Upward mobility, betrayal, and the Black Papers on education

At a quarter to six on the morning of 16 May 1968, a gas oven exploded on the eighteenth floor of Ronan Point, a London City Council tower block in London. The explosion blew out the exterior wall of one of the upper flats in the building, leading to what the Ministry of Housing and Local Government called in its report a ‘progressive collapse’ as the flats on one corner of Ronan Point gave way, one by one, under the weight of the floors above them. Four people were killed and seventeen people injured. Less than a year later, the former editors of Critical Quarterly, C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson, chose to use the disaster to frame the state of education in the UK in the first of what would be a series of five ‘Black Papers’, published intermittently between 1969 and 1977. (The Black Papers were so named in order to set them against the standard government White Papers on educational policy). In the open letter to current MPs that they appended to the essays in the first Black Paper, Cox and Dyson wrote that ‘There seems to be a grim humour in “progressive collapse”’, and asked, ‘How far are we witnessing the progressive collapse of education?’ Cox and Dyson would have been well aware of the rhetorical uses of the pun from their reading of William Empson’s influential Seven Types of Ambiguity. Cox and Dyson use what Empson identifies as the pun’s ability to ‘name two very different things, two ways of judging a situation’ in which ‘their clash in a single word will mirror the tension of the whole situation’. At the time Cox and Dyson were writing, ‘progressive education’ referred, strictly speaking, to the promotion of discovery methods in teaching, especially at the primary school level. In the Black Papers, however, the phrase ‘progressive education’ is stretched to cover a very wide range of practices, policies, and developments, including the push to end the practice of ‘streaming’ cohorts of students by intellectual ability, the threatened abolition of the grammar schools in favour of the new comprehensive schools, and the mushrooming of student sit-ins and other forms of protest on university campuses. Cox and Dyson deploy the ‘progressive collapse’ pun in order to revise the usual associations of the word ‘progressive’, making the word appear newly proximate to decline and fall, and directly

challenging the implication that progressive developments in education are always better than the traditional forms they would replace. The pun turns Ronan Point into a metaphor for the project of mass education in welfare-state Britain (for, as Jean-Jacques Lecercle observes, 'A pun is always threatening to turn into metaphor' 5 ) and Ronan Point becomes an architectural analogue for the unfolding collapse of the entire educational system, from the university all the way down to the primary school level.
The 'progressive collapse of education' pun was rhetorically effective in that it became, as it was probably designed to be, the part of the first Black Paper most frequently quoted in the media. The Black Papers as a whole succeeded in defining the terms of the debate between 'traditional' and 'progressive' policies and practices in education over the 1970s. But the rhetorical effectiveness of the pun came at the price of an implicit callousness towards the victims of the Ronan Point disaster. The pun might be dismissed simply as an insensitive joke made by people occupying a class position far removed from most of the people who lived in Ronan Point, were it not for the fact that Cox himself, as well as the two men with whom he co-edited instalments of the Black Papers -A.E. Dyson (the co-editor of Black Papers 1-3) and Rhodes Boyson (the co-editor of Black Papers 4-5)came from lower-class origins. In his memoir The Great Betrayal, Cox wrote 'My family existed on the borders of the working and lower middle classes' and described the two people with whom he edited instalments of the Black Papers, Boyson and Dyson, as 'reared in comparable backgrounds, working-class, but with determination not to submit to its penuries and repressions'. 6 Certainly, none of the editors of the Black Papers came from a background of privilege: Cox was the son of a Grimsby coal exporter's clerk and a lady's maid, Dyson's parents worked as assistants at a Paddington drapery shop, and Boyson's father was a Haslingden cotton spinner. The editors of the Black Papers, along with a good number of the contributors, argued that the type of student most harmed by the comprehensive school movement was precisely the kind of student they once had been, for whom grammar school education had been a ladder for escaping the privations of lower-class life. By threatening the grammar schools the Labour Party was, the Black Papers argued, kicking this ladder out from under the intelligent but underprivileged child.
This student is an anchoring figure to which the Black Papers' various polemics against different manifestations of 'progressivism' in education continually return. The student figures in the ten 'Black Paper Basics', a shibbolethic list of principles appearing at the beginning of Black Paper 1975, of which No. 7 reads 'Without selection the clever working class child in a deprived area stands little chance of a real academic education'. 7 The child who seeks, in education, a means to better their social status along the way to adulthood was a real social type, one that included the Black Paper editors themselves and many of their contributors. But the figure was also an archetype at the centre of those narratives of upward mobility with which Cox and Dyson were familiar as teachers of literature, including David Copperfield, whose protagonist appears in a comic mode, or Jude the Obscure, in a tragic one. 8 Appearing in the wake of a period of sustained expansion, the Black Papers illustrate how mass education became a source of anxiety not only for a public-school educated elite, but also for a grammar-school educated and upwardly mobile generation that came of age around the time of the 1944 Education Act. 9 Just as mass housing projects became, in the wake of Ronan Point, objects of anxiety, so too did the project of mass education for Boyson, Cox, and Dyson, for whom the reconstruction of the education system in the interests of the many threatened to crush the aspirations of the intelligent few. At the same time, a lingering sense of betrayal continued to haunt the Black Papers project as a whole.
Malcolm Bradbury, himself the son of a railwayman, calls attention to the general sense that the university-educated lower-class person has abandoned or even betrayed their former community in his essay 'The Idea of a Literary Élite', which appeared in the Critical Quarterly in 1960, in which he observes that, 'The mobility of the intellectual … breaks him away now more than ever from his cultural roots and family background, until alienations in family and personal relationships dramatize the issue for him; his interests and capacity for discourse usually confine him to the company of others like himself and yet make him aware of the necessity of a wider contact'. 10 A great number of the contributors to Critical Quarterly were only too acutely aware of the cost of upward mobility: the fact that mobility entails distance, both physical and emotional, between the upwardly mobile and their families and friends.
