“Another World” by Melvyn Bragg

In 2022 Melvyn Bragg published a memoir called ‘Back in the Day’ about growing up as the son of publicans during the post-war period in the town of Wigton in Cumbria. It was wonderful, being extraordinarily well-written, frank and fascinating.

He was in many respects a classic product of the grammar school system, passing his 11-plus and hence being given educational opportunities beyond anything on offer to most of his contemporaries. He seized these with enthusiasm, developing a particular interest in history thanks to an inspirational teacher called Mr James who persuaded his parents to let him stay on at school after the age of fifteen to complete his A levels, and hence consider the possibility of university which was unusual for people from his background in the 1950s.

Like, I would think, most British people with an interest in books and culture, I revere Melvyn Bragg who has been a constant presence in my life thanks to TV, radio and the odd literary festival for decades. I have enjoyed his fiction and some of the biographies he has written too, but I thought ‘Back in the Day’ was particularly enjoyable as he effectively here turned his own life story into a piece pretty dazzling literature.

The book finished with him passing his exams with flying colours and gaining a place to read Modern history at Wadham College in Oxford. This second volume picks up the story and covers the years 1958 to 1961 when he was an undergraduate, at the end of which he gained a position on the BBC general trainee scheme and commenced what was to become his highly impressive and enviable career.

This book is just as good as its predecessor, focusing in the main on the way he adapted to the inevitable social mobility that accompanied his Oxford experience.

It is by no means just about the university at all. He continued to spend plenty of time in Wigton and writes extensively about his parents (who later move to Reading) and, particularly, his teenage girlfriend Sarah with whom he tries desperately to maintain a long-distance relationship.

The book is full of conversations set out in some detail, verbatim, which I can not believe are all remembered so accurately. He has surely reconstructed these from the surviving gist in his memory, but they make the book very novelistic and hence highly pleasurable to read. Some of the passages featuring Sarah, particularly the section where she splits with him, and his father, are hugely moving.

For me there was some additional interest provided by the fact that some thirty years later I also studied Modern History at Oxford and am very familiar with the work of Melvyn Bragg’s principal tutor, Laurence Stone who later went on to have a very successful academic career in America.

I was also, in the first years of this century, a colleague of a university friend of Melvyn Bragg’s – Peter Copping – who was a member of the department I taught in for many yeas at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Peter features in the book briefly, Melvyn Bragg evidently always retaining something of a soft spot for a man I sadly remember mainly as being very awkward, irascible and arrogant.

One regret is that Melvyn Bragg has little to say in this book about Maurice Bowra, a legendary Oxford character, who was Warden of Wadham College (ie: principal) when he was a student. I would love to have known his impressions of this man about who so many anecdotes have been told by friends and enemies alike.

Overall though, a beautifully written and very honest memoir that is well-worth reading.