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By Christabel Stewart

Type “Whitechapel cheesecake” into a search engine, and you will discover the work of Marxist historian Raphael Samuel. In 1958, he co-founded the Partisan, a café and meeting house, with the hope of providing a venue where the young political left could discuss, organise and agitate for change. The cheesecake, a key menu staple, was in part a local mirror of the sweet offerings of the Viennese coffee houses and Parisian Left Bank hang-outs of the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre. Further information on this recipe is scarce, though its reference to the Whitechapel, an area of London that was and still is a place of mass immigration and mass poverty might be the clue.

Raphael Samuel himself founded the History Workshop Movement, a “history for all” attempt to democratise historical research, history and knowledge itself. “It is not knowledge we lack,” wrote the late Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, a contemporary of Samuel. “What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions...Historians have very often simply followed the lines suggested by the documents...And documentary history produces documentary results. What kind of history would we get if we used different tools, different means, to look at the same events?” Lindqvist’s assertion followed Samuel’s exhortations for ordinary people to seek their own evidence, trace their own stories of lives lived and the indications those could give for better work conditions. The History Workshop Movement defined itself as interested in “history from below”, and although it peaked in the mid-1970s, it has had a lasting influence in promoting disciplines such as oral history and women’s history interwoven with the cultures of pluralist, libertarian and internationalist everyday life.

Lindqvist’s 2002 book Exterminate All the Brutes asks: what does it mean to know and to act? How does knowledge – of the past, of history, of ourselves – shape the present and the way that we see and understand the world? His 1978 book Dig Where You Stand (Gräv där du star), takes its title from Friedrich Nietzsche’s poem “Undaunted”, which begins: “Where you stand, there dig deep!” At its most grave, Lindqvist’s book asserted that the history of workers in the 20th century is one of slow, industrial death, which arrives even when the tools to avoid it and the knowledge of the danger are available.

Letterpress printed menu by graphic designer Desmond Jeffery, c.1958–1959 

Dig Where You Stand and the movement it generated were the culmination of a variety of developments in Swedish cultural life in the 1970s such as the revival of documentarist fiction and the Community in Change (Bygd i förändring) local-history campaign, similar in ethos to Samuel’s History Workshops. The Swedish version worked through books and a television series and built on the strong Swedish tradition of study circles that brought a large amount of oral and written reminiscences, photographs and documents into local museums and archives.

Although Partisan closed in 1963, its legacy as a meeting place for the many, and as organisational ground for the anti-nuclear Aldermaston Marches in the 1950s and 1960s, lived on in part due to its having attracted great socialist thinkers such as Eric Hobsbawm, Doris Lessing and Stuart Hall, the last of whom summed up its particular promise in giving a life to the art of politics: “It would be a mistake to think that ‘politics’ alone can save us all, that if we nationalise enough and legislate enough, everything else will come right. Even if the vitality and radicalism of youth could be caught in some great political movement, young people would still want to sing and dance, just as their fathers would want to slip away for a pint in the local. Skiffle and jazz are not substitutes for politics: they are legitimate forms of creative expressions in themselves. Politics is not a replacement for life. Life is living together, making one’s own friends, and learning the guitar. The point is that there should not be an unbridgeable gap between those who play skiffle and those who talk politics. The two should not be, as they are today, opposed, but complementary.” ◉

All photography:Roger Mayne, Partisan Coffee House, 1958–1963 Courtesy Katkin Tremayne© Roger Mayne Archive / Mary Evans Picture Library