Both Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, who contributed to Critical Quarterly over the 1960s but were opposed to the Black Papers, 11 wrestled with the sense of uprootedness that Bradbury articulates in his essay. In The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart's exploration of the working-class culture of his youth and its deformation under the forces of the tabloid media and cheap paperback fiction, explores the plight of the 'Scholarship Boy', who is torn between two classes and divided against himself: 'He has left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways unusual; and he is still unusual in another class, too tense and over-wound.' 12 In a lecture that was published in Critical Quarterly on the autobiographical dimensions of The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart reflects at length on the difficulties created by a sense of palpable difference between the language used by working-class people and the language that must be used to discuss them in a book like The Uses of Literacy intended for academics and a broadly educated public. Raymond Williams's autobiographical novel Border Country, published in 1960, three years after The Uses of Literacy, also traces the many 'borders' between the grammar-school educated academic Matthew and his childhood village of Glynmawr. These include the physical boundary between England and Wales, the temporal break marked by the stroke that befalls Matthew's railway signalman father that separates the 'past' and 'present' storylines of the novel, the contrast between the name he has become accustomed to in his professional life ('Matthew') and the name by which he is known in Glynmawr ('Will'); and the difference between the spoken language used in Glynmawr and the academic language Matthew hears as a 'separate language in his mind'. 13 In both Hoggart and Williams, higher education scores a boundary between the working-class academic and their community, a boundary that is recapitulated within the working-class academic's consciousness.
A sense of ambivalence towards the very educational system that enables upward mobility is apparent in the contrast between Iris Murdoch's contribution to Black Paper 1975, in which the grammar-school educated Murdoch (descended from a once-prominent Anglo-Irish family that had fallen precipitously) argues for the compatibility of 'socialism' and 'selection' and the novel she published the same year, A Word Child. In her Black Paper essay, Murdoch writes 'The aim of becoming an all-round human being is certainly a worthy one, but a clever person should become an all-round clever person; and few things are more agonizing and anxious-making, both in childhood and later, than to feel that one has not had the academic advantages which one deserved'. But in A Word Child, the orphaned protagonist Hilary Burde makes a precipitous ascent from an impoverished youth to a fellowship at an Oxford college in part through the assistance of a grammar-school teacher who recognises his intelligence. But Burde's life prospects are destroyed when he falls in love with the wife of the young publicschool-educated don who supported his fellowship, embarks on an affair with her, and then kills her and her unborn child (to what extent 'accidentally' remains unclear) through his own reckless driving directly after she breaks off the affair. Burde gives up his academic career and settles into a squalid life as a minor public servant. A Word Child makes it clear that, for Burde at least, what is 'agonising and anxious-making' is not the sense of academic potential not achieved but the unfulfillable desire to erase the social difference that separates him from the upper-class don. A Word Child can be read as a parody of the upward mobility story, a story in which the linear ascent suggested by the protagonist's punning last name 'Burde' is turned back upon itself, trapping the protagonist within cycles of repetition, most obviously manifested in Burde's habit of riding the Circle Line round and round on the London Underground, which, in one of Burde's dreams, appears to merge with the examination hall that facilitated his initial rise in society. 14 Murdoch's novel makes plain the ways the upward mobility story as a genre is shadowed by the lingering sense of betraying others: not just people in the upwardly mobile protagonist's own class (shown in Burde's shabby treatment of his sister Crystal and her fiancé Arthur) but also one friend in the social class that he aspires to reach, namely the upper-class don whose wife he falls in love with and then kills, only to repeat the same process twenty years later at the novel's climax.
In large part to remedy this sense of deracination and alienation, and to create the conditions under which what Bradbury calls a 'wider contact' with people outside the academic caste would become possible, Cox and Dyson founded the Critical Quarterly Society, which was intentionally set up to include schoolteachers and schoolchildren interested in the study of literature together with academics. The Black Papers would work to expose divisions within the intellectual community that Cox and Dyson had nurtured through the Critical Quarterly Society. The political division in this intellectual community that Black Papers laid bare reflected the fundamental division within the lower-class intellectual's own mind that Hoggart, Williams, and Murdoch all articulate. Cox and Dyson's activities through this society need to be examined first because they help contextualise what would otherwise seem to be the editors' abrupt conversion to conservative politics in the Black Papers on education.

The Critical Quarterly Society
At the heart of the Critical Quarterly Society was the friendship between Cox and Dyson, who met as undergraduates at Cambridge University. In The Great Betrayal, Cox recounts his alienation from many of the students from public schools there, which he viscerally experienced when, during his first dinner at Pembroke College, he realised he was the only one eating his pudding with a spoon. 15 His sense of alienation began to recede after he encounters A.E. ('Tony') Dyson while waiting for a seminar, with Cox describing the ensuing friendship as a platonic but nevertheless intimate bond. Cox recounts meeting Dyson 'almost every day for walks or tea' and discovering a common passion for Brahms and Mahler. 16 Looking back on their long friendship from the perspective of forty years, Cox tells us that 'Tony Dyson believes there are no completely happy marriages and that we are the exception that proves the rule' and credits him with the fact that he had a career in academia at all: 'If he had not become my friend I would never have succeeded in the Tripos examinations, nor become a university teacher'. 17 This intense intellectual friendship between the two men, which Cox describes more as providing an alternative to their official Cambridge education than as a supplement to it, would come to define Cox and Dyson's careers in academia.
