An Uneasy Inheritance — Polly Toynbee’s memoir of her family and other radicals

It takes some courage, and a touch of recklessness, to tell the unvarnished truth about one’s own family. A double dose of bravery is required when that same clan is famed for its advocacy of largely unpopular radical causes and — at least in Polly Toynbee’s case — is marked by tragedy and far, far too much drinking. On her first day at The Observer, the newspaper for which her father Philip had long worked as a literary critic, Alf on reception appealed to the young Polly: “I hope you’re not like your dad. I hope you don’t pee in the lift.”

One of Britain’s most notable leftwing columnists, Toynbee decided to write this family biography when filming a documentary on social class. The perceptive producer asked her if she might like to turn her attention to her own story, thus forcing Toynbee to face the insidious reach of what she calls “class shame” in her own life.

Toynbee makes it clear from the outset how much she sees social class as the fundamental, yet often still unacknowledged, driver of British society — tainting all connections and identities. How much easier it would be, she ruefully admits, to leap to self-exposure if she had some satisfying “pulled-up-by-my-own-bootstraps-from-a tough-council-estate story” to tell instead of a life eased by material comforts and with an extensive set of influential social and professional networks to draw upon.

Her class identity has clearly caused her much confusion and soul-searching. She is particularly acute on the uncomfortable space that the radical middle and upper-middle classes have always occupied in our culture. The charge of hypocrisy is so easily made against affluent campaigners and reformers who must suffer “the cognitive dissonance of failing to live up to the beliefs we profess.” It’s a fate, Toynbee notes with irritation, that no smug wealthy Conservative ever has to endure.

The charge of hypocrisy is easily made against affluent campaigners — a fate, Toynbee notes, that no wealthy Conservative ever has to endure

Toynbee gallops engagingly through the life stories of an extraordinary array of forebears. One great-grandfather was the Australian-born classical scholar Gilbert Murray; the Toynbee branch of the family, London born and bred, included her great-grandfather, Arnold, a renowned social reformer (London’s Toynbee Hall was named in his honour); and the author’s grandfather, also called Arnold, was a philosopher and historian whose 12-volume examination of the rise and fall of civilisation A Study of History made him a global celebrity. Great-aunt Jocelyn was a celebrated Cambridge archeologist. The family’s many famous friends — Rupert Brooke, Jessica Mitford, Bertrand Russell — flit confidently through the narrative.

Toynbee passionately identifies with many of the values of her ancestors; mostly fiercely anti-Tory, they include formidable early advocates of everything from proper welfare provision to Irish home rule, trade unionism to nuclear disarmament. Her father, Philip, was an active communist in the 1930s and ran a pioneering, if ultimately disastrous, social commune in the 1970s. He eventually turned to God, in whose character, his daughter wryly observes, he showed more interest than in those of his children.

Yet in their devotion to the “service of humanity” — the term does send shivers down the contemporary spine — these same ancestors exhibit a kind of oppressive virtue that was easy to mock. Toynbee deplores the mix of shocking emotional neglect and impossibly high expectations that passed for parenting in a bygone, upper middle-class age. Her father, she claims, was all but ruined by his rigid and unloving mother Rosalind. His older brother Tony died young by suicide; Philip, a loveable if unreliable father, battled depression and alcoholism throughout his life.

The English education system also comes in for harsh criticism. The sons of the middle and upper-middle class were sent to boarding schools where they largely floundered rather than flourished. Toynbee herself was “punished” for failing the 11-plus exam by being sent to a boarding school, where she performed poorly. It was the attentions of Mr Stedman Jones, head of English at her pioneering comprehensive school, Holland Park (my old school), where she escaped for sixth form, that won her a scholarship to Oxford.

For all this, she is honest enough to shine a light on another of the supposed hypocrisies of so many of the affluent British liberal class: those parents who send their “children to profoundly conservative establishments, demanding a good education yet detesting the cultural, political, military, religious and social ambitions of English public schools; it happened to my father, it happened to me and I confess to doing it to some of my own children.”

She does not go into detail about the younger generations of her own family although there are heavy hints of both continued privilege and yet a tougher battle to stay on top. There are several references, for instance, to the vast increase in housing wealth, which keeps so many of today’s middle class afloat.

In other respects, life has got harder, even for the affluent, with today’s greater emphasis on exam-passing diligence rather than family connections or a louche kind of confidence. Toynbee herself dropped out of Oxford through a mix of “woe and impatience”. She acknowledges that “If I were starting out now . . . without qualifications, I would never get near a newspaper job.”

Uneasy Inheritance is a bit of a genre mash-up: part social analysis, part polemic (once a columnist, always a columnist), part compelling family memoir, replete with vivid — often hilarious, often shocking — anecdotes. It is ultimately, however, a work of love, forgiveness and understanding. It ends on an elegiac note with Toynbee observing how many of her once-celebrated relatives have now been forgotten — or worse; Arnold Toynbee’s masterwork was largely dismissed by later scholars.

Yet she proudly salutes her ancestors’ political radicalism, their stubborn membership of that despised minority of campaigners and socialists who have always had to face down scorn and defy convention. Thanks to their efforts, Toynbee concludes, some important liberal causes have been advanced, but “on the question of class inequality, I find no progress — the dial has stuck.”

An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals, by Polly Toynbee, Atlantic Books £22 448 pages

Melissa Benn is the author of ‘Life Lessons. The Case for a National Education Service’

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