Glad to be part of Mandle’s history

bill mandleHE DID not have to do it — the Oxford 10-quid MA and Pommy 10-quid immigrant. But there we were, second-year students at Bill Mandle’s place in Downer, or should I say Upper Downer, crowded under a Hills Hoist with a mass-produced cut-canvas hood for just these circumstances – an autumnal downpour in Canberra in March.

bill mandleHE DID not have to do it — the Oxford 10-quid MA and Pommy 10-quid immigrant. But there we were, second-year students at Bill Mandle’s place in Downer, or should I say Upper Downer, crowded under a Hills Hoist with a mass-produced cut-canvas hood for just these circumstances – an autumnal downpour in Canberra in March.

It was 1970, and we had enrolled in Renaissance and Reformation History. Mandle had his students round for a start-of-year barbecue. Some later got their firsts in history and went on to be part of the bureaucracy that ran the country.

I did not, and went on to a cadetship in journalism to help criticise the running of the country. But that is of little moment.

The barbecue was typical of Bill Mandle’s generosity of spirit that we experienced for nearly 45 years.

Unthinkable now. A second-year class would have hundreds not just 30 or 40, and in any event there would not be a history class now, at least not in Canberra. So there could be no backyard barbecue.

We did not count age then. Mandle – who died last Saturday aged 80 — would have been 36. We were just 17 or 18, and just 17 or 18 years younger.

That’s what happened in 1970, in a pioneering city and in a young land. Don’t think it would have happened in Oxford.

And 40-plus-year friendships followed.

Imagine, later, your history lecturer who held your grades in his hands comes to you when the tables have changed and he wants to write a column for The Canberra Times, and I, as editor, could decide if the column should run.

Well, the table had not changed. Mandle still had the intellectual upper hand.

Yes, I said. Not through the Old Mates Act – the paid rate was far to miserable (and still is) for anyone to suggest anything underhand, but through a profound respect for Bill Mandle’s underlying intellectual and writing strength.

Bluntly, I have to say, I did not like his conservative politics, even if they were of the lower c type. But I respected them. And I could not abide his rah, rah Carlton football allegiance.

But, gosh, the man could write. And observe.

He was an historian, but saw the underlying weakness of major government economic and social decisions with profound perspicacity.

My reference to the 10-quid MA is to a past tradition at Oxford that your Bachelor’s degrees could be converted to a Masters’ later on, on payment of a fee.

It did not matter. These days when PhDs are sprinkled about, Mandle’s converted Oxford BA was easily worth one of these days’ higher degrees.

Mandle was an educator. We enrolled in Renaissance and Reformation History because it was there – the unit that ANU then offered in second year for those who wanted to do a history major.

He made our study of that era a lesson in universal truths — from the endemic corruption of the Borgia papacies to the moral courage of Luther. And in 2014 Australia, surrounded by Borgia politicians, where is Luther now?

And he told us about the self-righteousness of the Calvanists and the agony (and temporal blindness) of English Catholics like Thomas More who put fear of unproveable damnation ahead of physical death. Mandle did not so much tell of the human weaknesses of the Reformation, but us but allowed us to discover the folly of it ourselves.

That’s teaching.

And then there was the annual Witchcraft Lecture. It had titillating expectation. But – and you can stake on it — Mandle educated his young students’ minds against the dangers of the mob.

He wrote a weekly column for The Canberra Times for several decades on and off. He was a first rate columnist: independent and unpredictable. His columns were always clear, logical, readable, beautifully written and never stooped to the ad hominem. He savaged people’s ideas, not their character or personality.

More importantly, his columns stirred people into response.

They would make what passes for conservative commentary nowadays look like the hypocritical, cheer-squad yapping that it is.

That is the importance of history. You do not cheer uncritically or make excuses for “your side” of politics when it does precisely the things that it earlier denounced when the other lot were in government.

History requires sourcing, data, fact and information. Without them, argument and opinion are naught. I wish students studied history more today. And I wish there were more Bill Mandles teaching it.

Mandle was a rampant, unabashed, unashamed conservative – but not an uncritical cheerleader for conservative parties. Yes, of course, he had his weaknesses. He wore his Oxford or football tie and tweed jackets, however crumpled the shirt collar. He was rambunctious and boisterous, but never blustering.

I see him now. The piercing blue eyes that could kill a socialist at thirty paces. The broad smile that you knew would transmogrify into a sharp verbal jibe.

Mandle was the sort of conservative for whom the bedrock principles of small l liberalism were fundamental to life. I don’t know how he coped with the contradiction. But for his students there has been four decades of unabiding respect, admiration, jocularity and joie de vie.

I hate the cliché “larger than life”, for Mandle, in teaching us the universality of Reformation history, showed us the force of – is there such a phrase — “larger than death”.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 31 May 2014.

One thought on “Glad to be part of Mandle’s history”

  1. “I see him now. The piercing blue eyes that could kill a socialist at thirty paces. ”
    .
    Yes, socialism was one of the fleas Mandle’s pants. In my view, he was far too opinionated to be a first-rate commentator. But he went over the top when he used the full name of Hitler’s Nazi party (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) in an attempt to discredit socialism. I remember lampooning him in a subsequent letter to the CT editor (published) which appears to have caught him flat-footed. As far as I know, he made no attempt to reply, in print or anywhere else.

    He said somewhere that he considered himself to be a Socratic ‘gadfly’: stirring up controversy in order to get people thinking. But there is a fine line between that and arrogant condescension, which Mandle had a way of straying over. Or rather say, blundering into and tripping over it.
    As the old saying has it: ‘a man who is not a communist before the age of 25 has got no heart; a man who is still a communist after the age of 25 has got no brains.’
    I was never a communist, but I have often wondered how that saying could be altered
    to be about a man who is not a conservative/ still a conservative.
    Like Mandle, say.

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