The friendship was the lynchpin of Cox and Dyson's flurry of collaborative activity, beginning in the late 1950s, in the service of growing a literary community that would embrace schoolteachers as well as university teachers. In 1959, when Cox was early in his career as a lecturer at the University of Hull, and Dyson a lecturer at the University of Bangor, the two men founded the journal Critical Quarterly with the aim, as Cox described it later, to promote the understanding of literature within what he called an 'expanding élite'. 18 In 1962, Cox and Dyson introduced the journal Critical Survey, which was addressed especially to schoolteachers, featuring essays on texts frequently taught at the secondary-school level, surveys of recent criticism, and essays on the state of education in the UK. 19 The new journal complemented Critical Quarterly, which was now positioned as the journal primarily intended for an academic audience, focusing on new interpretations of literary classics, essays on current debates in literary criticism, and critical evaluations of contemporary literature. Schoolteachers were sent copies of both Critical Quarterly and Critical Survey as part of their membership of the Critical Quarterly Society, which Cox and Dyson founded in 1962 in order to provide a common point of organisation for their editorial and conference work. 20 The ambition to cater toand even to createan 'expanding élite' served to distinguish the ethos of Cox and Dyson's journals from that of Scrutiny, the recently defunct journal edited by F.R. Leavis, who had been Cox and Dyson's teacher at Cambridge. 21 In a note written by hand on a typed letter to C.P. Snow in 1963, Cox expressed his opposition to the Leavisite restriction of literary interest to a small canon, writing, I know that many people think that most lecturers in English are in the Scrutiny tradition, morally arrogant and teaching their students to feel contemptuous towards larger sections of English Literature; but during the last years a very powerful opposition to such attitudes has emerged, and I like to think that The Critical Quarterly is assisting this movement to restore sanity (and magnanimity!) to the teaching of English. 22 Cox also opposed Leavis's corresponding claim that a proper education in literature could only feasibly be the privilege of a tiny cabal. In an essay published in Commentary the same year Scrutiny ceased publication, Leavis wrote 'It is disastrous to let a country's educational arrangements be determined, or even affected, by the assumption that a high intellectual standard can be attained by more than a small minority'. 23 In Education and the University, Leavis had made it clear that this elite was to be regarded as a subset of those who had graduated from Oxbridge, writing that 'a not altogether inconsiderable, if very small, minority do contrive to get something of an education (in the relevant sense of the word) at Oxford and Cambridge, as things are'. 24 Leavis appeared untroubled by the fact that an Oxbridge education was disproportionately bestowed on the upper classes, even though, as Francis Mulhern observes, Leavis and most of the Scrutiny circle were of solidly middle-class origins themselves and laboured to turn the study of literature into a profession, rather than the leisurely pursuit of the gentleman-scholar. 25 Cox and Dyson's activities through the Critical Quarterly Society over the 1960s can be understood as an attempt to share the fruits of an education in literature still further down the social scale, introducing schoolchildren across the UK to the pleasures of studying literature at the university level, and helping working-and lower-class aspiring academics to establish their careers. They published essays in Critical Survey with the explicit aim of encouraging a broader range of students across the UK to follow in their own footsteps to Oxbridge. At the same time, however, Cox and Dyson promoted provincial universities as places in which a full literary education could be acquired.
In the first issue of Critical Survey, Cox drew attention to the problem that drives the plot of Alan Bennett's play The History Boys: the unequal distribution of 'insider knowledge' of what is required to gain entrance to an elite university among the secondary schools. Cox lamented the fact that 'lack of knowledge causes great injustice in our university entrance system, and many brilliant students never even think of applying at Cambridge, Oxford or London'. He went on to give advice for doing well on the Cambridge Scholarship examination in particular, noting, for example, that 'The distinctive feature of the Cambridge examinations is their emphasis on practical criticism and the dating of prose and verse passages'. 26 Beginning with Cox's own analysis of Edwin Muir's 'The Horses', issues of Critical Survey included examples of practical criticism whose main purpose was to provide a model short analysis of a poem, such as might be called for in a scholarship examination. The last day of sixth form conferences organised through the Critical Quarterly Society featured a game in which the tutors and lecturers attempted to date unseen passages chosen by attendees at the conference. The implicit rationale for having the game was that if students were to perform well at this task themselves, when it was no longer a game but a question in a Cambridge scholarship examination, it might make the difference between them winning a place at a college and being shut out.
Cox and Dyson did not, however, subscribe to the idea that it was only possible to gain an education in the study of literature at Oxbridge. In an early editorial in Critical Quarterly, Dyson explicitly rejected the opposition between Cambridge and Oxford and universities founded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Hull and Bangor, where Cox and Dyson began their careers. He protested that 'To join all our younger universities together under the label "redbrick", which is then defined against "Oxbridge" in largely negative waysless tradition, less money, less prestige, less qualified staff, less careers opportunities and so onis demoralising, and misses the creative emphases that ought to come first'. 27 A primary aim of Critical Survey was to help schoolteachers and their sixth formers navigate the expanding network of UK universities. A regular series of essays reflecting on teaching practices and curricula across the UK (and sometimes beyond) appeared over the 1960s, including Ian Watt's essay on the newly created literature department at the University of East Anglia, founded in 1963, for which he served briefly as Dean before decamping to Stanford University. 28 Through the Critical Quarterly Society, Cox and Dyson also helped younger critics, often from similar backgrounds to themselves, establish their careers in academia. One of the many young critics to benefit from his association with the Critical Quarterly Society in its early days was David Lodge. In his first contribution to Critical Quarterly, an essay on Kingsley Amis, Lodge wrote 'I'm of lower-middle-class origins, brought up in South London, read English at the university, teach English at a provincial university, write novels, like jazz, believe literature is fundamentally untranslatable, feel unhappy abroad, know I'm less educated than the old-fashioned scholar, less cultured than the old-fashioned aesthete, but don't particularly mind.' (The next sentence attributes exactly the same characteristics to Amis.) Cox first reached out in a letter to Lodge (addressing him as 'Mr. Lodge') on 10 July 1963, asking him if he would act as a tutor for the Critical Quarterly Conference to be held in London, for which he offered £25 plus expenses for his services. Cox mentioned that a mutual friend, Malcolm Bradbury, had recommended Lodge for the job (Bradbury had previously taught alongside Cox at Hull, acted as tutor for the July 1962 conference at Bangor, and was now Lodge's colleague at Birmingham). Lodge took Cox up on his offer and must have impressed him at the conference, since less than a year later Cox wrote to Lodge (whom he now addressed as 'David') to offer him the opportunity to write a review article on three recent books of literary criticism, which ended up appearing in Critical Quarterly the following year. 29 Lodge became one of Critical Quarterly's regular contributors, publishing ten essays in the magazine between 1964 and 1987, when Colin MacCabe took over as editor.
