by Peter Lewis, London Metropolitan University
January 2012
I read Brian Winston’s fascinating obituary of Stuart Hood (Guardian, 22 December 2011) with sadness, surprise and a touch of guilt. Surprise that his death had not been reported till now, sadness and guilt because we had been colleagues at Goldsmiths in the 1980s and I had failed to keep in touch since then. We were not close – it was difficult to get close to a man for whom reserve was “a defence against the world” – but I felt I knew something about him before we first met. I had read his autobiographical account of wartime action with the Italian Resistance, Pebbles from my Skull, when it first came out in 1963. (It was republished with an Afterword as Carlino in 1985). The next year he left the BBC to come as Programme Controller to Rediffusion where I worked in the Schools Television Department. His arrival meant I was demoted from the library’s reading list of The Listener: ‘1: S.Hood, 2: P.Lewis 3: return to Library.’ The copy would arrive sometimes weeks later with intriguing annotations in red ink, suggestive of programme ideas. Ten years later, I encountered him in the smoke-filled meetings of the Free Communications Group, then from 1980 we taught in the Visual Communications Department at Goldsmiths. The College’s new joint degree in Communications with Sociology had got approval from Senate House too late for advertising in UCCA so recruitment came mainly through an ad in Time Out. The Time Out year, as they became known, were a diverse, mature and talented group, some of whom after graduation formed the company, Pictures of Women, won a commission from the new Channel 4 and hired Stuart as an adviser.
His wide experience, mediated through quiet dialogue in seminars and distilled in lucid lectures, often without notes, often supported by documentation from his broadcast days, won the students’ respect. I remember an astonishing, seemingly ad lib, performance to a first year course introducing Marxism and media studies which ran for an hour and a quarter. A public lecture on John Reith explicitly drew the parallel with his own Presbyterian upbringing, echoed in the novels he wrote in this fruitful period. For me and others in the community radio movement, his translation of Brecht’s ‘Talk on the function of Radio’, first published in Screen (vol 20, no 3/4,1980) became a much-quoted founding document, and On Television was a timely addition to the degree’s reading list. He took his part in the NATFHE struggles forced upon us by the College management’s behaviour and it was in this period that some of us got a little closer to him over meals. I remember a delicious fish lunch he cooked for us in Brighton, and being gratified for his praise for a meal I served colleagues (“I didn’t know you were a cook”) – actually straight from a Sainsbury cookbook.
After reading Brian Winston’s obituary I went back to my copy of Carlino and realised I had either forgotten, or perhaps not even read at the time of first buying the book, its Epilogue (from which the above reference to reserve is taken) and the Afterword. These fascinating few pages of reflection enable me to get a little closer to Stuart. He discusses the motive for his reticence about his political position – to the Italian partisans at the time and in his original account, written while still at the BBC. “It would have been difficult for an executive of the BBC to admit that he had for some years been an active member of the Young Communist League and then of the Party.” (It was more than a decade later that the ‘Christmas tree’ was revealed as the coded symbol attached to the personnel file of BBC staff who were of interest to MI5). He describes his return with his wife in 1981 to the Tuscan village where a family had sheltered him in 1944, a return made partly to verify the theory proposed by an unnamed “English sociologist” about the relationship between an escaped prisoner of war and those that shelter him. Because the escapee brings prestige to the hosts, even has exchange value in dealings with the Allies, the eventual victors, he becomes a prisoner all over again, this time of his hosts. and a further escape becomes necessary. So, much to the chagrin of his hosts and the local Communist Party, Stuart disappeared from Tuscany, the war ended, he was repatriated. By coincidence, I and my wife were also in Italy in the summer of 1981, on holiday and staying for a time with a Calabrian family, at the invitation of an Italian colleague. There we underwent a peacetime version of ‘friendly imprisonment’ from which we too had to escape. Recounting this on my return for the autumn term I learned from Stuart that our experience was recognised in sociological theory. Ever since, at home, we refer to it as ‘the Hood Syndrome’.
Stuart was indeed “a born escaper” as Brian Winston reminded us, and escaping is a continual necessity for those whose reserve, of whatever origin, makes attachment difficult. I hope others who knew him will add their reminiscences so that together we can continue to decipher the attractive mystery that was Stuart Hood.
MeCCSA invites members who wishes to share their own experiences of Stuart Hood to do so in the comments field below. We also invite suggestions for a memorial or way of commemorating him (e.g. a scholarship, conference or similar in his name).
