A daughter remembers her famous father: Julia Hobsbawn on Eric Hobsbawn

Thanks to Jim Johnson's excellent and informative blog Notes on Politics, Theory and Photography I found this link to a wonderful article by Julie Hobsbawn about her father, the distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawn, who died in late 2012.

Beautifully written and heartfelt Julie Hobsbawn's piece provides a revealing insight into a man considered one of the greatest historians of the 20th Century.  

My father died at the age of 95 with scores of global editions of his books in print, countless honorary doctorates and visiting fellowships and something close to a cult following among people of all classes, ages and types. He had political enemies in death as he had in life – he was resolutely a Marxist historian and never relinquished his membership of the Communist party – but mostly people seemed as upset as we were, which was a comfort. In the hours after he died, while the Twitter feeds lit up and the news agencies rang in alongside relatives, I phoned through a death notice to The Times. The young man taking copy on the phone sounded stressed: he asked me to repeat the credit card number several times and then blurted out suddenly that he had read history at university and had loved my father’s books. Former students rang in tears from time zones which suggested they had woken to the news and had acted on impulse........

He must have felt an affinity with the hospital workers because he would introduce them to us admiringly as we visited: they were from the Philippines or Nigeria; they had a PhD. I think that he saw in them the thing he valued greatly as someone who started poor and worked his way up in life through his curiosity and ability to learn. I think they reminded him of the students he loved during a 65-year association with Birkbeck College, University of London, which specialises in evening degrees for daytime workers. The life of the immigrant, of the émigré, of the student, lifting themselves from desperate lives through education, was what he understood. In return the ward nurses and nursing assistants leaned in close to him as they did dressings and lifts, saying cheerfully “Hello, professor!” and mostly doing their very best.

 ....

At home in Hampstead every one of my parents’ rooms had a table covered with hardbacks, paperbacks, manuscripts and papers which he could graze at. Up until the end he was writing something new or editing something old. Although he could use email and read internet links, he was a book man. We are still sorting through them.

....

We used to range widely in our chats in those ending years, discussing everything from gossip, which he loved, to the goings-on in the political world. He was always completely up to speed. He engaged in the lives of all of us, his two sons and his daughter, his nine grandchildren, and his young great-granddaughter. He always asked me avidly “How’s business?” during each visit, enjoying my tales from the front line of capitalism. He celebrated every entrepreneurial step forward but was always a bit anxious, leaving answerphone messages saying: “It’s Dad. Just checking in to see how you are. Don’t overdo it. Kiss, kiss.” My dad, the academic historian and giant of “the left”, and me, his degreeless, politically plural daughter who loves doing business. I never felt so close to him as towards the end.
. . .
Now in the closing months of 2012 there would be no more discussions about ideas, frivolous or intense – no more hearing his panoramic view of the present viewed through an immaculately detailed grasp of the past. No more watching him steeple his fingers in deep listening interest at the ideas of one of his army of devoted friends who came calling wherever they could find him, in London at home, in Wales, and in the stygian holding pen of the Royal Free Hospital, London.