Finally, both Critical Quarterly and Critical Survey also provided a means by which post-war writers, many of them from lower-class backgrounds, could represent themselves to themselves in ways that moved beyond the clichés, enabling them to situate themselves within a wider literary and critical traditions. The most ambitious example of this programme was John Wain's long essay, published across two concurrent issues of Critical Quarterly, the first arguing that the new theatre was rediscovering the origins of drama in ritual, and the second tracing the link between the news media and the novel from the eighteenth century, ending with a call for writers of his generation to push back against the journalistic 'Angry Young Man' straitjacket. By writing and publishing critical evaluations of contemporary literature, Dyson, Cox, and their contributors were themselves setting themselves squarely against Leavis who had, Dyson wrote in an early editorial, 'adopted towards contemporary literature an unfortunately negative approach; his standards of excellence are such that only a few writers in any century could hope to come up to them'. 30 By liberating themselves in this respect from Leavis, the younger generations of critics published in Critical Quarterly and Critical Survey were also clearing a space for themselves as scholars and teachers of literature. The Black Papers series whose first instalments would come out in Critical Survey from 1969 was, by contrast, much more of a backward-looking project in which Cox and Dyson attempted to preserve the educational system that had enabled their own social ascent.

The Black Papers
The first Black Paper was published in March 1969 in Critical Survey. It went on to have an influence beyond the wildest fantasies of the typical editor of an academic journal. The Black Papers were read and debated by politicians in parliament, reported on and excerpted in newspapers, and discussed in editorials and television talk shows. Edward Short, the Secretary of State for Education, lent the Black Papers much free publicity when he called the pamphlet's appearance 'one of the blackest days for education in the past century' at the annual conference of the National Union of Teachers, going on to say 'We should indeed be blind if we did not see this in its wider context of a massive lurch in society towards reaction. It is the reaction of racism. It is the demands for capital and corporal punishment, for the ending of the welfare state, and now reaction in education.' 31 Even if they were not actually read, the Black Papers operated as a kind of polemical brand name that helped define the traditional position on educational policy in the minds of the public. Cox and Dyson deliberately set out to have the Black Papers stoke public controversy: a letter from Dyson to Cox shows Dyson strategising how to keep the Black Papers in the news until the publication of a second Black Paper in October 1969: 'It seems important to keep the present debate going with articles, letters and so on for as long as possible', Dyson wrote, 'and at the same time to prepare the most effective possible pamphlet for the autumn'. 32 The same energies that Cox and Dyson channelled towards fostering a literary community through the Critical Quarterly Society were now directed towards influencing debates around educational policy on a national stage.
The shift from an audience of fellow academics and schoolteachers to a national audience accounts, in part, for the shift in the rhetoric of Cox and Dyson's own contributions to the first three Black Papers. As the letters in the Critical Quarterly archive show, many readers of Critical Survey were shocked at the alteration in Cox and Dyson's tone as well as their apparent politics. The Black Paper rhetoric is overwhelmingly one of hardness towards weakness and failure. Here is Cox in the first Black Paper, for example, arguing for the necessity of examinations: All life depends upon passing exams. If you fail at football, they drop you to the reserves. If you fail in business, you go bankrupt. If you fail in politics, you are forced to resign (or, in some countries, get shot). Exams measure people against standards distilled from human traditions and achievements, not against inclinations spun lazily out of the 'self'. To create an education system without examinations is to fail to prepare children and students for the realities of adult life. 33 Dyson's contribution to the first Black Paper projected a similar 'hard' rhetoric, attributing mental illnesses among students on university campuses to a 'bankrupt romanticism' that led to an overattentiveness to the self. 'What education exists to do', Dyson wrote, 'is to inform, train, extend and enrich the "self", to offer knowledge, insight, ideals and disciplines far beyond the self-regarding sterilities of our pop-culture world.' The morbid narcissism exhibited by the young people attending university, fed by the 'progressive' teaching they had received as children, had produced a psychological softness, which needed to be firmed up through the discipline of education. The same rhetoric runs through much of the first issue of the Black Papers, notably in John Sparrow's essay, in which he criticised a local educational authority's decision not to publish the names of pupils who had failed their exams. He wrote that he could see how the decision showed 'a feeling for social justice: stupid children, after all, can't help being stupid, and it is no credit to clever children that they were born with brains' but went on to say 'I cannot help wondering whether inferior pupils really benefit in after-life from such early coddling, and whether clever ones profit from being thus deprived of the stimulus of recognition and acclaim'. 34 The educational philosophies expounded in the first Black Paper and its successors are usually of the 'stiff upper lip' school: students are naturally clever or naturally dull and the primary task of the teacher is to recognise, develop, and reward superior intellectual ability, while at the same time instilling a sense of self-discipline in all the students so that they can accept their natural talents with equanimity.