Like Peter Lewis, I also feel a sense of guilt in not hearing of Stuart Hood’s death before now because he was somewhat of a hero.
I had brief dealings with Stuart in the course of the production of a film entitled FASCISM, that was made in 1980 under the auspices of the InterUniversity History Film Consortium. This was a collaboration between three Professors – Antony Polonsky (then at LSE*), Stuart Hood and the late James Joll (LSE). James read the voice-over, and Stuart looked after the structure of the film with Antony who delivered much of the writing – but it was a true collaboration throughout its construction.
When the film was in the research phase, I remember taking Stuart and Antony to the roof of 81 Dean Street (in the old BFI building where the BUFVC was at that time) with a pile of viewing prints to a former film storage vault where there was a 35 mm viewing table. I was fairly surprised, as a young whippersnapper, when the great Stuart Hood called down 20 minutes later to say he had never laced up a viewing table before and would I go back up to get him out of trouble…
The completed film was very well received by its target university audience and it probably deserved wider distribution. It drew on content sourced from British, Italian and German archives and I am pleased to say that it can be viewed online at http://bufvc.ac.uk/filmandsound?film_name=polonsky_f_hs6 (this delivery, for rights reasons, is offered under authenticated access only for bona fide staff and students in UK higher and further education). Along with the film there is a downloadable PDF of the accompanying booklet which, when it was first released, attracted considerable interest in its own right.
It is probably worth mentioning, as an historical factet, that the film FASCISM, along with Stanley Milgram’s OBEDIENCE, were used by Howard Davies, Alan Howard and the cast from the RSC as they planned the first production of C P Taylor’s play GOOD that was staged at the Donmar Warehouse to huge acclaim in 1981 (and later went to New York in 1982).
*Professor Antony Polonsky is at Brandeis University (http://tinyurl.com/yyegvxw)
I first met Stuart Hood in the 1970s at one of the broadcasting symposiums mounted by Manchester University’s adult education department. These events brought together practitioners from the BBC and non-BBC organisations and were at that time reckoned to be one of the very few forums when they could meet for open and free-ranging discussion. A few academics also attended. By then Stuart Hood had been a very successful broadcasting executive and freelance programme maker and was now an academic –‘I’m not a real professor’ he was fond of saying in disarming fashion. He most certainly was an individual possessed of a steely intelligence, whose interventions in debate were few but considered, and always to be listened to with care, not least because of the crisp manner of delivery in what used to be called an educated Scottish accent, in which those more skilled in these matters than I am could no doubt detect traces of his native Angus.
When at the beginning of the 1980s what is now Glasgow Caledonian University decided to develop a media studies degree, we approached Stuart and asked him to join an internal scrutiny panel prior to a CNAA submission. This he willingly undertook and, subsequent to the degree’s approval, he became our chief examiner for a number of years. He was always measured and generous in his comments and we were very grateful for his contribution. And for the opportunity over lunch to talk about much more than mark ranges and dissertation topics. I am writing this on a train which is hugging the coast en route to Aberdeen and I remember asking him over one such lunch why latterly he had moved away from London to Brighton. ‘To be near the sea again,’ was the reply.
Stuart Hood was a remarkably accomplished individual who distinguished himself not only in his chosen field but also as a translator and a novelist. The first book of his I read was enthusiastically recommended to me by my then colleague, James Boyle, who himself later worked for the BBC. That book was not one of the novels, which came later, but ‘Pebbles from my Skull’ (later re-issued as ‘Carlino’), his account of his life behind enemy lines with the Italian partisans at the end of the Second World War. It is an exciting story in which the author comes close to death on several occasions. It is also an intermittent meditation on the differences between the Presbyterian milieu in which Stuart Hood grew up and the much warmer, much more overtly emotional, Italian one he found himself in at this time.
As Brian Winston points out, fighting alongside the partisans inevitably meant some involvement – however peripheral – in dealing with suspected spies and traitors, and the feelings of regret, even guilt, which followed. A colleague remarked to me on hearing of Stuart’s death that one always knew when talking to him that this was a man with a military background.
His politics were very much of the left, though personally I have some difficulty in believing, notwithstanding what Brian Winston says, that such a hard headed individual would have had much to do with an outfit quite as dotty as the Workers’ Revolutionary Party.
It was both a pleasure and a privilege to have known him.