A Gut Radical
From popularising people's history to crusading for ordinary people’s access to good food and wine, Raymond Postgate’s socialism was about the full enrichment of life for all.
English author and journalist Raymond Postgate (1896–1971) outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London during a court case, UK, 3rd November 1965. (Photo by Evening Standard / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
In All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present, the sociologist Stephen Mennell disseminated the determination of good taste. Describing the opacity by which culinary class is arrived at, from established tourist manuals to Michelin guides, Mennell describes how judgements are created without engagement or public comment but with, at most ‘a laconic line’ or two. But in this 1985 work, Mennell also described a ‘rather different’ operation, informed by thousands of normal people, and led by a man who ‘did not at all fit the older stereotype of the gastronome’ — the man in question being Raymond Postgate, author of The Good Food Guide.
Raymond was born in 1896 in Cambridge into an academic family. His father, John Percival (J.P.), was a classicist whose household was so saturated with his passions that Greek and Latin were commonly spoken at the dinner table. His grandfather — another John – was, among many things, a pioneering parliamentary lobbyist for cleaner consumption, helping to halt the sale of poisonous medicine in Victorian pharmacies and ban the then-common grocers’ practice of allowing items like tea and bread to be contaminated with sand or rodent excrement.
During a childhood surrounded by neighbours like John Maynard Keynes, books covering everything from Thackeray to guides to ancient rivers and settlements, and dozens of pear trees on his family’s quarter acre of land, the young Postgate developed a voracious thirst for knowledge. But it was his father’s move from Cambridge to the University of Liverpool in 1909 that would decisively shape him. Raymond’s sister Margaret remembered how their father, arriving on the eve of the 1911 mass strike, which saw workers murdered by the military and Winston Churchill sending gunboats down the Mersey, fruit rotting, soldiers patrolling workers’ neighbourhoods, and broken bottles left from riots, thundered that ‘it was the beginning of the end of the world’.
J.P.’s son felt somewhat differently. The strike was the first time he had seen the dockers’ leader James Sexton, of whom he later remarked, ‘I had never seen anyone who looked more like a corpse.’ The ‘respectable Liverpool’ he belonged to was in a state of panic, terrified of what workers were willing to do out of the guilt that the Liverpool of 1911 was a city ‘in which you could find every reason for expecting a ferocious and merciless war of revenge on the rich’.
Developing his curiosity, Postgate read The World of Labour by G. D. H. Cole, then a promising 23-year-old Oxford fellow, and established a socialist reading group at his school. As he trundled through what he described as a ‘muddle’ of religious, socialist, and economic writings, his shock and revulsion at the jingoism that greeted the arrival of the First World War led him to action, and he joined the Edge Hill branch of the Independent Labour Party (ILP).
A St John’s Socialist
In 1914, Postgate accepted a scholarship to read classics at St John’s College, University of Oxford. Developing a reputation as a good drinker and avid socialite who carried himself with a certain forwardness, he also threw himself into radical groups, becoming active in the Union for Democratic Control and the Socialist Society. This was the moment that Britain’s labour movement was edging into confrontation with the government over the issue of conscription; alongside comrades such as Rajani Palme Dutt and Gordon Childe (both of whom would later go on to be prominent radical leftists), Postgate took strength from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Labour Party’s anti-conscription stance, and he pledged himself to the No Conscription Fellowship (NCF).
But despite the mass nature of the NCF, Parliament voted overwhelmingly in January 1916 to enforce conscription. Undeterred, Postgate took mere days to declare to the authorities his refusal to contribute to the slaughter. A March 1916 issue of the Oxford Times paraphrased his stance: he ‘objected on moral grounds to the taking of human life, and could not take part in killing or assisting to kill his fellow men, and as an international socialist he could not help in the death of his comrades’.
A military tribunal rejected Postgate’s appeal, and he received his call-up papers in April; after rejecting them, he spent a significant chunk of 1916 languidly moving around prisons and ‘on the run’ in London. When his sister Margaret campaigned for his freedom, she met Raymond’s one-time influencer, G. D. H. Cole; she later married him. At around the same time, Postgate married Daisy Lansbury, daughter of the East End socialist leader George Lansbury.
At this point, the tide was turning. As Russia bubbled with revolutionary ferment throughout 1917 and armed forces revolts shook the authorities of all sides, the Labour grandee Arthur Henderson was forced to resign from the wartime cabinet for calling for a conference to determine whether Labour should support the Stockholm Peace Conference, which would call for an end to the war by international working-class action. Labour delegates pledged support for the conference. Postgate was present, describing in a letter how Labour right-wingers sang God Save the King:
[And] we on the left drowning [them] slowly with the Red Flag, when there rose from somewhere in the middle of the hall a tune I had never heard before: drowning us both and sweeping us away. It was the Internationale . . .. I was most blue and hopeless before the conference. But I have never despaired since.
The Populariser
Despite the fact that Labour essentially ignored the delegate vote and what happened in Stockholm more generally, the new period of radical possibility consumed Postgate. Praise came from most unexpected places — when H. G. Wells met with Lenin following the Bolshevik Revolution, he unexpectedly, and approvingly, mentioned his writings. While working at the Daily Herald, he became a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), even working for the official party organ, The Communist, before becoming generally disillusioned with what he perceived to be the negative internal style of British communism.