The difference between Cox and Dyson's pronouncements on the purpose of education in the Black Papers and their former pronouncements on the same subject in their journals is striking. In his essay on 'English in the Younger Universities', published in the second issue of Critical Quarterly in 1959, Dyson had written of his own political awakening during the Suez Crisis and argued that the disciplined study of literature was not simply an end in itself but something that could help sensitise readers to injustice: 'literature, with its intense respect and concern for people constitutes a permanent challenge to the insensitivities and inhumanities of our civilisation, whether they are perpetrated by teddy-boys with flick-knives or by statesmen and bishops with the full approval of the powers-that be'. 35 Dyson had founded the Homosexual Reform Society in 1958, the year before the launch of Critical Quarterly, and his work as an academic over the 1960s was conducted alongside his political work as a leading figure in the gay rights movement. Cox, for his part, had published in 1965 an essay in Critical Survey in which he provided a generally sympathetic account of his observation of student protests during his year as visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He explained that the students were protesting the exploitation of neighbouring Oakland's mainly poor minority population for cheap labour and calling attention to racially discriminatory hiring practices by businesses in Berkeley. He criticised those right-wing commentators in the media who 'pilloried the students as unprincipled agitators, and made no reference to the main issue behind the controversy'. 36 Five years later, however, Cox was organising signatories for a 'Letter on Academic Freedom', opposing 'sit-ins' and other forms of protest in UK universities, and printing right-wing denunciations of student protesters in the Black Papers.
Part of what accounted for Cox and Dyson's apparent political volteface, at least on the issue of education, was the Labour Party's clear moves towards implementing a universally comprehensive system of education at the secondary-school level, including Anthony Crosland's dissemination of Circular 10/65, which requested local education authorities to submit plans for turning selective schools in their areas into comprehensives. C.S. Hillditch, the head of History at Balshaw's Grammar School, speaks to the strength of feeling that surrounded the fate of the grammar schools in his contribution to the third Black Paper: The Grammar School will always be to meas to many of youthe school which gave the working class child a chance to compete with the product of the public school and made it a principle that any scheme of reorganization which does not give as good an academic choice and chance to the talented child from the working class home as he had before is not only misguidedit is evil. 37 Cox and Dyson held similar sentiments and their decision to publish the Black Papers reflected, in part, a sense of loyalty to the grammar schools that had enabled them to make their way in academia. Meanwhile, the kind of student unrest that Cox had observed in Berkeley had gained in intensity in the UK, with many protests directed at Enoch Powell, who had delivered his 'Rivers of Blood' speech the year before the appearance of the Black Papers. 38 Cox and Dyson had, of course, observed the events of May 1968, when it briefly looked as if a student rebellion might spark a revolution in France: in their introduction to the first Black Paper, Cox and Dyson quoted an interview with John Osborne in the Observer, in which Osborne commented 'What happened at the Sorbonne seemed more animal than human to me'. 39 In his memoir, Cox admits that there was also a more mundane reason for his and Dyson's decision to publish the first Black Paper: financial troubles necessitated increasing the subscription fees to the Critical Quarterly Society and so they agreed that the issue in which they announced the hike 'must be of sufficiently high quality so that our members would be persuaded to resubscribe'. 40 The financial records of the Critical Quarterly Society held at the John Rylands Library suggest that, in a financial sense, the Black Papers did their job and more. Whereas the society realised a profit of £235 from publications in 1967/68, it recorded a profit of £13,814 in 1970/71, and it saw an increase in subscription income over the same period from £3,791 to £4,490. 41 Whatever the initial reasons for the decision to publish the Black Papers, the publication had consequences for the community of the upwardly mobile they had laboured to establish through the Critical Quarterly Society.
The first Black Paper and its successors marked a conscious departure from the previous issues of Critical Survey not just in their embrace of a conservative position on education but also in Cox and Dyson's departure from the protocols of politeness that had characterised their journals. They instead embraced the combative style that characterised the public persona of Kingsley Amis, whose presence loomed large over Cox and Dyson's journals, although hitherto more as an object of literary criticism than as a rhetorical model. Stefan Collini identifies a tendency towards 'self-caricature' as a characteristic of Movement writers, especially Larkin and Amis, that invites liberal cosmopolitans to condemn these writers as 'parochial, conservative, and sometimes downright offensive'. And yet, Collini continues, 'there is always the suspicion that to respond in this way is to fall into a cunningly designed heffalump trap, a spectacle witnessed with rowdy delight by the shades of Larkin and Amis, drinks in hand'. Heffalumps are elephant-like creatures that haunt the dreams of Pooh and Piglet in the Winnie-the-Pooh books: a 'heffalump trap', as a metaphor for falling into a trap one has designed to catch an opponent, refers to the episode in which Pooh lays sticks over a pit in order to trap a heffalump but ends up trapping himself. After the publication of the very first Black Paper, a Richard Wilson cartoon in which Short is terrorised by an elephantine Amis invading his bedroom identified Amis's rhetoric (and by extension the rhetoric of the Black Papers as a whole) as a trap designed to make the defenders of liberal educational policies lay and fall into their own heffalump traps by attacking the Black Papers with the same rhetorical hyperbole that the Black Papers themselves employed. The cartoon points to the strong current of 'self-caricature' that runs through the Black Papers as a whole, which allowed them to feed on the outraged reactions they garnered from the left.
Cartoon by Richard Wilson, in the Observer, 13 April 1969, 10.
Amis and his friend Robert Conquest, the poet and historian, became regular contributors to the Black Papers, writing more straightforward contributions as single authors, and humorous parodies and satires together. Their update of Gustav Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Wisdom entitled 'An Educational Dictionary', which appeared in the third Black Paper, gave mock definitions of buzzwords in the mouths of student activists and progressive educationalists. Amis and Conquest defined 'elitism', for example, as 'The theory that some people are better at some things than others are. In education, specifically, the idea that children of high "intelligence" who have "learnt" a lot should have a higher claim to further education than those lacking in, or actively resistant to, these qualities.' The title of their contribution to the second Black Paper, 'The Anti-Sex, Croquet-Playing, Statistic-Snubbing, Boyle-Baiting, Black Fascist Paper', is in much the same vein, taking aim at the chorus of critics condemning the Black Papers.
