Stuart Hall had a sort of revolutionary fire in his soul. He gave the lie in some senses to that idea of Gil Scott-Heron’s, that “the revolution will not be televised”. I grew up in Tottenham in the 1970s and early 1980s, my mother worked nights and I would often be up late watching the Open University TV programmes that came on after the regular channels finished. Stuart was broadcasting in the age of Alf Garnett and Love Thy Neighbour and contradicting every single stereotype that they presented. I grew up without a father, and was completely fascinated by this powerful, highly articulate male talking softly to me at a time when I probably should have been in bed.
There was, above all, a tremendous modernity and countercultural excitement to Stuart’s language – a modernity that challenged everything I was hearing in school, on the news, and in everyday life. There is a generation of social workers, teachers, academics, media studies students, political activists and many others who lived and breathed those OU courses, who were deeply influenced by him.
I met Stuart and got to know him well when I became an MP. He sought me out, and would come to the Commons for tea. We had a lot of contact when I was culture minister and he was chair of Rivington Place – the east London cultural institution he championed devoted to black archives, photography and art. I was very pleased to help him with support and funding for that fantastic project. He seemed proud that I was the minister at the time and instinctively understood the need for projects like these.
Stuart became a paternal kind of presence in my life. He had a quiet but affecting voice and an incredible authority and rigour of thought. He was not a didactic, authoritarian figure, but came across as a very open individual, a lover of jazz and of art, as well as politics. He was a guiding influence, authoritative and thought-provoking but always incredibly well-mannered. He wouldn’t raise his voice because that wasn’t the done thing. Stuart would listen hard to what you said and question everything. He was very quick to pick up the phone after the 2011 riots, for example, and gently question me on aspects of my response that he disagreed with.
Being born in Jamaica gave Stuart a totally different perspective on Britain, his adopted home. He was acutely aware of his own mixed heritage: African, Portuguese, West Indian, Jewish, British, and that context made his critique of otherness extremely personal.
History will be generous to Stuart as a public intellectual and polymath. In the theatre of academic greats, I would place him alongside Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband. His work was inter-disciplinary and leaves a strong legacy in the fields of cultural studies, media, anthropology, social history, and gender studies – a remarkable contribution to how we now analyse the world around us. He gave us the idea of multiculturalism as we understand it, of multiple identities. He not only coined the term “Thatcherism”, but he wrote the seminal deconstruction of it before Thatcher even came to power. He offered, too, the sharpest critique of the problems with British socialism that allowed Thatcherism to prosper. Much of that work formed the basis of New Labour, of which, of course, he later also became very critical.
Stuart’s memorial service at the end of November was, naturally, a very moving celebration of a remarkable life. His daughter paid him a wonderful tribute as a father and a soulmate, and intellectual colleagues, artists and writers, those whom he had taught and inspired and guided from across the world, joined to pay him full and heartfelt tribute. It felt a privilege to be there. Who could ask for more?
