 1915 in Scarborough, Yorkshire; his father was T. S. Hodge, a Cunard Line captain and officer in the Royal Naval Reserve.

He grew up in Liverpool and attended Liverpool Collegiate School before going up to Oriel College, Oxford where he read history.

In his spare time he wrote poetry and, with Kenneth Allott, co-edited the Oxford University English Club's magazine, Programme.

He was a member of the circle of writers and artists that centred on Laura Riding and Robert Graves in the late 1930s, and later collaborated with Graves on The Long Week-End, a social history of Britain between the wars, and The Reader Over Your Shoulder, a guide to writing English prose.

After the Second World War he worked as the general editor of Hamish Hamilton's Novel Library, as an editorial assistant on Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and as a founding co-editor (with Peter Quennell) of the successful magazine History Today.

In 1935 Hodge, then in his second year at Oriel, wrote a review of the first volume of Epilogue, an irregular critical journal, which led to a correspondence with its editor, the American poet Laura Riding.

Riding invited Hodge to visit her at the house in Majorca she shared with Robert Graves, and Hodge duly turned up in time for Christmas.

He made an excellent impression; Graves noted in his diary, "Hodge very decent & sensible", and described him as "young, blonde good head".

Another description of his appearance a year or so later described him as "a small blond boy with a cherubic soprano's face, an incongruously deep and hollow voice, and a deliberate, sententious manner; he seemed about sixteen".

Hodge went home in early January 1936, but returned the following July to spend the summer holidays there.

He was kept busy helping with a planned series of schoolbooks, contributing to Epilogue, and writing poems.

During July the Spanish Civil War broke out, and on 2 August, acting on official advice, the entire household left Majorca aboard a British destroyer.

Hodge settled in London with his new girlfriend Beryl Pritchard, a PPE student he had met at Oxford, but remained a part of the circle of writers and artists dominated by Laura Riding.

Before long he decided to return to Spain to work for the beleaguered Socialist government, despite himself being a lifelong Conservative, but Riding told him he must stay in England.

Hodge, who was becoming her closest disciple, acquiesced.

At this time he was working on a novel called A Year of Damage, based on his experiences with a former girlfriend, Audrey Beecham, and by the spring of 1937 it was completed.

Graves and Riding supervised its progress closely and made many suggestions for its improvement, all of which he adopted, but though both of them loved the finished book Hodge wouldn't publish it, and destroyed the manuscript.

In the second half of 1937 he used his skills as a historical researcher to help Graves with the writing of Count Belisarius, a novel set in the early Byzantine Empire; and at about the same time they worked on a historical survey of the influence of politics on literature, eventually published in Harry Kemp and Laura Riding's book The Left Heresy in Literature and Life.

These were only the first results of a fruitful partnership between the two friends.

On 29 January 1938 Hodge and Beryl Pritchard were married.

Beryl had previously doubted it was a good idea, but Hodge won her round; Beryl's parents were less amenable, her father being rude to Hodge at the wedding, and her mother telling her she was throwing her life away.

In June Riding, Graves, the Hodges and two more of the coterie travelled to Rennes in Brittany and found a large country house, which they rented and moved into.

A year later the entire party took ship for America, where an old friend of Graves, the journalist Tom Matthews, had engaged to find them a home.

The atmosphere in the new community became increasingly claustrophobic and nightmarish as Riding's domination grew more oppressive, and in a few months the group broke up.

Hodge, utterly disillusioned with Riding, returned to England with Graves in August, Beryl being expected to follow shortly after.

By now the dynamic of the Hodge marriage had completely changed, both coming to suspect that theirs was more a friendship than a romance, while Beryl and Graves had gradually fallen in love with each other.

On arriving in England Hodge immediately set out on a journalistic assignment to Poland, and was in Warsaw when the German army invaded the country.

He managed to return to England by a circuitous journey via Estonia, Finland, Sweden and Norway.

Beryl reached England from America in October and moved in with Graves, a situation which Hodge, after some initial resistance, accepted without ill-feeling.

Beryl remained with Graves for the rest of his life, while Hodge kept his close friendship with both.

Hodge now resumed his literary partnership with Graves, beginning with some historical research on the American War of Independence for Graves's Sergeant Lamb novels.

The next project, The Long Week-End, was intended as "a reliable record of what took place, of a forgettable sort, during the twenty-one-year interval between the two great European wars", for which Hodge did research work and wrote first drafts of several of the chapters.

The evidence was mainly drawn from ephemeral sources, such as newspapers, magazines and radio broadcasts, and the book depicted British life in this period as being mainly devoted to frivolities and distractions.

The Long Week-End was completed in June 1940 and published the following November by Faber and Faber, with Graves and Hodge being credited as co-authors.

There have been many subsequent editions in Britain and the United States, it has been translated into Danish and Swedish and even published in Braille.

On its first publication the reaction of academe was mixed.

One historian detected the malign influence of the Mass-Observation movement in the authors' approach, and called it "a strange unfocused photograph of the times, in which, although the 'camera-eye' has not lied, it has failed entirely to introduce any perspective or integration", but the sociologist Alfred McClung Lee thought it "regrettable that so few books do so well the useful task Graves and Hodge assigned themselves".

Press reviews had some very enthusiastic things to say: "thoroughly good reading", "swift, ironic, entertaining...fair and penetrating and a thoroughly significant book today", "it could hardly have been better done".

More recently it has been described as "stimulating and well-informed", and by Francis Wheen as "enthralling", while for the historian Alfred F. Havighurst "nothing has as yet replaced" it as a social history of the period.