Amis's and Conquest's contributions to the Black Papers drew on both men's fondness for parody and satire. Conquest had earlier published an interpretation of Amis's Lucky Jim as a Christian allegory in Critical Quarterly in the full knowledge of the editors that it was a hoax satirising earnest overinterpretations of literary texts. Amis's humour in Lucky Jim itself, as Lodge notes in his Critical Quarterly essay on Amis, leans heavily on 'the way in which Jim picks up a phrase, usually a clichéhis own or another person'sand mentally subjects it to sceptical scrutiny'. 42 Amis's carefully crafted voice as a political commentator, which drew on the same rhetorical techniques as the hero of his first novel does, helped inform the editorial style of the Black Papers, a style that reflects situation of the parvenu alienated from the language of the class in which he finds himself.
One point of continuity between the Black Papers and the previous issues of Cox and Dyson's journals was the dominance of male voices such as that of Amis. The first Black Paper was particularly egregious in this respect, with the sole female contributor being G.F. Browne, who contributed a few 'Notes from a Junior School Headmistress' to the bottom of page 50. On receiving the advertisement for the first Black Paper, Margaret Higginson, the headteacher of Bolton School in Lancashire, wrote to Cox to tell him 'I warmly welcome your initiative in producing the pamphlet, "Fight for Education"' and to order four copies. But she went on to chastise Cox for the fact that 'as usual' there were 'fifteen men to one woman' among the contributors. She concluded her letter by commenting 'No doubt your venture will be attacked as being reactionary and old-fashioned. Isn't it a pity that in this one respect the charge will be so well-founded?' 43 Although Cox and Dyson would include more women as Black Paper contributors, including Iris Murdoch and June Wedgwood Benn, the Black Papers contributors were overwhelmingly male, a fact that reflects not only the unequal representation of women in academia and politics but also the centrality that male friendship had always had to the progress of Cox and Dyson's career, with the result that women had tended to be peripheral to their academic lives.
Along with Margaret Higginson's letter, Cox and Dyson did receive other generally supportive letters, which were usually written by teachers at grammar schools. One such letter from a teacher at a grammar school faced with closure, thanked Cox and Dyson for defending the grammar schools, writing 'we feel powerless successfully to fight, unaided, both a local authority held at pistol point by those who hold the purse strings and a credulous or apathetic public'. 44 But the editors received an outpouring of hostile responses as well, showing that some of the relationships they had established through their work on Critical Survey and the sixth-form conferences had been damaged. After receiving a leaflet advertising the Black Papers, Charles M. Davey, a headmaster of a school in Blackwood, Monmouthshire, wrote to Cox to inquire why he should be asked to take seriously the screeds of writers like Kingsley Amis 'who made his name and reputation by taking the mickey out of people like you' and concluded his letter by suggesting that Cox 'try to achieve something instead of writing books and articles telling kids how to answer the ENG LIT questions you set the poor devils'. 45 Mary C. King, of Scansby College of Education, wrote 'It is a long time since I have encountered such an unscientific, emotionally imbalanced outpouring of pseudo-criticism parading as educational theory, & caught in the treadmill of its own unquestioned premises'. 46 D.R. Slanebury, the head of English at Park Senior High School in Swindon, informed Cox that although the sixth-formers had benefited from the sixth form conferences run by the Critical Quarterly Society, the school would not be renewing its subscription. 'I must dissociate myself from the society in its present political phase' Slanebury wrote, adding 'I cannot imagine what has caused you to take up the extreme position of your Black Paper on topics about which you appear to have very little knowledge or experience'. 47 The correspondence from those of Cox and Dyson's academic colleagues who did not contribute to the Black Papers was uniformly negative. Shortly after the publication of the first Black Paper, Cox received a letter from Richard Hoggart, written from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, in which Hoggart asked to be dropped from the Critical Quarterly Society's masthead. 'Believe me', Hoggart wrote, 'I'm not at all writing out of pique or irritation or annoyance, or anything like that. I feel as friendly as ever, but I think it's just as well not to let one's public alignments get too confused.' 48 In his memoir Cox wrote 'I found the break-up of my relationship with Richard Hoggart as an editor particularly distressing'. 49 John Mackie, the author of Inside the Primary School and a former Chief Inspector of Primary Education, wrote to Cox to remind him 'I have been a member of the Honorary Committee of the Critical Quarterly since it was founded. This does not make me responsible for its policy nor does it entail me to object if I disagree with its opinions. When, however, it launches an attack on modern primary education and keeps up this attack … I hope it is not presumptuous to expect that I might have been consulted'. Mackie's reprimand points to the extent to which Cox's insistence, in a letter to the moderate former Conservative Secretary of State for Education Edward Boyle, that 'Most of the B.P. contributors have never met each other. Dyson and I edit the pamphlets in the usual wayby sending out invitations' was highly disingenuous. 50 Cox and Dyson were clearly looking for essays that would take a certain line on education, which is why they did not invite Mackieor Hoggart for that matterto contribute. Even after the first Black Paper had appeared, the papers continued to cause problems in the Critical Quarterly Society community. Another member of the Honorary Committee, Kenneth Muir, wrote an aggrieved letter to Cox after the circular letter 'Freedom in the Academic Community' condemning student protests had appeared on 23 November 1970, five days before the appearance of the third Black Paper. 51 'I think it's a pity Black Paper came out when it did', wrote Muir, 'as many will assume that those who signed the letter in The Times agree with you on other matters. I signed the letter as I agreed with nearly all of it, but I confess I was taken aback when I saw the company I was in'. (The signatories included well-known conservatives like Max Beloff, Geoffrey Elton, and Hugh Trevor-Roper). Muir went on to explain that as a consequence of him signing Cox's letter, there have been resignations from the Association for the Future of Liverpool University (AFFLU) of which I'm chairman, and I offered my resignation lest the association should be damaged by my 'reactionary' associates. I have ceased to be surprised at this sort of misrepresentation and perhaps you were misrepresented in the Sunday Press when you were quoted in praise of Mrs Thatcher. I'm afraid I detest everything about herher voice, her face, her opinions, her condescension, all of which repell [sic] me physically … So, on balance, I'm sorry I resigned, as I should hate to be on that side of the fence. 52 As we have seen, Muir's discovery that a decision to take a stand on one political issue could have much wider repercussions was very much Cox and Dyson's experience as well.
