4. Why bother with Butterfield?

We seem to have come a long way from Butterfield, yet the story of the making of official history in the United Kingdom over the last seventy years reveals a recurrent tension between the demands of government and those of academic historians that he would have found very familiar. And between government and academics, of course, are the official historians. Are there any lessons to be drawn by official historians today from Butterfield’s encounter with their predecessors seventy years ago? Much of what Woodward and Medlicott wrote in response to Butterfield is instantly familiar. Like Woodward, we complain that no one in the Foreign Office seems interested in our work; that busy officials never have the time to read the drafts we send them. Like Medlicott, we have the run of the archives and we smile knowingly when academics claim that ‘MI5’ must have gone through thousands of files ‘with a fine-tooth comb’ before they were released to a gullible public.¹ And we agree with Woodward that there always exists a check on our honesty in the fact that the archives from which we make our selection will one day – perhaps very soon – be fully open. Like Woodward, we ‘don’t want to get the posthumous reputation of a faker of history’.²

Yet we also know that some of Butterfield’s criticisms are uncomfortably close to home. We do not knowingly practise self-censorship, but there are many documents we do not even try to include in our selection because we know they will not pass the scrutiny of the sensitivity reviewer: items to do with secret intelligence or the Royal Family, for instance. And if Gooch and Temperley or Woodward and Butler were not wholly independent because they drew a government salary and were subject to the Official Secrets Act, how independent are we as full-time civil servants?³ Perhaps the reason why we are allowed to go about our business with little interference is simply because our work is less politically sensitive, less vital to the nation’s self-image, than that of our predecessors who documented the origins of two world wars.

On the other hand, being ‘embedded’ within government departments confers a level of understanding about process, and of the relative importance of issues and parts of the governmental system, which is impossible for complete outsiders to achieve. If there are documents we cannot publish, we try hard to find others that make the same point without the same complications. Being civil servants, in the sense of being employed in the system, helps us know how to do this. Only official historians with clearance have privileged access to the full archive, even though that does not confer an automatic right to publish. But the number of times permission has been refused, over a long period, is very small.⁴ And in current circumstances, external scrutiny by critical academics and organizations pushes both the archives and historians to be as transparent as possible. Making sense of the material would be difficult without the help of ‘insiders’ like us. Being a civil servant, or at least subject to civil service rules for a while, is the trade-off for access, knowledge and understanding that our non-official colleagues, however critical they are, are generally grateful for.

As to the first of Butterfield’s two central maxims, we can agree that no government wants the public to know all the truth; the problem is to work out exactly what this means in practice: not least because, if the deception has been successful, we simply don’t know what has been concealed or destroyed. The cases we know about are the ones where the attempt has failed, as with the Windsor papers or, to take a more recent example, the so-called ‘migrated archive’ of colonial government records that was revealed in 2011 as a result of litigation against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office over the treatment of Mau Mau suspects in Kenya in the 1950s.⁵ Here the concealment was real, but with a variety of motives, including the desire to protect those who had collaborated with colonial regimes from retribution by post-colonial governments. And if the British government had been really determined to cover its tracks it would have simply have ordered the documents to be destroyed. Except in very few cases, that did not happen. The problem was not so much the one identified by Butterfield – that the present generation of official historians and archivists might be honest but later generations less so – but that later generations simply forgot or never knew about the original concealment, so that they could walk past the documents on the shelves every day without understanding their significance. The key problem is therefore not the mythical secret drawer, but the loss of institutional memory: one that will only get worse as the decline of official record-keeping accelerates.

Of course the preoccupation with the secret drawer, or some version of it, is not confined to Butterfield. It is at the heart of all criticism of official history: outsiders distrust it because they don’t know everything about how it works. One of the most common fallacies pursued by critics, not just of official history but of archival processes in general, is the assumption that if something is withheld or kept secret it must be important. This is not necessarily true, particularly in regard to intelligence-related material, which is always only one piece of the jigsaw and is rarely decisive. The same applies to Foreign Office minutes. Although we can all agree that minutes and other annotations can be significant and, if so, should be included, they can also be misleading. It is precisely the ordered, hierarchical character of Foreign Office documents, especially those of the inter-war period, that can tempt the unwary (among whom I count myself, certainly at the beginning of my career). A well-written, cogent minute by a junior member of the department is of little significance unless you can show it was acted upon further up the chain. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss the influence of officials entirely. It is true that on major issues of policy it is ministers who are responsible, and it is in the Cabinet and its committees that the big decisions are taken.⁶ But such decisions are generally taken on the basis of advice offered by officials, and it is those same officials who sometimes define, and more often refine, those decisions and turn them into actions. Butterfield’s mistrust of Vansittart, therefore, was not entirely misplaced.

Butterfield’s second maxim – that there is a place for official history, but that it should be submitted to unremitting scrutiny – remains as valid today as it was in 1949. Official historians are still people ‘to be shot at’. And his real thrust here is that academic history – history studied for its own sake and not for any imagined utility – must remain paramount and uncontaminated by any association with government. It is a belief to which, as we have seen, he remained faithful to the end of his life; and it is one worth bearing in mind in an era when academic historians are increasingly under pressure to demonstrate the impact of their research in the public sphere. We official historians have crossed the line and that is all very well, for we have a useful function in serving up the materials that help unofficial historians to do their work. But we must still expect to be kept up to the mark. And if our contemporaries won’t do that job, we can be sure that the ghost of Herbert Butterfield will always be there, taking pot shots at us with his rifle.

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¹ A claim made at the time of the discovery of the FCO’s colonial or ‘migrated’ archive in 2011.

² Woodward to Butterfield, 28 July 1949, BUTT/130/4.

³ In fact Gooch, who had a substantial private income, chose to work without payment. Temperley, having originally proposed £500 a year, a figure thought too low by the Foreign Office librarian, was paid £750: Frank Eyck, G.P. Gooch: A Study in History and Politics (London and Basingstoke, 1982), pp. 340–1. I do not know how much the editors of DBFP or the early editors of DBPO were paid.

⁴ For examples from the early volumes of DBPO, see Margaret Pelly, ‘Sensitive documents and editorial freedom’, in FCO Historians, Papers Presented at the Seminar for Editors of Diplomatic Documents, pp. 44–7.

⁵ Shohei Sato, ‘“Operation Legacy”: Britain’s destruction and concealment of colonial records worldwide’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, xlv (2017), 697–719. However, a large part of that archive is low-grade administrative material that no one thought would be of any value, including TNA, who originally refused to take it and advised the FCO to destroy it on more than one occasion.

⁶ This is one of the two principal arguments made by Gill Bennett in her Six Moments of Crisis: Inside British Foreign Policy (Oxford, 2013). The other is that ‘even in times of crisis, ministers always think about more than one issue, even if at the meeting in question they discuss a single issue’ (p. 5).