But beyond his excitement (and subsequent disappointment) over the tumult and anticlimactic ending of the 1926 General Strike, Postgate threw himself into his work. In 1930, his biography of the London radical politician John Wilkes — That Devil Wilkes — was published. After having been met with high acclaim as a thoughtfully woven work which dealt seriously with a protagonist Postgate initially found ridiculous, the book emphasised Wilkes’ preferable qualities as a scourge of political corruption and Britain’s ancient regime. He also wrote an early full study of Robert Emmet, the Irish Republican leader, and his How to Make A Revolution (1934) was banned in India by the colonial authorities as a work ‘capable of creating harm’. After his brief dalliance in workers’ cinema and a trip to the Soviet Union, it is no surprise that he was convinced he was blacklisted by the BBC.
In the late thirties, Postgate found himself at the helm of Fact, a stylistically ambitious but impoverished monthly, which, despite publishing booklet-length pieces from London taxi drivers to Ernest Hemingway on the Spanish Republic, fell to pieces. But his real triumph during this period was writing The Common People (1938) with his now brother-in-law, G. D. H. Cole, a bold attempt at a complete biography of the British working class that is in print to this day.
As the Second World War arrived, Postgate threw himself into the Home Guard and, at roughly the same time, took up the editor’s job at Tribune. There, in the words of Douglas Hill, the publication ‘emerged like a butterfly from a chrysalis’. Circulation figures of Tribune, which had dropped from 30,000 to just 6,000 due to the paper’s abandonment of the anti-war rhetoric popular with left-wing organisations during Moscow’s awkward suspension of hostilities with Hitler, grew back under Postgate — and in conditions of paper rationing — to approximately 10,000.
But sadly, it was not too long before Postgate was replaced by Aneurin Bevan. In his authoritative biography, Michael Foot reflected that the difference between the two was ‘much more one of temperament than of policy’. Postgate reflected later on in life that ‘at least two explosions’ characterised their ‘strained’ relationship by the end of his time at Tribune. Promises of other work were not fruitful, and Postgate found himself in the civil service, where he stayed on until 1945 and played a constructive role in information work for the post-war Labour government.
Public Stomach Number One
Though Postgate had always maintained a passion for food and drink, it was never his particular forte. Yet aspects of British society had allowed him to reconsider that. As Tony Benn was fond of pointing out, post-war rationing was marked by a period of advance in some respects. In many working-class kitchens, food experimentation was on the rise. Out of necessity or not, unprecedented numbers of households were interested in suggestions as to what they could be doing with South African snoek or pigeon meat, and this enthusiasm, Postgate felt, was not being met by a lagging British catering industry.
Derisively considering the idea of establishing a ‘Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Food’, Postgate wrote against the ‘sodden, sour, slimy, sloppy, stale or saccharined’ food considered acceptable in corporate British restaurants. In 1950, he made good on realising this joke, in the form of the Good Food Club. However, since the club was forced to hop between several different publications, the idea of an actual guide began to be mooted.
With huge exertion from Postgate and a vanguard of supporters, The Good Food Guide emerged. Published for the first time in 1951–2, the recommendations about high quality or unusual restaurants, cafes, chippies, and food wagons came attached with a statement of core principles. The Guide was about total freedom from the industry: no advertisements would be accepted, no judges were to take free meals, and all tips would come with a signed declaration from the suggester that they had no financial interest in the recommended establishment. The fundamental decency of the place mattered too, as Postgate removed at least one establishment from the Guide after discovering it operated a ‘colour bar’.
Throughout the production of the Guide, volunteers ploughed on in the Postgate family house in North London. Plied with endless food and good wine brought up from the air raid shelter, the volunteers would later recall the sense of working for an exciting, collective project — albeit guided by Postgate who, in Stephen Mennell’s words, exercised his presidents’ role with a ‘benevolent autocracy in the best Fabian tradition’. These often-boozy occasions were once warmly sent-up by one volunteer in a write-up of ‘President’s House’, recommending that he had ‘spent three weeks here and left in a haze of garlic, parsley and Australian brandy’. At the same time, Postgate opened up a second front over wine. As a decades-long wine enthusiast, he hated the atmosphere and snobbery surrounding it, as well as the ultra-profiteering of many restaurants. From his disgust came The Plain Man’s Guide to Wine. Addressing ‘the man who wishes to drink wine intelligently and not too expensively’, the book was written with the mission of demystification — unmasking notions such as the need for different wine glasses for different wines, uncovering the broader mysteries of vintages, and attacking wine snobbery in general.
Having gone through fourteen editions in nearly as many years, the Plain Man’s Guide was a tremendous success, despite claims of ‘amateurism’ from the liberal and Tory press and a particularly nasty verbal attack from the wine expert Andre Simon, who privately derided Postgate to a mutual friend as a ‘red’ (according to John and Mary Postgate’s biography of him, he preferred his son Oliver’s nickname for him — ‘public stomach number one’). But Postgate was unfazed, and he carried on helping the Guide in various capacities until his health began to seriously fail him. Nearing the end, he requested a bottle of Tokay Essenz — a drink known for its medicinal qualities — with the suggestion that if it didn’t save him, the family must drink the rest — which is what they did at his funeral in April 1971.
By the time of his death, streets had been named after Raymond Postgate by progressive Labour councils in Middlesbrough and Thamesmead, and honours had come from sources as disparate as continental wine groups, Le Monde, and Harold Wilson’s office. It was a reflection of a profoundly colourful, full-up life, rife with idiosyncrasies and contradictory aspects. But consistent throughout Postgate’s life — from his refusing to serve imperial slaughter and popularising peoples’ history to demanding better, clearer standards of what is consumed — was a democratic insistence that people deserve more, and should demand more, and that by taking a stand against any mystification and encouraging fundamental curiosities, life can be fully enriched for all.