Cox and Dyson soon found themselves part of a wider right-wing network that included figures who had their own agendas for the Black Papers. The Black Papers first of all seem to have catalysed a shift in political allegiances on the part of its editors. Cox 53 Cox and Dyson's movement towards the Conservative Party began with the first Black Paper, which included a contribution by the MP Angus Maude. Within a year of the appearance of the first Black Paper, Cox and Dyson were in direct and epistolary contact with the shadow Secretary of State for Education, Margaret Thatcher. 54 Many of the Black Paper contributors came from the network of right-wingers with connections to the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), a think tank inspired by Milton Friedman that helped develop the economic and social ideas that would define Thatcherite Britain.' 55 Cox recalls attending a meeting including Harris, Dyson, Boyson, and the twin brothers Norris and Ross McWhirter, the publishers of the Guinness Book of Records, in which the possibility of publishing further Black Papers on topics ranging from health to national defence was discussed, until somebody suggested that Angus Maude was not rightwing enough to join the committee that would oversee the project. 'I gasped', Cox remembers, 'and realized I was being inveigled into a project which might well run down public services for the poor and disadvantaged'. 56 One wonders, reading this anecdote, whether Cox himself feels uncertain, at this point in the memoir, whether his own political activities had really been for the benefit of the bright working-class students he had sought to defend. Cox tells an anecdote about Thatcher that, in context, reads as a literalisation of how he was pulled towards positions he would subsequently balk from as a result of his new association with Conservative politicians. In this anecdote he tells of meeting Thatcher in 1976, soon after she had won the battle to replace Edward Heath as leader of the Conservative Party. 'When he conducted us to her room', Cox recalls, 'the academics hung back, and no one would enter first. This was so ridiculous I strode forward, and took her hand. But as I began to speak, she tugged me past her while I was in mid-flow, and I found myself standing alone beside the salmon mousse and hock'. 57 Another example of Cox and Dyson being pulled in directions they did not at first anticipate was the prominence given to the psychometrists Cyril Burt, Hans Eysenck, and Richard Lynn in the Black Papers. Neither Cox nor Dyson intended at the outset to invite this group to contribute to the Black Papers. Rather, the idea was planted a month after the publication of the first Black Paper in March 1969, when Lynn, then a professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, wrote to Cox in order to introduce himself as 'a rather uncommon phenomenon, a psychologist who shares your views' and to extend an offer to contribute to any further Black Papers. 58 Lynn wrote another letter in May 1969, confirming that he would write a paper for the next issue of the Black Papers and naming other people from his field who might contribute. Although Lynn noted that the 'great majority of the people in this field are unsympathetic', he suggested that Cyril Burt and Hans Eysenck might be willing to write essays for the upcoming Black Paper, adding that 'Both are absolutely first class men and it would be a great coup if they contributed'. This came to pass and the second instalment of the Black Papers, published in September 1969, opened with essays by Burt, Eysenck, and Lynn under the heading 'The Basic Realities', implying that the innateness and heritability of intelligence were obdurate facts against which 'egalitarian' and 'progressive' educational policies must founder.
Eysenck and Lynn both openly argued that any attempt to use the educational system to address social inequalities was doomed to fail, for the simple reason that disparities between races or social classes reflected innate differences of intelligence. Eysenck's contribution quoted an essay published the same year by his postdoctoral student Arthur J. Jensen, entitled 'How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?' which argued that compensatory education had failed in the United States because the intellectual differences between social groupsthe disparity between the average IQs of black and white Americans being his central examplereflected differences in the distribution of genes conducive to intelligence in these racial 'breeding populations'. 59 Jensen's article had quickly become notorious, leading to calls for his resignation from the student body of the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a professor at the Institute of Human Learning. 60 Eysenck muted the explicitly racist implications of Jensen's article but he applied the same reasoning to the UK class system, interpreted similarly as 'breeding populations' stacked one on top of another. Lynn similarly criticised those who wanted to use education to address poverty, writing that such do-gooders 'do not realise that slum dwellers are caused principally by low innate intelligence and poor family upbringing, and that the real social challenge is posed by this'. He went on to suggest that even if existing educational arrangements meant that some clever working-class children failed to access higher education 'no tears need to be shed if some clever boys decide to get off the educational ladder and make their own way in the world of action. They may well be doing what best suits their own temperament.' 61 In another essay published in Economic Age the same year, Lynn recommended policies aimed at encouraging middle-class families to have more children and working-class families to have fewer in order to improve the quality of the national gene pool. The likely outcome of allowing working-class families to have more children, combined with the loss of superior citizens through emigration, was that 'The competence of the population could in time decline to the level of that of the Eskimos and the Red Indians and British civilisation become extinct'. 62 After the second Black Paper, all instalments included at least one essay by Lynn or Eysenck, and their contributions undoubtedly form the nastiest thread in the Black Papers.
Both men were publicly taking the genetic interpretation of differences in measured IQ across social groups in explicitly racist directions, even if their contributions to the Black Papers focused on what they claimed were innate differences in IQ between individuals and between social classes, rather than between races. 63 Despite this, and despite claiming in his memoir that his own experience in the army had given him 'a healthy scepticism for IQ tests', 64 Cox embraced the account of the 'basic realities' of education set out by Burt, Eysenck, and Lynn. Upon receiving Eysenck's first essay for the Black Papers, Cox wrote back to Eysenck to say that it was 'extremely well-written (as we expected), provocative, and, to my mind, so obviously right'. 65 It is worth asking why such an account of human nature, in which the educational attainments of individuals and social groups are explained as the largely inevitable consequences of innate genetic differences, might have appealed to Cox and Dyson. One answer is suggested by Cyril Burt's contribution to the second Black Paper, which emphasised the ability of individuals to escape the general genetic destiny of their social class: To become a doctor, lawyer, or teacher, it is necessary to pass certain qualifying examinations; and these demand a high level of innate ability. The ability of parents who have entered one of these professions tends to be transmitted to their children. In addition, for generation after generationgoing back well before the days of the legendary Dick Whittingtonthere has been an appreciable amount of social mobility: bright children from the poorer classes forge their way forward, and duller children from the higher classes drift downward. 66 The attraction of the idea of an elite defined not by birth but by innate ability should not be underestimated. One of the letters in the Black Paper archive was written a few months after the publication of the first Black Paper by Lilian Bader, who served as one of the first black aircraft women for the Royal Air Force during World War Two. Bader had not read the Black Papers but she had read a letter of Cox's in the Guardian quoting the open letter addressed to all MPs in the first Black Paper, in which Cox and Dyson argued that 'some teachers are taking to an extreme the belief that children must not be told anything, but must find out for themselves'. 67 After recounting her experience of a City and Guilds teacher training in which students were simply asked to listen to classical music and give their reactions, Bader wrote 'I did protest during my C. & G. course, but although a wife & mother of two sons, I am also an English born coloured, and know when to stop banging my head against a brick wall'. She ended her letter on a note of hope for the future, writing 'As things stand now, I see a new élite, an intellectual one, being formed'. 68 The agreement between Bader and Cox on the folly of relying solely on 'discovery methods' in education masks a fundamental difference: Cox wrote as if the system in which he was educated was basically a meritocracy, whereas for Bader a truly meritocratic system capable of producing a multiracial intellectual elite was yet to be achieved. For me, at least, it is difficult to see Cox and Dyson's embrace of Eysenck and Lynn as anything other than a betrayal of the ideal Bader had expressed in her letter.
Indeed, if The Great Betrayal were written by another writer, and Cox were teaching it in a literature seminar, it is easy to imagine him focusing on the title and asking his students to consider who is really being betrayed. Cox writes that he chose this title for his memoir because it was 'English education' that had been betrayed. 69 But then one of the golden rules of literary criticism is that one should trust the tale and not the teller. There is, in Cox's memoir, a pattern in which Cox's successes are shadowed by loss and abandonment in ways that are typical for the upward mobility story as a genre. Bruce Robbins has observed that the upward mobility story frequently defaults to a 'zero sum' logic that demands that 'Someone has to die in order for someone else to rise', with the result that 'The genre's signature effects include immobile bodies, bodies mentioned casually in passing or stepped over, hovered over, brooded over, or even knocked over by an upwardly mobile protagonist'. 70 Cox attributes his early success in school, for example, in part to his intelligence but also to his need 'to escape an unhappy home'. He includes self-accusatory anecdote of failing to invite three of his university friends, including Dyson, to his father's house when he stops there the day before his marriage. Later, his father let Cox know that 'he was made miserable by this', and Cox goes on to explain that 'it had not occurred to me to introduce them to him. By 1954 many years had passed since I last invited any friends (except my fiancée) into the house'. 71 Another instance of symbolic abandonment occurs when Cox recalls the crucial moment in which he waited to hear the names of the students in his class who had passed the eleven-plus, remembering choosing to focus not on his own feelings but rather on 'the blank, despairing face of Audrey, a girl of some intelligence whose name was not on the list'. 72 There is also the awful conjunction of the publication of Black Paper 1975 and Cox's brother's throwing himself from the seventh floor of his apartment building a few days before its appearance. In a larger sense, Cox's memoir suggests an implicit awareness that the whole Black Papers project could be seen as a betrayal of the class from which he came. It was an accusation Cox rejected in a letter he wrote to Edward Boyle in 1969, 'I get very angry when it is suggested we are a selfish élite who don't care about 80% at the bottom. I believe comprehensive education will lower standards and opportunities for all'. 73 The truth was, however, that Cox and Dyson's Black Papers had little to offer those working-class children who failed in the educational systemor were failed by it. Their focus on protecting the grammar-school route out of the working class for bright children led them, in the Black Papers, to abandon the idea of improving the education of the majority of the children 'at the bottom'. * As I hope should be clear by now, my essay is not intended to pillory the former editors of Critical Quarterly. Rather, I have tried to follow Cox and Dyson's political journey from the 'inside', as it were, tracing how the Black Papers project had its roots in their work building a more class-inclusive literary community in the 1960s and how it drew on ideas about the innateness of intelligence that are still fairly common if we are discussing the intelligence of individuals if not social groups. One lesson to be taken from reading the Black Papers is the way the sorting of people into gradations of intelligence and dullness can work against commitments to social justice, a salutary lesson for those working in an academic culture that still drives its professionals to desire to be, and to be seen to be, intelligent. Delving into the Black Papers and the Black Papers' archive has made me think the profession could use an explicit reckoning with the idea of innate intelligence and how it both shapes and deforms our scholarship and our teaching.

Notes
All archival sources are held at the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester. COX = Papers of Brian Cox, CQA = Critical Quarterly Archive, and AED = Papers of Tony Dyson and Cliff Tucker. My thanks to the assistance of the staff at the John Rylands Library and my apologies for being very bad at retying the ribbons on the folders. Thanks also to Matthew Taunton for his comments on this essay.